Full Transcript:

Cariann Higginbotham: Technology Evangelist Podcast,. Freestyle Friday for May 4^th, 2007, recorded live with audience participation.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Welcome to Freestyle Friday. My name is Benjamin Higginbotham, with me is Ed Kohler.

Ed Kohler: Hello.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Both of us from technologyevangelist.com. We just got back from the Killer App Expo.

Ed Kohler: Yeah.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It was very killer and appy, I would say.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I think besides being killer, there was a lot of talk about an app.

Benjamin Higginbotham: What app would that be?

Ed Kohler: It’s all about bandwidth.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It was. Actually, the Fort Wayne area was very impressive. It was wired with fiber to every doorstep, now whether that fiber went into the home was the consumer’s choice, whether they wanted to pay for that or not; and they also had -- so they had competing companies, they had Verizon with FiOS and they had Comcast with their bandwidth, so the customers actually has a choice and there was competition in the market place unlike most everywhere else in the United States that I’ve seen and they also had free Wi-Fi in the Downtown city area which was also very, very cool.

Ed Kohler: Right and where is Fort Wayne is -- why’s Fort Wayne such a leader on this stuff and with -- so that was something we were trying to figure out. We had a chance to talk to the Mayor about this because a lot of this was -- there was a big thing that he pushed as Mayor was to try to get the Wi-Fi or not the Wi-Fi, but their broadband really competitive as much as they could. But, it’s a rust  belt part of the country and they need a way to try to get more jobs coming in and become competitive again and they saw this as a big opportunity to do that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I would have to actually agree with them I think that by giving bandwidth or giving the ability to get high, high speed, real high speed bandwidth, not this 256 Kilobits per second up down DSL type of stuff, we’re talking 10, 20, 30 Megabits into every home. It is into down-speed and up-speed isn’t quite that much, but you’re still talking Megabits in upload speed, not Kilobits. They really create a great technology based market over there, one where I was looking around going “Heck, I'd live here!” It was way better than what we’ve got here in the Twin Cities area.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, and it starts to open up opportunities for so many different online applications, once you have really serious amount of data that you can push through into your home.

Benjamin Higginbotham: One of the really cool things we saw, I thought was Telepresence and its like -- how would you describe that, Ed? I would say Telepresence is a lot like video conferencing to the next degree. I wouldn’t call it video conferencing 2.0 though it is a little bit different.

Ed Kohler: Right, we had chance so we check out that semanar on it and it is definitely well beyond video conferencing where if you’ve ever done a live Skype call with someone with video, this is well beyond that, because you basically create, in some cases, an entire room that’s based around -- it’s basically made into a virtual boardroom for though like, you’ll take a boardroom table -- cut the table in half, and the other side of that table will be in another part of the country and so you’re looking a set of plasma screens there, but the people on the other end when they -- as they interact, they’re basically can look directly at you and in high resolution, so.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And you with them, what I thought was interesting is, as you said, they’ve not only cut the boardroom in half, that mean they’ve just sliced it right down the middle and replace that with a giant projection screen, now some of them are plasmas, but the new -- the next generation stuff that was really cool were just as an entire wall that’s nothing but a large projection of the people in order around the table and what they do is they set it up, so that both rooms are identical. So, it’s just a continue, visually it’s a continuation of the room and everyone is life size as is the table, so you’re not talking about small monitor. So, when you’re looking around the room, it looks like they’re actually there, except they’re little more two-dimensional than three-dimensional, but I can turn to my right and make eye-contact with a person at the right at the table, they can see that I’m making eye-contact with them and they can make eye-contact with me, whereas with video conferencing, you usually look in right at the monitor, the people are much smaller, they'er lit wrong, the audio is horrible and you’re never actually making eye contact, because the camera is above the monitor, so it looks like you’re looking down constantly.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I mean you can’t quite play footsie with the person across the table from here like, we’re right now, but it does -- they’ll go through a lot of work to make these rooms really impressive, or they’re actually -- they’re using the same lighting on both sides and the woodwork in the room, they basically build the room within a room in order to pull this off so, as you can imagine it’s not cheap, but it’s good to point out that it is a projection not a plasma because part of the power there is they can put cameras right behind it which allows you to look directly at someone when they’re on the screen and to them, you’ll be looking directly at them, so it build more a virtual reality type situation then.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely, guest 617 in Ustream asked “How expensive is it?” It is not cheap, as Ed said, it starts around $50,000 for a really low-end system, but really the systems that were -- I thought the coolest and the ones that would really be impactful were the ones that were -- a quarter million, half million or million dollars per room and you need to have at least two.

