Xconomy Seattle’s editor Greg Huang got this idea going last month when he conducted an informal and wholly anecdotal survey about the startup culture in the woodsy Pacific Northwest. His premise was that you can tell a lot about a company’s corporate culture from its chief executive.

Within a couple of weeks, Xconomy’s founder and editor-in-chief Bob Buderi followed suit with a survey of corporate culture in Boston’s startup community (and based on Bob’s endorsement, may I just take this opportunity to say this is terrific idea!)

To make this a trifecta of corporate culture insights, I followed the examples set in Seattle and Boston by contacting some San Diego CEOs to ask them to describe the corporate culture at their companies in a single word. In a variation on a theme—what I like to think of as a fugue in our continuing coverage of technology innovation—I chose San Diego CEOs whose business is focused on digital television and video. It is an industry that has been subject to fast and furious changes, which will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

In another twist, I asked each CEO if they think there are enough TV-and-video technology companies in San Diego to constitute a cluster or even a mini-cluster of innovation. Technology clusters, defined by Harvard University’s Michael Porter as geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized suppliers, service providers, and associated research institutions, have become a touchstone for promoting prosperity as well as advancing innovation in specific fields.

Packet Video (San Diego)

CEO: James C. Brailean
Culture: “Innovative.”
Comments: Brailean responded to my journalistic lob with a volley of innovations that Packet Video has introduced since 1998, when he says the software developer for wireless media was the first to demonstrate video on a handset. “PV has been out in front of several of the key trends in mobile multimedia over the last decade.”

“We do have a significant cluster,” Brailean says. “It may not seem like it, since we are focused on different aspects of digital video. However, we all have compression, transmission, and managing digital video at our core…The move to digital video was driven by …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

It’s not often in the startup world that you get to build the same company twice, with better technology the second time around. But that’s the basic story behind Extreme Reach, a Needham, MA, company that launched this January with a vision of helping video advertisers and their agencies distribute their ads to cable networks, TV stations, and Web publishers.

The principals at Extreme Reach—CEO John Roland, chief operating officer Tim Conley, chief technology officer Dan Brackett, and vice president of sales Patrick Hanavan—all worked together at FastChannel Network for seven years, until they sold the company to Irving, TX-based DG Systems in 2006. FastChannel helped to pioneer the digital video advertising distribution business, and made $30 million a year at it, Roland told me last week. But at the time, the task required 200 employees, a $15 million centralized data center, and dedicated video servers at 1,200 cable and TV stations across the country.

Extreme Reach, by contrast, has 17 employees and no data center—it stores and serves video ads using cloud-based storage and processing at Amazon and Nirvanix. The startup’s 10,000 clients don’t need any specialized hardware, either.

Roland says when he and his group of fellow FastChannel alums saw what was becoming possible thanks to cloud computing technology and declining bandwidth costs, they couldn’t resist the temptation to build FastChannel over again—but to “completely change the model of how we do it.” They knew they’d be up against their old company, which is now known as DG FastChannel, but Roland says they felt they’d have the advantage, since DG now relies on a satellite-based distribution system and dedicated hardware.

Extreme Reach’s cloud strategy puts it “two generations ahead” technologically, Roland says. Thanks to Amazon and Nirvanix, “I’m able to expand to massive amounts of bandwidth and storage whenever the business demands, and if I don’t have the volume I can go down—so I don’t have any cap-ex [capital expenditure] requirements,” he boasts. “It’s a 100 percent software model, and I can do it for about 20 percent of the cost of …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Cambridge, MA, venture firm General Catalyst Partners is the lead investor in a $6 million Series B funding round announced today by New York, NY-based Boxee, which makes video browser software for navigating online video offerings on the large screen of a television. Existing investor Spark Capital of Boston was also in on the round, along with New York-based Union Square Ventures. The company has raised $10 million in venture capital altogether, and plans to release an improved beta version of its software this fall.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

If you read Xconomy, chances are that digital information is a big part of your day. You spend quite a bit of time absorbing, manipulating, and repackaging it. So here are a few questions for you: How many different devices do you use to channel all those bits? Is the number going up, or down? And if—as I suspect—it’s going down, what’s the minimum set of devices that you think you could get along with?

Here’s my current list:

1. Apple iPhone 3G
2. Apple MacBook, OS X 10.5
3. Dell Inspiron 8600 Windows XP laptop
4. Amazon Kindle 2 e-book reader
5. Sharp Aquos 32-inch HDTV
6. Microsoft Xbox 360
7. Canon PowerShot S5 IS digital camera
8. Roku digital video player

Note that I’m not counting the key infrastructure devices, like the Comcast-provided cable modem and my Netgear Wi-Fi router, that support several of the devices above.

But even without those two indispensable items, there would still be 12 or 13 devices on my personal list, if it weren’t for the Internet and the creative geniuses at companies like Palm, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. I’m betting the same thing is true for many readers.

Here’s my tale of the disappearing devices:

Ah, the good old days. In 2005, just for fun, I arranged this group picture, which includes every device I owned containing a microchip.

The PDA. I used a series of Palm devices to manage my calendar and contact lists from 1998 until 2003, when Palm folded those functions into its Treo phones, allowing me to say goodbye to the standalone organizer.

The MP3 player. In 2005 or so, I had a running debate with a fellow tech journo named Eric Hellweg about whether there would ever be a successful music phone—meaning a cell phone with a built-in music player. At the time, the only examples were devices like the Motorola ROKR, which, to put it politely, was a piece of horse pucky that could only hold 100 songs. I argued that not only was the technical problem of building a more capacious music phone too hard (what manufacturer was going to put a hard drive into a mobile phone?), but people didn’t want such a device anyway, since they already seemed perfectly happy to be carrying around separate devices for these two purposes—an iPod for music and a cell phone for communications. Well, obviously Eric won that debate in the end. The Apple iPhone, which came out in 2007, is arguably a better iPod than the iPod itself, thanks to its larger screen and a multi-touch interface. And even the low-end models can hold four times more music in their solid-state memories than my first disk-drive-based iPod.

The DVD player. No need for it after I got the Xbox 360, which also plays DVDs.

