Creating a Niche

I ran into a couple of interesting things today that I figure I could combine into a good topic: creating a niche. Something I never really gave much thought to until today is that the big bucks out there really come out of making a niche. It makes sense in a lot of ways since the rule of thumb is that the more specialized the field you study is the more money your liable to make since you're probably in short supply. A direct example of this is David Elsewhere, who is actually the guy from some of the iPod ads and that cool Pepsi commercial with the dancing jeans and some others. His niche is crazy dancing, like he's made of rubber. No one can do what he does, otherwise they wouldn't superimpose people's faces on his body for some of these ads. If you don't possess a natural talent like that, then you can try creating something totally different like these three Berkeley grads who have come up with a high quality video compression technology for high-end e-Commerce clients. As far as video quality goes, there's no one above YouTube that has really picked up. I really like Stage6, but it hasn't really gone anywhere, and I think DivX has gotten a lot of bad press. These guys have the opportunity to become the YouTube of car companies and medium-sized businesses and the like. I know, it's not user-generated content, but its a video platform that doesn't really exist right now. It may not sound like much, but it has Steve Wozniak and Red McCombs backing it, which is pretty big. Moral of the story: find a niche, and build your business on it.

Ars Technica put out one of their great product reviews, this one for the new iMac, and it sounds like what I thought. It's an improvement, but the keyboard doesn't feel right. Why did they make it so low and flat? Anyway, still a solid machine, and I guess the glare isn't as obtrusive as one would presume.

New ground has been broken against the RIAA: an Oklahoma attorney brought in testimony from a computer security expert claiming that the RIAA cannot use IP addresses to identify litigants because IP addresses just aren't unique. They can be masked, shared, etc. I can't believe that no one used this argument before. Anyway, I can't imagine the RIAA winning this battle, so it should be interesting.

Is the iPhone set to get games? The Download Squad has snooped around iTunes's localization strings (I'm guessing these are some internal configuration settings used by iTunes in other countries) and found some strings that appear to confirmation messages for whether you want to remove a selected game from your iPhone. It could just be garbage, but doubtful. They already have games on iPods, after all, so this would make a lot of sense.

Beware of sites bearing pricey gifts and promises of robust file-sharing. uTorrent is prepared to file suit against one such fraudulent site trying to sell uTorrent, a freeware application. That really boils me: to profit solely off of someone else's hard work, and so blatantly. This site looks really authentic, so definitely beware of these sorts of schemes.

I know it defies the theory of evolution, but ever wonder if computers preceded us? Because if so, then our creation was probably something like this.

I have a few movie items for today. First off is a trailer for Lars and the Real Girl, a dramedy from Craig Gillespie featuring Ryan Gosling about a guy named Lars who pretends that a mannequin is his girlfriend to fill the void. The trailer actually looks really cute, I think this has the makings of a really interesting character study.

Speaking of characters, someone who saw Heath Ledger on the set of The Dark Knight had only good things to say about his portrayal of The Joker. I don't think he saw any dialogue, just his demeanor, and it sounded very true to the original villain. If I keep getting pumped about this movie, I may explode before we even get a real trailer.

Usually, I say that direct to video (DTV) movies aren't very good, but a part of me wonders if Return to House on Haunted Hill is the first movie to get it right because it takes advantage of being at home. How? It lets you choose your own path through the movie (I'm pretty sure this is only for high-definition formats), almost like a video game I suppose or those books when you were little that would have you turn to different pages depending on the path you chose. The trailer is pretty creepy, so I'm definitely not prepared to write this one off.

Lastly, I'm not a big Hitman fan or anything (though I think its story is one of those that is easily lent to a movie, unlike Halo), but I like the looks of this teaser poster:


Now for the Thursday Threesome:

Onesome: Swimming-- along? Do you swim? Can you swim? Do you like to swim? Do you have a place to swim? I'm drowning in questions here!
I can swim, but I don't often enough. At school, our gym has a cool Aquatic Complex, but I have never had the time to actually use it for exercise. I was sure glad I knew how to swim when I went rafting!

Twosome: Pool--? ...or billiards? Have you played either one? ...or would you like to learn?
Yeah, I have, but I'm not very good. I'm one of those people who makes key plays purely out of luck, not skill.

Threesome: Pump--ing iron: is that in your reps? ...or does the thought of that style of working out just do you in? Inquiring minds and all that...
I try to work out 6 days a week, but I'm a guy and so obviously muscle mass is probably of inflated importance to me. Hey, having a better physique sometimes correlates to bigger salaries because you're perceived as being more dedicated. I personally do it because I was overweight when I was younger and I feel obligated to keep myself in shape as a result.

I have a very special visitor coming tomorrow, and I'm dedicated my free time over the next several days to her, so don't expect a post from me for a week. Sorry to have to do this again after just coming back from my last hiatus, but stuff happens! I'm sure you'll all understand.