If you haven't seen the new Boxee bookmarking feature, check it out. Its a very simple, elegant feature. You see a video at work, it gets forwarded to you, whatever, you bookmark it and it appears on your queue at home (on your TV if you use the LINK with Boxee). I'm really struggling with how to add text to this blog post since the thing is so damn simple, but it just looks funny to have a two sentence blog post. Maybe I should have just tweeted this, but I'm curious about the trackback feature so I wanted to post it here.

Fernando sent the below message to the Neuros list, and its just another reason why an x86 (with a powerful CPU) continues to make sense for the LINK.  Until the world becomes more standards based, as a manufacturer, we'll continue to need to be flexible to keep our customers from having to deal with these headaches.  That means x86 and having enough space CPU cycles to be able to deal with some inefficiencies in the system.

The FCC is in the process of developing a National Broadband Plan Please check out the site and make your voice heard. Here are some of my thoughts off the bat:

1. I would give a kidney to testify at the upcoming field event the FCC is having on the new National Broadband Plan. Our business is in making innovative, open set-top boxes. We are arguably the only open set-top box maker in the US. If my testimony is not of interest to them given their consideration home gateways and open set-top boxes, well, then its something of a farce. I'll be there on Monday if any of you know anyone involved with this, please pass them along to me.

2. The open gateway they talk about is really a no brainer to me. There is a direct parallel to the 1968 Carterfone decision which allowed the direct connection of 3rd party devices to the AT&T network. It looks comical in retrospect to think it was ever controversial, because it gave rise to fax machines, and most importantly modems, leading in a pretty obvious way to the modern consumer adoption of the Internet. It's very clear to me that something very similar can happen with net connected TVs (but only if its done in an open way that allows the next wave of small innovators to participate).

3. CableCard is a farce and probably unfixable. No small company (or innovator of any kind) can get approved for cablecard, and even if they could, the devices are hamstrung and made needlessly handicapped by the MSOs who won't allow pay per view and other "special content" to be available. The goal of protecting content is probably best served by a compromise like a individual watermark rather than DRM.

Neuros has long spoken about digital rights and their important roll in innovation. They are rights that have long been under siege from big media. Google, however, has long been a company that we, as Internet users, have invested a great deal of trust in. It's very disappointing, and even more scary to me, to see them, through YouTube, come down on the side of a more proprietary, restricted Internet. Recently they started excluding certain device manufacturers from displaying videos add this to the recent move to give partners more ways to block viewing. These actions are almost certain to stymie innovation and freedom of communication in variety of ways. We can imagine many of those ways, but the saddest of all are the ways we can't imagine which will never be realized because they were blocked from ever seeing the light of day.

Open standards are a practical necessity for innovation. If Google, or anyone else, is picking the winners and losers up front, we can be certain that precious clever ideas will be lost before they ever get a chance to grow, morph and become the next big thing. No one should know this better than the folks at Google and YouTube who once took some of the most unlikely ideas and made them central to our lives. Imagine if Microsoft, IBM or any other entity had been able to act as gatekeeper at the inception of Google and YouTube. I think just about anyone can imagine those services would never have gotten to market. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with Google profiting from YouTube, and we welcome their experimentation in a variety of means to do that, but they need to do so in an open, non discriminatory way that allows small and big entities alike to experiment and innovate.

It goes without saying that I want to see our own Neuros products get a chance at the market, but as an interested citizen I also want to see Boxee, Miro, Moovida and a host of other innovative services, applications and devices make it to market. I want to see a world where we go from being passive consumers of content to active participants in adding our voices to the news of the day. Google needs to quickly decide if they are to be a force that helps accelerate that or impedes it.

For those not familiar with the Neuros LINK, I wanted to post a quick sketch, which is basically a snapshot of what the software looks like. I did this a couple months ago and revised it slightly for the v1.1 of the LINK. Like most everything LINK, its rapidly evolving, but I think it gives some guidance to where we are today if you're considering jumping aboard.

Getting slashdotted in the midst of a backorder situation is not exactly the ideal way to get out of the backorder as you might expect.

We are working hard to ramp up our production to get ourselves out of this backorder, so please bear with us, orders will be shipped in the order in which they are received and, of course, credit cards won't be charged until the order ships (and you can cancel at any time. Its expected that orders received today will ship in 4 weeks.

Thanks to all for your support and we're very sorry for the inconvenience. I'm loath to post it since I'm sure they will sell out immediately and leave more folks annoyed, but We do have a very small supply of refurbished links available

For those interested, here's the slashdot discussion that deepend the backorder situation

Released almost seven months ago, the Neuros LINK has continued its evolution to bring the comprehensiveness of the Internet's video to a consumer electronics like form (meaning it operates easily with a remote control, etc).  The Release of v1.3 of the LINK's software, codenamed "Hancock" marks an important milestone in that evolution.