The DVR. When I jettisoned premium cable TV back in March, I had no more need for the Comcast set-top box, which also functioned as my DVR. I now get all of my video entertainment through Internet video sites like Hulu, Netflix DVDs, and the …Next Page »

Comments (11) | Reprints | Share:        

Thanks to ongoing advances in liquid crystal display and plasma screen technology, flat-panel TVs keep getting flatter. Sharp’s new 46-inch Aquos X model is only 1.35 inches deep—thinner than three iPhones stacked together. But while all this thinness may be sexy, it comes at the cost of decent sound: the less room a conventional loudspeaker has to resonate, the less volume and fidelity it can manage. So millions of people are taking home their giant new 1080p HDTVs, hooking them up to their Dish Network receivers and Blu-Ray disc players, and discovering to their discontent that the built-in speakers sound like tinny little laptops.

But what if the screen itself could double as a TV’s loudspeakers? Then manufacturers could build televisions as wide and as thin as their display technology allows without sacrificing a decibel of volume or a hertz of frequency range. And this, in fact, is exactly the idea that a startup called Emo Labs is pitching to the likes of Sony, Samsung, Sharp, LG, and Toshiba.

I went out to Emo headquarters in Waltham, MA a couple of weeks ago to meet the company’s executives and see (and hear) their prototypes, and I’m here to report that if the idea takes off, it could completely change the way we experience DVDs, cable TV, satellite TV, and console video games. You know how when you go to a theater, the dialogue and music sounds like they’re coming from the movie screen? That’s because the screen is perforated, and the loudspeakers are actually right behind it. You get the same effect from Emo Labs’ “Edge Motion” technology—except that the sound in Emo’s device is coming from a thin, transparent layer of plastic between you and a TV’s display. The plastic vibrates like a drumhead, driven by actuators on either side, producing bright, room-filling, and very loud stereo sound.

So far, the company has built prototype “Edge Motion” membranes that measure up to 42 inches diagonally. Allan Evelyn, Emo’s vice president of business development, says the company is six or seven meetings deep into negotiations with certain Asian consumer electronics companies, talking about ways to get Emo’s technology built into future flat-panel TVs. If Emo wins a contract, it could not only help TV manufacturers start to reverse the trend toward tiny, tinny speakers, but it could lead to a nice payoff for the five-year-old startup, which is backed by Polaris Venture Partners, the Venture Capital Fund of New England, and a handful of angel investors.

But it’s an uphill battle, especially at a time when manufacturers beset by price wars and economic crisis are averse to anything that would make their products more expensive. Emo estimates that building in its membrane would add 10 to 15 percent to the cost of a television, making a $1,000 device into an $1,150 one. “If you have a choice between a quarter-inch-thick TV that sounds like a notebook computer, or a TV that sounds really good, I know what most consumers will choose,” says Jason Carlson’s, Emo Labs’ CEO. “But in what [the manufacturers] are doing, from a product planning point of view, I wouldn’t say they have fully embraced that yet.”

Emo Labs has gone through its share of twists and turns to get to this point. The company is a 2004 spinoff of Natick, MA-based Manifold Products, a “venture engineering” firm that helps to build businesses around novel electromechanical technologies. Lewis Athanas, a 20-year veteran of the Boston-area audio technology companies like Boston Acoustics, had approached Manifold in 2003 with an idea for a transparent plastic sheet that would fit over the screen of a computer monitor, producing sound under the influence of piezoelectric actuators along the sheet’s left and right edges.

Piezoelectric materials produce electricity when a stress is applied—and conversely, they change their shape when an electric field is applied, which is why they’re widely used in loudspeakers. By vibrating in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the plastic sheet, the actuators in Athanas’s system cause the sheet itself to flex slightly, moving the air in front of the sheet and producing sound waves. By moving independently, the actuators on the left and right sides of the sheet can give rise to stereo sound.

Manifold helped Athanas turn his lab concept into a prototype, and raised angel funding for a company to commercialize the idea. As the startup’s original name, Screenspeaker, suggests, …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Boston-based Backchannelmedia said this week that it’s moving from an extended period of beta testing to launching commercial operations in the New York area. The company, whose motto is “TV and the Internet finally just click,” has created a system that allows TV viewers to click using their remote controls in response to special onscreen offers and Web addresses, bringing additional information to their e-mail inboxes. Backchannelmedia says it hopes the “Clickable TV” technology will become a mainstream tool for targeted interactive marketing. The company was founded in 2000, has 29 employees, has raised $15 million in funding, and is expecting a full launch by mid-2010 with more funding.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The great thing about the Apple iPhone is that it’s a powerful miniature computer, with a screen that can be retasked to look like almost anything and do almost any job—it can switch in a moment from being a scientific calculator to simulating an airplane cockpit ti acting like the slide of a trombone. One obvious way to employ such a versatile information device would be to turn it into a universal remote control for home appliances. There’s only one problem—the iPhone doesn’t have an infrared port, so it can’t communicate in the only language known to most home appliances, including TVs, DVRs, stereo systems, and cable boxes.

A Waltham, MA, startup called ThinkFlood has set out to correct that flaw. It’s built an accessory for the iPhone and iPod Touch called RedEye that translates one of the wireless languages these devices do know—Wi-Fi—into the infrared signals that make sense to an appliance. The name may be unfortunate, seeing as it calls to mind two unpleasant things at once—exhausting overnight jet flights and those beady devil-eyes that show up on people in flash photographs. But the idea itself is cool, and seems likely to appeal to gadget hounds like me who enjoy seeing how many different things they can do with their iPhones.

ThinkFlood launched the device as a “beta” product yesterday, meaning it’s available at a reduced introductory price ($119, going up to $149 later) to a limited number of customers. As the beta tag suggests, the software that drives it is still a work in progress.

“Bringing universal remote control capabilities to the iPhone has been the goal of many in the industry since the device first became available,” ThinkFlood founder and president Matthew Eagar said in an announcement yesterday. “Beta participants will find that RedEye delivers the design and functionality of a high-end remote control at a fraction of the cost.”

Specifically, the RedEye device (and the iPhone software app that goes with it) let you do things like changing the channel on your TV or the volume on your stereo. It’s not an accessory in the usual sense of an attachment; while you can sit your iPhone in it like a cradle if you want, you can mainly just leave it on a table, as long as it has a line of sight to your appliances. It communicates with your iPhone by radio, which means you no longer need to near your audio/video equipment to relay commands—in fact, you can be in another room or on a different floor.

From watching a demo video at the ThinkFlood site, it appears that the RedEye software allows you to use flicking and multitouch gestures. So the device could make channel surfing as easy as flipping through albums using the iPod CoverFlow feature.

