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About Ambleside

Ambleside Logic is led by Aaron Rosenbaum. Father of 3, Programming since 7, DevOps since 11 (hacking RSTS), exIngres, exCTP, exCohera. Sold two companies to Oracle, one to HP. Research + Strategy for NoSQL/BigData ecosystem implementors, vendors and investors.

Friday
Apr242009

An interesting path to SAAS

I've spent a lot of my life taking care of computers...it's a thankless job.  Some who know me may remember my time @ Corio.  I was there and left before anything really worked - but I loved the concept...However, it was really hard.  At Ambleside, we an active customer of SAAS apps - multiple services from Quickbooks, Autotask, Google Docs - even some of D-Tools is basically SAAS.

I don't like our wiki though - basecamp never worked for us and the other stuff from them is a little too basic, google pages is also a little limiting...One of our customers companies uses JIRA for there issue tracker and I really like how it works and looks.  So, when Atlassian offered JIRA and Confluence licenses recently for $5 (!), I jumped at it - even though we don't have a decent server.

Atlassian put together an installer to put the whole thing onto Amazon EC2!  It took about 20 minutes but now I have a world-class production back-end, scalable, with a truly fantastic enterprise tool.  It's even running a Postgres back-end (thanks Wei!)  

Amazon charges around $80/month but that drops to $15/mo w/ a 3-year committment...The charges are by the hour so while I'm playing, I just suspend when not using it.

This is so cool on so many levels.....

 

Friday
Apr102009

DCI + High-end Projectors

A quick point of view for the relatively knowledgeable....The Xenon based Digital Cinema Initiative projectors (minus the servers) are interesting to me because I believe the high-end resi market is very small and doesn't have enough real demand for the sort of projector I'd like my customers to have. In the near-term, the large volume of digital cinema conversions represents the sort of backbone the market needs and is much more likely to support high-end home presentation than the sort of projector a big conference rental provider needs or even a large performance venue...Movies are movies...

  • High-end home theater market is very small - ~1000/units/yr worldwide
  • Replacing 35mm projectors with digital is larger - ~10000/units/yr
  • Putting DCI units in homes will be painful - noisy + hot.
  • All high-end residential vendors are vulnerable to market failure - even if recovery is now or imminent, they have 4-6 month revenue short-fall (and it's doesn't look right around the corner.)
  • Christie is leader in deployments (and is the leading incumbent provider of 35mm)
  • Christie is leader in supply of light engines to high-end home theater (Runco, Wolf, Digital Projection) and is likely to continue 
  • Sony will likely be second to Christie in Digitial Cinema (AMC deal alone is 5K projectors)
  • This puts JVC + NEC in sketchy position...Barco has a solid commercial business and some nice deals and isn't out of the running.
  • All providers in the residential space are weak right now, so access/support to underlying tech provider is key to risk mitigation
  • Wolf still looks the best and I think has a viable business plan (if they can conclude a service deal with Christie).

Thursday
Mar262009

Your 2010 whole house audio system is already obsolete

Want to know if your system will be upgradeable in 10 years? Take a look at what the vendors your thinking of have done with the products they sold 10 years earlier.  I believe that practically the whole of the residential electronics industry is ill-prepared for life-cycle technology support and the only providers are those who service enterprise, military and higher-education really have the proper demands placed upon them.

On the left is Niles Audio latest keypad, on the right is their offering from 10 years ago.  The old keypad is not supported on their new audio system.  The new keypad is not supported on their old system.  Could one possibly come up with a way to control an iPod and Pandora using their old keypad? Possibly, but it's not easy.  And it can't be - Niles Audio, like Bose, Russound, Nuvo, Sonance and others - builds specific purpose audio systems that assume very specific uses and aren't designed to be expanded or revised.  Because of that they are cheaper to develop and install but often are boat anchors as sources or needs change.

 

On the left is a Crestron panel from 10 years ago, on the right, their newest - the TPS-6X.  We can add Pandora, iPod, Sat Radio or ANY other source to the system on the left.  We can also add on the latest TPS-6X to that same system without throwing out ANYTHING.

 

Ambleside is working on overhauling an old system right now.  It's a mess. The home wasn't lived in for a while, some components failed and others became out of date.  Several botched repair jobs later and now the system is unusable.  This audio system was built with Crestron keypads + touchpanels which communicate to Crestron Control system.  The control system in turn operates the sources, audio switcher and amplifiers.

Because it was built from flexible components sold by a firm that supports it's products, the system is now being upgraded to support iPod + Satellite radio.  The broken hardware is being replaced but the entire refresh project has a budget of approximately 15% of the replacement cost of such a system....15% after 11 years is very, very inexpensive in the technology world.  

