‘Cross The Breeze

I don’t know much about VC stuff and I’m fine with that, it doesn’t interest me a great deal. Therefore you won’t find much related feeds in my RSS reader - but there’s on though that I read with great pleasure. I stumbled upon The Post Money Value from ex-Microsoftie Rick Segal after we met during his tour with Shel Israel in Europe. I would recommend every start-up looking for VC money to add this blog to their reader and start by reading Rick’s last post on his experiences. My favorite:

“Don’t start the meeting with ‘we’re in stealth mode and I can’t discuss exactly what we are doing.’ I will get up a leave the room since you aren’t actually there.”

There’s more where this came from, and apparently all just experiences from the last 10 days!

Yes, what made Scoble cry. Yesterday this project from Microsoft research was presented (as expected) at TED and a lot faster than usual, the video is already online. This was the first I got to see about the WorldWide Telescope as well and I must admit it looks stunning indeed. It’s quite fascinating to see someone move into the dark universe to end up zoom in on some star or other… pretty cool. Can’t wait to get my hands on this, might have to pull some strings when it goes in closed beta soon.

But first check out the TED video:

Last Saturday evening I took part in the My ooVoo Day promotion that Jaffe’s agency Crayon set up for their client ooVoo.

“Have you signed up to participate in My ooVoo Day yet? My ooVoo Day lets 20+ bloggers, podcasters and digital media makers from around the ’sphere connect with their communities in a series of 6-way video chats. Sound cool? Want to join in the fun. Head over to http://myoovooday.com, find a favorite blogger and register to attend.”

The ooVoo software (for PC and Mac) allows video conversations like in Live Messenger, with one big difference that you can have video conversations with up to 6 people at the same time. No better way to show that then by setting up these blogger chats so people have a reason to try it out… and blog about it :) So great job of the Crayonistas, although I must say I received a bit more messages about this promotion through email, FB, … than I wished for.

Anyway, when I saw they added Drew and Gavin to the planning to talk about Age of Conversation, I put my name on the list immediately. And so we ended up with a half hour conversation between myself, Gavin Heaton, Drew McLellan, Luc Debaisieux, Paul Mcenany and J Erik Potter which was good fun. And the quality of the video was quite good as well, with an interesting option to record the conversation from within the client by the way.

I don’t think I’ll be using it much though, it’s the 4th or 5th IM client on my desktop and that’s more than enough. But whenever I want to have a video conversation with a few people at the same time, ooVoo will definitely be what I’ll be using though. Thanks for the conversation guys!

I initially got onto the Dopplr Alpha in April last year thanks to Loic Le Meur. He seemed quite enthusiast about it and as I’m a bit of a traveler myself, so enough reason to test it out. I’ve liked it ever since. I’ve you’re a bit of a traveler yourself and still not on Dopplr than get on it fast ;) No need to explain I think, it’s pretty straightforward.

To celebrate one year of Dopplr, the team created this Raumzeitgeist 2007 round-up. This kind of ’space time spirit’ as they call it, shows where and how long people traveled based on the trips they shared.

There’s quite some fun data in the posts, but it were the visualisations like the one above that got to me. Make sure you check both posts, as there is more of the same in there. You can now even get this one as a poster and I must say it sure looks good on the Dopplr office wall. I’m thinking about getting my own here as well.

Anyway, if you are on Dopplr and we’re not connected yet - you can find me here: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/crossthebreeze

Sometimes I think I live on mobile. If there’s a device I really couldn’t miss it’s my mobile phone. Ask my wife, if on occasion I don’t take my mobile phone with me, she’ll wonder how it’s possible I forgot it. It’s just too odd for me to be without. According to my mom, it’ll grow on my ears one day. Whatever ;)

Anyway, it’s true that mobile is important for me, ever since I got my first mobile phone some 10 years ago. Every year I hope that mobile will really breakthrough, but unfortunately also this year won’t be the year of mobile, just like 2007, 2006 nor 2005 were the year of mobile. It’s that one prediction that I wish it were through, but you know it won’t be.

It’s not even in our hands. I think the devices are there, thinking of the N95, the iPhone and some Windows Mobile devices that are all capable of doing amazing things for such a small device. The iPhone has the interface to love, my HTC is less slick but comes with 3G, built in GPS and all the power of Office and Exchange on mobile. Or the N95 with it’s superb camera. And now I’m not mentioning a ton of other great features these phones have.

Apart from all that greatness, I’ve been a very active user of the mobile web for the last 6 years or so as well. First on WAP on my old Nokia 6310i for instance, later on Vodafone Live with a Sharp GX30. Back then I was still working on Kinepolis‘ new media strategy and we invested in this back then already. Today Kinepolis is still one of the very few Belgian companies with a decent mobile site, for which you got to give them credit. But even outside Belgium, there aren’t many mobile specific sites, which already resulted in a shout-out more than a year ago.

The mobile sites I currently use are: BBC, Bloglines, Gmail, Hotmail, Messenger, Dopplr, Facebook, Google Reader, Live Search, Kinepolis, MSN, Twitter, Technorati, Wapedia, Flickr, Yahoo and WordPress. I don’t really know many more that are of use to me, or that aren’t in a walled garden like Vodafone Live.

I also use client versions like Live Messenger (which you can download for all kinds of devices), the Live Search client as well as the Google Maps client, Yahoo!Go, … as well as apps that run in the Java environment on mobile like Gmail and Opera Mini. On the N95 I also tried the Widsets, but whatever the phone, the browse services still top them all.

Today, with the iPhone’s browsing capabilities, or other mobile browsers that enable better viewing of ‘normal websites’ on mobile we will probably skip the further development of mobile specific sites. With Skyfire for instance (see announcement) or Deepfish I expect to see more ‘regular’ browsing in the future.

