Tag: technology

Posted on

Elections & Technology

While it looks like eVoting will eventually arrive, we could likely streamline the current check-in/voting process. It seems ludicrous to me that in an at-large system, I must vote only at 1 particular poll. I watched at least 40-odd people turned away at Britannia in under 3 hours yesterday because they were supposed to be somewhere else. While we have large paper books of names, it sort of makes sense. But as I was scrutineering by iPhone, it occurred to me we have well-establish technology to make this easier. We’re all used to signing digitally at stores when buying things. Imagine the following scenario:

A voter is sent a voting card, like  normal. Only there’s a bar-code on it now. on e-Day, the voter goes to whichever poll is most convenient. At the sign-in desk, there’s a polling official with a hand-scanner. They scan the bar code & the person’s ino shows up on screen. They sign the screen (either with a stylus or a finger), then go vote as usual.

Behind the scenes, this san & signature is immediately updated across the system. Parties could likewise be immediately updated that voter # 12345 has just voted, further reducing the need  for scrutineers to do this work, reducing costs & ensuring that all registered electoral associations have equal access to this information & help them get out their vote.

If a voter needs to update their name, their address, or register, they can likewise do this digitally right there, updating the entire system. You wouldn’t even need particularly high-end technology to make this work. It seems reasonable to mandate that telcos/cablecos provide internet access on election day to make this possible.

It could even spit out live counts of voters by area, possibly alerting voters who have signed up for information that a particular polling station is busy or not, and suggesting alternates.

There’s probably various other ways existing, well-established technology could be used to help streamline the voting process, without digitizing voting itself – if you have any, let me know below.

 

Posted on

My PVR and my vision for my TV-viewing future

I’ve been thinking lately around the business model for Cable/TelCos & PVRs, and it seems to me that the current model is likely to be short-lived, with good reason, for both the companies and consumers. Why? Because it’s a one-time sale for the companies, and the storage on them is ludicrously small for consumers.

Currently, how I watch TV is that I go home, and I search my channel guide for:

  1. TV series that I want to watch, then record the series
  2. upcoming 1-off shows that I want to watch, like movies or sports, and set a recording for those.

This is all fine and dandy, except for a few problems:

  1. I have to be in front of the TV to set a new recording
  2. I have to use my remote to navigate the interface as well as “type” when searching, for which task it is most wretched
  3. I have to use the TV I recorded the show to in order to watch it (I only actually have 1 TV, but many, many homes I know have more than 1 – and can’t record a show on one TV to watch later on other TVs)
  4. I don’t have enough room to store an entire season’s worth of shows (or even several seasons) worth of shows on my PVR for later watching.

Now, the techies amongst us will say “Use a media PC!” – and that’s true, I can – that certainly takes care of some of these issues, as long as keep buying hardware to store this stuff, and have the technical know-how to link up 1 or more TVs scattered around the house to a centralized media server – certainly not something I could imagine many of my peers doing, let alone my parents. Slingbox solves many of these problems, it is true – but for the Cable/TelCo’s, it doesn’t do anything – a win for consumers that my guess is, angers the companies.

So after my rant, I suspect many of you can see where I’m heading – the cloud. Shaw is my current cable provider, so we’ll use them as the test case here for how infrastructure should be built. And note that most of it can be built on already extant technology that is currently available to consumers:.

Shaw builds a web portal for all cable customers. In this portal, I can browse listings, search shows based on any number of criteria (actors, studios, genre, directors, writers,etc) – most of this information readily available on services like IMDB, and so can simply be pulled in via Web Service for my use. Once I’ve found shows, let me set up a recording for my PVR – on the website (I believe that ComCast already offers something along the lines of this). This would then record to my PVR. Much like Tivo does, the service could very easily and quickly provide recommendations based on previous behaviour, what other customers have chosen, to allow me to extend my recordings. Take this one step further, and add a social component – allow me to share my recordings with my friends, and see their recordings. Let us recommend series/episodes/events to each other, and interact on the site regarding our shows. So now I’ve got a vastly more robust way to find & record shows. When I get weekly newsletters from things like MovieCentral, or whatever, I could easily click a link or two and have that movie set up to record – from wherever in the world that I am.

The next step is where to store these recordings, and the answer is simple: up in the cloud. Why? because then the storage is unlimited, and it can provide yet another revenue stream for the companies. For each level of subscription package, offer a certain amount of space, starting at, let’s say, 10GB – a paltry amount. But give customers the option of upping their storage, for a nominal fee – again, because storage is dirt cheap. That way, if I wanted to store the entire season of Lost, Heroes, the Daily Show for later watching, I could. Because I could just pay for more storage. At home, my interface remains the same: I click the “list” button, but instead of things stored locally, I’m now browsing my cloud storage. Of course, the list itself could download and be stored locally for ease of use/whatnot.

Once this model is working, a whole ream of future possibilities opens up for the Cable/TelCo’s to provide service (and make money), including:

  • Let me add OLD shows to my library – similar to buying an episode from iTunes – either free (or dirt cheap) with Ads still in the show (and could be current ads, not from the original air date) or more expensive, but ad-free. Again, these old episodes could be rented by me or sold.
  • Take a page from XBox Live and allow viewing parties – hell, integrate with XBox live, so I can watch a show with my friends, chatting over the mic, or with our avatars in front, what-not. It would be great fun for Leah to watch ANTM with her friends, even though they can’t all get together because of kids or whatnot. Again this could be a free, free-x-times-per-month, free-with-y-package or even a pay-per-use service.
  • Build (& sell) clients for computers, phones, anything, so I can actually watch my shows from anywhere. How great would it be to sit down in my seat on a WestJet or Air Canada plane and connect to my Shaw Library to watch shows while traveling? Or on my iPhone? Again, this could work in a pure-streaming method, or a “temporary download” or any number of any methods, depending on available technology & bandwidth.

None of the above strike me as terribly complicated things to accomplish, technology-wise. It’s possible (though I don’t know) that we wouldn’t even need new set-top boxes – just a firmware update, as they’re clearly able to connect online for the On-Demand services.

So why is this a win? Because it keeps Cable/TelCo’s in control of distribution in a way they’re rapidly losing on right now to Hulu, iTunes. It provides a more convenient service to customers, it provides a slew of new revenue streams, and what’s more, potentially huge cost-savings to these companies. Now, I highly doubt that any savings would be passed on to customers, but it could be. It keeps networks happy because they can still sell  ads that might be seen, it can provide the producers with some measurable viewing stats, because each stream of a show from the cloud could easily be tracked, which might fix the current ratings-are-down-because-people-pvr-the-show problems. And it wins because it is future-friendly – as new options become available, they only need to update a centralized service, which can easily be segmented into beta-test populations, not roll out a new hardware set-top box to millions of houses. And as/if these companies settle on some standards, hardware manufacturers can start to build hooks directly into TVs and whatnot.

What’re your thoughts?

%d bloggers like this: