15 Mar 2005
On the technology adoption curve, I'd generally consider myself a "technology enthusiast" or early adopter type. Especially with web stuff. I'm a dork, I know it, and I love fooling around with web technologies.
But I have to admit, I completely missed the boat on del.icio.us. I just couldn't quite grok its usefulness. I got what it did, but never really why it was useful.
Thankfully, we have Jon Udell. He's simply one of the best commentators around when it comes to actually communicating the usefulness and usage of new tools. He released a screencast of how to use del.icio.us today and the light bulb finally clicked on in my brain. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. A moving picture can be worth even more.
So, if you want to check out what I'm tagging on del.icio.us, you can always find my bookmarks.
11 Mar 2005
My preview of the atrociously bad Arizona Diamondbacks is up over at The House That Dewey Built. In summary, I think they suck.
Whatever warmth I had in my heart for the Diamonbacks after the 2001 World Series has been slowly drained away by watching them make consistently bad baseball decisions. Any team that signs Russ Ortiz to the sort of deal they did deserves my scorn.
09 Mar 2005
David Pinto of Baseball Musings is one of the better baseball bloggers out there. He's a smart guy with access to a ton of data (something not all of us are privvy to).
Over the offseason, he's been running a bunch of tables that show what he calls the Probablisitic Model of Range. Basically, he's got the direction and type of hit of every play in baseball in 2004 and runs it through a model to come up with the number of expected plays by each player versus the number of plays they actually made. Very cool stuff and also very similar to the UZR stat that MGL of the St. Louis Cardinals by way of Baseball Think Factory.
It's not a perfect stat -- there's some weirdness with certain positions seemingly being manned only by below average players and some only by above average players, but it's a worthwhile number to look at when looking at defense.
That's just it. Before today, it was just a number.
Today David broke that barrier. He's graphically represented the defensive capabilities of players. If you're a baseball fan/stathead, this is amazing stuff. He graphed both David "People Love Me Because I'm Scrappy and Suck" Eckstein and Cristian "You Want to Pay Me *How* Much, Mr. Bowden?" Guzman.
The graphs show it all. Eckstein isn't great moving to either side, but he makes the routine plays. He's awful catching foul pops on the 3rd base side. He's bad on liners. Basically, he's a pretty poor defensive SS (and this doesn't even address his arm). Guzman's graphs show a player who's pretty average on grounders to SS, but pretty great at snagging anything in the air, whether a pop or a liner.
Just awesome, awesome stuff. I'm slowly getting ready for baseball season. In fact, you should go read my analysis of the Milwaukee Brewers over at The House that Dewey Built. And check again later this week when I tear the Arizona Diamondbacks a new one.
02 Mar 2005
Baseball is here.
If you want to get a snapshot of every team, head over to The House that Dewey Built, which is a great site for baseball-commentary (mostly Red Sox-centric). I'm writing some of the capsules for the guys there, starting with the Milwaukee Brewers which should be up on Thursday.
So, go read it and then comment on it and let me know that I rule. Or don't rule.
02 Mar 2005
Baseball is here.
If you want to get a snapshot of every team, head over to The House that Dewey Built, which is a great site for baseball-commentary (mostly Red Sox-centric). I'm writing some of the capsules for the guys there, starting with the Milwaukee Brewers which should be up on Thursday.
So, go read it and then comment on it and let me know that I rule. Or don't rule.
18 Feb 2005
There used to be a picture here because my Hokies upset the Dookies.
The picture is gone, but the Hokies still rule.
18 Feb 2005
Right out of college I worked for a small hardware/software startup that developed haptics devices and software for the devices. It was a very fun place to work, a remarkable industry to work in, and a technology we all thought (well, at least I thought) would eventually make it to the general public and be widely used.
3.5 years later, much more jaded, I left that company. I no longer thought that mass market haptics would happen with our technology -- at least not by our company.
When I say mass market haptics, I'm referring to high fidelity haptics, not the kind you might find in a rumbling joystick or cellphone. Those are types of haptics too, but high fidelity single-point (or even multi-point) haptics interaction immerses you in a virtual environment in a way you really can't express in words. I've seen virtual surgery, sculpting, and even a virtual sonogram that allowed you to touch a 3d sonogram of your unborn child. Very cool.
Just a couple of days ago, Novint Technologies, the company behind the virtual sonogram software, announced their new haptics device at the DEMO conference. The Novint Falcon is a device very similar to the one my company used to make, with one exception: it's scheduled to market for about $100.
I haven't had the chance to use the Falcon yet, but the folks at the DEMO conference seemed to be pretty impressed with it. It leverages the technology made by Force Dimension, whose device I have had a chance to use and thought worked extremely well.
I know a few of the guys at Novint, and have had the chance to spend a batch of time with their President/CEO and CTO. These are brilliant guys and they're currently following what seems to be the right strategy to reach critical mass:
- Make a product you can sell for under $100
- Try to work with the big players since it's impossible to do it on your own
Novint needs to come up with a simple API and get it out to developers. Let the devleopers create the apps and drive the sales of the device. I think that's the only way to survive in a niche market like haptics.
Novint is getting a lot of good play on the web and in the blogosphere. They need to leverage this into as much exposure as they can and keep the PR ball rolling until they're actually ready to sell the device. The folks there are smart and I think they can do it.
So, probably about 7 years after I got into the haptics game (and much longer than that for many of the pioneers of haptics), and a couple of years after I got out of haptics, a high fidelity device might reach a mass market. I have bad timing. But, in my defense, I was one of the voices at my previous employer who was shouting that we were headed in the wrong direction. Sometimes it just takes too long to get the ship turned around.
