DISQUS

The spirit of what you've said here is spot on, but having people present doesn't mean you have solved the problem of creating a relationship with your customers. Best Buy has people in their stores, but they still don't have the traditional model (i.e. face-to-face) of customer relationships worked out. I have done a number of shopping expeditions to Best Buy stores to gain a better understanding of what people are experiencing when they buy computers. When asking about which notebook computer to choose at multiple Best Buy locations, the sales people always key in on selling me a product replacement plan and offer to charge me to remove trialware from the computer. Trying to get them to tell me why I might want the Toshiba or the HP notebook doesn't get me to the point of having an informed choice. If employees aren't being trained to provide this data effectively in person, how is Best Buy going to create that culture online?

without knowing anything about the types of media you download via utorrent, I'm inclined to think torrents may be a likely source of your malware infestation.

You point to Kazaa as an old source of malware. Torrents are the evolutionary equivalent.

I'm not going to pretend I understand patent law, but it seems like HP would be the most likely to attack this stuff since they've got a ton of patents around touch screen technology including the plain vanilla LCD Touch Screen patent, Touch screen two-dimensional emulation, and method of partitioning a touch screen.

Google Calendar Sync gets you part way there, but my biggest frustration was getting my contacts from Outlook to my G1 and keeping them in sync. CompanionLink was the best solution I found to address changes between both the Gmail contacts and Outlook contacts and having my G1 sync automatically with Outlook

Robert you had me until you started talking P/E ratio. A higher P/E ratio does not necessarily mean you'd want to own a stock. A high P/E can be an indicator that a stock is grossly overvalued. A low P/E can mean that a stock is an excellent buy. There are many other factors that dictate whether or not making an investment in a particular stock is worthwhile.

More importantly, P/E has nothing to do with the overall early adopterness of a company.

That's not spam, that's an opportunity. ;)

I'm guessing that most of the people screaming for Netflix on Xbox 360 haven't realized they can already watch Amazon Unbox videos. No there aren't as many titles as Netflix yet, but the world's largest seller of DVDs is certainly not going to hold back in acquiring every title they can add to their rental library.

Putting a needle on a vinyl record is most definitely not obsolete and according to a recent WSJ article is actually on the rise.

Seattle record label The Control Group specializes in putting out vinyl for NEW albums by bands like The Killers and Kings of Leon. They also handle vinyl output for other labels that no longer deal in vinyl.

In several musical genres, vinyl is still widely released and highly collectable.

Robert: Re your post @ 23 at Dmitry, instead of blasting him, put him on camera. He's in Moscow and a Russian native making software, which might be exactly what you're looking for.

The Flip Video Camera is awesome for the price. I'm blown away at how stable the shots are and the image quality. I posted some demo footage to show off a variety of use scenarios. My Flip goes with me everywhere, just in case I want to shoot video.

Free and easy don't necessarily mean compelling. While gimmicky content may grab people's attention for a few minutes, the video that builds new businesses will have to bring people back for more. The barrier to entry for that type of video goes far beyond something you can do in your car with your phone.

It's seems to be great sport to attack China's decisions about Internet access in China, but if you ask average people in China, they have more important concerns than whether or not they can Google for something. Some of the things I've observed people in China both want and could benefit from are all health related - cleaner air, potable water, private bathrooms in their residences, an OSHA-like standards body to set worker safety standards.

As I pointed out after attending DEMO China in 2006, television censorship in China is much more blatant. And local people are generally indifferent or know ways to get around blocked sites.

The TechMeme list says nothing about the death of blogging and everything about the way large percentages of people continue to get their news. 60% of the top 10 on that list are old media companies. Even TechCrunch is growing into a larger news outlet. Like most businesses, the business of blogging is pooling more talent in fewer places because it's easier to get your voice heard if you are part of one of the trusted sources (something you surely understand as an aggregator of original tech video). That doesn't mean people aren't still blogging as individuals, just that the places people read most are multiperson efforts.

