know | Future

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…)