Jeffrey McManus

The New Thing

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TV Rebroadcaster ivi.tv Shut Down by Injunction

February 22nd, 2011 · Business, TV, Web/Tech

I didn’t see any tech blogger coverage of this, then I remembered I had a dusty old blog of my own, so I’ll do a quick summary here. ivi.tv is a terrific television rebroadcasting product that enables you to watch local stations from various US markets on your computer using a downloadable client application that works on both Mac and PC. They charge a very reasonable monthly subscription fee (a fraction of what we paid for DirecTV before we got rid of it last year), but it was a bargain for the few times a month we want to watch live TV (basically, baseball playoffs and entertainment awards shows).

As you might guess, whenever big media is perturbed by technological innovation, a lawsuit must necessarily follow, and this time is no exception. This TechCrunch piece from last October, written by a presumably non-insane lawyer, talks about the legal status of ivi.tv. The writer points out that there’s an exemption to copyright law called the “passive carrier exemption” that theoretically enables companies to do what ivi.tv does as long as they don’t alter the programming (there were a few failed attempts at this where companies tried to superimpose their own advertisements, which is obviously evil). But ivi.tv doesn’t do that — they just charge subscribers a monthly fee, like any other cable operator. And importantly, ivi.tv kicks back a portion of subscriber fees to broadcasters, just like cable operators do.

Today the company announced that they were shut down by a court injunction brought by the standard evil media conglomerates (Comcast, Disney, CBS, Fox, Major League Baseball, etc.).

The net effect is that our consumption of live broadcast TV will be going from “very little” to “zero”. Well played, entertainment industry. If the Giants make the playoffs again this year, which they will, I guess I’ll watch every game from a barstool somewhere instead of the comfort of my laptop. Maybe I can teach my daughter to fetch peanuts for me or something. The net result is that the local pub will make more money from me than the TV nets ever will. That can’t possibly have been the intention here. And honestly, it can’t be long now before the black hats (also known as Our Triumphant Liberators of Content) will set up some kind of peer-to-peer rebroadcasting network. Have fun bringing a lawsuit against that, jerks.

Update: Over on GigaOM, Ryan Lawler has excerpts from the injunction, which seems to assert that because they send TV over the internet (instead of wires or via satellite), they can’t be classified as a cable operator. This seems like a pretty dippy interpretation of the law (it’s not ivi.tv is broadcasting content willy-nilly — they’re only sending it to paid users of their custom client app).

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Reason #285 Why Paper Telephone Books Must Die

December 23rd, 2010 · School of Customer Service, That's Pretty Messed Up Right There

A few days ago we got a delivery of a ten-pound paper Yellow Pages telephone directory. It went straight into the recycling, along with every paper phone directory we’ve received for the past 12 or so years.

Just now, I get a phone call from some mouth-breather asking whether we’d received the phone book that we didn’t ask for and will never use. A phone call. On my cel phone. During working hours.

Even better, when I told the person on the phone that I wasn’t interested in getting a paper phone book ever again, and I’d prefer that they put me on my Do Not Call list, the person on the phone said that to get removed from their list, I had to call some other number (of course, that number was printed on the now-recycled paper phone book; she couldn’t just give the number to me, ironically). When I pressed her, she said that removing me from their call list was “not her job”.

She literally said this. I am not exaggerating here.

Someone, please to make this business practice illegal? Thx.

Update: San Francisco heard me and is apparently actually going to make the delivery of unsolicited phone books illegal. Hooray for big government!

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The Untouchables, “Free Yourself”

November 29th, 2010 · Music

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Tokbox: A Platform for Adding Live Video Chat to Your Web Site

November 14th, 2010 · Platforms, Web/Tech, Work

This evening TokBox launched a new platform that enables Web developers to embed live video conferencing into their Web sites. This is an incredibly exciting product and I’m sure it’s something that a lot of sites are going to take advantage of.

TokBox provides all the challenging bits to make this happen; all a web developer has to do is write a little JavaScript and you’ve got live audio/video chat in the browser with up to 20 simultaneous live participants (more people than you’d probably want to be video-chatting with at once, really) and up to thousands of audience members.

