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If you’re interested in taking a look at some of the videos from the recent mesh conference, Rob Hyndman has links to the keynotes (Michael Arrington, Richard Edelman, Jim Buckmaster, Tom Williams and Austin Hill) and 15 Minutes of Fame winners.
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After waging a fierce and concerted battled against peer-to-peer networks and people who have used them over the past decade, the music industry has a new enemy that’s threatening its economic model: social networks.
Apparently, social networks such as MySpace and BeBo have emerged as a new and popular way to distribute music - albeit by people who aren’t paying for it. The survey suggests piracy has rebounded because consumers still find music expensive and the fear of legal action has subsided.
John Enser, head of music with Olswang, which conducted the survey with Entertainment Media Research, told the Telegraph that:
“The music industry needs to embrace new opportunities being generated by the increasing popularity of music on social networking sites. Surfing these sites and discovering new music is widespread with the latest generation of online consumers but the process of actually purchasing the music needs to be made easier to encourage sales and develop this new market.”
Is it me but haven’t we heard this kind of statements before about the music industry and its need to encourage sales and leverage new markets? Of course, every time the music industry looks like it’s taking a step forward (i.e. growing iTunes sales, the shutdown of AllofMP3.com), it seems to take a step backward (new, higher royalty rates for Webcasters).
Update: Speaking of iTunes, Apple said today it has sold more than three billion songs.
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Just an update on my search for a new Web host for a new - and terribly exciting! - Wordpress blog I’m launching soon with my brother, Sean. After a lot of great suggestions, I decided on A Small Orange. ASO users were impressed with its customer service, and its prices are extremely reasonable. Thanks to everyone who left comments! The blog will be unveiled in a week or so.
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Over the past couple of years, citizen journalism has become a growing part of the media landscape - and one of the leading players has been Vancouver-based NowPublic.
The company’s profile should get a huge boost amid news it has raised $10.6-million in private equity from Rho Ventures, Brightspark and GrowthWorks. The deal comes just over a year after NowPublic raised $1.4-million from Brightspark and several angel investors.
Mathew Ingram spoke with NowPublic’s Leonard Brody and Michael Tippett about the financing. The two entrepreneurs said they considered takeover offers but decided to focus on growing the company rather selling out too early - a decision likely bolstered by the strong interest in the financing.
Citizen journalism - and the concept’s future - has been in the spotlight recently with the demise of Backfence.com. As well, Dan Gilmour’s high-profile Bayosphere project also failed to resonate with readers or advertisers.
When it comes to citizen journalism, the key question is whether people want to read stories that, for the most part, aren’t as well written, polished or insightful as those written by professional journalists. While there is probably a niche for citizen journalism, it’s hard to see it establishing a major foothold at a time when so much news is available online.
NowPublic hopes to cement itself as the leading citizen journalism player by becoming a wire service with thousands of correspondents around the world. The company’s business model is mostly based on striking deals with media organizations looking to “outsource” their news gathering operations at a time when financial pressures are forcing them to squeeze costs and shrink newsrooms.
Earlier this year, NowPublic signed a deal with Associated Press that will see NowPublic’s citizen journalists contribute content (photos, text and video) to breaking stories on AP. AP will pay citizen journalists if their material is used with NowPublic getting part of the fee.
More: An interesting comment by NowPublic CEO Leonard Brody on GigaOm.com about whether you need to pay your writers: “We’re personally not big believers in paying for content, because we want you to own your content.â€
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Is there anything more frustrating than pouring milk into a steaming cup of morning coffee only to discover the milk’s gone bad? You’d think a milk maker looking for a competitive edge would offer technology that would let you know how long your milk has left before it goes bad. I mean, if Coors can come up with technology that lets you know when your brew is cold enough to drink, the milk industry can get on the high-tech bandwagon too.
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I wrote a post earlier this week about being tired of Facebook.
An interesting comment was how my view on Facebook reflects the fact that as someone really involved with the Web (aka online way too much!), I was hungry to try out new services/applications, and at the same time, impatient to move on to the next cool thing. This approach contrasts with probably 99% of online users who move slower and take more time to embrace a new service such as Facebook.
