Greek Complexity

Awww, those poor Americans

Wired Blog reports that the FCC is worried about rising digital cable TV subscription rates.

"Over the last decade, average cable rates have more than doubled. And now cable companies are charging consumers more but consumers are receiving less," FCC spokeswoman Mary Diamond told the Associated Press, referring to the transition from analog to digital television services. "This is an unfortunate trend for families facing increasingly difficult economic times."

Is she out of her mind?! If you can't afford cable, you have an option: disconnect! Talk about priorities. The culture of consumption still hasn't caught up with reality, it looks like.

"What do you mean I can switch to watching PBS? What's 'PBS'? Oh, wait, is it that... noooooo!"

Full house?

What would the movie business look like today if movies had only been invented a few years ago? The answer to that seemingly frivolous question comes up when I can grab half an hour to bang out my next post.

Technorati Tags: movies, hollywood, internet, media, strategy

Joost!

Does anyone have a spare Joost invitation token they can give me pleeeease?

Technorati Tags: joost, tv, internet, media, internet tv

Social Networking 2.0

An article on AlwaysOn on LinkedIn's prospects makes some interesting points that I'm going to summarise and generalise to social networks in general:

• Niche-ification If I may coin a term, Social Networking 1.0 is now progressing to Social Networking 2.0. Broad-based networks such as LinkedIn and Friendster will gradually move towards providing functions for more niche community interactions. (LinkedIn already does this to an extent with its groups feature.) In a sense, this is merely the culmination of a trend of convergence. Groups features from Yahoo!, MSN and Google have long provided people the ability to pursue niche interests (anyone for "Self-Reference Paradoxes & Incompleteness in Logic & Computer Science"?). What could be more obvious than adding such functionality to social networking services?
  
• Revenue! Social networking sites making money? Glory be! What started off as mere hobbies or side businesses for some (YouTube, Flickr, Facebook...) actually make money today.
• Member services It seems LinkedIn is planning to provide member services that go beyond finding jobs or new employees. Great idea, IMO, and one that goes back to their roots in helping entrepreneurs and VCs connect. This ties in somewhat with niche-ification. Services = higher margins and niches ≈ services, arguably, so the trend towards niches should reinforce the growth of services.
• Aiming to be acquired No surprise here. Exit strategies are centred around being acquired. Makes sense. A social network may make money on its own but the big bucks are more likely to be in cross-promotions, up-selling and all those other evil, evil things marketing guys dream up. :) Which means living inside media houses (Newscorp/MySpace), telecom firms (Verizon/Good Call Bad Call) and perhaps even consumer goods companies (P&G/Tremor).

Technorati Tags: media, social networks, c2c, internet

Singapore's government 'gets' consumer power -- at first sight

Singapore's government launches a lot of websites. One of their latest is 10 TouchPoints. On November 27, one of Singapore's ministers introduced the concept as follows:

The creative cluster helps improve our quality of life.  To this end, we launched 10 TouchPoints, an initiative which encourages the general public to identify 10 everyday things to be redesigned with a more user-centric focus. It could be ideas to improve our bus shelters or our currency notes which we use everyday without paying much attention to it.  The response to this initiative has been very encouraging.  Within two weeks, we have already received over 70 nominations of what need to be redesigned.  Such ideas could lead to better appreciation of good design and enhance our public service and lifestyle.

(The site today has 124 nominations, one of which is mine. Go and vote!)

But what is this website? Some Singaporean bureaucrat has cleverly realised that the culture of participation and user-generated content that has quickly become a way of life for many consumers could be harnessed to good effect by the government to improve design in public services. (See the website for more information.)

What this initiative does is to not only get suggestions from the public (something the government already does via various media) but also allow people to vote. Voting is crucial, IMO, because this harnesses collective intelligence, which is the key strength of large groups of reasonably informed people thinking and acting independently. In the ideal scenario, you would get zillions of ideas, the 'best' of which would bubble up to the top (however you define 'best').

