Several of the gadget blogs I read yesterday pointed to this cool video than an early-adopter user posted of his brand new Motorola Q running the new SlingPlayer Mobile client. Get a Slingbox, a Motorola Q and a TiVo, and you’ll be the coolest kid on the block. This blog post was also an excuse for me to embed a YouTube video in my blog for the first time.

If you’re reading in an aggregator that doesn’t support embeds, here’s the link.

Update: thanks to Michael Oryl at Mobileburn.com for the video and the link to the new version.

Technorati Tags: Broadband, Cellphones, Gadgets, Slingbox, TV, Video

I just read Fred Wilson’s Texting Home post. Fred details the shortcomings of landline phones versus what is now possible with mobile phones. Despite the dropped connections and inferior voice quality, he is ready to abandon his landline because, as he says, “all I really want is increased functionality”. Me too, as soon as I move away from my home in Portola Valley where I have no cellphone coverage.

There are other examples of trading quality (which might have an obsolete definition in a new technological context) for functionality in the digital (and networked) realm. Cell phones are much better than land lines because of PIM integration, ability to text/email and (obviously) their mobility.

Convenience also beats “quality” for print, photos, music and video in the internet age. Visually, photos and text in print media are higher resolution and easier on the eyes, yet I consume 99% of my news online, and I cannot think of the last time I sat down and looked through somebody’s 4×6 photos from a recently developed roll of film.

I’m a musician and an audiophile (with a very high-end system in my recording studio) and I can definitely hear the shortcomings in MP3 and other lossy compression formats, yet I am more than happy to trade the loss in audio quality for the convenience of carrying around thousands of albums on my iPod, having rich meta data to go with my tunes and the ability to download music and stream music from any number of giant jukeboxes in the sky.

And this holds true for video as well. Videos from the iTunes Music Store are pretty lo-res, but I’ve still bought some of them. I can’t stream high-def signals from my Slingbox (yet), but the ability to watch my TiVo from my office, my excercise room at home, or at some hotel when I am on the road more than makes up for the less-than-perfect video quality.

I’m sure the publishers of commercial encyclopedias have plenty of arguments why Wikipedia is of lower quality than their product, but I’ll take Wikipedia over old-school encyclopedias any day.

I’ve touched on the obvious media types here, yet I’m sure there are other good examples of applications where users are more than happy to trade lesser quality (as defined in a pre-digital, pre-networked analog context) for additional functionality enabled by networked digital media. I’d love to hear other examples if people have them.

Perhaps because I feel that I am betraying my German heritage, not to mention Erdinger Weißbier, a beer I determined to be the best of the German wheat beers after hundreds of liters of comparison drinking during my six months living in Germany (Berlin and München) in 1992, what follows is something that was not easy to admit to the world at large. It must be known that I’ve lately been enamored with Hoegaarden Wit, a lovely Belgian white beer that comes in a voluptuous bottle. And I’m (gasp) enjoying Hoegaarden even more than Erdinger. Plus it is great beer for warm weather, which has thankfully finally arrived in Northern California this May.

Hoegaarden’s distribution and marketing resources have clearly increased over the past few years, since I encounter Hoegaarden on tap much more often than I used to. But I probably first tasted Hoegaarden at Toronado, my favorite pub in San Francisco, and something of a beer nerd’s temple, while I was living within stumbling distance at 935 Page Street in 1996. Toronado also gets props because they often have Erdinger and Speakeasy beers on tap too.

Hoegaarden is not a pure wheat beer like Erdinger (and also violates the Rheinheitsgebot), but is brewed from a mixture of wheat, barley and oats, and is spiced with coriander and orange peel. The spicing is subtle and the wheat beer flavor remains dominant, making it an equally refreshing yet more interesting option than your basic German Wheat. There’s a nice review of Hoegaarden over at the Beer Man Blog.

You really do owe it to yourself to go buy a six-pack of cold Hoegaarden and get your Benelux beer groove on.

Technorati Tags: Beer, Belgium, Benelux, Erdinger, Germany, Hoegaarden, Speakeasy, Toronado, Wheat Beer, White Beer

OK, time for a twenty-first century rant:

One of the unfortunate side-effects of being a gadget freak is that I have a tangled and cumbersome collection of AC adapters, battery charges and automotive adapters, and Murphy’s law often dictates that I am missing the one I need at a crucial moment. This is also one of the more user-hostile aspects of living with electronic devices. The fact there exists no standard form factor, no standard connector and no intelligence in the AC/DC converter itself (most of them draw current whether or not they are plugged into the device they are meant to power or charge) means owners of these devices are stuck managing (and lugging around) a bunch of extra crap to support their coterie of gadgets, while these power adapters we all leave plugged into the wall waste epic amounts of energy, burning power 24×7, regardless of whether or not they are plugged in to a device.

