The iPhone, Nexus One, Or Droid?

(Matt Asay is responsible for this blog post. This was a comment I left at his CNet blog post. I have added a few lines.)

So what is the best smartphone to buy? The iPhone, Nexus One, or Motorola Droid? Is it fair to say those three are the top contenders? Is Nexus One the best Android phone out there? If not, which is? Is Droid better than the Nexus One? Is it a plus that the Droid is on the Verizon network?

I have never bought an Apple product in my life. I think the world of Steve Jobs as a tech icon, but my prejudices and business instincts are more in the direction of Sam Walton, Michael Dell and the 99 cent pizza people.

But if the Nexus One is to the iPhone what Bing is to search - I never seriously tried Bing - is one better off sticking to the iPhone? On the other hand, is the iPhone the Mac, and is Android the Windows, the one for the masses? My instinct says go for the masses.

So far I have stayed out the smartphone welcome. Heck, I don't even have a regular cellphone. I have a prepaid. I hardly ever make or receive calls - most communication happens over email, like Mark Cuban says, "If you can say it to me over the phone, you can say it to me over email" - and the prepaid baby is good enough for sending out Twitter updates, which I don't anymore since I do FourSquare check ins, perfectly possible on the prepaid text. Text it to 50500.

But I might have to give in soon and get me a smartphone. What should I get?

A friend livestreamed a video of him hanging out from across the world in Asia. He was using a Ustream application on his iPhone. That was the first time I felt like I could really use a smartphone. If I can take and upload photos and videos in real time from wherever, that would be cool, I thought. Also on the iPhone you can exchange contact info wirelessly. Bye bye business cards. A smartphone can turn you into a power networker.

On the other hand, photo and video editing has not completely migrated to the browser environment yet. That time will come, but that time is not now.

My Gmail is my primary, but I still log into my Yahoo Mail once in a while. It is good to be looking at the competition. An iPhone would be my way to stay a Google person, and still stay in touch with the competition.

Otherwise I am online for so many hours each day, when I am offline, I like to smell the roses, or the subway stench when that is what comes my way, which I compare to roses because I love the city so.

Face time is important, street time is important. It is also important to sometimes waste time. You have to make room for the random thought, for the muse to strike you. And people are all the rage for me, people I know, people I don't know, contacts and perfect strangers.

But I might cave in. What would be the smartphone to go for? Does the Nexus One have that Ustream application? I bet it does. Or should I get an iPhone in my first nod to Steve Jobs? At the risk of being called slick? I have a few weeks before I really might have to decide.

What do you think? What do you recommend?  

TechCrunch: Flurry: More Droid Devices Than iPhones Sold In First 74 Days On The Market

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google's Nexus One headed for AT&T to battle the iPhone (dvice.com)
• Day 74: iPhone, Droid, Nexus One (brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com)
• Day 74 Sales: Apple iPhone vs. Google Nexus One vs. Motorola Droid (flurry.com)
• Day 74 Sales: Apple iPhone vs. Google Nexus One vs. Motorola Droid (Peter Farago/blog.flurry.com) (techmeme.com)
• There is something to be said for marketing... (9to5mac.com)
• More Droids Sold In First 74 Days Than iPhones - Nexus One Sales Very Slow (techcrunch.com)
• iPhone, Droid launches eclipsed Nexus One launch (seattlepi.com)
• Why Google's Nexus One hasn't flopped (yet) (news.cnet.com)
• AT&T Nexus One now for sale (blogs.computerworld.com)

AnyClip.com: More Thoughts

Image via CrunchBase

AnyClip.com: Second Thoughts
AnyClip Is Live Now

Did AnyClip.com launch recently? Because I have been having a stream of thoughts about the site. My latest thoughts are to do with the bottleneck the site is facing. How do you get the movie studios to play along?

You have to start by acknowledging that they are nervous. Nervous as nervous can be. You have to acknowledge that. To them. There has to be some I feel your pain talk.

