Why Time Warner should incorporate Hulu
Time shifting is fast becoming the norm, but what if you forget to record a show? What if you want to catch the previous season of a program before jumping into the new season? Let’s not even get into the potential for making money from overseas content.
Media companies are slowly embracing the realities of the internet and it seems like this is a perfect opportunity to make a difference.
I understand that TW has to protect its add revenue and it wouldn’t want to have Hulu gain a bigger audience thus shifting ad revenue there, but what if instead it could figure out a model where TW could do the ad placement on hulu content and share the revenue?
TW could also make it so that a viewer could schedule a program to record on their TW DVR after watching the content from Hulu. This would bring the audience back to traditional media while blending in the online experience. In a sense this is enhanced TV. Without this option I might be more reluctant to jump into the new season of Heroes if I have never watched the series, but if I could go back and catch the series from season 1, I might stick around.
There are many ways that traditional media sources can collaborate with new distribution channels to enhance their offerings, but by not acknowledging the elephant in the room they can seal their own fate as more and more viewers catch on to the power of true on-demand entertainment. I already know people who are canceling cable in favor of online distribution and this trend is bound to continue unless companies like TW figure out more compelling ways to engage viewers.
Larry Page’s University of Michigan Commencement Address
Larry Pages University of Michigan Commencement Address
via Google Press Center: Press Release.
A nice read. Right up there with Job’s speech about his life.
Kindle 2 v iPod Shuffle text-to-speech: Funny
BlueTrip CSS grid overlay bookmarklet
badlyDrawnToy created a bookmarket for the 960.gs grid overlay. I modified it for Bluetrip. Just drag the link below to your bookmarks toolbar. In Internet Explorer, right click, select ‘Add to favourites’ and then select ‘Links’. It does not work with IE6.
Updated to version 2.0
Blueprint grid overlay – a jQuery plugin
Today I saw a link on Twitter for a jQuery plugin written by badlyDrawnToy that allows you to toggle the grid overlay when using 960.gs
I have been using Bluetrip for my app development, so I adapted badlyDrawnToy’s plugin to work with BluePrint / Bluetrip CSS.
You can get it on my Github repo
The only file you need is jquery.BTshowgrid-1.0.min.js. The other files are just there to support the example.
To enable it on your page just call
1 2 3 | $(document).ready(function(){ $("body").addGrid({img_path: '../img/',margin:"1.5em auto"}); }); |
The default options are as follows. They may be overridden by passing in this param
1 2 3 4 5 6 | var defaults = { z_index: 999, img_path: '/img/', opacity:.6, margin:'0 auto' }; |
Reversing Your Email Composition [Idea] « On Organization
If you have ever sent an email without including an attachment or clicked send before you were done, check out this article.
Here is a nice tip on a different approach to writing emails Reversing Your Email Composition [Idea] « On Organization.
Fight for Kindle access – Disabled Community organizes against Author’s Guild
The Reading Rights Coalition, which represents people who cannot read print, will protest the threatened removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 outside the Authors Guild headquarters in New York City at 31 East 32nd Street on April 7, 2009, from noon to 2:00 p.m
Reading Rights Coalition Urges Authors to Allow Everyone Access to E-books.
As I had pointed out in my precious posts on this subject. This technology would improve access to book for those who would normally not be able to access them and as such should have been treated by the Author’s Guild as a new revenue stream, not a threat to their current business model.
Dr. Peter Blanck, chairman and university professor at Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, said:
As electronic books become the norm, denying universal access will result in more and more people with disabilities being left out of education, employment, and the societal conversation. We will all suffer from the absence of their participation and contribution to the debates that occupy us as a society.
While the Kindle 2 is not currently accessible to blind users, Amazon recently announced on its Kindle 2 blog that it is currently at work on making the device’s navigational features accessible to the blind.
F* the Real World: A video of David Heinemeier Hansson’s talk at FOWA Dublin
This is a great speech by David Heinemeier Hansson on how one should believe in an idea and bring it to fruition and disregard the nay sayers who will always find faults and reasons why things won’t work.
I too have found what David speaks of to be the case. Many of the things I have accomplished were only due to perseverance when many said something couldn’t be done. I am currently in the process of developing my idea into a business so this speech came at a good time as it is hard to stay motivated in the face of hearing all the negatives about what I am trying to do. Enjoy
David Heinemeier Hansson – FOWA Dublin 2009 from Carsonified on Vimeo.