That “fraction of the cost” thing that Eager mentions depends on how you look at it, of course. An 8-gigabyte iPhone 3G costs $199, not counting a wireless calling plan, so if you add the cost of the phone to the cost of the RedEye, you get $318. That’s more than even the slickest universal remotes such as the Logitech Harmony 880, which retails for $249. On the other hand, ThinkFlood plans to upgrade the RedEye software regularly, meaning you’re really buying a device that will evolve into something more powerful over time. And hey—it doubles as a charging stand for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

ThinkFlood was founded in 2007 and RedEye is its first product. According to the company’s history page, the firm first set out to create an easier way to share and display digital photos, but switched gears after discovering that a standalone photo viewer would be too expensive to make and market. The company then settled on the idea of building iPhone accessories—specifically, accessories that would use hardware to amplify the power of the iPhone’s user interface. And that led to the idea of a combined hardware-software product that would turn the phenomenally popular Apple device into a substitute for the pile of remote controls laying on most people’s sofas.

With a bit of help, the ThinkFlood founders realized, the iPhone could become “the only [remote control] you will ever need, one that you will carry with you wherever you go, customized for each activity. And since the iPhone is missing the ability to record and send infrared signals, there was our opportunity to complete the picture with hardware.”

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:        

In a column published last July, I vacillated publicly about whether it was time to stop paying extortionate rates to my local cable provider, Comcast, for the privilege of watching 17 minutes of commercials with every hour of programming.

Well, it took me a while, but in early March I finally cut the cord. I pared back my cable TV lineup to the basic $10 per month level (which includes 30 local and community-access channels) and handed back Comcast’s set-top box/DVR. At the same time, I canceled my land-line digital telephone service and went cellular-only, of which I’ll say more some other week. Of course, I kept my cable Internet service—which is surprisingly fast, averaging 15 to 20 megabits per second.

And I am here to report that life without premium cable channels is just fine.

Now, I certainly have not given up watching TV shows. In fact, I probably consume just as much video content now as I did before, maybe more. The difference is that these days I’m getting the majority of it on demand, over the Internet, with few or no commercials. It’s easier to do this than ever before, given the explosion of new technologies and services around online video—a few of which I want to describe in today’s column.

First a quick illustration of how quickly the online video market is changing. Here’s a chart that I included in my July column, showing which of my favorite shows were available online and where. (By ABC and NBC, I mean ABC.com, NBC.com, etc.):

Here is the same chart today, with the addition of two new favorites that I wasn’t watching last year (24 and Fringe) and one video source that hadn’t fully emerged as of last summer (Amazon Video on Demand):

As you can see, the chart has filled in quite a bit. All of my favorite shows* are now available on Hulu. Many of the shows that weren’t available last year from iTunes now are, thanks in part to last September’s rapprochement between Apple and NBC Universal. Veoh has also filled out its list significantly, and Amazon Video on Demand has come out of nowhere to become a serious rival to iTunes (well, not quite nowhere, but its predecessor service, Amazon Unbox, sucked, to be frank).

[*I have to mention in passing that I no longer watch Friday Night Lights, which lost its magic somewhere in season 2, or Heroes, which jumped the shark ages ago. But I kept them in the chart for completeness' sake. Also, Battlestar Galactica, Pushing Daisies, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles have all ended or been canceled. And I haven't listed the shows that I only ever obtained online, such as Mad Men. Also, you'll notice that I don't watch any TV sports. I realize that the prospect of giving up the sports broadcasts monopolized by ESPN and their ilk would be a show stopper for many sports fans.]

“But wait,” you say. “Why would I want to watch TV on my laptop or my desktop monitor, especially when I dropped a grand last year on a new HDTV?” I have three words for you: Cables to Go. This one-stop online shop has cables for connecting every type of computer to every conceivable brand of television. I have one cable that connects my Windows computer’s VGA port to my TV’s serial input, and another that connects the mini-DVI video port on my Mac laptop to my TV’s DVI-I input. A third handles audio. I can just fire up Hulu or iTunes on one of my computers, plug it into my TV, and I’m ready to watch from across the living room, often in high-definition quality.

There are two other new technologies that have helped to smooth my defection from cable. One is the new category of what you might call “10-foot browsers”: video aggregators with big, boxy interfaces that make it easier to …Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Last month I connected by phone with Extend Media’s founder and president Keith Kocho. At the time, Kocho was sole leader of the Boston-based startup, which makes video management software for media companies. Given that Extend specializes in delivering video content across multiple platforms—over the broadband Internet to PCs, over traditional cable networks to TV sets, and over wireless networks to mobile phones—Kocho keeps a close eye on the tumult in the video entertainment industry, and I wanted to get his take on where things are heading and where the business opportunities lie.

As it happens, Extend generated some news shortly after my interview with Kocho. The company hired a CEO, a former venture partner from Menlo Park, CA-based Blue Run Ventures named Tom MacIsaac. Before his spin in the venture world MacIsaac led an Internet video infrastructure provider called Lightningcast, which was acquired by AOL in 2006. His experience working with content owners and distributors such as Comcast, Hulu, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon should serve him well at Extend, which has supplied its OpenCASE multi-platform video delivery software to AT&T, Bell Canada, and a few other big customers, but is looking to sell the system to more types of media organizations in more countries around the world.

Kocho, a Canadian expat, remains as president of Extend, which is funded by Venrock Associates, Atlas Venture, and TVM Capital and just collected a $10 million Series C round in December, bringing its total funding to more than $30 million. He’s been a voice of optimism in the industry, predicting that the economic downturn might actually translate into a boost for digital video providers as consumers look for free, advertising-supported entertainment. But in our conversation we focused mostly on the challenges faced by traditional cable and satellite TV providers as their customers become aware of the exploding options for accessing video on the Internet and their mobile devices. Extend has some cool technology that could help cable companies give their subscribers compelling reasons to stay—but nobody, including Kocho, can predict whether they’ll adopt it fast enough to stop the bleeding. Here’s an edited version of our talk:

Xconomy: There were some interesting statistics from Nielsen recently. They found that among people who watch video on their mobile devices, the average amount of time spent was nearly four hours per month. That’s one of the trends that Extend Media is trying to position itself to support, is it not?