Ed Kohler: Exactly, and of course as you have more, it becomes more valuable.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely, and what’s the cost of buying that private jet and flying that all around the world, as opposed to just having this virtual conference center and I think the thing with video conferencing versus Telepresence and the big deal and we were debating this in the car ride back, which will bring up Hypermiling in a minute -- in the car ride back, we were talking about why wouldn’t you use -- video conferencing hasn’t really taken off, but I think this will, at least in the fortune 1000 companies, as the price will continue to be driven down, and that quarter million system will eventually cost $50,000 or whatever way in that and I think part of what it is that video conferencing experience is quite poor, actually it’s not a simulation of being there real timing and you loose the eye contact, you loose the interaction with the person and that’s critical to been able to communicate with other people as eye contact -- like right now, I’m making eye contact with Ed as we’re talking, it’s just that’s how humans speak, and when you’re not able to do that effectively, it really annoys us and that technology was complicated and they never quite worked right whereas with this, it’s so life like, it’s almost like being there why would you fly at that point.

Ed Kohler: Right, yeah, it’s tricky because –for example, people are really turned off, I think if they are really pitch or something important doing over something like WebEx would be not so good, you don’t have that relationship and I think one of the biggest challenges is that even if you have a great camera, you’ve great bandwidth on your end, you have no control over the experience of the person that you’re trying to interact with. They could have some crappy setup or a horrible connection, so it’s a two way thing or you get so much more control on these situations, they did mention that they’re at the $299,000 level, there’re companies who were buying this.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Not $300,000, $299,000 because that extra number makes it just so much more expensive.

Ed Kohler: Oh yeah, you -- people are going to fold at that option, but they’re saying that some companies are buying them like 12 of these now, and putting them at important facilities throughout the country or all over the world and there’re also companies I think who’re going to try to get into the business of time sharing these were in major cities or something you will be able to go and just rent time.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Jill brought up an interesting point saying “Too bad, it’s so expensive. This would be great for educational institutions.” Well, they’re already throwing in it in the hospitals and I think that just like educational institutions get steep discounts on bandwidth, which is one of the more expensive parts of this, this isn’t something that just runs over the standard internet and you call it a day. I mean you need deep, deep trunks to make this all work together, you’re slinging more than high definition video over the internet, that’s not going to work. You have to have QoS, you have to have a line that supports very, very high quality QoS that right now today as expensive. That’s one of the more expensive parts of the line because it’s not just a quarter million dollars per room than it's a $15,000 per month per room to keep it running fee. So, right now today, that’s too expensive for schools but these prices are going to drop down. This is bleeding edge technology, we’re not even leading edge. We’re at the very beginning of this technology and technology always gets bigger, better, faster, cheaper in that just fantastic all the way round, so we’re going to see this get into educational institutions eventually.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, so, they actually had some examples in med schools where they’re also using this type of technology for like in the class room, in the surgery or in -- rather than, obviously you can put so many people in an operating room, so they can use similar technology to basically build like a I guess what you call, like a theater tied into the operating room with the high-def cameras that are in there and but there’s a two way interaction and in the operating room, they’ll create basically a projection screen in there so that the doctors can interact with the people.

Benjamin Higginbotham: What I’m really excited for is when these facilities, these Telepresence facilities start opening up around the country, I’ve some really interesting applications I want to throw at that, because you can just, I mean what you can do with these is insanecrazycool so, I’m really going to be watching this technology closely and I think we’re going to be releasing a video I think on the Technology Evangelist Home Page -- don’t hold me to that one and the reason for that is unfortunately the presentation started -- they were in a hurry to get it going, so we weren’t able to get audio from the presenter, we had to get it of a long shot gun and so I’m not sure what we picked up from an audio stand point and unfortunately audio is 80% of video, so I’m not sure what we have there, But I would love to be able to post that.

Ed Kohler: And if you want to learn -- the guy we met down there, his name is a Howard Lichtman and if you want to check out more about Telepresence, he is a real guru on the stuff and you can find out at humanproductivitylab.com, I’d just throw that in the checklist.

Benjamin Higginbotham: As we were driving to and fro for well it was Fort Wayne, almost said Fort Myers.

