The Tomigaia Blog

Back from Korea - PubSub and MyStack

I got back home after being in Seoul for the IETF meeting. It has been an extremely busy week. In the meantime, the only news I have to offer is about a new service from PubSub. PubSub is a very interesting new company that is offering real-time alert services, including Blog feed notifications, SEC filing notifications and other services. Their new service is called MyStack. With MyStack, you can create custom stacks that show matching blog entries that match your chosen topic or link to your chosen URL. I am testing this service on the right side of my blog. It looks good so far!

CeBit USA is Quiet.

I attended CeBit USA today at the Javitz center here in New York City. It was the third day of the show, and there were very few attendees on the floor. All the people manning the booths looked tired and bored. Perhaps I should have gone on the first day.

I did see some interesting demos at the NTT Docomo USA booth. They have developed a video pet feeder that lets you feed your dog or cat and watch it eat through a video phone. What will they think of next?

Mr. Ono, head of NTT Docomo USA gave a keynote speech, and he said that currently voice makes up 80% of their network usage, but in 7 years it will only make up 20%, and data will take up 80%. I hope he is right!

He ended with a very (unintentionally) funny video that was dubbed into English from Japanese. It seems that in the future, Japanese people will have mobile phones built into their clothing, and use their phones for everything. I sure hope they are wrong about that!

Oddpost as News Aggregator

As this blog has noted before, I love Oddpost. They have just added a new feature that allows customers to add RSS news feeds. For people who like to get their news/blog feeds along with their e-mail, this is a killer app.

I can't wait until the calendar feature is fully functional!

Where is DRM going?

After seeing the new Apple Music Store on the web today, I wanted to find out what other recent activity had been going on. I found an article on
Linux and DRM, and it seems that Linux embedded systems that implement DRM are getting Linus' tacit approval.

I worry that this trend will push the content industry to put too much trust in DRM solutions, when in the long run, they will fail at a crucial moment. There have ready been a few famous failures (Adobe Ebook, DVD CSS, etc).

I personally favor forensic watermarking as a better solution to the problem. There was a recent white paper about how this might work written by Paul Kocher of Cryptography Research. I have also been looking at the watermarking software of Blue Spike for a while, and I still think that their technology is very good for protecting the rights of artists.

I just hope that the music industry is lumbering in the wrong direction, causing more harm to the public's perception of them as greedy old folk.

Is there a trend towards micropayments for content or services?

I have been thinking a lot lately about how anybody will make money on the web in the future. It seems that web advertising has become less effective every year. "Pop-ups", "Pop-unders" and other annoying tactics have made most web users hostile to web ads, and more and more lawsuits are taking place. (See this article about the Gator situation, where a piece of spyware was swapping ads in web pages.)

Many sites are now using a "pay-to-not-see-ads" policy, and in many cases it seems to be successful. Users get to have a much better experience using the site, and the site gets the funding it needs to operate directly from the information consumer. Some shareware products, like Eudora, use the same technique to make users pay for using an application.

Some sites, like the New York Times, are free, but charge to see old articles. This model makes sense to me for many reasons. The evolution of business models in the world of publishing did not lead to a dead end. I think that paying for good content through micropayment subscriptions will be the next wave for content sites. The only new wrinkle is that subscriptions will be dynamic and of much finer granularity. (For example, subscribing to the "Science" section of the newspaper for the next 3 weeks.)

One very interesting company that I have been meeting with that has developed solutions for content providers who want to begin charging for content is Javien. They have built a service that is easily branded by the customer with their own logo and interface, and that allows sites to charge on a pay-per-view basis, a subscription basis, or both. Some of their customers sell access to archives, others sell monthly reports. In the future, they hope to integrate with other systems and enable music and movies to sold through their system as well.

The key to their technology is the ability to securely protect content to be sold. All the content is kept in a secure proxy server, and only released to the user once the payment has been made.

I think that this kind of solution will be the only way that most web-based content businesses will survive. But before this is truly viable a universal system, perhaps based on Federate Identity (MS Passport, Liberty, etc) that will make this type of transaction effortless to the user.

Adrian Vacca, a Dutch composer of experimental electronic music

[I am trying to catch up on all the stuff I have been meaning to blog over the last few months... This is old news, but still interesting. ]

When I was in a tiny town called Almen in the center of the Netherlands last year, I met a young man named Adrian Vacca. He has a Web page with samples of his original compositions in SuperCollider as well.

His latest project involved a multisenory performance that included original music, video and SMELLS!

The smells are produced by heating natural ingredients, and then blown into the audience with a fan. A blast of water vapor is used in between smells to clean the olfactory palate.

I hope to get avacca to perform in New York or Tokyo, and then go to see him! If anybody else is interested in contacting him, please send him e-mail at: vacca@civilrevoltage.com

Internet Phone Number fight in the USA

I read this article yesterday, and I was struck by the rate of change in the telecommunications world. There will be battles over assiging phone numbers, I am sure, but traditional phone companies have already lost the war with packet-switched Internet services.

What I find interesting is that Japan may be ahead of the US is accepting Internet Telephony. From the media reports that I get, it seems that the Japanese public feels ready to embrace this fundamental change in communications technology.

In any case, my prediction is that any local phone service providers that do not offer IP phones will be out of business in 5 years.

Radio Interview on JWAVE

I have an interview coming up on J-WAVE 81.3FM, a Tokyo radio station, on Sunday night. It will be on the air, live, in Tokyo at 7:30 am JST, Monday February 10th. (CHANGED FROM THE 3rd....)
I will be talking about a partner company of Tomigaia, Thinking Pictures, and their new service called ThinkPix Entertainment Network.

The radio show is called Good Morning Tokyo, and as I remember it, it is a very popular variety show that always has phone-in guests from overseas.
The host of the show is a well-know media figure in Japan, John Kabira, who will interview me in English for five minutes, and then give a condensed version of the interview in Japanese. It is fun and educational for the audience, as I recall.

In case you were wondering, the ThinkPix Entertainment Network is a network of digital posters that display interactive content in public spaces. They are deployed right now all over the USA, and are gaining the interest of theater owners and the public. They display movie ads, trailers, other ads, and short films on large, vertical plasma screens attached to a wall. Inside is a linux machine playing digital video, and a WiFi card talking to a local server. Since they have a proximity sensor embedded, these posters can tell when people are standing in front of them, and then start playing video. The most interesting part is that they also have radio smart-card readers built in, and if customers register for a membership to a theater chain, and not their movie preferences, the poster will play a trailer chosen to match their interests. This also allows for the user to avoid seeing the same trailers again, as the server keeps track of what a person has seen, and does not play the same trailer twice.

Content management is done from Thinking Pictures HQ in New York, and then sent over the net to all the theaters, and then viewer response data comes back.





I used to work with Stephan Fitch, the founder and CEO of Thinking Pictures back at the MIT Media Lab, and I am working with him again now to help him find a partner to launch this new advertising medium in Japan.

I hope someone who listened to the show on the radio in Japan and post a comment here!