This home's keypads, controllers, power supplies and other control system materials were discontinued long ago. But they are still supported - both on the phone and in the technology.  We took keypads created before MP3 existing and have them controlling an iPod.  One cannot do this with the technology sold by Russound, Niles, or any other audio system vendor using the components they sold in 2000.  

Even today, almost all the vendors continue to obsolete their products.  A friend asked me if he could run Rhapsody on his Control4 system.  I looked into it and discovered that their original hardware - shipped less than 24 months ago - cannot run Rhapsody.  Meanwhile, I can take 80% of the hardware of an 11 year old Crestron system and bring it up to current standards.

The resources necessary to deliver a COMPLETE product including continuous software upgrades, support, full lifecycle integration and correct coding is rare.  For the majority of the electronic industry, the cost of replacement parts are cheaper than upgrading an old system.  However, when it comes to a multi-room system, the costs of not having a flexible infastructure is demolishing to a home owner's budget.  How bad is the damage?  The inability for most systems to stay up to date results in a pathetic lifespan of approximately five years.  This is not nearly enough time for an owner to thoroughly enjoy, let alone discover all of the wonderful applications their system can do.  

If Sonos survives as a company, they might be an exception but other than them, no one in the AV industry is prepared for future media sources.  Rhapsody, Pandora, last.fm, etc. will force the industry to create new keypads AND back-end systems...just like they have had to do with iPod + Sat Radio.  

Crestron Electronics is a rare company in the consumer electronics industry.  Like HP, IBM, Cisco, Avaya and many other enterprise technology companies, they put clients interests first, building systems for the future.  Does anyone else in the industry equal them?  Would you want to own a 10 year old AMX system?  Not sure....

Tuesday
Mar032009

Kaleidescape Mini - A nice new option, still no downloads

 

I'm excited and a little sad about Kaleidescapes new server.  OTOH, Kaleidescape makes the most wonderful movie server player around.  Having a library of DVD's accessible throughout a home is just incredible for most of my customers.  I don't have any customers that dislike the Kaleidescape - for most it's their favorite product.

Before the mini, the minimum configuration of the Kaleidescape was around $14,000. Now for $7,995 you can get 3 zone server (1 video, 2 audio) with a player/reader.  It's only expandable to 1.5TB of storage - that's it's main limitation.  Enough for a fairly decent music collecton and a set of recent movies but not a huge movie library.  

What excites me is that this puts Kaleidescape as an option for many, many systems.  Kaleidescape can now fit, fairly easily, into the $50K-$75K system where before it took a vast % of the budget.

What makes me a little sad is the continuing lack of online content or content importing.  We have customers who like to purchase via iTunes (you can do it, but it's a pain) or shoot movies in HD (can't do it) or rent HD movies online (can't do it).  

Thursday
Nov132008

Surround Processors - what a mess!

Most of the high-end is on the sidelines, a few are treading water and meanwhile the leadership of the market is being held by Denon of all brands!

Are we undergoing a paradigm shift from hardware to software? Or a blip in the market caused by cautious approach to HDMI audio formats?

Here is where we stand in mid November:

- All major Japanese mfrs have $1K (and up) processors that deal with 1080P video and High bit-rate (HBR) 8 channel audio over hdmi.

- Some products from B&W group (Rotel, Classe) support it.

- No Harman Group components (Harman Kardon, JBL, Lexicon) support HBR audio in 8 channel.

- The leading performance pre-pro is the Denon AVP-A1HDC1

- Merdian, Theta and others have announced but not shipped supporting products for HDMI HBR audio.

In understanding the potential shift, one has to recognize whether this is a high-tech market or a luxury branded goods market?  I would postulate it's a high-tech software market and the luxury goods vendors are left flat-footed.

The software demands are intense - frequent updates and infrastructure for support are necessary.  The logic boards are intensly complicated.  The age of a "hand crafted" audio processors may go the same way as a "hand crafted" microprocessor (anyone else worked on a PDP-8 with core memory?)

Silicon Graphics used to own the graphics computing space.  Pixar switched to Intel in 2003, others switched to Sun.  Now it's 100% Intel.

On the other hand, the leaders in performance sports cars haven't changed.  Even as race car technology took a giant left-turn from the road technology, the leaders in consumer sports cars have been remarkeably stable (i.e. we don't have Sauber or Williams car dealers).  

As a business person, I had a hard time imaging supporting the development of a world-killer $20K processor on the sales volumes these companies must have.  It just seems like too small a market with too intense R&D requirements.  Like speaker drivers, there must be an OEM market to supply them.  There may already be such a set of providers - I know Bryston supplies their boards to others.

My analysis?  The dealers of most of the high-end aren't prepared to deal with the software support and integration costs.  The high-end integrators (as opposed to stereo dealers) would like a stable control protocol across their product lines. For some, the answer is Integra (Onkyo) - a full product line with low and mid-level solutions.  We've always split - Lexicon for nicer systems, Denon or Yamaha for mid and low-end.