Ed Kohler: For Wayne.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Right. Yeah, as we where driving to and fro, Ed decided that in the Ford Expedition, he would Hypermile.

Ed Kohler: Right, so the Ford Expedition is not the best mileage or doesn’t get the best mileage of any car on the road today, but we’ve a lot of gearing going these trips, so it works really well for that and it’s about a 1000 pounds for the gear I think when you add it all together plus our butts.

Benjamin Higginbotham: What is Hypermiling, Ed?

Ed Kohler: Hypermiling is using driving tactics to try to get your mileage as high as possible. So, with that you can get your mileage above the EPA for your car using certain techniques and stuff. So, on the way down there, when I took the wheel, the car had been averaging 14.4 miles per gallon, so I reset the average in so interested as you tries your I could get and I think I got an 18.6 so.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s really good.

Ed Kohler: Yeah that was a big step up, don’t you think?.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I think that was a really good step up. I don’t know if anyone really be able to be better than that.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, so some of the techniques I was using include just hopping in behind semis, using the cruise control and trying to never use the break as far as possible, so as I was approaching congestion, I would back off my speed basically do all of my speed control with my thumb by adjusting the cruise up and down. And that worked pretty well, like it go a long time like that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So how long have you been Hypermiling for?

Ed Kohler: I have been into it for a few months now and I don’t know it is pretty fun.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So you’re an experienced Hypermiler then?

Ed Kohler: I think you could say that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, so how -- I don’t know what do you think I would get if I were to sit behind the wheel? What kind of mileage you think I would get?

Ed Kohler: Well, I think it will come down to your experience and your tactics you used and…

Benjamin Higginbotham: The correct the answer by the way everyone is 24 miles per gallon when Ben credible sits behind the wheel, I got 24 miles per gallon.

Ed Kohler: Did you just refer to yourself as Ben credible.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yes, I did. Because, it’s so Ben credible.

Ed Kohler: That’s Ben credible.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It was so Ben credible, I had to, I couldn’t just say “Ben”, I had to say Ben credible.

Ed Kohler: That was impressive because I think the car is rated at 20, so I think that the deal is you were hopping behind semis too, but you’re taken to different average speed or I was I think averaging about something around posted speeds.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, I was going about 30 miles an hour. I just wanted to rub that into Ed a little bit because he’s been Hypermiling all this time and I just wanted to get a better mileage than he did, so I would do anything it took, including adding an extra hour to the return ride home, just so I could get that mileage up there and I did when I dropped him off, I think it was a -- what was it when I dropped you off? I think it was just like around 23, that’s all right.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, it was up there.

Benjamin Higginbotham: We'll posted somewhere in Flickr stream somewhere I just I thought that was humorous.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, you really got that thing runing.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So while we were at the Killer App Expo, there’s a little Shin Dig that happened with Digg.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, what the heck. The Twitter, my Twitter just started blown up two nights ago and people are just freaking out and kept sending links out Digg this, Digg this, you have to Digg this, so like “Wow, there’s mutiny going on over there.”

Benjamin Higginbotham: There was and that was all about the number to crack the HD-DVD encryption mechanism, the DRM on that. It was a very, very small number actually that was for the crack, and it just goes to prove that you can -- DRM is useless, you can’t devise a DRM that can’t be cracked and that only was this cracked it was -- what was it? 16 bits that cracked it.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, it’s pretty small.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It was really small. So, just give up on DRM, guys. Anyhow, what happened was Digg was given a notice -- a take down notice and they complied and then the author put it back up and they took it down again and then banned him.

Ed Kohler: But, what we know -- if you spend anytime on Digg or Slashdot or sites like that, there’re people that just hate DRM, I mean just hearing it makes their blood boil, so when something like this comes up, of course it’s going to be massive news on sites like that so and it was, but then the story ended up becoming the take down notice and I think for a while, the entire front page of Digg was stories about Digg taking down, the Dugg story and so it got nasty.

Benjamin Higginbotham: The community just really started attacking Digg and just really pushing Digg on that particular matter and it’s interesting because Digg is the community. Without the community, Digg is nothing.

Ed Kohler: Right.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, a lot of sites now are saying that Digg is completely controlled by the community and they’re just, I am trying to find a nice way to say that...

Ed Kohler: Right, well that’s because Kevin Rose caved and he said “All right, fine, I’m not going to fight this any more.”

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, he had no other option. He had to.

