Mari Silbey

Mari’s tech career started when she became the default “IT guy” in her first job out of college. Since leaving help-desk duties to the experts, she’s focused on trends in technology as a consultant, writer, reporter, analyst and at-home gadget tinkerer. Her current paid gig is with the non-profit organization US Ignite where she focuses on how networks and digital technologies impact smart cities. All posts on ZNF represent her own opinions and not those of US Ignite. Mari is a sucker for anything in the digital media space and covers interesting happenings in cable, telecom, and whatever else she feels like. Find her on Twitter at @msilbey.

New Slacker On-Demand Service Worth the Wait

I’ve been itching for the new Slacker on-demand music service to launch since last fall, and today the new app is (finally!) ready to go on the web, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, and Android devices. The whole Slacker experience has been overhauled, but the biggest change comes in the new Premium service tier. For $9.99 a month (or FREE for a limited time at www.facebook.com/SlackerRadio), Slacker Premium customers can now access individual songs and albums on demand. While this may not sound revolutionary, it is when you consider how Slacker implements its on-demand service. With a radio front end, users can find artists and songs simply by tuning to a station and either saving favorite selections as they play, or filtering through station content to find music worth storing. Naturally you can also search for any specific song and play it immediately, but the bigger benefit comes from station-based music discovery. Ask me what song I want to hear, and I may stumble over an answer. But play something I like, and I’ll add it to my personal playlist in a heartbeat.

After using Slacker Premium in beta for the last few weeks, I can happily say that the new service was worth the wait. I’ve only tested it on a computer so far, but I’ll be trialling it further on mobile devices in the near future, and the iPad video demo looks promising. From my own experience, the app is easy to use, and the ability to play favorite songs ad nauseum is addictive. I’ve never been one to collect music, so just being able to access songs when I want without having to make a commitment to buy is compelling. Even better, I don’t have to go out and search for music. If there’s a radio station I like, I can see the top 50 artists and songs on that station and jump around or create my own playlists at will. Stations, albums, and individual songs are also all cacheable for offline playback.

I spoke with Slacker CEO Jim Cady last week, who had a few things to say about where Slacker has been, and where it’s headed.

Netflix Wins Strategic Licensing Deal with Miramax

As digital licensing negotiations heat up, it’s heartening to see Netflix pull another big win from a new deal with Miramax. Netflix announced the multi-year agreement today, which includes instant streaming of a number of movies in the Miramax library, from Academy Award winners like “Shakespeare in Love,” and “The English Patient,” to cult favorites like “Chasing Amy” … Read more

New Cord-Cutting Stats

Opinions vary widely on whether cord cutting and cord shaving are legitimate trends. And at a panel during Streaming Media East yesterday, execs from MTV, NBA Digital and Roku threw out new stats on the subject. According to Tom Gorke from MTV Networks, digital video is not a substitute for television. Even in its audience … Read more

$0.99 Big Fish iPad Games for Mother’s Day

If you’re addicted to iPad games, you can’t do better than the deal Big Fish Games is running for Mother’s Day. Games that usually range $6.99-$9.99 are only $0.99 (on iPad or iPhone) through Sunday. Most of them are some variant of the Hidden Object/Puzzle and Adventure Quest genre – good for your own leisure … Read more

Battle Lines Drawn: Microsoft & RIM Vs. the World

It was free PlayBooks for all at the BlackBerry World Conference keynote presentation today, but that was hardly the biggest surprise of the morning. Taking the stage right after RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. That’s right, the CEO of Microsoft held court at a BlackBerry conference. Why? To announce a new alliance of course. RIM is now working closely with Microsoft to integrate Bing search at the OS level on BlackBerry devices. Eric Zemen, aka @phonescooper, captured the rather odd video (above) showing how the Bing-on-BlackBerry experience will work.

If there’s one clear conclusion to be divined from Ballmer’s appearance today, it’s that the mobile battle lines have been drawn. Microsoft signed an agreement with Nokia just last month to shore up its OS position with Windows 7. Now it’s supporting RIM in the mobile OS world in order to further its mobile search interests. Bizarre? Yes. But also very calculated. Microsoft was late to the mobile game, and now it’s aligning left, right, and center in order to combat Google and Apple in the space.

