In between all the great panels I was covering this week at CES, I spent time on the floor walking endless laps around the massive Las Vegas convention center. (Seriously, I have blisters on my feet right now). There were tons of cools gadgets and new services being showcased. Here are a few things that really stood out for me:
* High-def format war solutions: LG announced a dual format high-def DVD player called the “Super Multi Blue Player” that will play both next-generation high-def DVD formats (HD-DVD & Blu-Ray). I think that’s great news and other dual players are likely to follow now. Also, Warner Brothers will start developing dual-format “Total High Def” hybrid movie discs that have both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD versions of the movie on them.
* Cell phones that double as TVs: I visited a few wireless booths where manufacturers were highlighting cell phones that could show live TV. At the Qualcomm booth I actually got to play with an upcoming Verizon phone that will be powered by Qualcomm’s MediaFlo technology. The picture looked very good and the channel surfing was on par with what we’ve come to expect from most cable boxes.
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Congratulations are in order to our friends at Techdirt, who recently raised a round of funding to expand their Insight Community and welcomed Mark Fletcher, founder of Onelist and Bloglines, to their board of directors.
One of the remarkable things about Techdirt is how the Internet has allowed a small number of (exceptionally smart) people to do a lot with a little. According to the article I linked to above, they raised $600,000. That seems like a remarkably small number for a web site that gets more traffic than your average mid-sized newspaper’s website. And of course, Techdirt reached its current level of prominence before raising this round of financing, so I imagine this will allow them to be even more successful in the months ahead.
In an increasingly digital world filled with intangible products and instantaneous downloads, does the world really need packaged media anymore? That was the theme of an interesting panel I sat in on this morning at CES in Las Vegas. Panelists debated the future of packaged, physical media (CDs, DVDs, tapes, etc) and generally concluded that it was not dead just yet.
For example, DVDs as a form of packaged media are not dead but growth is slowing, argued Stephanie Ethier, an analyst with market research firm InStat. As broadband speeds grow, however, this could change. Homes need to have roughly 10 Megs of bandwidth to have a satisfactory movie downloading experience, she said, and that world could be upon us soon. 18% of music will be distributed electronically by 2010, she said, but there is still value in the CD due to the “collection value” many users place on having the actual physical disc in their home somewhere. Don Patrican of Maxell agreed saying that “people are collectors by nature” and that they love the idea of having a small personal and physical library in their home that they can see and feel. I thought that was a very good point which I can certainly relate to since I do that myself.
But I then asked a question about whether or not this was all just a generational thing and wondered if my kids would have ANY physical media / storage devices or formats when they are adults in the 2020’s. In response, Don Patrician said we shouldn’t confuse early adopters with the mass market. “Many demographic groups will not embrace all this new technology for some time.” Rich Lappenbusch of Microsoft generally agreed saying that “Many families still don’t trust technology” and want the security that comes along with a physical backup copy.
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OK, I like Apple as much as the next guy (OK, quite a bit more than the next guy) but it’s a little bit ridiculous that Apple’s unveiling of the iPhone (a product that’s still 6 months away from release) is the top story on Google News. Aren’t there several wars and an economic suicide going on at the moment?
WASHINGTON, January 8, 2007–Both the high-tech and the mainstream press go ga-ga over the Consumer Electronics Show. Forty years old, it’s the country’s largest annual trade show, and it officially opens this morning in Las Vegas.
What’s not to like in more than 1.2 million square feet of electronic glitz and glimmer? On Sunday night, Microsoft’s Bill Gates previewed how your car will communicate with your electronic address book and your digital music player. Verizon Wireless demonstrated how you will soon get television from Comedy Central, Fox, and NBC directly on your cell phone. And NetGear announced a “media receiver” for watching TV, movies and Internet videos from the comfort of your leather couch. Think of it as video iPod with an HDTV connection.
The impresario of all these digital goodies is Gary Shapiro, the chief lobbyist for the Consumer Electronics Association. CEA is the tech trade association that sponsors the annual event, raking in more than $80 million. But for Shapiro, who looks and acts like the proverbial kid in the candy shop for four days every January, the show is about more than just money. It’s about scoring points for his group’s public policy agenda in Washington.
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PJ Doland, TLF’s webmaster and occasional contributor, has come up with what strikes me as a really clever idea:
Almost two years ago, in an attempt to combat the rising problem of comment spam, Google unveiled a new HTML attribute:
rel=”nofollow”
By including that attribute in hyperlinks, website administrators direct search engines not to give any credit to the linked content. The attribute is generally applied by most blog software to comment and trackback content before it is posted. This obviously minimizes the incentive for comment spamming as a means of improving a site’s PageRank status.
