It’s that time of year again when everyone’s favorite Cupertino, CA company goes on a lawsuit spree in a futile attempt to squash all the rumors about upcoming products. This year’s Macworld Expo looks to be one of the most interesting in years with rumors of new low-price iMacs and iPods. Check with us later in the day to see which new devices are coming out and what impact they will have on media authoring.

So what are you wishing for from Apple this year?

That’s not a typo in the headline because that’s the name of a new group on the flickr photo-sharing site. Parking Lot Indicatr is a collaboration of random geeks with cell phone cams/digital cameras who upload photos from the parking lots of publicly traded companies in Silicon Valley. The thinking is of course that companies who have more workers on evenings and weekends have higher morale and products in the pipeline. Behold, the age of the Big Brother panopticon surveillance society is here!

This would be a great idea for car-loving Hollywood as well. Let’s start going around and snapping photos of studio parking lots (Quick! before they make it illegal). Any takers?

Cell phone or PDA? Some people use both. Some people would like to have both integrated into one device. Convergence is a goldmine for the phone manufacturers since they get to sell expensive PDA phones with lots of features. The downside of course is that these large bricks rarely work well, are expensive and are too fragile. Not to mention that they either don’t have the form factor that works well for a phone or a PDA. As a recent survey just revealed we all know that a jack of all trades is master of none:

The study and survey noted that device vendors obviously believe in the
convergence of the two types of devices or they wouldn’t be adding
wireless connectivity to PDAs and PDA functions to phones, the study
noted. But each form factor has its strengths and a survey run as part
of the study found that users don’t necessarily want convergence.

The survey also notes that people rarely use most of the features in their PDA phones anyways.

As if we needed any more evidence that TV is dying: Videora is a new product that essentially acts like a Tivo. You subscribe to shows that you like and it automatically downloads the episodes (using BitTorrent) to your computer. The product is so similar to Tivo that the company sent them a cease and desist letter stating that they have trademarked words like “season pass.” If you have Tivo suing you then you know you must be doing something right.

Personally, I find it a bit odd that Videora expects consumers to pay money for a product whose only purpose is to violate copyright. Not that I would ever endorse copyright infringement but a little birdie told me if you are broke or happen to not use a Windoze XP box you can easily use the RSS client in Azureus to do exactly the same thing. The product is free and java-based (so it will run on Mac, Linux and Windows).

P.S.: GigaOm seems to think Videora is all part of a Canadian conspiracy. Blame Canada!

Ever since Apple’s airport technology has popularized Wi-Fi you can now find wireless hotspots nearly anywhere that you spend a lot of time. At home, at work, the airport and the local cafe are all expected to have wireless installed and the coverage is growing every day. If you don’t believe me, check out this map created by SoCalWUG (the Southern California Wireless Users Group) where they flew over LA in an airplane to see how many hotspots they could find. Wi-Fi uses an unlicensed band of our radio spectrum which brings up some interesting issues.

In Japan and Taiwan, cell phone makers already sell models of phones that not only use the local cellular network but can switch to use internet connections over Wi-Fi so that you don’t have to use up or pay for precious minutes. Like most good technologies, this may have arrived in Asia first but it is just now beginning to trickle down to the second-class USofA:

The new Wi-Fi handset, to be known as the F-1000, would be designed to work with Vonage phone service out of the box for U.S. subscribers. The phones would take advantage of local radio airwaves on the most mainstream of Wi-Fi standards—the so-called “B” standard.

The Wi-Fi handset can act as a replacement to traditional fixed-line phones that a subscriber might have around the house. It can also work when it is within range of any nearby Wi-Fi hotspot out of the house, according to UTStarcom.

If you think turning all the cable/telecom/power companies into dumb pipes is a revolution, imagine what the impact will be on the cellular phone industry. Today we have several companies that have virtual monopolies in each major market using incompatible wireless technologies. If you’ve ever had to deal with the poor service and extortionate fees of a cellphone I am sure that you will eagerly anticipate the early death of the cellular firms. Remember when they promised “wireless internet”? Be careful what you wish for…

You already know which of your friends own a Tivo because once someone buys one all they can do is talk about it. Even worse, if you do own one you start seeking out other Tivo owners so that you can compare what whacky selection your personal livingroom assistant has proffered for your perusal.

Tivo owners have been hanging by a thread for nearly a year to get that TivoToGo feature activated. In a nutshell: it allows you to transfer saved shows from your Tivo to a Windows PC. Ostensibly this would be your laptop so that you can catch up on the latest episode of the Sopranos while you commute on the train (clearly none of Tivo’s execs lives in LA).

