Ray Rice, Donald Sterling & The Power of Video

I was at a conference last week where one of the topics was auto-understanding of video - and how we can use info captured from video to help complete transactions. For example, let's say you have something wrong with your car and instead of taking it to the mechanic, you are able to open up your hood, take a video of everything running, and have some sort of auto-analysis done that can determine what you need to do. You are then directed to Web sites where you can order the parts....This may be somewhat far fetched - but actual real world use cases include automatically analyzing face taken on video at airports for matches against dangerous persons databases.

The reason that transaction part of the equation is important is because I was at a document management conference, which mainly discusses better handling the documents used in transactions. It's my view that as smartphones and their cameras continue to improve, we will begin to rely more on their abilities, instead of documents, to complete transactions. Typing text into an app is one thing, but being able to take a picture or video and submit that is even easier and more powerful.

Why is that? Video is more powerful than words in today's society. Let's take the cases of Ray Rice and Donald Sterling. From this ESPN story on the Rice incident: "The source said that Rice admitted to the Ravens from the start that he was guilty of striking Janay and, for the most part, accurately described what they eventually saw on the video. But the brutality of the assault when seen on the security video made a different impression."

So, here's the deal:

• Story comes out about Rice beating up girlfriend/fiancee. 
• Rice gets suspended for two games.
• People get up in arms and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell stiffens NFL's domestic abuse policy
• But nothing more happens to Rice
• Video comes out showing what Rice admitted to
• Rice's team (Baltimore Ravens) terminate his contract and league suspends him indefinitely

In my opinion this is very similar to what happened with Clippers owner Donald Sterling, when the tape came out with him making all those racist comments to his ex-girlfriend. As far back as 2006, Bomani Jones wrote this article for ESPN's now defunct Page 2, entitled "Sterling's Racism Should be News." Yet, in spite of this, big name athletes and Coach Doc Rivers signed with the Clippers. Then, they acted all surprised when the audio recording (sorry, no one uses tape anymore, do they?) came out this spring. Apparently, nobody in the mass market pays attention to print anymore!

Which brings me back to my point about multi-media being so much more powerful than text. Armed with today's and tomorrow smartphone and other computing equipment, I fully expect the upcoming generation to marginalize textual communication in favor of multi-media stuff. Although, quick quips and meta data will keep text alive as a complementary form of communication!

Verizon Back Online

Got the call today that there was a service outage and it really had nothing to do with the modem...really not surprised. The who called me sounded English. I had previously dealt with Indians and Filipinos that were supposedly corresponding with Americans. And it took them about two and a half days to fix the problem...Funny thing is I'm getting to the point where I've had the service so long that I think I know more about that most of the lower-level support people....Maybe I need to get a business account.

Verizon Internet Change

Did this happen to anyone else? On Tuesday morning, my home Internet connection suddenly stopped working. It took three calls over two days, but the current diagnosis is that Verizon has upgraded the line so it is no longer compatible with the modem I bought from them a couple years go. They claim that they are going to send me a newer modem without charge. Well, if they knew I had this modem and they knew they were upgrading the lines.... I guess they're too big to worry about things like that. We'll see. I'm posting this from the downtown Starbucks. Interesting place after dark...

HDTV-Breaking Free From the Man

After about a week of research and a day of struggles, I think I've finally found a good HDTV solution. The whole thing started when I decided I wanted to get an HDTV in time for the Super Bowl. The local Fox affiliate was even accomodating me by launching a digital signal last weekend. Well, I got delayed and ended up first looking at TVs about an hour before gametime.

I tried to do some research prior to my purchase, but it was mostly fruitless. HDTV can be very confusing. First off, analog pictures look like shit on an digital TVs, at least the one I bought. Second, I had a couple people tell me that they were able to pick up HDTV signals through their normal cable service; this was not the case for me. Of course, all I have is Lifeline Basic, which is like 12 channels or something. I called Time Warner this morning about it, and they told me it would cost an extra $33 per month to add a tier that would enable me to get the local HDTV feeds. They also told me I'd get an extra 200 channel...not something I was very intersted in.

So, I went out and bought an antenna from Radio Shack. I plugged it in, scanned for channels, and 24.1, 54.1, and 66.1, all the local digital over-the-airwaves digital signals, registered. I tuned them in, and they come in great-crystal clear. (I may have actually found an advantage to living in the city-close proximity to HDTV signals!) The non-digital local guys, 12 and 35, are a little fuzzy, but I was getting a fuzzy 12 through Time Warner anyhow, plus, I'm assuming their digital signals will be as clear as their rivals as soon as they get them up, which by law has to happen in the next 12 months.

This all enables me to say, "sayonara Time Warner." I've got my HDTV, and I'm not paying you a cent. In fact, I don't even have to pay the $15 per month, I've been paying to get clear local channel reception. It seems that HDTV is giving me the opportunity to cut the cord. If this is what the government (the FCC, I assume) had in mind when it pushed the law through mandating HDTV broadcasing, God bless them. The next natural step seems to be be hooking up a PC to my digital TV, which will enable me to download or stream all non-network programming I want, on-demand.

I can see the future, and it doesn't look bright for Big Cable, at least in my house.

Cheers.

Ralph

Thanksgiving

One thing I'm thankful for is my wireless network.

I really missed it the past couple weeks. I was picking up interference from something; I'm not sure what, but it would kick me off my wireless Internet connection everytime I tried to do anything that required the slightest bandwidth...and then, for awhile, I couldn't even get on it. The interference seemed to be coming in on Channel 9, from what looked like some sort of secure wireless network with an odd name. I finally solved the problem by switching my network signal from channel 11 to channel 9. This seems to have elminated the interference from the other signal.

I'm now back up and running on wireless, which is much better than trying to move around connected to a three-foot Ethernet cable. Now, when the new laptop batter arrives...

What are you thankful for?

Cheers.

Ralph