Keith Kocho: The notion of mobile access to content on the “third screen” is definitely a consistent and growing trend. But whether or not it is specifically mobile phones, and in particular whether the content is streamed to mobile phones over existing carrier networks, is really a question at the moment. We are definitely seeing uptake in our customers supporting this class of devices. But the primary way for consumers to get content on those devices is local sync, which is increasingly accomplished via Wi-Fi. My son is a good example. He’s got an iPod Touch, and he’s constantly watching video on the thing, but all of that is streamed over our local Wi-Fi network. I think that’s quite consistent with what we’re seeing. From a carrier perspective, it’s much more cost-effective and scalable to get this rich media into the home or the workplace via a terrestrial broadband network and deliver it via some kind of hub device.

We see mobility happening in two ways. One is just the vanilla, “Hey, would you like to take this content with you on your commute?” or whatever. The second is application switching—the transience of how you’re viewing the content. Being able to stop viewing a program on the big screen and pick it up on the mobile phone when you leave the house—those kinds of things are the areas where we’re seeing a great deal of traction with providers. In the world going forward, everyone is going to have the same content; they’ll all be trying to provide it in the highest quality possible, up to high-definition; and they will all have to deal with the same available bandwidth. So the way you pitch it to consumers is by allowing them to use “sticky” platforms that go across devices. That’s the way you differentiate.

X: So I’m assuming that this device-switching is one of the things Extend’s technology enables.

KK: This is one class of features our technology provides—that multi screen experience. There is a bunch of sophistication on the back end required to make that possible, not the least of which is that the delivery mode might be different from device to device—it might be streamed, downloaded, or cached. Also, there’s the notion of linking the status or state of your viewing experience with your profile, and within your profile is a set of devices that we already know the characteristics of; it’s a bookmarking function that we use to maintain the state of the asset you are using as you go to another device.

We’re heading into a world where to be able to market yourself effectively to sophisticated consumers, these features are things [cable or satellite companies] must have. They have to have ways to serve the same content across all three screens [TVs, PCs, and mobile devices]. What the providers don’t want to have happen is …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

ZeeVee, the Littleton, MA-based startup focused on helping people watch high-definition Internet video on their TVs, today introduced a new version of its free video browser. Formerly called Zviewer—and originally designed for the ZvBox, the firm’s PC-to-TV-over-coaxial-cable appliance—the browser is now called Zinc, and runs on any Windows XP or Vista computer. (A Mac version is coming soon.)

Zinc is designed for viewers who want to hook up their PCs to their televisions and then navigate large amounts of Internet video content from across the living room—the so-called “lean back” mode, as opposed to “lean forward” mode common when you’re watching video directly on your laptop or desktop computer. As such, the Zinc interface is dominated by big tiles and brief, simple command menus. Users flip through TV episodes or movies using either their computer keyboard or a remote control compatible with Windows Media Center software, such as ZeeVee’s own ZvRemote.

In concept, Zinc is very similar to Boxee, a popular Internet video browser for the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Zinc and Boxee don’t compete directly, at least for now, since the Mac version of Zinc and the Windows version of Boxee aren’t yet publicly available. But both are examples of an emerging genre of media browsers that make it easy for TV owners to access TV episodes and movies over their Internet connections.

The overt function of Zinc and similar browsers, says ZeeVee CEO Vic Odryna, is “presenting choice in a unified way,” as opposed to having to surf to each provider’s video portal on the Web. “This way I can check out what’s on Amazon using the same interface that shows what’s on Netflix or ABC or Fox, through a very clean interface that shows what episodes are available and what I’ve already watched. It’s very TiVo-like.”

But these browsers, along with Internet TV appliances such as Apple TV and the Roku Player, are also helping to change the economy of mass entertainment. By eliminating the technical and navigational barriers that once made it difficult to access Internet video from the big screens of conventional televisions, the new video aggregators threaten to further erode the cable networks’ historical stranglehold over home video entertainment.

And that’s finally starting to make the cable companies nervous, according to Odryna. “Even nine months ago, the viewpoint was ‘You kids can go play all you want, [Internet video on TV] is just a toy.’ Now the tone is changing really fast. ”

Zinc’s predecessor, Zviewer, was first released as a standalone piece of software last November. But Zinc improves on it in several big ways. It allows access to more content—including all CBS shows and instant Netflix movies—as well as more information about each show and simpler navigation between them. The company says the browser can be used to access more than 15,000 movies and tens of thousands of TV shows. Because it’s based on the Mozilla code base, users also have the option of installing Zinc as a plugin for Firefox, rather than downloading the stand-alone Windows application. (A Macintosh version could be out as early as next month, Odryna says. ZeeVee allowed me to test an early version on my own Mac, and it worked nearly flawlessly.)

The evolution of Zinc is itself an interesting case study in the fast-changing market for video technology. Originally, Zviewer was developed as the user interface for the ZvBox 100, introduced by ZeeVee in May 2008. The ZvBox 100 contained a sophisticated encoder/modulator that transformed streaming video output from a Windows PC into a radio-frequency HDTV signal that could then travel over the coaxial cables already installed in most households and be displayed on any television in the house. The idea was cool, but the implementation was flawed. I tested out the $499 ZvBox 100 at home last September, and ran into so many technical hurdles while trying to make it work that I reluctantly concluded the device just wasn’t ready for prime time.

Odryna told me this week that he more or less agrees with that assessment. “What did we learn? First, that the complexities of installation were really too much for a lot of people. Another problem was cost. Even though this was a piece of equipment that would bring $20,000 in the broadcast world, the $500 price tag was too high. Then there was the complexity of asking a PC to do what we wanted—to broadcast in 720-line resolution. It worked in a lot of cases, but not everywhere.”

The company ultimately abandoned the ZvBox 100 after selling fewer than 10,000 units, Odryna says. “Had we continued to ride that horse, we would probably be dead as a company,” he says.

But as the ZvBox 100’s prospects with consumers sank, something unexpected happened. “From the day we launched the product,” says Odryna, “we got a huge deluge of calls from the commercial world”—meaning institutions such as hotels, restaurants, bars, hospitals, and airports that need to supply TV programming to large numbers of consoles and are looking for a cheap way to get high-definition signals to them. “If you walk into a hotel today, they all have HDTVs, but …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

You may not realize it, but your mobile phone is a cold-blooded killer.

Its assault began with little fanfare—the first victim, the phone booth, wasn’t particularly well-loved, and nobody was expecting a complete extermination. Yet here we stand in a world where Clark Kent couldn’t find a place to pull on his Supersuit if the fate of Metropolis depended on it.

The next victims were just “accidents.” Seen anyone whip out a paper address book lately? And who would have thought that a little thing like the clock on the phone’s home screen could cause so many business professionals to stop wearing watches? Just who, exactly, is next?

