Hasta La Gadget!

Video entertainment was “the one that got away” from Apple, but recent moves reveal the company is taking a second stab at the category, and that streaming video will play a major role.

The addition of video cameras to Apple’s latest iPhone and iPod Nano were just the first hints of the company’s new personal-media strategy. The company is also building a 500,000 square-foot data center in North Carolina, which could provide the massive bandwidth required for ubiquitous streaming video. And Apple’s recent acquisition of Lala suggests it’s interested in rebooting iTunes into a streaming service, according to Wall Street Journal. That means music, in Lala’s case, but the same infrastructure could be shared with streaming video.

The final piece of the puzzle was Apple’s approval this week of iPhone apps with live video-streaming capability. The company previously forbade this functionality, reserving live video as a private API. But a letter from an iPhone developer convinced Steve Jobs to release Apple’s restrictions, and now live video-streaming apps Ustream and Knocking Live Video are available for download in the App Store.

All these recent developments point to a significant new strategic market for Apple: personal broadcasting, or sharing personal experiences. YouTube and Flip are already big players in this young space, and the logical competitive move for Apple is to make personal media deliverable and accessible anytime, anywhere.

That means in the next few years, we’re likely to see video cameras with live-streaming software built into future iPods and iPhones (and the rumored touchscreen tablet, if it ever exists). These features will likely be integrated into iTunes, which Apple would convert into a social experience with real-time sharing services, in addition to being a storage tool.

It’s no wonder Jobs gave the green light on live video-broadcasting apps for the iPhone: He could use app developers to help Apple get started.

In a September iPod event, Jobs made it clear Apple was entering the consumer video market.

“We want to get in on this,” Jobs said when he presented the video-equipped iPod Nano’s main competitor: the Flip camcorder.

Building a data center, putting a video camera on the iPhone and approving iPhone apps with live video-streaming functionality are all precursor steps necessary for Apple to build for an always-connected, share-everything future.

“I would look at it and say, ‘You’re Apple. You can’t just refresh your existing line. What’s your game changer?’” said James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst who focuses on consumer video. “It’s getting into personal broadcasting, which is essentially what this is.”

Live video in its current state is mostly a bunch of niche applications. Satellite trucks enable broadcast journalists to televise live scoops. In the business space, professionals use live video conferencing to communicate remotely. Consumers use live video broadcasting with webcams to video-chat with each other, and a few exhibitionists broadcast themselves over websites like Ustream and Justin.tv.

So what’s the big deal if you put live-video capability in a phone? You can carry it everywhere and broadcast live from anywhere, and that opens a whole new world of applications for the technology. John Ham, co-founder of video-streaming startup Ustream, predicts live video will give birth to a new world of citizen journalists.

“People always have a cellphone on them,” said John Ham, co-founder of Ustream. “You can’t always predict life, and there are going to be moments where you want to share…. We’ve seen people take out devices and streaming earthquakes or planes landing, and now there are going to be all sorts of citizen journalism events now if we have millions with this application over iPhone.”

The developer of Knocking Live Video, an app that broadcasts live video between iPhones, said anywhere-video broadcasting is the evolution of Twitter.

“We are focused on phone-to-phone, not uploading to the web,” Pointy Head developer Brian Meehan explained to Ars Technica. “Who really cares about fleeting moments other than friends and family seeing it as it happens? With Knocking, people share what they are doing right now. Our testers have referred to Knocking as a ‘visual tweet.’”

And then there are those who are already using video cameras in phones and point-and-shoots to capture events like concerts or soccer games, which eventually get e-mailed or posted on Facebook. Sharing his personal experience, McQuivey said he went to a concert with his daughter recently and saw about 100 pocket video cameras shooting the show on the main floor.

“The performers even said, it used to be what goes on tour stays on tour, but now it ends up on Facebook,” McQuivey said. “Apple would be foolish not to try to be the center of that buzz.”

“Google is going to want to go with this, too: They have YouTube,” McQuivey noted. “This could be really interesting.”

And what about Lala? According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is working with Lala’s engineers to revamp iTunes into a streaming music service that lets users buy and listen to music through a web browser.

“For consumers, such changes could make it far easier to manage and access large libraries of music, which need to be stored, maintained and backed up on computer hard drives and portable devices,” The Wall Street Journal wrote.

Why stop with music? Adding video to the mix would turn iTunes into a personal media hub.

