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Will Nero Deal Open Europe to TiVo?

14 October 2008 Bob Snyder Vendor News
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tIvoAmerican favorite TiVo moves from set-top box to the PC with a deal that brings TiVo functions to PCs using Nero's LiquidTV package. 

Nero LiquidTV/TiVo PC will allow users to burn DVDs and carry their recorded content with them. (e.g., take TV shows on a plane trip or car ride).

The device targets the road warrior, college student and existing TiVo user (hardly any in EMEA outside UK at moment).

LiquidTV/TiVo PC is available in No. America but will not expand into Europe until 2009.

Go Nero Sizzles While TiVo Burns

Nokia to End Era of High Cost Music

14 October 2008 Bob Snyder Mobile Phones
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Nokia will bundle an all-you-can-eat music buffet with phones in a service called “Comes with Music”. 

This flat-fee music service with phone purchase lets  buyers download as many tracks as they like for a year, choosing from 2.1 million songs from Sony, Universal, EMI and Warner. If users want more tracks after year-end, they have to pay.

DRM battles may fall off quickly now as the music industry cuts the deals with the mobile phone industry, the same deals they petulantly refused the PC industry for more than a decade. If it works, the music CD is dead and iTunes could suffer.

Go Nokia “Comes With Music”

What’s Hype and What’s Not

05 October 2008 Bob Snyder Market Trends - Stats
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Master of hype analysis, Gartner identifies 27 emerging technologies and predicts 8 of these will transform business in the next 10 years.

Priority Matrix for Emerging Technologies, 2008  

 benefit

years to mainstream adoption
  less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years
 transformational Web 2.0 Cloud Computing
Public Virtual Worlds
SOA 		3-D Printing
Context Delivery Architecture
RFID (Case/Pallet)		 Mobile Robots
 high   Electronic Paper
Green IT
Location-Aware Applications
Service-Oriented Business Applications
Solid-State Drives 		Behavioral Economics Augmented Reality
 moderatele Basic Web Services Corporate Blogging Idea Management
Microblogging
Social Computing Platforms
Social Network Analysis
Tablet PC
Video Telepresence 		Surface Computers
Virtual Assistants 		Erasable Paper Printing Systems
    Wikis    
 low        


Go Gartner’s Pick of Peaks & Troughs

Bloatware as a Business

05 October 2008 Bob Snyder Software
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What a tangled web we weave…that free, preinstalled software (often trial or demo) that we used to dangle in front of public (as a reason to buy a particular PC ) is now called "bloatware” by an unappreciative public. And retailers want to charge that public a service fee to take off the pre-installed software…

But software companies pay PC makers to load it up. Removal upsets software publishers and drives PC makers right into the negative margin zone.

We are an industry at war with ourselves (and our customers are in the middle). Click here to see Bob’s Byte and hear how bad this war is-- and what HP wants to do about it.

Go 'Bye, 'Bye Bloatware

What’s A Nice Guru Like You... Doing In A Place Like This?

05 October 2008 Bob Snyder Software
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Apple Genius Bars versus Roving Geeks…As part of its $300-million marketing campaign to change the way we think about Redmond, Microsoft will deploy its own customer service reps at retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City.

At least 155 "Microsoft gurus" will be released in U.S. stores by year’s end. These gurus will answer questions about PCs and Microsoft products, demonstrating how the products work together. The idea is to get customers thinking Microsoft.

The Genius Bar offers tech support on products you’ve purchased, but Microsoft reps won’t go there. We’re told Microsoft gurus will not be paid on commission but measured by customer satisfaction. What a bad job to take.

Go Microsoft Customer Reps in Your Strore

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