Steve Jobs leads the charge against DRM!

Post ImageI never thought it would be Jobs, but in an open letter titled “Thoughts on Music”, the Apple head honcho seems to support getting rid of DRM altogether. Just over a week ago I mentioned that music should be free – no need for DRM if it is! Here’s what Mr. Jobs has to say:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Bring it on! I am so glad he has written this letter. If nothing else, it will simply increase the pressure on the labels to give in and realize that DRM is a stupid way to sell music.

When I read about this letter today, I had the same thought as Jason Calacanis did: Somewhere Cory Doctorow is smiling! Indeed it sounds like he is…kinda:

Well, this is pretty excellent news! Now, let’s see if Steve means it.

I hope he does. The way I see it, there’s only a few people that will be hurt by abolishing DRM – the product teams at Microsoft, Apple, and other companies who have put a lot of time and effort into creating the DRM technologies. No one likes to see their hard work end up being ignored. Though I suppose, if they truly like music, they’ll benefit from having no DRM too.

Read: Apple.com

Windows Vista Exploits Exposed!

Post ImageI was going to post something last week about the “fatal flaw” found in the speech recognition feature of Windows Vista, but I never got around to it. And now, thanks to Long Zheng’s brilliant post, there is simply no point. Here’s a snippet:

Last week, the media went schizophrenic over the Windows Vista speech recognition ‘loophole’ which allowed anyone with a microphone to have full access over your computer. Granted, you must also be partially-deaf, turned your speaker volume to full, carefully place your microphone next to the speakers, turn on speech recognition and train your speech profile as if you were someone else.

The rest of the post is quite funny, and discusses other possible exploits such as the mouse and keyboard, and Visual Studio. Definitely worth a read!

Read: Long Zheng

Did Facebook miss the boat?

Post ImageThat’s the question that Robert Young asks over at GigaOM today. Facebook apparently turned down many potential suitors last year, deciding to go it alone. Was that a good decision or a bad one? Robert does a good job of explaining that if you ignore the financial side of things, it looks like it was a good decision:

So given such positives, one might conclude that Facebook did in fact make the right decision not to sell. as momentum and value creation certainly seems to be in their favor.

Overall traffic is up, loyalty and usage stats are high, things look good. The problem is that advertising on Facebook appears to be a win-lose situation – good for Facebook, bad for the advertisers. Which means Facebook is going to have trouble earning revenue.

My personal opinion is that Facebook missed the boat, but that they’ll likely get another shot. The product has incredible value – they are just doing a really shoddy job of extracting it. It’s only a matter of time before they need to be rescued, by Yahoo! or another big player. Whether the rescuer will fare better at extracting value from Facebook is another story.

I’d be quite happy if Yahoo! purchased Facebook, and added support for del.icio.us and Flickr. I don’t upload photos to Facebook because I use Flickr, and I don’t use the share feature at Facebook, because I use del.icio.us. I’d still like to be able to share this stuff with my friends though.

(Another thing: all three products – del.icio.us, Facebook, and Flickr – have a clean and efficient design. That alone should be reason enough to make them play nicely together!)

Read: GigaOM

Notes for 2/4/2007

Here are my weekly notes:

Hubble Space Telescope in trouble?

Post ImageMany photographs of outer space have been taken over the years, but the really impressive ones have for the most part been taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. I have learned quite a bit about the telescope thanks to the two astronomy courses I have taken this year – it is a pretty amazing piece of engineering. Needless to say, I was a little worried when I read the headline “Hubble humbled by power failure” today. Fortunately, the news isn’t that bad (and it’s a few days old too):

The main camera aboard the Hubble Space Telescope has stopped functioning due to a short circuit, NASA announced Monday.

A previously planned service mission on the Hubble to install a completely new camera was already scheduled for September 2008. The new camera, currently called the Wide Field Camera 3, will replace the downed WFPC2 and prove more powerful than the ACS was in most ways…

So it’s not really in trouble. Though I suppose the scientists won’t be happy about having to wait until next year to use the main camera. As a mere bystander I’m just happy that it is mostly operational and that it will continue to be able to bring us amazing photos and information.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24th, 1990 and will be replaced in 2013 by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Read: CNET News.com

Pocket HD Video Recording

Post ImageIn the marketing presentation I gave on Monday I mentioned that podcasting will increasingly take advantage of advances in mobile devices, as well as high definition recording. When I put that idea into my presentation, I was thinking about the mobile and high def parts separately, but if this little video camera is any indication, they might come as a package deal:

The research kids in Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute just announced a tiny new video camera capable of shooting at a 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution and a variable frame rate up to 60 frames per second.

