Yes, I do.  That’s not really “news” though – just about every industry analyst thinks that Apple will release an actual HD TV.

But I’m going to go out on a limb here and prognosticate on a key feature of the device.  I’ve been thinking/saying this for several months now, but I’m going to put a stake in the ground here, for fun, to see if it holds up (or not) before I hear anyone else say what I’m about to say.  And by the way — I’m not claiming that nobody has said what I’m about to say, just that I have not heard it yet…

Ok, what is “it”?

I believe that Apple is going to release a consumer television, powered by Siri.

Steve Jobs made a statement that he felt that he found the missing piece that he needed to make a TV under the Apple brand.   It was a cryptic statement, and could mean many things.  Personally, I believe Siri is the missing piece.  In my opinion, the iPhone 4S was a proving ground for Siri. Notice that Siri is still referred to as a “beta.”  They’re working out the kinks.

Think about it:  Apple has all of the pieces.  They make flat screen displays.  They have iOS.  They have AppleTV working.  They have AirPlay and all the technology to make all of the devices in the house interoperable over WiFi.  They have iCloud and iTunes for content.

And now they have Siri.

I think Siri is the “missing link.”  And the magic!  I mean, they could have made a TV before.  They make flatscreens, and the AppleTV device has been out on the market for years. But it’s awkward and unwieldy to really control apps with the little TV remote.  When Netflix forgets my username and password, I cringe at having to hunt and peck it out again with the remote.  And besides, we have that now — Samsung and the other manufacturers already have apps integrated into their flat screen HD TVs.  A Samsung “Smart TV” is basically an HD TV with the equivalent of AppleTV (or Roku or whatnot) built-in.  That’s not revolutionary, it’s evolutionary.

Steve Jobs’ style was to transform industries, not just release yet another “me too” gadget.

And quite honestly, trying to control apps from a TV remote is a hassle and the average consumer does NOT want a keyboard to run their TV.  We’ve had that for years already, and they’re duds.

But imagine just TALKING to it!    “Turn to channel 10″ or “show CSI Miami”, and BAM!  It does it!

Now that is killer!

And, I think it’s going to be @?!*#$%! huge.

Not because I’m an “Apple fan boy.”  Because it just is.  Think about it.

As stated above, this is my opinion (that is, Eric Robichaud, CEO of 401 Consulting).  I’m neither a laywer nor a politician, so I invite you to view the actual, full text of the proposed bill here and judge for yourself.  That said, here is my overview / option on the matter.

The “Stop Online Piracy Act” bill, aka “SOPA”, is aimed at, well, stopping online piracy of copyrighted materials.  I certainly have my own opinions about copyright laws and approaches to this subject, but at no time am I debating the validity of protecting one’s copyrights.  This debate isn’t about whether or not to stop piracy online.  It’s about how to stop it.  And SOPA isn’t the way.

SOPA is far too broad-reaching, and far too vague in it’s language.  It overrules carefully crafted provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (aka “DMCA”), makes the wrong people liable for infringements, sets up website owners for massive lawsuits, and more.

For example, the DMCA has “safe harbor” provisions for web site operators and digital carriers. If I post an illegal video to Facebook, then Facebook is required to forcibly take it down if notified about it.  Stated another way, Facebook’s liability is merely to respond when notified.  They’re not liable for the original posting.  Under SOPA, Facebook itself is liable, and could be legally shut down, and sued!

The bill targets sites that are “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property.” That seems reasonable at first.  Except when you read how they define “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property.”  They define such a site (and therefore subject it to being shut down) if it is “primarily designed for the purpose of offering services in a manner that enables copyright violation.”

Read that closely.

The site does not have to be design for the purpose of copyright violation (such as “The Pirate Bay”).  No, it only has to be designed in such as way that it offers services that enable copyright violation!   So basically, Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, Dropbox, and nearly ANY site on the internet that allows anyone to upload content, would all suddenly become violators!

