Friday, October 04, 2002

Simple Rich Media Communications Marc Canter has some nice thoughts about activity-based computing and its apparent manifestation in this cool tool for capturing, managing and distributing photos online. The thinking is right on --- getting complex media (images, audio, video, even text) from a device or source material and into a computer, manipulating it, packaging it, and distributing it (through whatever electronic means) is just too hard. And it seriously limits the usefulness of computers as rich media communications tools. The range of "online photo tools" like this, Ofoto, Shutterfly, etc. are good examples of making things simpler for the average consumer, but we've still got a long way to go, especially as we consider richer, more composite forms of media-centric communications. 9:48:00 PM    comment []

Opening up Broadband Distribution This article in Cable DataComm News was picked up by Kevin Werbach (nice to have you back!), and for me underscores the rapid transformation that we're seeing in the marketing and distribution of consumer broadband. Anyone remember the wild-wild-west of ISPs in the early days of the commercial Internet (1994-1996)? Initially, IP access was licensed by Internet-focused firms (there were roughly 13 regional and national providers, including now famous UUNet, PSINet, Sprint, etc.) who allowed hundreds and then thousands of small ISPs to resell Internet access. That all eventually got rolled up into a smaller number of mega-data carriers, and consumer access consolidated to mostly national providers and bundled content/access (AOL). This opening up of cable broadband distribution is going to have the same impact, and hopefully we'll see a flurry of mom-and-pop (and serious startups) building valuable aggregations of content, application services, and high-speed access. It will inevitably drive down baseline broadband prices, and probably segment into tiered packages (similar to how cable content is licensed). 9:35:40 PM    comment []