Haibane.info

Category: Geek service

  • Iridium reborn

    iridiumThere’s a great in-depth article in the Iridium satellite network at TG Daily that is worth a read. When I worked in Boston back in 1997, an Iridium executive had come round to pitch the service, and made a compelling case for the technology and wow factor. Two years later it was bankrupt. the business model just wasn’t right for a consumer service:

    Analysts speculated back then that Iridium would need about 1 million customers to reach a break even. The estimated cost just to maintain the satellite network was about $540 million per year. Despite the hype, Iridium saw just a lukewarm feedback from customers: Just 3000 customers subscribed to the service in 1998. By the end of March, the customer base was just 10,300 and by the end of June just about 15,000. Still, especially market research firms fueled the hype around the company: Dataquest, for example, estimated in early 1999 that global satellite phone services would be able to attract about 10 million subscribers by 2003. Consider calling rates between $7 and $10 per minute and handset prices of more than $3000 and you can easily imagine that this was at least a $1 billion per month industry, if Dataquest was right. As we know today, they were wrong.

    What was ignored at the time was the fact that Motorola had borrowed lots of money to build Iridium’s satellite network (the final price tag was reportedly more than $5 billion). The staggering cost to build and maintain the network as well as the failure to attract enough customers pushed Iridium’s quarterly losses above the half-a-billion-dollar mark by Q1 1999 and eventually forced the company to file for Chapter 11: Less than a year after the official launch of the service, Iridium defaulted on a $1.5 billion loan in August 1999.

    I was under the impression that the network had been dismantled and the satellites abandoned. Instead, it had been bought out for pennies on the dollar and the business model completely revamped to focus on industry and military customers rather than the mobile consumer market. There still is no network quite like it, even though it’s based on technology that’s already decades old.

  • 9 inch EEE

    The big news yesterday was the release of the 9-inch screen version of the Asus EEE PC, here shown alongside its little brother:

    eee pc 9incheee pc 9inch

    As you can see, the screen displaces the speakers that surrounded the screen on the original. I wonder how that affects sound quality – I’ve been surprised by how good the speakers are on the EEE thus far. Also, the new model is slightly larger, with a heavier hinge and deeper footprint. It also comes in your choice of the Linux or XP OS, though there still isn’t any word on US pricing.

    The screen resolution is 1024×600, with the same pixel density as the 7-inch version. That is really appealing, but price remains the key – I wouldn’t want to pay more than $500 for an EEE because then I lose the value proposition over a regular laptop. I assume that ASUS will follow the Apple model and drop prices on the low end models as new ones come out. My expectation is that the new 9-inch will be in the 600 range, which is just too expensive for my usage model, but would still be appealing to a traveling business type.

  • acknowledging the inevitable

    Well, I was wrong. Even if this news is denied by Toshiba, the mere fact of it getting leaked will only accelerate the inevitable:

    While denying that a decision on the fate of HD DVD has been made, a Toshiba marketing exec left the door wide open. “Given the market developments in the past month, Toshiba will continue to study the market impact and the value proposition for consumers, particularly in light of our recent price reductions on all HD DVD players,” Jodi Sally, VP of marketing for Toshiba America Consumer Products, told The Hollywood Reporter.

    At current price points—HD DVD players are available for as little as $119—Toshiba has to be taking a substantial loss on each player sold. If there was a realistic prospect that those loss-leader sales would result in a large installed base for future movie sales and resultant royalties, those losses would be eagerly embraced. That’s an all-but-impossible scenario at this point, however.

    It’s time to concede that Blu-ray will win the format war. The economics of selling the players cheap no longer make sense.

    Still, that puts me in a quandary. Given that I (and literally everyone else who watches TV) will be in the market for an HDTV soon, do I now have to budget an additional $400 for a blu-ray player? I wonder if buying a HD-DVD player still makes sense – you can pick one up at fire-sale prices and they are outstanding upscalers for your existing old-fashioned DVD library. In fact, I might not bother with a dedicated Blu-ray player ever, since the Playstation 3 is actually more future-proof and feature rich than any standalone. In fact, bundling the BD player with the PS3 in hindsight turns out to have been genius, not just for winning the format war, but also for another more subtle reason:

    While HD DVD may have done a better job of future-proofing their players, the immaturity of the Blu-ray spec hasn’t proven to be an insurmountable obstacle. At CES, the Blu-ray Disc Association announced that 3.5 million Blu-ray players had been sold to date. Of those, 3 million were PlayStation 3s, the most future-proof Blu-ray player on the market. Still, this means that roughly 15 percent of the early adopters are going to be frozen out of the latest and greatest Blu-ray features with BD-Live. That’s bad news for current owners of stand-alone players, but with the price of the PlayStation 3 now down to $399.99 and the format wars shaping up nicely in Blu-ray’s favor, the system may actually be less expensive and more powerful than the latest-generation standalone players.

