Todd Barnard, Author at Zatz Not Funny!

Harvard Law School talks TiVo

Photo by John Atheron Earlier this week Herkko Hietanen gave a talk at Berkman Center for Internet & Society with the provocative title “Network Recorders and Social Enrichment of Television.” Hietanen is well known for his research on Creative Commons licensing and is a practicing lawyer who counsels clients on technology related legal issues. The … Read more

The Intimated Threat of Google Voice for Android

Until now, Google Voice has been a web-only service to manage voicemail in the same way Gmail manages email. That’s no longer the case. But, as of today, Google Voice is a first class locally installed mobile application, available in the Android Market, deeply integrated with the Android operating system. (And there’s a less robust … Read more

Here’s Why You Want Bandwidth Caps

broadband-meter
(Remixed photo sourced from Elizabeth West, Flickr.)

In the aftermath of last week’s Consumer insurrection to testing of bandwidth caps, Time Warner Cable’s Glenn Britt hinted that metered billing was inevitable.

“…We continue to believe that consumption based billing may be the best pricing plan for consumers.”

Now Patrick Knorr of Sunflower Broadband has gone on the record by saying metered bandwidth pricing (including caps and overage fees) are a foregone conclusion. He made this statement Tuesday during a press conference at the American Cable Association’s annual summit in Washington D.C. An especially notable quote by Mr. Knorr was;

“I would like to pay the same price for my heating bill all year round, but I have to pay more in winter, when I use more.”

Both Mr. Knorr and Mr. Britt seem to be implying that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are the same as the other household utilities like electricity and natural gas. If that is the case, the subject of Consumers being able to monitor their consumption is not the issue at hand, but how that monitoring is done.

The elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about is the utility provider cannot be the one who provides the monitoring tools – it is a conflict of interest.

Will Your TiVo Tweet?

TiVo programmer Ryan Rose has hacked his washing machine to send text message notifications over Twitter when his clothes are done. He did this for a practical reason, to prevent forgetting about his laundry which might sit in the damp washer and mildew. You can follow the washing machine’s activity on Twitter (412 people, including myself, already do) to be instantly informed when Mr. Rose’s laundry is done. Why would you want to? More on that later… Here’s video of “PiMPY” in action:

I’m a big fan of Activity Streams such as Twitter and FriendFeed. Once current user contributions across all the social web sites are freely distributed, with an emphasis on privacy, a new web era will arrive. My vision originates from Professor David Gelernter‘s “Life Streams” as defined in his 1993 book Mirror Worlds: The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox – How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean.

Apparently I am not alone in my opinion that Activity Streams are the next big thing. Some of the most influential people in social media (MySpace, Google, Plaxo, Comcast, Nokia just to name a few) recently attended a DiSo meeting to discuss the future of how their user’s activity will be published. (Ian Kennedy, formerly of Yahoo and now head of Nokia’s Ovi service, kindly recorded the DiSo meeting using his phone.) One of the points discussed during the event was that activity streams are not just generated by people but that machines, like PiMPY, can also broadcast what they’re doing. Mr. Rose’s place of employment is noteworthy, and it got me thinking about the possibilities of machines with their own activity streams – particularly TiVo.