You can place your bets now on whether Microsoft’s mobile strategies will work. Certainly the company is taking a scatter-shot approach to the market, but that doesn’t mean one of those shots won’t hit.

In the meantime, here’s a sampling of some of the greatest tweets covering the RIM conference this morning – from the hilarious to the insightful:

The State of Boxee, Roku and Tivo

Light Reading TV interviews Roku Anthony Wood Boxee Avner Ronen

One of the best things about this week’s Light Reading Cable event was Avner Ronen’s unfailingly humorous commentary. That guy could be a stand-up comedian. And in an industry where much is taken far too seriously, a little levity is appreciated.

That said, just because Avner was funny doesn’t mean he didn’t also have some status updates and pearls of wisdom to dispense. Here’s what I got from the Boxee CEO, along with Roku CEO Anthony Wood, and TiVo exec Tara Maitra. For more, check out Light Reading’s own coverage including interviews on Light Reading TV.

Boxee – wants to own the user experience
Avner Ronen still insists Boxee doesn’t want to be a cable killer. Instead, the company wants to own the user experience – not the delivery, the content, or the box. To date, the company has 1.7 million users worldwide, and it plans to use its recent funding round of 16.5 million dollars to license more content, get distribution on more TVs, and most importantly, continue focusing on product development. Avner says that Boxee still doesn’t meet the babysitter test – i.e. the babysitter wouldn’t necessarily be able to watch TV upon encountering the Boxee Box for the first time. However, the company is aggressively working on moving from being a geek-only product to one that’s appealing to mainstream early-adopters.

Roku – wants to be a next-generation video network
I don’t know that I could have articulated Roku’s goal of becoming a next-gen video network before CEO Anthony Wood did yesterday. (Ah, so that’s what the little box that could wants to be when it grows up!) But it’s a noble aim, and certainly one that Roku’s made a good start on achieving. According to Wood, Roku has already shipped more than a million boxes through direct Internet sales, and that number could explode when the company hits the retail big box stores this year. Meanwhile, Wood also noted that customer surveys suggest that new Roku owners are cutting back on cable services at a more rapid rate. Last year 30% of new owners said they downgraded cable service or cut it altogether. This year that number’s already at 40%.

Other Roku notes: Wood says the company will probably have more than 1,000 channels by the end of the year, and it will launch its first international product in 2011.

Cisco Says Set-Tops are Becoming Software

Cisco’s Dr. Ken Morse announced this morning at a Light Reading Cable event that set-tops are headed toward a next life as software, or as virtualized elements in the cloud. The statement is not terribly surprising on the face of it, except for the fact that it comes from Cisco. I’ve written plenty of “the … Read more

The Asus Transformer – A Netbook Replacement?

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 is launching in the US and Canada on April 26th as one of the first Android tablets with docking keyboard to grace our fair shores. (Brad Linder notes the Acer Iconia W500 Windows 7 tablet with keyboard is also on its way.) You may remember our excitement at CES 2010 over the Lenovo U1 hybrid tablet/laptop. Alas, that device still hasn’t made it to store shelves here, and it’s not clear that it ever well. The Transformer, on the other hand, promises much of what the U1 did, along with some 2011 upgrades.

If you’re looking for an Android tablet, the Transformer is beating out a lot of its more well-known competitors in review circles. According to Laptop Magazine, the Asus tablet compares favorably to the Xoom and G-Slate for battery life (about 8.5 hours detached, or more than 10 hours with the dock), and edges out both (just slightly in the G-Slate’s case) in a CPU benchmark test. Basic specs include the Android Honeycomb OS, a 10.1-inch display, Wi-Fi connectivity, a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor, 1GB on-board RAM with expansion room to 2GB, and on-board memory of 16GB (for $399) or 32GB (for $499) with support for microSD cards.

What most excites me, however, is the Transformer’s potential as a netbook replacement.