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The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that TiVo is introducing a new service that will allow its users to set up interest profiles that advertisers would then use to download or record matching advertising onto their TiVo boxes. The deal was struck directly with Publicis, IPG and Omnicomm but details are still sketchy. The service is expected to launch in the Spring.

More info can be found here…

My friend Sam Bogoch who has long been in the business of digital asset management systems for ad agencies and other creative companies, lately as principal of Seefile, purveyors of the awesome entry level DAM system of the same name, has just started an online forum called SeeJungle for all things DAM.

Take a swing by and register

Over the past month Sony has shown in the most spectacular way everything that is wrong with the music publishing industry. I suspect that this story did not have in the real world quite the impact that it had in the demi-monde of pop technology that I sometimes inhabit, so in case you have not heard: On October 31st Mark Russinovich broke news on his blog that he had discovered that certain Sony Music CDs he had played on his computer had without due warning, installed what is referred to as a rootkit, a piece of software that is completely hidden from the operating system. Furthermore, if you tried to remove it, your DVD or CD drive would stop working requiring a complete reinstall of Windows. Not only that, the software would also automatically cloak any files starting with a specified string hence becoming a handy method for other bad guys to infect your computer. The software was also found to be sending information back to Sony from the affected machines. And why did Sony do this: to prevent unauthorized duplication of the CD content.

Sony’s initial arrogant reaction was best encapsulated by Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG’s president of global digital business, when he told NPR that “Most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”. (more…)

TiVo has announced that an upoming version of TiVo ToGo will allow users to transfer recorded content to their brand spanking new video enabled iPods as well as to the PlayStation Portable which more practical mobile video viewer. Details are sketchy though apparently you will need to purchase additional software to make the magic happen.

Now, if it works properly, which considering how difficult TiVo ToGo is to use I don’t expect it will, and you look past the fact that out of the total population of TiVo subscribers that use TiVo ToGo is only about 300,000, this may ultimately put the kibosh on dreams of selling tons of downloadable, drm’ed video content via iTunes. (more…)

A credible and detailed report from Apple Insider claims that we will be seeing the first Intel based Mac coming out of Cupertino as early as Januarry Macworld. The first machine to be moved over to the dark side seems to be the iMac, not the Mini as most expected. They also believe that there is a new Powerbook in the works that should be available as early as February 2006 which will be much thinner than the G4 and will undoubtedly run circles aroung the G4.

One of my favorite novels of all time is Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Central to the plot is an electronic book named as the book is subtitled The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer . What is unique about the book is that it is not only interactive, but part of the most sophisticated interactivity is not managed by some clever computing or artificial intelligence, but rather by actors (called ractors in the book) that provide high level interactivity that would be difficult or impossible to do otherwise. Reuters is carrying an article today that talks about how close we are getting to that ideal. In seemingly unrelated news, Amazon has started a service called the Amazon Mechanical Turk that it is using to accomplish tasks such as generating copy edited entries for its website and identifying the correct photograph out of a group. The tasks are farmed out to webnauts that create a membership and receive micropayments (usually $0.03/task) for each task completed.

Well, Walmart for one, along with newspapers, magazines, real estate agents, book publishers and in general anybody who feels Google’s inscrutable gaze on their market. The New York Times is running an article that talks about this subject at some length. Now I don’t feel so bad about having so much Google content on the blog, if WalMart is taking notice, something is going on…

IDC is reporting that Instant messaging has achieved critical mass to be considered a mainstream tool. With 12 billion messages being transmitted each day the statistics support it. Personally I feel that IM is important less as a means of communications, after all, who doesn’t have their e-mail client open all the time, but more as an instrument of presence in an increasingly distributed environment.
You can read a teaser of the article here, of course, you will have to pay much bucks to get the full study.

Struggling Tivo has signed a deal with Yahoo that allows, as of today, Yahoo portal users to schedule Tivo recordings straight from Yahoo TV listings. Yahoo content would also be integrated into Tivos in an automagical way yet to be detailed. The only reason this is important is that it throws into sharp relief the failure of the Netflix/Tivo deal to allow users to have their Netflix movies delivered over broadband to their Tivos. One can only surmise that the pressure brough on by the MPAA was just too much. (more…)

Tanqueray has announced that they will be running new 150 second radio ads on Sirius radio which seems to have been transformed by their Howard Stern deal. This would not be that noteworthy except for how it shows that the long standing self restraint of the media when it comes to advertising for hooch which has been slowly cracking since 1996, is about to splinter to bits. The core issue is that we are no longer dealing with broadcast as traditionally understod, the national hearth of the big three at which we all sat and consumed pablum, but the edgy world of subscription entertainment where anything goes, including the right to stuff the pipe with more crap than you can measure, as long as we can find a splinter audience for it. So, the word of the day is opportunity. In the soon to be wild west of new media advertising, we can bring back the Marlboro Man and cigarrette advertising, for that matter, we can start advertising the local gun show, come on down!
Civilization though has a way of righting itself and surviving. On the positive side, there are new opportunities for brands such as Trojans that have been relegated to nether media buys in the high digital ghetto. There are saner comments on this matter at Mediapost