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If you are looking for packing supplies or moving boxes I have a great solution for you. The website offers great prices and fast (in most cases next day) free shipping. If you are not sure what supplies you need or in what quantities, there are numerous moving kits available that have been specially designed to suit every size move.

All of the boxes sold on the website are professional grade, high strength, brand new moving boxes. The boxes and supplies are shipped from an extensive network of warehouses were they are being stored in large quantities, and are ready to ship upon request. AllMovingQuotes.com offers great prices because the supplies are purchased in large quantities and the discount is passed on to you.
When selecting your boxes make sure to get the size you need. It’s recommended to pack heavy stuff in smaller boxes it would make them easier to move. Always mark the heavy boxes, just like you would fragile ones, to avoid any surprises and to put the heavier boxes on the bottom.

You can also find many useful moving tips and suggestion on the same webpage. These tips contain a lot of information on how to save on your move and make it less stressful, and more efficient. You can even find a moving company or a car shipping company there as well. So feel free to browse the website that has been designed around moving industry and packing supplies. Read the rest of this entry »

A discussion group member made this post recently which says a lot about the state of distributing and manufacturing consumer electronics and the bundling of software content with devices.

Sams Club in Flint, MI has LG internal DVD burners that will do 16X DVD+/-R’s, RW’s, DVD-RAM, CD/RW’s and double layer DVD’s for $79… The unit comes with Nero Express, Nero BackItUp, InCD, PowerDVD, & Power Producer Gold

What it says to me is not comforting. Who got to keep what part of $79 when a consumer purchased this product? Whose content will be recorded onto these discs?

In the first postwar decade in major economies, consumer electronics items were major purchases after a home, a car, and appliances. There were maintenance and repair shops, there was a secondary resale market for trade-ins, and the content was advertiser supported broadcast radio and television. People structured their lives around broadcasting schedules for information and entertainment. Global reporting of news transformed our perceptions of world events and cultures, and the concept of censorship and propaganda took on new meaning proportionate to the magnitude of the new media. Music, motion pictures, theatre and games of chance were consumed in public places. Read the rest of this entry »

What could make the two-way competition for the next generation of optical discs a three-way race? We have HD-DVD and BD-DVD. Is it EDVD? Is it FDVD? Try HVD.

In two weeks, TC44, a technical standards committee of ECMA formed at the 88th General Assembly in December 2004 will meet in Tokyo to discuss four proposed new product configurations based on holographic storage on rotating discs, both read-only and recordable. The activity was initiated by Optware on behalf of the newly formed Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance.

Within 2 years there could emerge an international standard, as ECMA standards may be automatically ratified by the ISO. Before then, products based on the agreements expected to be forthcoming could enter the commercialization process in sample quantities. If things ramped up quickly, within 3 to 5 years after that, economies of scale would kick in and mass markets could begin to form. Read the rest of this entry »

Dolby Laboratories is going public. Inquiring minds want to know: what are the future fortunes of Ray Dolby’s namesake enterprise after his retirement?

Dolby earned his place on the consumer electronics map taking the “ss” out of cassette. Way back when everything was still analog. The enterprise grew with unexpected agility as all components made the transition to transistors except the speaker (and Henry Kloss is another story). Audio giants like Sony, Pioneer, or Philips could have ignored him or bought him out or Microsofted him, but they didn’t. Dolby technology and professionalism has secured for the company a big fish position in the small and dwindling pool of American consumer electronics patent owners.

Digital changed everything. Noise reduction had no place in the CD era because there is no noise created by friction like tape scraping heads. No Dolby button on a CD player in my studio anyway. But Dolby, who was no one-trick Pony, reinvented the meaning of his own brand name. Dolby Digital, the 5.1 multichannel audio codec also known as AC3, carried Dolby into the digital television era piggybacked on the ample coat tails of DVD and digital pay TV as a full-fledged audio codec. Read the rest of this entry »

A mere 20 years ago, Stan Cornyn produced an album of the inside adult humor troupe Firesign Theatre by the name of Eat or Be Eaten. Far from the typical big shot, Cornyn has always had my admiration, just for being himself. Google him, as I just did, and what sets his career apart comes right to the top of the list. “King of Liner Notes” is his moniker.

Liner notes on LPs were huge in the record business in the 60’s and 70’s, and Cornyn wrote great ones, born of both a feel for the music and a flair for the slice of stardom that he brought to the project pie personally. The concept of a record album was more coherent then, like a concert orchestrated as an experience, thoughtful, artful, conceptual, not merely the list of a coupla hits plus filler that later led to its disintegration when making the transition to the era of distribution via online downloads.

