Over at John Cook’s Venture blog there is a post about technology in 2007. When asked about technologies that will “hit the wall” in 2007, Robin Murdoch of Accenture said:

…streaming TV to cell phones is “overhyped completely,” adding that most people would choose to watch a live sporting event on a large Plasma TV screen rather than their handheld device.

I agree with Robin’s conclusion, but not his/her justification. The fact of the matter is, with the exception of sporting events and breaking news, streaming live TV to anything, including TVs themselves is on the decline. The vast majority of content is not terribly time-critical. Even the NBC Nightly News is available as a podcast download now. The acceptance of TiVos and DVRs has demonstrated that people don’t mind watching things later, and in fact they prefer to watch things on their own time. When you’re out and about, that’s even more true.

The statement that people would choose a large screen over a small one isn’t even interesting. The reason someone would choose a small screen is because they can take it everywhere – that’s the tradeoff they’re making. The question is how many people want to take their video with them, and I’d imagine people in the cell phone industry are keeping an eye on sales in the iPod video store to answer that.

Google Answers never went anywhere, and Yahoo Answers did. Google Answers is now closing.

There are tons of reviews coming out for Intel’s new Quad Core chips. I’ve read through a few of them and repeatedly they keep saying that most applications can’t take advantage of all four cores. They seem to suggest that unless the popular applications are re-worked to take advantage of parallel processing, more cores aren’t going to help you.

I don’t understand why they’re saying that. Although a benchmark would look nice if it showed some mpeg encoder run twice as fast on a quad-core chip vs. a dual core, that’s not how most people use computers. Looking around my desktop right now I have a web browser, a mail client, several terminals and an IDE running. Taking a look at the process list reveals that I have 96 separate processes running in the background – a web server, desktop manager, random applets in the system tray, etc.

A real person using a computer has many programs open at once. Just because each program can’t use multiple processes, that doesn’t mean they’re not gaining substantial benefits from having multiple processors. I can compile some code that completely pegs one CPU, and still have another one idle so that checking e-mail is still responsive. Each of these processes are running independently, and their work can be allocated across all four processor cores. There is a net gain there that I have yet to see represented in any benchmark, but it would be interesting if someone bothered to do it.

I’d really love the ability to have an RSS feed turned into a podcast automatically. I don’t think it would be that hard to build a site where people could put in the URL of an RSS feed, and in return you’d give them a URL for an audio-version of that feed, where you’d use a text-to-speech library to convert that content to audio.

There are a lot of times I’m walking and would like to catch up on specific blogs. Also, being the motion sick type, if I’m in a car or bus it would be great to be able to “read” without the discomfort of taking my eyes off the surroundings. Someone get on it!

Recently, a few articles hit the blogs fairly hard because they were from reputable newspapers and talked about the decline of MySpace. One was MySpace, ByeSpace at the Wall Street Journal, and the other was In Teens’ Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year at the Washington Post.

Valleywag did a great job of trashing both articles, since in both cases the articles are based around individual anecdotes with minimal facts or statistics: 20-Year-Old Cancels MySpace Account, Site Folds and The Washington Post is so last January.

There was a downturn which is apparently seasonal and common, but other than that the statistics aren’t very compelling. Valleywag’s summary “BREAKING NEWS! SEVERAL STUDENTS AT FALLS CHURCH HIGH SCHOOL AREN’T ON MYSPACE AS MUCH AS THEY USED TO BE!” is pretty much accurate.

I guess Fil and I aren’t the only ones. Gina Trapani from Lifehacker jumped too. For people sticking with it though, they have a post today about how to make it less ugly.

I always wanted to open up a restaurant that appeared, to the patrons, to be fully automated. Lights on the floor would indicate what table to sit at, ordering would be done via touch screen, delivery of food would be done via conveyor belt. No waiting for the check, no waiting for refills, no tips necessary at all.

It appears that someone is doing something similar at uWink in California. There is a multi–part review that’s pretty interesting (summary: it’s not ready for prime time yet). They’ve chosen a video game theme and targeted gamers, which makes a lot of sense. I had always struggled with what type of restaurant it would be – a pizza place? burger joint? It couldn’t be a bar, because bars should be more social and human. uWink hasn’t gone as far as I was envisioning… they appear to have a fully human-staffed bar and I think you’re still seated by a human. They call their waitstaff “runners” because all they do is bring you the food you’ve ordered via the touchscreen at your table – they don’t actually wait on you. Kind of interesting… definitely nerdy.