Playout Intelligence - Latest Comments

Re: Otoy joins the fray of companies offering video games on demand

thinkstorm — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:46:22 -0000

You're right, the "On Demand" might be misleading. I guess that's my point of the post, that many companies jump onto the band wagon of on-demand, and so do the blogs and citizen journalists. After all, these posts are advertisement funded (amongst other things), and who would read a blog post if its headline doesn't capture your attention? :)
Maybe something like "remote play" or "streaming play" would be more adequate (please no more "cloud gaming"!).

Re: Otoy joins the fray of companies offering video games on demand

Free Games — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:57:26 -0000

what do you mean when you say games on demand?

Re: Why Mobile Advertisement Itself Doesn’t Make Sense For Carriers

thinkstorm — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:29:58 -0000

Just a quick note: During the CTIA I got some new thoughts on the $4.86 per year:

1/ The numbers for "mobile advertisment" I heard at the CTIA varied from $600M in 2012 to over $8 billion in 2013. Quite a range, so my research might be wide off.

2/ $4.86 could be a lot more if the market is saturated - if (localized) ads at this point don't increase the churn rate.

3/ $4.86 per year is a lot if the average subscriber revenue per year is $0. Point is: if a non mobile operator is looking for a business model for providing a mobile phone that is purely supported through "add-on" services, this might be one of them. Google could come out with a Google phone (as rumors have it) and have it "subsidized" through WiFi sharing, music, news, eReader, collaboration, cloud storage and backup, and advertisement... Advertising revenues made up 97% of Google revenues for the six months ended June 30, 2009 - about $11b, 53% of that comes from outside the US. If you believe http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com statistics, about 35% of all global Internet users visited Google last month, at about 9 pageviews per user per day, and about 141M US users visited Google last month (if you believe the estimates of http://www.quantcast.com/google.com). In effect, we're looking at an monthly US ARPU of $6.19 - without any one of us paying for it (other than through the costs of our goods that require Google advertisement to sell... nothing's for free). The resulting annual US ARPU at Google is about $74. we're getting there, with all the book stores and music stores announced...

Re: Project Status Dashboards Best Practice

AngelinaBellew — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 15:12:57 -0000

I quickly realized that most of these products and blind date uncensored programs were completely useless. Yet the owners were laughing all the way to the bank. Needless to say I didn't respond to them when they asked if I was still interested in buying them out.

Re: The Economics of Cloud – More Than Just Services, Platforms, Infrastructure

Justin Davis — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:35:15 -0000

We use Salesforce.com, seems to pretty well for us.

I like your thoughts. Can you send me a link to your other posts?

Justin Davis

Legal Disclaimer: Author does not represent any legal position of Lightspeed Systems Inc. and is the author's opinion only. Lightspeed Systems provides internet filter services to K-12 schools and institutions

Re: Why Mobile Advertisement Itself Doesn’t Make Sense For Carriers

Thorsten Claus — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:18:42 -0000

Jennifer Van Grove published a nice article on Foursquare vs. Twitter Local Advertisement (thanks!). She validates the point about smaller players and the "goldmine" of (local) mobile advertisement:

As a San Diego resident and frequent Foursquare user, I believe that local businesses have an unbelievable opportunity to leverage the advertising program to connect with customers ready to buy. There’s a very dedicated core group of users ready and willing to make our check-ins count for something, and the best part is we’re also an active social bunch, so you could find your coffee shop, bar, hotel, or clothing store the talk of the town both on Foursquare and Twitter. Now that’s smart business.

Re: Project Status Dashboards Best Practice

Olegreze — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:52:52 -0000

Основная задача Яндекса — давать ответы на вопросы пользователей!

Re: Chris Anderson’s Zero-Cost Digital Distribution? Not For Me!

Thorsten Claus — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:44:45 -0000

Hi Pete, Thanks for your comment, and I fully agree! And S3 is of course not really up to par in terms of latency, so no actual real-time data, please :)

One of the common slides that I present says that scale of (real-time and no-so real-time) information logistics is a design problem, no a resource problem.