    This is quite the odd turn of events: it was assumed when the PS3 launched that the gaming system would be the Trojan horse that brought Blu-ray into the homes of the mass market. Now? The inexpensive and future-proofed Blu-ray functions of the PS3, matched with the high-quality upscaling the system brings to normal DVDs, may be the Trojan horse bringing gaming to home theater enthusiasts.

    Game, set, match to Sony. But if there are still HD-DVD players available for sale when I’m ready to go HD, I think that’s a better value proposition for DVD playback.

    (UPDATE: Steven beat me to the punch)

    UPDATE 2: confirmed, Toshiba is getting out:

    TOKYO (Reuters) – Toshiba Corp (6502.T: Quote, Profile, Research) is planning to give up on its HD DVD format for high-definition video, conceding defeat to the competing Blu-Ray technology backed by Sony Corp (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research), a company source said on Saturday.

    Japanese public broadcaster NHK had earlier reported that Toshiba would suffer losses in the tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of dollars) as it scrapped production of HD DVD players and recorders and took other steps to exit the business.

    The company source told Reuters that Toshiba was in the final stages of planning to exit the HD DVD business and that an official decision would be made soon.

    It’s time to keep an eye on the price for the Toshiba HD-A30. It’s currently at $149, about $30 more expensive than the lowest-cost unit (HD-A3), but it’s 1080p instead of 1080i and comes with two HD-DVD movies included. Plus of course there’s the usual get 5 discs free offer. I’m going to wait to see if te price drops further but that’s not a bad deal at all.

  • cloudware

    foldershareCloudware is software that primarily runs in the cloud, rather than on your own hardware. I’ve started cataloging what cloudware I use over at metablog.us, starting with an incredibly handy service from Microsoft called Foldershare.

  • writing, meet wall

    Well, this sucks for HD-DVD:

    Netflix has just announced its intention to only stock Blu-ray titles in the future. Netflix justified its decision by pointing out the fact that most Hollywood studios seem to be converging solely around the Sony-backed format — a fact that’s all too familiar to Toshiba and friends. With both Blockbuster and now the ‘Flix having eschewed HD DVD for BD, it’s gonna get harder and harder to even find a place to rent those former discs in the first place, let alone one that has a decent selection.

    I think that this is pretty serious a blow, since renting movies is the way most people watch them instead of purchasing them outright. Though it should be noted that downloading a movie instead of renting a physical disc is a business plan waiting in the wings. I don’t think it will happen soon enough to blunt the impact of Netflix’s decision, though, and anyway even if download becomes prevalent that doesnt help Blu-ray or HD-DVD much. They are both fighting to see who gets obsoleted last.

    HD-DVD players are very, very cheap at Amazon.

  • all’s well that ends well, sorta

    Looks like the WGA strike is ending, so TV will be back to “normal” soon. Also, Yahoo just flipped off Microsoft, saying No! to the merger offer because “it undervalues the company”. Details at the respective linky.

  • Microsofty! Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle

    Microsoft plus Yahoo equals Microsofty!Yahoo’s board of directors is probably going to acquiesce to Microsoft’s buyout offer today:

    There are only two options left. Accept the offer in principal, and try to increase the price with no negotiating leverage at all, or do a deal with Google to outsource search advertising and, likely, search itself.

    The board, we’ve heard, is basically being told by outside advisors to take the Microsoft deal. But we’ve also heard that a contingent of senior executives at Yahoo, who are willing to do literally anything to thwart a Microsoft takeover, are pushing for the Google deal and will present their case at the meeting.

