Rakesh Agrawal's Blog — Founder, Investor, Houstonian

Now that Logitech’s Revue product and Sony’s Google TV enabled TVs have been announced (or announced and “leaked” respectively) there are folks that are getting pre-disenchanted with Google TV:

• Am I Blind, Or Am I Just Not ‘Seeing’ What’s So Great About Google TV?
  
• Tweet by @StardotGarf: It’s difficult to make things simple. But Apple must have rolled on the floor laughing when they saw this: http://bit.ly/9DvizE
  

First of all, I disagree with the idea that there’s a bunch of hype around Google TV. There’s not, this comment is just reflects an insular tech community perspective.

Second, yes, I agree with the fact that Sony’s keyboard for Google TV is silly… I joked earlier this week that Brother should sue Sony for copying their label printer keyboards… then again, come on now, be honest, who *hasn’t* thought of using their Brother label printer to control their television!?!

And, yes, I agree that Logitech’s Revue is too complicated (see the What you Need section of this page… consumers do NOT want this!) and it’s priced too high ($299… without an input device!).

So I think Logitech’s Revue is going to flop and Sony’s products aren’t going to sell any better than any of their other TV products (which I would consider a flop, if I were Sony). I’ve seen lots of other companies try and sell “next generation” TV experiences to consumers and Logitech and Sony repeat a lot of the same mistakes (including some of the same mistakes we made at SnapStream with Beyond TV).

But you know what: It doesn’t matter if Logitech and Sony fail, Google TV is going to be JUST fine. Why? Because it’s F-R-E-E, free!! (or, eventually, less than free). The $99 (or less) Google TV box WILL come out. Google will keep improving the software stack, bringing more content into the fold, bringing more 3rd party apps into the mix, making web-browsing on your TV better and better. The price premium for Google TV on your cable or satellite set-top box, your TV, your Blu-ray player, etc. will eventually go to $0. Android’s doing this in smartphones and Google TV will do it in the TV category as well.

Personally, I’m not going to buy a new Google TV enabled Sony TV (even though I’m actually in the market for a new TV right now) and I’m definitely not buying a Logitech Revue. But I will buy the first halfway decent $99 or less Google TV box that comes out so I can play around with it and watch Google make the software better and better.

(Since FastCompany’s commenting system is terrible and won’t let me 1) register to comment or 2) use my twitter or facebook to comment, here’s my comment to their article)

I think Facebook would say this is an outlier and these guys should just click the easy to see “unsubscribe” button and get out of the group if they don’t want to be a part of it. It’s an outlier because only your “friends” can add you to a group and most people don’t have a gazillion, random people as friends like Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis do.

But on the flipside of things, has anyone has this feature “work” for them? Do people see these wonderful, natural intuitive groups automagically coming into existence? That’s the idea that they talked about… that this would be photo tagging where group creation just kind of happened in a natural and organic way. I haven’t seen any such groups cross my path just yet.

When the Facebook people talk about things that are “social” as a checkbox feature vs. things that are built as being social from the ground up, I have to say that it sounds like a bunch of BS to me. I don’t think the line is that pronounced.

I’ve been using Fonmigo’s mifi-like device while I’ve been traveling in the United Kingdom (aka UK aka England) this week.

It works well and I recommend the service. Of the options I looked at, this was the lower cost one. I think it’s costing me something like $10 per day (you can see their full price information on their website).

So far, I’ve mostly used it outside of London, in Wales. I’ve used it on the First Great Western train and it’s worked well. I’ve used it while in Swansea (a town in Wales) and it’s worked well. I even FaceTime’ed with my Dad from the train!

The device isn’t actually the Novatel Mi-Fi device, which has been popular in the States — it’s something similar, the Huawei E5830. One of the theoretical advantages of this device over the MiFi is it has all of these lights on the front that tells you its status.

The Novetel MiFi, in contrast, tries to communicate all status information through one light that changes colors and blinks at different frequencies. Which is to say, Hell if I ever know what the MiFi’s status indicator is trying to tell me! But the Huawei E5830, isn’t really a lot better: While the MiFi has only one cryptic light, the Huawei has FIVE of them! But the device definitely works, once you figure out how the different buttons make it turn on. Still, there’s an opportunity for some device maker to do a much better job.

I always worried about this when I switched my blog over to http://rake.sh/:

Bit.ly, HootSuite (with its Ow.ly service), Ad.ly and perhaps even Smel.ly could well be at risk of having their domain names sudden.ly taken away by the Libyan government. full article

So here’s to hoping that the Island of St. Helena doesn’t start yanking .sh domain names!

