we three links
Stereogum’s “Decomposed,” featuring great bands performing in a stripped-down, all acoustic environment. Including The Soft Pack (above).
Mozilla’s Prism liberates web apps from the browser in much the same way Fluid does. But Prism uses Firefox and Fluid uses Safari.
SugarSync lets you share files across computers and devices, but not all files to all devices. Because, you know, not all files are created equal.
project management three ways
Over the weekend I had a brief Twitter/email correspondence with another non-profit professional regarding project management software. The conversation reminded me that I’ve been wanting to get some thoughts down on the three online project management tools I’ve used. So here they are:
The Baseline
Basecamp (37signals)
Price: $24-$149/month
Basecamp is the online project management software that seems to set the standard — almost everyone I know has used it at one point in their career and everyone has an opinion on it. For better or worse, it’s the software against which all others are judged.
Why it’s good: Basecamp is infinitely flexible and has a space to record everything — from simple, undated to-do lists, to milestones, document and image versioning, and basic time tracking.
If you’re working with multiple clients or large groups of projects, Basecamp is a winner — it allows you to set up multiple “Companies” (which can be clients or large groups of projects) and provide users tailored access to the system based on those companies.
With the companies feature, you essentially have four layers of information:
- client (or project group)
- project
- milestone
- to-do list
It also includes file sharing and versioning, message boards, time tracking and whiteboards — which allow for group-editable documents and notes.
Basecamp uses easy-to-grasp linear organization and an Ajax interface that most web-savvy users can grasp intuitively.
Also, Basecamp is brought to you by the same folks who bring you Ruby on Rails, so it’s open source with a robust community of developers building all sorts of extras and add-ons for its users.
Why it’s bad: Basecamp can be seriously complex and overwhelming — especially if users have access to projects and milestones they aren’t responsible for. This can be especially burdensome for administrators who are essentially forced to view all projects and all milestones.
If Basecamp isn’t managed properly, users can quickly become overwhelmed and abandon the system. To have a truly successful implementation, you need to have staff project managing out of Basecamp as part of their regular roles and responsibilities.
Also, if you think you’re going to need heavy customer service with Basecamp, it isn’t for you. Customer services simply doesn’t exist. If you have an issue, you’re dependent on the user community in the forums.
Tip for users: Turn off email notifications under the main settings window. When email notifications are on, the default is to send notifications whenever a new milestone is assigned. This can be burdensome — especially when you’re entering a slate of projects at the beginning of implementation.
The Price Leader
Zoho Projects
Price: $12-$80/month.
Zoho aims to be the cloud king. the company has documents, email, spreadsheets, CRM, organizer, whatever. If it’s software and can be hosted in the cloud, they have it. With this volume comes price competitiveness and Zoho Projects has Basecamp beat in this department.
Why it’s good: I served on a small committee that recommended Zoho over Basecamp as a new project management solution across a nationwide marketing department with several regional teams who, in turn, served several states.
Zoho got the nod for two reasons:
- Their monster time tracking abilities.
- Their excellent customer service.
Zoho can track time against task lists and even gives users a start, stop clock next to each task so they can track time right from the start page using a stop-watch-like interface. If you work freelance, or need to keep close track of time for accounting purposes, this is a killer function that may tip the scales in Zoho’s favor.
Zoho also includes some functionality that will be familiar to Microsoft Project users, namely gantt charts and dependency view. Basecamp doesn’t have either of these.
Zoho has serious customer service. When we implemented Zoho Projects following the recommendation, Zoho staff gave an online tutorial to all of our users (completely gratis), fielded programming requests for future upgrades and kept in contact with our core users to field additional questions and concerns.
The real coup: A month ago I moved to a smaller department where Basecamp was the norm. I twittered that I was transitioning from Zoho back to Basecamp and received a DM from Zoho staff politely asking if they could field any questions or get me back. Good stuff all around.
Why it’s bad: My primary complaint with Zoho is that it does not offer the levels of information that Basecamp does. Rather than starting at a company or client level, Zoho starts with projects, then moves to milestones, then dated task lists.
This means that if you work with multiple clients (or large groups of projects) you have to organize them as projects, then organize your actual projects as milestones, and milestones as tasks in a task list. This can cause some serious confusion.
Also — and this is somewhat a matter of semantics — I found the user interface and overall design of Zoho to be somewhat heavy, old fashioned and Microsoft-like. I always felt like I was working in SharePoint, which made me not want to use the system.
