A scene in Bedfordshire this afternoon.
YouBeeb — or is it BeebTube?
From SplashCast…
The BBC announced today that it has singed [sic] a deal with Google in regards to BBC video on YouTube. The agreement raises interesting strategic questions as it represents an important alternative approach to the high profile requests to remove content by other publishers. The BBC has made a series of high-profile announcements regarding new social media – the organization said it was remaking its website in the image of MySpace last April for example. We’ll see how much is hype and how much of this activity is smart use of new media.
The basics of the deal announced today are these:
* The BBC will create two channels on YouTube now and one more by the end of the year.
* The main channel will be advertising free promotional clips of entertainment programming, designed to drive traffic to the BBC’s own site for viewing the full programs.
* The secondary entertainment channel, BBC Worldwide, will include archival footage and some pre-roll ads. UK viewers will be able to see this and that’s a big deal, as the licensing fees every pays are supposed to keep their BBC experience ad-free.
* The third channel, out later this year, will show about 30 news clips per day and will include ads. Those ads, however, won’t be visible to UK users. Fascinating.
* The BBC will not actively hunt down its copyrighted materials in other users’ accounts, but it does reserve the right to swap low quality footage out for high quality versions and make other small changes. That’s very smart.
Hmmm…. We’ll see.
iPhoning home
Interesting interview with Apple’s COO, Tim Cook.
Q: Since its introduction at Macworld Expo, people have questioned the success of the iPhone. Could you talk a little about why Apple will be successful.
A: The iPhone is a revolutionary product. Steve mentioned this at Macworld, revolutionary products only come along so often: the Mac in 1984 re-invented the computer industry. The iPod in 2001 re-invented the music industry. And we think the iPhone is that class of product for the cell phone industry.
It’s a revolutionary cell phone with visual voicemail. It’s the best iPod that Apple has ever done and its this “really cool” internet device with desktop-class email, browsing, maps, and searching — all in one product. I think people are going to be amazed and delighted over it. We’ll have to see. Obviously, there are people who would prefer us not be successful in this, but I think it’s a revolutionary product. And we’ll see what the customers think. That’s the most important thing.
Q: Your stated goal for calendar 2008 is to ship 10 million units, which is about 1 percent of the overall market. Given the functionality and price point of the product, it eliminates the low end of the market. How do you look at the available market for the first generation of iPhone and what kind of marketshare do you think you can take?
A: The traditional way of look at a market you look at products you are selling, you think about the price bands that are currently market, you look at price band your product is in, and you assume you can get a percentage of it. And that’s how you get to the addressable market. That kind of analysis doesn’t make really great products. The iPod would not have been brought to market if we would have looked at it that way. How many $399 music players were being sold at that time?
Today in the cell phone industry, a lot of people pay zero for the cell phone. Guess what? That’s what it’s worth! And so, if we offer something that has tremendous value and is sort of this thing that people people didn’t have in their consciousness — it was unimaginable, I think a whole bunch of people will pay $499 and $599. Our target is clearly to hit 10 million and I would guess that some of those people — there are some of those in the audience — who are paying zero because it’s worth zero, will pay more a bit more because its worth it.
Q: Can you go through some of the thinking of not putting 3G in the phone, given that it is leading edge technology in every other aspect.
A: Our thinking was first and foremost that we wanted GSM because GSM was the world standard and that was one of the factors in the selection of Cingular. Secondly, the product as we announced it has wireless capabilities. Many people, like in this room, have access to WiFi, including this room, home, where you have coffee. Between this spots we are going to use 2.5G because it’s widely deployed. We’re confident that it will give the user a great experience.
Q: Do you expect iPhone to cannibalize iPod? If so, when might that kick in?
A: You know it’s still too early to tell. But I would make this point. We’ve sold 90 million iPods. 90 million. It still amazes me saying it. And these are being sold for a wide of usages: there’s a wide variety of form-factors, wide variety of capacities and a wide variety of price points. You know that there are a lot people that desire the iPod…
Good point about the iPod and the $399 music player.
Pesky varmits, customers
From Good Morning Silicon Valley…
The risk in asking customers what they want is that they will tell you. And then, spoiled brats that they are, they will expect you to follow through. It’s a risk Dell took two weeks ago when it launched IdeaStorm, a collaborative suggestion box intended to surface the deepest wants and needs of customers. Turns out the biggest, or at least most vocal, demand by far is for Dell to offer computers with the Linux OS preinstalled…
According to Nate Anderson of ArsTechnica, 85,000 users went to the trouble of creating an account on the Dell site and voting for the “pre-installed Linux” option, and another 55,000 asked for “pre-installed OpenOffice.”
IN a statement, Dell responded to the IdeaStorm firestorm by saying that it wouldn’t be able to meet the demands because customers want too many variants. “There is no single customer preference for a distribution of Linux,” said Dell. “We don’t want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another.”
Ryan Paul — also of ArsTechnica, is sympathetic to the company’s dilemma.
The big problem with Linux preinstallation, he writes,
is that one size rarely fits all. Although modern community-driven distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora are designed for a broad audience, serious Linux users are very particular about how their systems are configured. This is even more true for users who prefer highly granular distributions that provide more installation options. Smaller hardware vendors that specialize in Linux preinstallation are better equipped to accommodate user requests for certain configurations.
As an individual Linux user, I would much rather see Dell make Windows optional for every computer and focus on ensuring that the hardware components in Dell computers are compatible with Linux in general rather than specific Linux distributions.