Re: Chris Anderson’s Zero-Cost Digital Distribution? Not For Me!

Pete Grillo — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:41:07 -0000

There are lots of attractive benefits to SaaS/cloud computing. However the advantages may not be what they first appear to be. The costs, as you point out, are anything but ‘free and getting cheaper’. No denying the cost of storage and bandwidth has continued to drop. Simple math says spreading the fixed costs – startup, development, etc – across a higher number of users equates to lower costs and greater profits.

I wish it were this simple. First, things change as user counts grow. Back-end databases that purr like a kitten act very differently when user counts go up by a 100x increase. Or 10,000x. Look at Twitter, a great service that is well capitalized and still has uptime issues. My point is that data centers don’t run themselves. Development and tuning go on forever. So where do you put employee costs with a hosted system? If you place (hide?) them in development they appear as one-time costs. It could be argued that the staff running a hosted service belongs in COGS. The numbers look very different when you start adding employee costs to the raw storage and bandwidth costs. Still attractive, but not ‘free and getting freer’.

In my experience at iterasi the benefits to SaaS are primarily convenience and version control. It is convenient for a customer to be able to access their account from any computer anywhere in the world. It is convenient for the SaaS provider to deploy products, new features and bug fixes in one place without hoping that all customers get the email or the CD and actually install the patch. Having sold software in a variety of configurations, this one alone makes SaaS the platform architecture of choice.

And, btw, we built our own data center in a co-location facility. Why? Because despite what conventional wisdom tells us, we could not run the number in such a way as to make cloud computing come close to the cost of rolling our own.
pete

Re: Follow Twitter Conversations

felipe — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:30:24 -0000

Check twitalks
twitalks.com

Re: Plantronics Sucks.

sylent1 — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 04:31:30 -0000

Plantronics DOES suck. Look at the people seeking Persono audio control center for their DSP headsets that Plantronics no longer supports nor makes the software available for. I told a friend about the DSP 500 that I use....three months after he bought one they discontinued it and won't tell you where to get the software-without which the headset is worthless.

Re: Project Management: What’s Critical?

Project Management Methodology — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 03:47:41 -0000

Thanks for sharing this post

Re: Project Management, Where Are Thou?

Project Management — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 05:29:11 -0000

Great informative post

Re: Identity Theft via Trueswitch.com

Gary Scarfo — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 07:05:11 -0000

I received the same tupe of request, related to my AOL account:

We have detected that you have changed your AOL ( xxxxxxxx@aol.com ) account password. We can not complete the AOL Easy Trasnfer services you requested unless you verify that your AOL account and password is still active.

Please click here to resubmit your password so we can continue to complete your AOL Easy Trasnfer requests.

The AOL Easy Trasnfer Team.
Try AOL Easy Transfer next time you plan to switch your e-mail or Internet account: http://www.trueswitch.com/aol

I have submitted this to AOL for their information also

Re: Cloud Computing Is Not A Resource Problem – It’s A Design Problem

Thorsten Claus — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 08:38:06 -0000

why *exactly*? When i'm struggling with server issues, I buy a load balancer - in general? Could you elaborate a little bit, please? or are you simply advertising that you have a load balancer at kemptechnologies? ;)

Please let me know, I'm genuinely interested where you see that connection, for what business need, and for what technology problem...

Re: Cloud Computing Is Not A Resource Problem – It’s A Design Problem

Frank — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:27:37 -0000

http://www.kemptechnologies.com/?utm_source=blo...

For the small-medium businesses who are struggling with server issues, think about investing in a load balancer.

Re: Airport Websites – A Missed Mobile Opportunity

minimel — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:54:00 -0000

Does anyone know where the 4.2 minutes on-site stat came from? I work for an airport and am attempting to convince management that a mobile site is worth the effort and budget.