Ed Kohler: No, he could have written a script that would just automatically pull every -- he could have filtered based on that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, I’m sorry, I worded that wrong. If he pissed off his community, he would destroy his site.

Ed Kohler: Right, Well that’s perceptive

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, yes. That’s what I’m saying of course technically it’s possible, technically you can do anything you want. I’m just saying politically it was is very difficult move. I’m sure there may have been another way around it. Although, I don’t necessarily disagree with what he did. I think he handled that very well. Personally and of course now the critiques are coming back saying “Oh, he’s controlled by Digg and the community controls everything and he’s just a puppet.” And to that I would say “Yep.” I mean that’s Digg.

Ed Kohler: You know whether it’s on Digg or not, it doesn’t really change the information at all. So even giving him a take down notice I think it is ridiculous. I saw someone tweet yesterday I think that there’s like 700,000 hits for that code on Google already. So, what you’re going to after 700,000 sites now, because Digg is really just pointing to some sites that has the code. I mean if you were putting it on Digg, because they were putting it on the title of the posts, the descriptions of post, but once it’s out there, you can’t put that back.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, no, it’s gone, I mean there’re entire videos that are made around this, there’re songs that are made around the numbers, there’re posts made around the numbers, it’s out there, it does not take very long. What are they going to -- they’re going to give a notice to Google? What’s going to happen? Google is going to be like “No, we’ll fight you and we have the money to do so.” Yahoo! is shutting down Yahoo! Photos for Flickr.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, for the longest time, well, since as long as they’ve owned Flickr, they’ve run the two parallel services and Flickr’s been growning like crazy and there were some duplicate functionality between the two services but they’ve now decided they’re going to pull the plug and you can merge over on to Flickr, if you like, but they’re also making it easy for people to more to other services as well, so it seems like they’re handling it very well as far as shutdown the service goes, but I think it’s a good move on their part.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Is it totally automated to go from there to -- I mean how are they make it go from there to Flickr, so is it just click about and it’s gone?

Ed Kohler: Yeah.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And that’s it, just one button.

Ed Kohler: Yeah.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Oh well.

Ed Kohler: If you’re Yahoo! ID, so like “I’m going to use Flickr now”, so they’re already have your photos in their system, it basically just go look at them and all through a different interface. So, I think that’s not a bad way to go.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Jill from Ustream says “It’s about time, it’s starting to go a little bit confusing with the two services and Flickr is way better.”

Ed Kohler: Yeah.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Without question.

Ed Kohler: I think so too.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, we use Flickr pretty actively here in Technology Evangelist as well for you have an SD800 and I’ve an SD600.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I mean it’s great if you want to -- I mean there’re so many ways you can use it. I mean you can use it just as your remote backup. It’s fine for that, but obviously, for sharing photos, it’s great, for blogging it’s awesome, for moblogging, because you can email directly into Flickr have things post from there to your blog. That’s very cool.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I know we did that from the Killer App Expo, if I remember correctly.

Ed Kohler: Yeah.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yep, very cool stuff. So, the other issue is…

Ed Kohler: The one thing I don’t like about Flickr though is you can’t say “This photo is private except for these two people.” Like say, if you’re at like a wild and crazy wedding reception or something like that. Yeah, and so the only private permissions you can do right now are “private” or “shared with all of your family”, “all of your friends” or “public”. So, but sometimes there’re pictures that you want to share with just a handful of people, you can’t do that yet. So, I would like them to fix that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: They’ve heard you, Ed, and they’re working on that right now. They are actively listening to..

Ed Kohler: I’m not the first person to ask this one.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, but because you asked now they’re going to do it. Just for you.

Ed Kohler: Thanks for saying good idea, like that positive feedback. Anyone else wants to give me positive feedback, I’d appreciate it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Ed, that was a great idea.

Ed Kohler: Thanks, Ben.

Benjamin Higginbotham: We’re talking about cameras and we were trying to take a picture of a road sign. It was an interesting mile marker and where were we?

Ed Kohler: We were in Illinois at that time.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yep, it was a…

Ed Kohler: Just outside Chicago.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It was a half mile marker which we thought was interesting. We thought may be there’re a lot of accidents there and you instead of have -- not only mile markers but also half mile markers.

