Monthly Archive for January, 2006



547 views

TiVo and Video Podcasts

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 26, 2006
in Consumer Electronics, New Marketing and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

I am not much of a TV person. I have one, but I never turn it on. I am a podcast listener and a blog reader. Right now, you can download the Rocketboom video podcast to your Tivo. Tivo is coming out with a service where you can stream podcasts. Here is what I want. I want to subscribe to Rocketboom, DiggNation, and any other video podcast I like. Then, when I come home from work, anything that has been released has downloaded to my Tivo and I can just watch them. I don’t have a Tivo now. But if thus feature became available, buying a Tivo would be my top priority. I hope I would not have to pay for anything since I am not recording regular TV. I know I am probably in the minority but I don’t care. Or am I? How many Digg users are there? At least 60,000. And how many in the Twit army? 100,000? And don’t forget about the long tail. TiVo could pump out contextual ads to geeks they would actually care about. Tivo does need to try and stretch its market share.

Update 2/25/2006
I was right.
http://www.podcastingnews.com…people_want_vid.html
http://www.videopodcastingnews.com…consumers-want-video-podcasts-on-their-tvs
http://www.marketwire.com…_b1?release_id=109920

Update 5/9/2006
Another step closer.
TiVo hooks up with Internet video and ad sales service

Update 11/14/2006
Closer yet.
Coming Soon via Your TiVo: Internet Video on Television
Via Techmeme

Update 1/4/2007
Evan Young of TiVo Discusses the Details of the new TiVoCast Service.

Update 8/19/2007
If you want to watch video podcasts on your TV, you should probably get an AppleTV. Here is a comparison of the TiVo Series 3 and AppleTV. You cannot watch any podcast you want to on a TiVo Series 3, but you can with an AppleTV.

Update 3/15/08:
How to get YouTube on a TiVo.



206 views

Killer Innovations Podcast forum now with RSS

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 23, 2006
in My Projects
. 0 Comments

Phil McKinney of the Killer Innovations Podcast let me install the phpbb2 plugin that generates an RSS feeds for the forum. http://www.techtrendgroup.net/community



161 views

Ruby on Rails Podcast

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 23, 2006
in My Projects
. 0 Comments

My first contribution to the open source community! I did the post-production audio editing for the last Ruby on Rails Podcast interview with Sean Chittenden who reworked Penny-Arcade.com from PHP/MySQL/Apache to Rails/Postgresql/Lighttpd (I think). The new show should appear in the feed in the next day or so at http://podcast.rubyonrails.org. So if any Rails developers want to contribute to my “send Nick to the Ruby on Rails Workshop” fund, find the donate button in the sidebar. Thanks to Geoffrey Grosenbach for the opportunity. He is also the one teaching the workshop.

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154 views

Conversations: the new form of advertising

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 22, 2006
in I heard it on a podcast and New Marketing
. 1 Comment

Adam Curry has been commenting in his podcast for quite a while about how to using advertising in a podcast. Not necessarily 30 second spots (which are dying), but just talking about a product he likes. But is this really advertising? It is not paid. As an advertising customer, could pay a podcaster to talk about the product. However, not many podcasters may be able to to this in a genuine manner.

A listener of The Daily Source Code sent in a comment where he noted that he had purchased specific products because Adam talks about them because he uses them. This in not unlike a conversation you may have with a friend. As a matter of fact, a podcast could be just a conversation between people (not always real-time, but this does not matter). So, any lister can participate in the conversion by sending Adam a comment, and he can play them. This was not as common in TV and radio. Furthermore, with independent podcasters, there are no producers looking over the shoulders of the hosts, telling them what they can and cannot say.

When people go to purchase a new product or service, they may think of what their friends use. Maybe they will remember a conversation they had with a friend where the friend recommended for or against a particular product or service. In the case of this podcast listener, he thought about the conversation he had been listing to Adam have with the audience. And these conversation are genuine, they are not paid (or do not appear to be), otherwise, they would not have this effect.

How could a marketer harness the marketing power of a genuine conversation about a product or service in a podcast? Well, the marker could start by being more involved in the design of product or service, to ensure that it is of hight quality, and reliability. This way, no one could say anything bad about their experience with it. Of course, this is not the traditional role of a marketer. In fact, it could be said that some marketers are hired to make up for products cannot speak for themselves. So, what is a vendor of a product or service to do? They should not make bad products. They should make products that have thoughtful design and a great user experience. Make it so people want to talk highly about your product or service, so that your customers become evangelist as note in a book I read called Customer Mania!. Do I have to mention Apple and 37 Signals again? People want to talk about products and services they are passionate about, and they might talk about them in a podcast, and then thousands of people will hear it. I have not read it yet, but I am sure this is mentioned in Naked Conversations. As a matter of fact, I would be willing to bet that I have just summarized what Naked Conversations is about. My example though is to point out the phenomenon that is created in podcasting, and how it could have a stronger effect than blogging.

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159 views

Why We Download Music (“illegally”): A Manifesto

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 15, 2006
in DRM Rant, I heard it on a podcast and Social Web
. 0 Comments

This is a post I did on Panda’s Hideout Podcast via SpoiltVictorianChild.co.uk regarding an articel on BBC’s website about downloading music. The article suggests that ease of accessibility to music by downloading it means a lower appreciation of music.

