Downloading .asx video streams
October 21, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Software
Say there's an online video that is only available for real-time streaming, and you want to watch it offline at your non-'net convenience, like on a plane or on your iPhone. A lot of these streams have urls that end in .asx. If so, here are some (techie, Mac-centric) references that will let you download them and watch them later.
The Major MMS page is a good starting point. You'll quickly realize that the .asx file is just a redirector that has an mms:// url inside of it. In most cases you'll need to figure out what the mms:// url is.
Chris James Martin also had some good pointers, though his curl-based approach didn't work for me. I forget why, but I moved on.
You'll probably also end up at jwz's saving video streams page, no surprise. Short version:
mplayer -dumpstream -playlist url -dumpfile filename.wmv
Unfortunately, even after downloading the mplayer source, configuring, making, and installing it, this didn't work for me due to a "stream not seekable" error, which I could not debug, even with Google. Oh well, got some geeking in. Although it failed, and I didn't have the time to hone my ninja chops to master the source, this is probably the most promising long-term and flexible approach.
In the end, I used an application with a graphical interface to mmsclient, AFSRecorderX. You still have to figure out the mms:// url, and then you paste that into the url field, and choose "mmsclient" from the Tool pop-up menu. There is a "Select" button to choose a destination folder, but it doesn't do anything – everything is saved to the root (/) of your hard drive no matter what you point it to. Sometimes AFSRecorderX will spew a lot of information into the log section of the window, which you can ignore. It will not tell you when it's done; you'll have to occasionally check the file size of the download and eventually when it stops you can open the file and see if you got it all. Sometimes the log stops, and you think it's failed – you might reboot your computer, or even your network, and re-try several times. Only when you leave it alone long enough will you notice that the file size is indeed increasing, and it's working correctly. It's not apparent why the log is sometimes flying by like a 9600 baud modem, and why it sometimes stops dead, regardless of the success of the download. Despite the hackish nature of ASFRecorderX, it worked, and if you want the video badly enough it's currently the most straightforward approach.
Net-net, so to speak: The academic and corporate overlords that want you to watch video only in real-time streams are going to a lot of effort to make them hard to download. But, like all things code, if you're willing to go through your own personal video stream download hellfire, you can do it, because in the end, the data manipulates pixel-bits on the screen, and if you have access to the stream, you can do something with it.
The complete and total fall-back hack, the gawd-am-I-really-going-to-have-to-do-THIS? solution would be to use SnapzProX and make a real-time recording of the video window on your screen. I wasn't willing to stoop that low.
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Mostly Twittering
October 14, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Thoughts are shorter-form these days. Twitter is a good place to follow me. Example:
New Macbook video: http://bit.ly/1xNvDH Awesome emo marketing, utter techporn, richly deserves to be parodied.
So there's that....
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The day there was no news
May 14, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society
At least I can dream...
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Hubris, Denial, and the Financial Services Culture
May 2, 2008 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
Interesting behind the scenes report of the Milken Conference and pervasive "Republican/Chicago School of Economics ideology" in the face of a looming great depression.
via John Robb.
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One consequence of specialization is extinction
May 2, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce
Sobering reflections from Robert Rich, on making a living as a musical artist in the long tail, based on his life data from the past 30 years.
In reality the life of a "microcelebrity" resembles more the fate of Sisyphus, whose boulder rolls back down the mountain every time he reaches the summit. After every tour I feel exhausted but empowered by the thought that a few people really care a lot about this music. Yet, a few months later all is quiet again and CD/downoad sales slow down again. If I take the time to concentrate for a year on what I hope to be a breakthrough album, that time of silence widens out into a gaping hole and interest seems to fade. When I finally do release something that I feel to be a bold new direction, I manage only to sell it to the same 1,000 True Fans. The boulder sits back at the bottom of the mountain and it's time to start rolling it up again.
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US politics snapshot, all you need to know edition
April 25, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society
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Quote of the Day
April 15, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society
Scott Heriferman: "Sadly, no time to really get into Twitter. For me, to stay healthy AND lead a needed meme (meetup to go from 5M to 500M people, ~$10M to $100M+ rev, and 20K to 200K successful meetup groups), can't get sucked in."
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Thriving Office
April 12, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society
Home businesses know they must seem successful to become successful. So they play Thriving Office while on the phone. This valuable CD, which is filled with the sounds people expect to hear from an established company, provides instant credibility.
It's amazing what the world has come to.
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Renting vs Buying
March 19, 2008 | Business & Commerce
Now that I'm a "homeowner" I think a lot less about all the reasons I thought buying a house was foolish. But today comes Rent Vs. Buy Myths That Ruined the Housing Market to remind me. Ah yes, I remember them fondly.
What's with the scare quotes? Well, the bank actually owns my home, not me – I pay a lot more in interest than principal every month. And if I should fall behind they will take it away, along with all of my current "investment".
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A Call for Journalistic Courage
March 18, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society
Important essay by Walter Pincus on the role of the press in a free society:
Today’s mainstream print and electronic media want to be neutral, unbiased and objective, presenting both or all sides as if they were on the sidelines refereeing a game in which only the players—the government and its opponents—can participate. They have increasingly become common carriers, transmitters of other people’s ideas and thoughts, irrespective of import, relevance and at times even accuracy.
At a time when it is most needed, the media, and particularly newspapers, have dropped the idea of having experienced reporters provide analysis and context and turned instead to retired public figures or so-called experts to provide commentary. It was not always this way.
From the 1950s through the 1980s, I could name reporters and columnists whose experience on their beats or in their areas made them thoughtful and respected commentators. Younger reporters today are regularly shifted around from beat to beat, never really having enough time to master totally complex subjects, such as health, public education and environmental policies. Coverage then depends on statements and pronouncements by government sources or their critics.
Jay Rosen posts a long and thoughtful comment (here quoting Josh Marshall): "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well."
Related, and best headline of the day: MSM Still In Trouble–Also Generalissimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead.
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Adjacent Social Objects == Gonzo Marketing
March 4, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
Chris Locke, after co-authoring the Cluetrain Manifesto, went on to write a great book called Gonzo Marketing. Wicked unlucky for him, the book was released on October 1, 2001 - kind of a bad season for US commerce. The book gets mixed reviews – sometimes because it's somewhat dated, but primarily for the writing style, which I'll call brash for lack of a better word – but the key takeaway for me was the idea of indirect benefit.
The idea is that a company sponsors an online service/community/project, one which is related in some way to their business, but does no direct selling there. It's all about providing value, for which people thank you by buying your product or service. So rather than pushing mass-market stuff through broadcast, you do something cool to enable people to enjoy using your product.
Today come Social Objects. I've read and thought about this for about a year, but haven't blogged about it, as far as Google knows. I thought I had. Anyway, Rajesh Setty is a smart, thoughtful writer, and today he introduces adjacent social objects. It's a good post.
