Author: bijansabet

About 10 years ago, Microsoft had an idea for portable credentials with a product called Passport and later expanded into suite called Hailstorm. The basic idea: a better user experience across the web for personal information such as credentials & billing information plus other stuff.

Despite owning Hotmail and MSN, Hailstorm never caught on.

But the idea is quite interesting.

Fast forward a decade and we have a number of popular web services providing portable credentials today.

For example, you can leave a comment on this blog with Disqus. But you don’t have to be a Disqus user because you can also leave a comment using your Facebook username/password or Twitter credentials. I am biased but I think Twitter authentication with Disqus is fantastic. Super easy and a smooth user experience.

I think we are going to see more web services offer portable credentials soon. Apple now has over 75million accounts linked to credit cards. Will we see an “iTunes Connect” on third party sites?

Earlier today, my friend Fred Wilson wrote a post “Why isn’t PayPal more successful” about his recent experiences with PayPal and the benefits of stored credentials. In the comments, I wondered outloud if we will see “Amazon Connect” soon.

If Amazon offers something as good & easy as Twitter oauth or Facebook Connect for ecommerce, I would use it all day long.

Update: In the comments below JoeLaz points out that Amazon has Amazon Payments out for over a year. that is a good start but not as smooth as FB connect or twitter oauth. amazon payments requires too many clicks and takes the user away from the 3rd party site to log in to the amazon payment system. it has to work entirely outside of amazon’s site.

You don’t have to visit this blog too many times to know I enjoy Apple products.

These days we have 4 Macs in our house, two iPhones and 4 ipods.

And I use iPhoto, iTunes and iWork regularly and for the most part happily.

This weekend, I got my hands dirty with iMovie ‘09. In a nutshell the user experience was pretty bad.

Here’s what I wanted to do: make a DVD for a friend from about 6 relatively short video clips taken from our Flip Mino along with 20 photos and a few songs playing behind those photos.

I remember a few versions ago, iMovie was simple and straightfoward. Now it feels like a mess.

I couldn’t figure out how to fade the audio track out from one to another.

I couldn’t figure out how to fade out the music at the end of project.

By default it applied Ken Burns to each photo. I couldn’t figure out to change that for all photos at once.

Do I really have to make a project in iMovie and then export to iDVD to burn a disk? Why can’t I just make my project in iMovie and hit burn somewhere.

I wanted to overlay a photo on top of the video at one point. I couldn’t figure that out either.

As long as Apple forces me to use iDVD to burn a disk then please give me beautiful themes at least. Is there a way to import themes from a 3rd party because I didn’t like any of the stock themes.

I think the time is right for someone to create a beautiful and simple alternative to iMovie.

Pretty please.

There a number of reasons why people still subscribe to traditional pay television (satellite, cable, telco).

Just a year or so ago it was about network television shows & movies.

But very quickly those shows are finding their way online. Either thru illegal p2p networks or legal places like itunes, amazon, netflix and hulu.

Plus those traditional shows are just the tip of the iceberg. The web has much more to offer. Fred wrote a great post a few days ago about a recent evening that where he VJ’d 90 minutes of various clips on youtube with his family. You can’t replicate that experience with your standard cable box.

Web video critics have long believed that even as more shows go online, pay television operators will always have the advantage because of live events (news, sports, music etc).

As we saw with inauguration, CNN and otheres offered live streams of these events online. MLB has an amazing live product at MLB.tv. On June 1st, you can watch a live Dave Matthews concert on Hulu. There is more live content coming every day.

To be fair, there are still a number of barriers before the web can fully compete with live programming. Real technical challenges remain as well as economic issues as well. But these are going to be solved. I’m quite optimistic about that.

As these problems become solved, I think we are going to see cable start increasing ISP fees.

But here’s the thing: if ISP fees increase it will only accelerate pay television churn. Generally consumers have a fixed amount to spend on entertainment. And increasingly consumers would rather pick internet access over pay television. Certainly that is true with the younger generation.

If you could only have one which would you pick?