presidentialmatch.com

Jolida’s new $399 JT-10 all-tube integrated amplifier sounded awesome. It’s a gorgeous glass encased design, a little jewel of an amp. Jolida also showed the JD 9 tube phono preamplifier, which was also sounding phenomenal. I believe it’s $450, what a deal!

High price is no guarantee of ultimate sound quality, but the very best performers are never cheap. The best sound I heard, by far, came from the Focal Grande Utopia EM speakers ($180,000 per pair). The speaker boasts several breakthroughs; check Focal’s Web site to learn more. KEF’s reigning statement speaker debuted last year at $140,000, but the Muon now runs $165,000 a pair. Aren’t you kicking yourself?

Turntable manufacturer Thorens has been around for 125 years, predating consumer audio by a long shot. Its new TD 160 HD boasts a number of breakthroughs and goes for $899, but the brand offers a vast range of more affordable models.

The KEF Muon super speaker.

Vacuum tube electronics were plentiful, perhaps even in the majority compared with solid-state. Sure, a lot of gear was pricey, but budget high-end brands, such as Audioengine were making great sound on the cheap, the Audioengine 2 speakers run $200 a pair. Clever name, the Audiophile One is a tiny, $249, 30 watts per channel stereo amplifier. It’s no toy, the little thing comes in a bunch of colors and it’s built to a very high standard.

UPDATE: Click here to view more pictures from the RMAF.

High-end audio is a smaller industry, where established brands such as Krell and Vandersteen compete against fledgling start-ups. Every manufacturer sets out to build the very best performing products, without the dulling constraints that Sony or Bose has to contend with.

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)

The hundreds of manufacturers participating at the show proves high-end audio is alive and definitely kicking. RMAF has a very different vibe than the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas every January–RMAF is friendlier, without a hint of corporate oppression that dominates mainstream shows.

Cruising through the 160 demo rooms I noticed an interesting trend, a minority of companies were using CD players. Maybe half had music servers/laptops, 30 percent were spinning vinyl, a couple had reel-to-reel analog tape machines, and the remainder was CD based.

RMAF will return to Denver next October, and I’ll be there. Hope you can stop by and see and hear the show for yourself.

The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2008 was held at two hotels: the Denver Marriott Tech Center Hotel and the Hyatt Regency Tech Center on October 10 through October 12, 2008.

Twitter Grader seems to offer a better service than TweetValue, in terms of comparing Twitter users, offering breakdowns by location and specific information on how your score is calculated. I really don’t see a need in the market for TweetValue, when a site like Twitter Grader offers better tools for comparing users and a score that can actually be explained. Everyone likes to see how they compare in a given area every once in awhile, but there is no need for the absurd number of Twitter ranking sites that we are seeing pop up right now. Please, no more!

(Credit: TweetValue)

Call me skeptical, but it isn’t really apparent that the figures are based on any actual factual valuation of Twitter profiles. Rather, it appears to just be another rank to see how Twitterers stack up against one another. I’m not just saying this because my Twitter account’s value is a sorry $125. Rather, I actually believe that there is little to no real basis for this dollar figure. The number would be just as significant if the dollar sign were dropped.

Following the controversy surrounding Twitterank, TweetValue assigns a dollar value to your Twitter profile. While the site does not disclose how this value is calculated, it does give a message that reads, “The value is calculated with a Ph.D. algorithm that is based on the public information available on your Twitter profile.”

It's a little discouraging to hear that the Twitter account you worked so hard to build is worth $125.

I was pointed toward a new Twitter ranking tool by Louis Gray. The tool of the day is TweetValue.

While Slide’s early ventures might have been modest, it’s never been lacking in Silicon Valley starpower. It was launched in 2005 by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, and is backed by Khosla Ventures.

The video service, called FunSpace Channels, will reportedly include shows from CBS, Comcast’s E! Entertainment channel, NBC, Time Warner’s Warner Bros., and other media companies. Slide will recommend videos based on how often they are forwarded by others. Slide will either sell ads against the videos, or take a cut of the ads sold by the content owners, the article said.

CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.

Now the company is expanding its reach to include somewhat more sophisticated media. On Thursday, it plans to announce deals with several major media companies that would allow people to view clips of popular TV shows on social-networking sites, according to the Journal.

Slide, the start-up that brought sheep-flinging to the social-networking world, has inked deals with several major content companies, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

San Francisco-based Slide makes software tools that let people add some personalization–in the form of slideshows, guestbooks, skins, or virtual pets–to their pages on all the major social networks.

