The Changing Online Landscape in your Home

It's become clear that home is turning into a new battle. As platforms like Android and Microsoft seek to be a part of your in-home experience, it's become clear that there are few ways to manage it easily.

One thing that I've been thinking about a lot has been the idea of a configuration tool for your devices. There are services that make it easy to find and install updates, but few to manage your services similar to the online interface from boxee.net, an interesting new project in the digital home space that lets you turn any PC into part of your digital home.

As profiles evolve on the web, the web will become infinitely more useful in managing the services which include content, communities, and communication tools like mail and messaging. But devices still have a ways to go before the advent of a broadband data connection will make them behave more like a PC.

My predictions are:
1) Devices will have logins that will let you register them right when you purchase them
2) Setup will only require setting up the data connection
3) Communities and other settings will come from applications like Mail, Social Networks, and your ISP to be relevant as soon as you turn on the power.

Participation and Web 3.0

Media is changing today because of new technologies which allow people to participate with one another. There are plans to allow users to access programming in new ways from their phones, televisions, and PCs.

YouTube and other sites such as the social networks of MySpace and Facebook highlighted new ways for campaigns to reach and mobilize young voters, allow them to voice their sentiments about the current issues, and spotlight new ways for traditional broadcast journalists to take pulses of the current issues. This allowed pollsters to hit the target issues more focused than ever before.

Tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and Meebo, along with web widgets from companies like ClearSpring and Gigya allow medias to push updates frequently and interact with audiences of customers and partners. New platforms from companies such as Lithium Networks help brands virtually test market new products without having to invest in a full product development cycle prior to releasing products.

Participation will highlight several issues, among the key ones will be identity. Standards are required in order to make sure that a users identity is consistent across sites requiring login. Competition will be fierce, but the standards that win in the online world will most likely be used to help media companies and service providers tailor their services to individuals instead of households. Currently, the target services include OpenID, OAuth, Facebook Connect, MySpace ID, Passport,and Google FriendConnect. Each has a set of challenges but eventually will most likely coexist with one another and allow users to ultimately choose their service.

Long time, no speak

There is lots going on in the world right now.
It rained in September in Silicon Valley. And the electronics industry is beginning a new shift.
In the world of wireless where I work, lots of trends are starting to emerge.
The first is the concept of tiered networks. A network can be defined as an interconnected group or system.
Common attributes bring people together, and there is one massive network formed on top of the World Wide Web. This evolution of the telecommunications network now carries much more data than just voice. Over this, we are immersed in a world of digital content like voice calls, video conferences, email, instant messages, photos, music, and video.
The new layer of this network is the one of communities. It adds a human element to the concept, hence companies like Cisco becoming the "Human Network."
The second concept in this world of human networks is that they create value. Advertising, premium subscriptions, and other services are now running on top of this network where people can connect to one another around the world.
The third concept in this network is the ability to manage many types of content via feeds in a widget. These widgets are not blocks manufactured in the factory. Rather, these widgets are small applications that allow you to quickly access relevant data. Whether that data is personal or meant for the world, we are just now starting to see the value of being able to break things apart and host them with many services running together.
Stay tuned for more....

Welcome to Consumer 3.0!

There are too many things happening in the world today. I've kept my thoughts to a number of meetings over the last year, and witnessed many trends emerging before our very eyes. From the early days of the Internet and Web 1.0, to today's digital entertainment experience with mashups, Web 2.0, and nearly every other buzzword for convergence that we can find, people are overwhelmed with choices.
This year has already seen the announcement of the Apple Phone, Apple TV, Sony's Playstation 3, Sony's Home, an online social experiment, and this is only the beginning. The Internet is proving to be the greatest playground for a host of new services, whether they are broadcast, streaming, download, or Peer to Peer, people are being given new tools to personalize their entertainment experience.
The PC is only the start. From the early days of the PC, and the decisions to make it a platform instead of a device created and maintained by a single company, it has spawned a new range of services enabled by applications on the browser. As the browser continues to mature, it has the ability to change the way we access things on mobile phones, televisions, and even our cars.
From the launch of YouTube and MySpace leading a new generation of explosive entertainment options for the consumer, it is changing the way that we use content, manage content, and access content on nearly anything with a screen and a network connection. Video is leading the pack of a new wave of Web 2.0 companies, but it's only the start. Video is the richest experience because it combines picture and sound together. Add interactivity to it, and you get gaming, an industry that has matured over the last thirty years from a few pixels on a screen to the incredible multimedia experience on today's video game consoles like Sony's Playstation 3, Microsoft's XBox 360, and Nintendo's Wii.
Join me here as I continue to talk about the emerging world of digital media, the entertainment experience, and the trends that are transforming the battle for your entire home.
The future of entertainment is opening up, and a radical new ecosystem will emerge before our very eyes bringing companies together to establish a platform for the digital basics.
After all, it's just photos, music, and video.