Baffled. Utterly baffled.

How much did you pay the music industry for the record player you bought 30 years ago? What percentage of your 15-year-old tape deck’s cost went to the music companies? And how much did the RIAA get when you bought your new Bose speakers?A big fat zero, obviously.Which is why I’m so utterly baffled by comments like this:

Zucker also revealed his company had asked for a cut of iPod sales - though the company receives no dividend from sales of record or CD players.”Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money,” he said. “They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing.”

Almost. Literally. Unbelievable.What can you expect, I guess, from an industry that sues its customers, cheats its stars, eats its young talent for lunch, and is generally a disgusting, manipulative, and corrupting influence on popular culture.What a zero.

October 30, 2007 | Filed Under apple, movies, music, stupid, technology | Leave a Comment

I want this …

But it needs Canadian financial institutions. Mint, please come to Canada!

September 20, 2007 | Filed Under business2.0, movies, personal, podcasts, web2.0 | 4 Comments

Apple’s Sept. 5 iPod Announcement: iPod, iPhone, iPDA, iComputer, iMobile Computing

Apple’s scheduled a Steptember 5th special event: “the beat goes on.”It’s obviously about iPods. My guess is that Apple’s now ready to take the next step. More to the point, the marketplace is finally ready for Apple to release the next evolution in iPod: mobile computing.You already see it in iPhone. And we know that OS X is underpinning future iPods.iPods have been carrying our calendars and notes for years. But it’s always been the sideshow, the off-off-Broadway down-the-lane-to-the-left non-attraction.I think the new iPods are going to take a huge leap in functionality. iPhone’s seamless reading of PDFs, Microsoft Office documents, and more will be part of the iPod experience.It’ll still be the entertainment hub - music, movies, podcasts - that it is. But it’s going to take the next step to a mobile computing platform that includes some of what we currently think of as “business” functionality and some of what we think of as “consumer” functionality - especially games.It would not shock me if concurrent with this unveiling of the new iPod we have an “iSDK,” a software development kit for iPhone and iPod.You read it hear first.

August 28, 2007 | Filed Under apple, business2.0, marketing2.0, movies, music, podcasts, technology | 5 Comments

Thumbs up, thumbs down: obligatory post-Jobs-keynote post

I want the new iMac.
I want the new iPhoto.
I want the new iMovie.
I want the new GarageBand.
I want the new Keynote.
I want the new Numbers.
I’m not really impressed with iWeb.
Not too sure about .Mac yet.
I don’t really have a need for Pages - Word is good.

Best new iPhoto feature
Better organization of photos. Events is just brilliant … we have 14,000 photos and they’re just a complete blur. Events makes sense, and it’ll be a major enhancements. I called my wife down for that chunk of the demo, and it passed her keenly tuned BS filters. She even said “cool” a few times.

Best new iMovie features
Movie library just like photo library: one of those things that is obvious after Apple does it. Creating a movie in minutes: very needed, and very awesome.

Still needed: easier podcasting
I still think Apple needs a better podcasting tool. GarageBand is not the obvious place to go for podcasting, and it’s still not super simple and easy there, AFAIK.

August 7, 2007 | Filed Under apple, marketing2.0, movies, music, photo, social media, technology | 3 Comments

Is it really that bad?

I’ve been seeing a lot about the US housing market lately … how bad is it going to get?

August 3, 2007 | Filed Under business2.0, mistakes, movies | Leave a Comment

Skookumchuck Rapids

We’re currently on BC’s Sunshine Coast taking a week’s holiday. A couple of days ago we took a two-hour hike to Skookumchuck Narrows, which is where the tidal flow into a huge basin is constricted through a narrow passage and can exceed 30 km/hr.

Really cool rapids and standing waves … which the kayakers enjoy:

July 20, 2007 | Filed Under family, fun, movies, nature, personal | Leave a Comment

Save Mac screencasts to .swf

I’ve been searching for a long, long time for a way to save screencasts made on a Mac to Flash. Snapz Pro is an excellent screencast-creating tool, but saves to a QuickTime movie. Flash is more widely available and least likely to have compatability problems.

Today I saw Jing, which looks very promising. It lets you create screencasts (as well as annotated screen captures, and a Mac version was just announced.

I’ve downloaded it, and will try it out, then update this post with my thoughts. Something I’m thinking already: wouldn’t it be cool it if did annotated screencasts!

One interesting thing: screen captures and screencasts are automatically uploaded to screencasts.com, where you can share it with anyone you wish. I don’t know much about it yet, but you can imagine the possibilities of a social network built up around screencasts - sort of like Flickr and photos, YouTube and videos, and so on. Intriguing!

July 19, 2007 | Filed Under movies, personal, social media, web2.0 | Leave a Comment

New iLife: better camcorder compatibility

Camcorder compatibility is a major problem for iMovie users these days. If you haven’t heard or seen that, check out the comments on this post.

Many, many, many camcorders available right now, especially the new hard drive-based versions, will not work with iMovie. They record in low-quality MPEG-2, which combines the audio and video into one datastream. iMovie only works with DV camcorders or hard disk camcorders that record to MPEG-4, a higher-quality format that keeps the audio and video separate - enabling future editing.

There are workarounds (see above link) but they are time-consuming, costly, and not foolproof.

There are rumors that iLife is ready for an upgrade soon, perhaps even before the next version of Mac OS X comes out. It had better include an updated iMovie with built-in capability to handle MPEG-2, because it’s getting hard to find camcorders that are Mac-compatible.

Frankly, it’s hard to believe this is a problem that Apple has not yet addressed: imagine if iPhoto only worked with 5-6 cameras.

Apple needs to fix this quickly … or at the very least, provide an actual, specific list - with model numbers - of camcorders that work with Mac OS X and iMovie, instead of this no-help help page.

July 5, 2007 | Filed Under apple, mistakes, movies, technology | 1 Comment

Clipblast: well that sucked

If Scoble says it’s good, it’s usually worth a look. So when Scoble says that ClipBlast is a “killer video search engine”, I thought I’d check it out.

One thing I’ve been looking for lately is video footage of Alexander Ovechkin’s lying-on-the-ice backhander goal from last year. We’re talking ice-hockey, in case you’re wondering.

Here’s what ClipBlast gives me:

clipblast