Ed Kohler: Yeah on Interstate 90, they mark every half or so and you get the mile 74 or 74 and a half and on and on like that so, Jeremy who was with us, he thought this was pretty cool, so he wanted to snap a shot of it. Turns out, lot tougher to take a picture of a mile marker than you think.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, we were moving at the legal speed limit, and

Ed Kohler: Give or take, give or take.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Give or take, 30, 40 miles an hour and we found that when you try to take a picture, two things happen. One, there’s a delay built into the camera, so when you press the shutter, unlike a regular film camera, it’s not instant. Two, motion blur.

Ed Kohler: Right, so the first couple shots that Jeremy attempted, he didn’t get any of that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: The flash was on?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, oh yeah, flash is on first, through the windshield and I knew that he was taking these pictures at dusk, so those going to be a open aperture for quite a while to open exposure so it was a blurry mess but, so then eventually after I think about 8 or 9 tries, Ben decided he would try instead and had similar results.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I figured to be a Ben credible picture, but it was not, it was a blurry, blurry thing. It was a blurry, gob of something sliding across the screen. Even when I try to do it like as head on as possible, I just couldn’t do it, even if we were to take it into Photoshop and run a sharpen filter, wouldn’t work. Ustream is agreeing with us on the delay time on the Cannon cameras, we have both the Cannon 600 and an 800 in the car and yeah, I would agree, it’s just -- it’s nasty because you press that button and then you’ve to wait, you are like “click”.

Ed Kohler: Oh yeah. We were trying to take a couple like photo to say like a cross country ski race or running race or. You need to really be prepared ahead of time or I’ve seen it for like bowling to like, if you’re trying to get people out -- when someone is bowling, there’re only certain parts in the bowling motion that are photo friendly. So I’ll be trying get like later release or something. Good luck, luckily there are 10 frames.

Benjamin Higginbotham: We’ve added a Twitter feed to our video, if you’re watching the video live on Ustream right now, you can see there at very top of the page says Twitter.com/te. Subscribe to our Twitter feed and we’ll give you notices as to when we’re streaming live, when we’re doing events, what’s going on. It is a little more of a marketing feed, it’s less of the personal stuff and if you want the personal stuff, we do have personal accounts as well and I bring this up because Newsweek recently bashed Twitter.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I actually got a Tweet about Newsweek.

Benjamin Higginbotham: The irony.

Ed Kohler: Yeah. Lindsey Gish, she sent out a Tweet saying that “Newsweek could be in hate us.” Which they were, they were like “Oh, this is for the cool kids only and stuff like that.” Or “You won’t understand this unless you’re young.” That kind of thing, but you know what, Twitter isn’t for the young, Twitter is for the old, the young kids these days, they use that aim thing and.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, whippersnappers.

Ed Kohler: Yeah. They use that Facebook program so.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I don’t know. My brother in law uses Twitter. I know a lot of younger folks that use Twitter and I honestly have a harder time convincing the older folk. Younger folk, older folk where does that put me? That Twitter is interesting and good and that you want to keep up with these people and get these Tweets and get this constant stream of consciousness coming to you which is really what it is, it’s a stream of consciousness from people all around the globe and it just basically gives you an insight as to what people think and are doing and that whole -- it’s just intriguing and there’s also the marketing aspect like that Twitter.com/te.

Ed Kohler: In my opinion, the average Twitter user -- this is just my opinion, I don’t have any data to back this up, but the average Twitter user is 10 years older than the average Facebook user and the average Facebook user will never be a Twitter user.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Why do you saying really?

Ed Kohler: Because, all of their friends are on Facebook. They already have a network and Facebook is just going to add Twitter like functionality into it which they’re actually already doing now, where you can update your status and your Facebook profile using SMS now or instant messager

Benjamin Higginbotham: But the beautiful thing about Twitter is that it’s so incredibly simple to use. All of it is microblogging. The only thing it does is present’s awareness. That’s it. Whereas Facebook is much more complex, it’s much more Bloggy, MySpacey, all MyLifey type of thing, all in one.

Ed Kohler: Right, but you could subscribe to someone’s updates on Facebook just like you could with Twitter. Facebook has the functionality of Twitter -- it has the functionality of Twitter and so much more, but I think the people -- the key is -- they already have their network there. So, why do they want to come over to a new service to recreate that same network of friends?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Could be. The thing with Twitter is that started -- I don’t think that none of them are going to do that though. That is comes back to my conversation.

Ed Kohler: None will.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Not a single one?

Ed Kohler: Nope.