Ajdacent Social Objects are those that objects that are not directly related to your product or service but are close - they are in the periphery.
Our own example is a site called All About Steak (which is a site that’s all about steak - recipes, grilling tips etc.) which was built in partnership with Kansas City Steaks. All About Steak is an adjacent social object for Kansas City Steaks.
This is the future of marketing. Rajesh coined a good term for it. Gonzo Marketing provides some important background. And you can always stand to read Cluetrain every five years or so.
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Economics Worldview Today
February 29, 2008 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
Credit cards are as dangerous as they are convenient
Economics of the Macropocalypse
Why the Fed is compelled to lie to Congress
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Running Out of Ideas?
January 17, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Software
Amusing one-line review of Handmeon, pointing to the Boston Globe article:
Handmeon.com is a cool idea, perhaps showing that Web 2.0 entrepreneurs may be running out of ideas.
Well, I laughed out loud. He goes on to say, "Actually, I do think it's a pretty interesting social experiment." Thanks Pito, for taking a look.
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FDA Says Food From Cloned Animals Is Safe
January 15, 2008 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
After years of debate, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday declared that food from cloned animals and their progeny is safe, removing the last government hurdle before meat and milk derived from copies of prize dairy cows and superior hogs can be sold at grocery stores.
Tuesday’s decision means cloning technology could move into commercial use a mere decade after the world learned of the existence of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, in Scotland. To create Dolly, scientists took an unfertilized sheep egg and removed the genetic material. They then inserted the genetic material from an adult cell. Machinery within the egg somehow reset the clock on the adult genes, and the new cell, after implantation into a surrogate mother sheep, developed into Dolly.
This technique has since become routine in laboratories, with clones produced in numerous species — not including humans, so far as is known.
At a time when population growth is the biggest driver of all the world's major problems (poverty, resource scarcity, drought, global warming, species extinction, civility entropy, etc) the last thing we need is to perfect and assimilate cloning.
Coming up next: Perfect Twins!! Is it safe to clone your own children? We report, you decide!
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The Game Was Completely Up
January 14, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce
In 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.
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Handmeon Update
January 2, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Life
Here's a status (promotional) update (flogging) on (of) my project (startup) to change the world, Handmeon.
We got great press during the holiday season, including the Boston Globe, Vermont Public Radio, Seven Days, and the Valley News (broken link; left here for posterity).
Jeff had an epiphanette while in dialogue at GiftHub.org which we're discussing internally, and this might lead to some ground-breaking organizational structures.
We received some good traffic from the media, and a good round of registrations. People who like it seem to really like it. We're looking for more members, so stop by, explore a little, and see if it's something that resonates with you.
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Iowa Caucus Closers
January 2, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society
I had my hair cut today, and the stylist told me she supported Barack Obama in the NH primary. We chatted about that, and I asked her if she had considered Hillary Clinton. She said, "Well, it's funny, because when I first heard she was running I got really excited. People came into the salon and we would talk about it — a woman president! Sometimes, I would close my eyes, and just imagine what it would be like, what it would mean, to have a woman president. And I would just feel great — [she relaxes and collapses her shoulders, rolling her eyes up all aflutter, as if in a dreamy dream] — and then I would open my eyes and it would be Hillary, you know? And I just got sick to my stomach, thinking, 'I'd have to listen to that woman for the next eight years.' It was like, 'no way.'"
In honor of Lisa, here's Hillary's closing TV ad for the Iowa caucus:
And here's Barack Obama's:
How about this Obama propaganda ? Marching music? Check. Aspirational imagery? Check. Oratorical escalation? Check. (Still, I'm voting for the guy.)
John McCain is the only credible Republican nominee:
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MBA in Guesswork
January 1, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Technology
Good quote from a commencement speech by Bruce Eckel:
Management is much harder than technology because it involves virtually no deterministic factors. It's all guesswork, so if you don't have good intuition you'll probably make stupid decisions.
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Shopping As Hero's Quest
December 27, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
To complete my cultural survey, today we went to the mall. Had this been a comparative cultural survey, we would have also gone to this mall, where they have valet parking, which could be quite handy given the size of mall parking lots.
Nintendo has done an amazing job marketing the apparently amazing Wii video game. For two holiday seasons now they have restricted manufacturing, so it is very hard to get. Here in the Daytona FL area, local Wal-Marts are getting 15-18 units each Wednesday, with un-crating and shelving at about 11:30 AM. After a month or two of looking around, my hosts finally got one yesterday. Amazingly, after all that questing, it sits awaiting connection 24 hours later. I suppose there's no rush, but it seems like getting it was more important than using it, a decent definition of excess consumption. I make no judgments—it seems like the first video game I'd be interested in playing. It looks like I won't get to find out before I leave, though I'm sure if I was all that interested we could have set it up yesterday afternoon or this morning.
Today the quest was for 1) lunch (Chik-fil-A); 2) Books-A-Million (really low-vibration experience); 3) Sunglasses evaluation ($180 for molded plastic?!?); 4) Camera evaluation (40D definitely fits my hands better than the XTi). And: Success! We did it! It took five hours, including about two hours of driving. I used the mall stop as an exercise opportunity, getting in three walking circuits before the time was up. Now, a little zoning before supper.
On the plus side, I highly recommend Colonial Photo and Hobby in Orlando, FL. Don't let the cheesy website fool you. They are a true old-time camera shop, with a lot of experienced sales guys who really know their stuff. They sell Leica, where the M8 is $5,000 (body only) and the typical first lens is $5,300. They had the Canon XTi and the 40D in stock, as well as all the lenses I wanted to try, and they were happy to put them on the cameras and let me shoot away. Bring your own CF card and take it home to evaluate. A truly great resource in this era of know-nothing Ritz Camera minimum-wage lackeys. Like most specialized retail, the web has decimated the photography market, so it's nice that Colonial is able to stick around, offering workshops, one-day and weekend photo trips, and generally pricing stuff within reason of the online shops. Yes, a bit more, but they're offering a real service. If I wasn't waiting to see what is released at PMA in January, I would have bought a package there today.
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State of the Music
December 24, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce
Wired Magazine has done us a public service by hiring David Byrne to report on the current state of the music industry. It results in two feature articles: David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music (with a striking photo!), and David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars. Both articles include long audio clips of the conversations, with Thom Yorke, Brian Eno, and others. It's what modern online journalism should be.
In other music news, Daniel Lanois has started a grand experiment, with Red Floor Records. Hi entire back catalog is available for download, with mp3 and high-res wav versions each available for the same $10 price. He has a new movie arriving in March, with the soundtrack available now.
Our first new project available on the site is 'Here is What is'. This music is a direct soundtrack representation of the music that exists in our feature length documentary film also titled 'Here is What is'. For those of you who might not know, the film is a camera following me around over the course of a year, in and out of recording studios documenting once and for all the way it really happens.
