Bottom line, see page 7 of the presentation, it’s a heck of a lot more efficient (i.e., cleaner and less expensive) to power (i.e., unit of distance out per unit of energy in) with electric than messing around with hydrogen – and also if you’re feeling analytic layer on the incremental capex and lag for infrastructure development that’s not needed for moving electrons over the existing grid. It’s a nicely done presentation and def worth a read if you’re into energy effieciency or electric cars.

And check out Tesla’s blog.

One of the fellows behind Zecco was an early backer of Skype, Morten Lund, Zecco’s CEO is Jeroen Veth.

“The big guys need the commission to keep their marketing machine going” explains Zecco.com founder and CEO Jeroen Veth, a 37 year old entrepreneur and former Merrild Lynch Vice President. “The actual cost of a trade is around $2 but if you spend $500 or more per customer in marketing costs and run your business on old legacy systems, you need all the revenue you can get.”

Zero commission trading would certainly be disruptive. It will be interesting to see how brokerages such as ETRADE reply.

Holy sh*t, the NYT has a piece today with a prediction from AMC:

There is no easy fix for industry. But it’s clear that it can’t afford to leave easy money sitting on the table any longer, which is why executives are finally thinking about a more sensible business model. It is called variable pricing, and the first step is likely to be extending the old matinee discount to weeknights. “I predict we will see it within a year,” said Peter C. Brown, who runs the nation’s second-biggest theater chain, AMC Entertainment, which invented the multiplex in the 1960′s and the armchair cup holder in 1981. “There are people looking at it. I’ll leave it at that.”

It get’s more interesting every day. Coming to a theatre near you.

UPDATE: At the tech meet up last week I saw a clever implementation called Double Feature Finder, yet another possibility for variable pricing :)

From Techweb:

The 2006 Sundance Web site underwent a complete overhaul to make navigation easier and to bring the Sundance Film Festival online. Improvements include faster downloads, sharper graphics, an expanded help section, and weather and news updates on the home page. “We’re super excited to be using Flash 8 codec this year,” Beyer said. “We think it’s an amazing upgrade to Flash video and we’re extremely pleased with the results.”

New York Times reportage states:

Technology has unmoored some the constructs that have girded those businesses for decades, giving the consumers of pop culture a growing ability to watch or listen to their entertainment on their own terms and on their own time, and re-evaluating the role of traditional distribution companies. “Awesome” pushes that tension further, giving the ultimate user a chance to actually create the content. “It’s the democratization of filmmaking,” said Jon Doran, a producer of the movie.

Heh, NYT also report BB even managed to return the cameras to the shop for a refund after the shoot :)

Wired Says:

Jon Lech Johansen, the 21-year-old Norwegian media hacker nicknamed DVD Jon, is moving to San Diego to work for maverick tech entrepreneur Michael Robertson in what can only be described as the most portentous team-up since Butch met Sundance.

More re Jon here.

Bram is the guy behind BitTorrent, a program that enables our audiences to receive our productions whilst reducing the burden on our own bandwidth by sharing the distribution task. BitTorrent is making a bit of history right now, and a lot of tools developers are climbing on board with implementations and variations.

Anyway, for the 24×7 film experiment along with others who we thought would be interesting to audiences we invited Bram. Here’s a brief clip with Bram introducing himself and BitTorrent. We are using other footage in the final cut of the film and thought you might enjoy seeing and hearing Bram and getting a BitTorent 101 introduction.

Bram Cohen (8.2mb quicktime faststart .mov)

Show this video to friends on del.icio.us

Photo by Kathryn Yu, licensed under by-nc-sa.

Today, Creative Commons launches a fund raising campaign. The trigger is some bizarrely complicated requirement of the IRS that nonprofits demonstrate not just support from some large, wise, foundations, but also “public support.” So we’ve got an (urgent) need to demonstrate that support, through, well, support.

Over the course of the campaign, I’m going to be writing a weekly email that lays out the story of Creative Commons. There will be some surprise guest email authors as well as some replies to critics, and lots of reflection. You can subscribe to the letters here. They’ll be short and again just weekly. The first one is posted here. And of course, please, whatever you can, you can support Creative Commons here.

So pull your shit together and make a remix.

The New York Times reports ADV Films, the largest distributor of anime in the United States, is going BitTorrent.

To publicize its new series “Gilgamesh” and “Goddanar,” it is releasing promotional packages – not in stores, but via the dreaded BitTorrent. “BitTorrent has been used extensively in a kind of underground environment up until now,” said David Williams, a producer at ADV, in a telephone interview from the company’s Houston headquarters. “There’s a large group of people who have it on their systems. Since this core group already exists, we figured why not give them legitimate material to download that would help them learn about some of our products.”

