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Down in the Bunker

I headed up to the bunker the other night, supposedly to play cards and meet Baby G's brother—a user-interface designer who was visiting from Brooklyn. Baby G likes to assemble some of the tech dudes who live in and around Mill Valley for special occasions like that, and I get to tag along if I promise to behave and ask some, but not too many, questions. I also agreed to bring the beer, and Wolfenstein, a serial entrepreneur who lives in Sausalito, emailed that he'd swing by Pizza Antica to pick up a couple of Pepperoni and Mushrooms. But a half hour *before* we were supposed to head up the mountain to the bunker, the brother from Brooklyn Reply-ed All:

"Gentlemen...sorry to say I will not be joining you this evening in the bunker as I am off to LA."

"Still on?" I emailed Baby G, thinking he might want to bag it.

He replied: "Of course!"

I picked up Wen en route and we climbed the windy road, already dark and hopelessly twisted (the road, that is), to baby G's house, which sits perched like a golden eagle, overlooking all of Mill Valley and further beyond, San Francisco. G's place has to be the sweetest rental in town. I'm guessing 5,000 square feet and it has a pool house and one of those infinity pools, with the no-edge that bleeds off into space. Stone steps descend from the pool to a large, mirrored room beneath it: This is the legendary bunker.

The future of TV

By Josh Quittner

[Productivity alert! If you expect to get anything done for the next few hours, please read no further.]

[Still reading? Yeah. Slacker.]

I have seen the future of television and it's an application called called Miro. The app makes it super easy to find and watch Internet TV. It handles HD feeds and seamlessly staples together BitTorrent streams. A free, open-source download, Miro goes into its 1.0 public release today, here.

I never realized that finding and watching video online was a problem. But it is. With the steady proliferation of Net TV shows—not to mention all the things you might want to track on YouTube—organizing your video feeds is increasingly painful. From BoingBoing, to Wired Science, to The Onion, everyone is doing video, and a lot of it is getting fun. Miro gives you a way to subscribe to and organize it all. Since it solves a problem you didn't know you had, it's one of those programs you have to use to appreciate.

The end is near

It’s not exactly news that Web has slowly been killing off traditional media. Over the past decade, the music, publishing and video-broadcast industries have been scrambling to find a perch in a new world where consumers expect to get everything for free online.

But here’s an alarming thought for those of us who still draw paychecks from traditional media companies (and hope to send all three kids to college some day) : The end could come much sooner than anyone thinks.

That’s the theory anyway, of a pal I had dinner with last week in Palo Alto He pointed out what should have been obvious to me: That Web 2.0 companies are doing to Web 1.0 companies what Web 1.0 companies are doing to traditional media companies. According to my friend: Think of traditional media as kind of the top layer. The Web came along and settled in just beneath it, where it began to erode old media’s foundations—subscription, pay for play, traditional advertising, etc. But during the last five years, with the rise of the social web and Web 2.0 companies, many of the companies who formed the vanguard of the Web, are themselves at risk. And if they disintegrate, the old media companies that so tenuously rest upon them, could collapse.

Yahoo (YHOO) is a great example, my friend said. Aside from its acquisition of Flickr, in 2005, Yahoo hasn’t adjusted particularly well to the social web. By contrast, everything about Google (GOOG) —from its advertising model to its creation of the OpenSocial alliance, pretty much defines the social web.

It’s telling, actually, that Facebook isn’t gunning for Google so much as it is trying to take out Yahoo, whose search engine has long been sputtering and wheezing. With it’s foray into social ads last week, Facebook may well have jumped the shark, as some are suggesting. But if social ads work and Zuck & Co. harness the power of friend-to-friend recommendation—you can bet that online advertising money will flow like the Nile into Facebook. Why would anyone continue to advertise on Yahoo?

And that’s where the end comes sooner for traditional media companies, who for years have been relying on traffic deals with Yahoo. If the venerable Web 1.0 company collapses, then the old media companies that rest on its seemingly young shoulders, must, too. Unless of course, they start embracing the social web.

On the writer's strike

Marc Andreessen for president. Seriously, I love watching him think. Even when I disagree with his conclusions, I always learn something worthwhile. His heart is in the right place and his brain is without peer. Would someone please start a Facebook group for this?

In today's post, he argues that if the Hollywood studios don't capitulate to the writers they will effectively destroy their business–and perhaps, spark a revolution in the business model that creates video entertainment. Marc suggests that the film industry is ripe for overhaul: the big, centralized studio model ought to be replaced by the smaller, decentralized Silicon Valley-style startup model where VC funding is abundant. The compelling part of Mark's argument is that the two main reasons the studio system worked—marketing and distribution—no longer matter. When everything is digital, distribution is virtually free, and old-style marketing doesn't work very well anymore. The rise of the social web allows good stuff to spread virally.

I believe most of that (though VCs HATE the content game, which is hit-based and utterly unpredictable.)

The bigger problem with his scenario is the same issue that has plagued the content-creation business since the advent of the web: The creators can't make a decent living here yet.

Those guys walking picket lines make very healthy 6-figure salaries. (As they should! Writers ought to be among the highest-paid people on the planet!) Can they do that online, alone? No way. And not in the near future. No one has yet found a way to create the kinds of revenue streams from online content that would match what a pro makes working for traditional media.

Yes, we have a few one-man brands who are currently making at least as much money online as they could working for The Man. But so far, they are bloggers for the most part, with virtually no overhead—most of the success stories, in fact, work from home. Until someone figures out a better way to generate revenue than display ads, this medium won't be able to attract the top talent.

Marc, please solve that one asap.

