Rifling through my notebook

IDG News Service — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:47:37 -0400

Seen and heard last week at Network World's DEMOfall 08 in San Diego:

When RealNetworks took the wraps off new DVD-to-PC copying software, one major selling point was that users now can sleep soundly knowing for the first time that their homemade copies of commercial movies are perfectly legal.

Maybe. The motion picture industry, which doesn't even like to see the words "DVD" and "copying" in the same sentence, said it's not ready to endorse that blanket assurance from RealNetworks, as it had learned of the product only days before. The industry has fought such DVD copying in the past, last year losing a drawn-out courtroom battle with an upstart maker of high-end media servers, a ruling one losing attorney suggested --warned, actually -- would "open the floodgates" to the type of inexpensive DVD copying system RealNetworks unveiled. The industry has appealed that court ruling.

Called RealDVD, the US$50 application ($30 introductory price) is designed to make digital movie collections more accessible, portable and easier to manage. "Unlike existing consumer applications on the market today, RealDVD is licensed DVD software that saves a secure copy of a DVD to the hard drive without removing or altering the CSS encryption," the company says. RealDVD needs 10 to 40 minutes to copy a flick and eats up 4 to 8 gig per saved movie, so portable storage devices will be required to augment hard drives for users who want to collect more than a handful of movies.

As for that much-ballyhooed promise of legality, the Motion Picture Association of America isn't ready to agree: "We really just became aware of this in the past 24 hours," Elizabeth Kaltman, a spokeswoman for the MPAA, told me. "We have nothing else to say at this time."

I'm betting its lawyers will later.

A bit later in the program, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal fame conducted a panel in which they were to "interview" each other in the same aggressive manner one might expect of these veteran journalists when taking on a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. That didn't happen -- they were cupcakes toward each other -- but they had plenty of interesting things to say, including this rather ominous warning from Mossberg concerning the future of 3G phones and the increasingly heavy-duty computing they are enabling:

"I think there's an enormous cloud over all of this," Mossberg said. "I'm really beginning to wonder whether, at least in the United States, the 3G networks that are supposed to provide a broadband experience are going to be able to hold up as people use these devices as little laptops."

SpinSpotter, a start-up founded by former radio talk-show host/Microsoft executive Todd Herman, debuted a browser plug-in that is designed to help users identify media bias with precision and objectivity. ... Uh, good luck with that.

"By installing a SpinSpotter toolbar called Spinoculars, users of the SpinSpotter service can easily see, share and edit any clear sign of bias anywhere on the Web," the company said. You can see the potential in such a service if it would stick to matters of demonstrable fact (such as they exist).

However, SpinSpotter wants to referee writing and I had a problem with one of the examples it flagged from a New York Times story that included this passage: "Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton ... delivered an emphatic plea at the Democratic National Convention to unite behind her rival, Senator Barack Obama, no matter what ill will lingered."

A penalty flag was thrown at the phrase emphatic plea: "The reporter has no idea how 'emphatic' she was or whether she made a 'plea' or a calculated political decision. The fact is, she asked her delegates to endorse Obama."

Phooey. Clinton's speech was indeed a plea (I watched it) and it was certainly most emphatic. Neither the word plea nor the word emphatic describes anything other than her verbal intensity and delivery style. Even a con man can deliver an emphatic plea (that's not a subtle dig at Clinton, by the way). Had the Times writer called the speech "heartfelt" or "sincere," we could talk about the unknowable ... and bias.

A minor disagreement, but key to my bigger point: Subjectivity and its evil twin, bias, are in the eye of the beholder more often than not. Neither software nor the wisdom of crowds can alter that fact.

The show's gee-whiz, hold-it-in-your-hands hit product was the Plastic Logic reader designed specifically for business users. It's the size of a standard sheet of paper, three-tenths of an inch thin and weighs less than a pound, yet can be stuffed with thousands of documents in myriad formats that can in turn be read anywhere and annotated.

The unnamed reader won't ship until next year and pricing remains a mystery, but expect to see these babies popping on airplane flights -- albeit in first class.

Usable Security Systems was there making a play for those Internet users who simply cannot keep straight all of their myriad passwords -- in other words, everybody. Its first service, UsableLogin, asks the user to remember only two things -- a recognizable photograph and a simple, easily remembered "code word." The company takes care of all the serious security on the back end. Provided it holds up to the scrutiny of real security pros, it looks like the kind of thing I might give a whirl.

A company called Mapflow showed off an iPhone application that could redefine commuting and address the fact that "public transit goes from where we don't live to where we don't work." Described as a cross between public transit, carpooling and eBay, Avego uses GPS and smartphones to match drivers who have empty seats with fellow travelers willing to pay for a ride. I'm entirely too antisocial for this kind of thing, but could see it catching on -- especially when gas hits $5 or $6 a gallon.

Finally, a company called Cerego introduced its product called iKnow, which according to the DEMO show book, "empowers people to learn faster, remember longer, and manage their memory for a lifetime."

I meant to get over to their booth to learn more, but, uh, well ... plum forgot.

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Rifling through my notebook