One fan site offers this excerpt, which pretty much captures the essence of Stan’s approach to liner notes. “This is the dean martin. It is a largish bird which, like the purple martin, is given to frequent perching and swallowing. Its dark crest is going just a shade gray at the temples. The rest of its plumage it frequently sheds in favor of all new feathers from Sy Devore’s. Specifications on the dean martin rump have not been established, this bird not having yet appeared in any European art films. Its tail is believed not to be forked, except on formal dinner occasions.” Read the rest of this entry »

New Scientist this month reports on a study by the Santa Fe Institute comparing dummy and actual market and limit orders on the London Stock Exchange. I do not make this stuff up, folks. If we keep getting all this hilarious copy, we shall be forced to revive Bread & Circuses, our industry humor gazette on ice, so as to clearly differentiate it from the serious stuff. Don’t make me do it!

Entitled, ‘Zero intelligence’ trading closely mimics stock market, it shows that a lot of the volatility is irrational, e.g. not tied to information. Oh, to have the luxury of time to draw parallels, but alas, I must leave that up to you. I am far too busy modeling the highly evolved behavior of Hollywood studios, record labels, and other content developers interacting with the orderly evolution of delivery technology, and predicting the logical and reasonable reaction of consumers to those coherent business activities so as to forecast markets to illuminate the most economically efficient path. Do post at will.

This story was pointed out by Ray Kurzweil’s news feed, highly recommended reading for the eclectic technophile, along with the news from Esther’s Papa Freeman Dyson, writing in Technology Review, “Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over.” Far from the threatening specter of genetically modified food supplies that substitute Monsanto’s and Pfizer’s earnings objectives for natural life, his brief description has exotic birds singing and innocent children giggling on a soundtrack hidden in the narrative. Read the rest of this entry »

Not to be content with issuing lawsuits against minors, the RIAA filed suit against an 83 year old dead woman, currently residing in Greenwood Memorial Park.

In response to the claim that the woman made 700 songs available illegally on the Internet, her daughter said that, while living, her mom didn’t know how to turn on a computer.

She sent a copy of the death certificate to record company officials, in an effort to get her late Mum excused from attending the hearing, but they filed the suit anyway.

Greenwood officials did not return calls seeking to determine whether the )cemetery( was indeed war chalked. Read the rest of this entry »

While working with the BBC, it is terribly refreshing to hear people constantly harping on listening to the consumer, using the technology to create better programming, and competing with those damn Yanks who are always trying to culturally steamroll everyone else.

The Big Kahuna of Motion Video
True 1080i high definition television is coming down a pipe and through the atmosphere to you, and soon to a disc. Meanwhile, the studios can use some necessary post-production tasks to distract themselves from the blue laser disc standards politics. Check out this interview with THX’s Rick Dean by Jo Twist, science and technology reporter, on the facial make-up lines and back-stage filing cabinets that showed up in a high def viewing of Star Wars. According to Dean, video captured at 1.2 Gb/s in HD must be compressed to 5 Mb/s, about 98%. “I think if they see real HD [high-definition], not some heavily compressed version of it, there is such a remarkable difference. I have heard comments from people who say the images pop off the screen.”

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Storage technology is improving in performance one order of magnitude every five years (Schwerin’s Law, first theorem). Each main segment of technology is one generation apart in performance, i.e. for a given capacity of fixed magnetic, removable optical is one order of magnitude behind, and solid state one order behind that (Schwerin’s Law, second theorem). Storage technology is thus progressing along a similar trajectory as Moore’s Law. Transmission bandwidth and display resolution, which along with processors and storage form the four sectors of digital CE and PC devices, also proceed at a similar velocity of change over time.

Content delivery technology is both network and physical in nature, i.e. transmitted or stored locally. Data transmission from a remote host is best suited for infrequent access or rapidly changing content, whereas delivery to local storage suits archiving content which is frequently accessed but does not change rapidly.

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Norwich, VT USA. Entertainment economy and technology forecaster Infotech predicts a bullish market for home media storage in general and blue laser recorders in particular. Infotech research indicates a simultaneous decline in sales of two formats, CD and DVD over the next 5 years. The anticipated strong growth in consumer content collecting over the next five years is among the very favorable conditions cited by the veteran trend modelers. “Unlike previous generations,” observed Julie Schwerin, Infotech founder and CEO, “the majority will be recordable devices.”

The fifth generation holographic disc will enter the market by the end of the decade, but risks being eclipsed by nanotech storage technologies before realizing its full potential. Read the rest of this entry »

After the thrashing Sony received in the Financial Times last week for disappointing analysts on the Street, London and Tokyo by missing its third fiscal quarter earnings projections, something needed to be done to shore up the online music business. Chris Deering, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Chairman and Sony Europe President, and Ken Kutaragi, Sony Computer Entertainment Group CEO, charged to the rescue yesterday with a daring yet intriguing plan.
News yesterday that the rave Sony Playstation Portable would have a companion music service launched in Europe and in the US for spring was welcomed as a positive move. Read the rest of this entry »