• PHP Advent - http://phpadvent.org/2011
• 24 Ways – Design and Developmenthttp://24ways.org/
• Performance Planet - http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2011/
• Ad Font - http://2011.adfont-calendar.com/
• Mozilla Developer Network - http://thewebrocks.com/calendar/
• Perl Advent - http://perladvent.org/2011/
• HTML5 and CSS3 - http://html5advent2011.digitpaint.nl/
• 12 Devs of Christmas - http://www.12devsofxmas.co.uk/

I hope you find these handy, and learn a thing of two!

JJ, as he is called internally at O.co, announced today via the company’s press page that they are “partnering” with Barnes and Noble to sell eBooks. You can read the press release here. The best part of all this is you too can “partner” with BN.com and sell eBooks all day and night, I will show you how later in this article.

What Overstock.com Did

Not much that’s what. If you aren’t familiar with Affiliate Marketing let me give you the run down. You own http://www.awesomestuff.com but you don’t actually own any awesome stuff to sell. Instead you setup a website and partner with sites like Overstock.com to put product links on your site, and for every person that clicks on the product link and buys from Overstock.com you get a cut of the profit. Simple.

Guess what Overstock.com did? They signed up as an affiliate with BN.com to sell eBooks through their site… err rather through affiliate links on http://www.Overstock.com/ebooks

Every single link to a product or category is an affiliate link through LinkShare to BN.com. It gets worse, the links are only on the ebooks landing page, oh no they are on product pages too.

You’re Affiliate Sale Has Been Stolen

So let’s pretend that http://www.awesomestuff.com has a link to Overstock.com’s product page for Hunger Games. Normally I would make 10% (or so) on any purchases through that link. However, now there is a new “Buy ebook on Barnes & Noble” link. An affiliate link that I do NOT have a tracking ID in. Sure technically Overstock.com is the partner with BN.com but had I known you were going to be looking for the eBook I could have just as easily sent you to BN.com instead of OSTK.com, they are both in the same Affiliate Network!

Let’s recap, I did all the selling, I got you to the merchant, and Overstock.com snaked my sell and took my commission.

As the consumer you probably don’t care a lick who gets paid, as long as you get your book, but you should. You should care that Overstock.com has just poisoned the Affiliate Marketing world with their “partnership” with Barnes & Noble. Their partnership is going to literally steal money from the pockets of people who work hard everyday to get ranked in search engines, to place product placements that make sense, to help you get the everyday lowest price, and sometimes pass along the coupons that save you the money.

These are great events where you can show up and work on your own open source project, and get help, or you can show up and help with other open source projects.

This time they are giving away a Xoom tablet too! Why not go and try and win? That is all you have to do, is show up and participate, that is too easy!

Hope to see you all there!

That out of the way, let’s talk nerdy.

Microsoft

Microsoft didn’t make any really amazing announcements this year except that their already solid platform is getting even more refined with better support for the Kinect, both in the core element (dashboard) and from game developers.

Lots of new titles with Kinect support, including shooters, fighters, and more. That should be awesome to see flesh out. I am personally excited to try my hand at Madden 12 and FIFA 12, and in the past I have ignored and even ran  away from sports titles cause I hated the controls. Now that I can actually “play” these games I may give it another try.

Microsoft is also bringing TV offerings to the Xbox environment. I haven’t seen many details about when or how or what it will cost, but I am sure the details are out there somewhere.

Kinect has been really refined and Microsoft really doesn’t want you to use the controllers unless you must and so all things are now navigable by voice alone. Good work Microsoft!

The only critic I have, and have had for a while, is they need to open up the SDK and access to the environment. I am not at all surprised they are keeping this garden walled, but it would be fun to have the SDK and develop apps for their system.

Sony

Personally I think Sony had nothing of real excitement. They revamped the PSP, gave it a bigger screen, more power, and 3G. So now there will be more to clog the wireless intertubes of the world. The rest of the keynote was “We fixed things, and here are some more titles that use our Wii like controller”

Nintendo

Ok, I get that Nintendo really made this whole gaming world what it is today. We all owe a lot of gratitude to them for making the NES, the Gameboy, the DS, the 3DS, and the Wii. However, just because you “innovate” doesn’t mean you should do this one Nintendo. The Wii U is stupid. My opinion may change when I have a chance to play with the system, but really it is a dumb idea from where I sit.

