After now almost 2 weeks of heavy duty use of this machine, I must say Windows 8.1 is not fully baked when it comes to its tiled/touch/app store experience, however it’s not the nightmare I expected.
The FrostWire 5.7.0. currently circulating on the Internet was built on this machine, the experience was quite pleasant as a workstation, and then I carried it around for the North American Bittorrent conference and during that time it was a very convenient tablet while I was doing all the social networking during the event.
So I’m tired of evangelizing eBooks/eReaders in person and I guess I’ll do a lot more good by writing this so that you can share it next time you want to convince a friend to live in the year 2013 and stop the mad romanticism about the handicapped physical books, it’s just ludacris reading a book on paper unless it has no digital form.
Here is an ever growing list of why I prefer eBooks to physical books
(got more reasons, leave a comment below)
They are cheaper.
They are available immediately, no need to order, wait, or move physically to get them.
They never get lost.
They don’t take any space, or weight, this brings many added benefits to the world:
4.1. You can have a library of thousands of books with you wherever you are, on different devices (since they can be stored in the cloud)
4.2. You will free a lot of shelve space at home/office, which also means less dust being created at home.
4.3. If all students were forced to use eBooks they wouldn’t have to carry such heavy backpacks which can deform their spines.
4.4. If all students used eBooks exclusively, there would be CO2 emission reductions since that’s a lot of weight that doesn’t have to be transported by cars/buses/trains.
You can read them on different devices: e-readers, computers, smartphones.
You can copy and paste.
If you lend them you never have to beg your friend to give the book back, it comes back to you automatically.
You can search inside them.
If you don’t know the meaning of a word, a dictionary is always there for you, just touch/click the word in question.
The same book may come in different languages.
You can change font types, font sizes, color of the screen, margins, line spacing.
You can have lots of bookmarks, you can navigate your bookmarks.
You can read them with the light turned off.
You can read them with one hand, turning pages is effortlessly. Awesome when you go out for a walk and you have only one hand available.
No more wrinkled, stained, or broken pages.
You can share your highlights on social networks.
You can open a web browser right from the book if there’s a web reference.
There’s no such thing as “out of print”
It learns your reading speed and tells you how much time left you have on the current chapter or the whole book.
…
need more reasons?
or you will keep reading books because you like the smell of paper, even though there’s really a lot of stinky books out there.
are you still using cassette tapes, vinyl discs, hell are you still using CDs?
I was imagining a world maybe 5 years from now, where there’s an insane amount of Google-Glass-like devices out there.
If Google was bold enough to map the streets with cars equipped with GPS and cameras, I think one of the top uses they must have somewhere on their master plan is to use every Glass user’s video feed to map reality to a more fine grained level. It’s easy to see how this data could be used to create 3D detailed models of every city in the world, not just out on the street, but inside buildings to provide us with navigation everywhere, outside or inside.
This will def. be another level of creepy, I foresee a battle to preserve the privacy inside homes and office once this starts happening. How do you prevent someone else from not mapping the inside of your home or house and uploading it to the web?
I’m personally trying to simplify my life as much as possible, getting rid of the things I don’t need/enjoy. Keys are one of them. When you have too many locks in your life, this is particularly uncomfortable, and those few electronic locks in the mix that you find nowadays with fobs/passwords can only help so much, fobs still can be lost (lost my office’s key fob this week for example, it’s been a nightmare and it’ll cost me $50 to replace if I don’t find it)
In an ideal world, whoever solves this problem in a way that it’s cheap, safe, uses as little energy as possible (none would be sick so it can compete with regular keys, or at least human energy) wil have a billion dollar in his/her hands.
The ideal solution should work like magic, and these locks should be installable in doors, gates and vehicles. No passwords should be shared, and the lock magically opens to those who are authorized to use them.
These news by Motorola/Google are very promising, however I don’t buy the “pill” solution, but I’d definitively be willing to apply some sort of invisible electronic NFC tattoo in my hand or my arm, so that when my hand is near the lock it gives off a unique magnetic signature so I can be validated. Think NFC chips for your body.
For those of you who don’t want to have a tattoo, perhaps there could be a version of the NFC tag that we could place on the back of your watch if you wear one, or if you wear rings or some kind of jewelry at all times it could be attached there.
The idea is that you don’t have to carry your authentication mechanism in a wallet or a key ring, so that you can just go out not worrying about carrying keys with you because you are or have the keys on you all the time.
Facebook plays it really shady with it’s “Like” button on their inner “Pages”.
Everywhere on the net their like buttons just help quantify empathy towards content, however, when it comes to “Liking” a Facebook page, what you’re doing is really “Following”.
Don’t be surprised if you get more “followers” on Facebook, yet the rate of losing them is also faster. It’s all based on user experience deception. C’mon Zuck, of all companies Facebook doesn’t need to be so cheap.
It’s quite worrying what is going to happen to Facebook once it goes public if it’s already acting so cheap.
Don’t you hate when the wrong floor has been selected by someone and then everybody in the elevator has to pay with time for that error.
Enter the UNDO button for elevators. Such a simple idea.
It could work in 2 ways.
1. You press the button and it unselects the last button pressed, and so on.
2. You press the button, all selected buttons change color to hint the user you can undo any of them, and then press the floor you want to unselect.
Better yet! when are touchscreen elevator panels coming? that way we could update them, and even put ads on them (and even ads related to the floor you’re going to if you’re in a commercial building)
I just watched a lot of film makers crying about how their movies are being “stolen” every day and seeing rogue websites monetizing on their movies.