The important thing is that this is a platform, not just a canned widget, so web developers have control over how the in-browser video conference looks and behaves. This essentially enables you to integrate video conferencing anywhere Flash works.

For CodeLesson, the benefits to live chat in the browser are obvious — we’ve been working on using the new TokBox platform to embed live video chat into our online courses as an option to enable instructors to have live office hours with students online. Our hope is to have a video office hours incorporated into CodeLesson early in the new year.

To learn more you can check out their main site or their developer blog, or if you’re a coder and you’re ready to play, get started here.

My consultancy, Platform Associates, has been advising Tokbox on their transition from a consumer site to a platform for the past few months.

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CodeLesson ♥ Etsy

November 1st, 2010 · CodeLesson, Web/Tech, Work

Today we announced A Gentle Introduction to the Etsy API. This course is an important milestone for CodeLesson for two reasons:

  • It’s the first CodeLesson course produced by someone other than us. The curriculum and instructor will be provided by Etsy; we’re handling the details of getting students registered, hosting the learning software, setting up shell accounts for students, and so forth.
  • It’s our first free course. We’re able to make this course free to students thanks to the generous assistance of Chad, Justin, and the Etsy team. Thanks guys!

Today marks the transformation of CodeLesson from a somewhat functional online learning site into a mighty platform where anyone can learn and teach anything. We hope to announce more courses like this in the near future, so if you’ve got something you want to learn or teach, please let us know.

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What’s Happening on CodeLesson

October 22nd, 2010 · CodeLesson, Web/Tech, Work

Our mighty mighty online learning site, CodeLesson, continues to astound and amaze us as it slowly consumes my entire career forevermore. Here’s what’s going on with the site today:

  • My PHP course is proceeding apace. We are in week six of the course and no one’s brain has exploded yet. (At the same time I’m also teaching a modified version of the course for our partner, the University of Victoria.)
  • We started our first session of Introduction to Web Publishing (our WordPress course) this week.
  • The indefatigable Zed Shaw’s Introduction to Python Programming will start on November 8. There’s still space in this course, but it’s looking like it will fill up — you can sign up for the course here.
  • We are talking to a few more interesting instructors and hope to have some new course announcements in the next week or two.
  • We added a few new courses to our catalog to see if there’s interest: Google Chrome Extensions, a PayPal course, and a few more that you can see on our newly-compacted course catalog page. If any of these courses are interest to you, click on the big orange Add Course button to let us know you’re interested. (Some of our courses don’t make it onto our schedule until there’s sufficient student interest.)
  • We are itchingly close to announcing our first free course which will be sponsored by an awesomely excellent technology company of which we will be able to hopefully disclose more information soon.
  • We are having some interesting preliminary discussions with prospective investors who are mightily impressed at the fact that we have figured out a way to get people to pay for goods and services on the Web. Yay us!

Overall I can say that I’ve been blown away to the response to what we’ve been doing, and I’ve been particularly heartened by the dozen or so people who have stepped up to teach courses, suggest new topics and otherwise refine our offering. Thanks, all you cool folks.

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How Do You Solve A Problem Like Yahoo?

