The Richter Scale^®

Over the prior few years I have spent more than half of my time on the road - at trade shows, business meetings, and vacation travel. And being the gadget geek that I am, I always carry around lots of tech toys, including a cell phone or two, a Nintendo DS Lite, a notebook computer, a camera or two, my Sony Reader, and my iPod.

As anyone who travels with lots of gadgets know, you generally need a separate charger for each device, which makes for a lot of extra bulk in one’s carry-on luggage (I don’t know about you, but I would never check vital chargers in my checked luggage).

About four years ago in a Brookstone’s at the Philadelphia airport I came across something called the iGo Juice70 - a universal power supply which came with a variety of laptop charger “tips” and the ability to also charge a second smaller piece of electronics at the same time as powering the notebook computer. I bought it and was immensely pleased with my purchase. I later found that they offered a three-way splitter for powering the smaller gadgets and got that too, allowing me to charge my notebook, cell phone, iPod, and DS Lite all at the same time. Wow. Plus I can use my Juice on airplanes where there’s seat outlet power in the form of a 12VDC car charger plug.

My first Juice adapter burned out about 18 months ago, which was a disappointment, but I bought a new one immediately at the Radio Shack near my Texas office and it has worked great, all over the world.

My only frustration would be (and still is) that I frequently get newer gadgets than they have power tips for, and thus have to wait a few months for them to have compatible tips for my gadgets. And I still have to carry separate chargers for the diverse camera batteries I use as I can’t usually schedule myself to use the in-camera charge for this. But that is not a problem iGo can easily solve themselves.

The biggest overall drawback I have found so far has been the price of the tips ($9.99 for each new one) and the power adapters (the Juice70 is $129.99), and I wish I could get a short 3-inch cord to connect the gadgets to the power adapter plug instead of the bulky “cord savers” iGo presently sells, as with all my gadgets, having three sets of cord savers takes up a lot of space. A tip organizer would be nice too.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, I met with iGo’s marketing folks who showed me a smaller, sleeker version of the Juice power adapter (can’t wait for that to be readily available), and something called the iGo powerXtender (see photo above) - a dual AA battery powered charger which uses all the same iGo power tips I already use for my gadgets.

iGo sent me an evaluation unit of the powerXtender, and I have managed to put it to use a number of times when I had forgotten to recharge certain devices overnight. Most recently it was my Blackberry on Bonaire, as well as my kids Nintendo DS Lites during a long trip from New Mexico to San Juan (while the whole family was playing Uno wirelessly on four DS Lites). The powerXtender lasted for about a half-dozen charges. It doesn’t fully charge the device it’s working with (at least not in my tests), but does provide emergency power, which is what iGo promotes the powerXtender for.

For $15.99 the iGo powerXtender is a great deal for existing iGo product users, because you will likely already have all the power tips you need. For people new to the iGo product line you need to be aware that new tips are $9.99 each, so if you have several gadgets this can get costly quickly, which might be an argument to just jump in with both feet and also get the Juice70 or similar portable power adapter too.

I give the iGo Juice70 a 7.5 and the iGo powerXtender an 8.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale based on my prolonged use of these devices and the drawbacks mentioned above.

In catching up on some blog reading via my favorite blog aggregrator, Bloglines I stumbled across a new feature the talented folks at Bloglines have developed. They call it the Bloglines Image Wall.

The Bloglines Image Wall is a 6x4 grid of images, generated dynamically, showing the latest images from blogs that Bloglines has indexed into their databases. And it changes while you watch. And if you want to see what blog a particular image comes from, just click on it to go to that blog. It’s a fascinating way to discover blogs you never knew existed (but it requires them to post pictures).

Apparently after they launched the Image Wall a few weeks ago, Bloglines discovered that it was being viewed in family and school environments - a problem since some blogs post images which might not be appropriate for some audiences, so the Image Wall has been moved to its own domain and features an 18+ warning on the home page.

The timing is interesting. A few weeks ago I got a notice from the U.S. Consulate on the neighboring island of Curaçao requesting that I register on a U.S. State Department web site:

If you are an American citizen living or traveling in Aruba or the Netherlands Antilles, the U.S. State Department and the Consulate General in Curaçao strongly encourage you to register your trip on the State Department’s travel registration website at https://travelregistration.state.gov/. 

Since then I have seen a number of blogs run by military strategists discuss the possible invasion of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao by Venezuelan dictator and madman President Hugo Chavez.

The various blogs are:

- Strategy Page - The Dutch Defend Their World Empire
- The Dignified Rant - Dutch Treat
- Strategy Page - Might Venezuela Looks for Justice
- Pito’s Blog - What Would Happen If Venezuela Invaded Curacao

In reviewing the above blogs, it appears the primary source for this topic of Venezuela invading the ABC islands stems from the Strategy Page web site. But I find this particular quote chilling:

But for the last two years, Venezuelan officials, including the country’s demagogic president, Hugo Chavez, have made numerous public statements about the “reunification” of the islands of the Dutch West Indies (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaτao) with Venezuela.

