hapa:

Tablets: Always Innovating Touch Book Is Part-Netbook, Part-Tablet, Open Source Frankenstein

I’m actually a fan of this tablet form factor for netbook-class electronics.  At an expected $300, I think we are still about 40% to 50% too pricey to approach mass adoption, but we are 2 to 3 years away from ubiquitos networked, rich-GUI access to cloud-driven application experiences.  This will change the way consumers consume info/tainment at home much like the iPhone, G1, Storm, and Palm will have drastically changed the way we consume the same on-the-go.

I actually think the at-home applications for this class of computing power has a larger market than the on the go applications.  The netbook itself is such a dubious concept in my opinion.  You’ll see those form factors and implementations soon cannibalized by the smartphone market from below and the full blown notebook market from above.

However, the at-home ambient applications such an info/tainment device such as photo-frame, weather beacon, stock market watcher, life-feed alerts, etc, will be further augmented by applications like whole home audio, video telephony, home control, energy monitoring, etc… and lead to a much more useful application of this class of electronics.

No longer do computers at home need to be thought of as workstations or home media servers.  Even before the stillborn home theater PC takes hold, I think we may see the advent of the home info/tainment “pad”, or “frame”, or “panel” and every room in the house will have it’s own targeted class of device.

The real opprtunity here is the software.  The hardware sourcing for any of these applications will be a simple matter of spec effort and logistics.  The key will be driving the right user experience via a software interface that is tailored just right for the set of applications, and for the less tech-sophisticated domestic users.

A small “f”.

When I said “Fuckit” a few days ago, it really should have been a small “f.” I’ve received a few inquiries trying to understand if my skunk works had in fact been skunked, or not…

The cleats aren’t hung up, but the strategic focus is changing even as we speak.  I went into this zonio experiment with a pressing need to get a particular product concept built.  It was a cool product too.  I am still a big believer in the design, but I am not sure there is the right kind of capital ready to be put to work in a fashion I am willing to move forward.  Honestly speaking, there was such a temptation to build a product concept based on technologies that I knew intimately, but now I am finding that a lot of that desire came from the safety of it.  I was also spending an awful lot of time and mental energy trying to move too many partners who did not share my urgency or risk assessment of the opportunity.  Therefore it was a challenging nut to crack.  Top it all off, and my largest competitive advantage was first-mover advantage… not terribly robust in the CE market.

Another confounding issue was that within the next month or so, the likelihood of getting an early 2010 product built and placed is prohibitively slim.  Making this an even more weighty condition is the fact that there has been an incredible amount of movement and progress in enabling technologies for a competitive architecture that will be hard to compete against.  I will talk more about this later.  I am actually leaning towards documenting exactly what I believe the initial product concept should be based on these evermore market-ready technologies.  It won’t seem groundbreaking to those who are familiar with the technologies, but it may prove to be a unique perspective on a set of technologies that are currently targeted at a totally different set of consumer use cases.

My recent learnings and acceptance of some harsh economic realities will weigh on what kind of marketing strategy and partnerships will need to exist to pull it off.

I think Hulu and Boxee might be very clever!

hapa:

… and not “clever” in the purely flattering British sense… I’m starting to wonder whether Hulu and Boxee are really duping us here.

Now, OBVIOUSLY Hulu will be back up and running on Boxee very soon.  I mean, how could Hulu be sooo stupid as to so blatantly disenfranchise their users?  …particularly, the key influencer set… tech savy, early adoptor, tweeting, blogging, word-of-mouth generators.

So while we’re looking forward to the end of our little interruption in service, consider this:

On their own, Hulu and Boxee, both, were mainly in early-adoptor-zone (EAZ).  You could argue that Hulu after the Superbowl ad, was trying to cross the cha…. (egh… just can’t say it).  Anyway.  In a classic example of “the whole being greater than the sum of the parts,” when embroiled in a little geek-news drama, you get an ignition effect that helps get both Boxee and Hulu’s individual stories out to a larger audience.

See for yourself, take a look at Google Trends for February (Hulu in red, Boxee in blue), and the YTD running chart below.

The recent press coverage has Hulu’s news references exceeding the lead up to the Super Bowl, and we’ll see if the search volume gets a bigger uptick than it has so far… though it is noticable, but not dramatic.

Even better is the blog trends chart (Hulu in blue, Boxee in red) from Technorati:

Clearly the largest beneficiery has been Boxee.  They have more news reference and blog mentions than they have had in their history, and their search index is only modestly lower than during their “soft” launch late last Fall and when they were name dropping with Netflix and Joost in what very well could have been a paid press campaign (not sure).

That they’re the good-guy in this melee, it leads me to think that they will let it run its course and continue to benefit from the chatter.  I love Boxee, and much of their value is in the social networking aspects… so getting more eyeballs (and one would hope, users) like this is a stroke of cunning genius, or amazing luck.

Now, how long do we have to wait for Hulu to make their big magnanamous move and finally side with their users???

Data points to Android

I’m believing more in the power of Android.  I suspect that in 5 years, there will be an android-enabled device in every room of my home.

The CE world as we’ve known it is gone.  I actually think MS and Apple have lots of be concerned about.

"Fuckit."

—Me