Cartwright Reed

Rock Band and Twitter

I promised that I'd blog about Rock Band and Twitter today.

First up is Rock Band, which, if you're not a video game fan, is Harmonix's next generation virtual band version of Guitar Hero video game. Rock Band comes complete with guitar, a drum kit and a microphone. We got it for the iofy end-of-the-year party, and people continue to use it after hours.

As PCWorld describes it, people who play Rock Band immediately go out and buy the songs from the video game, or get the soundtrack from iTunes. It certainly had that effect on me. Virtually playing music is a strong inducement to buy it!

Now Twitter is something else. For those of you that haven't encountered Twitter, it's a microblogging service commonly used to create and read messages on mobile devices.

Sol Young,  iofy's VP of Engineering, has become a dedicated twitterer.  I use Twitter in-house as a easy way to text to groups, but Sol answers the question "What are you doing?" without letting the audience slow him down (you can follow him here). Two weekends ago, Sol twittered that he was "pallbearing".

...So why did I bring these two topics up? Rock Band represents where media is going: people can interact with the music instead of passively listening to it. With Twitter, Sol annotates what he's doing when he's  doing it, interacting with his personal media track.

Two great examples of how to mashup everyday life and media.

In which a post is inconveniently delayed....

...and of course I waited too long to do a new post and now there is too much to talk about.

I'll start with an update on our iofy player. Its selling well and we've gotten great feedback from customers that used our first generation players in 2005. We have a new gallery of iofy player pictures here. Here's a sample:

I've also got new news on our download software. We've got a new version posted that I'll blog about more tomorrow. Please try it out by downloading a sample audiobook title that we've put up on the iofy website. Here it is:

(It's got Sherlock Holmes, it's got vampires, it's got Sussex, Sussex, Sussex!)

Picture of the county of Sussex courtesy Wikipedia.

Look for more updates tomorrow on DRM, Rock Band and Twitter!

iofy player screencast

Here's a little screencast I did of the iofy player. There's a bit of the eDrawing software, couldn't fix the aspect ratio on the capture.

ALA Over. On to O'Reilly's Tools of Change, etc.

ALA was a great show. Met with librarians, publishers and resellers and sent a bunch of players out to libraries to review. Now, we're doing some final tinkering before we begin to ship players this Friday for those people that pre-ordered it.

I've noticed a certain rhythm to my posts. Mostly that I'm talking a lot about shows that we're preparing for and showing in. I want to do some posts that go into more detail on how we're developing downloads, hardware, software, new titles and such. I promise I'll get to it next week. But (of course) now we're prepping for O'Reilly's "Tools Of Change For Publishers in New York from Feb 11-13. We'll be showing off some new download and playback features and make a few announcements as well.

As a card carrying blogger, I've got to at least mention Steve Job's keynote and Macworld. I think the video rental program that he's announced is a game changer (not that Jupiter Research agrees) for the movie industry, mostly because he's pulled in enough content and is offering rentals at an attractive enough price that it should take off.

First day of ALA Midwinter

The company is prepping for the first day of the American Library Midwinter 2008 Association Meeting in Philadelphia. As the home team, just about everyone in the company will be out there attending the show. The press release announcing our new iofy Player will be up shortly, although it won't get on the wires until tomorrow. UPDATE: Here it is!

ALA shows are important to us: a third of all audiobooks revenue comes from your local library. See the Audio Publishers Association fact sheet for details.

We'll be giving out a limited number of players at the show, which runs through January 14th. Come by and see us at booth #1839, courtesy Ingram Digital Group.

second day at the CES - postscript

As I was leaving the BlogHaus, I had a chance to meet Robert Scobel, the tech überblogger. Today, Google and FaceBook decided to work together to establish a standard for data portability - precipitated by Scobel's attempt to scrape information from his Facebook account, his subsequent ejection from the FaceBook community, and, after a lot of negative publicity, his return to the FaceBook community (Scobel's side of the story here).

If Google and FaceBook agree on data portability standards, it should have a powerful effect on the way digital commercial media content is viewed as well as user generated content. It'll be the most important thing that happened during CES!

Second day at the CES - blogger conversations

Reporting in from the BlogHaus at the Bellagio, courtesy PodTech and Seagate. In between business meetings, I'm spending some time talking to bloggers to get a better idea of what we can do to make the iofy audiobook player a good podcasting player as well. I'm very happy with the software that our development team has created to make listening to an audiobook a simple and pleasurable experience. Now we need to do the same thing for podcasting and video blogs with an audio track.

Yesterday and today, I've talked to bloggers about the differences between regular blogging and multimedia blogging. I had a chance to talk to bloggers with a tight focus - like tablet PCs, storage devices or technology and driving - as well as bloggers that are part of multi-topic blogging teams like Microsoft's Channel 9.

In general, people agreed that podcasting and video blogging are not following the same path as regular blogging. First, multimedia blogging audiences are much smaller, and second, making compelling audio and video content is a lot harder.

Multimedia bloggers were frustrated by the success of text-only blogs. General agreement was that it was much harder to get people to commit to watch a video blog or listen to a podcast unless they were doing something else - typically driving or exercising, just like audiobooks.

Getting your laptop hard drive back from Apple

As I was getting ready for CES, the hard drive in my MacBook Pro died. I took the laptop (under warranty) to the Apple Store, and, mindful of Dave Winer's Hard Drive Adventure, requested that the defective drive be returned to me "because it had secure data on it". The Apple guy was surprised, but he included the words "return original drive" on the repair tag. Three days later I picked up the working laptop and the defective drive. No charge!

I suspect that as long as you confirm that the Apple Store person documents that you want your drive back on the repair tag, you should be ok.

BlogHaus at CES

I'll be at the BlogHaus Tuesday afternoon from 5PM to 8PM.

A place for bloggers, podcasters, video bloggers, and other online media creators to meet, have some food, relax, and share the day’s news at the Consumer Electronics Show — CES.

Like last year, its being held at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino, Suite #6601 - Spa Tower.  See you there!

Where does user generated content come from?

Prepping for my CES trip next Monday - meetings with hardware manufacturers, a few publishers and a bunch of ebook and audiobook people that happen to be at the show.  I'll be at Sunplus (Sands 73454), our hardware partner, some of the time.

Interesting post by Tim O'Reilly on Wikipedia - on whether or not it's created by a small group of editors, or by hundreds of thousands of casual content creators. Whether Wikipedia is or not, companies like StumbleUpon or YouTube rely on casual content creators for most of their content. I think that casual content creation is how we're going to have most of our media created, so we should make casual content creation tools as simple as YouTube star recommendations or thumb-up/thumb-down Stumbles.