26 Jan 2005
About three weeks after I signed up for the "priority list", I finally got
TiVoToGo pushed down to my TiVo. 30 minutes later, I'm pulling stuff off of my TiVo that I've been saving for over a year, namely, an appearance I made on an AT&T/Comcast show (in support of a friend's movie,
Working Stiff).
It's particularly interesting as it's the first time I've ever been on television in just my boxers.
More on TiVoToGo later. Right now, I'm digging it a good bit. It's good functionality -- with a really flawed rollout.
It'll be even better when I can push stuff onto my TiVo. That way, I can use BitTorrent like a second TiVo, download episodes of stuff that is on opposite stuff I currently TiVo, and not have to worry about hooking my laptop up to my TV.
23 Jan 2005
I really wish I had bought a whovel.
Stupid blizzard.
19 Jan 2005
So, after opining on the mostly goodness of Netflix, I'm sad to say that I think we're watching the waning days of TiVo.
I love my TiVo. I've had it for over a couple of years now and I've convinced other people to get one. I have never once regretted purchasing it. My TiVo (called Employee 8 after former Celtic and current Hawk Antoine Walker) has been one of the best and most rewarding purchases I've ever made. A DVR really will change your life.
But, even as a TiVo evangelist, I've seen the writing on the wall. The company needed to partner with a cable company to expand the userbase and reduce the hardware costs. There's just no way that TiVo could survive on its own in a landscape where Comcast can put out a DVR for just an extra $5 a month on your cable bill.
So I hoped that TiVo would start to push the boundaries of home entertainment, all the while looking to partner with Comcast or Motorola (the provider of most cable boxes). TiVo announced a partnership with Netflix. Not bad -- a forward thinking idea, but not really valuable when most people are getting used to DVD quality (or better video). But on a networked HD TiVo ... wow, that'd be amazing. TiVo had also previously announced TiVoToGo, an update to your TiVo to let it shoot video back to your computer to burn to DVD for taking it with you on a trip or archiving. And then there was news TiVo was beta-testing a HD TiVo.
All of this pointed in the right direction -- an HD TiVo, where Netflix customers could request a DVD-quality movie to be dripped down over an internet connection, and where you could then send recorded television back to your PC in case you needed to bring a show on an airplane. Combined with the existing Home Media service that TiVo had released letting you push pictures and music to your TiVo, and TiVo had the whole home entertainment center covered.
The last step -- figure out how to get a HD TiVo to market. A normal TiVo simply isn't going to cut it for a majority of these new features, especially not when the entire television industry is betting on HDTV.
Now, this is a tough road for TiVo. Most HDTVs do not automatically decode HD signals, so they require a converter box. The cable or satellite companies control the converter box. This is necessary until the CableCard 2.0 spec hits, sometime in mid-2005 (though TiVo could have released a CableCard 1.0 HD device in the interim). Thus, TiVo needed to get into the converter box. They accomplished this with DirectTV. The last step is to get in bed with a big cable company ... let's say Comcast.
Well, recently TiVO CEO Mike Ramsey stepped down as CEO. And now we know why: TiVo backed away from a deal with Comcast. Simply insane.
Even in the worst scenario, a deal with Comcast broadens TiVo's userbase and exposes millions of people to their interface and software. If TiVo then wanted to come out with a standalone system, they could likely convince some percentage of users to come with them. Good products have a way of drawing a market.
TiVo blows this deal. Then TiVoToGo ships arguably months late, and the rollout is done so unbelievably stupidly that a number of high profile users (Atrios, for instance) start to complain about it. This is the hallmark of a company circling the drain. In an attempt to get some great PR out of CES, they announce a product as being available, yet 90% of their customers can't use it.
But this is 2005 and an agile, Web 2.0-type of company can react to the bad news, explain the situation, and start to make amends.
Nope. Not TiVo. There have simply been more posts on TiVoCommunity.com talking about how they have to slowly build up to not overwhelm their support staff. Most users on the priority list (folks who knew how to sign up their TiVo to get precedence) should get the upgrade by February ... or March.
Jesus. That's just fucking stupid.
Oh, and the standalone HD TiVo people are pining for? They announced it at CES.
ETA: mid-2006.
I'll say it again. Jesus, that's just fucking stupid.
I've seen first hand companies who hit this stage. They grow to fast, decide that rather than giving the market what it wants, they're going to try to create a new market where they can dictate the terms and pricing. Much of this is driven by the need to pay back the investments of the venture capitalists who invested in the company initially. So rather than doing the slow build and trying to own a large piece of an existing market, small companies try to go it alone and own a niche. And it almost never works.
TiVo can be saved. A smart CEO could come in and get the company in order. There's still a ton of good ideas coming out of TiVo, as they're starting to embrace the idea that the TiVo shouldn't be a closed box.
But they are rapidly running out of time. At this point, they have about 2.1m subscribers, but a bunch of those are DirectTV users who will likely move to a DirectTV DVR when one is released. A bunch more are older TiVo users who have never upgraded. The rest - let's say 1 million - are a very small portion of the cable marketplace. Many of them are not technophiles or television hobbyists. They're grandparents and moms and dads who don't care how they "TiVo" Spongebob, they just need it done. Comcast's DVR will be fine for them.
TiVo's going to lose a bunch of people this year to cable company DVRs. If they don't act quickly, it will not matter how much better the TiVo is -- price and inertia will win out. A $5 a month device that records HD is good enough for most folk.
Thus, TiVo will end up owning a niche market ... but it won't be one large enough to sustain a company or pay back its investors.