They keep talking about how they made DVD deals that make no sense no more because people are watching their movies for free the day after the release online on pirate websites. Why on earth are you putting the financial fate of your indie film solely on a format that’s dying? hint, the people that are pirating your content aren’t doing so on DVD, they’re getting it through the internet remember?
Then you go on to say the solution to your problem without paying attention to your own words “the pirate websites are making money on advertising and we can’t do anything about it!”
Are you listening to yourselves?
The solution is doing exactly what the pirate websites are doing Make your content free and monetize it on ads YOURSELF, use your film to advertise itself and merchandise around it GLOBALLY.
Here you have the cheapest most effective content distribution tools available in history at virtually no cost and you’re not using them. Sharing your film with a Creative Commons license gives others a clear signal to share the content for you, you don’t even have to be there to give people permission when you do it in advance.
When your movie is done, give it for free on YOUR website, on BitTorrent, on youtube, put ads on it and around it, and place links for people to buy your DVD, Blu-ray, T-Shirt, Special Edition Sets, Action Figures. etc.
Make your content available through Creative Commons licenses, allow for it to be remixed, let your cultural impact reach others in ways you didn’t imagine, a Creative Commons license forces the sharer or remixer to give you attribution and incredible things can happen to your film when it reaches audiences you never intended in ways that you never intended.
Sharing your content is FREE MARKETING that can open so many business opportunities for you. And all this time you’re stuck on selling tickets and DVDs, the most expensive 2 ways to distribute your films, the worst distribution channels controlled by box office and retail mafias that will take a big cut of the sales, when all this time you could be saving so much on marketing and distribution worldwide. It’s almost unbelievable that you’re still missing out on these opportunities and saying the film industry will die when it now has a worldwide audience instantly.
Put your movie on YouTube as well and apply for monetization, you’ll get millions of viewers WORLDWIDE there too and get a great CPM rate on video advertising.
If you make it hard for people to see your movie while others are making it easy you are pushing business away, no matter what technology or law they pass, if someone really wants to see your movie and it’s not easy for them to access legally (not in theaters, not in DVD, or they just can’t afford to pay you) they are going to get it so it might as well be you spreading the content, tracking all the views, and monetizing all those free views yourself.
If it works out for the pirates, it will work 10 times better for you because you are the source of the content, you will be ranked first on search engines, and you will sell copies and merchandise, guaranteed.
You’re the only people complaining about having too many customers. Stop thinking of a scarcity based business model, you have a product that can be copied endlessly, why not make use of that amazing feature?
Update: I just want to say that I’m super happy that all this SOPA/PIPA happened, it has raised awareness not only on problems but it’s made people look at those of us who have been working for years on solutions for content creators around free based models. In this post I’ve talked about film, but all my talk doesn’t come out of thin air, it comes from the experience we’ve had working day and night with musicians, here’s more if you are interested on what we achieved in 2011 with Creative Commons, BitTorrent and open minded content creators (don’t miss the statements of singer Kellee Maize, who has come time after time back to the bittorrent community)
Update 2: I also want to clarify, that I’m not saying “drop selling and go free 100%”, I’m saying do both. Giving content for free on the internet will not affect your sales at all, if you remember it’s already being copied for free, it’s just not being done under your supervision. The people that pay to see your movie on DVD or on the movie theater are used to that experience of those form factors and they will keep doing it because they’re used to it.
Have your content easily accesible online, have both free and paid versions of it online, convenience and availability is the best antidote for piracy. Once the content is free there’s no motivation for the pirates to do anything, it’s already free and you can even use the opportunity to grow a much larger community of fans around your content, even if they don’t pay for it, they’ll love you and spread the word about it.
With undeniable Talent, Good recording equipment, HD Camera, YouTube account and a vision for business the world is ready to meet a lot of content creators thanks to the enabling technology for creation and distribution of media that is leveling the playfield for more and more people. Discovering music and original has never been more exciting in history.
Forget piracy, this is what Labels are scared of, they’re slowly becoming more and more unnecessary.
No wonder they are behind legislation like #SOPA to have the power to scare everyone from doing covers like this one.
These covers are great to showcase your talents to people that wouldn’t otherwise even pay attention to you.
Do these kids deserve 5 years in jail?
Love her expression at the end of the video, she knows how good she is.
Yes, a lot of people are all about the cloud and everything should be in the browser, but the reality is that there’s a very healthy (and still growing) ecosystem of desktop software being created, and updated everyday.
More so, the browser is still limited and it seems that we’re bending over backwards (in javascript of all languages #facepalming) to be able to do what we’ve been already been able to do for years inside it. It’s like we want to throw away the powerful hardware now available on the tip of our hands (ever faster multicore technology, super duper video cards, amazing storage for almost nothing, solid state drives, you name it, we’re getting it, and it’s gonna get better in 18 months)… for the promise of the cloud (which is convenient, but you should try living without internet at home for 3 weeks, fuck the cloud).
A few moments ago I was thinking about this and about Google’s vision of “everything inside the browser” and then it hit me.
Our industry is full of disruption, who would’ve thought that web browsers would get so big and create whole new industries, can’t the same happen to the browser?
I think it’s totally possible that some new software, some new Desktop software could emerge and change the face of the internet once again. I don’t know what it could be, but after seeing how things evolve it’s plausible something like this happens.
Google shouldn’t be putting all its eggs on the browser basket.
Desktop software is here to stay, and it has all the powers today to out-innovate the browser, as crazy as it sounds.
Maybe a well done Microsoft App store would be enough to get a lot of people excited. By looking at what’s happened in such a short time for iOS and the Apple AppStore, the browser has plenty to fear.
