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Family Photo Restoration…

April 30, 2005 By 2 Comments

My Grandpa and Grandma Borsch were at Lake Louise in Banff, Canada back in the 1970′s. I absolutely loved this picture of the two of them near this obelisk, but didn’t have them together in a shot. So I spent a little time in Photoshop and moved Grandpa next to Grandma. This was a bit tricky since their respective reflections were in the orb on top of the obelisk, so I had to clone the reflection too! Though I can see a few places where the photo is manipulated, no one else can.

I’ve invested quite a bit of time restoring my family photos. I’ve been struck over and over again how there is only *one* copy of a given picture and one person has it. So far, I’ve restored roughly 300 photos and have probably another 1,000 to go. Able to crank out 50 photos in an 8 hour shift on a weekend, do the math: I’ve got a ways to go.

I’ve been looking for batch processing capability that wouldn’t cost me an arm-and-leg to get these images scanned at least (I could then restore them at my leisure). I also think about all the people in a similiar situation to me: thousands of priceless family photos on paper, fading and crumbling with time, and a computer just sitting there as a place to manipulate and store them.

Filed Under: Technology

The Act of Creation. Step 1: Set Your Intention

April 29, 2005 By Leave a Comment

I’m sitting in a coffee shop (in an 1880′s farmhouse) this morning with the day off…and have been thinking about what is around me, the people that lived here once and the world they had created for themselves…and the one we’re creating for ourselves today.

This place makes me think about my great grandfather John Borsch. He was a merchant in Minnesota who set his intention to create a business that would grow, sustain his family and be a vehicle for wealth.

The picture you see here is his store. It was located near a railroad depot and the men who worked the railroad (and passengers) shopped here regularly. He also found out from some of them about distressed merchants in other cities. John decided to create opportunity for himself, traveled to these cities, bought up the distressed merchants property, crated it up and returned to Minneapolis. Liquidating much of the inventory in the big city before taking the remainder back to this store in a smaller town 20 miles away (which now is a close-in suburb!), John was able to accumulate wealth fairly quickly.

He retired at 45 and moved to Minneapolis with my great grandmother (Clara) and became a builder. The Depression hit and he owned many houses, and his son (my grandpa) encouraged him to kick out the freeloading tenants and get paid renters, but it was John’s intention to have pristine properties and allowed the tenants without jobs to stay for free in exchange for sweat investments. His houses were immaculate while others during the Depression didn’t fare so well or sat without tenants for years.

Step 1: Setting Your Intention
Spending time with my good friend George Johnson and having him be my “coach” a few years ago, we have had several conversations about the universal truths that intention contains and how that impacts creativity and realizing the true essence of oneself. He consistently smiles when I profess to be “so close that I can taste it” in aligning with my essence (I suspect he knows I’ll discover it eventually and utilize it) but I’m not quite there yet.

One of my favorite speakers and authors is Wayne Dyer who speaks and has written about The Power of Intention. Dyer makes the case that *everything* touched by the hand of humans has been created. I buy that. He also talks about the power of God and tapping in to universal truths and, most interestingly, how once you’ve set your intention, things begin to happen that seemingly and automagically line up to drive momentum behind your intention. My head is there too. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness

China’s Comeuppance

April 27, 2005 By Leave a Comment

After years of reading articles in magazines like Business Week and others about China’s counterfeiting, it was with amusement that I read an article today that starts out like this:

The five-volume “Executive Ability” book series is a classic in Chinese business and management circles. Collectively, it has sold more than 2 million copies in the last two years. Top universities and public libraries in China keep multiple copies on hand.  It’s also a big fake.

You can read today’s article in the LA Times yourself here.

So this country that is knocking off everything they can (Windows OS, furniture, cars, pharmaceuticals and more) is now relying on fake business advice.

Serves ‘em right.

Filed Under: Current Affairs

Tiger eats Longhorn?

April 26, 2005 By 1 Comment

On Friday, Apple is shipping the new version of Mac OS X “Tiger“.  Bill Gates this week “unveiled” (like it was a secret) their next version of Windows dubbed “Longhorn“.

Clearly concerned about the inherent security of a Unix-based operating system (OS), great graphics, a better client experience and Spotlight shipping in an OS roughly a year and a half before search even close to Spotlight debuts in Longhorn, Microsoft may not be nervous but undoubtedly ensuring they’re viewed as the technology leader…not Apple.

Is it just me…or is the timing of this amusing to you too?

Filed Under: Computing

Vlogging: Grassroots media continues to explode

April 24, 2005 By 4 Comments

I’ve had lots ‘o debates with people at work (and received a lot of teasing) about my trying to get people to understand the rapid acceleration in blogging and podcasting. You know what? Vlogging (or video blogging) is already accelerating almost as fast (and I frankly don’t care if people I interact with don’t get everything that is happening with grassroots media or don’t believe it).

