Category: Web/Tech

Make your TV a work of art

by  Tyler Cowen in

That’s right, put a digital copy of a masterpiece as a screensaver on your TV:

An expensive new digital television is big, beautiful, flat and can hang on the wall. Some might even consider the set a piece of art.

RGB Labs charges for subscriptions to images such as The Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre Auguste Renoir.

So why not display Picasso, Renoir, Monet and other masters on the screen itself?

Three companies have recently formed to help consumers do just that…

[One of them] Chandler’s company, Dream City, has acquired licensing rights to more than 1,000 pieces of art, including masterpieces from Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso. He sells them in $14.95, 30-piece collections as screensavers. A Web site offers step-by-step instructions on how to connect a PC to the TV and run a slide-show loop on your big screen.

The core idea came from Bill Gates:

Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates has displayed art on wall-mounted PC screens at his home for years. That’s where Chandler got the idea for Dream City.

He put a frame around a monitor hooked to an old PC, hung it on the wall and showed family photographs and art.

“At parties, people just stood there, mesmerized,” Chandler says. “I realized there was a business there.”

Here is the whole story, which includes a Renoir image on a big TV screen.

My take: The idea is a promising start, but I am repelled by the idea of copies of classic paintings in my living room. Looking at lower quality reproductions would depress me. It would also make me wonder why I cannot find anything more personal, more current, and more alive to enjoy. I am keener on the idea of art created especially for this medium, let’s hope that is forthcoming.

Addendum: Michael Giesbrecht writes: “You’re in luck, Tyler! Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of art, created especially for this medium, are taken to market each year, and have been for quite some time. Check out netflix.com. In the common vernacular, the medium is referred to as a “movie”. Many of them look great displayed on wall-mounted digital television screens.” You can put up a static image from these movies quite easily. I love Renoir but on my screen I want Blade Runner.

A rant against Gateway service

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I’m off to the North Carolina beach so expect reduced blogging from me. Ordinarily, I would holiday-blog when my wife wasn’t looking but my portable refused to boot more than two weeks ago. It was obviously a hardware problem so I knew the otherwise capable techs at GMU couldn’t fix it but before taking it to Gateway I needed their authorization. That took a few days. After a week of sitting on the bench, the Gateway store in Fairfax ran a diagnostic and realized that they couldn’t fix it either. They promised to expedite it to the main service center. A week later I found out they were still waiting for, get this, a box to be sent to them so they could send the portable to the service center. A box#$*! (Worse yet, I gave it to them in the original box it came in – foam included.) So finally the computer makes it to the main service center and now I am told it is waiting for a part!##!@! Now, wouldn’t you put your service center and parts warehouse close together like say in the same phrelling place?

We feed your need

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Yes we do RSS. What is RSS? It’s a format for stripping a blog of its non-text items and dividing each entry into useful chunks such as a headline and body text. A news “aggregator” automatically and periodically checks the RSS “feed” of all of your favorite blogs and when it finds new material it downloads the headlines and the first few sentences of each entry. Since only a limited amount of text is downloaded, the process is quick. If you read a lot of blogs, aggregators have two advantages. You won’t waste time checking a site only to find that is has no new material and skimming headlines allows you to more efficiently pass over what is of little interest to you – when you find something that does interest, you can click on that item and more information appears.

Reading blogs through an aggregator can sometimes be annoying as items don’t always format correctly, especially when you want to view non-text items or follow a link from a blog to another site. But aggregators are quickly becoming the delivery method of choice for blog junkies. Wired reports:

Maniacally wired netizens who read a hundred blogs a day and just as many news sources are turning to a new breed of software, called newsreaders or aggregators, to help them manage information overload.

My estimate is that if you regularly read more than 5 blogs a day then you should try an aggregator. On the other hand, once you have found MR why would you go elsewhere?

There are lots of aggregators available. I quite like FeedDemon. Newsgator integrates with Microsoft Outlook. See the Wired link for some other choices. I have not done a side to side comparison so let us know what you like and what works well with MR. If a site has one, FeedDemon will automatically search for and find its RSS feed. If your aggregator doesn’t find our feed the link is on the left hand side of this page above the Google search, the one that says Syndicate this site (XML).

The next artistic explosion?

by  Tyler Cowen in

According to the Entertainment Software Association, 50 percent of Americans over the age of six play computer games, and the industry had $11.4 billion in sales in 2003, more than the film industry. Last year, 63 percent of U.S. parents said they planned to buy a video game.

So will computer games be the breeding grounds for our next artistic renaissance? I’ve yet to see the evidence. Many people are negative on the aesthetic prospects:

Some in the industry, however, are not so sure that games will ever mature. They fear games could be a dead end like comic books – valuable as a social phenomenon, but outside a select few titles like Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” not worth a great deal of individual study. “I seldom play computer games, because it’s such a depressing experience,” said Chris Crawford, a game designer who is building a program to create interactive stories. “I end up shaking my head in dismay at how stuck the designers are in a rut.”

