Cisco Buys Arroyo Systems, Cements Video-on-Demand
Cisco purchased Arroyo Video Solutions for $92 million in an effort to expand its infrastructure offerings for the next stage of consumer-grade video-on-demand.
“The platforms out there today will not scale to the degree that we envision,” said Paul Bosco, vice president of video and cable initiatives at Cisco. “The nature of on-demand programming is changing. Cable operators used to be able to offer 100 choices that would get updated every couple of months, but consumers are soon going to expect millions of titles anytime they want them.”
Cisco also acquired Scientific-Atlanta and is working on both software and hardware for solving the bandwidth and compression speed issues facing current VoD systems.
Cisco Working on Video-on-Demand [CrunchGear]
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posted by Klintron at 12:28 PM
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Monday, August 21, 2006
MyDreamApp aims to bring ideas to fruition
MyDreamApp, a much buzzed about contest for Mac application ideas, launching this morning. Started by Phil Ryu, a Dartmouth College student and Mac developer, MyDreamApp has brought together a team of all-star advisers to shepherd software ideas submitted by non-developers, developers or anyone else with a vision of an application they’d like to see made available. Contest winners will see their applications actually developed as shareware and receive royalties, though MyDreamApp will retain the rights.
The advisory team includes Kevin Rose, Guy Kawasaki, David Pogue, Steve Wozniak and many more. Technical judges that will narrow down the submissions are Austin Sarner (AppZapper), Jason Harris (ShapeShifter), Martin Ott (SubEthaEdit) and John Casasanta (iClip).
I expect we’ll see at least a few interesting, useful applications come out of this. There’s allready no shortage of cool Mac apps, but the number of nondeveloper users with innovative ideas is probably huge as well. Since the software will be shareware and heavily vetted, the end result will probably be software that doesn’t look like it went through the last service Mike profiled.
The developer judges will determine the 24 best ideas out of the submissions, focusing on innovation, marketability, and feasibility of development. Then the advisers will give feedback and help ideas develop over a five week period in which readers of the site MyDreamApp are voting on the best three ideas. Those three ideas will be created as shareware with royalties going to the idea submitter. Submissions are due no later than the first of September.
Winners will recieve Mac Powerbooks and 15% royalties on sale of the products. MyDreamApp appears to retain the rights to the ideas once they are selected as winners. This will probably mitigate the seriousness of many of the submissions, but if it’s primarily nondevelopers then doing the submitting - then 15% is a whole lot better than nothing, the most likely result of not participating.
An ongoing, for profit version of this sort of thing is underway at Cambrian House, a “crowd sourced” software development company. The differences are many, but both projects are heavy on hype; Cambrian house recently delivered 1000 pizzas to the Google Complex in a move that was pretty widely mocked. It will be interesting to see MyDreamApp focus on a smaller number of projects with a focused group of experts.
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posted by Klintron at 11:17 AM
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