That’s not the rational behind Richard Jones and the Majors decision to "Set Free" music. Advertising is heavily moving into the music realm and Last.FM isn’t just a place for Music anymore. It’s kind of a music only Youtube these days. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a Last.FM user for years and I’ve loved every moment of their service. The idea basically presented in Richard Jones Blog is that you can listen to the same full length track or album a full three times before being prompted to sign up for their full service. I wonder sometimes how much Steve Jobs’ arrogance against the subscription model has cost his company. Last.FM and Rhapsody (not to mention the Zune Properties to come) are building full scale music service stacks which integrate seamlessly into the home with devices like Sonos and other new companies on the horizon. If anything this is at least a small move in the right direction of making music a free property in which to up-sell premium services like concerts and other merchandise. I hope this goes well for all involved.
Archive for January, 2008
If you love it, you will set it free!
January 23, 2008How about iPhone or iPod + Wallet (The United States of Phone & Wallet)
January 13, 2008I had an idea, how about build a wallet that you can insert and it holds and protects the cell phone? That means it’s less one thing you have to carry, and I never forget my wallet at home. We all use Bluetooth anyhow right? (Pictured is a three fold. You fold the phone side in first and then the other over to protect the phone to the max. What takes longer? Pulling a wallet out of your front pocket? (Were I wear my Wallet) or pulling it out of the clip. I wonder if someone will see this in make it. If you do let me know, I’d be glad to know I made a difference. All you have to do is sell something that is iPhone or iPod related and it sells anyhow.
Flickr: Leading the Way to the Semantic Future.
January 8, 2008First, a picture for every place, and now OpenID friendly, Yahoo! is on a role providing a first class picture storage service with all the bells and whistles that matter to their users and people who use it as a service in their mashups. As I have said before, open, isn’t open on the web unless it has URI independence, or in OpenID’s case, FOAF service files. Open ID also makes great use of the VCF format and the XFN. Many more services will enable this in the future, and you can comment on Google blogs with OpenID.
Once you start seeing the vast majority of the clouds largest services becoming machine readable or semantic you can then include these features in open source clients. This will further lead to that sector becoming competitive in the race to create new innovative mashups of functionality. I’m excited to see what happens next. APML (evolution of OPML) will eventually tie in with these services I’m thinking, and we hopefully will end up being the owners of our own data.
Macbook Mini or Macbook touch: Two handed multi-touch?
January 8, 2008The Macbook mini/touch could be two handed, I have been thinking. Apple has always taken the position of form over function (see iPhone) and so I wondered why you would have such a huge multi-touch panel on the new ultra-thin portable most likely called Macbook Mini or Macbook Touch but I supposed might be called the Nano?
Macbook Nano sounds weird doesn’t it? Mackbook Mini is my guess but I bet that sucker is two handed and contains major upgrades to OSX 10. That is, if this picture from CrunchGear.com is real.
(The Picture on the right shows a smaller (Macbok Pro style Macbook mini with a longer touchpad,)
There was no second great depression; why would there be another dot-com crash?
January 5, 2008Much of life is nothing more than a million instances of a flowing pendulum slowly repeating itself; flowing back and forth but ever so slowly coming to a halt. From time to time, new unique stimuli introduce themselves in the form of a new innovative breakthrough, and society as we know it is changed forever and world changes either in an instant, or over a period of time.
Black Tuesday was the result of that society not having a means to protect itself from this unique set of stimuli. The dot com bust era had much in common with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which led the United States into, "The Great Depression." but we’ve had no second day like that because we’ve implemented preventive measures that prevent the same stimuli from producing the same results. There could always be additional stimuli that produce similar results to "The Great Depression," but it wouldn’t be called the great depression, it would be called something else.
Greg Linden’s "The coming 2008 dot-com crash" does bring the thought to mind though.
The crash will be driven by a recession and prolonged slow growth in the US. Global investment capital will flee to quality, ending the speculative dumping of cash on Web 2.0 startups.
Man, this sounds very ugly. I don’t think it will be so bad but hell, neither Greg no I have any ability to see for sure what’s going to happen.
What we do know: If there were strong evidence to suggest that this was going to happen you would see a mass movement in capital taking place right now, and as far as I know there is not one happening. Could we see consolidation? Sure! But we could also see more growth, anyone read JPMorgan’s "Nothing but Net?" the guys over at TechCrunch did, and the report which I haven’t read yet mentioned that return on the US dollar in 2007 was up over 150% more than in 2006? and we should expect companies to see "34 percent earning growth" in 2008.