For those looking over their shoulder, here are the three keys that will lead us to the next genre killer:

1. Every phone’s got it. Until a feature is a part of every phone, mainstream, non-tech-savvy America won’t notice that it’s there—camera phones only penetrated everyone’s consciousness when they were everywhere.

2. The user experience really works on a phone. Mobile TV is coming, but 50″ plasmas aren’t going—the 2″ experience just doesn’t compare. SMS remains the definitive mobile success story, but don’t wait for the end of email—at least not until someone solves the keyboard problem.

3. It crosses the Good Enough Threshold. The “GET” is the point where the best phone experience exceeds the minimum consumer bar for the feature. For example, the camera GET is two megapixels, autofocus, and flash. It’s no coincidence that this is about the quality level of a cheap disposable camera.

Following these rules, let’s break down the likely victims:

Point-and-shoot cameras—The writing’s on the wall.
There’ll always be a place for high end single-lens reflex models and the like. Enthusiasts will want the very best, regardless of cost or size. Most consumers, however, ask for two things from their camera: make it small and make it cheap. The GET for camera phones is being crossed as we speak, and then comes the end of the mass market digital camera. Who’s going to pay $250 for “just a camera” when their carrier just put one in their pocket for free? Danger level: critical.

Landline phones—The signal is still keeping busy.
The latest innovation often destroys its predecessor—CDs killed records, and DVD decimated VHS. The most obvious target for the phone, then, is the landline. But while the dial tone is clearly in decline, a tradition of reliability and security in case of emergency are keeping it alive. Burglar in the backyard? Hope you can get signal for 911. Extended power outage? Your touchtone telephone will be up and running, even as cell sites go offline and your phone battery dies. Installing an alarm for your house? Neither cellular nor VoIP are approved alternatives for trusty old copper. The GET for landline replacement is high reliability, and until carriers can guarantee it, the wires are safe. Danger level: moderate.

E-mail—Just a flesh wound.
SMS has revolutionized the way we communicate, but it’s still hard to beat …Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:        

I’ve been writing World Wide Wade for almost a year now; this is the 44th installment. A year is a long time in the technology world—long enough for many of the gadgets, services, and websites I’ve covered in the past to evolve cool new features. So I thought I’d revisit a few of my previous columns and fill you in about what’s changed.

1. Beyond megapixels. In my April 4 and June 6 columns, I wrote about the Gigapan community site, where you can upload super-high-resolution photos stitched together from lots of regular digital shots. In January of this year, a new company called GigaPan Systems introduced a $379 robot camera mount that puts gigapixel imaging within the reach of hobbyists. It takes care of the tedious part of gigapixel imaging by guiding your camera through hundreds or thousands of individually-angled shots, with just enough overlap to give the stitching software something to work with.

2. News aggregators on steroids. Last April 11, I wrote about my favorite news-tracking tools on the Web, including Netvibes and Alltop. Netvibes hasn’t changed much in the last year, but Alltop, a cool aggregator that uses pop-up windows to squeeze a lot of news onto a single page, has exploded beyond all bounds. It had about 55 categories of RSS feeds when I last wrote about it; now there must be well over 500, on everything from Atheism to Zoology. And for tech-news enthusiasts, there’s a site called TechFuga that recently got a nice overhaul that makes it more competitive with the uber-popular but somewhat tired TechMeme. The new features at TechFuga include Twitter searching, reflecting the fact that more and more people are getting their news from each other via the red-hot microblogging service. (Speaking of Twitter, you can follow me there at “wroush“.)

3. Earth as you’ve never seen it. On April 18, I wrote about Google Earth 4.3, which featured improved navigation and a larger crop of 3-D buildings. The latest version of the world’s most popular geo-browser, Google Earth 5.0, came out in the middle of last month. The coolest improvements: a fantastic view of the ocean floor, the ability to delve back in time and see aerial imagery from the 1980s and earlier, and imagery for Mars as well as Earth and the Moon.

4. An art museum in your living room. If you’ve got an HDTV already, there’s no reason to buy one of those expensive digital photo frames. My April 25 column talked about GalleryPlayer, a company that provided software and imagery for turning your TV into a digital art exhibit. Unfortunately, GalleryPlayer went out of business in July (though founder Scott Lipsky, an ex-Amazon exec, hinted that it had merely been sold and might re-emerge). Luckily, there are still plenty of ways to find and display high-resolution images on your big screen. DeviantArt is a great place to browse and download free HD-resolution images created by professional artists and photographers. And if you hook up your computer to your TV, you can use software like Slickr or FlickrFan to display those images—or your own—in the form of animated slide shows.

5. An elephant never forgets. My July 18 column was about Evernote, a fantastic cross-platform system for storing and tracking all the info-flotsam in your life: Web pages, photos, receipts, you name it. I still add material to my Evernote account every day, and the company just keeps making the software better and better. There’s now a version for Android phones (on top of the existing Web, Windows, Mac, Windows Mobile, and iPhone versions). In December, Evernote (whose logo is an elephant) added a file synchronization feature, so you can use it to keep copies of important Word files, PDFs, PowerPoints, and other electronic documents, and more recently, it rolled out a vastly improved version of its Web Clipper, which is the tool I use most often. A feature I plan to try soon is the recently-announced Shoeboxed, a service that will scan that pile of business cards and receipts on your desk and put them right into Evernote. And if you used Google Notebooks—which Google gave up on in January—you can easily import all of your notes to Evernote and pick up where you left off.

6. Cutting the cord. In my July 25 column, I threatened to give up my cable TV subscription and switch to watching my favorite shows online, via video aggregators like Hulu. Well, it took me a while to gather up the courage, but last week I finally made good on the threat, and dropped my $80 digital cable package at Comcast in favor of a $10 lineup of about 23 local channels (which I kept just in case I ever feel the need to watch live news). While I was at it, I canceled …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

These days, there’s no sense in producing video for just one platform, like cable TV. Media companies also want to get their content out to consumers via the Web, mobile phones, game consoles, video-on-demand networks, and other platforms. The problem is that all of these channels use different video formats, protocols, and resolutions, which makes transcoding and managing video content a pain.

But this week Westford, MA-based Verivue unveiled a system designed to ease that discomfort. It’s a media distribution “switch”—a combination of servers, solid-state storage devices, networking hardware, and media applications inside a single big chassis—that can stream video and other media files to any type of end device over any Internet Protocol-based network.