Facebook has no idea what it’s 800 million users are doing in real-time, at any given moment.  It’s impossible to police.  Facebook provides a communication and content-sharing platform.   But SOPA puts the onus squarely upon the website operator (eg. Facebook).

The DMCA already states that posting copyright materials is illegal, but doesn’t make the website liable (unless the website itself posted the content of course) — the website is required to remove offending material when alerted.  SOPA overrules all of that.

SOPA also grants the U.S. Attorney General the sole right to police foreign websites where it has no jurisdiction.  If it notices infringing materials on a foreign website, it can censor the site in the U.S. by requiring all internet ISPs, DNS providers, search engines, etc. to permanently block access to the site, making it invisible to U.S. citizens.  If it’s a foreign site that the U.S. government can’t take down, it can block it.

Personally, I try to not be a conspiracy theorist, but I see this as one of the primary motivations behind SOPA — to give the government the ability to censor websites it doesn’t like.  Is Wiki Leaks embarrassing?  No problem – gone in a heartbeat.  What are we now, China?

There’s a lot more to this bill too.  For instance, a copyright owner can now sue the offending website without any ceilings or limitations on damages, including attorneys fees, and will win if the website cannot prove that they’re not “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property.”  And the way this is all worded (see above), it’s nearly impossible to prove that it isn’t!  This becomes a field day for attorneys, and an entrepreneurs worst nightmare.

SOPA tramples free speech.  SOPA makes the wrong people liable for copyright infringement.  And it will kill innovation — who wants to launch a new site that will just get you sued or worse?  We’ll never see the next Facebook, YouTube or Google.

I’m not here to debate the merits of Wiki Leaks or copyright law in general.  Just merely giving the high-level overview of why I’m against SOPA. It’s the legal equivalent of using a nuke to kill an ant.  So what if hundreds of square miles are a radioactive wasteland now, millions of people were killed, and billions in property destroyed — we got the ant!

There are proper and reasonable ways to do things.  This just isn’t it.

First and foremost, it ends the old “VHS versus Beta” quandary once and for all.  Now instead of “wait and see,” or going down a path of obsolescence and continuing to invest in a dead-end technology, we all know into which basket to place our eggs.  This allows all developers to get off the fence and start focusing in the same direction — towards HTML5 and open standards.

Additionally, with all developers moving down the same path, all of those resources will accelerate progress towards HTML5 as opposed to when resources and attention were divided.  This will speed the adoption of newer technologies.

The announcement, in my opinion, is long overdue.  Flash was breakthrough technology at the time (harkening back to it’s Macromedia days), but it’s past its prime.  Flash is inherently un-indexable by the search engines, appearing as a big void in web pages.  I’m sure I don’t have to comment on the incredible importance of search engine optimization in this blog, and having big pieces of content disappear in the eyes of the search engines is just bad business.   And with mobile access accounting for a significant and increasing percentage of all web traffic, having a page load up sans-Flash elements on an iPad or other mobile device is just not acceptable.

Trust me, I know Flash’s value.  Flash was the cornerstone to a multi-million dollar annual business I once ran.  I “get” Flash.  But I must also admit that Adobe has done a terrible job with the technology from a technical standpoint.  Most end users see the “cool” results of Flash in action, but don’t realize what goes on under the hood (and thus never really understood Steve Jobs’ main issues with Flash).   Flash is notoriously buggy, and a huge resource hog.  When it crashes (as it constantly does) it looks like your browser crashed.  Or Windows / Mac OSX. etc.  The vast majority of the time when things run slow or crash entirely, end users blame the web site or the OS or the browser, never realizing that the *real* culprit is the Flash plugin!    And on mobile, it just drains batter and resources way too fast — it’s a massive resource hog.

