Monthly Archives: February 2007

BitTorrent goes commercial; bye-bye BitTorrent

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

BitTorrent has gone legit — signed a deal with movie studies to enable them to use the system to distribute their content.

Unfortunately, getting in bed with the entertainment companies involves a lot of bondage, and that means BitTorrent will limp out of the starting gate. All the content is encased in Microsoft digital rights management and can be played only with Windows Media Player — no Macs, no iPods. And while the service will sell episodes of TV shows, it will only rent movies — they expire within 30 days of their purchase or 24 hours after the buyer begins to watch them. Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told the New York Times the company could have offered movies for outright sale, but the studios wanted to charge prices so high he was afraid to even let users see them. “We don’t think the current prices are a smart thing to show any user,” he said. “We want to allocate services with very digestible price points.” And Bram Cohen, BitTorrent’s co-founder and chief executive, and the inventor of the technology, sounded like he had to hold his nose a bit to swallow the terms. “We are not happy with the user interface implications” of digital rights management, Cohen told the Times. “It’s an unfortunate thing. We would really like to strip it all away.”

Not an auspicious beginning, given the nature of BitTorrent’s core users — males between 16 and 34…

Yep. And it was such a nice technology.

What ironic about this is that BitTorrent is the kind pf P2P technology that the content industries once wanted to see wiped from the face of the earth.

PEW data on wireless users

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The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released findings of a new survey of Internet users who connect wirelessly to the network.

Headlines:

Some 34% of internet users have logged onto the internet using a wireless connection either around the house, at their workplace, or some place else. In other words, one-third of internet users, either with a laptop computer, a handheld personal digital assistant (PDA), or cell phone, have surfed the internet or checked email using means such as WiFi broadband or cell phone networks.

Facts about wireless use (among internet users)

  • Those who have logged on wirelessly from a place other than home or work: 27%
  • Those who have wireless networks in their homes: 19%
  • Those with personal digital assistants that are able to connect to the internet wirelessly: 13%

    Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project December 2006
    Survey, n=798 for internet users.

    • How to be uncool

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    Giles Smith was lent a fancy wagon to review.

    Uncool things to do in a Porsche 911, number 27: sweep confidently on to the forecourt of a busy petrol station, casually, even rakishly, aligning the rear end of the car with a vacant pump. Emerge from Porsche. Unholster pump nozzle with exaggerated air of detachment and move nonchalantly to back of car. Find no petrol cap at back of car. In company of unwieldy length of petrol hose, explore possibility that petrol cap is on other side of car. Fail to find it there, either. Begin to wonder whether car is so furiously exclusive that petrol can only be fitted at registered dealerships by qualified Porsche engineers.

    Belatedly discover petrol cap embedded in driver’s side front wing. (What’s it doing there?) Also discover nozzle won’t reach it, on account of aforementioned rakish parking position. Sheepishly replace nozzle, re-enter Porsche, re-fire its noisy, attention-seeking engine and back up. Re-emerge and fill Porsche, with unusual concentration. Enact long walk of shame to petrol station kiosk.

    But, hey, who wants to be cool, anyway? In any case, it’s a bit late for that as far as the driver of a Porsche 911 is concerned. What, after all, could be less cool than owning and driving a Porsche? Even in 2007, fairly or otherwise, the “nine-eleven” labours under the image of being the default toy of cashed-up City boys and over-motivated advertising executives. The very word “Porsche” has become a portfolio term for unpalatable behaviour in many of its guises. Or, to put it another way, the car has “wanker” written all over it – sometimes literally, if you allow it to become dirty enough.

    It’s a lovely essay, written with verve and wit. Smith observes the way that

    the car can produce two distinct and entirely contradictory states of mind. Call those states of mind pre- and post-911. Before driving one, you are happy to join the rest of the world in its glorious, frequently hand-signalled contempt for the brand and all who sail in it. A couple of hours at the wheel, with all that power and responsiveness at your command and with the engine burbling in your ears, and you are just about ready to sell your mother’s house from under her in order to become a card-carrying member of the community, and to hell with what anyone else thinks.

    I once drove a 911, many years ago, when it was less environmentally incorrect (or at any rate when we knew nothing about global warming), and know just what he means.

    BTW, fuel consumption for the latest 911 is 11.8 mpg. And as for the CO2 emissions, well, don’t even ask.

    Tootle pip!

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    “When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigour”.

    From the English-language version of a Tokyo car-rental firm’s brochure. Quoted in the Independent, 12 August 1993 and reprinted in The Guinness Book of Humorous Anecdotes, edited by Nigel Rees.
    Q: What am I doing reading such trash when I could be doing something useful?
    A: We keep a copy in the loo — or, as my upper-class friends call it, lavatory.

    Later… A Reader writes:

    In 1976, when I was employed at [xxx], we had a client in Japan who liked to practise his English at all times. In those
    pre-email days, project interaction was done by post, and his letters were so joyful that they were often reprinted verbatim in the internal newsletter.