The reality is that Venezuela is only 50 miles from Bonaire, and they could invade and take over the island in mere hours. The other reality is that such hostilities would probably give the West a great excuse to remove Chavez from power. But Chavez, at least from where I sit, is a cowboy - a socialist cowboy with far too much oil money in his hands - and thus capable of most anything the rest of us would consider crazy.

Bonaire’s change of status from being part of the Netherlands Antilles to being a remote municipality of The Netherlands, scheduled for December 15, 2008, can’t come soon enough for my taste, assuming that at the very least it serves as a further deterrent to Chavez’s purported desire to reunify the islands with Venezuela. However, the blogs I list above stress Holland’s inability to respond militarily to any incursion, so as an American living abroad, I can only hope that my registering with the State Department as requested will make sure the U.S. military knows where to find me should Chavez decide he wants to claim the ABCs for his own.

Registering your trip allows Embassies and Consulates abroad to send you newsletters and time-sensitive travel warnings and public announcements specific to the areas in which you will be traveling or living.  The information you provide also makes it easier for them to contact you in case of emergency, or to contact your family or friends in the United States in the event of an emergency abroad.  Registration will also allow residents of Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles to receive notification when the vice consul will be on your island.

But still, the timing of the registration request is curious. Maybe the U.S. Consulate over in Curaçao knows something we don’t?

I attended an interesting conference a few weeks ago at which a number of people whom I respect shared their advice for presidential candidates in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The conference ended with a drop in visit by New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (himself a candidate for President, running on the Democratic ticket.

Other discussions at that conference included ones dealing with the impact of electronic communications on print media, and my aging brain slowly put together all sorts of disparate pieces. The result of my ruminations was a question: “Can the people of the U.S. elect a President with the same tools and principles used in the new Internet?” These tools include things like wikis, blogs, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, and more.

The more I have thought about this idea, the more I have come to the realization that just as there has been a shift from physical media to electronic media, there will ultimately be a similar shift in campaigning. And thus was born the concept that I call the Wiki Presidency.

I’ve started a new blog at http://wikipresidency.blogspot.com/ to discuss and explore the Wiki Presidency, and hope that you’ll join me there and become involved in getting campaign financing abuse and partisanship out of the presidential campaign process, while bringing the ideas and energy of real people into the process.

The Blu-ray Disc camp has been crowing in recent weeks about how it has already won the next generation movie disc format battle, touting the fact that in early January, there were twice as many Blu-ray movies sold as HD-DVD. The Blu-ray folks are right, based on numbers I’ve seen, that they are outselling HD-DVD movies, but the differences are slim, and the numbers are very low.

Sony, in particular, has been posturing about the “large” numbers of PS3 systems sold since that platform was released in mid-November 2006. Every PS3 system incorporates a Blu-ray player. By my estimates, according to data from Sony and NPD Group, as of the end of January, there were 1.25 million PS3 sold (one million through end of 2006 per Sony, 244,000 sold in January per NPD). Combine that with the standalone players sold, and you add maybe another few hundred thousand.

That compares with just a few hundred thousand HD-DVD players in the same time frame - about 262,000 in 2006 (170,000 standalone units per the HD-DVD group, and 92,000 HD-DVD add-on Xbox 360 drives), and some relatively equally smaller number in January 2007. For argument’s sake, let’s say that by the end of January 2007, there were 1.5 million Blu-ray capable players vs. 300,000 HD-DVD capable players in consumer’s hands. The actual exact numbers don’t really matter, but what is striking is that this means there are roughly five (that’ 5!) times as many Blu-ray players out there as HD-DVD players.

But most of those Blu-ray players are PS3 game consoles. Sony’s posturing about Blu-ray player sales in the form of PS3 game consoles is just that - posturing. That’s because only a fraction of the PS3 users out there are buying Blu-ray movies. Look at these numbers from an article in Next Generation less than a month ago, where Sony Computer Entertainment America is quoted as quoting NPD Group as saying that cumulative Blu-ray movie sales at the time stood at 439,000 units vs. a cumulative 438,000 HD-DVD movies. In my book, that’s a dead even race. But more importantly, it shows clearly that people are not buying Sony PS3s to watch Blu-ray movies. If they were, the Blu-ray movie numbers would be three times what NPD Group says (according to Sony).

Those numbers imply a tie ratio - the ratio at which movies are tied to players - as approximately 0.33 for Blu-ray players, and about 1.4 for HD-DVD players. However, in the short run (i.e., the present), all these numbers don’t really matter because they are still pretty small in the grand scheme of things - high-definition movie playback is for all practical purposes still a niche market, and anyone claiming to be king of that market is making a mountain out of a mole hill. It’s not until the installed base of players numbers in the several tens of millions that this market will be a real mass-market.

So what’s Sony to do get people to start using their PS3s to watch movies instead of just playing games on them? I have a short list of suggestions:

1) Include a real DVD remote with each PS3. You can now buy a $25 Sony-branded Bluetooth Blu-ray DVD remote control for the PS3, but it really should be included free with every PS3 if Sony is serious about the PS3 being a real Blu-ray player.