On this week’s EIC Squared podcast ZDNet’s Larry Dignan and I discuss Google’s latest disruption in the Web 2.0 field, the Chrome browser, as well as Apple’s product launch event on September 9. In addition, Larry explains his idea that Dell and Salesforce.com could merge. Dell is trying to be more of a software company and is using the Force.com platform, and Salesforce.com is a major Dell customer. But, it’s unclear how Salesforce.com, its shareholders and customers, would hugely benefit from a union.

commentary

It’s good to see TechCrunch picking up on Dimdim’s launch of its hosted Web-conferencing solution. But I think it misses the main driver of Dimdim’s opportunity:

No, it actually makes the most sense for manufacturers that are looking to embed Web conferencing into other solutions. The same is true for Ringside Networks. Arguably, we didn’t need another Web conferencing solution (Dimdim) or social-networking platform (Ringside).

The open-source strategy followed by Dimdim makes most sense when customers want to manage the software on-premise, and it’s not so important when everything’s hosted in the cloud. But it’s good to see competition nipping at the heals of giant WebEx.

What we do need are such platforms that can be expanded and integrated into other solutions. Open-source solutions that remain islands, developed and deployed by one company, are much less interesting than open-source solutions that are developed and deployed by a community. Community provides the opportunity for Dimdim.

In short, Dimdim isn’t cool because it’s open-source Web conferencing. It’s cool because of what open-source Web conferencing allows technology providers to do with Web conferencing that price and proprietary licensing hitherto precluded.

It’s the ultimate in weasel economics. But it works. Check out some of the closed jobs on the site - the quality of the work is quite good, there’s a lot of variety to choose from, and customers are paying bargain prices.

ID8 needs a new logo. Can you do better than this?

It sounds familiar, doesn’t it — like TaskMarket, Elance, and other task boards?

I hope, but am not convinced, that CrowdSpring can stay as good as it is today. An existing and larger task market, like Elance, could add a CrowdSpring-like assignment option, giving designers and clients exposure to a larger selection of business partners. CrowdSpring does have two things going for it, though: First, a purity of purpose that shows itself in a simple and easy-to-use marketplace. And second, there are apparently people out there willing to do creative work based only for the hope of getting paid. I’m wondering now how many other new businesses can be built to leverage this desperation.

I wouldn’t recommend CrowdSpring for complex jobs or secret projects, but it’s a good tool for simple creative tasks. And if you find a contractor you like on the system, you are of course free to hire them for a longer engagement.

It’s not. CrowdSpring has a radically different cashflow model. It works like this: If there’s a job you want done — say, the creation of a logo for your startup — you post that on the site. And you pay CrowdSpring in advance, before any contractor has even seen at your req. Wait, it gets better.

I saw CrowdSpring present at a recent Under the Radar conference I was moderating. I like the service a lot, because it simplifies the process of licensing creative works, and it levels the playing field so anyone can play. What it does, in a nutshell, is let people who need design work done put their requests up on the site. Then creatives compete for the jobs.

The creatives who want to earn the fee don’t go through the process of marketing themselves to you to earn the right to work on your project. Rather, they do the work up front, submitting their work, in public, to the job page that’s on the site.

Once you pick the work you like, rights to it transfer to you and the artist gets paid.

Let’s review: Clients pay for their work up front. Artists do the work before they have the contract. CrowdSpring collects the float.

I filmed a quick demo of me using it below. You can also check out the official video here.

Excuse Me Services (creators of Dial Directions) has finally made available its Say Where iPhone application which lets users search several popular Web services using just their voice. The tool was originally shown off at DemoFall back in early September, and it’s taken this long to go through Apple’s certification process.

The one big problem I found with the application was the quality of the voice recognition. It managed to pick up city names just fine, but out of five attempts at specific addresses it only succeeded once, and it was on some very basic words like “center” and “main.” I had far better luck simply saying intersections, which it pulled in with ease. It seems when you mix in numbers and street names it gets a little overwhelmed. It’s also worth mentioning that I was doing this in a quiet part of an office building, which means it’s going to have a harder time if you’re out on a busy street.

Its big feature is that you can search Google Maps, Yellowpages.com, Yelp, and Traffic.com without having to use the
iPhone’s often times challenging on-screen keyboard. You simply talk into the microphone and it converts your speech into a search query. There’s location awareness, so once the phone pinpoints where you are it will narrow what it’s searching for. You can also have it start and end in different locations, which can be set by simply speaking into the microphone.

Another issue is that this app requires too many button presses to make it worthwhile over a simple type-in search. It’s been designed as a way to alleviate the need to pay attention to what you’re doing, but you still need to go through two or three menus before you get to your result, which usually requires firing up another application–be it
Safari or Google Maps. Ideally, you could set it to automatically jump to the recording with just one click after it’s been launched, then open up those pages with an in-app maps tool or Webkit browser.

In a statement, Jack Christin, senior regulatory counsel for eBay had this to say:

The sale of elephant ivory has been illegal since 1989 (although there are certain exceptions to the prohibition).

