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TiVo Buys Super Secret Strangeberry
Raindeer writes "According to SEC-filings Tivo has bought a start up of Marimba-founder and Java-designer Arthur van Hoff. The name of the startup is Strangeberry Just because of their job-titles they must be building something cool Chief Hackberry, Chief Wiseberry, Chief Smartberry. The SEC-Filings show that it has something to do with delivering broadbandservices to televission. A Dutch web-log claims to have a picture of what they are building. Anybody got anymore ideas on what this could be?"
Kastjes onder de radar
In een voormalige winkel in Palo Alto zit een start up waarvan de oprichters op een lauwe dinsdagmiddag naar Fry's Electronics zijn gereden om componenten te kopen waaruit ze deze vreemde kastjes hebben gebouwd. Ik denk dat binnen twee jaar iedereen met een DSL- of kabelaansluiting zo'n kastje in huis heeft. Meer mag ik er van de oprichters niet over zeggen, want die hebben de illusie dat ik er veel van snap en dus veel kan verklappen, een tragisch misverstand. Ze zijn heel bedreven in het 'onder de radar' blijven, maar intussen lopen bedrijven als Apple en Google de deur bij ze plat. Ik zie Philips of Shell niet zo snel audientie vragen bij een paar nerds uit Delft. Helaas.
English translation
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Boxes below radar
In a former shop in Palo Alto there's a startup whose founders rode to Fry's Electronics on a tuesday afternoon to buy some components to build these weird cases. I think that within two years, everyone with DSL or Cable will have one in their home. I can't say more from the founders, because they think I understand it (a grave misunderstanding) and can this tell you guys about it. They are very skilled in staying 'below radar' but in the meantime, companies such as Apple and Google are knocking at their door. I can't see Philips or Shell asking for an audience with two nerds from Delft. Pity.
look at archive.org (way back machine) at what they used to be before becoming vaporware :) click here
sorry officer, left my sig in my other computer.
One of the boxes at the front is a Linksys
Media Adapter (on the right), allows you to pull your
mp3 collection over WiFi to your sterio/TV.
I bought one last week.
I'd say that's a good guess; sortof a TV pass-through so it can send the TV stuff to the computer and display the computer stuff on the TV. Maybe throw in a modem or a server and make it run linux (check their job adverts on the wayback machine).
Sure they might make a rad little machine, but with TIVO and what you can do with a MythTV and a mini-itx or shuttle/MSI mini-computer it has to be pretty damn good to be worth of a "killer app" title. I doubt there is anything brilliant behind it, call me a skeptic if you will.
One thing we can all be assured of though, is that the guys working there THINK they have a killer app. But IMO the sliced bread of the digital world isn't going to come from the one-thousand-and-one companies promising it... because they can't deliver "seamless" technology until open standards arrive - too many third party apps fighting each other will never be seamless. So you either go for a single vendor solution (apple, luxury stereo etc.) which is expensive and slow to delevop in some areas (TV tuners on apples for example) or you go for open standards which are only profitable to a certain extent.
Wifi antenna in the flowers anyone? Another flash in the pan. I want less news for "nerds" (whatever that is) and more of the stuff that matters people. Issues, real hardcore issues. Like a couple of people have said, we are past hyping companies that don't have a product to show us and are looking for VCs - we want the hard hitting stuff.
thats much spare change anyway....
Jobs
Join a world class team. Build potent software. Strangeberry Inc. is looking for smart, independent people who thrive at startups. Here are some of our openings:
GRAPHIC / USER INTERFACE DESIGNER
Graphic designer with experience building interface for consumer digital media applications. Must be creative and a good communicator. Qualified candidates have 3-4 years experience with interactive design and typographic skills. Knowledge of Photoshop and Illustrator required. DVD / Game UI experience a plus.
APPLICATION ENGINEER
Developer with experience creating user interfaces. Must be comfortable with C/C++, Java, Windows and Unix. No VB, please. Qualified candidates have 4-5 years experience building applications.
KERNEL ENGINEER
Linux kernel developer with experience writing device drivers under x86. Qualified candidates have 2-3 years experience working on the kernel. Knowledge of framebuffer internals a plus. Codec experience smiled upon.
First, the image is much larger than in the page.
Anyway... here's my thoughts.
The far left has RCA, SVIDEO, and Ethnernet. Maybe some way to output data over a network to RCA-based stereo systems, something like a PRISMIQ.
The middle device looks to be the same, except it has DV and optical in addition to RCA and SVIDEO. It could be another PRISMIQ-esque device, or it could also be something designed to go the other way too.
We can't see the back of the last unit, but I'm gonna guess it's something w/ wireless similar to the first two.
...and that's all there is to it.
Apple's Safari browser was one of the first to make use of the Rendezvous technology and, from what I gather, the most interesting thing it does is to enable local servers transparently (e.g. you can bookmark them, and you can make any computer around serve files). Open source browser Camino is also taking this route.
Tivo has expressed what Rendevous has to do with their plans:
This is just a collection of web-based info gotten through google. I may be seeing it all wrong, but the picture seems to make some sense to me. They are acquiring a company that brings something which Tivo intends to be a core offering of their system.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
DVR vendor/service provider, TiVo, generated a fair amount of news at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas:
http://milkshake.dexy.org
LINK: http://www.frackers.com/2004/01/24/000098.html
Translation Dutch->English
Tivo buys Strangeberry
Extreme-techie Arthur van Hoff scores again after his stock-exchange launch of Marimba:
He and his four collegues sold their top secret start-up Strangeberry, housed in a small shop in Palo Alto to Tivo.
