AP Review

Associated Press did a favorable review of Foneshow.

They also did a video.

Video Conferencing at Foneshow

We have an Apple Mini hooked up to the 42" Panasonic Commercial Plasma that hangs over the bar in our office. Here Liza and I chat with Erik (and Ellie!) and Mike - and watch CNN in the picture-in-picture!

Dave Winer is Right

Dave's post about mobile versions of web sites is spot on.

"The screens have limited resolution, and even if they didn't, even if they could cram a billion pixels into every square inch, there's the limit of how much detail our eyes can see and how big our hands are."

This ties in very well with my observations about mobile video.

2008 Election

The Foneshow team spent a good chunk of time last week at conferences talking with customers for our political activism and campaign products. We saw a lot of people talking about the role video (YouTube et. al.) will play in the 2008 election cycle. My position leans towards concern. I suspect their will be an enormous number of "unauthorized" campaign commercials released. We have already seen a number of these types of ads (the Hilary "1984 ad", the Edwards "I Feel Pretty" ad, lots of videos of Giuliani in drag, there was a nasty one about McCain which I can't find now).

I believe that understanding provenance of a political advertisement is key. You need to understand the agenda of the people creating the ad to learn something from it. I suspect what will happen is there is going to be lots of noise and video will get lots of press, but in the end it will be a wash and online video will not play a significant role in who gets elected. I fear it could get so ugly as to turn people off of the process and keep them away from the polls.

While the video people may make all the noise in the 2008 election, I think we mobile people have more power to actually influence the outcome on election day. We can coordinate getting people to the polls. We can do micro-broadcasts to campaign workers on breaking issues. Our groups product can coordinate large remote teams of volunteers in the field in real time. We may even be able to use our interactive features in getting people registered to vote. Hopefully we can get more people better informed and participating.

At the end of the day, YouTube is another broadcast channel. Mobile is a communication channel. I believe politics in this country needs more communication and less broadcasting.

Some Monday Links

David Beisel on the "Concurrent Startup Idea Generation and the Pervasive Copycat Fallacy". Someone else is working on your idea and you're far better served by talking and networking than being quiet.

Scott Converse from ClickCaster on starting a company: You're over 40 and you want to start your first company. Now what?. Starts off as a riff on Fred's post about founders over 40, but Scott expands and most of his best points are not about age.

Brad Feld sums up why iPods are a bad platform for podcasting.

Carnival of the Mobilists 72 is up.

Yahoo paid $52 million for Bix? I'm not getting something here, I don't think Bix had an audience yet and the technology is merely OK. I had put this one at ~$10-20 million.

NYT on cell phone video.

Speaking of the New York Times... How cool is this picture?

Finally, I've been a San Jose Sharks fan since the came into existence. I was a season ticket holder from 1991 until I left the bay area in 2004.

Ron Wilson needs to be fired. He actually needed to be fired after the Edmonton series last year, but better late than never.

Video on Cell Phones

I've been skeptical of video on cell phones for some time. I've mentioned it here and here. I've been meaning to blog about it for a while. Hunter (who runs some segment of video for Google and/or YouTube) reminded me to finally do it, so I am.

There are a number of real challenges to mobile video. Technology can solve many of them at some level. But one of them is much more fundamental and does not have a real technological solution. That problem is driven by biology, and by market forces. There are also a number of business issues involving the cellular carriers, but we'll assume the carriers will wise up at some point and those will go away.

Technology challenges include:

Battery life
Bandwidth
Local storage
Limited UI capability of handsets
Screen size

Batteries are getting better all the time. Mobile bandwidth is also improving (here in the US it lags, but that too will pass). Storage is always getting cheaper. Clever engineers can make good UIs. Screen resolutions are getting higher and higher.

Technological advances will solve many problems, but Moore's law will never give us better eyes.

A biological fact: Human eyes are limited in their capability. Very small complex video images, even at very high resolution, are difficult to see. It has more to do with the angle subtended in your field of view than with how many pixels there are. If you get a small screen close enough to your face to subtend an acceptably large angle, it will be too close for your eyes to focus on.

A market reality: People really like small cell phones.

So...

A) On one hand you have a downward market pressure for smaller and smaller handsets.

B) On the other hand to make video viable and viewable a handset needs to have some minimal X-Y dimensions.

If the dimensions required by B are greater than the maximum acceptable mass market size defined in A, cellphone video will be niche.

The iPhone will provide an interesting test here. There's been a lot written about the iPhone; battery issues, connectivity issues, storage issues. The one thing that is seldom discussed about the iPhone is how physically large it is. It's bigger than an iPod. It's bigger than a Treo or a Blackberry. It's MUCH larger than a RIZR or a KRZR. It's big enough to need a belt holster. It's smartphone size and smartphones are a niche market. The iPhone has 3.5 inch screen. I suspect that's about as small as you can go for an acceptable video experience. But a 3.5 inch screen necessitates a really big phone.

FWIW, I rarely see people watching video on their video enabled iPods.

Some Links

Sorry about the lack of posts recently, we've been really busy (in a good way).

MobiTV closes UK office, cuts off 3 and Orange. I owe you all a post about why I've been dubious of cell phone video for aeons.

There's a serious lobster shortage. Lobster Rolls at Red's Eats this year are $21! Eeek.

Podshow and Sirius have not renewed their contract. No one is talking about why.

Is Google making a big database of voices?

Bridge has new projections out,

"Growth of the podcasting phenomenon is severely limited by the process, according to this sample of the general population. A simplified process for listening to podcasts would greatly enhance the technology's growth potential."

Hey that's a good idea...

I love the GeekDad Blog