I'm very excited by his Omni Series:
For every song of mine that gets released there is an abundance of material that does not. These pieces, often favorites of mine remain unheard, so Red Floor and I have decided to release this body of work as The Omni Series. At the moment we are planning six cds. Each will be thematically assembled to represent a certain part of my work.
The SSEYO guys, makers of the generative music software Koan (no longer available) have launched two new products via Intermorphic: noatikl furthers the generative music cause, and liptikl does the same for lyrics.
And finally, every year or two I tune into the Brian Eno wavelength, which is best done at the news page of Enoweb. There are dozens of interesting links there for your deep-fringe avant-garde reading pleasure. Good diversions from the family dynamics this time of year. ;)
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How the Housing Bubble Worked
November 26, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
If you want to cut to the chase on the "sub-prime mortgage meltdown," or whatever we're calling it these days, tune into this post by Berkeley economist Brad DeLong:
Let’s look at the loan history on this property.... The property was purchased in January 2005 for $1,157,000. The combined first and second mortgages totalled $1,156,730 leaving a downpayment of $270. Let’s just call it 100% financing. By April, they owners were able to find refinancing through Countrywide with a $999,999 first mortgage... Option ARM with a 1% teaser rate... a simultaneous second mortgage for $215,000 pulling out their first $58,000. So look at their situation: They are living in a million dollar plus home in Turtle Ridge making payments less than those renting, and they “made” $58,000 in their first 4 months of ownership.
If you're playing by the so-called rules, it's revolting.
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Branding is Dead, part XCMXLLIV
October 10, 2007 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
I was thinking today that one reason branding was so important in the industrial age is that there were so many players in the chain. If you had any hope of having your "message" reach the end-user, you had to line it all up clear as a bell. And industrial organizations were so big, too. The chain was something like: CEO, VP Marketing, [several other VPs, including Sales, Finance, Operations, etc], copywriters, designers, vendors for manufactured parts, graphic design, printers, distributors, warehousers, sales representatives, retail buyers, retail sales clerks, etc.
Rules of the telephone game therefore required that you have one message, one value proposition, one identity. But now, in the age of conversation, and especially on the web, it's not clear that any of this matters, at least not nearly as much. Sure, you need a logo, and consistency is nice on all fronts. But you might be having "market conversations" with lots of different kinds of people, partners, and customers. The "value proposition" will be different for each one of them. Reducing all the richness down to a single tag line doesn't seem helpful, to say nothing of being plausible. You may still have to define it, but it may be presented and interpreted differently by each stakeholder.
Doc Searls has probably said all this and more years ago. I'm slow sometimes.
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What many people criticize
October 1, 2007 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society
Adam Nagourney at the New York Times on NH's independent voters:
As a rule, they are middle and upper income, college educated, socially moderate, fiscally conservative, anti-Washington and repulsed by what many people criticize as the overly partisan atmosphere there.
This is the first article I've read with any analysis that comes even close to what I observe. Most electoral commentary is completely vapid and virtually fictional. This article at least gets at some depth of the dynamics, even if it starts with oh-so-breathless coverage of the so-called swelling ranks of independents. Democrat? Republican? Does this have meaning anymore? Similar to the recording industry, all this is the last gasp (decades long) of a dying form of organization.
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Apple's .plan
September 11, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
In Unix culture there is the idea of the ".plan" (dot-plan) file. It lives in the user's home directory, and is a place to write updates about your life or work. It pre-dates blogging and Twitter by nearly a hundred years, but was typically updated much less frequently than either. The id software founder and programmer John Carmack had a somewhat famous .plan file for a while, blending both hardware-level graphics programming explorations with high-speed car racing on airport runways.
I think of Steve Jobs' live presentations as Apple's .plan file. What's new, what's up, what they are thinking about. The mainstream press focuses on the "literal" facts of the show – price cuts, happy customers, annoyed customers, new partners, projected earnings, impact on margins, etc. – while the Mac digerati focus on interpretations from the Mac/iPod/iTunes/iPhone ecosystem.
Here's all you need to know about the recent show, though it's still worth spending the 90 minutes watching the online stream if you are a student of design, marketing, or product and business development.
- Ringtones: Apple is making it fun to make ringtones. Customers are not just buying them, they're making them. You can select any segment of the song, up to 30 seconds long, choose the looping, and it automatically adds the fades and syncs with the iPhone. Oh, and, by the way, the price of the song plus the ringtone is $1.98, less than the current phone carrier offerings. Sell to the prosumers, and ignore the legacy carrier approach. [Update: Gruber says there's room for improvement.]
- iPod Nano: Revising the best-selling mp3 player in the world. New shape, and thinner. More memory for same price. The real news in this is that there are some major product design changes are under the hood. Pitched repeatedly as the "enhanced user interface," the new iPods are driven by OS X, the same foundation as the iPhone, and today's Mac OS. This is a very big deal, as an entirely new (and very rich) software platform is will be running on several million devices, offering new features like coverflow, along with potential bugs and the following requisite updates. [Update: Yup.]
- iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store: The fundamental change that iTunes brought to the market, from the consumers point of view, was the 30-second preview of every song, prior to buying. Instead of buying something based on a recommendation, you now buy based on what you hear. IOW, a measurement of the industry's product merit was put in place. Prior to that the industry was measured on their ability to market product – now they are judged by whether the product is worth buying. Big diff. Is anyone surprised their sales are off? It's not piracy, gents, its your product. Nuf' said. [Update: Oh, the iTunes wi-fi music store? Accelerates the changes. More below.]
- Partnership with Starbucks: This extends the music preview and buying experience away from the computer and into the retail environment. Moves offline buying experience from music as store, to music as environment. Music stores tried selling coffee, didn't work too well. Coffee stores selling music, this will be a blockbuster. Shows what's playing now and the last ten songs played in the store. Because the physical roll-out will go through 2009, both companies will have incremental yet cumulative increases, and will have another dimension of progress to announce for the next two years. Expect more deals at other retail stores. [Major update: see below.]
- Everything you need to know about Howard Schultz's presentation on the Apple stage: If you sell an addictive product, customers will buy it very frequently, and you'll need to open a lot of stores to keep up with the demand. As the business progresses, you'll make so much money that you'll need to invent brand extensions to consume the cash. Steve and Howard are both old hippies, and they both thank their sweet lucky stars that they get to do all this for the love of music. Thank you very much.
Update: There's one other thing worth noting here. Twice now, this year, Apple has done deals with another very large company, and convinced them to make fundamental changes to their "business operating system" – that is, the software that runs their customer-facing operations – to get the partnership deal. The first was AT&T, who had to modify their cellular telephone network software to create "visual voicemail." Visual voicemail is a fundamental change in how the customer interacts with their device, their carrier, their messages, and therefore their whole cell phone communications world.
