Sunday, April 11, 2004Microsoft Settles InterTrust Suit for $440 Million. Microsoft plans to announce that it has reached a $440 million legal settlement and licensing deal with a pioneer in software to protect digital music and movies from piracy. By Steve Lohr. [New York Times: Technology]
Congrats to all those involved with InterTrust - you know who you are. Unfortunately you don't get any of this money.
Oh yah, congrats to Sony for buying InterTrust.
Where's Laszlo?
I'm afraid there's been an error here. Laszlo is not part of this comparison - thereby making the entire premise irrlevant.
This is something Mikel and Marc Eisenstadt will like.
The Art and Science of Location and Media.
I came across two interesting experiments involving location metadata and media today.
First, scientists Roberto Cipolla and Duncan Robertson at the University of Cambridge are building a system for inferring location from image content:
Roberto Cipolla and Duncan Robertson have developed a program that can match a photograph of a building to a database of images. The database contains a three-dimensional representation of the real-life street, so the software can work out where the user is standing to within one metre.
Their project is the inverse of the Mobile Media Metadata project, which aims to infer image content from contextual metadata (including location). It is interesting to consider how the technologies might work together: taking a picture of a building tells the system where you are (South Hall). Knowing where you are tells the system what you are doing there (attending class), from which it can infer who the people in the picture are (your classmates)…
Second, artists Pall Thayer, Sara Kolster, and Pete Gomes are playing with the concept of geocinema, using open-source tools to superimpose GPS coordinates on video on real-time. Cool, but how much more interesting would it be if they could:
- convert those coordinates to higher-level semantic location metadata ("the place I passed out last night"), and
- use that metadata not just for superimposing on the video but as input for determining the structure of the video narrative?
This is the third Ted inspired post.....
Schtoom is a open source VoIP project in Python. This could be huge!
Shtoom
Shtoom is a open-source, cross-platform VoIP softphone, implemented in Python. As well as the basic phone, the package also includes a number of other applications -
- shtoom - the end-user phone
- shtam - a simple answering machine/voicemail application
- shmessage - an announcement server
Shtoom should work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It ships with user interfaces for Qt/KDE, Gtk/GNOME, Tk and a command line. There will hopefully be native user interfaces for Windows and the Mac soon, until then, the Tk interface works on those platforms.
Shtoom has audio support on Linux using OSS or ALSA, and on all other platforms using the PortAudio library. Native sound drivers for Mac/Windows are planned (the Mac interface should be done soon -- volunteers to help with an interface from Python to Windows DirectSound libraries are more than welcome!)
Shtoom requires Python 2.3.3 and Twisted 1.1.1 or greater.
Availability:
Shtoom 0.2 is now available. You can get it from the Sourceforge Files page. Or, for the brave, you can get source via subversion. Anonymous checkouts should get svn://divmod.org/svn/Shtoom/trunk/shtoom, while folks with developer access should use svn+ssh://divmod.org/svn/Shtoom/trunk/shtoom.
Second post inspired by Ted's post - points at what Phil Wolff has been writing.....
Judith Meskill tipped me that Silicon Valley Web Guild is hosting a panel on social network systems, another evening of YASNS puffery. May 6. Four smart people are speaking for their products. Tribe's Mark Pincus, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman (whom Marc Canter says I must get to know; Hi, Reid!), Adrian Scott (who preceded Ryze with an insightful essay on why you must scale your address book), and Spoke's Andy Halliday.
I have a challenge for moderator Rosemary Remacle:
The honeymoon's over. Ask tough questions.
All these systems depend on people volunteering time and attention, on their pimping friends into the system, on believing you can turn virtual connections into social capital, web pages into gold.
- What's in it for me?
- Do social network systems (SNS) get you love, sex, or friendship? get you competitive career advantage? get you elected? get you productive?
- What's in it for the person who only has a few "friends"?
- Do SNS's turn into anything more than a slightly smarter address book?
- What is your early conversion rate, the proportion of people who try your system and stick with it after 30 days? after 90?
- How do you avoid the Geocities problem of web page tombstones, profiles grown stale and abandoned?
- Why do you think your forms are a useful representation of me as a person?
- Are you modeling how people really interact or some oversimplification?
- Can I leave my contacts to my children?
- How do you turn my contacts into action?
- Aren't you making it easier for bad actors to be more effective at identity theft, stalking, and emotional abuse?
- Don't your systems burn my contacts, expending my social capital without real benefit?
Then ask about the enterprise version.
- How will this create value within a mid to large organization?
- Why is this more urgent than, say, spending another $100 per head on social skill training or antispam software or giving everyone a news portal?
