The home server in your pocket

Mark R Anderson — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:14:33 -0800

The toughest tech race in the last two years has involved getting office brands into the home den, generally through some form of "home server." Given the billions of dollars in potential ad revenue involved, the intensity of the race makes sense. Unfortunately, the goal now seems to have vanished into thin air.

Everyone knows the parameters of the vision: A server in the home which stores all of the video, audio, photos, online/time-shifted films, and other many-media objects that one might want to suddenly throw up onto a screen or out onto the Triple D Force 10 multiplayer sound system.

The products flowing from this vision have been rather uniform in both design and failure, and are mostly computers disguised to look like den appliances built to slide into your home-based stainless steel 2U server racking system with the faux Russian antique wood facade. Names like Home Media Center, Home Media PC, Media PC, AirTV, ad infinitum, have come out of Dell, Microsoft, Sony, HP, Apple, and, probably, the Church of England.

As far as I can tell, all of these players ignored one thing. Other than my Early Adopter friends, who like tech for tech's sake, I have yet to find anyone who wants a computer insinuated into their entertainment center. The word "computer" implies booting, failing, complexity, frustration, updates, anger, blue screens of death, more anger, whereas the word "entertainment" implies relaxation, no stress, no frustration, no anger -- did I mention no anger? No wonder consumers haven't bitten on the home server idea.

There have been two "accidental" or indirect hits while this war was going on. First up is the TiVo, which had a slow start but which today owns the territory of digital video recorder, even as many new similar units come on board. DirecTV ships TiVos as part of their new HD-format DVRs, and this won't hurt TiVo's market acceptance a bit. Note to vendors in the prior wars: No new box, no computer: This is an "invisible" appliance, and works the first time, every time.

The second hit was the iPod, that seventh-generation run at the MP3 market. Today, everyone has one, and the accessories industry has provided plenty of links between your iPod and your stereo system, if you're interested. While AirTV has gone nowhere, the iPod owns the world. The customer has spoken, and she has picked iPods by the millions.

A couple of weeks ago, Nokia, one of the companies on my list of favorites, announced a re-awakened N-Gage system which, like the new iPods and Zunes and iClicks, is designed to handle video as well as audio; but which is also intended to act like a wireless server. Nokia gets it.

Here's the company's vision of how this technology gets used, according to Mark Selby, vice president, Multimedia, at Nokia:

"We think it will work something like this: someone shares video footage they shot on their mobile device from a night out with a friend, that friend takes that footage and adds an MP3 file – the soundtrack of the evening – then passes it to another friend. That friend edits the footage by adding some photographs and passes it on to another friend and so on. The content keeps circulating between friends, who may or may not be geographically close, and becomes part of the group's entertainment."

Like the iPod, the home server is already here, and it's probably resting in your pocket right now.

Mark Anderson is CEO of Strategic News Service (TM), publisher of the technology industry's most accurate publicly-ranked predictive letter, at www.stratnews.com. He is also CEO of SNS Project Inkwell (TM), bringing appropriate technology design standards to K-12 classrooms (www.projectinkwell.com), and Chair of the "Future in Review (TM)" Conferences (www.futureinreview.com). He is a Contributing Editor to the Industry Standard.

The home server in your pocket

Mark R Anderson — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:14:33 -0800

Here's the company's vision of how this technology gets used, according to Mark Selby, vice president, Multimedia, at Nokia:

"We think it will work something like this: someone shares video footage they shot on their mobile device from a night out with a friend, that friend takes that footage and adds an MP3 file – the soundtrack of the evening – then passes it to another friend. That friend edits the footage by adding some photographs and passes it on to another friend and so on. The content keeps circulating between friends, who may or may not be geographically close, and becomes part of the group's entertainment."

Like the iPod, the home server is already here, and it's probably resting in your pocket right now.