The second instance is with Starbucks, who will be installing the capacity to upload to iTunes HQ, in real-time, what song is playing at this moment is each and every Starbucks cafe around the world. This will become an international real-time cultural baraometer, par excellence. It becomes possible to imagine a "flash" hit single, that spreads around the world and could sell a million copies in an hour. In effect, Apple has announced Phase III completion of their re-engineereing effort on the music business. Phase I was the iPod. Phase II was iTunes. Phase III is persistent purchasing, buying whatever music you want, wherever you are.
Much bigger news than the iPhone price cut is this idea of Apple entering the enterprise software ecosystem. Instead of typical enterprise deals where the vendor supplies software or hardware to re-engineer, say, the purchasing department, Apple is doing customer-facing enterprise deals, where they build or specify the software customers use. This is huge. Major huge.
Even better, there's a Sarbanes-Oxley rule where companies have to spread the revenue accounting of a product over two years if the company provides free updates that add features. Apple is doing this with the iPhone, AppleTV, and maybe some other products. This means that the revenue growth will show up slowly, over time, without much notice. Until say, in 2009, when they're still recognizing revenue from your iPhone purchase last month, and you've already bought another one, maybe two.
You can safely go very long on Apple stock.
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What is beauty?
July 18, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
This Dove ad should be required viewing for anyone who has ever wondered about "manufactured beauty." (1:30) Dig the photoshop work where they extend the neck, puff the lips, trim the shoulders, lower the eyebrows, etc. She looks totally normal at the start, and a super model at the end.
Update: Sassy Pants points to this great link on the same topic.
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Toilet 2.0
July 5, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
If you've been thinking that you use too much toilet paper, the Washlet might be for you. It also claims to increase happiness.
Bubblegen provides a good overview of the strategic challenge.
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Compare and Contrast
February 27, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society
Today in links:
Brûlee’s "Brownie Extradordinaire with Saint Louis" is a chocolate brownie made with Italian hazelnuts, dusted with edible gold powder and served with a very rare port. After each bite, the dessert captain squirts a mist of the vintage port on your tongue with a $750 atomizer, which incidentally is yours to keep.
Stock markets around the world plummeted today
In percentage terms, it was the worst day for the market since March 2003. In terms of points, it was the steepest slide since the first day the market resumed trading after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
So it goes.
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Food Security
February 22, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
When I say that "the food supply is far more fragile than people realize," this is what I have in mind.
It looks like fruit/almonds/etc. might get pretty expensive soon. Big commercial bee keepers, that provide pollination services worth $14 billion a year, have been experiencing die-offs of 50-90% of their colonies over the last two years.
No one knows why the bees are dying. In and of themselves, one species doesn't really matter much (heh, even humans!), but the interdependency of a living system depends on all things living. In this case, bee bye-bye means everything pollinated by the itty bitty bees will be affected. Wichita Eagle:
"One out of every three bites of food we eat is produced as the result of insect pollination, much of it by bees," said Bruce Broynton, a spokesman for the National Honey Board, which this week released $58,000 for research it hopes will lead to understanding the bee deaths.
Here's a wake-up call about what you can do to understand and prepare for the future. Short version: relearning to make everything more local and smaller-scale.
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Stop Buying This Crap
February 15, 2007 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Rant, defined.
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Results of Thinking Systemically
January 11, 2007 | Business & Commerce
Finally found the quote I've been looking for:
"He's the only guy who has applied systems thinking to media," said Paul Saffo, a consumer electronics industry consultant who is a director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif.
Paul is referring to Steve Jobs. Bonus: This is an interesting Google search.
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Ryu at Dartmouth
January 11, 2007 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
Wow, I had no idea this was a local person. Excerpt from PaidContent.org:
And then Pogue introduced us to an 18-year-old Dartmouth student named Phillip Ryu. The kid ran a competition called Mydreamapp.com, where amateurs competed to design their fantasy Mac application. The winner, a product Atmosphere ("an ambient way to see your weather") is now being built. Ryu and friends also produced something called MacHeist where they bundled shareware applications and sold them for $49, donating 25% of proceeds to the buyer’s charity of choice. MacHeist raised $200,000. Pogue got it right when he said the future of the tech looks good if it is in the hands of kids like Phillip Ryu.
The story is not quite that simple. Yes, they raised money for charity, but many people are upset that the developers got a fixed price, while MacHeist sold far more than expected and made a killing. The cooperative model would have been to share a percentage of the profits with the developers. For a summary, see this Wired story. For the details, read Jon Gruber's always-amusing posts (1, and 2) at Daring Fireball.
There's no doubt this project was a marketing masterpiece. Ryu and team probably made north of $400,000 in one week. [Yeah, four hundred, not forty.] But that doesn't mean I'm excited to put the future in their hands.
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Completely Redefining What You Can Do
January 9, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
I will be one of approximately 143,215,697 people to mention this today or tomorrow, but this is as close as it gets to product-orgasm. Cell phones have sucked forever, and this is a whole new game.
iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.
The picture is so good you are nearly drooling. [Note switch to second-person voice for a bit of self-revealing distance.] This product is far, far better than I expected, even with all the pre-hype. It's a big year for Apple. See also, no slouch either: AppleTV.
David Pogue comments on it all. Better, this Time magazine article on the culture and attitude that produces an object like this. And, Joshua Allen on some of the potential problems with Apple's approach.
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Design Is Good For Business
January 3, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
DETROIT, Jan. 3 — The Chrysler Group was the only Detroit carmaker to report a sales increase for December, while the Japanese carmakers Toyota and Honda both saw their sales grow last month, figures from the auto companies showed today.
I assert Chrysler gained sales because of design, with a capital-D. Of the US automakers, they are the only one with cars that spark the imagination. Anyone who is practical has done the math and found that Toyota or Honda will be the most reliable. If you are going to buy a car that falls apart it may as well look nice, since it will appear dated soon and you'll want to replace it.
This is the reason why design is good for business. (c.f. iPod.)
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Mattresses
January 2, 2007 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
How to cut through the marketing gimmicks.
The secret to mattress shopping is that the product is basically a commodity. The mattress biz is 99-percent marketing. So just buy the cheapest thing you can stand and be done with it, because they're pretty much all the same. And that's all you need to know.
Not sure I agree entirely, but it is a confusing market, with lots of re-branding, and essentially the major differences are firmness and price.
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Sneetchcrafted Chocolate
December 27, 2006 | Business & Commerce
Reading this investigative journalism piece about extremely overpriced chocolates made in Plano (Dallas) Texas, you will learn a whole lot about the origins, processing, and packaging of chocolate.
Bonus: The word "Sneetchcraft," following Dr. Seuss. "This collection of four of Dr. Seuss's most winning stories begins with that unforgettable tale of the unfortunate Sneetches, bamboozled by one Sylvester McMonkey McBean ("the Fix-it-up Chappie"), who teaches them that pointless prejudice can be costly."