Here is the full story, including a discussion of how academics are hoping to raise aesthetic standards in the area. Get this:

The field has its own research group (the Digital Games Research Association) and peer-reviewed online critical journal, Game Studies, where one writer, discussing the horror and splatter-fest PlayStation game “Silent Hill,” wrote that it “favors syntagmatic causality over descriptive explication. Its distinct chain of puzzle solving and conditional progression enable it to instigate and maintain pace and tension, and so fuel its unnerving visions of death and possession.”

Imagine if Motown or be-bop jazz had been studied in these terms, in their heydays. If that is our best hope, I am skeptical too.

The best case scenario is that game designers are breeding aesthetic wonders in their highly commercial and competitive environment, and outsiders such as myself simply don’t know it yet. The worst case scenario is that computer games unbundle “fun” and “the aesthetic,” and sell us the former at the expense of the latter. Mozart gives us both beauty and entertainment, but in a world with very low fixed costs, perhaps these two qualities will be sold separately from now on. Perhaps computer games, and books such as The Da Vinci Code, can damage the arts by hindering entertainment from cross-subsidizing beauty.

I’ll bet on the best case scenario, since I think enough people prefer indivisible cultural goods that bundle many different qualities, including aesthetic quality. But I’m still waiting to see the payoff.

Addendum: Here is a review of an < href="http://www.gameforms.com/features/misc/bang/">art exhibit of video games, thanks to Hei Lun Chan for the pointer.

Google’s newer competitors

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yahoo just dumped Google for its own search engine. But other competitors may prove a more serious threat:

Teoma relies on the rankings of experts to a greater extent.

Mooter relies more heavily on which links get clicked, and uses that information to produce personalized rankings for each individual user.

Microsoft is working on integrating search into every Windows mode, and also on perfecting the direct question and answer approach:

Take Microsoft Research’s AskMSR program, which Brill and his colleagues have been testing on Microsoft’s internal network for more than a year. At its core is a simple search box where users can enter questions such as “Who killed Abraham Lincoln?” and, instead of getting back a list of sites that may have the information they seek, receive a plain answer: “John Wilkes Booth.” The software relies not on any advanced artificial-intelligence algorithm but rather on two surprisingly simple tricks. First, it uses language rules learned from a large database of sample sentences to rewrite the search phrase so that it resembles possible answers: for example, “___ killed Abraham Lincoln” or “Abraham Lincoln was killed by ___.” Those text strings are then used as the queries in a sequence of standard keyword-based Web searches. If the searches produce an exact match, the program is done, and it presents that answer to the user.

Read the whole story on why Google is so vulnerable and has so few structural advantages in the search market. Thanks to www.geekpress.com for the pointer.

The future of blogging?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Read Glenn Reynolds at www.techcentralstation.com. His bottom line: We have enough blogs about wars and campaigns. Cover local politics, local bands, area restaurants. Use video if you can. In other words, think global, blog local, if you wish to change the world.

The economist in me: Can you have overcrowding in one blogging area? Say you have two roads to a destination, and drivers can observe how crowded each road is. Under some conditions drivers will allocate themselves efficiently across the two roads (average returns will equalize, marginal returns may not). So if the private returns to blogging in one area fall through crowding, some rough mechanisms operate to induce bloggers to leave that area. You might blog in a new area to attract a bigger audience, for instance. Alternatively, Glenn may be saying that local blogging has a higher social than private return, relative to blogging the national scene.

And if they had asked me? For economics, we are still at the margin where new blogs enhance each others’ value, rather than lowering it.

Economists versus spam

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The short history of society’s fight against spam–usually defined as unwanted commercial e-mail–may be about to pass into a significant third phase. In the first phase, it was geeks who led the resistance, using techie weapons such as e-mail filters with fancy Bayesian mathematics. In the second phase, politicians joined in, eager to get their names on to new legislation–in America, for instance, 36 states and Congress have passed laws of some sort against spam. Now, in the third phase, the economists are taking over.

The market opening for the economists is obvious. Both the geeks and the politicians are widely seen to have failed miserably.

Great writing from The Economist but it is not clear that we have an answer that will be accepted. The obvious solution is to price email. Even at a penny per email most spam would become uneconomic. The Economist argues, however, that internet culture is against pricing and micropayments are more expensive than they are worth. They recommend instead several groups who are creating clubs of approved bulk emailers. The emailers who join are guaranteed passage of their email past spam filters – club members either pay to get on the list or are fined if recipients complain. Unfortunately, these ideas only work indirectly by making the job of spam filters easier. If the clubs take off, a positive tipping point may be reached but that is a big if and in the meantime the plan assures that for many people spam will get worse before it gets better.

This economist has another idea. The problem of spam is really a negative externality generated by the people who actually buy the products spammers offer. Thus, I suggest sending out fake spam and prominently posting the names of all those who respond….. What product to advertise in the fake spam? I suggest, “length enhancers.”

