Business Week article: "Is Silicon Valley Losing its Magic?"

Here is a paragraph I copied from last week's Business Week article: 'Is Silicon Valley Losing its Magic?'

'... What really infuriates him [Andy Grove] is the concept of the "exit strategy". That's when leaders of startup companies make plans to sell out to the highest bidder rather than trying to build important companies ove a long period. "Intel never had an exit strategy", he tells me. "These days, people cobble something together. No capital. No technology. They measure eyeballs and sell advertising. Then they get rid of it. You can't build an empire out of this kind of concoction. You don't even try."

Now how true is that???

Here is the podcast version:

http://www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/qt/podcasts/cover_stories/covercast_01_01_09.mp3

and a video

Smooth Pour versus Good beer

Here is an interesting Marketing campaign.

How do you pretty up the bland beer taste of the silver bullet?

You smoothen the pour ;-))

Coors Light now ships the wide mouth can and you can see the ads posted on quite a few billboards these days







What's even more interesting is the use of new media in parallel to the old billboard signs.

First the paid videos

From Crackle: Coors Light Perfect Pour

(see the comment on the right hand side of the video: "Yes, we got paid for this. It was awesome because it was EASY MONEY! CHA-CHING!")

and



We even have a Coors Light group on Facebook with >1,000 members and the Coors Light Brewing Company with 24,000 fans on that same platform.

... and all for one of the weakest beers on earth.

So I checked my favorite beer on Facebook and the Jever community lags with some 181 members

Note that we are allowed to surf the Jever website with 16 while we have to wait to enter the Coors Light site with 21 ;-))

Na denn Prost

Muddy Buddy 2008 Ride & Run (and mud bath)

Guy and I got through the 5 legs of the Muddy Buddy 2008 in San Jose finishing it off in the mud pit.

... and I thought it was almost harder than a Marathon.

Check out the pictures and the video of the mud pit below:

AVCHD what...? High Def Cameras with limited software support

The Marketing campaign was working.

When we were on the search for a video camera it had to be high definition. Well, with our flat panel display and an HD Tivo box at home, how could you go back to 'normal' video when you could have high def...

The choice between Hard Disk, DVD/CD, cassette and flash was quickly decided towards hard disk.

But then there was the 5 letter acronymn AVCHD, with that sticker



glued to these high definition video cameras...

We spent some time on the web and finally decided to go with the Canon HG10 after reading the reviews in our mixed PC/Apple household knowing that we wouldn't be able to download the AVCHD video onto the older Apple.

We were all the more surprised when we saw the lack of good software and utilities. Especially converting the high def files to .avi proves to be something which I still haven't been able to accomplish even with studying a bunch of user forum sites...

In summary AVCHD cameras are still for the techies and not a plug and play solution for the general public.

Let's hope that this lack of ease of use software support is getting resolved soon.

Goodbye DirecTV, welcome U-verse

After 5 years with DirecTV, with 3 years of HD service, we finally decided to jump ship and got ourselves U-versed.

Sometimes it seems that being an early adopter is just not the right decision; in 2005 I paid some $800 for an HD Tivo box, which back that time was state of the art. As some of you might remember the early boxes were only capable of decoding MPEG-2 while you needed a new box for MPEG-4 decoding, necessary to view the local stations in HD (without an off air antenna).


So my $800 box plus the $10/month HD service fee got me <10 HD stations and after only 3 years the hard disk crashed, not even allowing live TV to be watched...

Time to say Goodbye to DirecTV and Tivo





and say Welcome to AT&T U-Verse.

The installation process was very friendly and customized as my technician pulled a cat5 connection to a bonus room where the wireless signal only got one bar on my laptops.

The Wireless Router from 2-Wire is quite a bit larger than my previous Netgear device for DSL only, but it's still small enough to hide under a shelf.



The Set Top Box from Motorola is quite a bit smaller than the Tivo box and is now too small underneath the Bose system:



Our Philips flat panel HD TV has some challenges displaying the SD content centered in the middle and seems a little offset to the right, while HD content seems centered alright.
I would also subjectively say that the U-Verse SD and HD picture quality is inferior to the quality of DirecTV. Quite some pixelation even in slow moving pictures and static text at the bottom of the picture.

So far, I would give it a 5 out of 5 for customer installation service but only a 2 out of 5 for the picture quality.

(quote technician: most customers get used to the picture quality after a while)

Still have some 3 weeks to decide if I want to stick or pull the plug...

Shang Lian Meise Primary School opening in Anyuan County, Jiangxi Province, China

Finally had the chance to follow up on my previous trip to the Jiangxi province and open the Shang Lian Meise Primary school in Anyuan County.

I have a lot of fond memories from our trip in the end of 2006 and probably the most memorable picture of 2006 was the below of the most happy children I have ever seen.



So, finally in April 2008 we have been able to organize for a follow up trip and attend the opening ceremony for the Shang Lian Meise Primary School.

We took a minibus from Shenzhen, China and drove 7 hours to Anyuan City in Anyuan County, Jiangxi, China.

After a good night sleep we went for another 30 minute drive to the mountainous village where we were greeted by the school children (please see the slide show below)



As there is no map of the village I took my Garmin GPS handheld this time and tracked our route, you can see the location of the school on the 3rd photo

Laserwire at Interop 2008 in Las Vegas

LCD and Plasma Panels; the thinner the better

Size does matter...

We have finally figured out that we will need to buy a new or remodel our old house to build walls to hold these monstrous 100 inch+ LCD and plasma panels.

So what was new in displays at CES 2008?

Superslim Displays and plenty of them:










One very impressive one was the Sony OLED display:








Now the only question is, how are we going to get a video cable aesthetically pleasing connected to the display...

HD-DVD, put to rest at CES 2008, the Un'Amusement Controller'

Toshiba showed the 'Amusement Controller' at CES 2008



While I was there the HD-DVD part of their booth was deserted, just the little blues band demo was up and running playing the last song...

RIP HD-DVD, thanks for playing

Sony's Rolly, finally an MP3 player for dogs...

It's finally here, the iPOD for your dog.
While mankind is using their iPODs in the Gym we have wondered what our 4 legged friends are going to be using... It's finally here; Sony released Rolly, the most ridiculous rolling and moving mp3 player.

Please find below a movie I took at CES 2008 this year; enjoy:



I give Rolly some 20 seconds survival time when playing with a Rottweiler...

Want more information on Rolly?




Visit:

Engadget

PC World Rolly Review

Dell's first DisplayPort at CES 2008

took me a while to find it but after some crawling I got a camera shot of the first Dell DisplayPort in a monitor.
Still no sources to connect it to though



See also

http://techdigest.tv/2008/01/dell_debuts_mon.html

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2243941,00.asp

http://www.slipperybrick.com/2008/01/new-dell-30-inch-display-uses-displayport/