Out of the Box

Many thanks to Technobabble 2.0 for naming Out of the Box a global Top 100 Analyst Blog! The ranking is a mix of Google PageRank, Bloglines subscriptions, Diggs, Technorati ranking and a Technobabble subjective assessment based on post quality and quanitity.

Out of the Box debuted at #75. Many of the others so ranked have been around quite a bit longer, are team efforts or can take advantage of several colleagues cross-linking to each other, so I am truly honored.

There were a couple of great posts by my colleagues on the DisplaySearch blog this week. Ross Young writes about the challenges of accommodating a state-of-the-art 1080p LCD television in the space allocated for an older 4 X 3 television in a cabinet that is decidedly more difficult to upgrade. Meanwhile, Paul Erickson discusses the impact of the Paramount repeat about-face with respect to the high-definition disc wars, a topic about which there have been some crazy conspiracy theories. I agree with him that this will serve to prolong the war and will have more to say on that shortly.

Speaking of DisplaySearch and the high-definition format war, its HDTV Conference will be the place to hear about the latest from many of the principal companies and alliances involved. Check out this panel lineup for the next-gen DVD hardware outlook panel on October 11th (the conference’s second day) in LA:

• Moderator: Paul Erickson, Director of DVD and HD Market Research, DisplaySearch
• Chris Walker, Sr. Manager Product Planning and Marketing Blu-ray and Optical Disc Products, Pioneer
• Jodi Sally, Vice President of Marketing, Digital A/V Group, Toshiba
• Kevin Collins, Director of HD DVD Evangelism, Consumer Media Technology Group, Microsoft Corp.
• Chris Fawcett, Vice President Home Video, Sony Electronics Inc.
• Tim Alessi, Director, Product Development and Advertising, LGE

I’ll also be speaking on a panel later that day on digital home connectivity.

In case you were wondering why there was no posting last week, I took a working vacation around CTIA Wireless 2007 in Orlando. I really like spring CTIA as far as large trade shows go. It’s big enough to command a position as an industry focal point while not being so big that taking it in within the alotted days becomes physically impossible without an elite team of ninja bloggers or at least a Segway. Unfortunately, I have neither.

This year I moderated a panel at the Smartphone Summit on smartphones and media with panelists from Nokia, Microsoft, WiderThan, Sling Media and MediaFLO. The panel consensus seemed to be that, while both smartphones and wireless media are gaining consumer momentum, they’re not moving toward each other, at least not yet. Why?

• the relative newfound popularity of smartphones, particularly the QWERTY Windows Mobile variety, which are starting to move well under the $100 price tag
• the fractured state of smartphone operating systems, which make native development less profitable
• the focus on the mass market by carrier initiatives such as VCast and easy to use quick access features such as the “TV” button used by MediaFLO-enabled handsets.

Why develop media optimized for smartphones? For traditional broadcast media, there isn’t much financial incentive, but there’s surely an opportunity for one of the Web 2.0 companies out there to bring some aspects of community and interactivity to a wireless media experience

Will the iPhone goose this market? Well, depending on how you define “smartphone” — and my personal view of the term is liberal — it’s the first high-end device to focus on a consumer media experience, However, much like the WinMo phones, the experience is still based on sideloading, which carriers are at best tolerating and which fail to capture the true flexibility that wireless is supposed to bring us.

Incidentally, this is the 150th post that I referenced in the Out of the Box birthday post.

Back when I wrote a twice-weekly column for Ziff Davis in 2003, the name of the game was to try and get Slashdotted. Nowadays, though, the king of traffic referral (outside of Google, of course) is Digg. By that measure, Radar Love (runner-up title “Love is in The Air”), this week’s Switched On column, was my most popular ever with over 470 diggs, and the second to reach Digg’s front page.

One of the complimentary e-mails I received from a reader called Radar Love the second-best thing he’d ever read on the site after The Maven. Well, Radar Love didn’t take nearly as long to write, but frankly I was less sure I could pull it off whereas I’d written many long verse pieces and parodies before.

Things became easier when I grouped multiple songs in a row and they really came together just a few hours before completion when I stumbled upon the gem title “Chewbacca’s on my Underwear.” Then it was a relatively simple matter of building the story about an “ex” who was lost to sci-fi infatuation and filling in the path to that punch line.

One thing I’m a bit surprised that nobody called me on is that i actually wrote almost nothing original for the piece. It’s all, in a sense, plagiarized, but I’m grateful for the kudos on what is essentially an ordered playlist. Oh, and for the record, I didn’t know about all those songs before writing the column. The iTunes store search box was my research tool.

My first column for ABCNews.com ran today. This will be a monthly feature that is more focused on NPD’s data than some of my other writing. The first piece is on Black Friday, where I’ve laid out the three rough classifications of different kinds of Black Friday promotions — big ticket, high demand items such as flat-panel televisions and notebook PCs, more mature, mid-priced categories such as camcorders and digital cameras, and clearance products such as low-capacity MP3 players, flash drives and thumb drives. It’s been a while since I’ve written for a newspaper-style column so I’m going to have to get readjusted to subheads (which I like) and really short paragraphs.

The story is featured as one of the rotating leads in the Technology and Science section, but can’t, of course, compete with the main section story about a Brazilian mayor who is giving his constituents free Viagra.

Thanks for ABCNews.com for moving ahead with this project and, again, Sarah Bogaty at NPD for making it happen.

Thanks to a great effort by Sarah Bogaty of NPD’s PR team, I appeared on the Today show earlier this week talking about Microsoft as the “tenacious” competitor to Apple in the digital audio player market.

It was a different experience from the cable news that I’ve done in the past. But while I didn’t get to meet Matt, Meredith or Al, I was interviewed by Peter Alexander and did learn a lot about lighting. My sound bite was about eight seconds, and I’ve been amazed at the number of folks that I’ve met only once or knew long, long ago who contacted me to confirm that it was really me. (It was.)