Markets in everything, part III

by  Tyler Cowen in

Had your fill of match.com? But lacking in guts today? Try an on-line break-up. Did you know you can hire someone to do it for you?

Breakupservice.com, founded in 2002, offers a range of options for heartbreakers who have $50 but not, as cofounder and president Ren Thompson puts it, “the nerve, or the know-how,” to write their own good-byes. According to Thompson, between 1,200 and 1,500 men and women annually turn to the Dublin, Calif.-based company for a custom-tailored “Dear John” or “Dear Jane” letter with that special admixture of grace, verve, tact, and distance.

For the less old-fashioned, Thompson or one of his six breakup representatives also break the news by means of a “Happy Ending counseling call” lasting roughly 15 minutes on average. The conversation doesn’t always begin on a happy note. The most common reactions, Thompson says, are “Is this some kind of joke?” or “Are you recording this?” But once people get over the skepticism, Thompson says, it’s a learning experience. “They have an inkling there’s a problem. Now they have some real closure with real answers. We try to help them look at it as a new beginning.”

Starting afresh is also behind the philosophy at LadyLoveWriter.com and its male-oriented counterpart LoveWriter.com. For $89, New Jersey-based scribe Erica Klein (who works by day as a direct-mail copywriter) will conduct a telephone consultation and compose “The Gentle Breakup Letter,” which she e-mails to the client to write out in his or her own handwriting. Would-be heartbreakers answer eight key informational questions on the order form and then choose from three “emotional styles”: “Light and Casual,” “Straightforward But From the Heart,” or “Super-Romantic” (though Klein can’t recall any client opting for the latter).

“We’re good at caring and compassion,” noted Klein.

Just look at one company’s client testimonials:

I met what I thought was a sweet girl. We dated a couple of times then I realized she was completely psycho. She would not take any of the hints I gave as I didn’t want her around but one phone call with a follow-up letter from breakupservice.com did the trick I never heard from her again. Thanks! Charlie M.

One of the companies also performs furniture and pet retrieval, for fees ranging up to $400.

Here is a previous installment of Markets in Everything.

Markets in prediction, revisited

by  Tyler Cowen in

You can now bet on future developments in the tech sector. The questions include the following:

1. When will Google have an IPO?

2. Will SCO be awarded damages? [in its lawsuit against IBM at the District Court in Utah]

3. When will there be a commercially available electronic device using ultrawideband technology?

4. Will Oracle acquire PeopleSoft Inc?…before March 31st, 2004.

Here is the website. There are no cash prizes, but it is not just for pure play either. The top ten winners receive prizes from Circuit City. If you are wrong about everything, you lose nothing.

My take: I’ve long been intrigued by the idea futures concept. One central question is whether they can perform some function that current asset markets do not already satisfy. I’ll say no for this version of the idea. For instance some of the other predictions involve the future value of the NASDAQ index. Many of the others can be satisfied, albeit with noise, by betting on the relevant companies. Note also that Circuit City wins publicity for sponsoring the contest, which points to another truth about idea futures. In financial terms they are a zero-sum game for the investors, so a sponsor may need an external incentive, such as publicity value, to market the idea. If idea futures have a breakthrough use, it may well be within companies, such as to evaluate competing R&D proposals.

Thanks to Daniel Akst for the pointer to the link.

New sports and technology blog

by  Tyler Cowen in

Nick Schulz, of TechCentralStation.com fame, has started a new blog on sports and technology, part of the Corante.com group. At the blog you can read Nick on the true meaning of sports, whether better equipment improves your golf game, how to solve the steroids problem, and why sports fans seem to enjoy a lack of competitive balance. John-Charles Bradbury addresses this same topic as well. From Nick’s own TCS, read this account of how NFL Films has driven the popularity of football in America. Here is a related story about how to better measure value in football, using a Bill James-like approach.

My own major sports interest, the NBA, has just started its own blog, though this consists largely of celebrity comments, presumably ghostwritten for the most part. Try also this sports and law blog. Did you know that relocating the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn might push at least 800 people out of their homes and require eminent domain?

By the way, Nick says the smart money is on the Panthers for today’s game.

Signalling spam

by  Tyler Cowen in

I received an email message this morning with the not very promising heading “Not a scam”. The contents? Here goes:

Face it, you’re not getting paid enough for what you do

http://[email protected]/click.php?id=sicosyl

to get off our database follow this link
jdefdmu s vgkitbaqizknh bdqdwxpoav w brfpu gotwzykprljsywaonqk

From Nigeria I received the following:

I KNOW YOU MIGHT HAVE RECEIVED DIFFERENT PROPOSALS OF SUCH ASSISTANCE BUT I
HAVE ALL INFORMATIONS WITH WHICH YOU CAN MAKE VERIFICATIONS.BESIDES EVEN
THOUGH THE INTERNET IS FLOODED WITH SCAM I STILL CANNOT AFFORD TO LOOSE
THIS OPPURTUNITY OF A LIFE TIME.

If I were a spammer I might try “Not sure whether this is worth your time.”