Finally, like Basecamp, Zoho can be extremely complex — even more complex than Basecamp if you’re using the gantt charts and dependency view. If you’re implementing this, use a project manager.
User tip: When using the time tacking stop watches, make sure you turn them off before closing out of Zoho. Otherwise they run forever, and it appears as though you’ve been working for 24, 36, 48 hours straight. Your clients won’t believe you.
The Gorgeous Newcomer
Action Method
Price: $12/month ($99/year)
Designed by the creative professionals at Behance for creative professionals, Action Method bills itself as a methodology, not just project management software. It’s based on the GTD-ish premise of action steps, which are posted into projects on color-coded blocks like sticky notes. By completing small actions, you complete complex projects.
Why it’s good: Action Method is gorgeous as hell. Like all things that are beautifully designed it has an inherent value that makes you want to use it. The first time I sat down to Action Method I just wanted to play in it like a Zen puzzle.
This is a good quality, because at first blush Action Method is a pretty sharp departure from the linear, project, milestone, task structure shared by Basecamp and Zoho. Action steps (which serve as your tasks) default to two rows that are easily scanned and lend themselves to being completed “out of order.” Although you can switch to a more linear, date-dependent layout in project view.
Also, it’s not readily apparent that projects can be grouped into clients or project groups, but the project does allow the creation of groups and a drag and drop function makes organizing easy.
Action Method is designed specifically for users who want something more than just a piece of project management software — it’s an organizing philosophy, complete with it’s own stationary, and should be treated as such. If you’re in to this sort of thing (and there is a part of me that is) and appreciate excellent design you will love Action Method.
In addition to the mechanics of project management, the system has two functions — references and backburners — that creative professionals will really like. References is essentially a filesharing space for notes, files, or links, and backburners is where you can store all those brilliant ideas you want to do in a project, but aren’t essential right now.
If I were a freelancer, or working with two or three people that I really trusted to use the system, I would implement Action Method in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, that’s not the case in my current group.
Why it’s bad: If all you want is a place to organize your projects and you don’t want all that philosophy mumbo-jumbo, you won’t like Action Method.
In all seriousness, their are two reasons why a group I was working with recently moved away from Action Method pretty quickly:
- The per-user pricing plan.
- Lack of a shared platform.
Action Method charges per user, so costs can add up and quickly become prohibitive (even at only $12/month). Even with only five users, you’re well above a Basecamp plan that allows for unlimited users.
Also, the system, as part of its philosophy, is tied to the individual user, rather than to the group. As the developers say in their FAQs:
We’ve seen a LOT of project management systems in our research with an “all-knowing big brother” view – and we’ve learned that, in such systems, employees don’t use them – and when they do, they are not honest nor productive. …
In our research we found that people are more likely to stay action-oriented when they can blend the actions of their personal life with their professional life. Also, we found that people are very unlikely to really keep all of their action steps for work in an area that is visible to the rest of the team. Instead, they use post-it notes and private to-do lists for most of their projects and only compose certain action steps that others can see.
I can see their point, but I don’t necessarily agree with it and my experience with the system was basically the opposite. I shared action steps with others working on projects and they simply disappeared into the ether. I had no idea how other users were filing the action steps, what their Action Method page looked like, or how they were organizing their projects. In reality, there was no accountability.
Action Method depends on small tight-knit groups who all buy in to the system and are all willing to be accountable to the system. In my experience that wasn’t practical. I was never able to point to an action step and say, “Dude, this is overdue.”
User tip: Color-code your action steps based on priority or due date. When you only have an hour or two to do some real work, you can exclude action steps that are not a priority and really focus.
why no running applications in the background?
One of the biggest complaints/mysteries about the iPhone operating system is why, exactly, Apple refuses to let applications run in the background.
Apple has long maintained that they prevent applications from running in the background to reduce strain on processors and battery life. But I think something else is going on.
It’s clear that, by limiting background processing Apple is protecting one of its core businesses: iTunes sales. As Fast Company’s Chris Dannen notes in this excellent analysis of why Apple is missing the boat by not allowing background processing:
This also eliminates the possibility for truly powerful subscription music applications. Why would I pay a few bucks a month for a Rhapsody application, if it existed, when I can’t keep listening to music and check my email at the same time? Only Apple’s iPod app can keep music playing in the background when I do other stuff, leaving all other music apps impotent. (emphasis is all me.)
