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.

Pandora Campaigns for Net Radio

I’ve written before about my love for Pandora and about the Copyright Royalty Board’s (CRB) attempt to kill it and other Internet radio services. Now Pandora, as part of a coalition called SaveNetRadio, is fighting back. The SaveNetRadio group (including listeners, artists, labels and webcasters) started a campaign yesterday with a petition to Congress protesting … Read more

Drool-Worthy Camera?

A press release crossed my inbox today with the announcement of a new camera by DXG USA. Now I have a great digital camera, but this release promised multimedia nirvana in one little device, all for just $199.

Before I get to the catch, here are some of the features of the DXG-589V. It’s a combination 5 megapixel camera, VGA camcorder, video game player, digital music player and video recorder that takes input from TVs and DVD players. Video is MPEG-4 with 30 frames per second at a 640×480 resolution. For gaming, the device has a flip screen and 20 built-in, full-color games. Not particularly exciting for a real gamer, but for someone like me who just likes to have something handy to do while waiting in line, it sounds great.

So why the second thoughts?

Tis the Season for Earnings

Wondering what kind of foundation is beneath your favorite gadgets and gizmos? Look no farther than the start of earnings season. Among this week’s contenders in the great earnings game are Yahoo, Motorola (my employer), and Google. Followed by Apple, Comcast and Microsoft next week, and Verizon and Time Warner the following. Recent news that … Read more

It’s Fandango-tastic!

A million years ago, and for a very brief period of time, I did some public relations work with the Comcast High-Speed Internet division. At the time, Comcast was pushing its Comcast.net portal as a destination site for news, video, entertainment and applications like photo sharing and shopping. Unfortunately, only Comcast subscribers could access everything … Read more

Immigration: The Human Cost This is what Web video was made for. Forget real news, video blogs and gadget demos, turn your browser to the Onion News Network. In case you missed it, the Onion debuted its online video broadcasts late last month. And if you’re a fan of the print version, the short-form videos … Read more

Gotuit Powers Sports Illustrated’s FilmRoom

News from Gotuit: The company has just announced a deal with Sports Illustrated to power the 2007 NFL Draft FilmRoom feature. Gotuit has essentially created a video database of Draft candidates’ top college plays. If you visit FilmRoom you can search for players by name, position or school and then watch mini highlight reels of touchdowns, passes, blocks, etc.

This is a very cool application for football fanatics, but it’s even more interesting to me for its potential across the landscape of online video.

Gotuit considers itself an online video publisher and will work with businesses in a number of different ways to make video on the Web engaging. In a situation like the SI deal, Gotuit encodes and transcodes video for the Web, adds massive amounts of metadata, and then provides the publishing and sharing tools to create a dynamic, semi-personalized application.

Big Brother is Watching… Web Video

We humans have a tendency to want to quantify absolutely everything, which is why it’s no surprise that bean counters have fixed their beady little eyes on the world of online video. Where Nielsen dominates broadcast TV metrics, web analytics companies are now carving out a niche in video on the Internet. And the nature … Read more

Digital Photo Frame Sales Explode

You heard it here first. Last November ZNF predicted, “Digital photo frames will probably hit their stride in the 2006 holiday season.” Now, Parks Associates has confirmed it: “approximately 1.7 million digital photo frames were sold in the US in 2006.” That’s a 400% growth rate over sales in 2005. Parks had originally predicted growth … Read more