I watch 100-150 independent and foreign movies every year. I was very excited when I found out about Jaman because they represent a (potentially) more convenient way to get movies I'm interested in. On trying them out for the first time, I was seriously disappointed with the slow download speeds as compared to most of the other video download services. Contrast this with both Xbox Live and Amazon Unbox, which have blazing fast download speeds and a much smaller selection of titles that interest me, and I'm still leaning toward those two solutions as my main movie download alternatives. The key reason to choose an alternative to the awesome selection of DVD rentals at Scarecrow video in Seattle is convenience. With the current state of Jaman, I need to know several hours in advance that I want to watch a movie or I might as well find something at the video store down the street.

I'm also not overly thrilled by Jaman's clueless choice of yet another proprietary DRM solution, but would be willing to put up with it if the downloads were faster.

If I recall correctly, all of Wordpress.com was blocked when I was in Beijing and Tianjin last summer.

C'mon Andy, my pal Brandon Wirtz deserves some link love just for hanging in there in spite of all the SEO love Colbert is getting over this Greatest Living American nonsense.

Jake Ludington

It was a pleasant surprise to see Robert in my home state at the John Edwards event. I'm here for the holidays. His video will look better than mine, but I posted a quick clip of the blogger meetup in Iowa.

Thanks for a an awesome party! DJmimimal did a great job entertaining on the law, the food was phenominal and it was great to gather everyone for a final post-Gnomedex chill session. :)

There are battery solutions for devices that don't require a $250 upgrade, like the Inflight Power Recharger Cables. Not a perfect solution but it gets there.

More to the greater point about WiFi on planes - it's priced in a way that doesn't make sense for normal people. The same way hotels should build in the cost of Internet into rooms and call it a "free perk" so should the airlines who provide the service charge a few bucks extra for a ticket and call it "free". That way everyone could use it if they want to instead of making it practical only for the front row seats.

The thing that will make this more interesting is Google providing a way you can serve the video from your own server and still insert the advertising and get credit for running the ads. In the scenario talked about here, the content is only available in Google Video and only on Google's terms. It's a good start, but what if I want to put my video on YouTube, on MySpace or whatever the next great video service happens to be and still get paid?

If it's the "Encyclopedia Galactica" they are trying to create at Wikipedia, they really ought to have a page for everyone on the planet. What's notable to a handful of elitists actively maintaining Wikipedia is hardly a representation of worth across the broad swath of the world population. Someone's small contribution to a local community might have a far reaching impact if it was documented in a place like Wikipedia where other people could find and learn from it.

Is the stock really in a "freefall" or would it be more accurate to say a smart company is currently caught in a 50% off sale? The fundamental revenue streams behind the Microsoft juggernaut aren't broken yet, no matter how many lousy Web-based office apps Google puts online. The people who aren't talking about Microsoft's current stock price are the ones who are quietly buying up shares as the price goes down because they see opportunity.

Robert: "it’s been there for almost three years and I don’t get much spam." is valid inside the sphere of Microsoft. You work for one of the companies actively trying to solve the spam problem. In the real world, posting your email address in public is asking to get spam. Post an address that isn't in the microsoft.com domain space and see how long it takes for the spam to start piling up.

I hide my email address in a Flash image that anyone can click but spammers can't scrape. Flash is the one thing automated spam scrapers haven't figured out how to parse yet. When there's a monetary incentive to figure it out, Flash won't be safe either.

That advanced setup option he includes is an extra step. I blogged the instructions for my SMT5600 last year and they still work with 2125 at 115 kbps.

In correction to my previous statement, DRM v2 has never existed for the Mac platform. That's the DRM that powers all the subscription services like Napster and Yahoo; it's also the DRM powering all current pay-for-download services that are PlaysForSure compliant. As well as the previously cited Movielink (and CinemaNow). That I know of, no new DRM implementations are using the old stuff because the new stuff is better in a number of ways.

Whether MS drops support for Windows Media Player v9 for Mac in the not too distant future, it is still available for now and probably will be in the timeframe that any of the supported formats are still relevant.