Time: Cisco's New Router: Trouble For Hollywood The CRS-3, a network routing system, is able to stream every film ever made, from Hollywood to Bombay, in under four minutes...... the business equivalent of an earthquake for the likes of Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures....... the MPAA, whose members include Disney and Universal, attacked the VCR in congressional hearings in the 1980s with a Darth Vader–like zeal, predicting box-office receipts would collapse if consumers were allowed to freely share and copy VHS tapes of Hollywood movies. A decade later, the MPAA fought to block the DVD revolution, mainly because digital media could be copied and distributed even more easily than videocassettes....... The prospect of tying their future success to online distribution scares them because it means they will need to develop new distribution and pricing models....... both the MPAA and the RIAA continue to fight emerging technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing with costly court battles rather than figuring out how to appeal to the next generation of movie enthusiasts and still make a buck..... the latest developments at Cisco, Google and elsewhere may do more than kill the DVD and CD and further upset entertainment-business models that have changed little since the Mesozoic Era. With superfast streaming and downloading, indie filmmakers will soon be able to effectively distribute feature films online and promote them using social media such as Facebook and Twitter....... the high castle walls built over the past 100 years by the film industry to establish privilege and protect monopolistic profits may soon come tumbling down, just as they have for the music industry

Then you have to suggest you can't fight new technology. What you can do is come up with new business models so you make more money than ever before, and new technology feels like a friend, not an enemy. Steve Jobs was able to convince the music people, AnyClip needs to be able to convince the movie people. No small undertaking, but it can be done.

Then you have to start with what they are offering. They are offering 12,000 clips to the rival MovieClips.com. You take that. That can be the starting point. It can't be everything or nothing. You have to pass the 12,000 mark on your way to the 120,000 mark. You have to first show to them that the 12,000 clips were able to generate revenue. More movies got rented and bought as a result. More clips got embedded across the web. Movies as a category rose in the search results. They are big as they are. 2% of all searches are for 8,000 movies and 1,000 actors, right?



Sure the AnyClip promise is to make available any clip from any movie ever made. But then Google's promise is to organize all the world's information. But that does not mean Google stayed in hiding until they organized all the world's information. You release, you iterate, you take the site through a few different incarnations.

It is okay to have 120 clips, then 1,200 clips, then 12,000, then 120,000.

And maybe starting with the big names in the movie business, the big studios, is not the best of ideas. Maybe independent movie makers will feed the AnyClip database for, forget the old movies, all their new releases for all the free marketing and word of mouth they will get. Mark Cuban has a thought or two on this one. That guy is not just in the sports business. He is one restless entrepreneur. He is also in the movie business.

Maybe I should seek a consulting gig with AnyClip to put a few hours into helping AnyClip get over this hurdle that seems to come in the form of intransigence from the big movie studios.

AnyClip is an ambitious undertaking. This is not the last major hurdle it will face. Got to brace for the long haul.

Related articles by Zemanta

• TC50 Movie Search Startup AnyClip Launches, Without Many Clips (techcrunch.com)
• AnyClip: Quote Database for Movie Fanatics (crenk.com)
• AnyClip opens its quote database for movie buffs (digital.venturebeat.com)
• Technicolor 3D Launches in North America on More Than 150 Screens (eon.businesswire.com)
• AnyClip - Search and Watch Favorite Movie Scenes (makeuseof.com)
• Cisco's New Router - Trouble For Hollywood (tech.slashdot.org)
• Search Thousands of Movie Clips, Assuming You Can Get API Access (programmableweb.com)

Facebook And Twitter Suck When It Comes To Searching Their Own Sites

(This was left as a comment to a blog post by Mashable's Adam Ostrow.)

What I want to be able to search on Facebook is all the updates on my wall, and my friends' walls. An update is the Facebook equivalent of the tweet. The update is the building block. Each update has its unique URL as it should. Why can't I look up individual updates, however far back in time?

