Bill’s Views on Technology and Development

Since Apple’s announcement of the iPad, the tech pundits have been trying (and mostly failing) to find a category for it.  Granted, when you look at the iPad with nothing else, it appears to be a gigantic iPod Touch or iPhone.  To me, the key element is the add-on keyboard.

The Apple iPad is nothing more (or less) than a netbook done right.  It’s designed to be carried around easily, to provide quick access to its functionality without time consuming boot up sequences, and to be connected to the rest of the world all of the time. These are all of the motivations for owning a netbook. Where the iPad diverges from the usual description of the netbook is price: It isn’t just a cheap and weakened notebook computer; it’s a computer designed from the ground up to be used in a mobile manner.

I expect that, with the success of the iPad, the netbooks we’ve been seeing for a few years will disappear back into the bottom end of the notebook computer market and other computers, probably based upon Android, will take their place.  This computer is really the game changer that Apple touted it to be, but I think we’re just beginning to understand just what that change will mean.

Okay, I’m back and once again thinking of Tech.  Stay tuned.

As I’ve said before, the future of home entertainment is IPTV.  If you’re an IPTV company, one of the big challenges you have is how to get your content to the TV sets of the masses.

This is where the set top box comes in.  Cable and satellite companies have a built in solution (I consider FiOS another cable company). Customers are used to getting their content from them via set top box.  However, if you’re some other company, say Netflix or YouTube, you need to solve this problem.

Netflix did it by working deals with Roku and Microsoft (via XBox).  You can access YouTube via either Blu-Ray players or your iPhone/iPod (really).

Notice that in all of these cases, someone else built the set top box.  In fact, it seems that the new model is that the service company doesn’t even provide the box; you go get it yourself.

Here’s where Roku comes in.  They started as a set top box for Netflix, then added Amazon’s video entertainment, without any change to the hardware.  Now, Engadget’s reporting a rumor that Hulu may be coming to Roku.  As a Roku early adopter, I’m overjoyed about this.  I have very little interest in watching TV shows on my computer. I have a perfectly nice living room for that type of activity.  It seems that Roku is well placed to take advantage of IPTV now.

Update:  I just read that Boxee is talking about producing a set top box to run their software.  I have a ton of problems with Boxee, the first being that I found out virtually nothing about the product from their web site.  Luckily, we have Wikipedia.  Boxee’s going to have to get their act together if they want to really be successful in this space.

Joe Wilcox tweeted “…Bing search will surprise you. Google? What’s that?”.

That was enough to send me to the site. I’ve been resisting Microsoft’s latest moves with search. I’d thought that it was just more re-marketing. Boy, was I wrong.

If you haven’t taken a look yet, go ahead.

I don’t know if this is a return to the past or the future of search. Maybe it’s both.  One of the distinctive things about Google was that they stripped search down to the bare essentials.  While the other engines were popping up all kinds of media, Google stuck to giving you results, with just color coding and columns to indicate what was what.  Bing, on the other hand, embraces rich media in a big way (just take a look at the front page). 

I’m interested to see which way this goes…