What with a deepening global recession it’s been pretty much a lousy 2008 for most folks, but it’s closing on a very good note–if you happen to be an elephant, that is.

Come January 1, eBay’s worldwide ban on ivory products goes into effect, a move that animal rights advocates hope will help protect elephant populations around the world.

“Due to the unique nature of eBay’s global online marketplace and the complexity surrounding the sale of ivory, we decided to ban the sale of ivory on eBay. We appreciate the support from the IFAW in assisting us and we look forward to continuing to work with them on the implementation of the global ban. Like the IFAW, ultimately we feel this is the best way to protect the endangered and protected species from which a significant portion of ivory products are derived.”

The proliferation in the illegal trade of wildlife species has been aided by the use of the Internet. In a recent report (PDF), the International Fund for Animal Welfare found that about two-thirds of the global online trade in protected wildlife takes place on eBay’s platform. The group said that poachers kill more than 2,000 elephants in Africa and Asia annually to meet demand for ivory products.

A much more physical modification of your mobile device is Coveroo’s laser-etching service.

Skout requires users to sign up, but once they do, anyone using a compatible phone–the service requires GPS–will be able to see other members who are somewhere nearby. And for each person that pops up, you can see how far away they are and their profile and add them to a friends list.

(Credit:
Coveroo)

Another very interesting app on display is Skout, a social-dating service for a multitude of platforms, including the iPhone.

Skout has an iPhone app that lets people flirt with any other user of the service that are nearby. It utilizes GPS to determine who is nearby, and has social networking features that combine well with more traditional dating service tools.

Asurion Mobile AddressBook lets Android users add new context to their traditional contacts list. The application was one of several for mobile devices on display at Demo 09.

In addition to selling personalized cell phone covers, Coveroo will soon offer custom-engraved laptops, as well.

Lastly, HAM-IT has built a system that matches service providers with customers looking for specific kinds of services. It’s mainly not a mobile application, but does have a mobile component that will allow someone on, say, an iPhone, to say they’re looking for an accountant in Boston, and any accountants in that city who use HAM-IT will offer up their business.

Here at Demo 09, I figured that that ratio would jump, or at least stay about the same. But everything is smaller this time around–just 39 companies are presenting, for example, and there are hundreds fewer attendees–and as far as I can tell, the
iPhone is hardly the hot platform.

Still, there are a number of companies who have turned to the iPhone–or other mobile devices–as the basis of their offerings. And in fact, a number of them have been grouped together into an afternoon session called “iLove my iPhone.” But despite that title, only a few of them actually had dedicated iPhone apps.

Of course, Palm’s Pre is built around much the same functionality–but as an Android app, and perhaps for iPhone later, this allows someone to get these features without having to dedicate themselves to Palm’s new phone.

And, ShoutOut does the same voice to text translation for Twitter, meaning that you can send a tweet from your iPhone without having to type it in.

I’ve written about laser-etching services before; as a consumer-facing business, this started with Adafruit Laser Services, a New York company that would etch any laptop, iPod, or cell phone. And in many ways, what Coveroo is doing is not that much different.

It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure how many people will sign up. Further, I can imagine it being somewhat annoying to have offers popping up on my phone from time to time, though the company promises that it will be unintrusive. Still, I remain skeptical.

The next notable iPhone app was Promptu Systems’ ShoutOut, a voice-to SMS system for the platform. This is pretty simple–it does just what it sounds like: it converts spoken phrases to text, which can then be sent out as a text message.

Nevertheless, the companies grouped into this session–Coveroo, Promptu Systems, HAM-IT, Asurion Mobile Applications, bluBuzz and Skout–have some pretty interesting technology and services going on. How many of them will last is certainly unknown, but that’s no different than any other product category at Demo or elsewhere in the tech business.

That’s pretty cool–being able to go directly from the address book to, say, a friend’s Flickr photos. But what’s even better is that Asurion is making available an open API that will allow third-party developers to link other social tools to the contact list. That can be almost anything you can imagine. In addition, there will be what are called “smart contacts” for companies like airlines. So, you could have Southwest Airlines in your contact list, and click straight through from there to see upcoming itineraries or your account information.

At $10 to $50, this seems like an inexpensive (especially at the lower end) way to personalize a mobile device, or even protect it against theft.

Maybe the most interesting of these applications, Asurion Mobile AddressBook, isn’t actually available (yet) for the iPhone. For now, it’s only on Android. As an iPhone user, though, I can still appreciate Android apps, especially ones that are smart and provide some all-new functionality.