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Rich People Don’t Care About Gas Prices
December 4, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
Great essay, with attitude, on why Ford, GM, and Chrysler are sucking eggs so hard.
We’re looking at two strategies here. Toyota: build affordable transportation for the masses at a quality level that slightly exceeds expectations relative to price. GM et al: build oversized, under-engineered and fuel inefficient cars for people who don’t care about money while palming off sub-standard cars on mainstream customers.
Recall that GM has underfunded its pension and Ford just laid off bought out 40,000 workers, and you realize how they've already lost the game. There won't be any decent American cars to buy in a few years. Just government subsidized Yugo-clones that attempt to preserve a national pride of manufacturing. Oh well; we still have the entertainment industry.
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One Bank, One Card
November 20, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce
Here's a new video for all you U2 fans: One (4:49).
Spoiler: Corporate execs wearing ties in a typical hotel conference room co-opting the song with celebration lyrics of their merger. Funny. Sick. Unbelievable. Horrible. Capital-C Culture.
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The World Standard in Studless Winter Tyres
November 7, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment
Glen said, "The ultimate winter weapon is still the Hakk 2's with studs, but if you don't want to run the studs with the noise and the rolling resistance and everything, then the RSi is what people are talking about." Better than the Hakk 2's? "Without the studs; With the studs, Hakk 2's are what you want." Got it. "This is a good tyre, it's quiet—people say it's really quiet—and it replaces the Nokia Q, which was around for ten years, and people liked that tyre quite a lot." How much? "Let me go work it out." [3 minutes of tyre store being] "$109 mounted and balanced." Okay, sold.
Now I just have to get there at 7:15 some morning to be in the first batch of customers. Otherwise it's an all-day affair.
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Dear Boloco
November 7, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life
Quality control in Hanover has GOT to improve. Today: Regular teriaki with chicken. $6.25 They forgot the chicken. Then realized that this is normally $5.25 if memory serves. Last visit: Ordered extra chicken. Got normal amount of chicken.
This is the sort of thing where it's way too much of a hassle to go back and complain for a dollar or two. Plus, with a small staff you can get a rep for complaining and then who knows what happens to the ingredients in your next order.
Recommendation: Give every customer a receipt. Put a sign up saying, "If we don't give you a receipt your next order is free." Print messages on the receipt like, "Was your order perfect? How can we improve? www.boloco.com" etc. Monthly drawing for best feedback, etc.
I realize it's a tough staff to manage (high turnover, low pay, tedious work, food service, lunchtime slams, etc) but at this point three of my last four visits were incorrect meals, and one of them seems like it included an overcharge (two, if you count the missing extra chicken).
So I'll give it another shot in December, but it's been kind of a downer in Sept and Oct.
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Enormous Copyright Infringement Claims
October 31, 2006 | Business & Commerce
Interesting business strategy analysis of the Google purchase of YouTube.
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Children
October 12, 2006 | Business & Commerce
There's a new bead store in town. It's nicely decorated, and my favorite part is a sign on the wall:
Unattended children will be given an espresso and a free kitten.
Hard to believe they'll survive when Hanover rents are a couple of grand a month and a beads cost a nickel or a quarter apiece. But it adds a bit of funk to the neighborhood, and that's nice.
[ Local: In the Five Olde Nugget alley, where Ann Rose Travel used to be. ]
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Advice on Work
October 6, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
The best place to work, if you want to start a startup, is probably a startup. In addition to being the right sort of experience, one way or another it will be over quickly. You'll either end up rich, in which case problem solved, or the startup will get bought, in which case it it will start to suck to work there and it will be easy to leave, or most likely, the thing will blow up and you'll be free again.
It's mostly focused on advice for graduating college students, but I especially like the focus of a job as a temporary condition. Another nugget:
Professors will tend to judge you by the distance between the starting point and where you are now. If someone has achieved a lot, they should get a good grade. But customers will judge you from the other direction: the distance remaining between where you are now and the features they need. The market doesn't give a shit how hard you worked. Users just want your software to do what they need, and you get a zero otherwise. That is one of the most distinctive differences between school and the real world: there is no reward for putting in a good effort. In fact, the whole concept of a "good effort" is a fake idea adults invented to encourage kids. It is not found in nature.
If you're self-employed you learn this fast, or you find yourself a job PDQ. More:
You know from an early age that you'll have some sort of job, because everyone asks what you're going to "be" when you grow up. What they don't tell you is that as a kid you're sitting on the shoulders of someone else who's treading water, and that starting working means you get thrown into the water on your own, and have to start treading water yourself or sink. "Being" something is incidental; the immediate problem is not to drown.
As usual, the whole essay is a good read.
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Sonny Boy
October 2, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society
The meeting was 15 people, by invitation. Hosted in a very comfortable high-tech room. The guest speaker was from a famous university a few hours south. Worker bees and VPs gathered to talk shop and think big. 45 minute presentation, then lunch is served. We introduce ourselves. Discussion ensues.
Eventually I ask: "What kinds of governance and decision-making structures work for highly complex topics? I have evolved many processes and approaches to working with this, but frequently executives override the advice of their best domain experts, which is bad for morale, bad for projects, and bad for institutions."
[Paraphrasing and editing makes me sound better than I did at the time.]
A few people speak. Eventually the VP says, among other things, with a wry smile pointed in my direction, "Those of us who have been around a while know that politics can't be avoided." Smile.
"Yes," I thought, but didn't say, "my point is we need to subvert politics. It's bad for morale, bad for projects, and bad for institutions. How about if we make decisions based on the merits, instead of the patronizing hierarchical power?"
"Those of us who have been around a while...." Those of us who have been around a while.... Those of us who have been around a while....
[I should grow my beard a little longer to show off the gray hair.]
This is your brain on intelligence, honesty, and enthusiasm. This is your brain on politics and power. Any questions?
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Just Ignore Any Conflicts
October 2, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society
I'm scheduling interviews for a project and I received the following (lightly edited) email at 10 AM today, illustrating the problems of "groupware."
That works for Susan! If this works for others, please feel free to add it to Susan's calendar (I'm leaving at 10:30am today). Just ignore any conflicts that show at that time.
First of all, I'm not an internal employee (read the email sig much?), so I can't add it myself, she has to do it for me. And, uh, what does an assistant do if not manage the boss's schedule?? In this case, direct other people to add it to the schedule, I guess... Everyone needs someone to supervise.
But further, note the last line: "Just ignore any conflicts that show at that time." So, when the boss looks at her schedule she has to manually filter what she is doing when, instead of just having one item per time slot.
It's no wonder there are so many problems in the world. People don't do their jobs, or don't know what their jobs are, and then somehow people think they can do more than one thing, or be in more than one place, all at the same time. By the time they head home to find out their government is torturing people to manufacture evidence of terrorism to perpetuate it's own power, they're too exhausted to think. Mission accomplished.
