Sorry... :)

Glömde länka till sidan med alla kvällstidningsorden igår. Den är ju courtesy of Flashback Forum, såklart - läs och njut, och utöka er vokabulär no end!

Register! Register now!

Registration for the Eyes on iTV conference in late May has now opened at the website. Register now! Not only is it cheaper, you also get first pick of the t-shirts :)

Det Svenska Språket

Ofta tycker jag att det är rätt tråkigt att ha svenska som modersmål. Språket är liksom lite andefattigt på något sätt. Jämfört med till exempel finskan, som är kort och kraftigt och mycket mycket bra att uttrycka sig kärnfullt på, eller engelskan där allt man säger kan utvecklas till en lyckad slogan.

Men så kan man ju utveckla språk också - vilket de svenska kvällstidningarna verkar vara mycket bra på. För en fantastisk lista på ALLA kvällstidningsord, var vänliga och klicka här.

Mina favoriter? För många för att räkna upp här, men exempelvis Vampyrekorre, Tjockisattack, Terrorgranne, Onanischlager och Knarkchoklad är ju alla fina fina ord, ägnade att lugna läsare och på ett nyanserat sätt beskriva omgivningen. :)

Day off? Whaddya mean "day off"???

I have a day off. This due to me having vacation days that I haven't been able to spend yet and will have to portion them out before the end of April, so they don't suddenly disappear.

So, a day off. But WHAT TO DO? I have 1,746 things that NEEDS doing, I have about 3-4 things that I WANT to do. Funnily enough none of the 1,746 things match the 3-4 things...

Well, I'll do something, I guess. Not too much though :)

The HOFF!

What can I say? I haven't seen it before, but... Pure genius!

The New Style - Content 360 nominees announced

Well, if you want to have a look at what might be coming to your mobile television or your enchanced television or your webservices in the near future, show up at the (fairly entertaining) pitching sessions at the Content 360 Awards in Cannes in just under a month. They are a part of the MIPTV feat MILIA 2007, and are a cooperation between the BBC, KBS, National Film Board of Canada and Ogilvy (strangely enough), to get new and entertaining content to different genres and platforms.

Loads and loads of people sent in their entries, and now the nominees have been announced - find them here.

The most entertaining IMO? Probably "The Club for Weird and Disgusting Sports" by compatriot Carita Forsgren - sounds like a hit in the making :)

Joost the next generation

The more I test (or watch, rather) Joost, the more I would like it to be:

- HD quality
- loadsa more content
- equipped with a much more advance GUI and possiblities to program / record / whatever
- have a lot of funky widgets (the kind that you use twice a year but are really essential to have)

and all sorts of other stuff. With that, I'd be a happier person. At least until I find something else to bitch about.

* * *

Last ice-fishing expedition yesterday was a success (as in "we didn't go through the ice and drown"), yet still a failure (as in "the bloody fish eluded us while the grandpa sitting 20 meters from us was hauling fish after fish")

Well, season's over now, so next time it'll be with some other, more familiar gear.

Our non-existant fishing luck might have something to do with our bait, as the maggotts had somehow died during the night. Quite frankly, were I a fish I wouldn't eat those either :)

* * *

Election day yesterday in Finland. My candidate did not win, but it was fairly close. And no, despite all the results from the "test-which-candidate-thinks-like-you" web tests, I did not vote for the communist party.

* * *

Beautiful art!

Have a look at this, a most excellent thing to do with your spare time - paint paintings on the back windows of dusty cars! And nice ones, at that!

Heh

A Very Important Message (in Swedish though)... a prime example of stunning journalism!

Babelgum, the new Joost (even though there IS no Joost on the market yet :)

Hi ho Silver!

Funny thing, that. As soon as someone comes up with something, someone else does as well. Just have a look at Babelgum, a service now in Betatesting (just like Joost), that is set to "blend the lean-back experience of traditional TV with the interactive and social power of the Internet" (just like Joost), offering 2cutting-edge peer-to-peer technology to stream video to your PC safely and efficiently at near-TV resolution" (just like Joost) and lost of other stuff (just like Joost).

As I'm not (yet) betatesting Babelgum, I can't comment on the service itself, but William Cooper over at informitv is testing both, and has a pretty good review here. By the looks of it, what the consumer would REALLY like is a blend of the two. Which is about as likely to happen as a sudden and everlasting peace in the Middle East, or some such thing.

Well, as a future consumer of TV over broadband, I'll just say that the more people are working on getting these things to work better and better, with niftier and niftier widgets and GUI:s, the better. Keep'em coming!

Bonk OIF! It's Friday!

What to do over the weekend?

I'll try to come up with a really good idea for a tv format. Otherwise I'll have nothing to pitch during format pitching session on Sunday - first one, might just be fun :)

Off now, since nothing interesting is going on in the field of interactive and cross media television (just a bunch of same-old, same-old... I wonder when everyone involved is going to tire of hypeing new stuff every bloody day, without much substance? Soon, hopefully...)

Also, the pilot for The Space Trainees is soon to be finished. Well happy with that, it's been a long process. Now, let's hope everyone bites!!

Heads up! Book you Finland-flights NOW!

Short ad here :)

Anyone interested in the creation of interactive and cross media, the development process, the testing and all aspects of it - book up the end of May in you calendars already. And book a flight to Vaasa, Finland, as we are hosting a conference on just those things here at MediaCity.

Speakers will include Dr William Cooper from informitv, Christian Fonnesbech from Congin, Frank Alsema of 4xM and the academic Konstantinos Chorianopoulus from EuroITV and UITV.INFO.

Should be interesting, and there will be a couple of wicked parties thrown in as well :)

Welcome!

Joost again...

Just a quick note - hats off to the guys at Joost.