Benjamin Higginbotham: You’re speaking in absolute terms, I am so proud. I have trained you so well, I’m so proud of you, Ed. You know I…

Ed Kohler: They’re just -- I don’t think they’re going to do it. I think that Twitter is going to be for a Gen-X and Facebook for Gen-Y.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I think this speaks back to the volatility of the social networking sites in and of themselves and what happens if the key players move from one to the next. And now Facebook I think has move past that, there’s like this hump that you move past where everyone’s on it and even if the key players move, everyone is on it, right?. I think MySpace has moved past that hump as well. Actually, they’ve moved past it well before Facebook did, didn’t they? Facebook is still smaller than…

Ed Kohler: Yeah, MySpace is much bigger, but I think Facebook has more loyalty. I think amongst people I know they’ll be much more likely to give up their MySpace page than their Facebook page.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Pixel Spread Matt in the TalkShoe room says “Twitter can be story telling too”, which is absolutely true. These are all story telling mechanisms, these are all -- you can use -- the beautiful thing about them is unlike a service like Dodgeball, which is very specific and very niche, Twitter or Facebook or any one of these is so open that you can do whatever you want with it. You can use it to tell your story, you can use it to just shout out and say “On the can.” Or you can use it as a marketing tool to, say, doing a podcast, “Come, join us live” and I think it’s very powerful in that way and then I can use it however I want and I’m going actually going to I’ve never done this before I’m going to Pixel Spread gave out it’s Twitter address as Twitter.com/zombieattack, which I have to say “Very Cool Twitter name.” So everyone sign up for ZombieAttach. I’m building this network forum, how’s that?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, jump on it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely.

Ed Kohler: So? Cool.

Benjamin Higginbotham: You know what? That was everything in the -- I was just looking at the show notes. I was everything in the show notes and, for some reason, and may be it’s because we were doing the Killer App Expo all last week, the TalkShoe room is very quite. We’ve got cafn8ed Captain Slim, Jill, Jarah and I’ve got to remember how to pronounce it, it’s a Makyz is well.

Ed Kohler: Makyz

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, Absolutely. And you guys throw some questions my way. Cafn8ed saying he's working away, probably drinking some coffee. Drinking coffee.

Ed Kohler: I bet he is.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely. We got a little -- we had four more minutes in the podcast if we want to hit the 30 minute mark. We don’t have to, we could end it at anytime, but if you guys are fun, let’s make this thing happen, let’s start a new conversation. Someone throw out a topic.

Ed Kohler: All right. Is it easy to -- is it better to run Windows on Ubuntu or windows on a Mac? I’ve never tried that on a ban two.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Windows on -- so what’re you saying?

Ed Kohler: Using VM ware.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Oh, through out well, it is in VM, so who cares. Well, that point is hardware, it’s less OS I think, and more hardware personally. I would just throw Ubuntu on the laptop as a pure install if I want it. If I really wanted it, I would personally be throw out on the MacBook because they’re stylish and cool but then again, Mac OS X runs Darwin Unix, so I’ll just stick with Mac OS X.

Ed Kohler: It turns out that MacBooks are dentable found that on our trip. My laptop bag, the shoulder strap was not entirely attached and so it took a fall. Haven’t tried it -- the DVD player that’s a corner of it got smashed and I haven’t directly try to inserting anything in their sense.

Benjamin Higginbotham: The front of the Mac book is looking -- has seen better days, let’s put it that way.

Ed Kohler: Yep.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I was laughing, no, I was chortling heartily. It’s hard to say quickly.

Ed Kohler: It was quite the chortle.

Benjamin Higginbotham: We’re going to have Makyz logging and here we go. Let’s bring Makyz into the conversation. Maykz, welcome.

Makyz: All right. Can you hear me?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely. Can you hear us?

Makyz: Yes, definitely.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Fantastic.

Makyz: Well, I think it is…

Ed Kohler: How do pronounce your name, Maykz?

Makyz: Yes, Oh, it’s Maykz, exactly as you said it.

Ed Kohler: OK.

Makyz: All right. Well, several times in your past podcasts you guys talked about, high-definition TV’s and right now, I’m in the market, I’m going  to college and I live with a roommate and we go on fifty-fifty on a good high-definition TV.

Ed Kohler: So you want…

Makyz: I think you said that price break is it like 42 inches before it goes -- before it shoots up drastically?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, that seems to be about it right now. Today, and like there’s this pretty neat price point of 42 inches, and you say you’re going to college and you’re going in fifty-fifty with your roommate?

