mad dog in the fog

The Mavericks Surf Contest will be happening tomorrow. If you can’t make it down to Half Moon Bay, you can watch the event live from your computer.

Notice how different the waterfront was back in 1849. Market Street runs into the water at 1st Street. The Embarcadero and the Ferry Building (built in 1898) didn’t exist yet.

Click here to see full-sized image.

You would think that selling TV shows on iTunes and Google would cause TV ratings to go down. It turns out that the opposite is true. Ratings are up for shows that are now being sold online. NBC’s The Office has seen a jump in the ratings and other networks are seeing similar results for shows that are being sold online.

Filed under: Television, iTunes, The Office, TV

There is a web site called MyHeritage that matches your uploaded photo to a database of celebrity photos. Flickr users are uploading screenshots of the photo matches and tagging them with the “myheritage” tag. Some of them are pretty funny, like this one, this one, and this one.

I’ve been trying out the recently launched Yahoo Answers! service. It works on a point system. If you ask a question, you lose a couple of points. If you answer a question, you gain points and you get additional points if your answer is rated as the best answer. This guards against people abusing the service by asking question after question and not giving anything back to the community. It looks like eventually you will be able to earn money (probably not a lot) by answering questions. This requires applying for a Yahoo! Publisher Network ID.

The quality of the answers that I have received has been mixed but I’m going to continue using this from time to time. I’d really like to see this model succeed. I think there is also a place for this type of service in the business world. Companies pay an arm and a leg for yearly maintenenace from software companies. It’s a real racket. A business version of this could have a category for Enterprise Software and categories for different software packages - Siebel, SAP, Oracle, etc. Freelance support engineers who have expertise with these software packages could answer the questions and be compensated financially. In this case it would make sense for the person (or company) asking the question to compensate the person who answered the question - e.g. $10 for a simple question and higher dollar amounts for questions that are more critical or more urgent (the company would need to be able to set the price for the question and maybe define a timeline for that price - e.g. $100 for an answer within 30 minutes, $50 for an answer within an hour, etc.). So instead of paying a software company $25,000 per year for maintenance and support, they could farm out their support to an army of freelance tech support people. It would be a massive Help Desk organized by categories. The quality and consitency of the support might be inconsistent but I would bet that it would be a heck of a lot cheaper in the long run. And this could be a nice way of earning extra cash for people who have exertise in some field.

A couple of months ago in Amsterdam:

I took a quick look at Google Video and my first impression was not great. Notice on the Charlie Rose videos that there is no show topic displayed when your are in “Grid” view. You just see the date of the show and a thumbnail of Charlie Rose. You need to go to the “List” view to see a description of the show. While this is a minor issue, I would have expected Google to catch something like this before they launch the paid video service. First impressions are everything. Another thing: Notice how the upload date of the video is displayed next to the running time of the show. For these shows, the upload date appears to be Dec 25, 2005 (hmmmm, someone at Google was working on Christmas). As a consumer, I really don’t care about when the video was uploaded. On the positive side, I really like that any content provider can sell video on Google and the content provider can set the price. These capabilities are not available on iTunes yet.

More bad first impressions here.

1/19/2005 Update:

David Pogue from the New York Times takes a look at the Google Video Marketplace.

“According to Google, the current Google Video is a beta test, a dry run intended to solicit feedback and suggestions for improvement. That’s fortunate, because at the moment, the site is appallingly half-baked. Quarter-baked, in fact.”

1/26/2005 Update:

Google admits that their video service has “fallen far short” of competing services such as iTunes. More here.

Here’s the List view, which does show a description of the show.

Filed under: Google Video, Google

Chronicle Podcasts has posted the audio from the Bill Gates keynote speech at the 2005 CES show. Video of the speech is available here.

Filed under: CES, CES 2006, Bill Gates

There was a press release today from HUMAX that mentioned DIRECTV’s rumored DirecTV 2Go service. I haven’t seen any details yet on when this will be available. A photo of the device and pricing details are available on Engadget.

From the press release:

The HUMAX DIRECTV 2Go compliant PMP device is designed for a direct connection to a DIRECTV DVR, which will allow the consumer to transfer DIRECTV content recorded at home - a key benefit of the HUMAX platform.

Filed under: DIRECTV, DIRECTV 2Go, Mobile Video, Portable Media Player