Not so much because it would be the best running thing with streaming media over the internet or anything like that (because it's not, even though it IS quite nifty and nice).

Nah, hats off because they manage to do it all over again. With Skype, their last venture, the buzz and the hype was building on itself, a prime example of viral marketing. With Joost, they've managed to do it again. Lots of people are talking about Joost, lots of people are writing about it, lots of people know someone who is betatesting it and have heard good things about it... and the hype keeps on growing.

With Skype, we customers got a wonderful communicating tool, and the guys at Skype got billions of dollars for it. Win-win-situation, no? Hope the same goes for Joost :)

Betatesting Joost

Started beta-testing Joost today. First impressions:

- a lot like what I would expect from a well founded IPTV venture
- slightly dodgy on the picture quality, most probably something that will improve. Still way better than other competitors out there.
- EPG needs some working on, suggestions, reviews, ratings etc should help the viewer more
- good feel of the service, nice layout, well constructed as a whole
- some really nice widgets, but I'm sure there'll be lots more around soon

Will look forward to testing it a lot more! As of now it gets the thumbs up, definitely. Let's wait and see what happens.. :)

Vacations r00lez ok

I really like my job. It's entertaining, fulfilling, gives lots of space for creativity and for coming up with new and interesting ideas. I get to travel, meet interesting people, work together with dedicated colleagues, generally have a pretty good time.

Even so, it's nice to have some time off now and then :)

Below, some pictures from the short vacation - from top down:

a) when it's steep, it's steep!
b) Snow is nice, especially a four-backed snow horse
c) The road stretches ever onwards
d) just a nice tree :)

Think about it

Off for a short vacation with the family in just a couple of hours, going skiing.

Which is nice.

Just stumbled upon this web page though, and it's just too disturbing not to give it a little bit of added publicity. It's about the aftermath of the Chernobyl catastrophy, and it shows a world where nothing has been the same since 1986, where infants are still born with terrible diseases and disfigurations, where some areas must be closed off for a further 900 (!) years due to contamination... and this is just one place. How many nuclear reactors are there in the world? How much waste is being put into the ground, do slowly decompose for 100.000 years? How on earth can we be this bloody stupid? It didn't work when we were seven years old and told to clean up our room, to just push all the toys under the bed and try to forget about them - how can we expect it to work now??

I'm feeling a little bit upset at the moment. If we could just take, for instance, 1% of the money being shoveled at the disaster that is the current situation in Iraq, and instead use it to try to develop new and environmentally sound ways of generating energy, we could close down most nuclear power plants within five years. SO WHY CAN'T IT BE DONE??!!

Hmrpf. Let's all get together and do something, ok? I'm tired of NOT doing something.

Quite funny

for a different take on the Microsoft vs Mac eternal struggle, look no further than this. Pretty neat :)

The biggest, the best, better (?) than the rest

Who should be afraid of the big bad wolf? Just about anyone, I guess. Analyst firm ZenithOptimedia (what a name! :P) just released a report on the biggest media owners on the planet. Not surprisingly, most are from the US, with Time Warner heading the list (a measly 29 billion $ in revenues). Leading the chase are News Corporation (16,7$ bln), General Electric (who are the parent company of NBC Universal) (14,6$bln), CBS Corporation (13,3$ bln) and Walt Disney Company (13,2$ bln). Google are on the list in a 13th place, Yahoo has squeezed into a 15th place.

Now, these wolves are big, but are they bad? Not per say, but more by default, methinks. See, with all this money floating around, and with the inate hunger of commercial companies to expand and devour (and not necessarily in that order) more and more take-overs will be accomplished in the coming years. The nightmare would be the crisp autumn day in 2019 when Time Warner NBC finally merges with NewsCorpDisneyCBS to form the ONLY media company on Earth. By jove, it will become boring pretty quickly.

If you're gonna watch mobile TV - watch it on this

Having familiarized myself with the earlier, pretty bulky and unwieldy, versions of gadgets supporting DVB-H (that's Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld, a standard for mobile broadcasting advocated by the DVB project, Nokia, Siemens etc, and in competition with DMB, the Korean version, MediaFLO etc) this next gadget to be out on the market feels like a trip back to sanity. Nokias N77, a new phone in the N-series, is for once a phone that doesn't try to look like anything but a phone. It has still got DVB-H compatibility, though, which means that you can watch mobile television on it.



It's got a 2,4" screen with 320x240 pixels resolution and up to 16 million colors, so it perfectly possible to actually watch something on it as well :) And weighing in at 114g, you can lug it around anywhere.

So, one of those for me as well, thank you. Out Q2 2007, reportedly. For reviews of said phone, please go here or here, to start with.

IPTV World Forum - preview

Well, it's gearing up for one of the specialized IPTV events of the year, the annual IPTV World Forum, to be held at the Olympia in London on the 5-7th of March. Anyone who is interested in IPTV for one reason or another (for my part I couldn't care less about the technologies involved - all I want is working IPTV to everyone on this planet, as it would make my job as a developer of interactive television shows so much simpler. Or, rather, not simpler, but offer a lot more opportunities...)

With over 5,000 visitors and 200 exhibitors, there should be something for everyone at the Forum. Highlights, as far as I'm concerned, are panel discussion such as "Making the most of on-demand and iTV" and "Revenue generators and killer applications". Some of the keynotes might also be worth listening in on - but as for the exhibitors, there is almost exclusively technological companies with set-top-boxes, middleware etc. Content for IPTV is nowhere (on the other hand, MIPTV is coming up in mid-April).

But what would really get me personally going would be some showcases of the possibilities that IPTV can offer, especially when thinking about developing tv formats, as the possibilities for interaction etc are much greater with a broadband connection connection the viewer to the broadcaster. Some of that, please!