simplicity

I recently got an invite to beta-test Boxee. While, I have only used it on my Macbook Pro, I’m in the middle of debating whether to purchase an AppleTV or MacMini, I find it to be a great tool. If something like this gets integrated into TV-set or cable-boxes it would make the TV watching experience ten-folds better. Although, Boxee will be a great asset to non-live television you can’t assume that it will be able to get rid of cable because of live tv.

The issue comes down to how will people be able to watch sports? Until we can stream sufficient live HD content, I don’t think this will truly replace the cable.

At some point I would love to be able to see Boxee or something similar start to be able to use the internet to it’s advantage. Such as being able to hit info during a show or movie and getting the IMDB page and cast listing. Also, what about if you are watching baseball and want live statistics or information on whose on first and what the percentage of their steal attempts is. It’s these things that I think will eventually be where the television and cable experience is headed.

Mr. Ronen said he has been brainstorming about Boxee with a childhood friend, Tom Sella, since 2004. They were inspired by XBMC, another open-source software originally configured for the Xbox.

“We bounced around ideas on what the future of TV should look like,” Mr. Avner wrote on Boxee’s company blog a few months ago. “What a truly connected experience means? How people will share? How would they interact? How would they discover content? What is the role of the Web? What kinds of apps people will run on their TV? We drank beer. We smoked. We dug deep. We called it Boxee.”

They released their first version of Boxee this spring. By 2009, Mr. Ronen wants to attract one million Boxee users.

Source – It’s Living Room 2.0 | The New York Observer

I took the opportunity this week to implement auto-posting from Google Reader to WordPress. I spend an excessive amount of my time online in Google Reader, mostly catching up on all the latest blogs and news. The ability to share items or add a note to shared items is really quite easy and thus my ‘Google Reader Shared Items‘ feed is updated regularly. As a result, I thought it may be advantageous to take the items I share with notes and add them to the blog. It took some time to determine the best method to implement the posts from my shared items to my blog and it still is far from perfect. As such, in the coming weeks I will continue to update and tweak the method and how the post itself looks.

The most notable and major issue that arose during determining how to do this was ‘How to share only items that I have added a note to?’ While the ‘Shared Items‘ have one feed, each tag can also have an individual feed, but items with a note aren’t broke down into their individual feed. Thus, I decided that the feed needed to be manipulated and to do this I used Yahoo Pipes to manipulate the feed. I essentially created a pipe that would take my ‘Shared Items‘ feed and filter out items that did not contain ‘text’ within the content element under ‘item.gr:annotation.content.content’. The pipe then loops through the filtered content placing ‘blockquotes’ around the content and not my comments. That final loop was just for display purposes.

To implement the output as a post in WordPress I used the ‘wp-o-matic‘ plug-in. This plug-in lets you create a campaign, which will check an RSS feed for updates (using a variety of methods) and then create individual posts. The plug-in does have the ability to configure how the post is displayed in a variety of ways. However, there is one issue with the current version, the plug-in does not fetch any items in a Yahoo Pipes feed or any feed with an ‘&’ in the URL. Currently, any URL that contains an ampersand will have the ampersand get converted to its encoded URL value, so an ‘&’ will get converted to ‘&’. To fix this: In the wp_campaign_feeds table in your WordPress database find the erroneous URL and update the ‘&’ to ‘&’ and you should be all set.

As I said above, I will be continuing to tweak this as time permits.

Shared items from Aakars Google Reader

Hilarious, yet so true.

For the fifth straight year, Jordan McCabe will return home for the holidays and spend the night before Thanksgiving running into every smug and unlikable asshole he ever went to high school with, the 26-year-old reported Monday.

Source – 26-Year-Old To See Every Asshole He Ever Went To High School With On Night Before Thanksgiving | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Shared items from Aakars Google Reader

Very informative article on how to prepare yourself early on in your career for business school.

.

Source – Five Years To B-School: The First Year

Shared items from Aakars Google Reader

An interesting piece on Ray. While I will hold my opinions on Red Dog till it’s actually released, I’m a little indifferent about Live Mesh. My concern is and has been for the last few years the ability of synchronization across multiple platforms and systems for user/users. Obviously with so many different applications it becomes quite difficult, but there shouldn’t be a reason why I cannot easily synchronize my contacts under Outlook, Gmail, Mac, and my iPhone. In addition, why must I independently have my contacts in Facebook or LinkedIn be useless. It shouldn’t be necessary for me to update my address book contacts myself. I should be able to link my contacts to their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles to keep them updated. Obviously with the added bonus of editing any information I like. All of this should happen automatically and over-the-air(OTA).

The keynote speaker at this past summer’s TechReady conference-a gathering of 6,000 or so Microsoft engineers from around the world-was the company’s chief software architect, Ray Ozzie. This was not a routine appearance. Ozzie arrived at Microsoft in 2005, and the following year he inherited the title of CSA directly from Bill Gates. He was now the microprocessor of the Microsoft machine. But he had never addressed the semiannual conclave. His explanation? He wanted to wait until he had something big to show the troops.

Source – Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode

Shared items from Aakars Google Reader

Well.. Well…

You may recall when The Dark Knight opened, we pointed out that its record breaking opening was because movie makers created a movie that people wanted to see in a theater. The fact that parts of the movie were designed for IMAX theaters drove many people to pay even more (or even see the movie multiple times) in order to experience the IMAX version, which simply can’t be replicated at home. As we pointed out, this was a perfect example of how the movie studios could compete with free. In fact, in such a scenario, you could even make the argument that the more people saw the movie in download format, the more willing they would be to go pay to see the IMAX version, to get the full experience.

However, it was stunning to hear movie industry execs then claim that the reason the movie was so successful was because of their anti-piracy efforts. That was clearly untrue at the time, and now Parker Mason alerts us to the fact that The Dark Knight was not just the biggest grossing film, but also the most pirated film of the year. Of course, if you believed the studio execs, that would be impossible. After all, if so many people are downloading the movie, then clearly they’re “stealing” from the industry and would never go see the movie. But, seeing that the movie made record profits, it seems to show that’s simply incorrect. Many people, reasonably, viewed the download as marketing, convincing them to go see the movie in the theaters.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Source – Dark Knight… Both Most Pirated And Highest Earning Movie