That is the same gripe I have with Twitter. Why can't I locate all my past tweets? Let alone that of everyone else. They misunderstand real time. Real time is not just now. Real time also is real time as it happened two years ago. All tweets old and new are relevant.

Both Facebook and Twitter have been trying my patience on this one.

Related articles by Zemanta

• We're addicted to social media, even in bed (sfgate.com)
• We're addicted to social media, even in bed (seattlepi.com)
• MashBash SXSWi: 3 Things to Do Before You Set Off (mashable.com)
• Friday Poll: Do Location Check-In Services Freak You Out? (mashable.com)
• Facebook Doesn't Care What You Think, Worms (stoweboyd.com)
• Is Digg the future of social news? (cnn.com)
• Facebook Abuse (laughingsquid.com)
• Follow Friday: Tech tweeters you should know (cnn.com)
• Learning from Starbucks - One Tweet at a Time (blonde2dot0.com)
• LUNCHTIME POLL: What's Your Favorite Facebook Application? (mashable.com)

AnyClip.com: Second Thoughts

Image via CrunchBase

The AnyClip Launch PressLift

I am having second thoughts about AnyClip, but not in the traditional meaning of the phrase. I blogged about AnyClip not long back (AnyClip Is Live Now), and already I have enough new thoughts - a second train of thoughts - about the site that I feel like a new blog post is warranted.

You can't ask for traffic, and then get it, and then complain you have too much traffic. The "fail whale" might be part of doing business also for AnyClip, but the longer the site is on the better. Take care of the server issues best you can. That is basic. Expect traffic. Fulfill the basic promises made.

Add more movies. 2,000 movies are a good starting point. But God knows more than 2,000 movies have been made. Feed the monster, I mean the database.

The embed feature is a powerul one. Every blog and site that is embedding AnyClip video clips is giving AnyClip much needed Google juice. Those are one way inbound links. They matter. And so the embed feature has to "simply work," Google's phrase about their forthcoming Chrome OS.

Social media matters, but of course. There are studies showing Facebook has overtaken Google itself as the most visited site in America. If I find a clip on AnyClip that I like and want to share, I should be able to share easy. Over time there has to be a sense of community at the site itself. As to how you go about it, there are a few different ways. The Disqus integration is a very good idea. A lot of people link their Disqus profiles to their blogs and Twitter accounts. That gives you the option to get to know them better. That builds community.

New movies get made. They put out trailers before they put out movies. AnyClip is like saying no movie ever made has to go stale. The best movies have a timeless quality to them. If you are going to watch four minutes of a movie that you end up liking, you might as well rent or buy the movie. AnyClip's SceneSearch tool is a major discovery engine.

The Netflix, and Amazon integrations on AnyClip are a great first move. I wonder if it would be possible to have those integrations to also be part of the embedded clips. So someone watches a clip at my blog, and they get to go straight to Amazon to buy the movie without having to first go to the AnyClip page.

The summary statement would be, the fundamentals are already in place, just go ahead and deliver on your basic promises. Scale with gusto.          

Related articles by Zemanta

• TC50 Movie Search Startup AnyClip Launches, Without Many Clips (techcrunch.com)
• AnyClip: Quote Database for Movie Fanatics (crenk.com)
• AnyClip opens its quote database for movie buffs (digital.venturebeat.com)
• If You Build It, He Will Come: Movieclips Now Available Internationally, Releases API (techcrunch.com)
• AnyClip - Search and Watch Favorite Movie Scenes (makeuseof.com)
• AnyClip.com - Watch Your Favorite Movie Scenes (killerstartups.com)
• ReelSurfer Makes Video Searching Easy (crenk.com)
• AnyClip.com - Watch Your Favorite Movie Scenes (domainmacher.com)
• Want More Traffic? Write Compelling Content (shoutmeloud.com)

My Comment At TechCrunch

The movie studios are going to have to come around, and come around fast. AnyClip's promise is no movie ever made has to go stale. Otherwise movies go stale. AnyClip for the movie studios is like being able to run trailers of all their movies all the time. And once you grab someone's attention, that is one step closer to them buying or renting that movie. It makes absolutely no sense for the movie studios to drag their feet on this one.