Thank you Bram&Company for progressing BitTorrent to where it is today. It’s great to see this fine technology no longer under fire and recognised for the virtues it brings to the marketplace.

In describing his consumption behavior after having got an iPod, he said that his “music metabolism” increased. Since having his collection digitized and easily available on the iPod, he listened to more ‘deep tracks’ that he hadn’t listened to in a long time (courtesy of the shuffle function). However, he soon got sick of his library of tracks and wanted to hear new/different music.

Methinks the business model for music delivery will not be so quickly solved and the evolving nature of our collective music metabolism is significant. And it’s clear music metabolism is part of what drives p2p. Interestingly, the ownership model felt like the right model in the beginning, it’s the one I favoured since the mid 1990s when it became clear music downloading was the future. In recent months I’ve come to better understand my own music metabolism and after ripping my CDs to my iPod, purchasing an obscene number of tracks from iTunes and listening to more music more often than I have at any time before. I’m wondering if I’m beginning to experience remorse for all of those purchases. I’m seriously reconsidering my position regarding music rental. In thinking about my reservations for making the switch to rental and the best I can come up with is uncertainty.

When you purchase a CD you are fairly certain you will have it in the future. With music rental there is less certainly the music will always be available under that model, you don’t get the option to own and that’s what makes you uneasy. What happens if the labels decide to no renew their agreements with the rental intermediaries? In that case you not only no longer have your music and have no option (below the then current market price) to buy it, you feel like a sucker.

Methinks that’s what keeps the the balance towards the purchase model though if the rental price is low enough and I can play the rented music on my iPod I’ll probably either partially or fully switch to rental. If I have to bin my iPod and purchase another device to play the rented music before my iPod battery needs replacement I’m probably still unlikely to start renting. But then again my music metabolism my override other variables. Apple, are you listening?

Anyway, go read Rags’ blog entry, it’s late and I’m rambling. I’ll write something more coherent on the price of uncertainty in the rental model and the disconnect from the market that has migrated from the labels to the online purchase and rental distributors another time when I’m operating on more sleep. The music distribution problem is far from solved and if anything it’s more complicated than ever, making p2p appear the path of least resistance still/again/yet. I can’t imagine the transition to electronic distribution could have gone much worse than it did.

This seems like a 1980 problem raising its head 25 years late.

Methinks he’s correct, it’s not only the “inventory” problem, which can be made to go away pretty easily given widening broadband availability. The alternatives to movie watching are enormous and growing, the competition for your sacred minutes of leisure attention is fierce. I for one don’t always have 90 contiguous minutes available to watch a feature length flick, and I prefer not to chop the movie experience into multiple sessions. Has the market for shorts finally arrived? I say yes, go long shorts. Indie downloads with runtimes of between 10 and 40 minutes will rule.

It looks official. The State of New York, after being told by the Supreme Court that their direct shipping laws were discriminatory and unconstitutional, will send a bill to the governor’s desk that opens the State to direct shipping of wine to consumers.

Here’s the quote from boingboing:

Slashdot the vote: We’re beating back the Broadcast Flag!

Donna sez, “EFF Activism Coordinator Danny O’Brien shares inspiring stats from the 48-hour campaign to stop the Broadcast Flag:
At the beginning of this week, we learned that a Broadcast Flag amendment might slip past the gates in an appropriations bill. It’s easy to see how this could happen. Despite strong opposition to the flag in the Internet community, in many circles it’s still considered “non-controversial.”
But that was Monday evening.

Within the space of a few hours, the committee was Slashdotted, BoingBoinged and Instalanched.

By 6 p.m. on Tuesday, the 27 members of the Senate Appropriations Committee received more than 11,000 emails and faxes. That’s nearly 500 faxes an hour. Dianne Feinstein alone received more than 2,600 messages in her inbox. Kay Hutchison, the senior senator for Texas, received 1,441 letters.

And these are just the numbers EFF has. We don’t track telephone calls. But we do know that many of you listened when we joined Public Knowledge in urging you to call your senators directly. If you tried to call and the line was engaged, it was likely occupied by someone else griping about the same amendment. Staffers say they were “swamped.”

Today, the phone calls, email messages, and faxes continue to flood in. This is a mass protest even without voices from many of the more populous states, which don’t have senators on the committee.

Suffice it to say that you don’t get that kind of reaction except for very controversial bills. You did it. You got the attention of every senator on the Appropriations Committee.

And so far, it’s working.