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The “Great HD Shoot Out” review picks the Canon HV20 as top HD camcorder

Just as I was comparing specs online and the ‘feel’ of camcorders in person at the few stores that carry the latest hardware, I received a link to on to the the Great HD Shoot Out which compares some of the latest and greatest prosumer HD camcorders, including the Canon HV20, Sony HDR-HC7, Panasonic HDC-SD1 and the JVC GZ-HD7. I had already selected the DV tape-based Canon HV20 and the new hard-disc Sony HDR-HC7, but added the (more expenisive) JVC GZ-HD7 to the mix.


Going into my evaluation, I had already decided on the Canon HV20 given the very reasonable price, HDV MPEG-2 video compression and 24P mode, with comprehensive manual controls. I have heard from other owners that as the camcorder supports HD as well as lower quality SD (standard definition), it’s said that the SD quality is comparable to the Canon XL1.


And being an old audio nut, the Canon offers rich audio capabilities: choose from the mini microphone input or the hot Advanced Accessory Shoe (AAS) which I have paired with a Canon DM-50 stereo mic on my current Canon DV camcorder. This plus a headphone jack and manual audio level controls.


The reviewers selected the Canon as the preferred camcorder out of this bunch, with the Canon and Sony with comparable video quality over the JVC



“The crispness of the HV20’s image was most notable in close-up shots of our model, where we could literally count every hair on our model’s face…  The Canon also turned in a stellar low light score, thanks to a 24p mode that more than doubles the light gathering ability of its imager.  In low light, it beat out the others in the same order as above.  The 24p capability in and of itself is a great extra feature on the HV20, yet another reason to consider it.” 


There is a LANC connection on the Sony, but missing from the new Canon HV20: I use the LANC (aka Control-L) connector on my Optura, for tripod control of the zoom. But this is a small price to pay and a gap that the HV20’s wireless remote would likely fill.


I may have to bend the budget and go for the Canon — especially tempting as it’s on sale this weekend — and put my old tried and true Canon Optura100mc camcorder up on eBay. I agree with the review of the Optura 100MC: it’s “a great camcorder… [and]  produces a great picture and gives you tons of manual control. It’s a great deal and a good camcorder for anyone who would like to learn how to maximize the performance of their camcorder and get the best results.”


For more info on the Canon HV20, visit Canon’s consumer page on the camcorder.

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Mary Jo Foley: Ten lessons the Xbox Team can teach the rest of Microsoft

Last week, ZDNet‘s Mary Jo Foley posted on her blog the Ten lessons the Xbox Team can teach the rest of Microsoft.


“When it comes to building community — and profiting from it — Microsoft’s Xbox team is helping write the playbook. That fact isn’t lost on the rest of the company. Increasingly, other divisions at Microsoft are studying what the Xbox folks are doing right and trying to apply those lessons to their own products and services.”


She’s right, IMHO.


Mary Jo spoke with JJ Richards, the GM of Xbox Live, to collect his thoughts on what other parts of the company could learn from the Xbox. Here they are…



1. Tiers need to be clear and simple. In Xbox Live, there is gold and there is silver. Fewer, simpler SKUs are better.


2. The dashboard is the UI. Users want access to lots of data, all in one place. They don’t want to have to hunt for it.


3. An online marketplace sells content. The Windows and Office Live teams already grok this one. Making Microsoft and third-party wares available as a one-stop shop helps move more add-on hardware, software and services.


4. Arcade: Not everyone is a shooter-game pro. Users come with different skill sets and interests. Some prefer “Geometry Wars” to “Gears of War.” Microsoft’s Developer Division gets this, and is launching Express versions of its tools for hobbyists/nonprofessional programmers.


5. Achievements are a way to stay in touch. The more ways you can encourage community members to stay in touch, the better.


6. Ubiquitous voice and text are de rigeur. In the Web 2.0 world, everyone’s a multi-tasker. All services and apps should bake-in messaging, mail and other unified-communications technologies.


7. Roaming accounts are key. Users want their audio and video content, contact lists, address books, favorites and other settings available on any device, anywhere at any time.


8. Build communities within your community. Gamerzones in the Xbox world allow similar types of users to more easily connect. What’s the business equivalent of Xbox Live’s “Underground”? Good question.


9. Points are the new online currency. Office Online already is moving in this direction, and other Microsoft Live services will likely do the same.


10. Gamerscore = reputation. Other divisions at Microsoft have been wrestling with how to rank community participants by “reputation” to help users gauge which content/commentary to trust. Gamerscore could become the model here.


“Richards acknowledged that the Xbox Live team can learn a thing or two from other Microsoft divisions, as well, such as how to handle child safety settings in world with more and more user-generated content. But it seems to me that it’s Microsoft’s non-gaming businesses that have more to learn from the Xbox team — at least when it comes to building community — than the other way around.”


I’ll add number 11: Connect with your customers. Customers want to be heard and sometimes appreciate that they have influenced product design and delivery with their feedback. More and more, teams have formalized how they get direct responses from customers, whether it’s internally through a dogfood deployment, more formally through a Connect-managed beta or customer focus groups to see how people react to and how they use a new product or service. Some of the teams that have the best understanding of their customer’s needs are connecting directly in 1:1 and 1:many discussions, whether it’s on Xbox Live in head-to-head matches and play, or on blogs like the Xbox team’s Gamerscore blog, the Xbox team blog on MSDN and of course Major Nelson.