Still, the problem remains, now even more than ever I guess. We will have access to every site we want, with great browsers but at what cost? There’s a good explanation why I use so much mobile: I can use it obviously but more important is that I don’t have to pay for it. The day I have to pay for it, I’ll cut back for sure, need or no need. How much I love the Wifi on these phones, that’s not truly mobile for me. It’s when in a taxi, or before checking in a plane, while waiting on someone, … that I love to use all my catching up. Not only in my sofa at home for instance.

So unless operators change their models on data costs, mobile will never really breakthrough and that’s sad. And yes you can discuss devices etc aren’t ready yet either, allow me to say they’re well ahead of the game when you compare them to operator attitudes. And I’m afraid they won’t change that soon either. There’s too much money to be made with TXT messages to allow you to use IM on mobile instead for instance. What’s your take?

PS: Also check out the upcoming FF for Mobile now we’re at it ;)

PPS: And Twitter, for god’s sake, at least add a replies tab to m.twitter.com will ya!

I noticed this a couple of days ago through an article on Techcrunch. Yahoo! started doing some testing on integrating the Delicious results into their search results, and I like it. It seems like for now the Delicious rank has no impact on the search results (although that might obviously be next), but still this shows some extra value to the search results.

Here’s an example of a Yahoo! search on the query Windows Live. That way I still got Windows Live in here somehow ;) Anyway, I like it Yahoo!

A good friend of mine, Matth, just sent me this video over IM. It’s about a guy who did some cool development for the Wii:

“Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space. By Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University. For more information and software visit http://johnnylee.net“

But you know what, just watch the video instead ;)

Imagine how this could be used in gaming, I really hope some game developers do answers Johnny Lee’s request and use this. This is the consumer 2.0 - taking the product further…

Last week I spent a couple of hours at Microsoft’s European Innovation Day. Apart from the presentations, there was a whole ‘trade show’ of companies from all over Europe showing innovative technology, all somehow based on Microsoft technology. Some if we already knew like Microsoft HD view with their ‘gigapixel panoramas’, Skinkers with LiveStation (new version coming soon), etc.

There were also some cool things that I had never seen before like the 3D flatscreen for instance. I have no imagery here unfortunately, but I just kept staring. Another very cool thing, distributed by the same company was this ‘virtual lego’ thingy. It had nothing to do with Lego, they just used it to show the capability of their software.

It’s quite tough to explain, maybe Luc who I joined at the event can do better then me, or Miel who filmed this. Look at the empty Lego box and how they add a 3D object to this on screen. Cooler even is it detects which Lego object is on the box which defines the 3D object they show (note: the 3D objects where created in advance). Anyway, too hard to explain, just give it this a look and let me know what you think.

Think about what this technology can do for the traditional ’shop window’ ;)

The Blue Monster Show: now this might become interesting. I’ve got as much information as you about what this is going to look like (that is after watching this video) and probably nobody really knows. To some point, that is part of what made the Blue Monster so interesting to me so far, the fact that you never really know where it is going. Apart from the fact that it is a good conversation starter for better conversations about Microsoft and where the company is going.

Here’s the video announcement of Loic Le Meur and Hugh MacLeod on Seesmic, since that’s where you should be able to find the “Blue Monster Show”. As Hugh states, the Blue Monster isn’t really owned by anyone, which is good. I know that many benefit from it, and that’s maybe even better.

And Loic, if you read this, thanks again for the Seesmic invitation but I haven’t had time to record anything on it yet… but I’ll get to it ;)

Technorati Tags: gapingvoid, bluemonster, seesmic, socialobject, stormhoek

It was no real surprise that this was coming, but it’s still interesting to see how every video service is trying out different kinds of advertising on and around their videos. I honestly expected it to happen earlier as we all know the daily costs for services such as Youtube are quite high and there’s little monetization just yet.

The solution that most services seem to bet on is the advertising pre-roll: showing a short ad before you see the video you actually chose/came for. Also here are some differences as some have a pre-roll for every video while on MSN Video for instance this is based on time spent on the site. So regardless of how many videos you watch, you’ll only get a pre-roll every 3 minutes. It’s interesting to see how ads are not tied to pageviews anymore although also this model will continue to improve. (disclaimer: I work for Microsoft)

Another solution is the advertising that shows as a partial overlay on the video. VideoEgg has this for a while now and it is also what Youtube introduced on their service not so long ago. After user complaints they made this an opt in for content owners since many weren’t happy at all. It would be interesting to find out how many content owners opted in for this.

And since online video is so popular, it attracts other types of advertising especially when people share videos. Google just introduced their Adsense Video Units which is basically a way of embedding video into your site/blog with ads surrounding it. People who do embed this can make a bit of money (similar to AdSense) but they could have done with a little bit less ads I think.

A last type of advertising with video that I found just recently is the Wildfire Network. It’s less related to advertising before and during online video, but I thought it’s still somehow part of this discussion. Basically it’ll pay bloggers to post videos on their blog, and it’ll show it’s a sponsored entry. Pay-per-post for video basically and I guess the whole pay-per-post discussion applies here as well.

Anyway, will any/more of these solutions attract advertisers? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I remember back in 2001 or 2002 (I still worked at Kinepolis Group, which is a cinema operator) we changed all online movie trailers from Quicktime to Flash (which back then was hardly used for video). At the same time we introduced the possibility of adding a 7 second commercial before each movie trailer and I always found it weird we were never able to sell that to anyone. And cinema advertising was big part of our business remember. Curious to see if that changed today, 5-6 years later.

Wait and see.