    A deal with Google is, for various reasons, unlikely. Not least of which is antitrust concerns, whereas a Microsoft-Yahoo merger somewhat paradoxically would improve the competitive landscape (by providing a true competitor to Google;s dominance, a fact that has not been lost on Google).

    There’s a lot of speculation about how the merger will affect the various brands and services offered by both Microsoft and Yahoo. It’s likely that MSN will go away, to be supplanted by the Yahoo portal (branding intact). Search will probably be a combination of technologies between Live Search and Yahoo’s own algorithms. I wager that the combo will gain more market share than merely the sum of their separate share now, because by consolidating the alternatives into one product, it’s becomes The Alternative to Google.

    There’s a whole raft of other services from both MS and Y! such as maps, photos, bookmarking, email, and more that will all be integrated, combined, or weeded out. Of these, the ones of most interest to me are del.icio.us, Flickr, and Yahoo Mail (the latter of which I actually pay Yahoo $20/year for the upgraded service). It will be interesting to see if/how these services get integrated into Internet Explorer, Office, and even Windows itself.

    I’ve always been a fan of Yahoo and I don’t subscribe to the Microsoft as Evil dogma. So I guess you might accuse me of drinking the Kool-Aid, but I am pretty excited about this merger.

  • the future is Blu

    Congratulations in advance to Ubu for joining the Haibane Renmei renmei. Almost as noteworthy are his comments about the state of the R1 anime industry, partly in response to Steven’s earlier comments about the size of the market and even earlier commentary about the impact of fansubs. Ubu writes,

    At nearly 40 times the going rate for an American series, fansubs be damned: they aren’t giving value for their money, and they will go out of business if that’s their plan.

    In fact, I worry that it is their plan — to self-justify retreating from the R1 market. […] there’s obviously a fundamental disconnect between Japanese management views and R1 market conditions.

    I have to agree that the problem isn’t fansubs. The disconnect is at least partly because of region-coding. However, it should be noted that Blu-Ray (the likely victor of the nextgen DVD format wars, at least as far as anime is concerned) compresses Japan and the United States into a single region. I’ll leave informed speculation as to the ramifications of that to the experts, but it’s definitely time to start taking Blu-Ray into account.

  • in memoriam: STS-107

    sts 107

    debris

    patch

    The definitive timeline of events. Here’s what I wrote that morning, 5 years ago. Eric Berger also looks back.

  • game over

    chickens play scrabble

    Hasbro plays hardball:

    The saga of Scrabulous is nearing an end. The Facebook version of Scrabble raised the ire of Hasbro and Mattel, which jointly own the rights to the game abroad and in the U.S., respectively. They have already asked Facebook to pull Scrabulous, one of the most popular apps on the social networking site.

    So why is Scrabulous still up on Facebook? A flurry of behind the scenes deal-making has been going on between Hasbro, Scrabulous, and Electronic Arts, which has the license in the U.S. to the online version of the game. Hasbro is trying to get Scrabulous to sell itself for a song to Electronic Arts, or else shut down completely by the end of the day today. Scrabulous has been trying to shop itself to other buyers as well, but its legal liability is scaring away any potential white knights. Unless it gets some sort of reprieve or agrees to sell to Electronic Arts, Scrabulous will be no more, despite the more than 46,000 Facebook members who have joined the “Save Scrabulous” group. What choice does it have, really, but to sell?

    I find myself somewhat sympathetic to Hasbro here, since the Scrabulous game is obviously and blatantly an infringement on their copyright, and all the tales of scrab players buying real copies of Scrabble after “rediscovering” the game are certainly heartwarming but also irrelevant. I agree its a fantastic game but it would have been nice if they’d made some token effort at obscuring the game’s lineage to Scrabble, the way that the generic version of Battleship is done at ItsYourTurn.com (“battle boats”). Don’t get me wrong, Scrabulous is probably the single reason I even visit Facebook on a semiregular basis – it’s brilliant. But given that the facebook app nets its creators $25000 a month in advertising revenue, it’s not like selling to Hasbro makes them victims. Even if they are forced to sell for a “song”.

    I loved Scrabulous, but I just want to play the game. If it’s bought out by Hasbro, renamed Scrabble, and becomes legit, so much the better. Why exactly wouldn’t the Scrab folks sell out, except as some kind of middle finger to those of us who gave them their success – the players? Ante up.