Update: I requested that she add it, since I couldn't, and received the following reply:
Sorry, lost my mind. ;o)
Honesty duly noted.
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Welcome to the "Soft Landing"
September 25, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
NY Times (September 25, 2006):
The median price of a previously owned home fell for the first time in 11 years last month, and inventories of unsold homes swelled to levels not seen in more than a decade.
Jason Calacanis (September 24, 2006):
Real estate is a horribly inefficient market and many of the brokers seem to be playing games. Folks are relisting homes all over the place to "reset" the days listed number, and people are not updating their MLS listing with the market down prices. We've been to homes months ago that were shown at 10-25% less than their MLS pages *still* say they are.
Barry Ritholtz (September 15, 2006):
$2.7 trillion in loans will adjust to higher rates in 2006 and 2007. According to Reality Trac, August foreclosures were up 23% over July and 53% over a year ago. Nationally, home prices have not declined on a year-to-year basis since 1933. Recently, however, prices have been dropping in the North East, West and Mid-West.
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Just The Facts
September 21, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
There is a weapons system development effort in every congressional district. [Which weapons system to you want to kill, Senator??]
Of the 350 annual megatons of carbon output that Ford is responsible for, only eight of it comes from car emissions; the rest is from factories.
The NSA joke used to be, "No Such Agency;" now it's "Not Secret Anymore."
Ford is not using the Toyota batteries in their Toyota-technology hybrid cars, because the Toyota batteries use child labor that wouldn't pass Ford's human-rights code. But Ford doesn't publicize this because they would be accused of "greenwashing" their terrible overall carbon footprint.
Nissan executives in Japan are working 17-hour days, which includes six hours of drinking with their colleagues every evening. 55-year old men commonly sob when talking about the pressure with their personal coaches or HR.
General Hayden, formerly head of the NSA, now head of the CIA, was variously described by People Who Should Know as one of the most kind, loving, humanistic, and caring people they had ever met. [Triangulated from four discussions.]
Ford will offer buy-out packages to every single hourly production worker, and every single salaried worker over 50. In the next two years they will cut 40% of their management positions. [Can you spell "ripple effect?"]
Just three years ago Nissan's internal projections assumed an endless supply of oil and stable gas prices.
The Director of Sustainability at Ford spends 50 - 70% of his time educating colleagues. Most people still don't believe climate change is real.
There are 40 million cubicles in American workplaces.
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Kids Don't Use Mail
September 11, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
If you think email marketing is going to work forever, you might want to think again.
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Link Roundup
September 10, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
Miscellaneous tabs still open from last week:
Robert Young on the fat belly of the Long Tail.
Kiko threw in the towel and put the company up for sale on eBay. It went for $250K. Tucows explains why they bought the technology.
Another excellent minimalist layout a la Craigslist and Facebook. More good content, too.
Useful: How to Have Better Conversations.
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Crony Capitalism at it's Finest
September 8, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society
Industry Note: The Rot at the Core, Special Disney Crony Capitalism Edition
Of course, neither move - coypright extensions or side payments to politicians in the form of propaganda - are in the least good for the economy, because they destroy more value than they create, through the stifling of potential innovation, competition, and new capital formation. This is crony capitalism at it's finest - we make your propaganda, you protect our assets; this is the kind of anti-capitalism that ends up destroying economies (hi Japan).
Right on.
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Facebook Mini-Review
September 7, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Software
Well, I had a demo of Facebook, and it's a very nice web application. [Previously: Attention Metastream. Today: Fred Wilson on the changes (good comments thread).]
(I have removed names from this screenshot.)
It's hard to get a sense of it from the picture, but I can tell that if I were a college student it would be easy to live here and check in frequently and see what my friends are up to and post about my life. There are nine million Facebook users, so they're doing something right.
I also note there is zero "flashy design" on this site. Note the one-color plus black palette, the simple obvious layout, the single ad in the left column, the simple unobtrusive logo in the upper left. It's a beautiful minimalist approach. This has the beneficial side-effect of lowering the server load and bandwidth costs for high-traffic sites.
It seems like the most popular websites either have bad design, or minimal design. You might want to think about that the next time you spend two hours getting the rounded corners just so in your incremental design update. Better to hire a good writer, or to think about your use-cases and user-centric design. As always, design has to support the message and function, not overtake the purpose of the effort. Facebook is a good example of What People Want.
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Commodity Fetishism
September 6, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
Thanks to Tom Matrullo I am now aware of the term commodity fetishism:
In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism is a state of social relations, said to arise in complex capitalist market systems, in which social relationships are defined by the values that are placed on commodities. The term is introduced in the opening chapter of Karl Marx's main work of political economy, Capital, of 1867. It replaced the Young Marx's theory of alienation.
Georg Lukács based History and Class Consciousness on Marx's notion, developing his own notion of commodity reification as the key obstacle to class consciousness. Lukács's work was a significant influence on later philosophers such as Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. Debord developed a notion of the spectacle that ran directly parallel to Marx's notion of the commodity; for Debord, the spectacle made relations among people seem like relations among images (and vice versa). In the work of the semiotician Baudrillard, commodity fetishism is deployed to explain subjective feelings towards consumer goods in the "realm of circulation", that is, among consumers. Baudrillard is especially interested in the cultural mystique added to objects by advertising, which encourages consumers to purchase them as aids to the construction of their personal identity.
It doesn't get much better than that on a Wednesday afternoon.
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Attention Metastream
September 5, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
I don't yet have access to Facebook, but this TechCrunch review notes the key element in successful web applications:
Facebook clearly gets the idea of an attention metastream, where page views aren’t the currency that matters but rather how effectively the service allows users to communicate. Facebook users will now have a much easier way of staying up to date on what their friends are up to. It may mean less page views for Facebook in the short run as users rarely have to leave their home/admin page to see what’s going on with friends, but if it makes users love Facebook more (is that possible?), it’ll pay off in the end.
Whether for business or pleasure, information, passion, and interaction are key.
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Complex Problem Solving
September 5, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce
Very interesting diagram of complex problem solving processes. Mousing over almost anything brings up more depth. Rewards exploration at the expense of obscuring details.
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WoW Update
September 5, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Software
In June 2005, I wrote about World of Warcraft (WoW):
Conservatively, there was a one-time revenue stream of just under $100 million dollars, and an on-going monthly revenue of just under $26 million (just under $312 million annually). They are opening the game up in China soon, where there are 500,000 players in the open beta period. It's not hard to imagine cumulative revenues of over a billion dollars, or perhaps two.
Today's NY Times brings news that indeed, they are on track for a billion dollars this year:
Less than two years after its introduction, World of Warcraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif., is on pace to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year with almost seven million paying subscribers, who can log into the game and interact with other players. That makes it one of the most lucrative entertainment media properties of any kind. Almost every other subscription online game, including EverQuest II and Star Wars: Galaxies, measures its customers in hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands.