Still, don’t take my word for the fact that this is happening…click on the links below and see for yourself what people are already doing and the volume of vlogs already online. Though most of the content below is clearly garage or basement quality, it will give you a sense of what people are doing with vlogging and the potential that exists. It reminds me of the cheesey quality of early works in the mid-Eighties created as a result of a phenomena called Desktop Publishing (DTP) that skeptics also didn’t believe would take off…and it has revolutionized the publishing world (early DTP works contained an explosion of fonts, bad design and worse layout…but people learned). [Read more...]

Filed Under: Vlogging

Amazon’s A9 Search: Personalization and History

April 23, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Amazon has entered search. Look out Google and Microsoft.

When Amazon first began gaining a lot of traction in the marketplace back in 2000, I was at Vignette. A part of our value proposition was web-based “implicit” and “explicit” personalization of content. Implicit was tough to do (an observation process ran and — based on clickstream data — would automatically deliver the right content to the right person) and explicit was easy (someone would login and then the site would deliver content germane to that person).

Instead of an observation process or daemon running to only just deliver personalized content, Amazon leveraged Net Perceptions’ Recommendation Engine for collaborative filtering and have gone way beyond it. When you peruse a product on Amazon, the site immediately tells you accessories (and what percent of people buy them), reviews and much more. Amazon’s ability to set context, make connections between product-to-accessories-to-similiar products-to-opinions is nothing short of phenomenal…and don’t even get me started on their “Associates” program and how they’ve extended their brand and catalog all over the ‘net or what they’ve done with web services.

So it comes as no surprise that Amazon has leveraged their expertise and jumped in to search with a new offering dubbed “A9“.

This search engine is *really* cool. Rather than have me describe it here, go there, read about it first and then spend some time playing with it. Oh yeah…I should mention that here’s yet *another* example of using an Ajax approach to building fast, browser-based capability so the user interface feels like a desktop application.

Filed Under: Web 2.0

Podscope: Search *inside* of podcasts

April 21, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Back in February I did a post about “Searching *inside* your photos, podcasts, videos and more…” which described some of the enterprise tools that are available which could solve a problem about to explode with the groundswell of media being created: big blobs like media files require metadata tags to be added to them describing what’s inside the file (which most humans just won’t do). Just think about your own email filing in to folders or how you manage all the computer files on your desktop. Bet you don’t do either.

Though I’ve met a few anally retentive and/or highly organized individuals who *do* perform metatagging or have built a taxonomy of folders on their computer for storing stuff…it’s the rare individual who does it. Just one reason why Mac OS X Tiger will contain Spotlight and Longhorn will contain search so people can easily have their own explosion of unstructured content on their computers easily searched and managed.  I was and am convinced there are enterprise-class tools that make the process of finding what’s inside media files manageable and — when hosted and offered as software-as-a-service –  could apply enough horsepower to solve the problem for mere mortals.

Enter a new hosted service currently in Beta called “Podscope” powered by “TVEyes“. They’re offering exactly what I’d described in that earlier post: using an industrial strength, enterprise-class toolset and applying it to a micro problem like looking for what’s inside a podcast.

Very cool and just the start of this trend in my view….

Filed Under: Podcasting

Where is the “iPhone”?

April 19, 2005 By 2 Comments

There has been a lot of buzz about the agreement last summer between Motorola and Apple for a mobile phone that would also deliver iPod-like functionality and be easily connected to a PC and iTunes for music download over a broadband connection. Design firms like xnodesign have even put together fun prototypes of an “iPhone” like the one at left.

Got some bad news for ya. We’re not going to see it from Apple or Motorola. Looks like the mobile phone companies are telling Ed Zander and Steve Jobs to go pound sand since they’re perceived to be cutting-in-on-the-action of the wireless carriers business.

Last summer Forbes discussed the possibility that the wireless carriers wanted to sell music themselves and the current Business Week has a great article about what they’re up to and asks, “iPod killer?” when looking at this standoff. In an article in Fortune magazine from last year it was discussed that the new, hot Motorola Razor phone was not pleasing to the mobile carriers since all it did was voice and the carriers wanted to sell data services.

Data services are big business. According to Strategy Analytics, Inc., “(ringtones)…will become a nearly $9.4 billion business in 2008.” The carriers are offering ringtones for $1-$3 for all the boneheads willing to buy tiny little midi files and download them to their phone. The kicker? A tiny 30k ringtone downloaded is no problem over a wireless mobile connection. A 3MB song? Several 3MB songs? Ahhh….I think we got a problem here kids. To show you how excited some are about *just* this ringtone business, Rio Caraeff, VP of Universal Mobile Music has said, “…teenagers sometimes swap out ringtones as many as three to four times a week” and “Ringtones are all about personalization. They are self-expression.”