Makyz: Yeah.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, you probably got a -- is this in a dorm room, or is this in like a rented apartment? What are you doing?

Makyz: We rented a condo in Miami.

Ed Kohler: Nice.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It’s -- yeah, no kidding. Oh that’s why you’re traveling to Miami, that was part of the pre-show conversation, you’re traveling to Miami and that’s going to be nice. You’re not going to get any school work down there. It’s all going to be beach time. Personally, right now, it depends on what you’re going to use it for, if you’re going to strictly use it for television or for an Apple TV signal, you can go with just about any technology you want. However, if you going to be plugging your computer into it and you want to use it as a computer monitor as well as a television monitor, I would actually really have your focus on the plasma technology and from there, I would say, your best bang for your buck seems to be the Vizio monitor at Costco and that thing is a pretty inexpensive. It’s like you’ll -- each piece paying spending about 600 bucks, you can do your over the air HD, you can do your cable box HD, you can do your Apple TV and you can plug your computer in at native resolution on the monitor and not have any over-scan, under-scan issues. It seems to be working pretty good. It’s a 720p monitor, not 1080p, but if you want 1080p, you’ve to pay a premium for that right now and as college student, I assume, you don’t have the money for the premium of the 1080p.

Makyz: Well, both have pretty steady jobs. There’s no problem with the price, it’s just that -- we want something that last us to three and a half years and something that we can go in together because this is like the celebration thing for the little condo.

Ed Kohler: It’s a good bonding experience to share TV.

Benjamin Higginbotham: yeah, no, I’m really -- frankly I’m really quite impressed with that Vizio -- the other one that is really good is there’s a Maxent monitor from Costco as well, that’s also a very good monitor, also supports the computer and the television signal without having over-scan, under-scan issues. You’ll find that if you’re moving to LCD monitors or DLP monitors or other technology, you’re going to have what’s called over-scan, under-scan and that’s where the television signal actually, it is you can’t see the outside border of the TV signal, that’s cut off and they do that on purpose because there’s extra garbage that goes across that across that their television area like time coding, close caption data and stuff like that. So they just they put a little bezzle around it and cut it off. Well, when you plug a computer into and run it at native resolution, what ends up happening is that it then starts cutting and if you’re on the window’s box, it cuts off your start bar, you can’t see any of your star bar, your close boxes if you run things full screen or if you’re running Mac OS X, your Apple Menu is gone and with LCD and DLP technology, it’s really hit and miss, some of them do work, some of them don’t work. The plasma technology is less miss, more hit. So, some of them won’t work, they just won’t. But, the two that I mentioned, the Vizio and the Maxent are really good bang for buck, really good images on the monitors, they are 720p plasma 1080P technology, even if 42 inches, you’re going to be spending two to three times that, it’s just really expensive right now, and frankly, in the content isn’t here today and if you’re going to be dumping that in three years, that’s really when the content will be here and you will be able to get a really good bang for your buck than I assume for 1080p monitors in two to three years, and when the lifespan of the monitor -- when the monitor essentially have life and end your own, check it anyhow. So, that would be my recommendation, check those out, check them on in person though, because everyone’s perception of color and contrast and how you see things is different and what I see in a monitor, you may not like. I’m also looking for broadcast characteristics like how the blacks hold up and things like that and most people don’t want that, they want really dark blacks and really bright whites and I hate that, that’s not what I want at all. So, go check it out, go see it in the store although that’s not exactly a good place to see, because it’s hooked poorly. The other reason I like Costco is they’ve a 90 day return policy, no questions asked, so if you don’t like it, bring it back, try another one. They’ve got Panasonic, they’ve got a bunch of things.

Makyz: One more question. One other question.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Sure, absolutely.

