(Side note: DAGNABBIT! The feed began including ALL of the shows again! Soo… if you ended up with a bunch of shows in your agrregator again, please accept my most humble apologies.)

P. Dilly just Skyped me to ask “where’s this week’s Podcheck?” I had to remind him that the show is no longer called “The Podcheck Weekly Review,” but I also told him that he could hear me on David Lawrence’s show at www.TheDavidLawrenceShow.com . David had me as a guest on his radio show last night, and he also was kind enough to have me as his guest on his Personal Netcast Podcast.

Follow these links to hear the free podcast, and you can also purchase hour #3 of yesterday’s “Online Tonight” radio show ($.25 via BitPass):

• www.TheDavidLawrenceShow.com
• The Personal Netcast Podcast - Guest: Scott Fletcher - (free)
  (Thanks to TIM! for helping me tame WordPress so that I can now link to mp3 files without having WordPress automatically include them in the feed!. I haven’t done it yet, though… http://thedavidlawrenceshow.com/coral/david_lawrence_20051020.MP3)
• Online Tonight 10/20/05 - Hour#3 ($.25 via BitPass)

David’s “Online Tonight” radio show is heard in Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, (and others) as well as on Sirius and XM satellite radio.

As always, I had a great time on his show. At times, you might be able to tell that it was way past my bedtime, but it was well worth it. David will also be presenting a session at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo on November 11th and 12th (2005) in Ontario California, and he also said that he is announcing a new product/service/etc at the show. There will be a number of companies announcing stuff at the expo, but I’m going to pay special attention to what David has to say.

Apple actively enforcing “iPod” trademark: Word on the street is that Apple Computer Company is issuing ‘cease-and-desist’ letters to podcasters who are using the word “iPod” in their name, products, podcast name, and/or domain name. The letters indicate that the people/podcasters/companies using the word ‘iPod’ must stop or face legal action. This is a bummer for folks who use the word “iPod” in the name of their podcast, but it was not unexpected; “iPod” is a trademark of Apple, and they are excercising their rights to control the use of the trademarked word. I suppose they would do the same for “iTunes,” “iSight,” etc.

ALSO, Apple is prohibiting the use of the iPod likeness/image in logos, etc. (My legal team says that is a copyright issue, and not a trademark issue.)

Big bad Apple? No. Paramount Pictures is famous for preventing Star Trek fanatics from creating their own fan sites, 20th Century Fox is equally militant about controlling the Star Wars brand, and many other companies spend a good deal of time preventing the unlicensed use of their trademarks. Apple must believe that this action is necessary to protect their brand, and they might be legally obligated to enforce the trademark; if they don’t enforce the trademark, they might leave themselves open to trademark dilution, whereby they would no longer be able to enforce the trademark at all.

Still, part of me is disappointed that fans of the “iPod” device cannot pay homage to the device in the names of their podcasts.

p.s. The little birdie also pointed out that it’s a good thing that Adam Curry changed the name of “iPodder.org” to “IndiePodder.org,” huh? I suspect that the Curry folks didn’t think about the trademark aspect at the time, but it now turns out that it was a good idea to change the name. Honestly, if it was that important for them to keep the ‘iPodder.org” name, PodShow could have worked out a CHEAP licensing deal with Apple to continue using the trademark.

More pure speculation: Microsoft has been very quiet when it comes to on-demand portable media. Sure, they have announced ’support’ for RSS in the upcoming versions of Windows, and they are slowly conquering the palm-top computing market with PocketPC and TabletPC, and they are making significant in-roads into the home theater market with the Microsoft Media Center PC and Windows Vista… but they are virtually silent when it comes to podcasting and videocasting. Why let Apple bask all alone in the glorious sunlight cast by iTunes and the iPod? Because there is a much bigger battle brewing with a potentially bigger adversary…

Microsoft is about to take on Maromedia Flash. (huh?) Since September 14, 2005, Microsoft has been quietly trickling details about their new fully-integrated tool set (codename: Acrylic) to develop vector-based applications for Avalon and web content. Details HERE. This new system will integrate AJAX, vector-based rendering, web services, etc. It will allow developers to create rich user experiences on the web and on the desktop, especially since Windows Vista has deep support for 3-d and vector-based graphics rendering.