2) Add an infrared (IR) port to the PS3 so that folks can use their universal home theater remote controls to control DVD and Blu-ray DVD playback on a PS3. For older units this can be a USB add-on, and for newer units it should be built it. Blu-ray is supposedly a home theater delight, so why shouldn’t consumers be able to use their home theater remotes to control it? Bluetooth is “cool”, but IR is the standard for remotes.

3) Provide decent DVD upscaling so that older DVDs still look decent when played back on the PS3 on that nice new HD-TV. This would provide people with greater purchase justification for the PS3, as they could then sell their old upscaling DVD player on eBay (not that it would bring in much money, but it’s still a great rationalization point).

4) Offer a breadth of family-friendly games so that moms and non-game playing spouses would feel better about having it in the family (or communal) living room. Nintendo has done this so very right with the Wii, but meanwhile among the sparse assortment of PS3 games, you pretty much have only Mature and Teen ESRB rated titles.

5) Include a way to write to PS2 game cartridges as well as the current optional dongle to read them, so that the living room PS2 can truly be replaced by a PS3, as opposed to only kind of, somewhat, almost replacing the PS2 (and that’s in the U.S. - European PS3 will have far greater PS2 compatibility issues when they ship).

6) Rebrand the PS3 as a Blu-ray disc player which also plays games, instead of a game console which also plays Blu-ray discs.

Without better addressing PS3 owner apathy in using the PS3 for playing Blu-ray movies, the tie ratio for Blu-ray titles to Blu-ray players will continue to embarrass the Blu-ray camp as it becomes more and more obvious that the majority of PS3 owners aren’t watching movies. 

One of the news services I get daily clips from about various intellectual property issues in this electronics age is Doug Isenberg’s Gigalaw. This morning one of the headlines caught my attention: Fair Use Bill would ‘Legalize Hacking.’ RIAA Says. Boo hoo for the RIAA.

”Fair Use” is a long standing doctrine under U.S. copyright law, which permits limited use of copyrighted material without permission from copyright holders for scholarly efforts and review. The fair use doctrine has also been applied to the right of consumers to make backups of software they have purchased. Under the fair use doctrine, we can backup our CDs to our hard disks to preserve our purchase and data. However, fair use does not permit one to wantonly make copies of things and distribute them to others.

But that distinction does not matter to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), an organization which helped bully the Digital Millennium Copyright Act through Congress in 1998. The DMCA made it illegal to reverse engineer and disable most any effort used to protect digital content. The DMCA effectively slammed the door on fair use as provided for in copyright law.

Now, U.S. Representatives Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, and John Doolittle, a California Republican, according to an article in InfoWorld, have introduced a bill called The Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship (FAIR USE) Act in order to restore fair use rights to consumers.

This new bill upsets the RIAA greatly, considering that they have worked hard to trample upon the rights of consumers with the DMCA, and then have embarked upon a “reeducation” campaign about file sharing, where the educational part involves suing everyone they think has been illegally sharing music files. Very consumer friendly organization, the RIAA - not!

Under the DMCA, without fair use provisions, we consumers are beholden to the whims and mercies of distributors of electronic media content under the guise (or curse) of something called Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM is a bane to one’s being able to freely use purchased media for one’s own use. For example, if you buy a movie from Xbox Live Marketplace to view on your Xbox 360, you have a limited number of views and days in which to do the viewing, and then poof, the content is no longer accessible. With Apple iTunes music and video, you can only view the content on a limited number of “authorized” PCs or Apple iPod players. Should Apple decide to stop supporting iTunes platform at some point in the future, you would no longer have access to that content. And the future is even scarier as some companies have suggested that we should pay for every use of content - imaging being charged money for listening to the same song over and over, or having to pay something every time your kid wants to see Shrek on your TV, even if it’s the 17th viewing of the same movie.

On the flip side, if you take care of your CDs and DVDs, you can have them last decades (in theory), and you can also backup the CDs into whatever the most current safe storage form is (and DVDs too, but then arguably you’re breaking the laws created by the DMCA). And you don’t have to pay for repeated use.

Our use of content as consumers and purchasers should not be dictated solely by draconian organizations like the RIAA, nor by corporations looking to squeeze us for more money at every turn.

Boucher and Doolittle are doing a great thing by introducing this bill. One can only hope that their efforts to protect consumers will win against the big dollar lobbying by the music and movie industries. Boucher is no stranger to the fight for Fair Use, incidentally - in 2001, he gave a speech about this very topic.

There’s no question that copyright law needs to be respected. Artists and creators of works - whether they be musicians, writers, actors, software developers, artists, or any one of a near limitless number of professional content creators - need the respect (and revenue) their works generate. Making copies of content and given them to one’s friends is wrong (we call that stealing), and selling illegal copies for a profit is even worse (we call that piracy). But on the other end of the spectrum is the fair use doctrine, and the necessary right of people to protect the investment they have made in their purchases. That right needs to be returned to the people, and protected.