In a nearer term, McQuivey says Apple has an easy opportunity to integrate video from the fifth-generation iPod Nano into iTunes, enabling users to share recordings with one another through the software.

“This puts Apple in an important place it hasn’t occupied until now: It makes Apple software the potential hub for personal media, something that is poised to explode in the next 2-3 years,” McQuivey wrote in a blog post when the video-equipped Nano was released in September.

“Even Flip’s success has not guaranteed that people use Flip software to manage the videos they capture,” he added. “But Apple’s iTunes has always been the glue that makes Apple’s ecosystem work. And now it just acquired superadhesive properties.”

See Also:

• Apple’s New Data Center Likely to Focus on Cloud Computing …
• Rhapsody to Apple: ‘Get Off of My Cloud’
• Apple’s Purchase of Lala Could Signal Cheaper, Streaming iTunes …
• Dropbox Brings Cloud Storage Within iPhone’s Reach

Photo: michaelhilton/Flickr

Even in a world full of racket, it seems that the squeaky wheel still gets the grease. In yet another blow to this whole “cloud” agenda, a vocal segment of Palm users began to notice that information transferred from their online Palm Profile was only a fraction of what it should have been. Today, both Palm and Sprint have issued a joint statement acknowledging the issue and promising to work much, much harder in order to avoid having something like this ruin your life once again. To quote:

“We are seeing a small number of customers who have experienced issues transferring their Palm Profile information to another Palm webOS device. Palm and Sprint are working closely together to support these customers to successfully transfer their information to the new device.”

Between this mess and the T-Mobile fiasco, we’re pretty certain we’re being forced to stay on the manual backup bandwagon for the foreseeable future.

[Thanks, Mike]

Palm and Sprint issue statement acknowledging Profile backup issue originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sometimes you have to take a step down to step up. That’s what Google should’ve done with its open source PC operating system Chrome OS, which the corporation demonstrated Thursday.

Instead, Google is positioning Chrome OS against Microsoft with a lightweight OS shipping with netbooks next year. Chrome OS will function as a modified browser, enabling netbooks to handle everyday computing with web-based applications. That’s right: No native software, just the web.

The philosophy behind Chrome OS is extreme: Go the web way, all the way. It’s a “paradigm shift to make the web synonymous with the computer,” as Mashable’s Ben Parr puts it. But it’s an idealistic vision that could take several years to actualize, given the currently limited state of wireless connectivity and web-based applications. Google is aware of that, and the company is merely massaging us with this radical idea of a web-only computing experience by suggesting we try it on netbooks first.

Looking ahead, the company said it plans to share Chrome OS with more-powerful devices, including notebooks and desktops. But we doubt consumers will show much interest in a Chrome OS netbook the way Google is currently packaging it.

With Chrome OS, the search giant is pushing an OS that enables us to do less — even less than already low-powered netbooks can do. Web apps can’t let us process Microsoft Word documents, sync our iTunes libraries, or edit photos with Photoshop, for example. Thanks to their crampy keyboards and small screens, netbooks aren’t ideal for productivity apps such as Photoshop or Microsoft Word — but you’d be surprised at the different uses for netbooks that made them last year’s hit product category. Watch what happens when Google offers an OS that doesn’t at least provide the option of using the aforementioned apps.

Of course, as Google’s pitch goes, there are web alternatives to everything. Cloud storage for backups, internet-streaming music and video services, and the Google Docs web suite for all your spreadsheet or word-processing needs. The list goes on.

The idea is such: Give up the computing experience you’ve grown accustomed to for over a decade. Come live in Google’s browser.

Why would anyone wish to do that today, tomorrow or even next year when the OS ships?

Michael Gartenberg, a tech analyst at Interpret, sums up the state of computer use today better than anyone else: “What we’ve seen is most users are looking for a combination of the two: rich applications on my desktop, and the apps where I want to be connected.”

“This idea that I’m somehow going to do away with rich app architectures and do everything through the browser is an old argument, and it’s never taken root,” he added.

The benefits of Chrome OS don’t seem to outweigh everything Google’s modified browser will do away with. The pluses: Tight security, thanks to Google’s careful monitoring for malware in Chrome OS apps; saving the money you’d spend on an external hard-disk drive thanks to cloud storage; ultimately, being able to “stop worrying about your computer,” as Google said in a promotional video shown at its Thursday event.

Stop worrying about our computers? We’re worried about you, Google. T-Mobile Sidekick customers should especially be disenchanted with the cloud. Microsoft, T-Mobile and Danger hosted the data of all of T-Mobile’s Sidekick users in the cloud, and recently the server crashed, losing everything.