- Will your system work within firewalls?
- How will your system work across firewalls? How do you expose just some of the profile of some of the people in an organization to some of the public?
- If my company has Spoke inside and my customer has the Google Orkut Appliance, how will they work together?
- What about cultural boundaries?
- Why should employees invest their time and trust in an enterprise SNS when they know their profiles will be left behind when they move on?
- Why is your explicit declaration of relationships better than their tacit discovery?
- With what other enterprise IT systems will you integrate your SNS?
Then speak for those of us who invest:
- How will you make money now?
- How will you compete when AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft follow Google into social networks? You know they're going to turn their buddy lists, email groups, blogrolls, and discussion forums into some version of an SNS. What will you do better and differently?
- Orkut was one programmer's side project. Where's the barrier to entry?
This should be a trial by fire, Rosemary. They're smart and have been on the road for more than a year, bored to their gills. Do them a favor. Pull teeth until they give up the answers. Be the skeptical interrogator I know you can be. [a klog apart]
Phil always inspires me with his succinct, straight forward, no bullshit style.
OK - multi-post sequence - all based upon this post......
See my comments at the end........
Here's Ted Leung.......
Back. Well, I"m finally back in the saddle after a week at OSAF. It was five months since my last visit, which was probably a little too long. Some of the things that I talked about this week included several meetings on Item Clouds, a long clarifying discussion on our Data Model, and several discussions on Item Sharing. Anthony Baxter dropped by to tell us about shtoom, encourage us to think about voice in Chandler and suggest some ways to get more involved with the python community, so I suppose I'll forgive him for greeting me by telling me that I looked like ****. It was also a good time to be around to accelerate the coordination needed for planning the 0.4 release, and since we've hired a number of new folks, it was good to meet all of them, and spend some time developing existing relationships.
This trip I also managed to have an active evening social calendar. I spent one evening with our old family friends David and Katherine Fedor. It's been entirely too long since I saw them -- hopefully we'll be able to get the families together sometime soon. I spent another evening with fellow Brownies David Temkin and Sarah Allen who are both at Laszlo. David and I worked on Newton together, and it was interesting to hear his reflections on the project now that a number of years have passed.
I also ended up spending an evening with Marc Canter, his wife Lisa, and Phil Wolff. Marc is doing a bunch of open source style projects in addition to his consulting with various companies in the social software space. A lot of what he's doing right now centers around FOAF, and I'm looking forward to seeing the results soon. I think that there could be a nice tie in between the PeopleAggregator and Chandler's "sharing circles". One thing that Marc's interested in is being able to build another user interface on top of Chandler functionality. If we do a good job at MVC in CPIA, then this shouldn't be that much labor. Something that struck me as I talked with Marc was the long term view that he's taking of the stuff that he's working on. He's thinking multiple years worth of effort, a point of view that's been in short supply / disfavor since the dot com boom and "internet time".
Phil Wolff has gotten a fair amount of reading in our house -- he's hit both my and Julie's aggregator. In fact, when I told Julie I was meeting Phil too, she exclaimed "the thousand beers guy". You never know what will stick... Phil's been doing a lot of work with the Kerry campaign, and thinking about the issues related to taking the software artifacts created by campaigns and making sure that they have a life so that succeeding elections/campaigns could make use of them. He also asked me some interesting questions about Chandler. How will Chandler compete with a "Google in a box" appliance that includes search, e-mail, etc? How will Chandler do calendar support for events like Muslim prayers which occur a sunrise and sunset in your current location? This requires knowing where you are in the world so that you can compute when sunrise and sunset are. Food for thought, indeed. Phil had two thought provoking posts earlier that day, one on the 'Perfect' Corporate Weblogging 'Elevator Pitch' Competition (which he is judging) and another on social network software.
Lisa, Marc, and Phil got me the last night I was in town, and by then I was slightly draggy (I didn't say that Anthony was wrong), so I hope that I was suitably interesting company. [Ted Leung on the air]
It was great to meet Ted Leung - someone who I have been reading and who's working at one of my favorite entities - OSAF. When Mitch and Andy were on their original road show - showing off version .1 of Chandler - they promised me that we'd be able to build on the APIs and data structures - utilizing what's known as an 'object store'.
Dave Winer had built an object store - it was called the XML storage system - so I knew that the world needed an open source of of those. When I heard Chandler had one - I got excited!
So we all have vested interests in seeing the OSAF succeed.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people all come up with the same conclusions on FOAF, sharing and multiple accounts being aggregated together. This meme is taking off.
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