Pretty damn intense. The camera will be on display at CeBIT in March. I can just imagine the possibilities a small, high quality camera such as this would make possible. Bring it on!

Read: Engadget

Amazon Web Services Growth

Post ImageAmazon.com released their fourth quarter and year end (2006) financials today, and tucked away inside the press release was a little information on how their relatively new Web Services division is doing:

Over 220,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services, up greater than 55% year-over-year.

Unfortunately – and this is often the case with these kinds of numbers – the release says nothing about how many of those 220,000 developer accounts are active.

The poster boy for Amazon S3, SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, recently wrote yet another blog post on the service. The entire post is worth a read, but in particular he says:

Finally, S3 is a new service and yet remarkably reliable. Since April 2006, they’ve been more reliable than our own internal systems, which I consider to be quite reliable. Nothing’s perfect, but they’re doing quite well so far for a brand-new service.

I suspect their growth isn’t going to slow down anytime soon, so let’s hope their reliability and performance both scale with the continued influx of new developers.

Read: Amazon.com

What Comes Next for Jim Allchin

Post ImageI just read Jim Allchin’s final post over at the Windows Vista blog, and I have to admit, it’s kind of sad. He has been in charge of Windows development at Microsoft for so long, I’m sure he won’t know what to do with himself now. I mean, it must be pretty hard to go from running the Windows team to just relaxing, right? Running the Windows team has to be one of the hardest jobs around. They are always behind, always getting dumped on by the press, always fighting the bad guys, etc.

Jim’s post conveys this very well, with a funny overview of what a “typical day” might look like now that he’s retired. I guess he knows it’ll be hard to transition. This one is my favorite entry:

9:30 AM: Spent 45 minutes looking around the house for the big refrigerator with the free soda just like Microsoft – was unable to find it.

When I visited the Microsoft campus a couple years ago that was easily one of the coolest things. Big refrigerators all over the place with all the Coke you could ever want. It was wonderful!

Anyway, here’s my “thanks Mr. Allchin”. My fellow Windows fans and I appreciate all that you’ve done. And hey, no need to stop blogging! Start a personal blog!

Read: Vista Team Blog

A Rant About MySpace

Post ImageI hate MySpace. I simply cannot stand it. The navigation is horrible. The design is ugly. Their URLs are the most unfriendly ever. Random people add me to their “friends” list. Users have too much control over the look of the pages…which usually means that they end up making the pages painful to look at. Dancing text, repeating background images that were never meant to repeat, music that starts playing automatically, etc. I really cannot fathom how so many millions of people use MySpace on a daily basis.

Quite possibly the only thing I like about MySpace is that it runs on .NET and is therefore an excellent case study/example. But that would be the only reason.

Every single time I look at MySpace I cringe. Maybe I just don’t get it?

Marketing Presentation Audio

Post ImageLast night I gave a presentation on podcasting & marketing to students taking MARK 450 (Electronic Marketing) at the University of Alberta. I covered “what is podcasting”, Podcast Spot, some podcasting statistics, podcasting and its effects on marketing, and finished with some final thoughts. The presentation went very well and the initial feedback was very positive, so I hope the students got something out of it. I enjoyed talking to them!

We recently purchased some digital voice recorders and they arrived just yesterday afternoon. They are Olympus WS-100’s, and last night we tested them for the first time by recording my presentation. In general I’m pretty happy with them. We had one at the back of the room and one on the table in front of me. The far away recording isn’t so great, but the close range recording is quite good.

So if you’re interested, you can listen to my presentation here. The only editing I did was to remove the questions (as I didn’t have permission to post them). Otherwise it’s a straightforward recording. You can look in the show notes to see the time codes for the major topics I covered. I don’t know why, but it sounds like I was sniffling quite a bit – apologies for that!

If you have questions or feedback, I’d love to hear from you. I’m not going to post the slides here, but if you’re interested in them, feel free to email me.

Read: MasterMaq’s Podcast