Month: January 2007

Mobile USB computing– and they are charging what for this?

Mobile computing with USB devices seems to be all the rage these days. The premise is simple: instead of lugging around a laptop/PDA or other general purpose computing device, users only need to carry around a small portable drive which will contain their data and even applications. This drive can be attached to any PC they run into, to recreate the same environment from any machine. Since many people carry around an iPod or other portable media player that doubles as USB drive in any case, the past objection around having to carry around one more gadget is disappearing.

Three commercial examples of this concept in action:

But a closer look at the options raises some questions.
U3 is best characterized as a new application development model, to allow Windows apps to run from a USB drive instead of requiring installation. This is easier said then done because a lot of Windows apps depends on having various resource located on the host PC– for example the registry is used to store configuration. When a random USB drive is attached to the PC and an application tries to run, the components it is looking for will not be there.  (Simply carrying around the installer isn’t going to work necessarily; aside from requiring adminstrator rights on the host PC, it will not port the user preferences.) So there is sizable amount of work required and some componentized applications may not work correctly this way at all. This is one of the reasons list of “supported applications” in U3 is very limited. Don’t look for any of the major productivity applications here. With the exception of Firefox, most are substitutions / replicas.

Ceedo looks very similar. In the basic version, the applications that can be installed this way have to be checked for compatibility one-by-one with the vendor and tweaked as necessary.  This is a closed-ended selection in the “Ceedo Programs Directory” according to FAQ on the website. But there is an “InstallAnything” add-on which promises to allow installation of any application, using the ordinary installer. (No details on how this works.)

Mojopac has a different paradigm: instead of trying to get applications to cooperate with Windows it creates the appearance of machine-within-a-machine, to run all the user applications in a different environment. Because these machine images are large, Mojopac is specifically targetted at using an iPod or iPod mini/nano as the storage device. That works around space requirements but on the downside hard-drive based iPod will be slower than flash drive. Virtualization provides for greater flexibility including full freedom in choice of applications to install on this mobile environment. Of course the customer still needs to have a license for the operating system and any apps they plan on installing in the guest. Interesting enough Mojopac FAQ points out the limitations in the approach used by Ceedo and U3:

“Why do I need MojoPac to install and run applications from a USB Device? Can’t I just do it without MojoPac?
No, this is not possible. You can use a standard USB storage device only to carry data (files and folders). But standard storage devices cannot be used to carry applications. MojoPac uses a lot of Mojo Magic to add portability to off-the-shelf Windows applications… Secret Mojo Sauce!”

And the problem is, this secret sauce is not exactly a well-kept secret. It is called virtualization. It is unlikely that MojoPac is doing whole machine virtualization (a la VMware, Virtual PC/Server or Xen) because the space requirements list 30MB for the base app. But the fact remains that 90% of this functionality is available for free using existing off-the-shelf software.

A follow-up post will discuss exactly how.

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LiveJournal statistics

Most websites dependent on advertising do not disclose detailed information about their userbase. The demographics, number of active users etc. is arguably a key indicator of the business.

LiveJournal takes  the opposite approach with being completely transparent:

http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml

On this page for example, everybody can learn that out of a total of 12M accounts only about one-sixth are “active” (not defined) and of that fraction only about one-third have updated within the past 7 days. They can also learn that LJ has a very young audience, the distribution peaking at 19-20, women outnumber men two to one, and US residents outnumber bloggers from every other country. For advertisers trying to decide if this is a good way to reach their target demographic, this is very useful peek at the audience.

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Slingbox and re-defining economics of subscription services

It is not very often that a new gadget comes along that promises to change the way existing services are viewed. Tivo already had this impact on TV viewership. Slingbox is promising to be another disruptive technology, but for very different reasons.  It is also ahead of its time: unlike the DVR which would become an instant winner in the marketplace, limited only by the usual reluctance in adoption of new technologies, Slingbox has fewer applications today.  But it does fundamentally change the way one views their cable subscription.

This becomes clear for those of us with multiple residences or who end up racking up frequently flyer miles for business. It used to be that if one wanted to watch TV in a new place, they needed a subscription associated with that new physical address. That meant your new location, whether it is another home, friend’s place or the hotel room had better have its own subscription via cable or satellite. Slingbox changes that equation: once you have a subscription, the right to watch that content effectively roams with you. If Tivo enabled time-shifting as the contemporary digital successor to the analog BetaMax revolution, Slingbox enables space-shifting in real time. Short of carrying around those bulky tapes, there was no good analog for that in the analog world.

For now this comes in handy in a few unique circumstances: if your hometown team is playing the Yankees and you are travelling on business, chances are the local TV will not carry that game. (Strangely enough the MLB does have a paid online subscription offer for watching games in streaming 350K  video, but it includes black-out provisions based on region for billing address.) Another example involves maintaining multiple residences in different cities. Until recently it was a foregone conclusion that each needed its own cable service, in the same way each one unit has independent electricity and water. But the Slingbox creates an alternative: provided both places have high bandwidth lines, all the content in one location becomes available at the other one. In fact SlingMedia even includes a mobile client for Windows CE based smart-phones. This worked remarkably well on a Motorola Q device, coupled to a Verizon data subscription.

Granted there are significant obstacles. First this requires broadband, which is particularly scarce on the source side. Residential net service in the US has developed on the assumption that consumers need a lot of downstream bandwidth to download those big multimedia files, but very little upstream bandwidth for pushing anything out. It’s debatable if that asymmetry is technical limitation or relic of the mass-media mindset where subscribers sit glued to their TV screens, as the all-knowing broadcasters pipe hand-picked message through their channels. Either way, service providers are not going be too happy about this usage of bandwidth any more than they welcomes P2P swamping their network. Image quality is highly dependent on the available bandwidth during streaming. SlingMedia uses a proprietary streaming protocol, which by itself is not a good thing– using an existing format such as MP2 would help interop and allow for greater choice of applications to use on either side. But the custom protocol has smarts to optimize video quality based on bandwidth use, its redeeming virtue. On the remote side, you still need a computer running the SlingPlayer client connected to a display. Huddling around a desktop PC will do but this is far from approximating the original TV watching experience. Making it one step closer  to couch-potato ideal requires either a full time media-center PC permanently sitting in the living room or a more temporary arrangement  that involves conneting a laptop to the TV– assuming the television is a recent vintage unit with VGA or DVI input.

Biggest unknown may be the content owners themselves. There were rubmlings from MPAA about seeking legal action, but these appear to have calmed, down for the moment. In the near future legal concerns will be the dark cloud on the horizon for this fledgling technology. It may have been a good idea for SlingMedia to have sponsored the EFF Pioneer Awards ceremony at the CFP 2006 conference after all.

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