Working to improve the signal-to-noise ratio
Yesterday, I was at a gadget “demo day” with some friends and got a hands-on, up-close view of Apple TV and the Slingbox client running on a Windows Mobile phone. This past weekend, my daughter got addicted to Hulu content on her EEE PC.
I’ve written before about IP video. I keep repeating myself, but it feels like 2008 will be the tipping-point year for full-on IP video: full-length, full-quality TV and movie content (not 10 minute clips at sub-NTSC quality).
The iPhone SDK party in Cambridge on Monday was a little disappointing. It was much more networking than substantive content. The iPhone store has a tough layout for large crowds + presenters. Jonathan Zdziarski spoke about the genesis of the open SDK, but I think it’s pretty much dead given Apple’s official SDK release. There were a few demos, but if you’re relatively current on iPhone development, there was no new data.
But hats off to the organizers; there’s always risk in organizing events like this. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.
(But it was good to catch up with folks! I saw: Antonio Rodriguez, Beth Winkowski, Ted Morgan, Ryan Sarver, Daniel Cozza, Dan Slavin, Jeff Glass, Michael Campbell, Dan Allen, Ajay Agarwal, John Keyes, and others.)
I’ve written before about the future of television being just a fat IP pipe into your house. “What’s cable TV, daddy?”
We’re another small step there with Hulu going public tomorrow, with a bunch of content. This could be the tipping point for the “classic” network content providers to do a good job with on-line delivery.
And they have Alfred Hitchcock.
Here’s a great article on hiring.
In startups, hiring is one of the key skills, if not the key skill.
Take two entrepreneurs, with the same idea, the same funding, the same strategy and the same product. The one that can evaluate candidates and build the best team is going to win, by a huge margin.
UPDATED: Fixed link to actually work.
I do have a few Windows machines left around the house doing utility duty, and it seems each update of Firefox runs slower and slower. Maybe Web browsers are like the government: inevitable bloat.
I’m trying the beta of Safari (Apple’s Web browser) on Windows. It’s got some quirks, but it’s quite zippy (esp. on a fiber Internet connection) — very promising.