Greek Complexity

Spotify the bubble

Fundraising to lift Spotify to $1bn valuation, reports the FT, Digital Sky Technologies being the rumoured new investor.

More than 10m people across European countries use its advertising-supported service to listen to a catalogue of 10m tracks for free, on-demand over the internet. But it has attracted fewer than 1m paying subscribers to its mobile and ad-free premium service, a conversion rate that concerns some record labels investors in the company.

Concern over its business model and the probable returns for artists and labels has held up a planned launch in the US for more than a year, although it is now starting to secure contracts with US labels.

The [company's 2009] accounts showed Spotify lost £16.6m in the UK in 2009, on revenues of £11.3m.

“$1bn is pretty frothy for a loss-making business, whilst growing fast,” said one venture-capital investor in a rival music service.

Ya think?

A new kind of power meter

Ok, new to me but perhaps not to others who follow the space more closely than I do.

Brim Brothers have been working for a couple of years on a power meter that works on a quite different principle from others in the market. Now they're ready to tell the world a little more about what they've been doing.

The standard model used by companies like PowerTap and SRM is to measure power directly off cranks and wheel hubs. This is expensive, cumbersome and inflexible, because you can't easily switch bikes or wheels, plus (if you're not a cheapo like me) you most probably wouldn't race with your training wheels.

The iBike, which is what I use (and love), measures power indirectly using Newton's third law. It measures the forces acting on the cyclist and therefore knows what forces the cyclist is putting out. The iBike is more affordable than its rivals and more easily transferable from one bike to another, but is criticised as being "inaccurate". (If you're interested in getting into that debate, first go through this benchmarking data.)

Brim Brothers's approach is very different. They stick a couple of pods on the cyclist's shoes and measure the power put out by the cyclist directly off his feet. What this means is that cyclists can jump on any old bike with no prior setup or customisation and start getting results. It also means that the setup may be pretty affordable compared to the SRMs of the world.

Very interesting idea in theory. But, as they say: in theory, theory is the same as practice; in practice, it isn't. We'll just have to wait and see.

The Apple begins to rot?

When I saw this report in the FT two days ago...

Apple demands 30% slice of subscriptions

Apple is dictating tougher terms of commerce on its wildly successful mobile devices, demanding a 30 per cent cut of all subscriber content sold directly through its iPads and iPhones.

The new rules, which apply internationally, say that if publishers offer digital subscriptions they must make the same offer through the App Store. Publishers can still offer subscriptions through their own websites, but cannot link to the website from their app.

...I thought to myself that content owners and publishers deserved the mess they found themselves in. They all ran arms wide open to Apple, starting with the music industry a few years ago, as though it was the messiah, the one and only saviour of their imperilled business models. It was, but quickly does the embrace turn into a bone-crushing bear-hug. If you anoint someone with the powers of a monopoly, you can't expect him not to exercise those powers.

Today's news though is that publishers have an alternative with Google unveiling a new payment system.

Google’s One Pass to take on Apple

Google has thrown down the gauntlet to Apple with a payment service for digital content that features a more generous revenue share for publishers than Apple’s new system. ... The initial partners are all newspaper publishers, but Google said it could also be used for music or video content. ... [Eric] Schmidt, [CEO of Google], called the One Pass service “very publisher-friendly ... We basically don’t make any money on this.”

Gotta love the corporate version of a soap opera, what with Schmidt even being a former board member of Apple.

Street-side gawking aside, I'm bearish on Apple as a company. They make pretty things everyone wants to buy but, gosh, they're expensive, the competition is intense and has arguably caught up with them, the control culture is stifling, the gadgets stop working one day after the warranty period ends, they're squeezing their suppliers too hard, etc, etc. And let's not forget Steve Jobs's health problems, tragic though this is on a personal level.

Apple is the second-largest publicly traded company in America today and in fact isn't wildly over-valued when you look at some basic price multiples, but I'm calling a top. The stock has only one way to go from here -- down.

(If you disagree, remember to make fun of me a year from now when they're the largest company in America!)