Basically the Wii U is a new console with HD support. About time. Add to that they gave you a controller with a 6.2 inch screen. So now your HDTV becomes the top half of a really elaborate DS and the controller is the bottom half. The second screen gives you a lot of neat things to build off of and some of the demo videos show some neat concepts. But as my good friend Monnok said it

Oh shit, we cant beat NO controller.. how about we make ours bigger and more unwieldy and just call it better?

I will give some respect to Nintendo and let them finish fleshing out the world of Wii U, but I can’t see myself purchasing one in the near future.

And the winner is…

Microsoft. Although they really didn’t bring anything new or amazing to the table, they are perfecting their already awesome idea of removing the controller entirely from the picture. They have even started allowing titles that merge the existence of the controller with Kinect. That is going to be a really big winner in my mind.

I think the Kinect experience can still get better, and I think we will only see that over the next year or so while Microsoft prepares the next level of console.

The last line in the credits was this:

Thor will return in The Avengers

Now to most people that would seem innocuous, and just to serve as an opportunity to advertise another film. However I see it quite differently. I see this as vendor lockin (stay with me here).

Thor is an independent creature from The Avengers, and there is plenty of stories about Thor and family and friends that could fill volumes of movies and still work toward the plot or in worst case scenario against the plot of The Avengers. Instead they have decided to tease us with Thor, and then leave us hanging until an otherwise undetermined point in time when they may or may not make The Avengers. Furthermore, The Avengers wasn’t always Thor and friends, it constantly changed in line up.

I am just disappointed that Iron Man got two movies before being sidelined until The Avengers and Thor only got one movie. It is disheartening. It sort of makes you think that Thor is simply going to get Thor and The Avengers and then be back burnered until some future time at which it will be rebooted and then made into something sad and only a glimpse of things that once were.

I think the director of the film should be ashamed that they loaded these last words into the credit as they did nothing but lock down the future possibilities of Thor movies and a full Thor franchise until a time at which The Avengers has come and gone.

What I am most interested in though is the consumer  perspective of all of this, and some of the business and legal aspects.

First let’s talk about Amazon Appstore for Android. I am loving it! Mostly because of the free apps. If you didn’t know, go install Amazon Appstore for Android now! You get 1 free PAID app a day. I have already snagged Newsweek, Shazam (full version), Angry Birds (two versions), Diner Dash 2, and Farm Frenzy, to name a few. I look forward to the new app each day.  All this adds up to win in my book.

Next let’s tackle Android Cloud Player (Amazon MP3 Store). The app works, no doubt about it, but there are some weird quarks that I think should have been given more thought and polish before the release that just happened. Basically the app works 90% of the way, the remaining 10% is not hard to find however. The biggest upset was when I “purchased” the free song of the day from Amazon.com and added it to my Amazon Cloud Drive. I had to logout of the Amazon MP3 Store app and re-login to see the content I had just purchased. I personally think this is a huge mistake, and probably one they should have figured out before launching. Aside from that aspect the product seems to work well enough.

There are legal questions brewing about the music sharing and privacy of users of the service. The RIAA and the big music labels have already expressed concerns that people will be uploading stolen music. Frankly I don’t see how this could be considered a real problem, unless I guess they are afraid people are going to setup Amazon.com accounts, load lots of stolen music, and then start selling access to their shares (is that even possible?).

Frankly I think music labels are completely aware of the fact that their empire is crumbling down around their ears and all they can hope for is for some judge (who they will pay off) to come down on Amazon.com and make them either pay royalties for uploaded music, shut down the service, stop people from uploading music files, give over personal data for each account, or worse.

I think Amazon.com is well aware of the risk they took to get where they are, and I think all things considered it was all a calculated risk to get in the market ahead of Google (rumored to launch their music service soon). I hope though that Amazon.com will show the community the highest level of respect when the RIAA and others come knocking asking for account information to build a case against common users of their services.

For now, I am going to continue to use Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player, although very little as I have other means of moving music and files back and forth between machines (I do own my own servers after all). I will continue to like Amazon Appstore for Android as long as they continue to give away useful paid apps everyday. That is just a bargain I can’t pass up.

I have seen a huge swell in Amazon and their support for Android, and I hope that in time this will flourish even more into a great community setup. How about native support for Amazon AWS in the Android SDK? Who knows, but I like what I see.

This weekend I spent a few hours streaming shows over Netflix and in the recent past I have watched movies from other services like Vudu. The point of this blog post is to create an open letter (more or less) to Netflix to call them to improve their streaming capabilities.