So as the “cool kids” such as Jason Calacanis ditch the “old” to move on to the “new”, most everything else is just starting to get used to the new or hasn’t even tried the new out yet.
Realizing the chasm between the leading/bleeding edge and the mainstream is important because they are two distinct groups with different needs, behaviours and roles.
While the in crowd may set the tone and determine whether a service is valuable/useful/needs improvement, the mainstream will eventually determine whether the service is going to be commercially viable.
More: In keeping with the theme of this post, it’s interesting to read about Pownce in today’s New York Times, and how it’s got “street cred” by opening itself up on an invite-only basis.
It’s interesting to see Pownce get this kind of coverage given it’s really just another social networking/P2P service - albeit started by an entrepreneur - Digg’s Kevin Rose - with a relatively high profile.
Having used Pownce, it’s an interesting service but I don’t share the enthusiasm that Om Malik (an insider’s insider within the Web 2.0 landscape) exudes in the NYT story.
To me, the most interesting part of Pownce is how you can share files (music, video, etc.) with friends using P2P technology. For content producers worried about the economic threats of P2P, Pownce could be a huge nightmare if it gets any kind of traction.
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Has the Globe & Mail been reading my blog?
You’d think so given a story that appeared earlier this week (”Technophiles Hit the Pause Button“) looking at people who had decided to take a “sabbatical” from e-mail, the Blackberrys, blogs, etc. At a time when being always-on, all-the-time is becoming easier and more ubiquitous, many people are struggling with the reality it’s challenging - if not impossible - to get away from it all.
One argument about being continually accessible/connected is it’s just a reality of work/personal life these days so just suck it up if you don’t like the idea of people being obsessed by e-mail, blogging, etc. The other side of the coin is more people are getting themselves out of balance by allowing/letting the digital sides of their lives to be ever-present.
So what do you do to maintain balance? How do you stay connected yet give yourself time to be unconnected? Maybe it’s about establishing boundaries. During certain hours/times of the day, you allow yourself to check e-mail, blog, etc.; while you also establish certain times (e.g. dinner) to turn off and tune out.
Somewhere in between being on and being off is making sure you’re focused on the here and now. Instead of checking your e-mail while having lunch with someone, for example, do the right/polite thing by waiting until afterward lunch is over. It’s not like an e-mail is that urgent that it requires your immediate attention. If someone really wants to get in touch with you, maybe they’ll do something radical and call you.
The bottom line is maintaining work/life and digital/non-digital balance is going to be a challenge more people are going to have to tackle. For some people, it may mean taking a sabbatical; for others it make mean giving yourself more structure and discipline; while others will simply concede digital defeat and stay connected all the time.
Post Script: It is somewhat ironic that I’m writing this post while vacationing at a cottage without Internet access. I had to come into town to do, which is enterprising and sad at the same time. Nevertheless, I do feel re-charged by focusing on the lake, family, food, cocktails and reading (newspapers, books, magazines) as opposed to blogs, e-mail, etc.
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Not sure about you but I’m getting a bad case of Facebook-itis. Everywhere you turn, it’s Facebook that and/or Facebook this.
For example, a U.S. judge is apparently going to decide this week whether to grant an injunction related to three ex-Harvard students who allege Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea when he was hired to do some programming for their social networking service a few years ago. There was another item in yesterday’s paper about a “white knight” in Cambridge, Ont., who successfully worked to have a group removed from Facebook that was aimed at a troubled street woman. And yet another column about someone’s father found himself hooked on Facebook after trying to ignore it.
Then, there’s the constant friendship requests….and people recommending new applications…and Facebook buying start-ups….and venture capitalists thinking about investing in start-ups developing Facebook applications….and whether Facebook will be acquired for $10-billion or do an IPO.
Sure, Facebook (or FB as the cool kids apparently call it now) is a super-popular service and certainly enjoying more than its 15 minutes of fame. But how much Facebook is enough?
