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.

Mari’s Gadget-Giving Post-Mortem, Part 1

I realize that even among the people that celebrate Christmas, few celebrate it the way my family does. We have a particular gene in our DNA that leads to obscene levels of spending on Christmas presents. Yes, you could view it as rampant commercialism, but we prefer to think of it as extreme generosity. Below … Read more

Pandora’s Grass Roots Marketing

Another quick note about Pandora as the next-generation MySpace… They’re taking a very social-networking approach to marketing. A musician friend of mine attended an event back in November hosted by Pandora at UPenn. The event was not directed at press, but instead consisted of founder Tim Westergren talking to students and gathering feedback and suggestions … Read more

Pandora the New MySpace?

I’m not an expert Pandora user. I only discovered it this year, and I haven’t remotely finished plumbing the feature set. Mostly I just create new stations when I remember a particular artist or song I love and leave it at that. That’s one of the great things about Pandora. You can be a casual user and still thoroughly enjoy the service.

Last week, however, Michael Arrington and I got an email from the Pandora folks: Seems they’ve gone and made the service more Web 2.0’ish. Now you can find shared stations within the Pandora community, see who is listening to what, and search for songs, stations and listener profiles by keyword.

The original, innovative idea behind Pandora is music discovery, and the fact that you can do things like seed stations with specific music to discover similar works is a great one. While the latest features still clearly fall under that concept, there is also something else going on here. Check out this quote from Pandora’s blog:

Find other Pandora listeners that share your musical tastes, hometown, school, or place of work. Explore their favorite songs and artists, listen to their stations, and leave them comments. Even bookmark them so you can check what they’re into later.

Once you add in elements like “hometown” and “school,” Pandora suddenly starts to sound a lot more like MySpace or Facebook to me. And indeed, I’ve heard from a lot of companies lately suggesting that the next wave of social networking sites will be based around specific interests. Vertical social networks.

So is Pandora the new, cooler MySpace?

Comprehensive Digital Lifestyle Goes Mainstream

While we (the writers and readers of blogs like ZNF) tend to think the universe of consumer electronics revolves around us, the truth is big brands are after a much larger and more lucrative market: the soccer mom and her family. Hence the new trend toward lifestyle marketing. Apple stores sell a “digital experience;” Comcast has created an “electronics spa” in a retail experiment with Circuit City; Sony Style stores have popped up all over the US.

This is a real shift in approach: the idea of architecting a digital home instead of selling gadgets. And at a Sony Style store over the weekend, I was somewhat amazed at how many dads, moms and tots were being drawn in by the lifestyle lure.

Wonder what’s become of the life-transforming, human-transporting Segway? Apparently it’s all the rage among cops at the King of Prussia mall this season. My question is, do the cops stay on their Segways during an actual criminal pursuit? Also, since everyone was giving this guy a wide berth, what are the odds he’s going to see a criminal in action?

Dave had this to say (with Jamaican accent):

Bad boys, bad boys
Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do
When the Segway come for you?

One benefit to covering cool companies is the subsequent rise in status to “official insider.” After writing about Gotuit at the TechCrunch NY party, the company contacted me to set up a pre-brief on a new product announcement. The new product, SceneMaker – which launches today – is a consumer application for tagging video segments within larger video clips. Gotuit calls SceneMaker the “first social video tagging application.” I personally think the word social should have been retired from the lexicon immediately after Zune’s “Welcome to the Social” campaign hit, but semantics aside, SceneMaker is a welcome addition to the world of online video.

Scenemaker works like this: You copy a video URL from YouTube or Metacafe into the SceneMaker application and add metadata to any segment you want within the clip. These user-generated tags are called VideoMarks. Once a video has VideoMarks, that metadata is included whenever someone runs a search in Gotuit’s InVideo search engine. You can also embed a video segment on your website or blog that only includes the section of a video you’ve marked. For example, the middle 30 seconds in a three-minute clip.

The Content Wars

Want to know how cable and telecom operators are going to compete in the short-term? One word: content. Verizon has put a few notches in its lipstick case with recent sports content deals. Exhibit: 1. FiOS TV Signs the NFL Network I’ve been skeptical of the NFL Network, but it does carry a few critical … Read more

Let the Sun Shine

I’ve seen a lot out of Sun recently, and I’m not sure if I’m simply more attuned to it, or if the company is trying to up its profile. First there was the woman I met at DEMOfall from Sun who talked about her team of colleagues walking the show promoting Java. Then there was … Read more