What remains to be seen now is whether this initiative really takes off and what comes of it in the end. I think that will depend to an extent on the the number of ideas they receive but, more importantly, on how actively people search for and vote for their favourite suggestions. I think it is a fair assumption given Singapore's reputation that the best suggestions will make it to implementation, so I don't think implementation is a concern. It seems to me that publicising the initiative and making it easy for people to vote should be the key areas to focus on.

I guess the last word on this subject --at least for now-- should go to someone called Chris (bottom of this page):

Fantastic concept of asking people's opinion for free R+D btw. Innovative

Technorati Tags: C2C, innovation, government, social networks, social software, internet, media, collective intelligence, singapore

Why MySpace’s legality matters

Are MySpace, YouTube and their cousins illegal? This article in the Financial Times shows why the law has not kept pace with technology and changing consumer behaviour. Any business that gives users the power to express themselves online with music, videos, pictures and the like is potentially breaking the law. And what's more, what of businesses that operate across borders?

Here’s a snippet from the FT article:

Since the dawn of time, technology has constantly outpaced the law – but never quite as fast as in the digital age. Some of the most profitable and popular places on the internet today – from MySpace, to YouTube and beyond – exist in legal limbo. Every day, MySpacers and YouTubers commit millions of arguably unlawful acts. But what about the websites that provide a venue for all this new-age lawlessness? That remains a remarkably open question.

[…]

Copyright owners should get some of the profits generated by MySpace and YouTube – but they would be foolish to try to shut them down entirely. The US Supreme Court made clear last year, in the landmark Grokster case, that it will stand for quite a lot of copytheft, rather than impede innovation. The music and film industries can try to strangle the new sites with litigation, but they will probably not win in the end. Now is the time to let the market fix this problem, before any more harm is done.

Can someone tell me what it means to let the market fix the problem?

And when it comes to companies operating in multiple markets, think about this scenario: Imagine a company that is built around user-generated content and based in Iceland. Say some of their users upload copyrighted or otherwise disputed content belonging to an American media firm. Let's say these users are based in France, and let's also say that the content is physically hosted in Ireland. (Let's not even begin talking about mash-ups.) Even if this company managed to extract itself from legal hassles in the US arising from the DMCA (pdf), it would still be left wide open to challenges elsewhere. What a nightmare! Have VCs thought about how to mitigate this?

Technorati Tags: C2C, internet, innovation, law, c2c, technology, business models, venture capital

Genomes, AI and music

[via Ventureblog] Came across a very interesting music service today called Pandora (cool name, that!) that aims to help people discover new music that they might like. This really turns me on. I'm a real discovery junkie and love trying out new things. Music is no exception.

Enough about me and let's read about Pandora.

Pandora is a streaming radio experience in which each radio station is created based upon your own choice of song or group. So perhaps you are driving to work and the song "Underdog Victorious" by Jill Sobule is running through your head. You can go to Pandora and plug in Jill Sobule or Underdog Victorious and it will play music for you that is most like that particular song or that particular artist.

And how it does that is:

Tim [Westergren, founder of Pandora] devised a way to categorize music (working with some Stanford music professors) that he called the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome is a set of about 400 characteristics that best describe the nature of a piece of music. As Tom Conrad, Savage Beast's CTO, describes it, the Music Genome captures standard things like tempo, key, etc. but also captures more subtle things like guitar picking style or "how much cowbell" (which, of course, you can never have enough of).

This is particularly interesting to me because quite fortuitously, I was talking to a researcher in developmental biology yesterday, and for the first time ever, someone explained to me in simple terms how genes work. Extending the genomic (genetic?) metaphor further, I am interested to know how Pandora works:

• Does it simply look for songs that match containing the maximum number of matching criteria as the song I specify? Because that's not how genes work. If I have a gene that is known to be tied to a particular genetic characteristic, there's no guarantee that I will actually possess that characteristic.
• Or is there some "non-linear" element to it (by which I mean, that criteria can be satisfied in ways that are not purely additive)? This, as I understand, is how most genes work.
• Does Pandora also take into account other listeners' preferences? For example, if I search for Chuck Loeb, am treated to some Astrid and rate her highly, does this affect the music served up to other listeners? This is one way of listeners passively/implicitly affecting music heard by other listeners.
• Or more explicitly, will Pandora look at listener tags as an option? At the moment, there doesn't seem to be a tagging mechanism in place. Tags could both help increase the relevance of streamed music (which, admittedly, is already pretty darn good) and offload some of the effort of analysing each song onto listeners.
• I'm a big fan of Yahoo! Launch as well -- do these two systems work in the same way?
• Most fundamentally, is this how our brains are wired? If I like Chuck Loeb's music, does that mean I will always like music that is classified as smooth jazz, has a catchy beat, has some wah-wah voices, a trumpet as lead and the occasional electric guitar solo? I'm actually asking the same question about non-linearity here, only in a different way.

Let's leave these questions to be answered by the experts. For my part, what I like best about Pandora is that it's a superb customer experience. I simply typed in Chuck Loeb's name into Pandora and immediately began getting perfectly matched music. Nothing could be simpler.

Solving the mystery of online ads

Nova Spivack of Minding the Planet asks:

So who IS clicking all those ads? Google and Overture are making gigabucks, but how? This is one of those unexplained mysteries of the Twilight Zone of the Web. Where are the actual clicks coming from? Who are the Clickers? Has anyone actually witnessed someone click on a Web ad?

To which my answer is, surprisingly perhaps, I'm one of the jokers who clicks ads! I tune out simple banner ads and positively detest animated ads, but I do sometimes notice interesting text ads, which I then proceed to click on. Especially in my gmail.

When I'm surfing the web, I'm usually already on some random page that I got to via three different hyperlinks, so I don't want to start yet another thread by clicking an ad. But in gmail, I'm doing something focused (one would think!) and if I see an ad that is equally focused, then I do click it.

And since the time I began clicking on ads in this way, I've actually become even more receptive to text-based ads. So now I click even on obviously out-of-context ads as long as they look interesting to me.

"The demand side supplies itself"

Adriana Cronin-Lukas writes on Media Influencer about two guys that are promoting classical music by searching out rare Beethoven compositions and putting them up for download.

Link: Media Influencer: Music of the long tail

To me, this shows another crack in the traditional producer-distribution-audience models. It is obvious that scholars and professionals were not the audience. The two Beethoven enthusiasts were first doing what they wanted to enjoy and couldn't find and now they are hoping to reach the mainstream in a way academicians and virtuosos can't. As Doc Searls points out, this is the demand side supplying itself. Sure, enthusiasts and amateurs have achieved feats that impressed the official experts and professionals but now, thanks to an unparalled distribution system that the internet has become, they can go directly to the audience. Some consumer-generated content that is scaring those who grew comfortable with the model and the control it gave them.

She calls this "long tail for producers" because of the obscurity of the compositions in question. But I prefer to focus on another aspect of this phenomenon that she identifies above -- that of consumers producing their own content and thereby rejigging the producer-distributor-consumer model. The demand side can also supply itself in non-long tail situations.

I think this phenomenon also goes well beyond music. At the consulting firm where I work, we are working on a new way to think about the world. We call this the C2C Future. Consumers talk to each other. Companies co-opt them into the process of producing a product or service. Consumers get personalised offerings as a result. Increased value results, which, depending on the industry, is either captured by existing firms or by new start-ups or accrues directly to consumers themselves. These things apply to a lot of industries, not just music or media although those are obvious the first places to look.

(There are many other aspects of the C2C Future that I want to talk about but this isn't the place, and certainly not the time -- I'm going to bed!)

Podcasting via cellular phone

From AlwaysOn: A radical way to Podcast :: AO.

Sify, india's largest ISP provider, is launching podcasting in India. as a matter of fact i would say they are introducing India to podcasting. Other ways are ok like recording the audio on a portable device or on your desktop PC. But think of people being empowered with a simple thing like their mobile phone. People can call a number given by the local mobile operator. The mobile number responds with an IVRS and on saying a particular word, you can start recording yuor podcast. This is uploaded on your server space. This is a great idea that empowers people at no additional cost for trying this service.

I don't know whether "no additional cost" means "free" (in the pilot stage). That would be very interesting.