In 1999's
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story Michael Lewis writes about serial entreprenuer Jim Clark's quest to help define, create, and launch the next, gigantic technological breakthrough. Clark did just that with Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon.
Seven years later, with high tech off life support and rising like a phoenix, Clark has been replaced with newer, younger entrepreneurs - Yahoo!'s David Filo and Jerry Yang, eBay's Pierre Omidyar, Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and YouTube's Chad Hurley and Steven Chen.
Given the latter's recent $1.65B sale to Brin and Page's Google, all eyes and venture capital dollar have been examining the online media space for the next 'new new thing.' And former Kazaa and Skype founders
Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom have released a sneak peek beta of their unparalleled internet TV service - The Venice Project (TVP).
TVP's recently launched beta is slick in user experience, content, and video quality. THR found the installation incredibly intuitive and the ability to access a range of commerical, recognizable programs, quite easy and fast. TVP's User Interface (UI) team seems to have borrowed heavily from Apple's OSX widgets, enabling personalization of the TVP UI with a clock, comment board, and rankings amongst other goodies.
THR has only tested TVP on a Windows XP machine and looks forward to the experience on Mac OSX. But after a brief test drive, I'm convinced TVP is THE next killer app in the crowded, red-hot online media / internet TV market.