The Times also addresses the employee head-count, which I had guessed at 350 a year ago:
Since the game’s introduction in November 2004 the company has expanded to more than 1,800 employees from around 400. Almost all of the additions have been customer-service representatives to handle World of Warcraft players, helping them with both technical advice and billing concerns.
That's $555,555 of recurring annual revenue per employee, for the business modelers out there.
And why do people play this game? First, it's easy for beginners to get started, but it also has a lot to engage long-term players. But the most important aspect can be gleaned from an interview with this 3,000-hour player:
“Think about it: I’m a 33-year-old guy with a 9-to-5 job, a wife and a baby on the way,” Mr. Pinsky said. “I can’t be going out all the time. So what opportunities do I have to not only meet people and make new friends but actually spend time with them on a nightly basis? In WOW I’ve made, like, 50 new friends, some of whom I’ve hung out with in person, and they are of all ages and from all over the place. You don’t get that sitting on the couch watching TV every night like most people.”
People want to be engaged—some might say entertained—and they want to extend their networks. Yochai Benkler might call it social production.
Please make a note of it.
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From the Mailbag
September 1, 2006 | Business & Commerce
Here's a hot one, in its entirety:
Dear Friend,
I need a partner for $14 million deal, for more details please contact me immediately .
Thanks, Mike Wilcox.
I'm on it.
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Trapping Telemarketers
August 30, 2006 | Business & Commerce
Rather cruel for the telemarketing employee, but genius nonetheless.
A little while ago I put together a little application on our phone system so that when a telemarketer calls in, I can transfer them to this extension and annoy the hell out of them. I thought about it a bit more and decided to make it a little more interesting, so I can get them to hold on the line as long as possible.
Previously: TeleZapper. I have one of these and it definitely makes a difference.
Update: The author admits it was a joke, not a real telemarketer. Totally lame.
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Rail Trail to Twigs
August 27, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life
Most readers of this blog will be shocked to hear that I rode my bicycle 14 miles yesterday. I have owned this bike for ten years, and on yesterday's one ride I probably doubled it's total lifetime miles.
One of the draws was the Rail Trail, a reclaimed railroad bed turned into a flat, well-maintained activity trail, with beautiful "behind-the-scenes" views of neighborhoods, covered bridges, lakes, rivers, and streams. Compared to riding around near my country house, with its steep hills, both short and long, the rail trail was a breeze, and that made it more fun. Lots of people had been telling me to get out there, for at least a year now, and I'm glad I did.
But the big news is the absolutely amazing Twigs cafe in Enfield, NH.
It's at the ~7 mile mark riding from Lebanon, and I expected yummy carbo treats, but in addition to all that they have fantastic sandwiches. I had a turkey wrap with sprouts, tomato, mustard, and, get this, real roasted turkey, like from Thanksgiving dinner. It was one of the best sandwiches I've ever had, no kidding.
Cool decorative atmosphere, river views, free wi-fi, what more could you want? It's really worth the ride.
Just opened next door is Stecco, an upscale Italian restaurant with a menu that looks great. Downtown Enfield is coming into its own. There was talk of training this winter and next spring to ride the full length of the rail trail (45 miles) to the Thai restaurant in Concord, NH. Some of you have just spit out your coffee; I apologize.
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Now In Clogs
August 24, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites
On May 10 I cracked a sole on my Birkenstock Chicago shoes. No biggie, they were six years old, and it was my second pair. The first pair failed the same way at about the same time. Not so bad: Spend $200 on shoes and wear them almost every day and they last six years. They were also super-comfortable—I could go to a trade show in NYC and walk on concrete for 16 hours and my feet were fine.
So on May 11 I went to the local store to buy another pair, and I found they had discontinued the Chicago model. Okay, what's the replacement? I ended up in the Wexford, which looked a little more business-like, but had a thinner sole and the Footprints low-arch footbed. I like the high-arch footbed, but this model didn't allow the swap. Oh well. $195 later I'm out the door.
The following week it rained. Not hard pouring rain, but a steady drizzle. And walking down Main Street, my feet got soaked. Not because I stepped in a puddle or anything, just from the rain. Bad sign; the Chicago's never did this.
The week after that I noticed that my feet were killing me, and I was mostly just walking to work and sitting all day at the computer. Another bad sign: the Chicago's never did this either.
So I stopped in the store to see if anyone had had similar problems. Of course the store hadn't heard anything.... so I went on my merry way thinking, "No way am I wearing these for six years. I'll last the summer, switch to winter boots when it snows, and then buy some Rockports in the spring, and put Birkenstock insoles in them for the high-arch comfort."
Then this morning I went to put my shoes on and the right one was completely blown out on the side. I hadn't noticed yesterday or last night, but there was a six-inch tear in the seam between the leather and the sole. When did I buy these again? It appears to me that they've either cost-cut this thing to the point of worthlessness, or I got a real bad apple.
I stopped in the store on my way to work, and the owner, who sold me the shoes, was there. He was genuinely surprised. His brother has worn these for the past two years without a problem. We talked about the history as related above. Long story short, not wanting another pair of Wexford's, I'm now in some stylish Alton clogs. Comfy, easy on and off, a firmer sole, and a high-arch footbed.
We haven't actually sorted out the money yet. He wanted to talk to Birkenstock, but if they didn't "do something" he would. I said that weighing 160 lbs, with only three months of use, I didn't really want to eat it, but I'd trust him to sort it out in the next couple of weeks. I'm a 15-year Birkenstock customer, so I'm assuming that they'll do the right thing here.
Meanwhile, for business shoes, I'm headed for the waterproof Rockport with Birk insole option.
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Continuing Examples of Music Industry Stupidity
August 21, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
This is worth a lengthy quote:
NY Times: Now the Music Industry Wants Guitarists to Stop Sharing
Lauren Keiser, president of the Music Publishers’ Association, says guitar tablature Web sites reduce the earnings of songwriters.
In the last few months, trade groups representing music publishers have used the threat of copyright lawsuits to shut down guitar tablature sites, where users exchange tips on how to play songs like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Highway to Hell” and thousands of others.
“People can get it for free on the Internet, and it’s hurting the songwriters,” said Lauren Keiser, who is president of the Music Publishers’ Association and chief executive of Carl Fischer, a music publisher in New York.
So far, the Music Publishers’ Association and the National Music Publishers’ Association have shut down several Web sites, or have pressured them to remove all of their tabs, but users have quickly migrated to other sites. According to comScore Media Metrix, an Internet statistics service, Ultimate-Guitar.com had 1.4 million visitors in July, twice the number from a year earlier.
The publishers, who share royalties with composers each time customers buy sheet music or books of guitar tablature, maintain that tablature postings, even inaccurate ones, are protected by copyright laws because the postings represent “derivative works” related to the original compositions, to use the industry jargon.
