The feds are handing out $40 coupons for digital tuner boxes that will allow viewing of digital TV transmissions on analog analog TV receivers. January 01, 2008 is the first day to apply and there is a limit on how many coupons will be offered. As most of us already know, analog channels will do dark in ‘09. Even if you are planning to retire you analog TV, the boxes are useful for getting digital content into your DVR, DVD recorder and more.

Starting January 1, 2008, all U.S. households will be eligible to request up to two coupons, worth $40 each, to be used toward the purchase of up to two, digital-to-analog converter boxes. For more details on the federal regulations, including the budget information, please the DTV Converter Box Coupon Program Rules.

For a quick overview, see the Associated Press (AP) video about the digital TV converter boxes with Technical Writer Peter Svensson at AP Online Video Network www.ap.org/ovn/) (from the NTIA)

We here at ThirdPipe has been pontificating about the new ‘ThirdPipe’ that will replace the old services we all were born into. We have looked at the technologies, politics and peripheral support systems. We will continue to do so. But we are not alone in that view. Doc Searls in his latest Linux Journal posting –

The Net may have an end-to-end architecture (back in ‘03 David Weinberger and I called it a World of Ends), but the realities of provisioning and latency cause “difficulties” of the sort Steve Chen hinted about. If you work or live in places where you get upwards of 20Mb/sec of upload and/or download speeds (as I do), you can see the picture when you run speed tests at distances upward of a couple hundred miles from your location. tend to go down. There are exceptions, but on the whole bit transport is faster locally than over long distances.

This, of course, is why Akamai is in business too. They provide servers, services and various kinds of localized optimizations. The result, Akamai brags, “has transformed the chaos of the Internet into a predictable, scalable, and secure platform for business and entertainment”.

See the hole in that claim? It’s you. The individual. The guy or gal or small business or school or church with a basic Internet connection — and a growing sum of “content” that’s all yours, waiting for the Net to come through with its original promise of pure connected utility.

Getting that last mile to a broadband level [10mbps or better] to a significant portion of the population is a critical factor in reaching the true post industrial society that futurists discuss. Mr. Searles also has this observation –

…Though the biggest player at the back end these days is Amazon, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which recently added DevPay and SimpleDB to EC2, S3 and the rest of the company’s growing portfolio of back-end services. Let’s run just those four down.

* DevPay is “a simple-to-use billing and account management service that makes it very easy for developers to get paid for applications they build on Amazon Web Services”
* SimpleDB runs structured queries on simple data in real time.
* EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) runs resizable compute capacity
* S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides cheap and easy storage of any size

What you’re seeing here, at least partially (and ever more completely), is the new phone company business being re-invented from the back end forward. What makes AWS a phone company business is DevPay. Billing. Phone companies are basically billing engines. The difference is that phone companies have long been in the business of billing in monopoly conditions, often for scarcities that are essentially artificial. That is, created for the simple need to have something to bill.

Amazon by providing cloud service and a portal from the virtual economy to the physical economy may stand as one of the three legs of the new information economy. The other two being Google and the Duopoly carriers. Over time anyone running a online business will most likely being dealing with all three entities.

Our goal is to keep you posted on these changes as they occur.

Doc Searles article.

We have covered this before, but it bears repeating. The RIAA believes that you can’t copy the song off the CD to your PC. This on its face turns the US Copyright law on its head. Copyright has traditionally been, you the consumer having purchased the right to use of a instance of a work, you need not be concerned about the form of the ‘container’ that houses the instance. Regardless –

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.

Which to some lawyers seems strange –

“I couldn’t believe it when I read that,” says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. “The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation.”

Eventually a case will be driven all the way to 1st District court for resolution. RIAA’s argument is that the container of the data is as important as the data contained within. The problem for RIAA is that the genie is already out of the bottle and no cork will stopper it.

Link.

Mark Andrejevic is the author of a book called iSpy. No its not a review of the old TV series but the matters of digital capture of your personal habits. The matters he touches on will be of considerable importance to the wireless ThirdPipe world we will live in, in the not too distance future.

And we haven’t even mentioned RFID as another tool to be used to track us…;l

MIT goes open source? Sort of. If you’ve ever wanted to attend a class at one the the elite universities but lacked the time, money and credentials, your time has come. With MIT in the lead, more and more colleges are making lectures, notes and tests available to anyone with internet access.

The world’s top universities have come late to the world of online education, but they’re arriving at last, creating an all-you-can eat online buffet of information.

And mostly, they are giving it away.

MIT’s initiative is the largest, but the trend is spreading. More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware. You no longer need a Princeton ID to hear the prominent guests who speak regularly on campus, just an Internet connection. This month, Yale announced it would make material from seven popular courses available online, with 30 more to follow. (from Yahoo News)

If you want textbooks, you’ll still have to pay, and they are not cheap. Neither are the degrees. But, if what you really seek is knowledge, who cares about the sheepskin?