Currently, we are in a dot-property value crash, and I sure hope we can climb out of this before we hit the next one. Let’s say that every startup dollar that was in Santa Clara county in 1998 left today, we still would not see another dot-com bust, just like we never saw another, "Black Tuesday." I don’t mean to disagree so much but I think unless there is a nuke attack somewhere, and we get out of Iraq, and things settle down there a bit (I know I’m being an optimist) You will see a little less foreign capital as the dollar rounds off and gets a little bit more heavy.
After I say all of this, I have to think of more reasons to reassure myself this gloomy story wont happen. I’m thinking about all of the eyeballs on the Internet. I know we have a heck of a lot more of the US on broadband now, much more of Europe, Asia, and the monstrous behemoth that is china. The one laptop per child program. We are rolling out eyeballs. Advertisers can’t send a piece of paper these places with their logo on it, but they sure can throw it in a .swf file and have it everywhere faster than you can type Adwords.com
Get Well Soon Om Malik
January 4, 2008Om Malik recently had a heart attack right before new years on December 28th. The holidays can and are stressful for all of us, but I’d like to take this moment to with the best to you and your family Om. I spent most of December either thinking about or being with my mom who was in the hospital. I know how quickly things change when someone so close to you, and how quickly priorities change in these situations. I even declared to my friends that 2007, with the exception of my marriage, was perhaps the most stressful year of my life. I pushed harder and harder on myself, I told myself I could do more and more, and not only at my job all around me in my family life, my extended family. It was the the year of trying to make a difference in so many ways. I get stressed out and I tell myself I wish things were better and then it takes something like this, or something I witnessed on NYE to put things in a proper respective for me. My life isn’t so bad, I have a loving wife and family, I have many friends who care about me, I have a great job and I work for a great company who cares about its employees even though there are so many. It can be taxing to be in the know at all times, I try to do it so much that it stresses me out as well. It’s good that your family is there for you to support you, you are a lucky man, and I wish you and your family the best of a 2008, and if not, at least a healthy one!
Best wishes!
-Jason bogovich aka GeekSpeaker
Twitter, The Best Human Powered Search Engine
January 3, 2008Mathew Ingram has noted that you Jason C. said you have to be a player to have a killer app. Then it occurred to me, Twitter is a much better human powered search engine than Malaho. People ask questions on the service and have a multitude of human delivered solutions instantly and one can even refine a question to get a million responses. Surely, this feature will get better and better as the collective IQ of the service increases beyond Jason’s capital. No offense Jason, your service is really cool but, when you talk about human powered everything needs to be in context. And so with just a few words we’ve solved the Techmeme puzzle of the day, the best way to monetize Twitter, is to subsidize the "answers you get back" with an add or two. That would be original, it wouldn’t be too awkward, and it would be the magic sauce like Google has:
I recently heard someone say that the reason Google does so well is that the user’s provide the data for the advertising willfully, and it’s this data in which Twitter must present ads to in order to effectively moniztize Twitter.
There you have it! Be a player! =-P
Huge Multi-touch Macbook Mini?
January 2, 2008Peter Ha over at Crunch Gear is running a photo that "may be real. "
The object in the picture appears to be the new rumored smaller thinner Macbook with a huge multi-touch interface.
I would go on to assume that even though the larger Macbook pro looking thing next to it has a normal looking touchpad, it is a 2007 Macbook pro and the new ones will come in a multi-touch interface as well, and I would hope that us 2007 Macbook pro user’s will be able to upgrade to multi-touch by sending out Macs in, or at the very least some Bluetooth peripheral?
I think it could be a fake, it looks as though the trackpad’s button is too high, but it could just be the angle of the light.
Twitter needs to innovate, elaborate, associate and inflate before it’s too late.
January 2, 2008Allen Stern recently asked, "is Twitter F’ed?"
The question of business model timing seems to come up weekly with regards to some startup. As Twitter usage has grown, have they f’ed themselves out of a real, sustainable business model? And has Pownce done something right by launching with a business model? Personally I prefer that a startup come out of the gate with a business model — perhaps it’s the accountant in me.
Everyone is questioning business model timing and I say focus on the core feature set and your think of your customers as "fans" and forget about the business model–for now. User’s are just now starting to hear the word twitter. Twitter is not going away! We are way back in the early stages still, many rooks still on the table.
