Invention of the Day: DVR recording from a link on the Internet.

Yesterday, October 9, 2013, Twitter announced that it "will provide links that let pay–TV users record or view programs on Comcast's cable services." Bloomberg News reports about a Comcast executive explaining the new service,

“There are tons of conversation about live TV, but does that really lead to someone programming their DVR or picking up their remote?” Schwartz said. “This very clearly and in a measurable way links that conversation with consumption. If you’re a programmer, you monetize best if someone is watching that show live on a television set. It’s a win-win-win for Twitter, the programmers and the distributors.” 

More than 14 years ago when I worked at Philips Multimedia Center in Palo Alto, California, I invented (US Patent 6,611,654) a service that enabled users to accomplish scenarios now marketed by Twitter and Comcast. One of the scenarios covered by the patent involves a mobile user:

Alice got stuck in traffic on her way home. She is going to be late for the broadcast of a live piano concert. Fortunately, her palm-top Nino (or cell phone, or laptop) can access the TV programming network. With just a couple of clicks Alice sets her recording time-shifting device to cache the concert.

[Nino was a personal communications device developed and marketed — unsuccessfully— by Philips at the time. Tony Fadell, who later went to Apple to develop the original iPod and then created Nest, lead the effort.]

Even at that time, I could see that the Internet and mobile connectivity was going to bring new functionality to the users, including elements of social networking (because the nature of visual media is inherently social). Here's how it is described in the patent:

Alice loves talking about her favorite TV series. She watches the episodes frequently and enjoys every minute of it. In today's episode one of the characters behaves exactly as she predicted a couple of days ago. Alice needs to talk to her friend Jane about it. Jane is at work and cannot see the show. ...  One click and today's phone discussion (telecon) with Jane is going to be a real time experience.

The yesterday's announcement highlights the difference between Invention and Innovation that we emphasize in our book Scalable Innovation.

Source: Shteyn & Shtein, 2013. Figure P3.

Although we were able to make a first step toward innovation in 1999, e.g. by creating a prototype (first red dot on the chart), the innovation has become scalable when the connectivity infrastructure became ubiquitous. Today, phones, TVs, DVRs, thermostats, watches, and other devices are connected to the network and can be accessed by consumers in many contexts — personal, social, and business. As we show in the book, scalable innovation creates its own space. Right now, we enter a new phase (Chapters 15) when the entire system "flips" to accommodate connected devices; adding them to the network has become a "no-brainer."

Alan Kay once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." I'm happy I was involved in inventing the right future.

Ripping off for fun and profit - 3

VBeat runs a story on 14 best copycat Internet services/apps in China. Definitely, there's a different understanding of innovation there.

Jan 22, 2012. VBeat -- People outside of China often wonder why the Chinese love to copy things. The answer is that it’s the way they’re taught to learn. Follow the teacher, recite books, and don’t challenge authority.

Not copying would almost represent a missed opportunity.

One trend we noticed is that the best clones are often created by very large Chinese tech companies with existing resources and money. It shows how tough the environment is for grassroots startups trying to compete against the big guys. It is also telling of the health of China’s startup eco-system — big companies can and will simply crush anything they see as a threat.

How is it possible to compete with this business model? Keeping technology secret seems to be the only way to succeed. In other words, globally we are back to the 17th century intellectual property system.

tags: business, model, patents, internet, service, intellectual, property

Online video – learning 24/7

Broadband creates new opportunities in the service economy. Music lessons are going virtual on Skype.

January 10, 2012. NYT -- Skype and other videochat programs have transformed the simple phone call, but the technology is venturing into a new frontier: it is upending and democratizing the world of music lessons.


Students who used to limit the pool of potential teachers to those within a 20-mile radius from their homes now take lessons from teachers — some with world-class credentials — on other coasts or continents.

Parents are also driving the shift to webcam music lessons. After Susan Patterson grew tired of taking her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, 45 minutes each way for violin lessons, she e-mailed 15 violin teachers with Web sites.

What e-Bay did for physical goods, social video is going to do to services, including education.

¡Touchdown 49ers!

tags: commerce, service, social, distribution, business, information, education

The dilemma of happy marriage beyond sex and companionship.

The last figure from Thinking Fast and Slow, by David Kahneman, shows that life satisfaction peaks at the time of marriage and then goes precipitously down.

Kahneman writes that on one hand, marriage creates life satisfaction because it provides access to regular enjoyable sex. On the other hand, it requires "more time for doing housework, preparing food, and caring for children."

This is a typical trade-off that falls apart over time as family and household commitments grow. Solutions? I think they are somewhat straightforward: babysitters, house help, and a network of friends outside of home. Since $75K a year seems to be the threshold for happiness money can buy, any money made above it would be best invested in household services.

My last year's prediction about a steep drop in electronic book prices is coming true. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc.'s top 50 digital best-seller list featured 15 books priced at $5 or less on Wednesday afternoon. Louisville businessman John Locke, for example, a part-time thriller writer whose signature series features a former CIA assassin, claimed seven of those titles, all priced at 99 cents.

All-you-can-eat book subscriptions, today we call them libraries, is probably one of the logical scenarios. Amazon or Netflix could become such new digital libraries, providing easy access for various e-readers.

tags: source, payload, service, cloud, distribution, s-curve, maturity, storage

More on Amazon from VentureBeat:

Amazon Web Services has become a huge business, with revenues of $500 million in 2010, according to UBS Investment Research. And that success is due in no small part to the rapid rise of social games such as FarmVille on Facebook.

...Amazon hosts six to eight of the top 10 games on Facebook at any given time. That includes top Zynga and EA Playfish games, meaning that hundreds of millions of players are playing games on Amazon’s servers, without even knowing it. Overall, Amazon has hundreds of thousands of customers in 190 countries for its web services. It also powers big operations such as Netflix, NASA, Autodesk, NASDAQ and the New York Times.

Cloud services is only about 2% of Amazon's revenue. But still it's a good, and growing, chunk of change. I wish I bought their stock around July 1, this year.

tags: cloud, information, service, source, games, virtualization, commerce

History in the making.

According to VentureBeat:

Crowdstar is giving a big endorsement to Facebook Credits. The social gaming company has made a five-year commitment to using Facebook’s virtual currency.

The use of Facebook Credits is important to Facebook as a way to monetize its vast audience of nearly 500 million monthly active users. Davis said early results show that Facebook Credits is increasing both the revenue per paying user and the number of people who are buying things in apps. He acknowledged that changes that Facebook made to its platform this spring have slowed growth of games, but he said that newly launched Facebook games are seeing rapid growth.

History of money shows that introduction of a widely accepted currency is key to the development of a market for services. So far, we've seen trading in goods only. One reason for that would be narrow scope of most gaming scenarios and lack of service development tools. Another, a steep tax (30%) that Facebook imposes on all transactions.

tags: commerce, money, payload, service, control, market, scale, games, virtual

Medical records, along with internet video, is emerging as a major source of data. The major difference, though, is that analysis of medical data can produce a breakthrough in treatment methods, which, in combination with DNA analysis, may lead to a revolution in health care. IBM is taking a position in the forefront of this slow-developing tsunami:

IBM said Wednesday that it has agreed to buy Initiate Systems, a privately held company that makes software designed to help health care companies manage and share information.

The buyout of Initiate marks IBM's 30th acquisition in the area of information and analytics. Over the past couple of years, Big Blue has been on a roll picking up new companies and ended 2009 with several businesses in its shopping cart.

tags: health, information, cloud, infrastructure, service, tool