Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Despite the rhetoric from both sides, neither HD-DVD nor Blu-Ray is a clear winner in the high definition video format wars, according to the New York Times. It's a stalemate.

We bought an HD DVD player when they were on sale earlier this year.  Even so, we've only seen two HD DVD titles since that time, opting for the most part for ordinary DVD.  Why?

1. Cost.  Ordinary DVDs are available for anywhere from $6 to $20, depending on how old the release is.  HD DVD releases are generally $30 and up. 
2. Selection.  There really isn't much of a selection.  One or two shelf units at Best Buy versus the thousands of titles available in regular DVD format.
3. Rental.  Our local video store doesn't carry either Blu-Ray or HD DVD.

As a result, of the dozen or so DVD's we purchased at Christmas, only one was an HD DVD.  It looks great, but until there are more titles available at a more reasonable price, I don't expect to be getting a lot of use out of our fancy new HD DVD player.

As a nation, we Canadians aren't party animals.  According to the paper this morning, just 6% of us will be going out for the all-out New Years party this evening, and fully 40% of us aren't planning to party at all… not even at someone's house!  Me, well… I'll be hosting our fabulous North America wide New Years Countdown call… with a glass of champagne in hand. 380 people have RSVP'd across 3 time zones.

Hope to see you there!

New Telephony’s Kelly Teal writes:

VoIP clearly has moved into the mainstream, but 2007 marked a year of high-profile stumbles that appear to signal the end of standalone IP telephony.

The rest of the article talks about the stumbles of Vonage, SunRocket and Ebay / Skype, concluding with this quote from Infonetics Research analyst Stéphane Téral:

Overall, 2007 set the stage for big changes in the VoIP industry. VoIP is no longer an adventure, an opportunity for startups, says Téral. “It’s a serious telephony business taken over by giant telcos. … You can’t stay pure-play forever.”

I, for one, am not buying that VoIP is not longer an opportunity for startups.  Granted, the business of being an IP replacement for the telco is a bad one (but who didn’t know that?), but we’ve barely started to scratch the surface of what’s possible in IP.  So the big guys will run the networks… who cares?

1. Equipment costs have fallen to the point where anyone can start a VoIP company, building virtually any kind of application.  Moore’s Law is wreaking havoc on the telco equipment suppliers. It’s benefiting anyone in the business of building software for those networks.
2. Peering arrangements and interconnects between telcos and the VoIP networks have made it possible for applications to be built that piggy back on whatever carrier network that subscribers are attached to.
3. The web has now reached into telephone networks, allowing innovative mashups to be created. 

2008 will mean huge opportunities for startups.  They just won’t be the opportunities that Stéphane Téral writes about.

This is a fabulous picture of the tail end of the fireworks in Sydney Australia, shot just a few hours ago by Warren Howard, brother of iotum’s Chairman Randall Howard.  In his email, he writes:

"I ended up in an area called "the Rocks’ which is more downtown and virtually under the Harbour Bridge.  The ending of the fireworks always involves a major display from the bridge the this year did not disappoint. "

Apparently  the temperature at the harbour was a balmy 25C (77F).  It won’t be that warm here tonight… good excuse to get on our New Years Conference Call rather than braving the cold. 

BlogFuse launched yesterday with an appropriately Web 2.0 PR blitz, including giveaways on TechCrunch.  BlogFuse is a tool that lets you create a Facebook application from an existing blog.  Compatible with any blog that has an RSS feed, it's targeted at the "pro" blogger looking to generate more viral traffic. 

Setting it up is easy.  You simply sign up for a $5/month account, run a small wizard (runs only in Firefox) which walks you through creating a Facebook developer account, and the basics of creating your application, and … bob's your uncle, you've got a Facebook application — no muss, no fuss and most of all… no icky coding!

So I did it, and here's the result.   

But Facebook already reads RSS feeds, right?  So, what's the point?  Well, for the aforementioned "pro" blogger, Facebook's approach has some downsides.  It imports the content inside the Facebook walled garden, for starters, which (if you read their TOS carefully) makes it their content and not yours.  All the advertising you rely on to monetize your blog gets stripped out.  And… suddenly you have two comment streams to manage — one on the blog, and one on Facebook.

BlogFuse, in comparison, redirects the reader to the original blog, which obviates all those problems. 

Still, there's a lot left for the BlogFuse team to do before this becomes really easy and really valuable for the Blogger who doesn't know his or her way around Facebook development.  For example:

• There's no way to monetize the BlogFuse generated application canvas.  It would be nice to put some advertising into them.
• Despite the wizard, you still have to manually edit the about page, icons, application directory entry, sidenav URL and other application settings within Facebook.  It's not as fuss-free as the BlogFuse team makes out.
• Although BlogFuse claims that the application can be embedded in a fan page, I was unable to do so. 
• The share button behaviour is pretty clunky.  Sometimes it shares the application, and sometimes it shares individual items. 

BlogFuse is promising, but I suspect that the majority of Facebook users will want an RSS reader for multiple feeds rather than an application dedicated to one feed.  Ultimately, that will limit its appeal to the few pro bloggers that are also interested in building fan pages for themselves on Facebook.  It's unlikely, in my opinion, that you will see viral propagation of BlogFuse generated applications.  However, BlogFuse does make it very easy for individual readers to share the stories they think valuable. 

I'll use it for now.  It looks like a nice widget to drive readers back to the blog rather than orphaning them inside Facebook.