Aimed at big customers like cable operators, telecom companies, Web video providers, and content distribution networks, the so-called “MDX 9000″ series is the company’s first product. It’s been under development behind closed doors since Verivue’s founding in November 2006. Aside from its cross-platform capabilities, the device’s big advantage, according to Verivue, is that it uses Flash-based storage with no moving parts. That means it can stream data faster, and use less energy, than server racks using traditional hard drives.

The first switch in the MDX 9000 series will be available in the second quarter of this year, the company says. The company plans to resell the machines through Arris Group (NASDAQ:ARRS), a Suwanee, GA-based maker of broadband networking equipment.

At the same time, the 85-employee company revealed that it has collected a sizable $40 million Series B funding round. Comcast Interactive Capital led the round, which also included Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Accel Partners, and Arris. The round closed last July, according to a company spokesman, but it wasn’t announced until this week. The $40 million comes on top of a $25 million Series A round, provided by Matrix and Spark Capital, that was one of the 10 largest venture deals in New England for the second quarter of 2007.

Light Reading’s Cable Digital News has a good overview of Verivue’s strategy.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

People seem to eat up the platefuls of food-related programming fed to them by cable networks like Lifetime, The Travel Channel, and the Food Network. Will cell phone owners do the same?

The folks at SnapMyLife, the mobile photo-sharing community run by Needham, MA-based Mobicious, hope to find out. Last year the company formed a partnership with Zero Point Zero Production, the company behind curmudgeonly cook Anthony Bourdain’s popular Travel Channel show “No Reservations,” to post backstage candids from the show on SnapMyLife. Already the show’s crew has posted some 340 photos to SnapMyLife’s free public albums, which are advertising-supported and optimized for browsing and viewing on mobile phones. Most of the photos show Bourdain visiting countries around the world and—as he does on the show—trying a variety of exotic foods in the company of local chefs or families.

It’s all intended as a way for food and travel lovers to keep up with the show and learn about locations that will be featured in upcoming episodes. David Chang, co-founder and vice president of marketing at Mobicious, says it’s the first time a TV show has turned to mobile photo-sharing to help form connections with viewers. “The problem they were trying to solve is that they’ve got this great program, and they wanted to use mobile devices to reach people—whether to involve existing viewers, to send them alerts about new episodes, or to recruit brand new viewers,” he says. “And since SnapMyLife users come from all over the world and just eat up any content about travel, it was a really good fit, from our standpoint.”

Some 440 SnapMyLife users have signed up to receive alerts when the crew posts new pictures from “No Reservations,” which is now in its fifth season; users can choose to see the alerts on the mobile website or receive e-mail or text messages. (Overall, SnapMyLife has signed up nearly 700,000 registered users since Mobicious launched the service last April, Chang says; users browse 15 million photos every month.)

For all the novelty of a television production company using a mobile photo-sharing network to share behind-the-scenes views, though, the “No Reservations” photo stream is curiously unsocial. It’s a one-to-many enterprise: Zero Point Zero crew members post photos that are then viewed by SnapMyLife users, but there’s no way for users to contribute their own food- or travel-related photos to the stream. And users can comment on the photos, but Zero Point Zero doesn’t engage with users by responding to the comments. (I could only find four comments from the “No Reservations” crew, for 340 photos.) The photos themselves, while less staged or scripted than the show itself, still have the look of studio-produced publicity shots.

There’s an explanation for that. According to Chang, the images that show up in the “No Reservations” photo stream have been extensively vetted by both Zero Point Zero and the Travel Channel, mainly to make sure they don’t show anyone who hasn’t signed a legal photo release.

“Dan, the camera guy, has a camera phone, and he could snap a picture and just use that—which was initially what we were pushing for,” says Chang. “But because Dan is employed by the production company, there are legal constraints in terms of what they can show.”

It’s all an interesting case study in the frictions and ironies that can crop up when traditional media enterprises like TV production crews try to adapt their content for more social, less controlled channels. When you friend Anthony Bourdain on SnapMyLife, there may not be quite as much distance as there would be if you friended, say, Barack Obama on Facebook. But it’s still a case of social networking minus the social.

“We are still trying to navigate these waters,” Chang acknowledges. “This is just stage one—taking content that we know has gone through this vetting process and getting that out to users. Stage 2 will be capturing live media on the spot in a way that is more spontaneous.”

Chang says the Mobicious team is in early discussions with the Travel Channel and other big media companies about mixing photos from users with professionally-produced content, where appropriate. “They recognize that users have mobile devices, and that it’s a great way of capturing content when they are in places that are interesting and relevant,” he says. So while the snapshot of the blowfish-testicles entrée from your last trip to Tokyo probably won’t show up on the Travel Channel itself, it might just be included in its photo stream.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Boston’s Backchannelmedia, whose “clickable TV” system embeds links in broadcast TV signals that consumers can activate with their remote controls to receive information about a program or a product via e-mail, said today that Gray Television (NYSE: GTN) of Atlanta will roll out the Backchannelmedia system to its 36 local broadcast stations.

That brings the total number of stations participating in Backchannelmedia’s system to 68 (including New England stations WCVB, WJAR, WTNH, and WCTX), covering more than a sixth of all U.S. broadcast viewers.

“This is our first paying contract for clickable TV—a huge milestone for us,” says Backchannelmedia marketing director Eric Martin. “The market trials continue up here in the Northeast but the fact that a broadcast group is on the record and willing to pay for it demonstrates that it has actual monetary value to broadcasters.”

We’ve profiled Backchannelmedia here and here.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Boston’s Spark Capital and New York’s Union Square Ventures have put $2 million each into Boxee, a New York-based startup working on “social media center” software that optimizes Internet TV shows, music, and photos for consumption on high-definition TVs, Spark announced Tuesday. Spark’s Bijan Sabet and Union Square’s Fred Wilson will join the board of Boxee, which has not yet released its software to the public.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

If you thought the notorious Total Information Awareness program went away when Congress eliminated funding for the Pentagon’s mass-surveillance experiment in 2003, you were misled. The program itself may have been dismantled, but as an investigation by the Wall Street Journal detailed in March, many pieces of it were simply transferred to other federal agencies, where they’re now part of a massive effort to mine U.S. residents’ e-mail messages, bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel records, Web searches, and telephone records for signs of terrorist conspiracy. Suspects identified by this mining can be targeted by the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program for wiretapping and other searches without a warrant—a practice authorized by President Bush in 2002, first publicly exposed by the New York Times in 2005, and legalized by Congress in 2007.