This may be an off-the-mark thesis but I think Facebook’s popularity has crested. I’m not suggesting it’s going to be Friendster-rized (hot and trendy today; popular only in Brazil and parts of Asia tomorrow) but Facebook has reached that point where it doesn’t seem that cool or in anymore.
We’ve arrived at a fork in the road where Facebook’s ongoing success/popularity will depend on how useful it continues to be. Maybe Facebook’s user-friendly interface will keep it at the top of the heap, and maybe all those Facebook Apps will make the platform more useful beyond collecting friends.
Then again, online users are notoriously fickle so maybe Facebook should go public or do an IPO before the cool kids discover another hot social networking service down the street - leaving Facebook and wunderkind CEO Mark Zuckerberg wondering what happened.
Of course, I could be completely, totally wrong but when it comes to me and Facebook, I’ve lost that loving feeling.
For more on Facebook Fatigue, check out Alx Klive’s WorldTV Blog. Like me, he argues the biggest threat to Facebook and social networking sites is “fashion”. “Social networking sites by their very nature are trend based. They can be fashionable for a bit, but after a while a new one comes along which is cooler. Switching between two social networking applications is becoming a right of passage….”
Update: Interesting to see that Jason Calcanis has declared Facebook Bankruptcy.
Technorati Tags: Facebook
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Taking some holiday time in cottage country so fairly light blogging this week. You’ll probably find me here:
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Technology is awesome but far too frustrating sometimes - most of it caused by manufacturers who seem to have little clue about consumers and what they really want.
For example, I bought a Casio Exilim EX-275 digital camera last weekend after watching Loren Feldman wander around the mesh conference taking videos until the cows came home.
You know how much memory comes with the camera? According to the Best Buy salesman: “about enough to take 10 pictures”. Of course, this means you have to buy some memory to make the camera useful.
How come it doesn’t standard with more memory - say 1GB - given memory is so cheap these days and the average consumer is taking hundreds of pictures as well as video these days without even thinking about it.
Maybe it’s a way for the camera makers to keep prices down. After all, if you’re including one or two gigabytes of memory but your camera costs $25 to $50 more than the next guy who’s not including memory, that could have negative competitive consequences.
Here’s some more consumer-unfriendly technology riddles.
1. iTunes/iPod: Okay, I totally get why Apple and the music industry don’t want to give us the ability to hand an iPod to a friend so they can cut and paste our music collection into their iPod or personal computer. But what I don’t get is why it’s not easy to synch your iPod with the iTunes you have on different computers.
For example, I have two laptops and a desktop computer - all of which I use to rip, download and play music. In an ideal world, I could connect my iPod to all of them and get my entire collection to easily synched. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem to offer a way to make this happen, and I can’t track down another solution/hack that would make it easy to do.
2. The remote control: Since the first remote control probably appeared in the 1950s, they have become increasingly more complicated as opposed to easier to use. These days, you need an engineering degree just to figure out how to power up the TV, let alone control the DVD, digital box, Slingbox, etc.
The funny thing is the remote control industry believes the solution is simply adding more technology! The way they see it, it’s a matter of giving you a remote control that, in theory, can automatically connect with all your devices (assuming they aren’t a decade old). Of course, you then have to read through the entire manual to figure out how to control your devices once the remote control does its set-up thing. Sometimes, I yearn for the days when the remote control was just a box with about 20 buttons on it and a shifter that gave you ability to browse through 60 channels in no time at all.
3. Vista. I don’t use Vista but the frustrations I’ve seen from other people using Vista blow me away. Among the best (or worse depending on your point of view) issues is Vista asking if it has security permission so you access your security software. Ha!
4. Composite hockey sticks: A bit of a technology stretch but the newest rage in the hockey business is selling composite hockey sticks that are supposed to make your shot better and faster. The problem is some of these sticks last a long time but some of them only last a game or two before crumbling due to “quality control” issues. If the technology was that advanced, why is this happening, especially when you’re paying $100 to $200 for a “superior” product?
Anyway, enough of my ranting. If you’ve got any tech riddles to shares, fire away.
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