And that’s really the point isn’t it? Apple wants iTunes to be the only fully functioning music application on the iPhone, because it’s the only one it makes real money from. By hamstringing LastFM, Pandaora and others, Apple is simply protecting a core business.
iPhone 3.0 means not having to jailbreak
I am pretty well satisfied with the functionality Apple announced today with iPhone OS 3.0. They clearly have listened to user complaints about the phone and introduced some new Apple applications that make the phone a bit more useful.
More than anything though, Apple clearly is looking to swamp the competition when it comes to creating a platform that is developer-friendly.
The slew of third-party applications announced today, combined with the new features Apple is bringing to the table should give developers the chance to really innovate and make a solid platform truly great.
Here are some notes on what Apple brought to the table today (hat-tip: Gizmodo’s list is fantastic):*
What I’ll definitely use:
- Copy and Paste (text and photos): I’ve wanted this for text for ages — especially for copying links out of safari. And today, I needed to paste two photos into an email, so there you go.
- Search in Mail, Calendar and iPod: Oh yeah — especially Mail. God. Definitely Mail.
- Landscape keyboard: Duh. Why the fuck was this not in version 1.0?
- MMS: see above.
- Improved calendar support: I will go calendar crazy now. DC United’s schedule is on Google as is my personal calendar. So: Yay.
- Note syncing: This sounds crazy, but this is the functionality I am most excited about/intrigued by. It has the opportunity to be really hot if Apple gives some thought to implementing it.
It could be anything from a quick, “jot down a note and have it on your computer,” thing. Or, it could be a full on personal organization tool (coupled with iCal). I’m psyched to see this in action.
- Auto Safari login: Finally, Twitter will remember me when I click through from Mail to follow people.
- Voice memo: I am a brilliant man with lots of brilliant ideas that have gone unrecorded — but no longer.
- Push notifications: Oy, finally. Instant Messages are finally useful. Christ Almighty.
- Accessing music from other applications: This has some interesting possibilities for developers — especially music applications. I can see LastFM and Pandora using this functionality.
What I might use:
- 3G Tethering: intriguing, might use it, but honestly, I can’t think of the last time I didn’t have WiFi when I needed it.
- Stereo Bluetooth: Only if I buy fancy headphones.
- Send and receive files: Maybe. I don’t store a lot of files on the iPhone.
- Peer-to-peer Bluetooth: This does have a lot of possibilities for third-party developers, but I wonder: Why Bluetooth? Wouldn’t a WiFi network connection be more robust and cast a wider net?
- Voice Communication in applications: This probably means I can call my brother in Paris on Skype.
What I might find annoying or won’t use:
- Spotlight: Probably won’t use this, but we’ll see. Apple seems to just love spotlight. I think it’s just OK.
- Stock application: Fuck the stock application.
- Shake to shuffle: Really? Do Apple employees commute? Or ever put their iPhones in their pocket?
- WiFi auto-log in: I don’t subscribe to hotspots, I eat them for breakfast — or something like that.
- Anti-phishing: Umm… I know a phishing site when I see one. (He said, before surrendering his credit card number.)
- Rumbling: What? Oh, this is a gaming thing I guess. Sweet.
*I skipped some of the functionality because it was tied directly to developers.
To Jailbreak or Not to Jailbreak?
As I discussed in my post earlier this week, I have some fairly substantial complaints about the current software offering on Apple’s iPhone 3G.
Well, seemingly on cue, ReadWriteWeb posts a tantalizing piece on jailbreaking the iPhone. This of course would provide access to applications solving most, if not all, of my iPhone gripes. (I haven’t found an easy-to-install MMS application, even for jailbreak, but that doesn’t mean it’s not out their.)
That said, jailbreaking (aka. hacking) my newest and most favorite piece of technology — breaking the warranty and AppleCare agreement — scares the daylights out of me.
So, before I even think about going for broke, I need some iron-clad answers to a few questions:
If I jailbreak my phone, can I still download apps from the Apps store and sync my phone with iTunes?
The answer seems to be, “yes” but I’d love to have this confirmed.
If I jailbreak my phone and something gets seriously fucked, I can just restore through iTunes, right?
Again, the answer seems to be, “yes,” but I need confirmation.
Will Apple release some of these features themselves without the risk and hassle of jailbreaking and voiding the warrant?
Seriously Apple, fill a need here OK? (see below)
The Pwnage instructions referenced in the post says it is for use with iPhone 3G 2.1. I have 3G 2.2. Is there a Pwnage tool for this version? (And/or doesQuickPwn 1.1 work for 3G 2.2?)