Quagmire news (contd.)
The headline says it all, really. Full story reads, in part:
An elite team of officers advising the US commander, General David Petraeus, in Baghdad has concluded that they have six months to win the war in Iraq – or face a Vietnam-style collapse in political and public support that could force the military into a hasty retreat.
The officers – combat veterans who are experts in counter-insurgency – are charged with implementing the “new way forward” strategy announced by George Bush on January 10. The plan includes a controversial “surge” of 21,500 additional American troops to establish security in the Iraqi capital and Anbar province.
But the team, known as the “Baghdad brains trust” and ensconced in the heavily fortified Green Zone, is struggling to overcome a range of entrenched problems in what has become a race against time, according to a former senior administration official familiar with their deliberations.
“They know they are operating under a clock. They know they are going to hear a lot more talk in Washington about ‘Plan B’ by the autumn – meaning withdrawal. They know the next six-month period is their opportunity. And they say it’s getting harder every day,” he said.
Who says webcam images are boring?
Between April 2004 and April 2005, Mark Ryan collected something like 1500 frames off the web camera positioned at Canal Park in Minnesota and put them together in this video. Mesmeric stuff, beautifully edited.
The mathematics of opinion formation
Here’s something to drive innumerate spin-doctors wild: a mathematical theory of opinion formation by Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs. Abstract reads:
We present a dynamical theory of opinion formation that takes explicitly into account the structure of the social network in which individuals are embedded. The theory predicts the evolution of a set of opinions through the social network and establishes the existence of a martingale property, i.e. that the expected weighted fraction of the population that holds a given opinion is constant in time. Most importantly, this weighted fraction is not either zero or one, but corresponds to a non-trivial distribution of opinions in thelong time limit. This coexistence of opinions within a social network is in agreement with the often observed locality effect, in which an opinion or a fad is localized to given groups without infecting the whole society. We verified these predictions, as well as those concerning the fragility of opinions and the importance of highly connected individuals in opinion formation, by performing computer experiments on a number of social networks.
So now you know. The paper has lots of nice equations of the kind that make some people’s eyeballs revolve. But, at heart, it reaches reassuringly obvious conclusions. For example,
Our theory further predicts that a relatively small number of individuals with high social ranks can have a larger effect on opinion formation than individuals with low rank. By high rank we mean people with a large number of social connections. This explains naturally a fragility phenomenon frequently noted within societies, whereby an opinion that seems to be held by a rather large group of people can become nearly extinct in a very short time, a mechanism that is at the heart of fads.
These predictions, which apply to general classes of social networks, including power-law and exponential networks, were verified by computer experiments and extended to the case when some individuals hold fixed opinions throughout the dynamical process. Furthermore, we dealt with the case of information asymmetries, which are characterized by the fact that some individuals are often influenced by other people’s opinions while being unable to reciprocate and change their counterpart’s views.
Gadget wars (contd.)
Bah! Quentin has a new toy.
It’s the Sony PRS – the Portable Reader System – which is a bit like a giant read-only PalmPilot that uses the new e-Paper type display. It’s designed to be a replacement for a paperback – a way of viewing eBooks, and unlike some earlier devices, it’s not limited to DRM-encoded books downloaded from the manufacturer. You can put text files, RTF files, PDF files on it as well, and they look gorgeous.
However, there was a big question-mark over my purchase, which was that there is no official Mac or Linux support for this device. You can use a card reader to plug an SD card into your Mac, copy the files onto it and then plug it into the PRS, but that’s hardly convenient, especially in comparison to the (optional) USB docking station. Sadly, the PRS doesn’t just appear as a USB storage device. You can run the Sony software just fine under Windows using Parallels, but that’s yucky too…
Needless to say, he’s hacked it. He’s found a way to take an arbitrary document on his Mac and make it available as a pdf on the Sony device. See the full post for the grisly details.
Later… And to add insult to injury, he’s put Memex on it!
US generals ‘will quit’ if Bush orders Iran attack
From today’s Times Online…
SOME of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources.
Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.
“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”
A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them…
Server power
A new study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (pdf available here) finds that:
Aggregate electricity use for servers doubled over the period 2000 to 2005 both in the U.S. and worldwide Almost all of this growth was the result of growth in the number of the least expensive servers, with only a small part of that growth being attributable to growth in the power use per unit.
Total power used by servers represented about 0.6% of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2005. When cooling and auxiliary infrastructure are included, that number grows to 1.2%, an amount comparable to that for color televisions. The total power demand in 2005 (including associated infrastructure) is equivalent (in capacity terms) to about five 1000 MW power plants for the U.S. and 14 such plants for the world. The total electricity bill for operating those servers and associated infrastructure in 2005 was about $2.7 B and $7.2 B for the U.S. and the world, respectively.
Nicholas Carr comments:
The estimate that servers account for 1.2 percent of overall power consumption in the U.S. is, as the San Francisco Chronicle reports, considerably lower than some previous estimates, which put data center power consumption as high as 13 percent of total U.S. consumption. It should be noted that the study, underwritten by AMD, looks only at power consumption attributable to servers, which represents about 60% to 80% of total data center power consumption. Electricity consumed by storage and networking gear is excluded. The study also excludes custom-built servers, such as the ones used by Google. The number of servers Google runs is unknown but is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
It all goes to explain why Sergey Brin & Co are getting so exercised about power consumption.