Our standards have been raised because the amount of music that is out there. We are no longer satisfied as easily as we would have been in the past because of this. In the past, the way we would discover interesting music was through the radio, MTV, and maybe through record stores and friends recommendations. So, if you were a fan of music, you would find the music you liked best and become a fan. But of course, there is always something that you may like that may remain undiscovered by you for months or even years.

Now that there is so much music out there and it is so much easier to discover it, we have the chance to refine our tastes. We can download a ton of music to try and find something we really like rather than settling. When we find something we really, really like that is worth our time, we can then become obsessive fanboys and fangirls, buying ever release on vinyl, every single that come out, and going to every show. Life as a music fan is so much better when you have a mad passion about music, rather than settling for music that makes us feel luke-warm.

We, as music fans, will now take auditions for music that we will become passionate about. We will not pay for this screening process as we did in the past, and we will not narrow our search to what old media is presenting to us. We want to find music that is really, good, and then remain committed to that artist or genre.

Ease of discovery + breadth of variety = higher standards (more discriminating tastes)

*Does this mean we “consume” more music? Yes. (need to plow through all the crap to find the gems).
*Do we want to pay for music we do not like? No (and we want to pay for music we do like).
*Should we have to pay for everything we “consume?” No (but the old, dying media model says yes).
*Do we think “paid, industry sanctioned channels of discovery” of music are a dying model? Yes (radio, MTV, brick-and-mortar music stores).

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174 views

Budget Allocation and Good Design: A Catch 22

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 14, 2006
in Consumer Electronics, I heard it on a podcast and Product Support and Customer Service
. 0 Comments

Some of the panels from the 2006 CES are downloadable as podcasts. I would like to point out an interesting observation in one of the panels. One of the panelists sates that that good design is more expensive (obvious point), but very important. Marketers cannot see a cost benefit in spending more money on good design in order to cut down support costs. After all, the customer support department has its own budget; and this is how the company is left to deal with unintuitive product design. So, with that in mind, a sales/marketing/product management department has no incentive to spend money on good design because it is more money out of their own budget, which could cut into their bottom line personally if are rewarded with a bonus if sales are good (forgoing support expenses that are far removed from themselves). A company could allocate budgets to departments in a way where the departments work autonomously; not a good thing.

The panelist point out that marketers may have more pull in the company than designers. And support may have even less impact on either department. This is most definitely can occur in large, slow companies where the decision makers have been with the company for a long time. As pointed out by It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small…It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow by Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton, people often do a better job (or at least do it with more passion) during their first year. Then, as change occurs, they can sometimes not adapt in order to prove that the way they did it back then continues to work, even through it may not be working. This will be true of big and slow companies. They point out that this can be avoided by moving the people around into different positions.

My theory is that these slow, old decision makers and the people that oversee them may not decide to adapt to changes in the market, and are not creating a system where great design and a great customer experience are placed before bonuses and marketers’ opinions.

Apple Computers and 37 Signals are great examples of companies that have created a situation where customers’ experience is paramount. They realize that if they make this happens profits, envy, and admiration in the design scene will follow. Jason Fried at 37 Signals is small enough to care about every aspect of the company, specifically, customer experience. Steve Jobs at Apple is the cutting edge of cool design and great customer experience. If more companies could emulate the customer experience these companies could provide instead of simply looking at products and services (the end product), they may get somewhere. Maybe someday we will be able to arbor a company that strives to do anything less than this.

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131 views

Mixcasting

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 11, 2006
in My Projects
. 0 Comments

Check out the new idea I came up with today I am calling Mixcasting on my wiki http://www.suggestions4ipodanditunes.com”. As far as a name for what I am proposing, it looks like it may be taken by some Linux proposed idea, and someone was trying to sell the domain name, but it seems like fair game.

So, a mixcast is a podcast of a DJ mix where the track indexing is embedded in a chapter enabled M4A with ChapterTool on the fly by the special client software. I came up with idea while working on my podcast DnBPodcast.com

Update 6/1/2006
I guess someone else is already using the term “mixcast” for something else. I’ll think of a different name.

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125 views

CES 2006 follow up

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 10, 2006
in Consumer Electronics
. 0 Comments

Regarding CES meetups, I just found this: http://ces.bubbleshare.com/index.php?wiki=CesCamp :(

Didn’t get to meet with Phil, but he mentions me here!

Other than meeting with Phil and checking out new toys and technology, I did not have any business to do there. Did some partying here and there. I was supposed to have dinner with my boss be he cancel on everyone for some reason.

I have some photos in my Flickr stream. I’ll give the scoop on the new Kenwood navigation unit in the next couple days on CarNavigationForum.com



108 views

CES 2006

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 5, 2006
in Consumer Electronics and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

I will be flying into Las Vegas on Friday night for CES 2006. If anyone knows of any blogger meetups going on there, let me know. I may get a chance to meet with Phil McKinney of Killer Innovations Podcast.

I can’t wait to find out if there is any new gear that works with Web 2.0 apps. Yeah, this looks like it is going to be the year web apps meet portable devices in an entirely new way.

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