Think Forward

The Digital Nucleus - My new digital home addition

I've been testing for a while now several of the entries into the home server market by Microsoft and several others. Prior to these servers I used a mesh-network of my electronics to distribute and access my digital content on all my displays.

Recently though I added several connected photo frames that can accept "streamed" content that really pushed me to now have all my media content in one location. This led me to move all my media that I want connected like photos, video, music etc onto these servers as the digital backbone or "nucleus" as I like to call it.

I am a strong believer in keeping your data network seperate from your media network. In short that means that I would have one network, say 802.11x to let all my machines get to the internet for data. Then a seperate more proprietary network that connects my entertainment devices to things like my digital nucleus/server or each other. This way the experience of video not skipping or music getting lost, pictures not being delivered in full quality will not happen. Their is a higher level of quality assurance in this model where the media network and the data network is seperate.

The result now is all the video I create, photos I take and music I acquire are all now automatically synced with my storage server and readily available to access at any time by my TV's, PC's and connected photo frames.

Thus far the experience has been quite positive and my assumptions of the importance of a digital nucleus for the family or individual has been confirmed. Wheter that nucleus is online, mesh network of devices or a dedicated server is yet to be flushed out. However the option that it is all three is highly likely.

It's official Blue Ray is our Hi-Def format.

It appears it is official as we all thought would happen as a windfall from several retailers and studios backing Blue Ray. This has been a fascinating event to watch. We can learn many things from this war that will be useful in the future of the electronics industry.

We all knew that having two formats was counter productive to the consumer electronics industry. If we could have aligned with one format at the outset everyone would have benefited. I hope now that this has happened several times we can not make this mistake in the future.

On that note in the future we may not be looking at a format war but more of a codec war. Lets hope that as the industry looks digital distribution that we are not in a digital format/codec war in the future. That will take technology industry and Hollywood to for once in their life collaborate for the better good of all interested parties.

From an outside looking in perspective I think that this is again the case where the better format lost. Sony lost with BetaMax and it was the better format. I say that HD-DVD was the better format because it was dual sided and supported HD-DVD on one side and DVD on the other. This I feel has a very compelling value proposition to consumers because when they buy the disk it is backward compatible and not constrained to one location. So taking the movie to a friends house our playing in non HD-DVD player in the house is possible.

Obviosly we are already looking to the future of distribution whether movies will be rented/streamed to the home in an on-Demand fashion or people will buy them and keep them locally stored to be served up to the home remains the question.

That being said I truely hope Hollywood starts to grasp some innovative new business models that create value around motion pictures and new consumer services.

I believe Sony fought a well played game and their efforts with PS3 and Sony Pictures support is what won this battle for them.

Millennial voters and the 08 election

Because I have spent a great deal of the last 5 years researching the Millennial mindset as it relates to technology and media, I have been brought in to do some advising of several political campaigns. Every political candidate has always viewed young voters as an elusive group that rarely votes. There are a number of reason young voter turnout is generally always low but this year will be different for several reasons.

1. This year more then any year that I have been able to vote, which is just over ten years now, it truly feels like our vote can count. There doesn’t seem to be a clear winner yet in any race which really makes it feel like each vote means something.

2. The second is the Internet. Several campaigns have tremendous online platforms utilizing every possible community and web based technology to communicate with the public and encourage involvement. Because there are so many hot topics that are resonating with young voters the Internet has allowed all of us to get more information on the issues and see which candidates resonate with our values.

3. The third is psychological for Millennials. The Millennial mindset is very different from past generations. Academic research has pinpointed this demographic has having many of the same traits as the WW II generation called the “Greatest Generation.” Millennials are very sensitive to the worlds issues and feel that as a group they can be a part of the solution to make the world better. Many things have contributed to this from the news, to the Internet as well as celebrity support etc. However due to the overwhelming feeling that our country has a tainted brand and that this election is an important step in re-establishing the greatness of America not only locally but abroad as well is understood by the younger voters. This is a large contributing factor to younger voter turnout.