Tivo is just a geeky Linux computer that lurks in your den in disguise. At its core is a bare-bones computer that records TV programs onto a computer hard drive as a digital file. Transferring that file to another computer isn’t really a challenge at all. In fact if you’ve ever joined the discussions on one of the many Tivo hacking sites you would know that your favorite neighborhood pirates have been, in fact, doing this for years. So why did it take so long to have this “feature” come along?

Note: Not all shows may be eligible for transfer from your TiVo box to your computer. Programming providers may restrict or limit the ability to record, display, view or transfer any particular program using a variety of copy protection mechanisms.

That’s right. Tivo allows random people wearing suits sitting in offices to decide what you can or cannot put onto your computer. That may not seem so bad until you realize that they can change their minds at any time and there is nothing you can do about it. If you buy a DVD from me you expect to be able to watch it whenever you want. What if a couple weeks later I decide to send a signal to your DVD player that I’ve changed my mind and you shouldn’t be able to watch that DVD anymore?

Well, this is basically what is starting to happen. This is also why the release of this new “feature” was met with so little interest. Anyone who really wants to watch Tivo files on their computer already knows how to do it anyways.

Sure the event is designed to promote the book but that doesn’t mean it won’t be interesting.

Ever since Apple introduced Final Cut Pro in 1999, Hollywood has been in a tailspin. It took nearly three decades for studios to adopt flat-bed technology for film editing. It took another 20 for them to dump film and move into the digital arena with Avid technology. However, today anyone with a thousand dollars and a firewire cable can now edit just like the big boys.

It has been five years now since the intro of Final Cut Pro. There was nothing remarkable about digital editing, Avid has done that for years. What was remarkable was that FCP did not require any specialized hardware: all you need is a desktop Mac. This saves you tens of thousands of dollars and simplifies your post production.

Five years ago everyone told me that FCP would never catch on. Avid was too entrenched. Avid was better. Sure it was more expensive but you got what you paid for. Now, FCP is responsible for nearly every reality TV show, student/low-budget film, and increasingly feature films. If you want to know where film and post-production are heading in the new “Digital Revolution” it is wise to listen to Murch.

A visit to LAFCPUG (the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro Users Group) is also greatly informative.

There is a massive war taking place just outside your door. You may not even be aware of it and yet it dwarfs the cola wars in its scope and intensity. For many years people have been fighting to bring services into homes and businesses. Telecommunications companies fought to bring in copper wires for phone service, cable companies fought to bring coax and so on and so forth. But now nearly each of these “lines” including power lines can provide Internet connectivity. Does it matter to you if you use satellite or cable to use eBay? Of course not.

SBC, the No. 2 U.S. telecommunications company, plans to spend about $5 billion over the next three years to build and connect customers to a high-speed data network designed to handle video, voice and Internet access over one line.

Where this gets really complicated is that once you have access to the net you can use all sorts of third party services. Don’t like your local phone company? Just dump ‘em and use Vonage instead. If you’re a cable company you are beginning to drool because now you have a legitimate reason to get customers to dump phone lines. Telecoms haven’t missed the party either. They realize that they can stream video over their internet connections eliminating any reason to have cable installed in the home. Even the power companies are getting in on the act.

What does this all mean? All this competition inevitably leads to one conclusion: as each service provider trample over each other to provide you with broadband net access they render themselves more irrelevant. Should you get DSL via SBC or cable via Adelphia? It doesn’t matter because you are no longer going to be dependent on them for services, they just become a big, DUMB PIPE. Well, five to ten years down the line that is…

It is now the year 2005 and we are still left wondering where are all the jetpacks, flying cars and aluminum suits promised to us by every Sci-Fi film. While we may still not have a personal jetpack to rise high above the LA traffic and smog we can at least breathe a sigh of relief that someone is finally beginning to integrate audio technology into clothing. After all, putting some audio cables inside a jacket is merely the low-hanging fruit of our techno-fashion future.

In a bid to increase the appeal of Motorola’s phones and a continuation of Burton’s iPod integrated line of clothing, the two companies announced today that they will be selling jackets that integrate cell phones and iPods in one convenient (if expensive) snowboarder jacket.

The jackets will have a padded casing for a Motorola cell phone and an MP3 music player. They will feature a device on the sleeve that lets the wearer control incoming and outgoing calls, and toggle back and forth to music, sending audio signals to removable speakers in the hood.

The new clothes will use Blue Tooth, a popular technology that allows devices such as headsets and computers to communicate with each other over a short range without wired connections.

Integrating our portable gadgets (that seem to multiply every time we aren’t looking) into clothing has seemed like a no-brainer forever. Burton’s involvement in this initiative is no surprise since after the release of the initial iPods they announced their first iPod jacket. It was later followed with an entire line of iPod integrated gear likethis backpack with iPod integration. Do only hip snowboarders deserve this technology? Apparently Motorola believes this is the way to “hipsterize” their image as they have lost ground in the cell phone arena in 2004.