Vudu vs Netflix

Before I start down the path of comparing each service I want to note that where Netflix has a subscription based service. You pay a flat monthly fee for as many movies as you want. Vudu is a pay as you go service. A minimum of $2 per rental, for up to 2 days. That does not include HD or HDX which each cost more. We will get to that though.

Price

Because the first thing everyone is going to ask is what is the price comparison let’s break it down.

Netflix (streaming only) is $7.99. Vudu starts at $2 a movie and goes up to $7 a movie. If you only watch 1-8 movies a month then Vudu is quite comparable. My family however, utilizing 9 devices (2 laptops, 2 Wiis, 2Xboxes, 3 Blu-ray players) could in theory stream 9 movies at a time each night for a high of 270 movies (and tv shows) a month. Realistically we watch 3 movies a week. That is still 12 movies a month as a low ball. So the pricing would be

• Netflix – $7.99
• Vudu – $24 – $2000 (270*7.99)

Obviously the Netflix option is best, right? Let’s talk about releases.

New Releases

New releases is becoming a bit of a problem in Hollywood. Studios are keeping services like Redbox and Netflix from having DVDs for up to 28 days. However, companies like Blockbuster, and Vudu can have these same movies the day the DVD releases. I have a hard time discerning the difference between Blockbuster and Redbox, or between Netflix and Vudu except that the movie studios are obviously biased that subscription and dollar rentals are bad. More on this later too as I have a strong opinion about the entire thing.

So for new releases to stream to your house you are stuck waiting at least 28 days for Netflix (actually is is closer to 7 years*), where Vudu can stream it to you the same day. Note that these movies on Vudu are typically not at the $2/2day rate, and so you are looking at more like $6-7 for the rental.

Vudu wins**.

Streaming Quality

This is where Vudu shines, and why shouldn’t they? They are charging the customer more money per movie than Netflix and so they can afford better streaming options. Hands down Vudu wins.

Although Netflix does a pretty good job most of the time there are times when the streaming quality sucks. I mean sucks. I was watching Doctor Who the other night and streaming was blocky, and choppy. This isn’t everytime I watch a show/movie, and it isn’t the whole movie. However it does happen and it really bugs the hell out of me.

Vudu on the other hand nails streaming. I’ve never had any visual lag, no pixelating, and never a stop to recalculate streaming. It has been crystal clear, picture perfect everytime.

Again Vudu wins, but at a price.

Wrap Up

I love the subscription plan with Netflix, but they need to fight for their right to stream new movies, and they need a better streaming setup. If you must watch a new movie or want a perfect picture then rent your movie on Vudu.

* Netflix has really had a hard time negotiating streaming rights, most of the “newer” movies on Netflix are 7 years old, or older. There are exceptions, though few.

** Vudu in my mind has an unfair advantage, I’m not sure of the relationship with Hollywood, but I assume it is there.

LTE and iPhone

The good guys at Verizon have been kicking butt in setting up an powerful wireless data network called LTE, and it has gone over really well with few complaints about latency and general connection problems. They allow you to setup hotspots with their devices and things are fast. Unfortunately the Verizon iPhone is being held back to their 3G network, which by all means is just as powerful, if not as fast.

Why are they being held back to 3G, here’s what Tim Cook from Apple has to say:

Two reasons — the first gen LTE chipsets force design changes we wouldn’t make. And Verizon customers told us they want the iPhone now. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve been asked ‘when will it work on Verizon.’

So the basics are, we can force you to upgrade later, how very Apple.

CDMA and Voice + Data

When asked will the CDMA version of the iPhone allow voice and data at the same time, Dan Dee has this to say:

Same as a CDMA device

Which historically has been no. Data and voice can’t be used at the same time. So much to all those Apple commercials showing a person getting a call and simultaneously sending a Tweet, looking up maps, and getting location information on where their stolen car is headed.

All in all the Verizon iPhone 4 is a huge step in the right direction, allowing the iPhone to test the waters outside the prison of AT&T and their lagging network problems.

On a positive note, Verizon was quite proud and enthusiastic today to taut their network strength and their bandwidth margin to ensure that users will get a flawless data experience, as long as they aren’t on a call.

This year I’m taking a new focus on my blog. I’m going to post more often, about more things. Hopefully this all works into a regular habit, and decent content.

The  posts have been heavily centered on books, and although I intend to keep reviewing books I’m going to open the flood gates that were holding back app reviews (Android and iOS), software review, linux distro reviews, security news, and other general geeky stuff.

I hope you’ll join me on this ride, and for those interested, we are always looking for content writers.

Here’s to a  great new year!