This is clearly something that is broken and needs fixing, at least from the end-user’s perspective. I’d love it if, for example, all devices adopted a mini-USB plug and could easily charge off a laptop or a simple wall adapter with a hub to charge multiple USB ports. Or if all devices could charge via contact-less magnetic induction and could share a single charging station simply by being placed within a few inches of the charge-hub. Imagine if every desk, hotel and automobile came standard with a charging solution that was guaranteed to work with all your devices. Sure would be nice to only have to carry one charger around, or to carry none at all since you could be sure anywhere you went, you’d be able to find power for your devices.

I recall several years ago when a couple startups were pitching a technology for a standardized “charge-pad,” which was basically a powered place-mat with a mesh of wires on it that would charge any devices that were placed upon the pad, assuming the device had embedded this technology into it and had the special exposed contacts necessary to make contact with the pad and negotiate for its specific power requirements. Since I haven’t seen any such devices come to the market, I can only assume these companies failed to get funded or that they failed to drive adoption of their technology, which is not surprising given the dynamics I will describe below.

A market-driven solution to this is probably just a big pipe dream, and one that is not likely to be driven by any of the existing players in the industry. It is a boil-the-ocean, chicken-and-egg type problem. Until 90%+ of all devices out there adopt a standard, the benefits won’t be seen by most users, and it would take years for the existing install base to turn over. At least one company has a product that capitalizes on the inefficiency and stupidity of the status quo, and this is iGo, which manufactures the iGo everywhere power adapter that allows a user to power and/or charge two devices at a time using AC outlets, car power and airplane power. One can choose among a bewildering array of adapter tips to fit most popular devices. I get the impression that this has been a successful product for iGo.

I bought one myself and sometimes use it while traveling, but even the iGo falls short since it does not offer an adapter tip for the Sidekick II. And they’ll always always be one step behind the state-of-the-art. iGo can’t possibly provide tips for every device out there and won’t offer a new adapter until there is enough of an install base to warrant adding a new tip to their product line. So my hopes that iGo would solve my problems were dashed when I realized I still needed to travel with my charger for my Sidekick. And the charger only charges two devices at a time. I carry around a laptop, a cell phone, a couple iPods, a bluetooth headset and a Sidekick. Charging just two devices at a time doesn’t cut it. Plus, by the time you have an iGo and all the tips to go along with it, it pretty much occupies the same amount of space that all the other charges and power supplies did.

But the real reason reason why a standardized solution is unlikely to be adopted: retailers and the device manufacturers themselves enjoy the fat margins they reap from selling these over-priced accessories, so they’ve got no incentive to standardize. I’ve lost many chargers and automotive adapters (or left them behind on a trip and been forced to buy another lest my phone’s battery runs dry). Once, I even had to pay Sony $90 for a new battery charger for my DV cam. No way that thing cost them more than $5 to produce, but they know I can’t get the charger anywhere else and that if I want to use my $1000 video camera, I’ll have to pay their ransom. The waste and inefficiency of this is only felt by the user, not by any of the other players in the value chain.

Maybe the only way this could ever be solved is via some regulatory mandate. But AC adapters aren’t exactly a sexy issue for an enterprising politician to get behind, though the energy efficiency angle might be a viable way to drive change here. Maybe I’m just not thinking creatively enough about how to fix this…

If anyone has any bright ideas, I’d love to hear them. If someone could convince me there is a viable business model and/or sufficiently disruptive technological approach to attack this problem, I’d love to hear about it. Or if there is any political or regulatory movement with a sensible approach, I’d love to hear about that too.

Technorati Tags: Gadgets

I’m happy to report that Akustica has announced their first digital microphone design win with a major customer. On Monday, Akustica announced that Fujitsu will use the Akustica’s AKU2000 digital microphone (the world’s first single-chip digital output mic) in the upcoming Lifebook Q2010 high-end executive notebook. CommsDesign has an article that covers the announcement in some detail.

Fujitsu adopted Akustica’s mic for several reasons: the growing use of VOIP on the laptop, the upcoming support for multi-channel high-definition audio and noise-cancellation algorithms in Microsoft Vista, and, perhaps most importantly, the enhanced voice quality and design flexibility that Akustica’s mic provides. Fujitsu was able to place two microphones above the display in the LCD’s bezel, something that was previously impossible since running the heavy shielded wiring from an analog microphone through the display hinge was not feasible. Furthermore, placing the mics in the laptop bezel is actually the optimal location on a laptop, away from the noise generated by fans, hard discs, DVD drives and the user’s annoying tendency to repeatedly tap the keys on their keyboard.

Update: Brian Dipert’s blog at EDN has a great engineer’s view of the advantages I’ve listed above, plus some more interesting advantages Akustica’s mic offers when it comes to the interference WiFi, Bluetooth and GSM phones can cause when using an old-school analog microphone.

Kudos to Fujitsu on having the vision to be an early adopter of this important new audio input technology and kudos to Akustica for winning such a great customer!

Technorati Tags: Akustica, Audio, MEMS, Semiconductors