My sister called me to earlier today to ask me a random question: is there a way for me to send SMS messages from my computer?  Of course!, I told her.  Here’s the reply I sent her, in case it’s useful to anyone else:

Approach 1: Sending SMS using Google Voice

• Go to http://voice.google.com/
• Create yourself an account
• Now from http://voice.google.com/ you can send and receive SMS messages.
• The “from” phone number on these messages will be your Google Voice number.

Approach 2: Using Gmail’s chat feature to send SMS

• Google chat in Gmail has an SMS feature
• On any contact in your chat list, you can choose “send SMS” (it’s there in the options)
• It’ll ask you to enter a number for that person.
• Now, from now on, if that’s person’s offline or online, you can send them SMS through google chat.
• If they reply, it’ll show up in your google chat, archived in gmail.
• Note: there are limits to how many SMS messages you can send before you get a reply… a safeguard against the service being abused by spammers

I’ve been using the new Nike Plus iPhone app to track my runs… It’s really cool. It talks to you while you’re running, letting you know your pace for each mile you run and it uploads all the data to Nike’s website so you can chart your progress and get a view of your run on Google Maps with a speed gradient that shows you where you ran faster and where you ran slower.  I’m sure there’s more the the website, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Anyways, I carried my iPhone in my hand on my first run but that wasn’t any fun so I went looking for an iPhone armband that I could wear while running.  After poking around reading reviews on Amazon.com and reading random review through Google, last week I bought two armbands for my iPhone 4.  The first one, was the Apple iPhone 4 / iPhone 4G Black Mesh Sport Armband.  It’s not so good… it’s fit to the iPhone 4 but you have to remove the iPhone 4 from whatever case/bumper you have it in and then you have to really squeeze it into this thing to use it.  And once it’s in there, operating the screen is something you can only do by forcefully pushing the piece of thick plastic against the iPhone’s screen.  I can’t even say what it’s like when it’s actually fastened on your arm because I haven’t even tried it yet.

The other iPhone 4 armband I tried out was Grantwood’s Tuneband for iPhone 4 — this one works pretty well.

It comes with it’s own iPhone 4 cover and then the velcro armband slips through a slits on the back of that case.  I wear it slightly above my elbow and it stays in place while I run.  The armband is made mostly of a stretchy nylon (?) material so when you pull and apply the velcro, the whole thing is tensioned on your arm.  I don’t have huge arms but they aren’t that skinny either… with the length of the strap and location of the velcro, if my arms were any skinnier, I’d have to wear this thing higher on my arm, closer to my shoulder.  And there might even be some people whose arms are two thin for this particular strap.  But it works great for me!

I was surprised to see the name brands in iPhone cases (Belkin, Speck, etc) don’t have their own armbands for sports… There’s the  Nike+Armband for iPhone but it hasn’t been re-designed for the iPhone 4 — come on Nike!

The last thing I’ll say is that even though the Nike app is cool with it’s visualizations, GPS maps, Nike Plus website, etc. the is the iPhone feels a  little bit big to be carrying around on runs like this.  So maybe I’ll get one of those Garmin or Polar wristwatches instead.  Meanwhile, the Tuneband from Grantwood is my iPhone armband of choice, I recommend it!

Jason McElweenie did an SEO project for us at SnapStream and Piping and he did some great work for us (if you happen to visit our sites, a lot of the changes he recommended for SnapStream are pending a new site template that we’re still debugging). So, anyways I wanted to wish him best of luck with his new Houston-focused marketing agency, the “You Might Know Me” marketing agency.

Jason, JR and Kerri: best of luck to you all!

Some details from Jason’s email announcing the new venture:

You Might Know Me – A Marketing Agency
Partners: JR Cohen, Jason McElweenie, Kerri Ryan
Website (almost): www.ymkmagency.com
Phone: (713) 487-5112
Facebook | Twitter

What we do: marketing strategy, online strategy, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media, events, video, and design…and a few more things.

A couple of weeks ago, after setting up Sonos for a family member, I had lots of fresh thoughts on Apple’s iTunes + Airport Express whole home audio solution (which I run at my house) vs. Sonos’ system for whole home audio, so I jotted them down as a series of tweets. Here they are in a single blog post:

1. Sonos just works. Apple’s Airport Express + AirTunes requires some setup.

2. Sonos supports Rhapsody, Pandora & other music services. Airport Express only supports playing back music that’s in your iTunes library.

3. Sonos is more expensive — about $300-400 per room. You can get an Airport Express on eBay (that’s where I bought the three that I’m running in my house) for $60-70.