October 18th, 2010 · Work, Yahoo

On his blog Jeremy Zawodny poses an open question regarding Yahoo’s malaise:
The less obvious problem is a deeper cultural issue. It’s an institutionalized lack of accountability that makes it easy to blame others (upper management, other product teams, “market forces”, and so on) for things that don’t happen.
Of course you can acquire your way to greatness; that’s the core of the success of companies like Cisco and HP. The problem is that buying successful teams/products doesn’t always work. But if that’s not working there are a couple of possible reasons why: 1) you’re not integrating the acquisition properly; 2) the acquisition wasn’t a good fit in the first place; 3) your strategy changed between the time you made the acquisition, etc., etc.
It’s also possible that if your acquisition strategy isn’t working, you’re just not doing enough of it. Cisco (to use the canonical example) snaps up an absurd number of companies each year, and that company has a culture and a process to support that efficiently.
Bad company culture isn’t nobody’s fault, and no product team within a bad culture can be successful forever. Responsibility for systemic cultural problems has to land at the feet of executive management; middle managers can’t be responsible for fixing it. (I know, I’ve tried.)
There’s an excellent term from the startup world that applies to Yahoo: “bias toward action”. There is no bias toward action at Yahoo, and there hasn’t been for years. There’s very little reward for accomplishing anything, and there are no consequences for doing nothing.
If Yahoo’s CEO, whoever that’s going to be this week, could wave a magic wand and fix one problem at the company, I’d fix that one. But that’s not the wand that Carol Bartz is waving (she’s elected to solve a problem that’s far easier, which is cutting costs).

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AOL/Yahoo! Sure, Whatever.

October 14th, 2010 · Work, Yahoo

I’m not enthusiastic about flogging this sickly horse; if you guys want to merge your businesses, you know, knock yourselves out.

Both companies should have been taken private years ago so they have some breathing room to reinvent themselves without having to worry about the innovation-killing tyranny of quarterly earnings growth. Maybe a hostile takeover of Yahoo! by AOL will be the tonic that both companies need to find a new direction.

However: Remember a few years back when Kmart bought Sears using a boatload of private equity dough? It was supposed to bring every Kmart store up to the level of value and service that Sears was known for. Instead, the takeover just sort of Kmart-ified every Sears store. I’m just saying.

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Screencast Video: Installing WordPress 3.0

October 11th, 2010 · CodeLesson

This is a screencast video that’s part of my Introduction to Web Publishing course on CodeLesson. If you’re already a WordPress jock this will be old hat to you, but if you haven’t installed and run your own copy of WordPress, this should give you a sense of how it works. It’s not difficult, but there are a few steps and a few things to know.

I had to edit this to get around YouTube’s 15 minute limit; there’s another part to this (the bit where you actually upload the files to your Web server). For the CodeLesson course we don’t use YouTube for video viewing so there’s no size limit and students can view the videos at their original HD resolution if we have it.

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Upcoming CodeLesson Courses

October 10th, 2010 · CodeLesson, Web/Tech, Work

It’s hard to believe it’s been less than six weeks since we’ve launched CodeLesson. The response to the site has been terrific and we’re having some enlightening conversations with students, instructors and others about what they want to see from the site.

My CodeLesson PHP course is in progress, and it’s going really well. It’s a small, energetic group, more than one of whom are fellow startup CEOs, which was great to hear. We’re all about smashing the divide between the geeks and the suits.

Meanwhile, we’ve brought on a team of instructors to teach some more courses, a few of which are on our course schedule now:

  • Introduction to Programming in Python will start November 8 and will be taught by the most excellent Zed Shaw.
  • Introduction to Web Publishing is our introductory WordPress course. If you’ve ever wanted to run your own Web site but weren’t sure where to get started, this course is for you. This course doesn’t involve coding, but it does cover how to set up, configure, and manage WordPress from beginning to end. The course also covers new features of the recently-released WordPress 3.0. I’ll be teaching this course, which will start on October 18.
  • Developing WordPress Themes was just announced last week; this is a more advanced WordPress course that will show you how to use your HTML and CSS skills to create custom WordPress front-ends. The instructor for this course will be Cheryl Chung.
  • We hope to run a session on The Ruby Programming Language in November. We should be able to announce the instructor in the next week or so, but the guy we’re talking to has written a few books on Ruby and is basically drenched in awesome sauce.

We have a few more courses lined up (JavaScript and jQuery are biggies with me), and we’re also taking suggestions for new courses. Which courses would you like to see taught on CodeLesson? Let us know.

Also, we’re starting to get requests from businesses who want use CodeLesson to teach courses on their technology products. We’re calling this “CodeLesson for Your Business”;  we should have some announcements with specifics about how this will work around the holidays. For now, if you have a technology product that you want to provide training for, let me know in the comments and let’s talk.

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