This reminds me of Nepal, the dual citizenship issue, and FDI, Foreign Direct Investment. Issuing dual citizenship to the Non Resident Nepalis is the single best thing Nepal could do to bring in FDI to the country, and FDI is the single best thing that could happen for Nepal's economic growth, but the morons will not do it. The politicians in Nepal have been dragging their feet on the dual citizenship issue for years now. Ignorance can hurt self interest. Defies logic, but happens all the time.

AnyClip is in the movie studios' self interest.

Broader Broadband

Fred Wilson: The National Broadband Plan

My comment to Fred's post that I left at his blog: Of all the blog posts I ever read at this blog, and I have read my share, this post really stands out for me. This topic gets me like nothing else in computing.

"....another 500mhz of hiqh quality spectrum to be used for "terrestrial broadband services" over the next decade...."

This is miserly. This is not going to cut it. TV needs to take second place to broadband. This is not some tertiary concern. This is the number one - Numero Uno - thing America needs to do to become a post-industrial, information age economy. The government just needs to get out of the way. The government selling that spectrum space to a handful of old companies is the government getting in the way. The American people need to revolt like they revolted against the British.

The nastiest part of that phrase is "over a decade. This has to happen in 2010, not in 2020. The jobs are needed now, "look around."

Broad Broadband
Silicon Valley Vs. New York City
Fred Wilson's Insight

John Chambers: Why America Needs A National Broadband Plan
betanews: FCC: Wireless Spectrum 10X More Valuable For Wireless Broadband Than For TV
Steve Cheney: Why Google Broadband Finally Makes Sense
CNet: TV Broadcasters Prepare For Spectrum Battle

Related articles by Zemanta

• FCC Delivers National Broadband Plan to Congress (dailyfinance.com)
• The National Broadband Plan (seekingalpha.com)
• The FCC's broadband plan: Winners and losers (macworld.com)
• National Broadband Plan: An Effort for the Ages (microsoftontheissues.com)
• CEA Calls FCC's National Broadband Plan Forward-Thinking and Essential to Broadband Crisis (eon.businesswire.com)
• CTIA-The Wireless Association Statement on FCC's Release of the National Broadband Plan (eon.businesswire.com)
• The National Broadband Plan (myventurepad.com)
• Sprint Commends FCC for Work on Country's First National Broadband Plan (eon.businesswire.com)
• FOSI Applauds National Broadband Plan (eon.businesswire.com)

Bollywood Needs To Conquer

New York Times: Bollywood Soars Toward Hollywood: Indian cinema has an annual estimated audience of over three billion worldwide. South Asians are avid consumers, as are viewers in countries as varied as Germany, Malaysia and South Korea.

Pictured above, Amitabh Bachchan, the most recognized face on the planet.

Indian cinema went global long before Indian technology did. It is only a matter of time before Indian cinema cracks open the US market as well. It will be less a feeling of conquest, and more of globalization, of cross-pollination. It is a good idea for Hollywood to go to India, and for Bollywood to come to America.

Pictured below, me during my high school days and after, imitating Amitabh's hairstyle.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Bachchan: It's time for Hollywood to head to Bollywood (cnn.com)
• Hong Kong festival to honour Bollywood legend (cbc.ca)
• Bollywood legend (bbc.co.uk)
• Bollywood Film Sparks Extremist Attack Fear (news.sky.com)
• Ben Kingsley gambles on success in Bollywood debut (telegraph.co.uk)
• Watch Bollywood Movies on YouTube (labnol.org)
• Changing plotlines (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Bolllywood hits in awards battle (news.bbc.co.uk)