4. Sonos’ software seems more instant on. With Apple Airport Express, you use the “Remote” iPhone app, which can be laggy & behave weirdly.

5. Sonos lets you control the volume of each zone independently. With Apple Airport Express, there’s one volume level across all zones. (UPDATE: this has now been fixed in iTunes 10 and Airplay. See my post on what’s new in Airplay.)

6. Sonos’ search function is terrible, forcing you to first pick search by title / artist / etc. Apple Remote search is a simple one box, the way it should be.

7. Sonos has dedicated touchscreen device (it’s handy and gets used). No such option With Apple Airport Express, iPhone “Remote” app is it.

8. Sonos let’s you play multiple tracks, each in it’s own zone. Airport Express doesn’t. It’s one song in the zones you select.

9. Sonos seems to be more robust in dealing with wifi problems. The music with my Apple Airport Express system will glitch sometimes (see AirTunes Airport audio stream drops or cuts out). Of all of Sonos’ strengths / Apple’s weaknesses, this is probably the most significant. There’s nothing worse than having some nice music playing while you have friends over and then having it just completely cut out in the middle. I’m hoping with Apple’s renewed interest in whole home audio (see what’s new with Airplay in iTunes 10), they’re going to quickly fix this.

10. Sonos has the S5 all-in-one wifi digital music interface + amp + speakers box. It’s awesome. No such option with Apple Airport Express. (UPDATE: with Apple’s new AirPlay being opened to 3rd parties, this is no longer an advantage for Sonos… You’ll see lots of standalone speakers (and more) that are as simple as the S5. Like this iHome Airplay speaker that’s been announced.)

So while it might look like the list above says, “Sonos is the only way to go!”, that’s not true. Apple’s solution totally works, it just has some limitations. And some of those limitations have been eliminated with Apple’s Airplay upgrade in iTunes 10.

Here’s where Apple’s Airport Express + iTunes is compelling, at least for me. To wire up my four “zones” in my house, the total cost was:

4 Airport Expresses = 4 x $70 = $280

4 amps (I use this one) = 4 x $55 = $220

4 sets of speakers = 4 x $100 (roughly) = $400

The same same setup with Sonos would have been at least $1100 more! (Sonos 90, which is equivalent to the Airport Express, is $350, ie $280 more than Airport Express. $280 x 4 = $1120 more)

Amidst bigger announcements last week, Apple quietly announced a new version of their “whole home audio” technology: AirPlay (formerly known as AirTunes). To my knowledge, here’s what’s new:

• The game changer: Apple appears to be opening up the AirPlay protocol to 3rd parties, as reported by Engadget here and here. Here’s a teaser from iHome on their upcoming AirPlay speakers:

  

  What makes this exciting is setting up whole home audio with Apple + iTunes will now be a LOT easier. Before, the only option was to get an Airport Express, combine it with an amp and some speakers. Yes, complicated. Now, with AirPlay being built in 3rd party products, you’ll be able to get standalone speakers off-the-shelf, plug them into power and that’s it! They’ll just show up as speakers available in iTunes. Just like the Sonos S5. This is going to bring a lot more people to Apple’s whole home audio solution.

• This is a smaller thing, but I haven’t seen it reported anywhere else: iTunes 10’s AirPlay “audio zone” selector now features volume controls for each zone. Screenshots:

  
  The new "zone selector" drop down in the bottom right of the iTunes window (where it says "Living Room")

  
  New volume control per zone in iTunes 10 Airplay

  I’m excited about this, first, because it’s useful. We had a birthday party last weekend and had music going in the backyard and the living at the same time, but it was too loud in the backyard and not loud enough in the living room. This is what I needed to get the audio levels right. Sonos has always had this.

• The thing that excites me about both of these items is Apple is paying attention to distributing music around the house. Hopefully they have or will fix long-standing problems with AirTunes/AirPlay (like the “audio stream drops or cuts out” problem) as more people use this technology! And hopefully, by the same token, the technology will see more feature additions too… For example, I want to be able to access music services like Pandora and Rhapsody on my iTunes+Airport Express whole home audio system. And I want to be able to play one song in one room and another song in another room… all from the same instance of iTunes.

Sylvia at Piping created this photomosaic of the people at Piping Technology and the products we manufacture… pretty cool:

It was created using a web-based mosaic making tool called zumyn. The first photo mosaics I saw online were made by an MIT guy, Rob Silvers… Who I discovered through Philip Greenspun’s personal blog. Back then he had been commissioned to do photo mosaic for the rich and famous like Bill Gates (out of currency bills from around the world).