Once you pair the watch via Bluetooth with your Android or iOS based smart phone you can then load a multitude of apps onto the watch to let it interface with your smart phone – and through your smart phone, the internet at large. Out of the box, the watch will support incoming Caller ID, e-mail (Gmail or any IMAP email account), calendar alerts, Facebook messages, Twitter, weather alerts, and silent vibrating alarm and timer. The list of possible uses for the phone is much larger than this, however, with the accelerometer and connection to the internet via smartphone it is possible to create many unique interactive experiences.

The project aimed to raise $100,000 over 40 days – the response, however, was phenomenal. The initial $100,000 was raised during the first two hours of the project page being live. As it currently stands, eight days later the amount pledge is $2,900,000 – that’s $2.9 million dollars. This is despite similar products already being available, e.g. Sony’s SmartWatch, the Imwatch, and others. This is because despite the Pebble not being first to market, it is smartest to market. I would say this is due to two important factors: first, the Pebble is going to provide an open API for developers using a standard gcc toolchain, meaning that anyone can develop for the Pebble without paying any licence fees or investing anything at all into the platform. Secondly, the Pebble makes use of e-ink display technology to give an estimated seven day battery life, which is a far better option than competing products which last for a day at most. Although this limits the display to monochrome, the physical size limitation of such a device does not lend itself to high quality graphical output even if the display were a high pixel density colour display – it would be like trying to squeeze modern smartphone apps onto an old Nokia mobile phone; or like printing postage stamps with 500 dpi resolution.

The project is due to deliver a final product around September. Needless to say I am very excited and will have trouble waiting that long!

Having voiced my opinion on this topic several times in the past, I left the thread alone for a time until there were comments I could just not ignore. I was rewarded of course after only 119 posts with this:

The major and minor thing some people here want are “free” downloads of intellectual property, such as movies, games, software, music, and other copyrighted material. You want stuff for free. It’s not about property rights, it’s about the intention to possess and use something you do not want to pay the asked price for. If it were not for the possibility to get your hands on such material via file sharing, there would not be any discussion.

I responded with this:

http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?30,767183

The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact – it sucks as the musician BUT THAT’S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So… have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site and garner good will in the process

And the poster I responded to responded to me with this:

Copyrighted material, including music is not free, was never free, and will never be free. Such false statements are the core of the problem. Some kids might even believe the nonsense.

My response:

There will never be a technological means to prevent file sharing on the scale that it exists today. It may be reduced somewhat, and others may be discouraged with new laws, but everything that exists in an uncontrollable format today will always exist, as is, in one way or another, accessible by the general public for free.

Perhaps new technologies will prevent future releases from being piratable, but I very much doubt that. BluRay is supposedly “un-piratable” but it is regularly pirated. Look at BluRay adoption versus DVD sales. BluRay is slowly and steadily gaining market share, but it is nowhere near surpassing that of DVD. This is in part due to the fact that people don’t care about the great features of BluRay (I personally love hi-def), but it would also be because people do not want to buy into such a restrictive format.

The more control the labels have over the end-users use of a product or service, the less that informed people will want to make use of said service. DRM is a failure, so now the labels have changed tacts and laws are being changed. Will it work? I personally don’t think so.

I will continue to buy CDs and transcode them to my preferred digital format irrespective of the legality of such an action (I actually believe this was made legal in Australia in the last few years). I will also continue to download high-quality rips of CDs for the purposes of evaluation before I decide to buy them. This is illegal in Australia. Do I end up buying CDs that I download? Yes. What do I do with albums I don’t buy? Honestly, I just keep them. I never listen to them, so I could delete them. I’m just too lazy to do so. Anyway, I don’t really see a problem with this. I don’t share my music collection with others.

According to you, and the law, I am stealing. According to me, I am stealing, but there is no victim. I don’t listen to music that I don’t like, and the artist isn’t missing any money that I “stole” by not paying. Maybe I should purge my collection of artists I don’t listen to; that’d probably make you happy, but I personally am not bothered. I have no concern for labels because I believe they are dishonest anyway.

His response:

Of course there is a victim. The copyright owner who is supposed to get a fee. We have covered this, even if you believe that the labels are dishonest, our law system does not allow you take from them. Also: This has only partially to do with “labels”, illegal downlands are not only referring to music. What about the thousands of companies and their staff who produce games and software that is illegally distributed by file sharing? How about the production companies that produce movies that are illegally distributed by file sharing, or direct downloads?