Hancock is important because its the most comprehensive Internet video navigation available with a remote control.  We finally got to a point where the amount of content you could navigate with a remote was sufficient that we felt comfortable promoting that as the initial boot interface.  Of course, no content has been removed, everything the LINK was ever able to access is still there.  The only difference is that the device now starts up with a beautiful new front end that suits a piece of "electronics" rather than a PC.  Naturally, there are still plenty of times that a free form mouse interface is handy, so the remote is RF and has a trackball.   Most users will still have a need for a keyboard at least occasionally, but what the new interface does is allow the device to be usable by many more people in many more casual situations.  Basically, the remote gives you access to a pretty rich set of content and features, and the keyboard gives you even more including the ability to configure the box to your heart's content.

Hancock is largely the product of the mass of 3rd parties working on this, The front end is XBMC with a modified Mediastream skin. In future releases, you'll see Boxee and Miro pre-installed (they both work well with the box today).

The LINK has quietly generated more hacks and experimentation than any product in Neuros history. Thankfully, I have managed to do an equally historic job in dropping the ball on promoting these hacks. This strategic ineptitude on my part has saved these noble (but private) hackers the undesirable attention that they otherwise would have gotten, had I been more attentive, they might now be suffering from the blinding glare of the FOSS spotlight.

Regrettably, we can no longer hold back the floodgates of the free software paparazzi. They have uncovered the hack the duck mugs silently perched on the desks of the otherwise anonymous heroes fighting for the freedom of your television set.

Ok, I've beat this joke to death. Bottom line is that I created a wiki Gamma LINK Hacker User Manual that begins to attempt to catalog the results of the hacks that are spread out among the forums, mailing lists, etc into one place that the bring the next Greyback or ChadV up to speed, without having to dig through the entire history on the forums. Really it's for anyone that wants to go a bit deeper in using the LINK, and obviously the device is still evolving too rapidly to put this in a printed manual anyway.

Please make sure your favorite hacks, tips and tricks are there, and remember DON'T PANIC!

User contributions have been enabled on Neuros.TV. This means that you can help us make the dbase more comprehensive by adding your own sources. While the process isn't fully automated, it does draw from the database to help you populate entries. So please try it out and give us your comments.

As I don't have to tell our readers, user contributions have a strong history of creating big comprehensive databases of content. Just look at gracenote and freedb with millions of entries for songs. The challenge of cataloging tv shows is nowhere near as great, so we hope that with a bit of user contributions, we can build a database that is not only comprehensive but international as well (although the first focus, as you'll see is US shows).

Hopefully using the system will be pretty self-explanatory: Search for a show and you'll see the "Contribute" link at the top of the page. Some of the fields will be automatically populated. Basically you have to pick the show and season, and input the URL. The "channel" field is basically the website. Sometimes it will be automatically populated and other times you'll just have to enter a name for the website.

As always, it's evolving, so we're eager to get feedback.

This Thursday Night (US Time) We are resuming our beloved "Breakfast with the Chairman" series of fireside IRC chats. It's breakfast because it's Friday morning in Xiamen China where Gao was. Now, that was probably confusing to many when Gao was actually hosting the meeting, now that it's being hosted by westerners, it's just plain impossible to understand. But I just can't resist posting that picture of the chicken feet, and I'd have no excuse whatsoever if we lost the "Chinese Breakfast" theme

In any case, it's Thursday, Mar 5th @ 6pm CST , or UTC Mar 6 @ 00:00 Click Here to find your local time.

During this weekly meeting, the Nero, Crweb and MattJ will patiently answer your questions about hacking the Neuros LINK, no matter how stupid, ignorant or inane they may be. It's been a while since we've had one of these meetings, and it's also special because I've invited some actual product users from the gasp outside world through a heavily promoted campaign (I posted on the forums) to discuss the LINK from the perspective of someone actually connecting it to a television set and trying to watch videos on it; Now these folks may not know the Kernel of Linux from the Colonel Sanders, but they have cold hard cash we're trying to pry out of their fingers to buy the LINK and/or to tell their friends to do the same

Agenda:
1. Talk about priorities of users, issues they are having and importance of various bugs and enhancements
2. Talk about what we'd like to see hackers doing and experimenting with on the system
3. Talk about big decisions on the horizon, what we're researching for various components, media players, etc.


#neuros regulars: This money mentioned above will allow us to finance the "bounties" for these ingenious "hacks" I've been hearing so much about.  I will try to portray you as these brilliant, skilled hackers, please don't blow it and look like  psychopathic  nincompoops (at least until we get their money)