Nobody’s perfect, so it’s conceivable that the same thing could happen with Chrome OS. After all, Google’s Gmail service crashed in February and again in September this year. While no data was lost, it did cause hours of angst for people who had grown dependent on the mail service.

And then there’s money. Aside from losing access to the native apps we’ve paid for on our PC, it’s certainly imaginable that using Chrome OS could get expensive in general. If we wished to put an always-connected, web-app-only computer to good use, we’d need to purchase a data plan from a carrier. This could come in the form of an EVDO card or a smartphone tethering plan — in other words, a monthly bill. Google said Chrome OS will have caching features, so you won’t need internet access to do everything, but caching won’t provide the same offline experience as a full native application.

(Of course, our wireless problems could be solved if we could find an open Wi-Fi connection just anywhere we go. But unless you live in Mountain View, California, where Google provides free Wi-Fi, ubiquitous, free hotspots are not part of your reality.)

With all that said, there’s a ton of potential here for Chrome OS to be vastly appealing, and I’m keeping an open mind. To succeed with Chrome OS, Google should take a step down. To start, Google should modify Chrome OS into a “mini OS” of sorts that can live alongside another OS, such as Windows, on a netbook.

For comparison, Phoenix Technologies offers a mini OS called HyperSpace, which some netbooks are already shipping with. HyperSpace runs parallel to Windows as an instant-on environment, allowing netbooks to perform internet-centric functions without actually booting into Windows. Functions include multimedia players, browsers, internet telephony, e-mail and IM.

Sounds a lot like what Chrome OS is going to be, doesn’t it? That’s because it’s almost the same idea, only Phoenix Technologies is a lesser-known company (which developed the BIOS that boots many Windows computers today, by the way) and is taking a humbler approach — offering HyperSpace as an optional, complementary (but not complimentary) OS rather than a full-blown substitute for Windows. It’s an approach that could lead to greater results if embraced by an incredibly powerful brand like Google.

By offering Chrome OS as a free, downloadable mini OS that runs parallel to a full one, Google can still continue to expand its presence onto hardware — without having to sell the OS with netbooks. Consumers could still try out the benefits of Chrome OS and cloud computing when it’s convenient for them. Then, if users wished to boot into their primary OS to back up their data or do document processing with Microsoft Word, for example, they could — a hybrid, more feature-rich experience.

Unfortunately, not everything we want is on the web just yet. That’s not going to radically change in one year, and not even Google can change that.

See Also:

• Google Chrome OS: Ditch Your Hard Drives, the Future Is the Web
• Five Things Google’s Chrome OS Will Do for Your Netbook
• Google Announces PC Operating System to Compete with Windows …
• You Predict the Winner of OS Wars: Chrome, Windows, Linux, OS X?
• Google FAQ Reveals Chrome OS Hardware Partners

Photo: Melanie Phung/Flickr

Continue reading Digital ‘Cloud’ could form over London for the 2012 Olympics

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Digital ‘Cloud’ could form over London for the 2012 Olympics originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been the story of the week. T-Mobile Sidekick customers were told that all of their data might be lost and warned not to turn off their devices to prevent losing what’s already on them. It’s about the worst case nightmare scenario for any vendor and it underscored the weakness and vulnerability of cloud-based computing with no other means of backup and storage.

The Sidekick story is complicated, and there’s much rumor and speculation as to what went wrong and how. To be clear, Sidekick is a T-Mobile branded-and-sold device and service, but the Sidekick technology comes from Danger, a former startup now owned by Microsoft, which T-Mobile pays to keep Sidekick going. Trust me, there’s going to be lots of finger pointing and perhaps a few class-action lawsuits before this all comes to an end. While finger pointing is fun, it’s not the issue. (And, as grandpa used to say, when you point your finger at someone else, three fingers point back at you.) Some argued with me last night that cloud computing is perfectly safe, it’s the company deploying that you need to look to. OK. I accept that. Only thing is that Danger’s been doing this pretty well since 2002 and at no point did I ever see a single warning from anyone that dealing with T-Mobile, Danger or Microsoft might be a bad idea when it comes to personal data solely living in the cloud.

Continue reading Entelligence: Cloud’s illusions I recall

Filed under: Cellphones, Misc. Gadgets

Entelligence: Cloud’s illusions I recall originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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