…and Macromedia is not too far ahead, though they are blazing their way new technology (via Macromedia’s Flex 2.0 and Flash 8.5) (- Watch the October 6th, 2005 video - Kevin Lynch, CTO of Macrovision) Sure, Flash is the most ubiquitous client technology, dwarfing both Windows and Mac, and it has grown into a very mature platform with support for AJAX, sockets data access, etc. built in. The company “Adaptive Path” has developed a new application that utilizes the brand-new implementations. Sure, Macromedia seems abosuletly unstoppable. But just how much money would it take for Microsoft to crush Macromedia? Microsoft is just now coming off long-term development cycles for Vista, .NET 2.0, and Office, and I speculate that they have been quietly sinking money into an upcoming challenge to Macromedia.

So, here is the battleground, and I speculate that here is where Microsoft’s money will be spent. I suspect that Microsoft is betting that they can usurp the defacto-leader of vector-based interfaces. If so, Microsoft doesn’t have time for something as small as “podcasting.”

File this under pure speculation: It occured to me (which means that it is already in development at Apple Skunkworks) that the incredibly small Video iPod will soon morph into the iPod Personal Video Assistant, or (insert your cool product name here).

They would certainly not be pioneers in this space - Sanyo’s VPC-C5 is a super-slim, light and compact digital movie camera (pictured on the right). I had no idea that the Sanyo VPC-C5 could record 640×480 30 fps video! But leave it to Apple to convince consumers that NOW is the time to adopt the technology.

If you take a close look at the Sanyo VPC-C5 (pictured on the right), you’ll notice that its main body is about 3-4 times as thick as the Video iPod not including the lens/optics! Apple has miniaturized those main storage and display components, so the only missing piece is the camera/mpeg encoder attachment. Imagine the Video iPod with a camera attachment (oh, say, like a yet-to-be-announced Griffin iPodSight not pictured here?) attached to the video iPod (with oh, say, a dock-port-friendly connector?), and viola!

In our opinion, it is only a matter of time before either Apple, or a 3rd-party accessory company, releases a Video Camera add-on for your Video iPod.

Download mp3

We’re back!! THANK YOU FOR STAYING SUBSCRIBED! Thanks again to Steve and Sam from the SG show for filling in for the last show! This week, we have an exclusive ‘listen’ to a new iPod commercial from Apple (disclaimer: parody). We have a lot to catch up on. Let’s go…

The Old News:

This is the REALLY OLD NEWS that I felt obligated to cover before getting to the new news…

• GoogleTalk, like all other talk clients, only talks to other GoogleTalk users. It will text chat with others, but it won’t voice.
• Drew from Dawn & Drew quit his job to work on podcasting full time.

(more…)

Welcome to the new Podcheck site. My humblest apologies to you if you found a bunch of old shows in your iPodder/Doppler/iTunes folder this morning. I (thought that I had) kept everything the same so that your client software wouldn’t try to re-download the shows. Boy, was I surprised when my server’s bandwidth meter started spinning around like a propeller blade. $ka-ching$ I have configured the feed to serve only the last 5 shows, so that should help. Also, if you’re ever in Peoria, please feel free to stop by and bitch-slap me.

In any event, this is the new home of Podcheck Review. New features include:

• It’s easier to navigate.
• It’s easier on the eyes.
• You can write comments without logging in or creating an account.
• There are more articles and links to stuff.
• Flash-based mp3 Player (Thanks Podcast Pickle!)
• Feedburner stats (though they may not be visible forever).

I wanted to get the new site up in time for the Podcast and Portable Media Expo on November 11-12, 2005 in Ontario, CA. I’ll probably be taking some pictures and maybe posting some articles to the site while I’m there. Or, maybe I’ll just spend all my time in the bar. Who knows.

Thanks again for listening and staying subscribed, even after this recent technical flub!
–Scott

We all wondered when this would happen - when would Apple Computer, Inc. go completey meglo-nutjob-trademark-crazy and assert that they owned the name “POD”?

Use “POD” in your trademark, get sued. Has Apple gone too far? by ZDNet’s David Berlind — Has Apple gone too far? Even if the product you make doesn’t look, smell, feel, or do anything remotely close to what an iPod does, and even if consumers can’t buy it on the shelves in a store, that apparently doesn’t mean Apple won’t release its legal dogs on you if […]

“POD” is Latin for “FOOT” after all.  Does that mean that FootLocker can sue the National Football League for using the word “foot” in their name?  This is just crap.
When Apple’s legal team moves on from ‘devices’ to ‘concepts,’ will names like Podcheck, Podshow, and PodSquad be next? There are lots of other Trademarks that include the word Podcast, so how about Paul Fowlie, the guy that claims the trademark on the word “PODCAST.” I couldn’t find anything on Mr. Fowlie, so I hope he doesn’t turn out to be an ass-clown.
It’s clear that the USPTO is overworked, overwhelmed, with a profound lack of understanding of how spontaneously-gereated markets that create their own common terminology.