- Make sure the Pownce isn’t the verb people use. Make sure it’s a tweet. (I just feel like Pownce’ing someone is a bad thing to do, pro account or no pro)
- Innovate your freaking butt off until everyone is begging for sleep; everyone in the company must come up with one additional idea or way to use the service each and every day.
- Elaborate by explaining all of these other ways to get users is to explain exactly what it is and why it is your users want to use your service. Currently you have:
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
What the heck does that mean??? Remember the critical mass needs to see that in action. They need to know how to get started I don’t mean to say what that says is bad, but I know it could be more informative, some users only hit the page once and then bounce off.
- Partner your butt off. Associate, talk to other people, this is the way Microsoft did so well. Dave Winer mentions some ideas here.
- Show it in action show the people why their lives are better because of twitter, show how it’s changing the world show them this and everyone wants to be a part of a success story, not an advertisement.
Forget about the bubble and think about ways to expand the problems in which your service could solve. - Inflate: get more servers and admin in order to stabilize the service.
- Get someone else thinking about how to get the money coming in, but don’t implement yet because you don’t want to screw up your awesome service.
Jason Calacanis knows how to make money with a service, and he has his take here. He basically says you need:
1. In feed Advertising
2. SMS Adverting
3. Subscriptions
Before you implement these service, try to think of a unique way to deliver advertisements that is kind on the vast majority of your users. I would hold off longer if I were you but I don’t see the inside picture. Make some arrangement with Google to use some of their infrastructure, partner with them, get your tweets working before your advertisements or you will loose users to the competition. Follow everyone’s take at Techmeme. It’s also a great place to see an advertising system that is set up which does not interfere with the core offering, which is to correctly follow the best stories, but shows related advertising in a non-obtrusive, Google way.
FlickrFan is worth a 1000 feeds
January 2, 2008They say a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s very true, a picture is not only worth a thousand words, but a picture doesn’t have any bias. A picture doesn’t put spin on something and a picture is one of many formats that our more visually enabled world is getting used to have displayed in just about any format.
There is one on the front page of every news paper which I would assume makes much of the difference on whether someone purchases it or not. Considering the newspaper is a thing of yesteryear, and we are entering the semantic age (not there yet but soon) Enter the person responsible for the vast majority of data distribution in the next five years–Dave Winer.
Dave Winer recently released FlickrFan in the form a logical add on to his not so advertised OPML editor tool. I’ve given thought to this exact type of tool in the past and what makes Dave special is he takes most of his ideas and runs with them.
The idea is simple, subscribe to the RSS feeds you want, for instance one can subscribe to an RSS feed of my pictures on flikr, ( I have a few cool pictures up) or if you want to see live pictures which are GEO tagged instantly appear in your home, subscribe to a flikr feed of–let’s say–Hawaii to
see every picture in the world that is uploaded to flikr geotagged Hawaii instantly appear in any screen in your home. Living in North East Ohio, I’d say that’s a beautiful thing.
The theme I was talking about before was that we live in a more and more semantic and a more visually enabled world. People expect to be able to visualize anything, and any digital idea of creation is only some programming hours away from a reality.
Once you have Flikr fan up and running you can "screen cast" to any other mac. I’ve been searching for a pragmatic way to get these pictures to my TV and all I have to do is share and include the flikr friend folder my Xbox 360’s and the pictures are presented in all of the glory of the Xbox 360’s video power.
Perhaps all you have is Macs and you would like to install the program just once, you could either just install on the machine you plan using the most or just install good old ScreenRecycler which uses VNC to do all of the heavy lifting for you by simply sending the screen session over your wireless or LAN connection (just make sure you choose 24 bit color quality.)
The Future: A semantic Internet is simply an Internet which is readable by machines. We are starting to see programs that take advantage of this via the RSS feeds and the API’s in which Flikr makes available. For instance you can now have any picture of any location earth appear on any screen in my house, I can. But I want the concept taken a bit further, I want pictures of the location "x" with theme "y" and I want an algorithm which matches the feed’s location and metadata to search my music library and play the correct photos so that it can then group the right photos and music into "bunches" and play them all in a semantic chewy golden way.
The greatest part about dreaming about such a thing is I know that it won’t be long until such a thing exists. I love technology.
GeekSpeaker 