Everyone is so G*d D*mn unique
I have yet to find a company that feels that they are just like everyone else. In my career I have been fortunate to work in a variety of industries including Pharmaceutical, Manufacturing, Semiconductor, Entertainment, Standardized Testing, Software etc. Everyone always thinks they are unique. It’s probably a defense mechanism or an excuse as to why things are so poor in that particular company.
This morning I was watching a live Q&A with 37signals and David Heinemeier Hansson was talking about customizing their application to a specific industry vs. being generic. That’s when he inspired this post with the words that became it’s title.
DHH went on to say:
Everyone thinks they are this perfect little snowflake
What he said was that the things that work are those which work for everyone, like email. I couldn’t agree more. People think that just because some solution worked at one company it does not mean that it will work at theirs. What companies don’t see is that most of what they do is pretty generic. If you focus on the 5% that may be unique, your company will not progress because it will get stuck in never ending analysis.
At a company I once consulted for, they were developing a large piece of software for something I knew other companies were doing. I was not in a position to convince them that they should find an off-the-shelf solution, but I knew it was wasteful to try to build something internally especially if what they were building was not their core competency. Needless to say that company didn’t complete that project because when new management came in and saw the lack of progress, they quickly killed the project and set out to implement the generic off-the-shelf solution which was used at other companies.
If what you are doing is that much different from your competitors and you are not the leader of the pack, then you should seriously analyze what you are doing because your “uniqueness” may be your downfall.
Make an effort to learn what works at other companies even if they are in other industries. You will gain a tremendous amount. I’ve had clients who talk every acronym under the sun from LEAN and Six Sigma to PRINCE2 and RUP. In most cases what they were missing was not a unifying technique for improving their business. What they were missing was a change to their corporate culture which hindered progress. In the end these companies were not unique because of what they did, but because of how they were doing it. So stop thinking you are so special and work on actually getting things done and changing the complacent attitude which is what is really holding you back.
Apple embraces accessibility and helps everyone in the process
Most people don’t know that Macs are by default the most “off-the-shelf” accessible computers sold today. Every single Mac comes with accessibility features for the physical and motor skills, hearing, and vision impaired. This means that a blind person can walk into any Apple store and use any computer without installing any software. They can even carry all their settings on a USB drive so that their customization can travel with them. On Windows computers these features need to be purchased separately from third parties and as such lack the level of refinement and availability of the Apple solution.
Since 2002 Apple has been investing on accessibility on the Mac platform, but in the last year it has been taking steps to make it’s other products namely iTunes and iPods more accessible to the blind.
Today Apple demonstrated how a company can use accessibility to it’s advantage. By integrating Voice Over into the latest iPod shuffle not only did they make the product accessible to the blind, they made it accessible to everyone. Since the shuffle has no screen the product has always been marketed as one where the listener has little control of the listening experience, hence the Shuffle name. Now that the device has Voice Over a listener can select a specific play list allowing them to customize their experience to their current mood.
Making Macs accessible led to making iPod Nanos accessible. This work led to Voice Over in the new iPod Shuffles giving Apple another competitive advantage. A short sighted company would not invest in this feature for a product line where they already own the market. But at Apple this work will not be limited to the iPod line. I am sure this trend will continue at Apple because it makes sense. The iPod “experiment” is just baby steps.
Currently the iPhone is the least accessible device they make, but think of what text-to speech can do for Apple. Imagine your phone reading your RSS feeds and email while you drive to work or speaking the name of the caller so that you don’t need to take your eyes off the road? The iPods currently don’t have enough processing power to actually generate the speech real time, Apple actually does the work on the computer prior to loading the music on the device, hence the different voices depending on whether the iPod was synced on a PC or a MAc. However, the iPone’s CPU is a lot more capable and the next version will be even more so allowing Apple to explore these capabilities on the device.
Apple, unlike Amazon and the Author’s Guild, today demonstrated how a company can embrace accessibility and not only help those in need, but improve its product along the way.
Here is a video of the new iPod Shuffle in action. (Quicktime Required). More info can be found on the Shuffle page.