Exactly what kind of a world are we building with these domestic spying programs—and could we unbuild it now, even if we wanted to? Those are the questions posed by a fictional-but-realistic BBC miniseries, “The Last Enemy,” that concluded this week on PBS. I highly recommend it—and if you rush, you can still watch the whole five-hour series at the PBS website (it’s available online until November 9). You can also pre-order a DVD of the series for delivery in January.

In an interesting bit of timing on PBS’s part, the series closer aired on November 2, just two days before Americans decisively turned away from the Bush-Cheney legacy and its shocking assault on civil liberties in favor of a President-elect, Barack Obama, who has worked in the Senate to rein in the Patriot Act and who promised during the campaign that he would end warrantless wiretaps. We may not know until after January 20 where an overhaul of the nation’s intelligence-gathering apparatus will rank on Obama’s priority list. But the moment is clearly ripe for a rollback of many of the abuses perpetrated by the Bush administration in the name of national security.

What could happen if democratic societies continue to sacrifice liberty for the appearance of security is the subject of “The Last Enemy,” a depressing tale set in London in the year 2011. Closed-circuit surveillance is ubiquitous (not much of a stretch, given that Britain already has 5 million closed-circuit cameras) and every citizen must carry an ID card linked to their thumbprint and iris scan (also not much of a stretch—the British parliament passed a national identity card act in 2006, and starting in 2010 everyone who applies for a passport will be issued a card and placed in a national identity register). In this near-future world, the government is in the final testing phases of an all-encompassing national intelligence database called (you guessed it) Total Information Awareness.

As the story begins, a brilliant, antisocial mathematician, Stephen Ezard, is returning from self-imposed exile in China to attend the funeral of his brother, an international aid worker supposedly killed in a roadside bombing in Afghanistan. Stephen gradually learns that refugees treated in his brother’s camp have been dying from a tainted hepatitis vaccine, and that his brother was working to expose the government’s cover-up. Stephen promptly falls in love with his brother’s widow, and is asked by the British government to evaluate—and then assist with public relations for—TIA. We soon begin to suspect that the government has invited Stephen into the program simply to keep a closer eye on him. He gets a couple of steps ahead of his minders, and figures out how to exploit the database to track down vaccine researchers who might help to untangle the conspiracy. But that leads to some nasty surprises—and I won’t give away any more of the story.

The writing and acting in “The Last Enemy” are a bit duller than what I usually expect from the BBC, but the story is well-researched and chillingly plausible. If it were shorter, I’d say that it should be mandatory viewing for high school and college civics classes. What’s most disturbing about the show’s plot is the way that Stephen’s attempts to evade TIA’s web (once he begins to learn how deep the conspiracy goes) are taken as de facto evidence that he’s a danger to national security. How often has it been said that surveillance programs are harmless, since innocent, law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide? The problem with this logic, of course, is its dark corollary—that anyone who seems to be hiding something must be guilty.

I’ve always been amazed by the British flair for technological dystopianism—just think of Orwell’s 1984, Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” and the utterly devastating “28 Days Later.” If I had to guess at an explanation for this phenomenon, I’d say that England had a front-row view as her sister industrial democracy, Germany, descended into Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. In the aftermath, a few British authors and filmmakers have been sufficiently honest and courageous to point out related tendencies in their own society, like xenophobia, grandiosity, technological triumphalism, and a fetish for bureaucracy and authority figures.

As the Bush-Cheney era finally lifts, will Americans take an equally honest look at how 9/11 exacerbated our own none-too-latent xenophobia? Will our government come to understand that constant electronic scrutiny is itself a violation of our privacy? Not without some pushing. Yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union published a transition plan calling on Obama to “begin repairing the damage to freedom” on day one of his presidency by, among many other things, prohibiting the National Security Agency from monitoring the communications of U.S. citizens and residents without a warrant. He will doubtless have bigger things on his mind, like preventing a depression, exiting Iraq, and stabilizing Afghanistan. But through his choice of an attorney general and his early policies on issues such as implementing a civil-liberties board to oversee the Patriot Act, Obama has the opportunity to reverse eight years of progress toward a total-surveillance state. To push through legislation that heads off new abuses in the future, he’ll need the voices of concerned citizens behind him. And if, in the end, we can’t elect leaders who will restore and respect our liberties, then perhaps we deserve to be treated like the enemy.

For a full list of my columns, check out the World Wide Wade Archive. You can also subscribe to the column via RSS or e-mail.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

There’s a new development in the saga of ZeeVee, the Littleton, MA, startup that makes a “localcasting” PC-to-HDTV appliance called the ZvBox. It’s taking the best part of its appliance—an elegant user interface that aggregates video from across the Internet—and making it available to all Windows computer users over the Web.

The newly liberated “ZViewer” functions as a kind of Internet equivalent of TiVo, but without the recording function. In other words, it provides a simple, attractive interface that you can easily manipulate even if you’re sitting 10 feet away from your TV screen. It also lets you subscribe to your favorite TV shows, then alerts you when new episodes are available online, even if they’re at disparate sites like Hulu, Amazon, YouTube, or the TV network sites.

It’s an interesting move for ZeeVee, which has had trouble working the kinks out of its primary product, the ZvBox itself. The device is designed to enable living-room viewing of Internet video, by taking the video signal from your PC—even if it’s located in your den or your basement—and piping it over the coaxial cables inside your walls to your HDTV. I greeted that idea enthusiastically in my May story about the company’s debut, but then panned the actual hardware after I had a chance to test it out in September.

I concluded, after running into one technical snafu after another, that the ZvBox needs some reengineering before average consumers will have a shot at making it work with their existing computer and video equipment. Indeed, when I spoke yesterday with ZeeVee co-founder and CEO Vic Odryna, he called my review “pretty well right on” and said that the company has “spent a lot of time addressing” the kinds of compatibility issues I encountered. ZeeVee will be coming out with “some pretty significant improvements” to the ZvBox by year’s end, Odryna said.

That’s something to look forward to. But meanwhile, the company is going Web-wide with the one part of the ZvBox system that it clearly got right—the Zviewer software, which I described in my review as “by far the coolest thing about ZvBox.” You can sign up to try the beta version of the software on your Windows computer here; it’s an 18.5-megabyte download that works with Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

If you connect your desktop or laptop PC to your HDTV through a VGA cable, you can then use the Zviewer screen as a convenient clearinghouse for free Internet video from sites like Hulu, YouTube, ABC.com, CNN.com, MTV, Joost, and Miro, as well as paid on-demand video from iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon. There’s also a “local content” tab that shows you thumbnails of videos stored on your computer. Once you select a video to watch, Zviewer sends you directly to that video’s home site or application.

