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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Saturday, May 14, 2005
Frank Zappa Was THE Man
As Zappa would have said — “Poot”
But that Would Have Killed the Music Industry, Right?
“We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company's difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user's home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1…
All accounting for royalty payments, billing to the customer, etc. would be automatic, built into the initial software for the system.
The consumer has the option of subscribing to one or more Interest Categories, charged at a monthly rate, without regard for the quantity of music he or she decides to tape.”
-- Frank Zappa invents Rhapsody, Napster in 1983 [Good Morning Silicon Valley, via Shawn] via Jenny Levine
Terry Frazier at 1:24 PM
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Sunday, March 20, 2005
Buddy Guy into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Last night VH1 showed the 2005 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony that took place March 14 in New York. One of my all-time favorites, and a man that laid the roots of much what rock and roll became, was finally given his due. Buddy Guy was inducted by Eric Clapton and given his award by the legendary B.B. King. There is a lot going on in music today but none of it moves me like the blues, and so much of what we listen to today is possible only because of what's gone before.
Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images and VH1.
Wednesday, January 5, 2005
HP Puts Consumer in Middle
WSJ reports on Carly Fiorina's annual foray at CES in Las Vegas. As you may recall, Carly takes this opportunity every year to tell us just how HP is going to help Hollywood screw its customers. This year HP wants to get in on the act a little better. It seems building lots of digital rights technology into their products was great for the MPAA and RIAA folks. Unfortunately, they don't really buy anything, so HP remains a minor player in the consumer electronics space. Here's Carly's latest strategy:
Claiming to put the consumer at the center but failing to address - at any level - the legitimate concerns of Fair Use, personal rights, privacy, compatibility, etc. really just puts us in the middle. Failing to understand that we are no longer consumers - we are part and parcel of the whole freakin' process - denotes a lack of clarity and understanding of the market rivaled only by the RIAA and MPAA themselves. So Carly says:Hewlett-Packard Co. will announce a slew of new consumer-electronics products and partnerships this week in a bid to accelerate its drive into digital entertainment.
The announcements, which will come at the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, include two new multimedia devices that bring together television programming, digital music, digital photos and Internet access. H-P also plans to introduce 17 new high-definition TVs and projectors throughout the year.
Carly Fiorina, H-P's chief executive, called the set of announcements a "significant" extension of the company's plans for the living room. "We believe in putting the consumer at the center of the experience, rather than the technology at the center," she said.
... the company this spring will introduce a more advanced entertainment center, updated to support tuning and recording of high-definition programming. Whereas that product is aimed at today's PC users, she said, H-P in the fall plans to kick off a separate line of products, dubbed media "hubs," that have more features and are aimed more at mainstream consumers.Just how useful will a Linux-based media center that kowtows exclusively to the media oligopoly be? And how many of us will really want one? I think Carly is counting on those "mainstream" (aka naive) consumers to buy this stuff. I sure won't. Has anyone really bought an iPod+HP? What do you get with that? But there are better partnerships on the way -- even some "sexy" ones. Hoo ha!
Ms. Fiorina said she will discuss several partnerships at CES, including "some sexy, fun ones," with people involved in entertainment and digital-content creation. Among other things, H-P will discuss plans to work with partners such as Philips Electronics NV to prevent piracy of digital-entertainment content.Imagine that - another partnership to stop all the cretins out here in consumerland from using our peg legs and eye patches.
I'll go out on a limb and guess that Carly has 12-18 months left at HP and then it's adios for family reasons or to pursue other interests or somesuch. This woman doesn't get it. And if she plans to lead the technology industry into the personal entertainment space she desperately needs to.
Terry Frazier at 7:28 PM
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