In the same spirit, I am now proposing a new attribute:
rel=”nsfw”
NSFW is an abbreviation often used to indicate that content is “not safe for work.” This new attribute should be applied to tags to indicate that the content is potentially “not safe for work.”
Sounds like a great idea to me. Read the whole thing for details on how it would work and why people would want to use it. There’s also some good discussion of the idea going on over at Digg.
Sage advice from Brooke.
I’m not going to name names, but I find it particularly disturbing when people who work in tech policy refer to individual blog posts as “blogs.” The blog is the medium, not the message; calling a post a “blog” is the equivalent of calling an article in the Washington Post a newspaper, as in, “Hey, did you read that newspaper in the Washington Post this morning about new FDA regulations on over-the-counter pain relievers? Boy, that Matthew Perrone sure can write a newspaper!”
I’m glad she wrote that blog to make sure no one was confused.
Ezra Klein worries about the perils of robotics to the labor market:
Soon enough, according to Bill Gates, we’ll all have personal robots. The precise implications of a transition to an economy largely run by hyperpowered, anthropomorphic machines is, obviously, unclear. It’s pretty safe to assume you’ll see a lot of occupational displacement, and at a point, you’ll see more than can be effectively made up. Was Marx right, but we had to wait for robots? Maybe. Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your usefulness!
This gets economics completely backwards. The purpose of an economy is to produce wealth, not jobs. Jobs are the unpleasant tasks we have to perform to get the wealth. If we can get wealth without jobs, that’s an unambiguous improvement. Only decades of demagoguery about “creating jobs” makes it possible for people to get that so backwards.
The more wealth there is in the world, the easier it will be for you to get some of it. Robots would only accelerate the accumulation of wealth, thereby increasing the amount of money a worker is likely to be able to get for a given unit of his labor. True, his wages might shrink relative to the overall economy, but he’ll only get more productive as technology improves, so in absolute terms his wages will only go up.
But what if the robots are better than the people at absolutely everything? Here, we have to bring in the concept of comparative advantage. Even if robots are better in absolute terms at everything, humans will always have a comparative advantage at something. The classic example here is a lawyer and his secretary. The lawyer might be better than the secretary at absolutely everything. Yet the secretary is still useful, because the lawyer might be 100 times as good as the secretary at practicing law, but only twice as good at making photocopies. Therefore, it still makes sense to hire the secretary to make photocopies so the lawyer can devote his energies to practicing law.
My former Cato Institute colleague and frequent co-author Wayne Crews suggests in an editorial today the time may be right for a “Declaration of Independence for virtual games.” Crews, who is currently vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, argues that:
“Can political regulation be avoided? ‘Second Life’ is a grand experiment: Those appreciative of today’s numerous revolutions in communications, of which ‘Second Life’ is one striking example, have a stake in keeping voluntary, private networks like ‘Second Life’ as unregulated as possible, or at the very least, relying on existing law that obviates the need for harmful regulatory adventurism.”
This is something I’ve wondered about myself in various essays here. It’s been ten years since John Perry Barlow penned his famous “Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace.” Maybe it’s time for someone take a shot at one for the virtual reality world. So, who wants be the Thomas Jefferson of virtual reality?!
Kirk Douglas warns young people that the world is going to hell:
THE WORLD IS IN A MESS and you are inheriting it. Generation Y, you are on the cusp. You are the group facing many problems: abject poverty, global warming, genocide, Aids, and suicide bombers to name a few. These problems exist, and the world is silent. We have done very little to solve these problems. Now, we leave it to you. You have to fix it because the situation is intolerable.
My old boss David Boaz sets the record straight:
let’s take a closer look at the problems the long-lived actor identifies. Abject poverty? Sure, but nothing like 1916, when Douglas was born. The percentage of people who are “absolutely poor” has fallen from 80% of the world’s population in 1820 to 50% around Douglas’s birth to just over 20% now. The average person in the developed world has a real income about five times as high as the average person 50 years ago. People in India and China have mostly – though not all – moved out of the back-breaking poverty that their ancestors knew for centuries. In America’s inner cities, the level of actual deprivation is far less than in generations past, though hopelessness and despair remain serious challenges…
Since ancient times people have worried that our best days were behind us, that things were getting worse, that we were running out of resources, that our morals had declined. And yet, at least since the rise of liberalism and the Industrial Revolution, the statistics tell us that things are getting better, that – as the subtitle of a new book puts it, “we’re living longer, healthier, more comfortable lives on a cleaner planet.” Somebody needs to send Kirk Douglas a copy of that book, The Improving State of the World by Indur Goklany.
Amen to that.
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