You can operate Zviewer directly from your computer (for that matter, you don’t even have to hook up your PC to a TV to use it—it provides a nice way to browse videos even if you’re sitting right at your computer). But it also responds to commands from any remote control that’s compatible with Microsoft’s Windows Media Center software, or from ZeeVee’s own ZvRemote, which has a cool built-in track pad. (Right now you can only get the ZvRemote as part of the ZvBox package, but Odryna says the remote will be available for purchase separately by the end of this month.)

From a technical perspective, “this is really a way to put a 10-foot graphical user interface on existing Web video properties without having to rebuild those properties,” says Odryna. “Most media files can be described by a tile containing a thumbnail picture with a bit of information underneath—a title, the season and episode number, the length in minutes. It’s fairly easy to build a tile for every piece of content a website might have, and suck those in and present them in a unified way.”

ZeeVee has already created Zviewer tiles for prominent video sites like YouTube, ABC.com, and Hulu just by reformatting the information in their RSS feeds. Odryna says the company will soon publish the XML specifications for its tiles so that anyone who publishes video online can create a custom Zviewer button. “If you have a gardening website and you’ve got 40 videos, you can create a feed describing those and your videos will show up in the Zviewer” right alongside the latest episodes of Heroes or Desperate Housewives, he explains.

Why would ZeeVee give away the best part of the ZvBox experience to all comers? Contrary to what you might assume, the company isn’t out to sell advertising. “There’s nothing in our current plans” about monetizing the Zviewer service, Odryna says. “You won’t see ads littering it. Our goal is very simple—we believe the ZvBox creates a very unique way to bridge the Internet and the HDTVs in your house. The more people can get comfortable watching video on the Internet, the more likely our main business will succeed.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Crime shows generally turn me off, but for years I’ve enjoyed CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, because (as I’ve written before) the heroes are scientists. They catch crooks not by outgunning them, but by observing, hypothesizing, and testing. Of course, the dramatic license that CSI and other series sometimes take with real-world science can be disturbing: no matter how much you “enhance” a still from a surveillance video, for example, you can’t read a license plate in the reflection on someone’s cornea. But you’ve got to applaud creator Jerry Bruckheimer and the show’s writers for bringing out the glamour in a dweeby and meticulous profession like forensic science.

TV viewers clearly have an ongoing appetite for scientists as leading characters. And there are two new series this season that play on that fascination. One of them—another Bruckheimer creation called Eleventh Hour that premiered on CBS last night—tries its best to stick to known, real-world science and its uses and abuses. The other, the Fox series Fringe, has no such scruples. Created by J.J. Abrams, it gleefully mixes factual science with patently impossible claptrap, yet manages to stay charming.

I felt moved to write about the two shows this week because they’re both inspired by science, but take almost diametrically opposite approaches to portraying it—with wildly differing results. In short—though I wish it were the other way around—Fringe is an enjoyable romp, while Eleventh Hour (at least in its pilot episode) is preachy and predictable.

Fringe’s plot will feel familiar to any fan of The X-Files or of Abrams’ previous series, Alias and Lost. FBI agent Olivia Dunham (played by Australian actor Anna Torv) joins a top-secret interagency task force investigating a series of bizarre occurrences: a planeload of bodies dissolved by a mysterious virus, a mutant baby that hits Social Security age in under an hour, a bus full of people suffocated by instant Jell-O, a demonic underground torpedo that surfaces every few decades. The government thinks these events are connected: Dunham’s boss refers to the phenomena as the Pattern.

To study the events, Dunham recruits former Harvard scientist Walter Bishop—a mad-scientist type played to the hilt by John Noble, aka The Lord of the Rings‘ Lord Denethor—and his son Peter, a genius-dropout gamely portrayed by Joshua Jackson, the wisecracking actor who single-handedly made Dawson’s Creek tolerable. Walter has a childlike wonder about science, but is haunted by the memory of the defense-related experiments he was forced to perform in the 1970s (experiments that, it is implied, may have given rise to the Pattern). Meanwhile, Peter is on the run from some unpleasant people who loaned him a lot of money (and they’re not mortgage brokers).

Dunham’s investigations frequently lead her back to Massive Dynamic, a Microsoft-Apple-Intel-General Dynamics hybrid where all of the offices look as if they were designed by Ayn Rand protagonists. Her contact there is Nina Sharp, lieutenant to the company’s reclusive founder. Sharp has a bionic arm and is played with creepy gusto by Blair Brown (Altered States, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd).

It’s actually Sharp, in the pilot, who’s given the line that sums up the series’ intellectual premise: “Science and technology have advanced at such an exponential rate for so long… it may be well beyond our ability to regulate and control them.” We’re meant to infer that the Pattern is a global experiment by some dark organization (SD6, perhaps?) that’s bent on transforming society but may be in over its own head. Clearly, Abrams has been reading books like Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity, which posits that genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are about to give rise to a new species of hyper-intelligent and virtually immortal super-humans. But whereas Kurzweil greets this glorious future with optimism, Abrams sees the potential for boundless mischief.

I would be very surprised if Abrams ever reveals, or even knows, what the Pattern really is—I stopped watching Lost after it became obvious that he had no intention of clarifying who created the island or why the plane-crash survivors were brought there. But I think I may stick with Fringe, because in the end, it isn’t about the conspiracy. It’s really about Walter, who keeps the show moving forward by conceiving the brilliant (if pseudoscientific) experiments that provide the clues to solving each episode’s conundrum. (Hey, if we just hook up a TV to this corpse’s optic nerve, we’ll get a picture of the last thing she ever saw!) Walter is the MacGyver of neurophysics—his genius lies in his willingness to consider how, with the aid of defibrillators, LSD, and aluminum foil, one might approximate fringe phenomena like telepathy. The show’s big question is …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Verimatrix, a San Diego-based maker of security software for Internet-delivered pay TV, said today that it has obtained $20 million in Series C venture funding from JK&B Capital, Goldman Sachs, and SunAmerica Ventures. The company said the investment round would help it accelerate deployment of its software to hybrid cable/satellite networks in markets around the world.

Comments | Reprints | Share: