A little bit of inspiration...

LiveBooks helps professional photographer create online presence, control content and connect with audience. While browsing their site and offering I stumbled upon August Bradely's portfolio (a must check-out!).

As I enter the final few months of my MBA experience, I have been contemplating various career options and dealing with the possibility of taking up widely different jobs. August's brief bio hit home an important point - to pursue your passion!

The Venice Project

From the The Venice Project Blog

We are in the process of launching a secure P2P streaming technology that allows content owners to bring TV-quality video and ease of use to a TV-sized audience mixed with all the wonders of the Internet. All content on The Venice platform is provided by content owners directly, and it's all protected with the highest standard of encryption and we are working within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) framework to ensure that it complies with appropriate content protection and ownership regulations.

These are people who were behind success of Skype so definitely worth keeping an eye on...

MediaTube from CBS,NBC,Viacom,News corp ...

NYT writes about recent effort by media companies to create a competing offering for YouTube.
 

"I think people have been trying to figure out: 'Do we take a check from Google, or do we create our own game?' " said another executive who has been in the negotiations said. "But that Google check comes only once. The other option is to create something that is capable of becoming a big asset and controlling our own game."

While no one can dispute the value of sitting on a huge pile of content. That is undeniable a great asset for media companies, I am skeptic about any effort that has so many players trying to put together a simplified product for end users. Almost always each player has his own agenda and alignment of interest is difficult, to add to this Google factor, various partnerships that Google has and the check's that it can write today. I think this effort will turn out to be a good negotiation card for the media players to play against Google/YouTube, and that does have value, but nothing more.

TV to Go

Recently came across this site Zattoo.

Interesting offering... they describe the product as high-quality, long-play video delivery with plenty of channels to choose from and delivered via browser, i.e no downloads required. 

I have not be able to try it out as they are available only in Europe for the moment but if they deliver all the things they promise, they might be on to something...

Fighting identity theft

A few classmates of mine have been working on ideas to prevent identity theft.

Here is a plug for their recently launched website - http://www.consumeradoption.com/index.html