Don’t these people think that teenagers will figure out that an iTunes song is $ .99 and the stupid ringtone they’re buying is $2 or more!?!

I believe strongly that wireless companies have also pressured phone makers to remove Bluetooth or USB connection capability to the file structure of phones or for using the phone as a laptop data connection. Besides downloading phone photos, updating contact lists and address books with a PC to phone connection, one of the other useful things to do with such a connection is uploading your own midi files for ringtones (which is brain-dead-simple and I used to do all the time with my older Nokia 3650. There are even utilities to generate small midi files easily). There is no way wireless carriers are going to allow us to leverage this capability ourselves so they’ve slammed that door shut by simply not allowing phones with this capability on their networks or to be subsidized by them (killing its chances of adoption). They’re not going to allow Motorola or Apple to control what they perceive to be a new cash cow with ringtones and digital music, so the door is slammed shut on both companies.

Here’s yet another case of vendors (the wireless carriers) doing what is good for THEM vs. what is good for US.

Filed Under: Gadgets & Hacks

Adobe + Macromedia = Bonanza?

April 18, 2005 By 1 Comment

I remember that we were the first people on our block with a color television in 1968. Watching Bonanza and Walt Disney’s “The Wonderful World of Color” on Sunday night’s was amazing with our own color TV! Besides…we ended up watching a lot more TV when we could see it in color.

So what does that have to do with yesterday’s announcement of Adobe buying Macromedia?

There is a lot of conjecture about the strategic reasons Adobe bought them (competing with Microsoft is but one). I submit that *the* primary reason is the ubiquity of the Flash container and all that it means for video and the continuation of the drive toward on demand media consumption and a bonanza of profit to be gained from it. Let me outline a few thoughts:

  • As you can see from the post below, the video that is playing is done through a Flash player. My provider (Audioblog) lets me upload an .AVI video, they instantly encode it in to Flash, and allow me to publish it to my blog. The video aspect of the Flash container is but one key reason this deal got done. No more “choose Quicktime, Windows Media, Real Player” when you want to ensure that your users can play your content
  • Today Macromedia Inc. and Speedera Networks launched a secure delivery system for Internet video aimed at boosting pay-per-view video and other online subscription services. The kicker? Akamai recently acquired Speedera which will provide the technologies to deliver rich media in a way that allows content providers to get paid (leveraging Akamai’s robust, global edge network)
  • OK…the acquisition was not all about video. Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are gaining momentum and Macromedia is right there with Flex — though many of my alpha programmer pals would differ with RIA’s readiness for prime-time user interfaces (and are more interested in approaches such as Ajax). Still…there are competing offerings from Laszlo Systems and their open source alternative, Open Laszlo (which has been embraced by IBM), so it’s not just Microsoft that Adobe is positioning themselves against and Flash is the main reason for this deal in my view.

So how this acquisition is leveraged is going to be very, very interesting to watch.

UPDATE: Read “Adobe + Macromedia = PDF“

Filed Under: Innovation, Podcasting, Vlogging, Web 2.0

Will the Balance of Power tip to China?

April 16, 2005 By Leave a Comment

On the way to work the other morning I listened to this fabulous IT Conversations podcast done by Dr. Moira Gunn of Tech Nation (the National Public Radio show). It was an interview by Dr. Gunn with professor Oded Shenkar, Ford Motor Company Chair, Global Business Management, Ohio State University, and the author of, “The Chinese Century — The Rising Chinese Economy and its Impact on the Global Economy, The Balance of Power and Your Job.”

They discussed the rise of China and some interesting connections he’s made about the seeming inevitability that the United States and other Western states reigns as superpowers (or major economic powers) will soon be over.

How feasible is this premise?

Take a look at the video below. It’s amusing to view but then think about the euphoria that existed within the automobile industry in 1960 (“What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.” Charles Wilson (Head of GM, 1941-1953)). Then connect the dots between how it was and about what’s already happened in just one (albeit huge and visible) industry through the efforts of a tiny country (Japan) with limited people and resources: the United States’ lead in automobile production is over. Toyota has already surpassed the Ford Motor Company as the world’s #2 car maker.

China is not far behind. People, capital, and joint ventures with 50-50 ownership is allowing China to accelerate their position in the world economically. What other industries will they soon dominate?

The 1960 “The Wonderful World of Ford” new car introduction film…

Filed Under: Current Affairs
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