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On September 5, 2006 Katie Couric will make broadcast history–not by becoming the anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” but by participating in the first network television newscast to metamorphose into a full-featured Internet simulcast. Sean McManus, President, CBS News and Sports, explains: “For people who can’t be in front of their televisions when the Continue Reading →

Threat Level: Red–London’s Heathrow Airport shut down due to an alleged terrorist plot to blow up 10 planes headed for the United States. Versions of that story have been all over the media for the past few days.  And, of course, they have been all over the blogosphere. Business as usual, right?  Well … not Continue Reading →

SONY JUST ANNOUNCED A NEW personal communications device called “mylo” (MY Life Online). It’s a Wi-Fi-based, PSP-shaped Instant Messenger with Web browsing, VoIP phone with MP3/Video playback capabilities. According to John Kodera, a director of product marketing at Sony, “Our mylo personal communicator lets you have the fun parts of a computer in the palm Continue Reading →

I love Radio Shack.  I’ve been shopping there since I was a kid.  They have all of the stuff that techno-geeks crave.  Gear, toys, things you can build circuits with .–everything for the wirehead in all of us. That’s the good news.  Unfortunately, Radio Shack (like all retailers) has to compete for your hard-earned dollars Continue Reading →

Microsoft has announced Zune, its new personal media brand and associated download service.  There is much speculation about the player and its features. Pundits are weighing in on the validity of the rumored “closed” system (similar to Apple’s iPod/iTunes environment)–good idea, bad idea? There will be video, but not until later, it will be wireless, Continue Reading →

There’s a video on YouTube simply called, “war.” is a home video of a trip down the stairs and into the street with alarm sirens blaring.  Perhaps it was made in Israel (as the descriptive tag “16.7.06 war in haifa. hisbllah attak haifa” suggests), perhaps it was made somewhere else –we cannot be sure. Is Continue Reading →

CAN YOU NAME A FEATURE that plain old telephone service (POTS) has that voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephone service does not? It’s pretty easy to do it in reverse. VoIP service has caller ID, voicemail, conference calling, call forwarding, etc., etc. But there is one feature that POTS lines have that most people are Continue Reading →

In my book, Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (Focal Press; 1st edition, 2006), I spend some quality time explaining why (at some point in the near future) cable operators will need to open up their walled gardens and let their subscribers access files from the public Internet with their set-top boxes. Continue Reading →

IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE A professional observer with a magic telescope. Like ordinary telescopes, it lets you see things that are far away, but this one is attached to a magic screen, so I can use it to tell my story. On your magic screen, you see a farm in a distant land. Each morning Continue Reading →

ACCORDING TO AN ARTICLE BY Paul Tharp in the New York Post, the New York State Consumer Protection Board has its knickers in a knot over video.google.com. “It’s fairly easy to find [explicit] videos throughout the Internet, but it’s certainly another case for Google to organize these videos and present them so freely on a Continue Reading →