The transaction took place on the 12. of January
but TIVO only disclosed that yesterday.
Founded in April 2002, Strangeberry still was "pre-revenue", as companies who are still developping their technologies are called.
The gentlemen are working on an application of the technology best described with this posting.(posting points to a story of Haupage showing on CES a box to play multimedia on a TV from your local ethernet/internet)
Van Hoff and Jonathan Payne already worked together for SUN and Marimba. They work well together.
It was difficult not to tell anything about Strangeberry to their friends.
Van Hoff is, justly, the pride of the Technical IT college in Enschede and the university of Strathclyde.
It, however, is a pity he'll make his accomplischments in Silicon Valley and the Netherlands won't benefit from his knowledge and skills.
After Marimba went public [(got listen on the stock exchange)], Dutch ubertechnician Arthur van Hoff (center) scores again: he and his four collegues sold their ultra-secret start-up strangeberry, located in a small shop in Palo Alto, to Tivo. The transaction took place on the 12th of januari but Tivo only went public with the news yesterday.
Founded in 2002, Straneberry was still pre-revenue, as they like to call companies who are still developing their technology. The gentlemen are working on a product related to the field of the posting below. After working together at Sun and Marimba, a bond had grown between the two which created a great atmosphere between them. Though occasionally it was hard to not tell friends everything about the activities of Strangeberry. The HIQ in Enschede and the university of Strathclyde are rightfully proud of van Hoff. It's a shame he makes his accomplishments in Silicon Valley, though, and can't pass on his experience in the Netherlands.
The picture on the page is much larger than you actually see on the page. Just insert the picture url into your browser for a much larger view (http://apollo.lunarpages.com/~fracke2/DCP_1976.JP G)
Marimba is an platform indepedant software deployment and management tool.
Think of it this way: Novell have a product called ZenWorks, which sits on top of Novell Directory. Now say Mr I.T. Guy wants to deploy Napster to his 3,000 users. He could go to each of their machines and install it (sure!), he could edit the global shared login script to deploy it (messy, I'll explain in a bit) or he can use a software deployment tool.
Lets go back the the batch script thing. Great idea, but what if someone logs in again a few minutes later - they try to get the software pushed across to them again. Or what if he only wants to deploy it to people within a certain department - or people who have existing software dependancies, or etc...
Novell's ZenWorks allows you to create a "deployment package", which is essentially a wrapper around MSI to call all sorts of clever silent switches so the user gets a seamless experience. The package then has deployment rules, which can be based on LDAP (so organisational structure), dependancies, time of day, etc.. etc.. it also has licensing reporting capabilities built in so you can tell how many licenses of every single software package you can have installed. In truth, its got hundreds of features that you or I may go "who the fsck cares"...
Marimba is pretty much the same thing - although its "open", yeah whatever that means! It also allows application deployment and management across server architectures as well as desktop deployment.
So, no bullshit I'm affraid. These sorts of tools are very useful to either large and/or decentralised IT departments. Other players in this space include:
* Tarantella
* Microsoft SMS (now outdated)
* Microsoft Active Directory Roll-out
* WinInstall
I think Tivoli from IBM may also do some of this as well.
There you go. Whore the Karma!
StrangeBerry is involved in a lot of networking projects, including UPnP and Java Port of ZeroConf.
Obviously this is going to allow for some level of interaction between your TiVo and equipment on your LAN, be it your router, your PC and/or your Mac. This could lead to an interface betweeen your TiVo and iTunes using Java. Maybe it is about pulling down content over broadband to your TiVo, though DRM concerns immediately come to mind. Maybe it is both.
Only time will tell.
At that time, it was a system that allowed you to connect multiple media sources to a television set for, you guessed it, on-demand media. They were using Rendezvous to implement auto-discovery of media services on a network without having to use traditional IP, which might have to be configured.
The idea, it seemed, was that you would have a home network, plug in your Strangeberry box, and it would discover images, audio and video living on specialized servers (Rendezvous services) running on your other networked hardware. Technically, it could also connect to video feeds over the Internet. Plugging the box into your television would present a UI on the screen that would allow you to select what you wanted to see/hear using a remote. The UI was written in a proprietary language that was supposedly very extensible, so that it would be easy to re-brand the device or to make it more purpose-specific if some big company wanted to buy it.
At the time, I thought it was all a bit too ambitious. The real value of such a system (IMHO) lies in the media, not in the technology that delivers it.
That said, the possibilities for TiVo are very interesting. Their angle might be use the technology to have a single (or multiple) DVR serving up media to multiple TVs using a (potentially wireless) home network that requires no configuration. That would be sweet.
Hi, I make the Dutch blog mentioned in the article. Just to get the story straight: the boxes in the picture on my site are similar to the ones that were featured in this week's PC World. See http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,114355,0 0.asp There's nothing secret about those devices: they connect your tv to your home network. As I understand, they were seen all over this year's CES.
The official Tivo statement says 'Strangeberry has created technology (...) designed to enable the development of new broadband-based content delivery services.' And as you can judge by the resumes of the Strangeberry guys (http://www.strangeberry.com/about), they are software specialists, not hardware guys. And just to be clear (as I am getting a lot of e-mail since your posting on Slashdot linking to my blog): I am not associated with Strangeberry in any way. I am just a friend of Arthur's, as I wrote on my English blog about this: http://mf.typepad.com/on_the_road/2004/01/chief_sm artberr.html