My response:
“Our law system does not allow you to take from them” – well, actually it does. I could at any time decide to download literally several terabytes of pirated music which is freely available on the internet. The practicality of the matter is what you seem to be ignoring. Or, in another way, the impracticality of preventing the spread of such material is what you seem to be ignoring. This kind of spreading cannot be stopped, and instead of embracing this method of distribution, the labels are sticking their head in the sand. As Trent Reznor says, it’s better that fans download direct from the source rather than from an unknown website.

An interesting note is that those who are wanting to abolish or change copyright law really are doing themselves and the artists they love a disservice by spreading this kind of sentiment. The Creative Commons relies on copyright law to support it. The original owner should maintain copyright on their material (reading between the lines: the artists should maintain copyright, not the labels). This gives them the freedom to licence their material under a Creative Commons style licence. In other words, it gives the true owner the power to disseminate their works as they see fit. This is a fundamental right and this copyright law should not be changed, save for some small wording amendments which may be made to reduce the ambiguity surrounding “free downloads” versus “illegal downloads”.

I’ll say this straight: I believe that pirating any material is wrong, but what I am saying is that I believe my use of this material should not be considered piracy. I do not download movies (they are poor quality and without special features, the main selling points of the original material). I only download games that are no longer available for purchase (be it from a bricks and mortar store or online at sites like www.gog.com). It’s kind of funny really how woefully inadequate most companies are at keeping an up-to-date back catalogue of their material, be it music, games or movies, but I digress.

What I do with music, as I outlined previously, is not stealing. I download an evaluation copy and then if I like it I buy it and if I don’t, I don’t listen to it anymore. I am no longer using this material, thus it is no different than if I visited a record store every day and listened to the album in-store and decided not to buy it after a week. The difference is that I don’t have to waste my time in a record store by using technology to overcome the problem. Record labels should embrace this: they will sell more. It’s pretty straightforward.

This is an ongoing discussion and I will update this post in the future, but what are your thoughts so far?

I’m a ‘downloader’. I download television programmes from popular torrent websites for several reasons:

1. Unavailability in Australia; typically the shows I download aren’t aired on free-to-air television, or if they are, it is several months (even years) behind the airing in the US. This is problematic because when going online to discuss my favourite shows, US and other overseas viewers have already seen and are well ahead of the episodes I’ve seen.
2. Easy to watch; I can watch the downloaded show whenever I want, wherever I want. I can put it on my phone and watch it on the train to work if I really want.
3. No advertisements; helpfully, the people who record the shows cut the advertisements out.
4. Reliability; sometimes the FTA networks will air episodes out of order for whatever their obscure reasons are, usually to boost viewers at certain times for advertising reasons. When episodes are linked and follow a greater story arc, this is incredibly annoying.

As for the legal issues?

From the point of view of Australia FTA networks; they should get their act together and get overseas shows here sooner. They should cut the crap advertisements (people screaming about sales, SALES, SALES!!!) and condense advertisements into a single block at the end of a programme/beginning of the next.

From the point of overseas content creators; they should get their acts together with networks worldwide and make sure content is released globally simultaneously. It really is ridiculous in this day and age that programmes take months to be “shipped” (they are not physically shipped of course) overseas. It’s similar to region encoded DVDs that are “locked” to a particular country in order to enforce artificial price tiers in different countries simultaneously.

From my point of view; I don’t much care for the legality of it, which is why I do it. However, if the content providers or networks did offer a download service it would have to be flexible, ie no DRM. Fair use (for me) means I should be able to transcode the content to another file format for playback on another system that I own if I so desire.

The main show that I download, and will religiously download no matter what, is Top Gear from UK. I can literally watch the episode about an hour after it is aired in the UK. The producers of TGUK have indirectly commented about this phenomenon on their official blog and do not seem against it in the slightest. Then again, TGUK is funded through payments collected by the British TV licensing system and as such the British people already “own” all shows paid for through this scheme, so there are no networks/content providers involved to complain about “stolen revenue.”

As all of us know, the internet is one of the most important resources. Ever. I’m not even joking (well, maybe a little) — but the point is, I needed to get a ‘net connection at my new residence, as soon as possible.

More difficult than one might have originally thought. My new residence is a townhouse and as such the phone system is provided via an MDF. Can’t understand the Wiki article? Don’t worry, neither can I. The point is that the MDF makes the physical cabling from the exchange to my house atypical.