Norman Mailer, RIP

Norman Mailer died and I am very sad. He was brilliant right up until his last book, The Castle in the Forest. That book was supposed to be the first part of a trilogy—what hubris for a guy in his 80s! That was Mailer, though. I hope he got far enough into the second installment so that it will be published posthumously.

How Facebook Can Save Face

It looks inevitable that Facebook will move away from its proprietary platform to the open platform of OpenSocial. Indeed, sources tell me that representatives from Facebook and Google met for the first time late yesterday afternoon. And already, Facebook investor and board member Jim Breyer is indicating that the social network would be willing to join the Everybody-but-Facebook Alliance.

Meanwhile, a favorite parlor game yesterday afternoon among  pundits here in Techland was playing "What Should Facebook Do?"—though most of the people I spoke to were unwilling to go on the record. Virtually everyone's answers however, boiled down to three optionss:

1. Do nothing. Facebook has a surprising amount of power in this relationship. It has 50 million members and continues to grow. As long as that's the case, developers will continue to craft apps in FBML, its proprietary platform language.

2. Surrender, totally and at once. Converting Facebook's platform to open HTML isn't difficult from a programming standpoint or particularly time-consuming. Besides,  developers will love it. Many have privately griped that Facebook's platform is too gnarly and they look forward to simple HTML and Javascript. And no one I've spoken to can find any real problem with this shift from Facebook's perspective——indeed, the move should benefit Facebook since its members will be able to stay put, where FB can serve ads at them, while doing more outside the walls of FB.

3. Some combination of 1 & 2.

I had dinner last night with John Lilly, COO of the Mozilla Foundation. (Who better to talk about the virtues of openness?) Lilly, in fact, made me think that Option 3 was the smartest way to go. If he were running Facebook, he said, "I would not let Google take the 'open' mantle from the world."

Myspace Teams Up with Google

Here was go again. Word on the street is that Myspace (NWS) is joining Google's (GOOG) Everybody-But-Facebook Coalition. That would mean the anti-Facebook alliance, known as OpenSocial, would grow to 170 million users. (Assuming that Myspace has 70 million active monthly users, as per its July press release.) Google is holding a press conference later today, presumably to make the announcement. In typical Google fashion, it's asking reporters not to report the news until after 5 p.m. PST--we suppose to give the New York Times and TechCunch time to break the details of the story first. That's what happened Tuesday night, anyway. Note to Google: Embargoes don't work anymore.

How to Add WiFi to Your Digital Camera

Apple is the king of simplicity. A huge amount of engineering and thought goes into making every aspect of every product -- from how the thing works, to how it's packaged -- simple. One could argue that's Steve Jobs's greatest gift: taking the enormous complexity out of technology, and making a tool work as it should.

Luckily, lots of companies are finally starting to get this. A smart, new product I've been fooling around with lately, the Eye-Fi Card, is a great example. The gadget takes something complex (uploading digital photographs) and let's you do it simply (on most cameras, via Wifi).  The $99,  2-gigabyte WiFi-enabled memory card went on sale this week at finer online  stores everywhere.

Perhaps uploading photographs isn't complex so much as it is too-many stepped and annoying. Either way, people simply don't do it: Some 4 out of 5 pictures are never uploaded and languish, forgotten, on digital cameras. Eye-Fi solves the problem by converting most digital cameras to WiFi, and allowing them to transmit photos over home wireless networks. The card works on any digital camera that has a slot for an SD memory card -- that would be more than 60% of digital cameras out there.

The Eye-Fi Card looks like a garden-variety SD card, but contains a tiny WiFi transmitter. It's a real feat of engineering, given that the entrepreneurs who founded the company two years ago figured out how to embed a WiFi chip on an SD card without drawing too much battery power or adding an external antenna. Try doing that for under $100. Some half-dozen patents (pending) flowed from that work. (See Fortune writer Michal Lev-Ram's report on  Eye-Fi, "New WiFi camera technology a boon for photo-sharing sites.")

While setting up WiFi networks can be an exasperating exercise, installing the Eye-Fi Card may be the simplest tech chore I've ever performed. It was Apple-like, starting with the packaging: There's only one way to open the box -- via a tiny tab that juts out on the side. Pull the tab and the card slides out on the left side, and a Quick Start Guide slides out on the right side. Follow four steps -- which take about two minutes -- and you're good to go.

The Eye-Fi Card slots into a USB reader, which fits into your computer during configuration. (PCs and Macs are supported.) During the config process, you can choose whether to automatically upload your pictures to your computer and to most major, photo-sharing sites, including such Web 2.0 stalwarts as Facebook, Flickr and Typepad. When you're done with the setup, simply remove the USB reader, pull out the 2-gigabyte card, and put the card in your camera. The rest is automatic. When you take a picture, it flows to your computer and to any photo-sharing sites you selected, as well as to your free, online Eye-Fi account.

It's pretty fast, too. The picture above was taken with a 5-megapixel Casio Exilim; it took 10 seconds to stream from my camera to my MacBook Pro. Some tweakage may be required. I had to adjust the power settings on my camera to ensure it stayed awake long enough to transmit the images.

Emboldened by how easy it was to use, I took the Eye-Fi on the road and attempted to add a public WiFi network at a conference, and then my local network at work. Inadvertently, I had stumbled onto two things that the system cannot currently do. The public WiFi network had a "landing page" -- as do many sites that offer free Wifi or sell it at airports so users can sign up for the service. Eye-Fi can't handle landing pages. And in the case of my office wireless network, Eye-Fi can't deal with so-called transparent proxies -- a common protocol used on such networks for security reasons. A company spokesman said that future versions would address those issues.

But for now, the Eye-Fi works quite well on home networks, and you can add as many of them as you can access. I predict this will be a huge hit at the holidays. Indeed, it may be the first holiday season to actually be seen by future generations in too many awful digital photos.