So, let me get this straight. There are 1.4 million web surfers addicted to guitar tablature. And there is an existing legal arrangement where the publishers share royalties with the artists.
Listen up bubba, this right here is what we call a strategy: The publishers should license the websites to use the material and find the natural market price point.
D'oh, he said.
I mean, come on! This is not rocket science. Charge $0.99 a song for guitar tablature PDFs and see what happens, fer cryin' out loud! There might be varying degrees of sophistication among the PDF products, and maybe some tabs are worth $1.49, or even $2.99 per song. Maybe some are only worth $0.49 or $0.29. Who cares? Internet distribution removes friction. You can make money at any price by scaling to the market.
Instead of shutting them down they should be creating a new market.
I can't even believe people are this dumb sometimes.
So here's your Web 2.0 startup solution: Define a standard XML format for guitar tablature, and a server-side translator to take this XML, render it through template(s), and generate PDFs on the fly. Optionally, develop and support some sort of digital rights management scheme that is not ridiculously onerous. Tie this into a mass-customized MLM marketing, e-commerce, and community-driven web interface, and get started in the indie low-budget music scene. Build an audience, and a revenue stream, and sign on the heavyweights. At some point they will realize that while it might be worth reverse engineering the software and building their own system, they can't replicate the community.
Then you have your liquidity event, as they say.
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What Is Lingr?
August 13, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software
Now live: "Lingr is the place for chat on the web. That's it, seriously- nothing could be simpler."
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Declaring First Use
August 9, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
I want to take this moment to claim first use and moral rights on the following trademarks.
- Governance for Design and Technology™
- Feed-Forward Governance™
- Strategic Website Leadership™
- People, Process, and Positive Feedback™
- Feed-Forward Methods for People and Process™
- Proportional Budget Matrix™
- Factor-Based Peer Review™
- Weighted-Factor Competitive Review™
- Concentric Roles™
- Fast-Feedback Design/Build™
- Polyrhythmic Iteration™
- Small-Multiple Deliverables™
- Loosely-Coupled Timeline™
All of the above have zero Google hits as of today.
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That's Odd
August 9, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life
Sticker found on bananas: "Eat five a day for good health." Five bananas a day?? Wow.
How do you know it's early August? You receive the Eddie Bauer Holiday Preview catalog in the mail. That is so, like, in sync! I have been thinking about Christmas gifts and winter clothing recently, haven't you?
The world is a very odd place.
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Bogus Mail List Data
August 4, 2006 | Business & Commerce
Today in the mail I received three identical computer catalogs from Hewlett-Packard (Holliston, MA office). The interesting thing was the people they were addressed to:
- Ms. Roxanne Waldner, Executive Director
- Mr. Bill Bitzer, Executive Director
- Ms. Beth A. Milardo, Manager
So? Well, I don't have any employees, first of all. But those names are familiar. They are clients whose names appear under their testimonial quotes on my professional website. Totally bogus. Either there is a software robot scanning the web for names and addresses to add to direct mail lists, or someone deliberately (and fraudulently) is beefing up the size of their list by intentionally adding whatever names they can find attached to any addresses available.
The worst thing is that these names are now in circulation in the list industry, and will be rented and sold over and over again. More bad data in the infosphere.
The vertically stacked coding numbers on the label were: 0120 — 0046 — [ 012/013/014] — 4294, in case anyone cares where this data came from.
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Small-Scale Music Marketing
August 3, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
Last weekend I recorded my friend Chris and his band, testing out the new gadget. I sat in the second row and held the recorder in my hand on my thigh. Considering the situation, the recording is surprisingly good.
I gave Chris copies of the audio and the .wav file, and encouraged him to post it online. Of course, the band needs to make the decision as a group, and they might want to break it into tracks instead of one 56 minute piece, but the idea was to put it out there.
Chris responded:
I don't think I'll post the whole thing -- our playing isn't up to our snuff throughout -- but definitely snippets.
My internal reaction was, "What if the Grateful Dead or Phish had only put out their perfect playing?" Rarely did a full Dead or Phish show contain flawless playing. We never would have heard anything but official recordings under this criteria. It's also worth noting that I listened to the recording the day after the performance and didn't hear a single error—not that they don't exist, just that the typical listener is not working from the score to easily hear or find mistakes.
Chris' music is much more formal and structured, so you could argue that this style should have a higher quality standard than rock 'n roll. But I would retort by pointing to the boatload of lame classical releases which pale in comparison to the premiere performances of any given composition. Chris' response got me thinking about what I would do if I had a band and wanted to spread the music (assumption alert: they may not want to spread the music). Here's what I consider the basics of small-scale music marketing.
On the website, have a music archive page, and put up mp3's of every show, or at least put them up on Archive.org and point to them there. (This is what Oshe did before they broke up.) Then, sell compilations of the best cuts. Create CD-length "albums" that you can buy (or download from iTunes) that have good flow, that put things together in a new way, that are built around a theme, whatever.
The basic idea is to give away the full-length works for the hardcore fans, for people who went to the show, for people who are going on a long drive and want a full-length work, etc. Then sell the "best of" discs/downloads as the consolidated snapshot. List these at the top of the music page. Feature them on the home page of the website. "Lead" with them, as they say in journalism. Encourage your hardcore fans to buy the compilations to support you, even though they already "own" everything. Present it as a new experience, the Band's Choice, as it were.
This is the model that the Grateful Dead pioneered in the '60s and '70s. Use the free trading to drive people to the live experience. Give away full performances, because what people want to pay for is a unique experience, either live in person or via the "official" CDs. The advantage of putting up everything comes later on, when someone discovers your music and wants to dig deep. Now they've got a huge archive to listen to, and while they're focused on you for a few weeks or months they'll tell their friends, who will go check it out too. If there's just a bit of music posted, you can't create the depth of engagement. And that depth is what will hook people.
Now, having decided what they should do, it might be good to ask them what their goals are. Oh, wait, did I reverse the order?? Sorry, I was acting like a manager, getting all tactical first, not a consultant, starting with the goals. Oh well, this is only what I would do after all.
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A Cooperative Solution
August 1, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Cooperatives | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
An excellent 3,300 word article in Strategy + Business on the cooperative advantage. A very good read.
Cooperatives are often assumed to be merely local affiliations of small and midsized companies, and therefore limited in scope and reach. But their deep roots in their countries of origin — as well as their surprising pervasiveness and stability — are exactly what puts cooperatives in a strong position in the new global economy. Through their highly participative governance models (involving both members and employees in making decisions), the cooperative system is particularly well suited to combining entrepreneurial and social objectives. Because it encourages internal checks and balances and general transparency, cooperative structure also makes it easier to avoid the ethical and legal lapses that have brought down the management of many investor-owned companies.
Also quotes my SoL colleague Arie de Geus, former head of Royal Dutch/Shell scenario planning and author of The Living Company on the value of cooperatives f