So, I consulted the OCAU forums about this issue and was pleasantly surprised to find that this previously-perceived “problem” of an MDF was actually not a problem at all.

So I headed over to the website of my favourite ISP to sign up for a Naked DSL service. Woops, I can’t easily do that it seems. As the previous tenants have moved their phone service from the residence, it does have a phone line, but no number. Internode’s sign-up process for converting a service requires a phone number. Hrm.

Oh well, I’ll try the connect new service option, and see how I fare. I enter all the details and forget about it. Promptly though (the very next morning) I receive an e-mail from Internode stating that because the property is serviced by an MDF there may be problems with cabling. ‘Hang on’ I think, the good people of OCAU have said otherwise.

So, I resolve to call Internode to find out exactly what the problem is. Apparently, Internode cannot enable Naked DSL on an IVULL (intact vacant ULL) due to a recent legal case concerning this very type of operation. They tell me that I must have a standard phone service connected to the line before they can perform a ‘convert’ operation to enable Naked DSL.

What’s the catch, you say? Well, it’s simple: I have to get a phone number on the inactive line. This involves paying Telstra $59 to “activate” the service and then paying a further $20 for their lowest line-rental for one month. After the line is activated, I’ll submit my new phone number to Internode for conversion to a Naked DSL service. This will then cancel the active phone service on the line and enable the Naked DSL.

Basically what I’m doing is paying Telstra $80 just for the privelidge of then cancelling the service provided by the $80, which will enable Internode to install Naked DSL.

There’s gotta be something suspect about this kind of practice, and although many people will label me a cynic, prejudiced and a bigot, I’m betting that Telstra has something to do with it.

The only good part of this story is after ordering my phone service with Telstra today, I was told it would be active by close of business today! That’s speedy in anyone’s terms. It means that almost as quickly, it’ll be disabled again!

Case in point, tiwstori, which promises you endless hours of fun reading other peoples’ thoughts; worldwide, in real-time. Generated on-the-fly through summize, the site displays a stream of consciousness with thoughts grouped together by a few select keywords, such as “I love”, “I hate”, “I believe”, etc. It’s quite interesting to see what other people are thinking, but also disturbingly addictive.

Twitter is cool for keeping in touch with your friends, but using it to keep in touch with the entire world is something else entirely. I think it would be very interesting to do some analysis on the content of twitter to try and see if you really can get a worldwide(ish) snapshot of peoples thoughts. This kind of data would be a boon to market researchers and advertisers, which is, I think, part of the reason that many blogs hosting services, and other services like Twitter, are able to offer so many services for free: they’re working with advertisers both publicly (through ads on their sites) and perhaps not so publicly, providing either the methods, the data, or both, to fully analyze the current state of mind of consumers and netizens alike.

Maybe that’s a conspiracy theory, but I believe there must be some truth to it. I can’t be the only person to postulate on the worth of this kind of data.

Remember the bad old days of early internet where the tech-savvy among us would create themselves a home page filled with links to their favourite sites? Well, over the last few years this concept has begun to gain some technical accreditation, and in doing so made itself available to the masses. I’m talking about services like iGoogle, and one I recently discovered, Netvibes.

While iGoogle comes with all the news and e-mail you could possibly ask for, it doesn’t have the same comprehensive database of information offered by the more aesthetically pleasing Netvibes service. Netvibes, I’ve so far found, is quite cool. It’s fully “Web 2.0″ and allows you to add pre-built or your own widgets to your home page, while also allowing full customisation in terms of tabbed content browsing, the ability to place items almost wherever you want, and to arrange them in whatever kind of order or categories you desire.

They boast 100,000+ pre-built widgets including monitoring of all major webmail services, news, personal sites, bidding, anything you can think of really. For any site that doesn’t already have its own widget, you can create your own using an RSS feed. I personally find the MySpace and eBay widgets quite useful; without having to go to either site in-full and login, I can just go to my netvibes private page and see everything I need to see.

That’s another interesting feature, supposedly designed for sharing and collaboration (and perhaps competition with the aforementioned MySpace et al); you have yourself a private page full of things you want to keep tabs on, but you also have a “my universe” page which is a publicly viewable version of your stuff. You can add friends, join groups and all that good stuff we’ve come to love from MySpace, Facebook and Beebo.

Whether or not the netvibes portal is going to serve me with any great useful purpose I’m yet to determine, but for now I can appreciate it as a cool toy, as I’m sure many other netizens will appreciate.

You can view my public page here. Happy vibes!