Re: Text-To-Font Wordpress Plugin

Thorsten Claus — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:17:12 -0000

Hi Michael,

[I have to put spaces between the "<", ">", and the tags so they don't get interpreted or filtered ;))]

Can you give me an example where your TTF plugin renders text "centered"? In my experience, the width of the TTF images is exactly the length of the text. If you want text to be centered, you would have to enclose it in a < div > or < p > or < h1 > tag etc. and then center the enclosed TTF image via CSS. In case your image also has a background color, your enclosure tag needs to have that background color as well. So if you're using my plugin, this helped:

< h1 style="text-align:center">||Super Header||||< /h1 >

Also: for compatibility reasons with non-image browsers as well as for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reasons, you should never render important text (like headings) into images and then not set the ALT tag accordingly. An even better solution is something called "StateScoping" of CSS, shown here:

http://alt.skybound.ca/statescope/

In the upper right corner of the main text content there is a link to switch "scopes", and you can see the difference between the page rendered with images and without. The example is also somewhat SEO safe, even with images switched on, as the text will still be included in the page and just displaced by CSS.I say "somewhat", because my latest experience is that Google does interpret the CSS placement for otherwise higher ranking sites to avoid tweaking of sites with SEO code that would never be displayed - such as putting "Nokia, N95, Gizmodo, Samsung, LG, G1, iPhone" within an < div > container that is placed off the screen just so to improve the hit rate on these keywords without actually displaying them :).

Cheers,
Thorsten

Re: Text-To-Font Wordpress Plugin

michael — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:19:34 -0000

great adjustment to the plugin. i do have one question that maybe you can answer. is there a way to have ttftitles render the text inside of the image as center-aligned instead of left?

Re: Cloud Computing Is Not A Resource Problem – It’s A Design Problem

Thorsten Claus — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:02:45 -0000

You make some good points here, Sachin. I guess the lesson learned is that a lot of people who have little previous experience with large deployments also have little experience with the right testing environments. In effect they forgo basic testing principles and procedures that are "old" and well known and instead think that more resources can solve their problem instead of the right design - which is exactly my point.

On the other hand, if she would have 100 local PCs in her network, a DHCP router would've assigned 100 IP addresses, which in return would've avoided triggering flooding policies. Bad virtual machine setup, on the other hand, could lead to a single IP address for 100s of machines, resulting in her aforementioned triggering of flooding policies.

And yes, I'm looking forward to the order entry due to "please rewrite my applications" requests :)

Re: Cloud Computing Is Not A Resource Problem – It’s A Design Problem

Sachin Agarwal — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:05:40 -0000

Hi Thorsten,

The issue Lori brings up is a network provisioning (lack of IP addresses) rather than a cloud-specific one. It would be the same if she had 100s of (non-cloud) physical machines; unless she supplied non-NATed PCs to test, there would still be the confused web-apps. So I would contend that the lack of resources (IP addresses) caused the issues she described, rather than cloud computing. In my opinion the design assumptions of the applications being deployed over cloud infrastructures are not in line with the new reality of execution environments (e.g. assumptions of non-NATed machines).

Theres a whole bunch of applications that need to be re-written due to (1) Cloud computing execution platforms (2) Multi-core processing environments. Thats good news for developer firms!

Re: Otoy joins the fray of companies offering video games on demand

JamesD — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:52:42 -0000

Thanks for the useful info. It's so interesting

Re: The Rise Of The Digital Entertainment Market

nasdaq — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 05:21:36 -0000

OHH This is good for me. Thank ^_^ I really do appreciate your time on putting this up

Re: Project Status Dashboards Best Practice

Yorikk — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:11:36 -0000

я бы сказал не интересно, а разумно

Re: Project Status Dashboards Best Practice

Avertedd — Tue, 26 May 2009 02:32:28 -0000

Офигеть просто! Все, блин, всё знают, кроме меня