The music industry has been blaming technology (most recently broadband enabled file sharing) for all of its woes. The RIAA has become a relentless litigator for its big music company members, now even suing individuals for copying content from CD’s they own onto other devices for personal use.

They may be correct in assigning blame to digital technology. It has changed the landscape in which they have controlled and distributed content. Until broadband enabled new channels, distribution had remained much the same as it was in the time of lacquer discs and the Victorola. Now, with increasing frequency, artists are retaining the rights to their their material and doing their own distribution. This has all been enabled by technology, and more significantly broadband. Musicians and consumers suddenly gained control of distribution as well as how and where content could be used.
David Byrne recently wrote the best overview of the changes in the music industry I have read to date. Mr. Byrne writes with great authority:

I used to own a record label. That label, Luaka Bop, still exists, though I’m no longer involved in running it. My last record came out through Nonesuch, a subsidiary of the Warner Music Group empire. I have also released music through indie labels like Thrill Jockey, and I have pressed up CDs and sold them on tour. I tour every few years, and I don’t see it as simply a loss leader for CD sales. So I have seen this business from both sides. I’ve made money, and I’ve been ripped off. I’ve had creative freedom, and I’ve been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will. It saved my life, and I bet I’m not the only one who can say that.

What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that’s not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists. (from Wired)

David knows what he speaks and he believes the industry is growing, but in a segmented and horizontal fashion which is incompatible with the big music industry’s business model. Will they change? Probably not, and the world will leave them behind as a relic of a more unenlighted time if they don’t.
Again, Mr. Byrnes article is a very worthy read for any musician or music lover, so here’s the link again.

In this highly mobile world it had to come to pass. Time Square highlights will come to the small screen —

Wi-Fi TV Inc. offers Internet users worldwide an opportunity to “virtually” be in Times Square New Year’s Eve to witness the world famous Times Square ball drop via a free, live satellite feed direct from Times Square on Dec. 31 from 10:00 p.m. EST - 12:15 a.m. EST (www.Wi-FiNewYear.com). Wi-Fi TV is providing a live chat box so that viewers around the world can instant message each other and ring in the new year. Wi-Fi TV coverage includes an eight-camera mixed feed including panoramic views of Times Square and the ball from proprietary camera locations on rooftops and on the street.

Wi-Fi TV Inc. is working with the non-profit Times Square Alliance, whose mission is to promote travel & tourism in New York City.

linkl

The New Year is upon us and changes are afoot. Two items –

Fujitsu

Another week, another one bites the dust: although the company the first to introduce plasma televisions, Japan’s Fujitsu group has said it will cease production of plasma TVs because it simply can’t make enough money at it. Fujitsu once offered a broad range of plasma models, but had recently scaled back to offering only high-end units via exclusive European and U.S. retailers, and in 2005 sold off control of a plasma joint venture to Hitachi.

“During the past several years, the pricing and profitability of this segment has compressed beyond the point which our company could realize a satisfactory return on investment,” Fujitsu General said in a statement. Fujitsu General will close out its plasma business by March, and focus on it remaining business in the heating and ventilation market. Fujitsu General is separate from Fujitsu’s operations in consumer electronics and computer manufacturing.

Fujitsu started the whole plasma biz so many years ago. Times change and LCD panels have gotten cheaper and more competitive. They also lack the plasma burn associated with plasma displays.

Link

Netscape

AOL has a long history on the internet, being one of the first companies to really get people online. Throughout its lifetime, it has been involved with a number of high profile acquisitions, perhaps the largest of which was the 1999 acquisition of the Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape was known to many as the thought leader in web browsing, and had developed a number of complementary pieces of software that allowed for a rich suite of internet tools.

At the time of the acquisition, the Netscape team had begun working on converting their flagship product - the Netscape Communicator web suite - into open source software, under a new name: Mozilla. AOL played a significant role in the launch of the Netscape 6 browser, the first Mozilla-based, Netscape-branded browser that was released in 2000 and continued to solely fund the development and marketing efforts of Netscape-branded browsers. In 2003, an independent foundation was created to support the continued development of the open source web suite. AOL was a major source of support for the Mozilla Foundation and the company continued to develop versions of the Netscape browser based on the work of the foundation.

From AOL’s press release. This sadly closes a chapter in the internet space. Netscape’s browser initiated a sea change in how computing was to be done. It was also one of the few technologies that caused Microsoft to change their direction. Development stops in February.

Link

au revoir, to both of them.

Look for a broader range of wireless capabilities in new portable devices soon, as well as in laptops. A single low power chip will now enable broadcast TV reception as well as high speed wireless access. I would venture a guess this device may also be persuaded to receive digital broadcast radio with a little firmware. link