Classic FTW!
WWE Network is the future of TV
Yes! Yes! Yes! WWE announced its upcoming WWE Network last night and I think this is exactly the way to go for television content producers. The deal is that we get all present and historical WWE content, in HD quality, live and on demand, for only $10 per month. Damn! It’s like Spotify for wrestling fans (okay okay of course it has no TNA and indies but who cares). And that’s what TV should be.
Last summer we cancelled our television cable subscription and decided to only watch those shows we really really liked. And only on demand. This meant no more useless zapping around and wasting time watching crap and commercials. I got Hulu Plus to watch the big shows on-demand and also have a subscription to Fox Sports GO to watch the away matches of my football club. We use the Apple TV to stream this to the big screen TV. Also, most television channels in Holland have an app on which you can watch their shows on demand and sometimes even live, so why pay at all for this?
Back to the WWE Network. For the past two or three years WWE has been trying to start a ‘real’ television network, but that didn’t work out with the cable companies. Now they are bypassing the cable guys and creating their own direct platform. Great! That is exactly what the Internet is all about. Just do it yourself.
With a monthly price of $10 for everything WWE this is just a no-brainer for fans. And yes, WrestleMania is included. Just as with the Spotify deal, who is going to pirate anymore? There are only two problems with the network at this moment:
1. There is no channel on Apple TV available yet, but that should be a matter of time since we also have channels for the NBA, MLS and so on. For the mean time we can use the iPad app to stream it or use Playstation.
2. WWE Network only launches in US for now. But, just as with Hulu there will be ‘solutions’ for that.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Steve Jobs movie – finally watched it
After missing the Steve Jobs movie last summer in the theater run I finally watched it yesterday at home on BR with fellow Apple fan/evangelist @reddrummaster. In the past 15 years I read everything on Apple, Woz and Jobs so I already know all the great stories, but I still like to go through them one more time on screen. This expectation was clearly wrong and therefor the movie kinda sucked.
The story that they tell is extremely incomplete from begin to end. Not mentioning the stories of the blue box, the Xerox Parc visit and the naming of the Lisa is pretty meh, but skipping all his years at Pixar and NeXT?!? Ugh. And the movie finishes with the Steve Jobs return at Apple in 1997. The End.
So, I clearly prefer the 25 hour (!!) audio book of the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson over this Ashton Kutcher movie. The ’99 Pirates of Silicon Valley movie is also a very good pick, but of course this one also only shows you part of the story.
http://vimeo.com/75390564
Design Studio add-ons: Graphomate Charts 2.0
2014 is going to be a big year for SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio, especially since the recent 1.2 version of Design Studio offers an SDK to create custom components. I expect to see a lot of cool new add-ons in the coming year.
One of the first companies that created such an add-on is Graphomate from Germany. For SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards they already created the Visualization Add-on in the past, and now they made the same add-on available for Design Studio, called Graphomate Charts 2.0.
So what does this add-on offer? The Graphomate Charts lets you visualize data quickly according to the SUCCESS concept of Prof. Hichert. This SUCCESS concept is a set of rules for designing reports and presentations. More info can be found here and on Hichert.com.
The charts look very minimalistic and the emphasize is clearly on presenting differences and trends as clearly as possible. In fact, you can edit the looks of each element of a chart (color, filling, shape, width) independently. With the option to activate Deviation Axes you can add extra mini-charts above/besides the chart that display the deviation between two data series (percentage or absolute).
eBook Bonanza: Get SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook for only $5
Just like last year Packt Publishing is having an eBook Bonanza. The coming two weeks you can get any of their eBooks for only $5! So this is a good time to pick up the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook if you haven’t done that already!
Packt Publishing also has some other interesting (SAP) BI books in its catalogue:
- Data Visualization: a successful design process
- SAP HANA Starter
- SAP HANA Cookbook
- Software Development on the SAP HANA Platform
- SAP ABAP Advanced Cookbook
- Data Visualization with D3.js Cookbook
Packt eBooks are flexible and easy to use on any eBook reader or just on your Mac or PC:
- Download any version, any time, from your account on packtpub.com
- Available in PDF, ePub [Android, Kobo], Mobi [Kindle] – You can email it right onto your Kindle from your account.
- No DRM, meaning you can copy to any device, as often as you like
- You can print, and copy and paste from the eBook directly.
This offer is available until 3 January 2014.
De Nederlandse BI Podcast – Episode 7 XMAS edition
Ho ho ho, a special X-MAS edition of De Nederlandse BI Podcast today in which we look back at the 2013 BI tops and flops and look forward to 2014. Yes we are soooo original. Anyway, topics are SAP River, SAPUI5, OpenUI5, Webi 4.1, Lumira, KXEN, SAP InfiniteInsight, SAP Predictive Analysis and of course the usual Design Studio and HANA stuff!! Enjoy!
Check the show in iTunes, on our website or just use the Podcast player below.