    One memorable phrase was “I look ahead to your smart comments on scrumbling the budget”.

    ‘Scrumbling the budget’ immediately entered the internal corporate phrase-book, and is possibly still extant.

    And then, of course, there is the famous hotel brochure which promised “a French widow in every room”.

    Jobs’s bloopers

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    Nice YouTube compilation of Apple’s presiding genius having the kind of trouble with live demonstrations that ordinary mortals experience.

    Thanks to Michael Dales for the link. I love the closing line: “It’s pretty awesome when it works.”

    Brown vs. Cameron: contd.

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    Sorry to be a bore about this (er, see here, here and here) but the recent ICM poll for the Guardian confirms my suspicion — that Labour won’t win the next election if they are led by Gordon Brown.

    Gordon Brown is failing to persuade the public that he would make a better prime minister than David Cameron, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today which suggests the Conservatives could win a working majority at the next general election.

    Voters give the Tories a clear 13-point lead when asked which party they would back in a likely contest between Mr Brown, Mr Cameron and Sir Menzies Campbell.

    The result would give the party 42% of the vote against Labour on 29%, similar to its performance under Michael Foot in 1983. The Liberal Democrats would drop to 17%. The result is the highest that the Conservatives have scored in any ICM poll since July 1992, just after their last general election victory…

    The Economist‘s Bagehot column has some interesting reflections on this.

    Three quite big and important things appear to be going on. The first is that a sort of positive feedback loop has been established in which the long-standing misgivings about Mr Brown within his own party are now being projected back to it by the voters. Senior Labour figures glumly go through the motions of declaring in public their utter confidence in Mr Brown’s prime-ministerial credentials. He is the most successful chancellor of the exchequer since records began, a political heavyweight of towering intellectual stature and soaring moral purpose. It’s a testimonial just close enough to the truth not to provoke sniggers, but they and we know it’s only half the story. What increasingly worries ministers, and those Labour MPs in southern seats whose majorities hang by a thread, is that, unless he can reveal a different side to his personality, dour, stiff, slightly odd Mr Brown will struggle to reach those aspiring middle-class voters whom Mr Blair could still just about deliver in 2005.

    The second big thing is that the mood of the electorate seems to be swinging from apathetic boredom and irritation with the government to a feeling that maybe it’s time for a change. If that is right, Mr Brown, for all his admirable qualities, is the last person on earth who can deliver it. However much Mr Brown and his supporters insist that Labour will look very different when he is prime minister, the fact is that Mr Brown is universally recognised as the joint-architect of the government’s successes and failures. It is hard to see what sort of meaningful fresh start Mr Brown can offer.

    That was the argument made last week by Frank Field, an independent-minded Labour MP. Mr Field reminded his colleagues that the Tories were able to win a remarkable fourth successive election partly because Margaret Thatcher’s replacement, Mr Major, emerged from nowhere. Even Mrs Thatcher, who backed Mr Major’s leadership bid, had only the haziest idea what he was really like (and was bitterly disappointed when she found out). But it meant that the Tories were able to claim plausibly that by choosing the obscure, untainted Mr Major they had already given the voters the change they demanded.

    Mr Field went on to suggest that if Labour was serious about winning it should thank Mr Brown for his outstanding service and move on to the next generation in the shape of David Miliband, the 41-year-old environment secretary who for some time has been uncomfortably cast in the role of next-leader-but-one. That is where Mr Field’s line of reasoning runs out of steam…

    Agreed. Miliband is a nice lad (and he’s driven around in a Prius), but not Premiership material. Labour’s problem is that they have nobody else in Cameron’s generation who has leadership potential. Game over, I suspect.

    What is Google really up to?

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    This morning’s Observer column…

    So we have two curious facts: Google has acquired fabulous amounts of bandwidth capacity, for which it has no obvious use; and it’s putting local data centres all over the place. Why would it be doing this? What’s the factor that links these two observations?

    The answer is…

    Read on.

    The quantum theory of trust

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    I’ve been listening to an intriguing talk in the invaluable IT Conversations series. It’s given by Karen Stephenson, an academic and consultant who has created a way of doing social network analysis in organisations. The nub of her approach is summarised in this pdf. Basically, she seems to look for several kinds of network in any organisational culture she studies:

  • The Work network. With whom do you exchange information as part of your daily work routines?
  • The Social network. With whom do you “check in” inside and outside the office?
  • The Innovation network. With whom do you collaborate or kick around new ideas?
  • The Expert Knowledge network. To whom do you turn for expertise or advice?
  • The Career Guidance or Strategic network. To whom do you go for advice about the future?
  • The Learning network. With whom do you work to improve existing processes or methods?

    Having worked in a large organisation for a long time, and been a consultant in many others, this analysis makes a lot of sense.

    Stephenson has a company which does social network analysis using an explicit methodology and some proprietary software for analysing social interactions (it probably includes monitoring and mapping email conversations). She’s also published a book, The Quantum Theory of Trust.