Adobe has been sprinting towards producing next-generation HTML5 development tools, in essence obsoleting its own technology.   I do not begrudge Adobe the opportunity to make a buck.  Not at all.  I hope they make just as much money with their new HTML5 tools.  I merely applaud the move to make the money from new HTML5 tools versus from Flash tools. And, in the process, allowing the industry at large to all start pulling in the same direction and accelerating the speed of adoption of these new open standards.

It’s good for the industry at large and for end users, who will see better, faster and more responsive web apps on both smartphones and desktops.

If you pay attention and process quickly, you may notice the Great Lakes in the U.S., the Sinai Peninsula, Italy’s “boot” and more.  The flashes in the clouds are lightening, and the night scenes are amazing -- especially those showing the green magnetic “aurora” effects in the atmosphere!

Enjoy!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls9yJTphLxg

It all began when they started running an ill-conceived ad of an attractive woman losing her Chapstick behind the couch. The print ad was essentially a huge shot of her bent-over, skinny-jean-clad backend.

Regardless of whether you think the ad crossed beyond the line of good taste, or couldn’t care less one way or the other, the undeniable fact is that it caused a (negative) stir and consumers started saying so, posting negative feedback comments on the Chapstick Facebook fan page.

In this case it went viral in the worst sense — like its real world brethren, a contagion of negativity and dissent.

What happened next was downright shocking to anyone who works in social media: the folks at Chapstick started deleting the negative comments!

Presumably the folks managing the Facebook presence of a national mega-brand ought to know better!  This breaks one of the cardinal rules of social media. It’s like censoring a newspaper and removing any articles critical of the government or a certain person or business, for example.

Social media is supposed to be about engaging your audience and interacting with them. This would have been a non-issue (and non-story) if they had merely responded to the negative posts with empathy and a promise to rethink their approach.

A simple “gee, we’re sorry you were offended. We certainly didn’t mean that. We were just trying to be funny. We’ll pass along your comments and see if the creative team can rethink their approach” would have not just quelled the negativity, but in fact would have been a major “win” for the brand. The folks at Chapstick would have demonstrated that they listen to their customers, and are responsive and approachable.

That sort of approach would have been exactly what social media is all about — interacting and engaging your audience and being responsive.

Instead, by trying to cover up the problem by deleting the negative posts, they just inflamed the community. Now even the people who didn’t care about the original ad were taking up arms.  It wasn’t the ad that was the issue, it was the handling of the issue — the censoring of comments.

The story grew legs, so to speak. Facebook postings went thru the roof.  The Twitterverse went viral with the story. And even worse for Chapstick — it crossed over into the mainstream media!  It’s been a PR disaster.

Like Watergate, it was the cover-up that inflamed a citizenry.

Lest any reader get the wrong idea here, the takeaway from this is not to stay out of social media — do that at your own peril.  As I always say: the conversation is going to go on with or without you. If you don’t participate then you have no hope of ever steering it or, in times of trouble, “setting the story straight.”

No, rather the issue here is how one handles its presence.

C’mon people, it’s not that hard. It’s like you were taught as a kid — honesty is always the best policy. If a bad situation arises, tackle it open and honestly, head on. Your customers will appreciate you for it.

That is the takeaway from this debacle.

Administering FTP services on Mac OSX server has always left me wanting something better.   The built-in services work, but they have a few drawbacks:

1. I don’t like having to bounce around multiple places to administer things.  Over to the User section of the System Settings to add users.  Back over to the Server Admin to manage FTP Server settings, etc.  I always liked the all-in-one console approach with things like FileZilla on Windows servers.

2. I don’t like having to create real, actual user accounts in the system for FTP users.  I have multiple web hosting clients who need access, each to their own specific web site directories.  I don’t like creating “real” user accounts on the machine for them.  Partially a security concern, and partially just “…something bothers me about it.”  The Windows Server OS has FTP services built-in, but they are woefully inadquate and they too are all integrated and require actual user accounts.  For years I’ve used the open source FileZilla Server for Windows.

