Headworx

Four months ago I commented on the victory of Blue-Ray over HD-DVD, coming to the conclusion the actual winner might be an on-line, on-demand movie delivery system. Last week there were two important events worth mentioning here, both clearly favor the Sony PlayStation 3 as the heart of the next generation living room entertainment center. The first event was the presentation of Sony strategy by CEO, Howard Stinger, on June 26th, 2008 . On slide 22 you can see the Video Service rollout strategy. Video Service will launch this summer and will deliver online premium video content do PS3's. Later on (2010) the service will be extended to cover other Sony products like Vaio laptops, Bravia TV sets and even SonyEricsson mobiles. The choice of PS3 as the delivery platform is very clear and obvious. It has all the attributes needed now. High definition (HDMI) output, WiFi Internet connection and a local hard disk, necessary today, as usually the "broadband" speed is not enough f...

Last week I put some food for thoughts related to discovery services (or to be precise - the actual scarcity of them...). Yes, in the post - Pareto, long - tail world we need a new ways to discover products and services. I think I need to sidetrack a little bit here and explain a few shortcuts: Pareto - or The Pareto Principle - to quote Wikipedia: "The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule , Haddad's Theorem , the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity ) states that, for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Business management thinker Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto , who observed that 80% of income in Italy went to 20% of the population. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales comes from 20% of your clients."" The Pareto Economy, as referred here, or the economy of hits, means 20% of all goods available (hits) satisf...

All the statistics show we watch less and less television, spending more and more time with various Internet activities instead. The same is true comparing radio stations and MP3 players. That is the trend we cannot argue, more choice, more personalization. But to be honest sometimes I miss the old days when radio and television were stars. Why? Because they have been great discovery services. I used to learn about new music from my favorite radio station (and imagine 20 years ago it was both free and ad-free). Millions of people have learned new things and have shaped their tastes watching TV. Behind the scenes there have been millions of professionals selecting the content for us. Sure it has not been the long tail ... the selection has had to be according to the Pareto rule (20% of hits to please the 80% of the audience). And now what? We have the Internet, we have the Long Tail, we have everything personalized... and we are completely on our own to search and discover. Sure there a...

Last two weeks I had a chance to attend two of the best conferences ever. Highly visionary Telecosm 2008 and highly business oriented Intel Capital CEO Summit 2008 . Both giving fantastic insight on trends and technologies driving our future. And both concentrated on the Internet. Paul Otellini presented a fantastic keynote, rejecting my “default” view on big companies. Intel is different. The difference comes from the top, from the visionary CEO who certainly is a right – brainer, implementing the six new senses of the Conceptual Era: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning (more on this in the upcoming posts). Intel is also doing a phenomenal job with its VC arm, the Intel Capital. They ferociously dig up for talent and ideas worldwide. And the payback they have is hard to overestimate. Intel might have been late on some trends (like vector processing mastered by GPU guys or performance per watt mastered by ARM) or even missed some of them (like 3G telephony and probably...

Another Telecosm brought another great talk by Jules Urbach . Hew as showing some new stuff (I even do not know I I can share it here, as he was requesting the cameraman to stop taping what was on the screens a number of times...). But anyway. You know - they have full ray tracing in the GPU. And he was showing how his models perform on stage. OK, I mean the computerized models of virtual reality. Humans with skin modeled several layers deep... some reflective, some absorbing different parts of light spectrum, with veins and bones below them... Or a model of the SpiderMan, all of them generated in high definition theater - like quality real time. This "real-time" part is the breakthrough. We have seen many computer - generated moves already, but nobody but OTOY can do it in real time. And all it takes is a number of clustered NVIDIA cards. This GPU trend is turning the computing industry upside down. Suddenly we have discovered GPUs are not only for graphics... they are supe...