I have no fucking clue. In fact, what’s the difference between QuickPwn and the full Pwnage tool?
There’s a lot of different Pwnage tools out there and I have no idea which is the right one, and I don’t want to try this thing unless I know it’s going to work and my phone is not going to be screwed. (See, question 2)
Finally, has anyone ever tried to jailbreak a phone and had it fail so miserably they had to throw the thing in the trash? Similarly, has anyone ever jailbroken a phone, restored it via iTunes and then had it serviced under Apple’s warranty?
The answer to these questions will likely be the deciding factors on whether or not I decide to jailbreak.
But why should I even be debating this (with myself)? Why hasn’t Apple simply allowed its development community to work to its fullest potential? I understand that Apple wants to keep the UI simple and ensure that phones will perform well and not get bogged down by junky applications, but can’t users make those decisions for themselves?
After all, Apple hasn’t limited development on the Mac OS platform and we seem to be able to judge if and when a third-party application is no good or hindering the performance of our equipment. Why can’t we make the same decisions on our phones?
The Next iPhone Software Release Should Include …
My lovely wife got me an iPhone for Christmas and I have to say that it is far and away the best piece of technology I’ve ever owned. Like the best designed Mac products it’s a device that makes you more productive by compelling you to use it.
But that’s not to say that the iPhone is perfect — far from it. As anyone who has read the spasmodically good reviews of the Palm Pre can tell you, the iPhone software could use some improvements.
Here are the improvements I would make in no particular order:
- Just added: Eliminate “Slide to Unlock” screen. This is redundant to pushing the center button which seems to be the only way to wake the phone up.
- The ability to run third-party apps in the background. At the very least, we need an Apple IM client that supports all major platforms that can run in the background. I shouldn’t be held captive to AIM and Gtalk when I’m on IM.
- Video. Seriously, WTF with no video?
- Notifications that don’t shutdown the application you’re running. Plain and simple, I don’t want my browser to close out when a call comes in.
- Cut and paste. (See Palm Pre)
- MMS, not just SMS. This one is really bizarre. Why can’t you send a frickin’ picture to another cell phone using the iPhone? My free Nokia could do that, (Yes, there’s a work around, but that’s just insane.)
- Ability to manage iTunes library by individual song or album, not just by syncing playlists. Better yet, let me also delete songs and albums from the iPhone itself using the swipe and delete functionality.
- Also, we need to be able to manage browser bookmarks outside of a sync environment. Right now my Safari (which I happen to not use) is set up with mobile and iphone links, just so I can manage, and sync, the phone’s browser.
- For the love of God, let me delete the pre-installed Apple applications. Sorry guys, I’m never going to use your stock ticker app.
- And/or, create an application tray, similar to the Mac OS dashboard tray that allows users to hide applications they’re not using.
That’s what I have for now. I’m sure others will pop up, and I’llpost updates to this list as they do. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from any other iPhone/iPod Touch users about what they’d like to see from the next software release.
Should Media Companies Create Their Own Social Networks?
Cisco’s announcement of Eos, the company’s foray into social networking platforms, is flying a bit under the radar at the Consumer Electronics Show. The service is an interesting, if somewhat ham-fisted attempt at trying to drag big media into the online social networking space.
CNet reports that the platform allows large media companies to build social networks around its artists. These platforms will let users repurpose content, do some mixing and create user-generated content. Essentially, Cisco is helping companies like Warner Music Group create walled gardens in the hopes that their intellectual property will stop showing up on YouTube and Facebook where it can’t be as easily monetized.
So, will it work? Frankly, I’m pretty skeptical. First, I’m not sure how compelling it is for users to go to one artist’s site and interact with content and other fans. (I mean, I love Wilco, I really do, but I don’t love them that much.) Second, I think these companies are way too far behind the curve to become adequate competitors to big social media players. Third, and I think most problematic, I don’t think social media users trust big media companies anymore.
After all, these are the guys who have been hassling social network users, threatening to sue college kids and generally acting like big ol’ party poopers since the inception of the Internet. Why would we want to join any party they’re throwing?
The move to Eos shows that the big music groups are starting to get it, but they aren’t quite there yet. CNet quotes Michael Nash, executive vice president of digital strategy and business development for Warner Music Group, as saying that the company has been trying “for years” to get into the social media space but just haven’t been able to crack the nut.