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Your questions: “What is going on? aQuantive… sounds like a Silicon Valley deal.”

I was asked this morning by a friend from down south at a not-so-small Internet services company: “What is going on up there [in Redmond]? Six billion for aQuantive? That is a bunch of money. It sounds like a Silicon Valley deal.”


A new record-setting, massive Microsoft acquisition, the largest the company has done. And yes, it sounds more of the type of acquisition you’d see being made in 94025, 94306 or 94043 rather than 98052.


The Seatte Times has a couple of articles today that take a look at the aQuantive acquisition announced yesterday, including this one on “What Microsoft saw in aQuantive: tools, tech and top-tier ties” from reporter Kim Peterson.



“Still, the acquisition news left some wondering why, exactly, Microsoft would pay so much for an advertising company. What is aQuantive all about, anyway?


“The 10-year-old company has grown mainly by offering top-to-bottom services for advertisers. It helps them create advertising and branding campaigns. It serves, or electronically places, those ads on popular Web sites for maximum exposure. And it offers sophisticated tools for tracking when people clicked on those ads and what they did on the Web site that followed.


“If you went to a banking site, for example, aQuantive’s system would note that and could show you ads for that bank when you visited other Web pages. And it wouldn’t be the same ad each time, either. The system could show you a sequence of ads targeted to your interests.


“AQuantive also creates Web sites for companies. It built the Postopia.com gaming site for Kraft, for example, and a site about youth travel programs for Disney. It created a “Fanta-island” Web site to help the Fanta beverage company reach out to teenagers.”


From my friend: “I’m surprised that you [referring to Microsoft corporate, not me personally] didn’t buy 24/7 [Real Media] for their technology [ad management systems and analytics]…” which was WPP’s announced purchase this week, for roughly a tenth of the aQuantive deal.


Good question.


Given the number of online properties Microsoft has, across Microsoft.com (plus popular subsites like Office Online), Live, MSN, MDSN, TechNet and Xbox, there is an opportunity to leverage AQuantive’s experience in the complete cycle os ad services, from develpment to placement and ultimately the analytics to see how the ads fare in the marketplace.


Given Google’s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick to augment their display advertising business, as well as Yahoo’s controlling purchase of Right Media, I wonder about the future of other online advertising technology company firms, including as ValueClick and Viewpoint.


See also Times’ reporter Benjamin Romano’s article “For $6 billion, Microsoft buys huge slice of online-ad pie” which includes this excerpt:



“Asked whether the acquisition is in part to prevent a competitor from getting aQuantive — one the last large independent digital-advertising houses — Johnson talked only of the opportunity.


“We looked at how rapidly this industry is consolidating and unfolding, and we felt like now was the time to put a stake in the ground that says we are going to take our advertising platform to the next level and we are committed to this industry for the future growth of our company,” Johnson said.”

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News: HP Garage now officially an historic place

AP reported this week that the legendary Hewlett-Packard garage is now officially an historic place. It’s the little garage behind the house at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard (the co-founders of HP) first started in 1938.



“It was there that Hewlett and Packard developed their first product, an audio oscillator, which Walt Disney Co. used to improve sound quality in its 1940 animated movie “Fantasia.”


You can read more about the HP garage at the official website.


We often discuss how leading companies strive to improve customer satisfaction and measurement, which includes a look at HP. Recently, one of my friends referred to HP’s “Rules of the Garage” which were widely promoted by HP back in the late ’90s. Here they are for your reference:



  1. Believe you can change the world.

  2. Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.

  3. Know when to work alone and when to work together.

  4. Share — tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.

  5. No politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage.)

  6. The customer defines a job well done.

  7. Radical ideas are not bad ideas.

  8. Invent different ways of working.

  9. Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.

  10. Believe that together we can do anything. Invent.

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“Thank you for your visit” could mean you’re curious or just gullible

Lisa Vaas of eWeek has an article today on how nearly 500 people took the bait to ‘Click Here to Get Infected.’ It was as simple as setting up an innocent looking domain name (drive-by-download.info), one with an ‘.info’ suffix that is reportedly popular with malware providers, as noted in the article. If you managed to find the ad and click through, you received a “Thank you for your visit” message. Sounds innocent enough. 



“That was evidenced by the 409 people who clicked on an ad that offers infection for those with virus-free PCs. The ad, run by a person who identifies himself as security professional Didier Stevens, reads like this:


Drive-By Download
Is your PC virus-free?
Get it infected here!
drive-by-download.info


“Stevens, who says he works for Contraste Europe, a branch of the IT consultancy The Contraste Group, has been running his Google Adwords campaign for six months now and has received 409 hits. Stevens has done similar research in the past, such as finding out how easy it is to land on a drive-by download site when doing a Google search.”


In other words, be careful what you click on.


Although the site owner and the mock-site owner claims that no PCs were harmed, it goes to show that a significant number of people will click on ads or other interesting tidbits that have the potential harbour potential malware or malicious code. (In a related post, see “ani exploit via e-mail: you’d think hackers would know how to spell ‘Britney Spears’.)


You can read more about this on the site owner’s blog at http://didierstevens.wordpress.com/tag/malware/.


For more, see my past note on how there’s no immunity from security vulnerabilities.



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