Business Week’s Olga Kharif suggests investors may lose patience with Verizon’s FiOS and other Telco TV initiatives. To back up this contention, Olga cites a forecast by Convergence Consulting Group that “By 2007, 12% of residential consumers will be buying phone service from cable outfits, vs. 4% now [while o]ver the same period, phone companies will have signed up only 2% of TV-service subscribers.”
That’s far below the 20% to 25% share that telcos will need in order to make money on the service, says Mitch Mitchell, an analyst at strategy consultancy A.T. Kearney. As things stand, telco TV providers might not break even, on an annual basis, for 10 to 15 years, says Albert Lin, an analyst at American Technology Research.
[A]s price wars ensue, the breakeven date could be pushed out further still, analysts say. And investors are likely to grow impatient, says Phillip Swanni, CEO of industry researcher TV Predictions. Some may urge the phone companies to pull the plug altogether, he warns. “My prediction is, two years from now there won’t be a TV offering” from Verizon, SBC, or BellSouth(BLS ), he says.
Verizon and others reckon their own TV services will include bells and whistles they can’t offer through a partnership with a satellite provider…Yet for Verizon and the others, the hardest part of satisfying the customer may be keeping investors happy at the same time.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 7:16 PM | Print | Comments (0)
What struck me reading this News.com story about Wikibooks, was how significant the potential implications are not only for the textbook industry—which seems fundamentally threatened by Wikibooks—but also more broadly for our educational system. The piece describes Wikibooks as an “attempt to create a comprehensive, kindergarten-to-college curriculum of textbooks that are free and freely distributable, based on an open-source development model.”
[Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia] explained that the Wikibooks authors—whom he calls “volunteers”—are professionals from many fields, college and graduate students and professors. “All sorts of geeky people, basically,” he said…The bigger it gets and the more people stumble across it, the more people are interested in volunteering. So it grows in that way.”
[Steven Brewer, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts] hopes Wikibooks opens up a new kind of learning opportunity for students because it leverages the power of digital information that is instantly modified and easily researched.
“There are a number of things people can do…that don’t require Wikibooks to be finished yet,” Brewer said. “The big one is to get students involved in producing materials (and) also vetting materials (and) also adding elaboration to materials.”
He envisions teachers—at any level—asking students to examine existing Wikibooks entries for accuracy and relevancy and then appending their findings to those entries. That would allow the project to become a teaching tool and a work in progress all at once…”Increasingly, we’re going to see classes where students do that kind of work,” Brewer said, “and I think that at that point we’re going to see Wikibooks really take off.”Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 7:10 PM | Print | Comments (1)
After digesting O’Reilly’s meme-map, Dion Hinchcliffe comes up with his own visualization of Web 2.0, while Joshua Porter contributes some themes, links and questions to the discussion.
Cristian Vidmar sees “RSS as the first mainstream example of movable data: a simple and safe way to make human-understandable data available to any computer and application, anywhere. Movable data, with both its technical and social impacts, is more than anything else the roots of the Web 2.0 revolution.”
What’s most fascinating is that in the Web 2.0 arena movable data plays a key role both on the technical side (XML-RPC, SOAs) where it changes the development model and on the human side (RSS, hopefully soon many microcontent formats) where it makes new forms of data consuming available to people, changing the way they interact and inform.
RSS and XML-RPC were the first real world incarnation of these concepts, honor is due. Even if I wouldn’t say that Web 2.0 is RSS 2.0, RSS 2.0 is probably the first and most widely adopted kind of movable data. And movable data is the real revolution.
Thanks to techmemeorandum.com for tracking and organizing the streams of discussion.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 4:28 PM | Print | Comments (0)In a recent post we pointed to a meme map posted by Tim O’Reilly that attempts to visually depict the emerging reality often referred to as Web 2.0. The meme map has helped spur several other attempts to define the term.
Dave Winer says “Web 2.0 is really simple, it’s RSS 2.0.” Richard MacManus, who’s writing a book on Web 2.0, disagrees:
Web 2.0 is much more than RSS. It’s about people using the Web as a platform to build on. RSS is one of the tools we use to do that, but there are others - APIs, AJAX, REST, XHTML/CSS, etc…Actually when it comes down to it, Web 2.0 is really about normal everyday people using the Web and creating things on it - forget the acronyms.
Richard also likes a definition offered by Susan Mernit:
Dave Winer says: Web 2.0 is really simple, it’s RSS 2.0, but I would venture to disagree. While RSS is an amazing tool, to me the heart of Web 2.0 is the user. The enduring lesson of all of the social media and emerging technologies is that we’ve created an a la carte, do it yourself platform where users can engage with sophisticated forms of search, feeds, metadata and APIs, social networks and identity, and commerce and fill these vessels with their own information—And that’s the heart of the revolution, IMHO.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 3:05 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Robert Scoble tells us why he fears Google Wifi:
I fear they are using their Wifi to build a better search engine.
MSN’s engineers last week showed me how their system actually evolves without any human contact. It learns from usage patterns…That’s new for search engines. Remember in the mid-1990s? Search engines basically only did text lookup…Then Google came along and added to that algorithm one that tracked linking behavior too. That made it harder to game and made the relevancy of Google much better…Now search engine designers and developers are trying to find “the next algorithm.”
What’s next? Using what users are actually visiting and clicking on. Steve Gillmor calls that attention data… If one engine can get more attention data than another engine they’ll win in the relevancy scores.
So, why do I fear Google’s wifi? Well, if you own the last few yards in between people and the Internet you can really learn a lot. You can watch everything those people click on, what pages they visit, what browsers they use, how often they turn on Skype, and a lot of other stuff.
I guess that’s also why some people fear today’s first-mile gatekeepers, the cable and telephone companies. Like Google, they hope to leverage the enormous amounts of user information they’re in a position to gather. And while the main issue raised today concerns potential blocking of competitive services, today’s first-mile pipe-owners are also coming to recognize the value of search functionality in a web-based world, where content and services are often monetized by context-based targeted advertising.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:13 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Courtesy of Engadget, a new service just begging to be shut down by a squadron of lawyers from the MPAA. Rent My DVR is a new peer-to-peer service that allows users to buy and sell TV programming. Users can scan listings of TV shows recorded on DVRs and order a program for about $.25 a piece.
Uploaders can receive about $.25 a piece for sharing their recorded programs. Founder Mickey Langberg says the service is legal because it’s just like asking your neighbor to record a program for you. I think not, or at least I’m pretty sure that copyright holders won’t see it this way.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:30 AM | Print | Comments (0)
VoIP played an important role in helping to maintain some semblance of communications in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, and legislators are taking notice. According to this piece by Drew Clark in the National Journal’s Tech Daily, Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) has introduced a bill, S. 1063, that would grant VoIP providers relief from an FCC order that they provide e911 capabilities by November 28.
VoIP companies have been arguing that the deadline is not technically feasible, and the FCC has had to twice relax certain requirements related to that deadline. Among the bill’s other provisions, it would require incumbent telcos to give VoIP providers access to phone lines and databases they need to complete 911 calls.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:47 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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