His contention makes me wonder if they’ve ever tried reaching out to some of the established social media players themselves. Instead of shutting down YouTube pages that use copyrighted material, why not come up with a creative way to monetize that content in a way that they and the user are able to make some money? Instead of suing the college kids, partner with them and leverage that existing army of fans to help you distribute your content?
By signing on with Eos, Warner Music Group is recognizing that they have to embrace social media, but they’re going about it bassackwards. Instead of going where the audience is and partnering with established brands, they’re trying to bring the audience to them and starting from scratch. They’re buying a software platform (and presumably a very expensive one) when dozens already exist.
Instead of callling Cisco and starting a costly Eos installation, why not call Facebook and figure out a way to establish your artists on their site in a way that drives concert and download sales to you; users to Facebook and click-throughs to its advertisers. Then, you’ll truly be leveraging social media.
The Future of Storage
On the eve of Macworld there seems to be some rumblings that Apple will be releasing a home server product similar to the HP Media Server. The Apple device may be in the guise of a customizable mini, or a new device that replaces AppleTV.
(My own personal guess is the device will be tied to Apple’s MobileMe service meaning consumers will have to pay for the device twice — once when they pull it off the shelf and in yearly installments as they re-up their MobileMe subscription. Tying such a device to MobileMe would hamper adoption because most users simply aren’t familiar with the service and won’t want to pay $99 when they can get Flickr for $27.)
Regardless of whether or not Apple releases a home server, it’s time for computer makers to move these products into the mainstream and it’s time to end the debate over whether the future of storage is “in the cloud” or under your home office desk. Clearly the cloud and large-scale home storage are here to stay.
What’s driving this? The paradox that the average home computer user increasingly wants to share everything they own, but continue to own everything they share. They want their baby pictures to be available on Flickr for all their friends to see (not consciously admitting that they’re also available for all the world to see) but they want to the comfort of knowing the “original copies” of the photos are sitting on a hard drive somewhere in the house.
The average computer user wants to have Pandora and LastFM magically serve up his favorite tunes based on past listening habits — with a few new suggestions thrown in — but he wants to own his iTunes collection and keep it obsessively organized on his hard drive.
The average user will catch a missed episode of 30 Rock on the NBC website, but wants to own season 3 on a four disc set.
When it comes to media, there’s a paradox — we want it on demand everywhere, but we also want to own our own copies even if all we’re “owning” are the same digitized bits that come streaming at us over the Internet. There is a psychological barrier preventing the vast majority of computer users from giving themselves fully to the cloud. In short, we have trust issues.
However, users increasingly want to share their media (and access shared media) through well-known and trusted sits like Flickr, YouTube and Pandora.
While there is a clear mix between the cloud and home storage when it comes to media, old habits die hard when it comes to traditional documents.
We’re comfortable with the ephemeral nature of email, gladly allowing it to live somewhere else and not caring a lick where it sits. But the vast majority of us would never dream of giving up our trusted Word docs and Excel spreadsheets to a server farm that’s God knows where, running on God knows what and being manage by God knows who. It’s simply not safe! (Never mind that our hard drives could fail at any moment.) I simply don’t see a mass movement to the cloud for businesses and document management happening anytime soon.
So what do we have? First, we have a user-base that wants to own an increasing amount of digitized media that comes in increasingly large sizes. (Think of the popularity and falling prices of SLR cameras and all those RAW photos they’re taking. Also think HD programming.) Second, we have users who increasingly want to share media through well-known, well-branded and well-marketed services like Flickr and YouTube. (Sharing through personalized, but still generic domains off a home server will never be nearly as sexy.) Third, we have a user-base that will always want to maintain physical control of their documents.
Add these three together and you have a need for large-volume home storage for “permanence” and a robust ecosystem of well-branded cloud applications for sharing and community building.
In short, you’ve got a whole hell of a lot of storage.
In The Year 2013…
We will walk on solar panels and surf the Internet by talking to our computers and yelling, “Porn! Porn! I need more Porn!”
The IBM “Next Five in Five” list, which predicts five innovations that will happen in the next five years has some interesting ideas, including: solar sidewalks, a spoken Internet, predictive health through genetic mapping, in-store digital dressing room assistants and PDAs and smart appliances that ensure you’ll never forget anything ever again — and that the information will be readily available when you actually need it.