3. FTP access is SOOOOOO SLOOOOOOOW.

The very first thing I had done, when I first installed the Mac OSX Server, was to look for an OSX version of FileZilla.  Alas, they don’t make an OSX version of FileZilla.  I poked around didn’t find a suitable alternative.  So I stuck with the built-in services.

We hadn’t been using FTP all that much on the OSX Server, so we dealt with the slowness issue.  But more recently we’ve had the need to use it a bit more, and the time lags made us want to stab our eyes out.  So less we go blind, I started searching around for a cause and hopefully solution.  And to my great pleasure, I found TWO solutions!

First, it turns out that the slowness issue is very easily solved.  It’s merely a configuration setting that really ought to be part of the default installation, but isn’t.    Go here to find the full write-up from Apple.  But in a nutshell, I just needed to open the file   /Library/FTPServer/Configuration/ftpaccess    in a text editor, and then add the following line:

  passive ports Server_IP_Address 49152 65535

Then restart the server.

That’s it!  The slowdown was because when trying to go to passive mode, it was banging its head against the wall trying to find a valid port to use.

However, it gets even better…

In my travels, I also got clued into a FileZilla -like open source FTP Server!

pureFTPd is an active, open source FTP server project for the BSD unix / linux families including Mac OSX.  And there’s a GUI interface called pureFTPd Manager for OSX!    Just click the preceeding link, and you can download the GUI interface and ftp server all bundled up in one since installation package.

This software will allow you to setup multiple different username/password combinations, locking each into a specific set of “home folders”.  But these are all accounts setup within the software, and NOT actual system accounts.  Its much better security approach, and much “cleaner”.   And the software is FAST too, with better system monitors.

Enjoy!

Today NetFlix announced that their much-discussed and much-embattled price hikes were actually just the precursor to splitting out the DVD and Internet Streaming services as essentially two different companies with two different CEOs and separate respective teams running/focusing on each. The original NetFlix business will be rebranded “Qwickster” and the Internet Streaming service will retain the NetFlix brand.

Within the coming weeks, the two services will further split physically. Each brand will have its own dedicated web site and once and for all split apart the online features and functionality. The two services will no longer interact and work as one. You will no longer be able to log in and view your Instant Queue and your DVD Queue side by side.

Although Netflix is nowhere near the size of Coca Cola, for some reason this strikes me as a gaffe nearly on scale with Coca Cola’s changing of its formula in the 80′s. However, Coca Cola was able to issue a mea culpa and merely re-introduce original Coke as “Coca Cola Classic” side by side with “New Coke” and keep trucking — it was merely a product offering change. In this case, Netflix is changing it’s entire business operation and dealing a major blow to its brand. I doubt recovery will be so easy if it turns out to be a misstep.

And in my eyes, this is a massive misstep, to say the least. In one fell swoop they have just gutted the brand that they’ve spent years and millions (hundreds of millions?) to build. Not only that — they’ve done it at a time when that very brand is already battered and bruised from the massive upheaval caused by the pricing changes. After nearly a decade entrenching NetFlix as the leading player in DVD rentals, the company is now starting all over with $0 in brand equity in Qwickster. Aside from the fact that it’s a stupid, meaningless, forgetful name, in my opinion.

Add in the fact that NetFlix lost its rights to Starz content for the Internet streaming service as of February 2012, which is the source of the bulk of its most valuable new releases and top-line Hollywood titles.

In my opinion, Netflix has gone from an Internet darling to a slow motion train-wreck-in-progress in a matter of months. Can it be saved? Is it too little, too late? Are there any more surprises forthcoming?

I think they have completely destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars in brand equity, and disenfranchised millions of customers. I expect this latest announcement to be received about as well as the last one (the pricing changes) and I smell the death of the DVD business. I think it’s all over but the crying.

