San Disk is announcing this week that they’ve actually talked record execs into selling high-quality, DRM free music on 1Gb microSD cards.  Can you believe it?  This is amazing to me on a number of levels, not the least of which is the fact that flash media is so cheap that it has become a suitable media for delivering music to customers.

But DRM-free and already on a microSD card?  Could this finally be the recording industry coming to grips with reality?  Naw, gotta be a misprint. . .

Google has revealed it’s latest offering in its information indexing services, Google Gaudi.  Gaudi’s purpose is to utilize voice recognition software and search for words and phrases inside of Google Video and YouTube videos just like Google ordinarily would search HTML text.

This is actually a smaller piece of a larger technology, as anyone who has ever released a video with copyrighted music in it probably knows by now.  YouTube (owned, remember, by Google) scans it’s video library with audio recognition software to find audio that indicates the video might be in violation of copyright law and alerts copyright holders of the issue.  I know this because back when I was still doing video blogs (which I miss), I did a blog that was partially in tribute to James Brown shortly after his death.  I was informed last week that my video, which included a few clips of James, was potentially in violation of copyright.  Happily, the copyright holder had no interest in persuing the removal of my content.

So, those of us interested in SEO (Search Engine Optimization, basically making your webpage as friendly to search engines as possible) have been hearing rumors forever that Google would eventually be developing sound and video search capabilities.  It appears we are seeing the dawn of that new era of search capability.  It wil be interesting going forward to see what this new technologies bring to light, from advanced new uses and benefits for end users to brand new “Black Hat” attacks.

Kodak’s technology blog, A Thousand Nerds, has an interesting post about the changing nature of consumer entertainment demand and how that will affect the way content gets delivered to its audience. It may be that we finally bridge the Television / PC divide by eliminating both from the equation:

A Thousand Nerds: A Kodak blog about innovation

What does this all mean? The TV and Internet as we know it are about to undergo massive change. TV will be replaced by connected displays able to deliver a full range of multimedia output. Sitting in front of the computer clicking away will also be replaced by new ways of interacting with these connected displays as the interaction transforms from passive consumption to two-way interaction. You can also expect more changes within the industry as companies consolidate, form new strategic partnerships, and realign offerings around multimedia.

Not that PCs will go away, or televisions either. But after decades of attempts to somehow merge the two (Windows Media Center, WebTV, etc), its seemed very clear that the two do not go together. The problem is largely one of furniture, however: people sit at desks to use their PCs and lounge on couches to watch TV, neither of which providing a comfortable environment to swap roles.
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