Two of these ideas — flexible solar panels and predictive health — could be potential breakthroughs and have long-lasting positive effects on society (clean, efficient, independent energy and better health). However, the other three seem a little frivolous. Dressing rooms that that help you pick the right t-shirt? Talking to the Internet? A fridge that tells you when you need more milk? These hardly seems like word-changing breakthroughs. Cool gadgets to see in the next five years? Sure, but they don’t seem nearly as significant as the first two.
Anyway, here’s some totally awesome b-roll that explains it all:
Technorati Tags: digital assistant, futurism, genetic mapping, health, IBM, information, innovation, innovations, internet, next five, next five years, PDAs, retail sales, sidewalks, smart appliances, solar panels, solar power, web
My Slingbox Saga
In August of last yeart, I bought a Slingbox Pro for my brother for his birthday and hooked it up to my cable system. Why did I get my brother a present and then hook it up to my own system? Because he lives in Paris and there are a few things here that they don’t necessarily have in Europe (or have consistently) — Redskin football games, The Daily Show and US Soccer qualifying matches chief among them.
The idea was to hook up the Slingbox to our cable system here in the States and allow my brother to watch American programming at his leisure. That was the theory anyway.
From the start, the Slingbox was trouble. The equipment setup is complicated and not something I would recommend for those who aren’t tech savvy. While the Slingbox support site now has some good resources for router set-up — something they didn’t have when I purchased my device — requiring users to log into, and alter, their settings is not something I would consider standard procedure.
That said, I was able to get it done and the Slingbox worked well. My brother downloaded the SlingPlayer software onto his PowerBook G4 and we were able to watch several Skins games together — including last year’s wild card game against the Seahawks.
The trouble begins
The Slingbox pretty much sat with little use after that until this August when we began gearing up for the current NFL season. That’s when the trouble started. The Slingbox wasn’t holding a network connection and the remote on the SlingPlayer software inexplicably disappeared. (We ran the box on an independent coax so my brother could control what he watched and not interfere with what we were watching.) When we ran the SlingPlayer Directory a dialogue box appeared saying US users weren’t “fully supported.” Something was definitely wrong.
A long session with Slingbox tech support — the company has excellent customer service — yielded no result. The rep. essentially said there was an issue with my network because the Slingbox was not maintaining the connection.
Bring in the reinforcements
With this recommendation, I went out and got a Mac Airport Extreme figuring — if I did have a network problem — the Airport would get the job done.
In fact, the Airport did work. We were able to get a solid network connection, but the remote on the SlingPlayer was still not showing up, so we changed the hookup to connect directly to the cable box and re-ran the SlingPlayer Directory setup. The remote did not show up and we were still getting the weird US is “not fully supported” dialogue box during setup.
We were able to sling to Paris, but only if our TV was on and my brother was willing to watch what we were watching at the time. Decent, but not exactly what I had in mind when I spent around $200 on the Slingbox and $180 on the new router.
Introducing Fios
This Thursday, we had Fios installed and attempted to reconfigure the slingbox for the new system. This time, connecting it directly to the Fios-supplied router in order to make the setup less complicated.
Again, the slingbox could not maintain a connection to the network, no remote and the US “not supported” error. Again, several hours with a customer support tech.
This time there was a satisfactory result — of sorts. This time, after not getting a connection and hearing about the other odd errors, the Slingbox tech told me he was going to put me on hold to “check the documentation” on the error because there was “a physical defect with the machine.” When he came back, he told me SlingMedia would be sending me a new box.
My new Slingbox
My new Slingbox will be here in five-to-seven business days — with any luck, enough time to have it set up for next Sunday’s Redskins vs. Giants game.
I hope it works and I can be a satisfied Slingbox customer — I really do. The concept of the Slingbox — the ability to watch your television from anywhere in the world over the web — is amazing. I really want them to succeed, but as it is now, I don’t see the Slingbox ever making it out of the early adopter market. It’s just far too complicated to set up and operate. I think of TiVo/DVR technology and how plug-and-play, second nature that has become and wonder if Slingbox will ever get there.
My parents can set up a TiVo, but they wouldn’t even know where to begin with a Slingbox — it’s just too complicated. Unless they can come up with some sort of step-by-step set-up interface, similar to what TiVo does, I just don’t see the device breaking through.
Technorati Tags: apple airport extreme, cable system, comcast, early adopters, fios, good resources, home networks, network, powerbook G4, programming, router, slingbox, slingbox pro, slingmedia, SlingPlayer, tivo