(Credit:
Asurion Mobile Applications)

But in some ways, it is. In particular, the licensed images gives Coveroo the ability to attract customers with very popular movie or TV show characters. In addition, the company is also hoping to license its technology to retailers in the hopes that places like Best Buy or mobile phone retailers will offer etching services to customers right when they’re buying their devices.

I wonder how popular this will be, but given how dangerous it is to text and drive, I’m hopeful that something like this will become popular, since there’s very little chance that drivers are going to stop trying to communicate just because they’re behind the wheel.

A couple of mobile applications on display here at Demo I’m not so sure about are bluBuzz’s Bluetooth advertising platform and HAM-IT’s own customer and service provider matching service.

This seems like a service that few people will use on their devices, and I can’t really see it being successful. It may be better on the Web, but in focusing on the mobile side of things, this looks less than essential to me.

This is just what it sounds like: A system that allows you to have an image etched on to the back of your device, be it an iPhone, a BlackBerry, an
iPod or one of dozens of others. The company has a collection of more than 200 licensed images–from, say, “The Simpsons”–and it can also work with any custom image sent to it.

(Credit:
Skout)

The Mobile AddressBook is a cool app that brings a lot of fresh context to the staid list of names and phone numbers with which all of us are so familiar. Now, Android users will be able to link directly to the Flickr photo sets, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds of those in their contact lists.

PALM DESERT, Calif.–Last September, at DemoFall, I wrote that the most obvious trend in evidence at the technology showcase confab was the prevalence of iPhone apps. It seemed that at least a couple of dozen of the 72 companies at that show were putting at least part of their product offering on Apple’s hit device.

Further, Coveroo is serving as a reseller of some devices, in the sense that customers can order a new phone, have it etched, and then sent to them.

Whether this will actually help anyone find love is unknown, but the idea is interesting. There have certainly been plenty of mobile social applications in the past–remember Dodgeball? But by making this an opt-in system and combining GPS, this quickly becomes perhaps the most advanced such app I’ve ever heard of.

You might ask why you’d want to use such a system, but then think about how often you might want to send someone a text message while driving, and how unsafe doing that can be. In this case, you could simply hold the iPhone up to your mouth, say what you want to say, and then have the ShoutOut technology convert your words to text, which you can edit if necessary, and then send off.

BluBuzz has built a system that allows companies to reach out to mobile device owners with instant offers–via Bluetooth. The idea is that for anyone who has signed up with the service, a special offer from a business is just a ping away. The location-aware technology can put out a signal that travels up to 1,000 feet. So, if, say, an ice-cream shop has a special flavor today, it can push out an ad to anyone in the area who has signed up for BluBuzz–who will then have the offer appear on their device.

Of course, the biggest question is if the cloud is anything more than “mainframe in a browser.”

With few reference points for enterprise cloud computing consumption, many new and interesting companies are popping up to make cloud resources available, with the aim of simplifying the processes.

While enterprises are growing comfortable with applications in clouds and realizing the upside of dynamic provisioning and scaling, they will be developing new applications and replacing/changing existing ones. They will start building the new applications in clouds and as they change existing applications, will consider migrating them to the cloud in the process. This will afford them the advantages of much faster time to market, the ability to run applications on demand in multiple data centers (globally if appropriate) creating their first truly complete disaster recovery abilities and concentrate on their core businesses which may be financial services, health care, manufacturing, etc., but certainly is not data center operations. (They will leave that to the companies whose core business IS data center operations.)

All of that makes a lot of sense, providing a virtualized infrastructure with the software and hardware running separately but creating a complete environment.

3Tera’s Applogic allows you to abstract the hardware from the software and adds a management layer. Anything that can run in a physical data center can run in an Applogic cloud without having to change any code.

3Tera’s CEO Barry X. Lynn wrote a guest post on ZDNet that got me wondering about how software companies can leverage tools that make the cloud more consumable for users and, specifically, enterprises. Lynn takes the view that operations will be abstracted completely from data in the future, which affects both enterprises and the software that they run their businesses on.

Applogic encapsulates all the virtual resources as “applications”–OS, apps, servers, etc., and let’s you superimpose the combined components as an image on a cloud or grid. Applogic will then consume the appropriate the resources from the underlying hardware and software.

I spoke to Barry about how 3Tera works and got a demo of the service. My overall impression is that this is a very powerful tool set that is way ahead of how people are utilizing cloud-based resources today. I’m just not sure that the approach is the right one for the masses.

Applogic provides a browser-based Visio-like UI that lets you create these “applications” by dragging in resources that create a definition file that describe the overall package. You don’t need to know anything about the infrastructure that an application or service is running on; you just need to define the level of resource availability and service level required.

The question in my mind is if this “virtualized layer” is what enterprises want. The other question is if cloud consumers will be interested in this type of Visio-like approach or will they just want to “mount” cloud resources that are managed from behind the firewall.