The chinks in the armor have been revealed, and it won’t be long before Blockbuster (which has been purchased by DISH Network and is being reincarnated to once again go after the Netflix mailorder DVD business) and Internet streaming companies such as Hulu jump on the bandwagon and start capturing market share from the once invincible Netflix.

As I’ve said, it’s just my opinion. But I see these moves as major brand gaffes.

Now Netflix is wounded. And it’s self-inflicted.

UPDATE: This blog entry was written as the news was unfolding. In hindsight, a month or so later, we now know that NetFlix has doubled-back on its plans, scrapping Qwikster entirely, and said: “Mea culpa! Don’t worry folks, we’ve listened and changed our minds — things will stay as they were.” As a customer, I’m thrilled. And as a pundit, I’m smiling…

What is Chatter?   It’s basically a private Facebook – a social network just for the folks within your organization.  They limit access by domain name, so that only the people within your company can login and access.

In this day and age, with remote and virtual workforces and distributed offices, and far-flung teams spanning multiple disciplines and departments, Chatter offers a way for everyone to interact, share ideas, answer questions, and more.  Like with any network, the value of the network increases exponentially as more users join.

If you use Facebook, then you “get” the concept behind Chatter.   Make a post, comment on posts, yada yada yada.

Unlike Facebook, however, it’s a closed ecosystem.  Only the people in your company (or to whom you dole out @yourdomain  email addresses) can participate.

Businesses are turning to Chatter to enable real-time interaction and collaboration, yet in a “safe” and private environment where company secrets and confidential information can be discussed without fear of leaks as you would have with a public system such as Facebook.

Salesforce.com recently dropped the fees and make it open to everyone and anyone.  I think it’s a pretty smart move – they get to expose their brand to more and more people, help smaller startups collaborate and hopefully reel them in as CRM customers down the line as their businesses grow.

For smaller entreprenuers and virtual organizations or companies with lots of remote offices, remote workers, sales teams out on the road, etc., free is a pretty great price.

The product is quite robust and they have an array of “native” apps for various platforms.  So while it is a web-browser based app to start, they have a terrific native iPhone app, and Mac & Windows desktop applet as well, which make it extremely easy to keep up with what’s going on without having to have a browser open or an actual computer in-hand (in the case of the mobile apps).

My core team (headcount under a dozen) has been using it  for a couple of weeks and so far so good.  It’s a nice way to keep people on the same page, and cross-pollinate the teams.  Now the engineering team can get a feel for the new projects coming down the pike, they can see what the Sales guys are working on, what the Designers are involved in, interact with the Marketing team, and vice-versa.

One of my initial concerns was yet-another-web-app.  In otherwords, overload.  We’re already checking Facebook, Twitter, Flow (project management), email, blogs, yada yada yada.  I was (and still am) concerned about maintaining yet another presence.  But I was willing to give it a try, and the concern is waning.   The service itself is extremely solid, well done, and…just works.

We’ve only been using it for a couple week, but so far, so good.  I’ll be happy to report back a bit later after we’ve had a bit more of a track record with the service.  At this point, I can recommend taking a look — it’s worth a try.  Especially if you have remote workers who feel isolated.  This is a great way to bring everyone into the fold.

Since the prior blog post on troubleshooting Microsoft’s built-in FTP server in IIS, I’ve gone back to the tried and true FileZilla Server.  Yes, the community that brought you the free FTP client software also provides a free server version.  It’s great, robust and secure.  Oh, and super fast and easy to install and configure.  Very intuitive.  I’ve been using it for YEARS.  I had such a simple need that I was just trying to work with the built-in FTP in IIS on a new server install (hence the previous post).  But when a new requirement arose recently, I finally punted entirely, turned off FTP in IIS and installed my old friend – the FileZilla FTP Server.

Life is much better now.

It’s reinforced my prior thinking — even if the need is super simple, it’s just faster and easier to go with FileZilla right off the bat.   I recommend you check it out if you have FTP needs.