Monday, November 24, 2008

Interactive TV Reinvents Itself - Nov. 20 iBreakfast

Welcome to the world of the SuperDVR - getting the show you want when you want it. It is really the convergence of IPTV, what speaker Shelly Palmer elaborates in his book TV Disrupted (version 2 is coming out shortly) in what he calls the migration from Network TV to Networked TV.

Mark Risis, TiVo; Alan Body iBreakfast; Shelly Palmer, Advanced Media; Gary Lauder, Lauder Partners

In its simplest form it just means that any video anywhere – whether Network TV, Cable, Pay-per-View or any YouTube or Internet Video can be retrieved and called up on your TV. This is where the giant screen TVs and those increasingly elaborate set-top boxes will really earn their keep.

Moreover, as you see this evolve, the convergence with mobile both as a kind of smart clicker (that’s where Bluetooth really kicks in) and as a remote viewing device for what you have overcaptured. There is also an emerging video conversation that young people are already engaged in over the internet, is as we can see from TiVo, moving on to interactive TV.
This is where TiVo is getting interesting.

For all the early hype, there is really only one company that has brought us a successful form of iTV and that is TiVo – wich is really just a vision of making a TV work like a VCR thanks to some cool software and a big hard drive. So their next steps into the future are compelling – now they are offering a convergence with broadband so you can start doing what kids everywhere are doing, looking at YouTube videos, but on your giant TV instead of a laptop. To pay for it, and all the commercial zapping that takes place with commercial TV, they are getting advertisers to offer special TiVo friendly versions of their ads that send out a banner message as they are being skimmed.

This in turn is another new frontier of the TV experience, enabling viewers to get a video shorthand of all the material they are now amassing……and this, along iwht the mobile component will be the topics we revisit when we do iTV Reinvented Part II.

VC Outlook

Alan Meckler led this iBreakfast that examined the investor outlook in a new era of financial failures. In a strange way, the last bubble and the virtual closing of the tech IPO market has insulated many investors from the fallout. They just weren't part of the public markets. On the other hand, the general climate is bad and that will tend to lower valuations dramatically. Lean and mean is the watchword and major investors like Sequioa are sending out the word to cut back - or else.

iPhone vs. Android

The iPhone still has a lot more going for it than Google's Android, but the market is excited about a viable competitor that has the ability to improve dramatically and open up the smart phone to widespread development.

Click for more on the comparison and a report on the iPhone vs Android iBreakfast.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Web 2.0 Best Practices Conference Report

Implementation of Web 2.0 concepts at companies in all sectors of the business world, was the theme of this event. Mobile became an important part of the discussion with the features of Android being compared to iPhone.



For more details visit:

Dorian Benkoil's Report

General Report

Greg Verdino's Report