Makyz: We download a lot of videos and we watch a anime and stuff, so which -- so the things aren't licensed in United States yet, so we just download it from service whatever they’re called. If we full screen it on our laptops and we hook it up to this LCD monitor that you’re talking to us about, will it look good, will it like how would it look to have LCD?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, there’re two ways to answer that. If you do in LCD technology, you’re probably going to be stuck with 1024x768 resolution in order to get it to work correctly and what ends up happening is this it stretches the image across the screen and then when you try to play a video full screen, you get these weird black bars where they don’t belong and it just looks horrible, so if you stick with a plasma monitor that does the proper resolution, if you run your computer at the native resolution of the plasma, it is usually 1366x768, which is the resolution and then you run that video full screen, it should look pretty decent. It depends on a bunch of variables; what was the video encoded at, frame size wise, how good was the codec, what was the bit rate and the graphics card, how good is the smoothing in the graphics card that you’re going to be using. So, if you’ve got a Macbox or Mac OS X box or a MacBook Pro or a Mac Mini, it should look pretty decent. If you’ve got a Windows box, just make sure you have a decent video graphics card, try to stay away from the integrated Intel stuff, and it should look pretty good actually. It’s not going to look true HD, because it’s probably not encoded in true HD. Now if it is encoded in true HD, 1280x720, it’ll be beautiful. You’d love it.

Makyz: Oh I’m not too much of a video buff, but I know that most of the stuff I downloaded is encoded in H.264. I’m not sure what that means.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, H.264 is a compression technology, it’s called a codec that stands for compressor-decompressor and what that is, is when you’ve got video, it’s ginormous, it’s huge, it’s Gigabytes per second. Uncompressed HD is -- I’m averaging that because it depends on the resolution but 120 Gigabytes -- is that right? -- Gigabytes per second -- that didn’t seem quite right.

Ed Kohler: A lot.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It’s a lot. Not Gigabits, Gigabytes, that can’t be right, it’s got to be 120 Megabytes per second because the other systems 1.2, anyhow. It’s 120 something bytes per second which is a really high speed, so if you’re to try to distribute that online, it wouldn’t work because the files would be gigs upon gigs upon gigs, so they use H.264 or VC-1 or these other really cool or complicated acronyms, they basically compress the size of the video down. H.264 DivX and XviD are next generation codec’s that are designed for high definition and at the same time having really tiny file sizes that look good. For example, Technology Evangelist, we shoot our -- we distribute our videos in H.264, because we think it’s a great format and is -- most computers can play that back, so if you’ve got a Windows box, you can play it back in VLC, same thing with Linux, same thing with Mac OS X, you just need to have the proper player. The codec won’t -- it all goes back to who compressed it. If I did an H.264 video, but I compressed it wrong, it’s going to look horrible. If I did an MPEG-2 video, but I compressed it right, it’s going to look great. So, it all depends on the compression artist. Most compression artists are pretty good and most of the programs are pretty good at automating that, but it should look pretty decent, hopefully. Like I said it all depends on how they compressed it, what frame size did they choose.

Ed Kohler: Oh, I hope they’d work it out before they published.

Benjamin Higginbotham: You do hope that, but they don’t always. So…

Makyz: Oh, thank you very much.

Benjamin Higginbotham: No problem. I hope that helped a little bit.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, we’ll have to come and see in Miami sometime.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, no kidding. Oh, I cut him off. I’m sorry. All right. Cafn8ed is saying the Vizio 37 inch rocks and it’s recognized by the laptop at 1366x733 -- that’s interesting, – it should be 768, I thought, for proper aspect but I could be mistaken and that’s on Windows XP. So, yeah, and again, it all depends you’ve got to watch for that over-scan, under-scan issue. I found the best luck for over-scan/under-scan is with plasmas, because they’re able to move the image whereas LCD is a very fixed format. So, I do recommend sticking with the plasma technology for that which is a 180 from my opinion about a year ago, I was just not liking plasma at all, and I just hated the way the blacks worked, but after trying many, many monitors, I ultimately came down to plasma scaled the best and they seem to work the best.

Ed Kohler: And you’re a real convert.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I am a convert. Weird?

Ed Kohler: Wow.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Wow, that’s weird. There is no one right technology, go in, test it, see what works for you and go for it, but from a ease of use standpoint, from a tech support standpoint, I go, I just say plasma first, because I don't have deal with it.

Ed Kohler: It’s like drinking the wine. Who cares what the label says if it taste good, drink it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I would like to thank everyone in Ustream for joining us as well as everyone in TalkShoe. I also like to thank Maykz for joining this live and joining the conversation, it was a fun one. We’ll be coming back to you on Monday, the -- what is today? 4 -- it was at the 7^th with New Media Monday, whatever day that is. So, join us then at so 12 O’clock Eastern, 11 Central, 9 Pacific, our time zone is -0600 GMT Earth Standard Time, so it’s 11 O’clock AM. Thank you so much and you guys have a great day.