Algorithms and Sensors – web 3.0 services abound
November 25th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Its been a while since my last post – I’ve been consumed at my work ( which I have been really enjoying) . However, I felt compelled today to write a bit about algorithms and sensors, which are creating some GREAT services now and even better in the near future. We are watching web 3.0 ‘blossom’ right now. Here is what I mean.
Ever since I’ve gotten my hands on Apple’s new iPhone 4Gs and Siri, my mind has never been the same. Not that Siri is the end all and be all. It has its drawbacks and in fairness, Apple has always and still does call it a ‘beta’.
But the mere presence and interaction I’ve had with Siri signaled something new to me on the internet was really happening – and in a very subtle but meaningful way.
Siri is learning – yes, she really does learn. “Artificial Intelligence” – no one seems to think that the machines are actually intelligent, but they can certainly do a lot of things that used to be hard for computers. Clearly Siri is an ‘AI’ that is programmed to adapt in certain ways and modify its behavior according to how I or what I would request of Siri. Fascinating really.
The real thing to keep your eye on here is that sensors plus big data algorithms are leading us from today’s world where content considered king to one where content is simply one component of a service. Content is becoming secondary and the service and platform primary. There never used to be 13 different ways to rent’ the same movie before. Content is becoming commoditized. When Siri was first introduced, its creators called it a “do engine.” that is, rather than retrieving a web page (media) that you consume to make a decision, it just does things for you. “Find me a restaurant near here.” “Make me a reservation.” Media will become part of a database back end rather than a media front end.
Some examples of sensory algorithms that in effect build a network-mediated global mind are (this is really us, just augmented):
– Mobile cell devices -we are augmented with cellphone cameras (electronic sensors again), the ability of events to become a shared experience is has become vastly increased and more so now with social media connects.
– Smart Parking Meters – In the city of San Francisco, you’re seeing something similar, where all the parking meters are equipped with sensors, and pricing varies by time of day, and ultimately by demand. In effect an “algorithmic regulation” – they regulate in the same way our body regulates itself, autonomically and unconsciously.
– Predictive AdWords -Google’s Adwords were always more effective than competitors because Google was better at learning from human input – instead of selling ads to the highest bidder as competitors such as Yahoo did, they used machine learning algorithms to predict which ads were more likely to be clicked on. They might choose an advertiser who only wanted to pay half as much if their ad was 3 times as likely to be clicked. Google was the first to harness the collective intelligence of their users to improve ad results. Just like the social media platforms we use to disseminate events and other digerati it’s important to understand just how much this is man-machine symbiosis.
– Large connected networks – it could be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or G+, but any one of them connects to most of us somewhere at some point. The massive sharing of data and thoughts, the crowd-sourcing of opinion and the collective conclusions we draw are all kept and logged, improved upon and progressively mature and evolve. Here and on these massive giants, nothing stays the same for very long. The mere platforms themselves have spawned other interconnected platforms like Zynga.
The Internet as a whole is a mirror image of us – a thriving interconnected network. It improves with knowledge and data and learns 24/7. It’s the community that creates content. Its about how you engage people and who you engage, not the number of followers. It’s about the collective impact we make together. The Internet is an architecture of participation, interconnected, open source and open protocols. It really is our global brain. Look at the ‘picture’ of the network. It is no coincidence that it looks the way it does.
the internet
Google also thinks about this. Their key business model depends on the success of others – driving traffic to their sites, and producing ad results. Google only does well if their partners do well.
Contrast this with how the dwindling and toxic financial firms, who once positioned themselves as the enabler of the economy, creating liquidity and trading on behalf of clients, began to trade against them, and increasingly created products – from the mortgage backed loans that brought down the global economy to even more reprehensible trading practices that have driven up the cost of food for starving millions and was directly responsible for not only our economic collapse, but the ripple effects that are being felt worldwide. This is capitalism gone wrong. Occupy Wall Street’s fundamentals are not incorrect.
In the end, a company is most successful when it makes all of its stakeholders successful, not just its shareholders – a good example of this is Apple.
Which brings me back to algorithms and sensors. Soon, Apple will release an API for Siri. Many businesses’ that can use it will use it and the revolution will progress in earnest. As Siri learns what I do the most on my mobile device, she will also begin to learn my doctor’s and dentist’s name, the nearest hospital to me and map, my grocery list and cost and what I’ve run out of in my house, the type of movies I watch and music I listen to and where to find the content. In short, Siri will make my life a little more convenient and predictive. It will combine my habits with my surfing activities on the Internet and will suggest based on location where to buy items that interest me conveniently and cost-effectively based on my location.
'Things to Come' 1936
Just think of the services that will come…H.G. Wells would have had a blast.
The End of An Era – Music Companies, ‘cloud’ services and the ISP’s are laughing all the way to the Bank, courtesy of you and me!
May 14th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Amazon’s Cloud Drive, Google’s BetaMusic, iTunes upcoming ‘cloud’ offering, current subscription based music ‘cloud’ services and music ‘lockers’ ( eMusic, Spotify, Rhapsody, Thumbplay Music, mSpot, MP3Tunes, and others) are all similar in many ways.
There are slight differences in the cost and the amount of storage for free that you get initially. After that, users will find the old fashioned way we now store and playback music might in fact have been the best and most cost efficient after all.
Today, we all have mp3’s or m4p’s (iTunes) stored somewhere on our computers or in an external hard drive or both. We have our iPod and other devices to playback these files. Load up a playlist and take them with you. Soon, the above mentioned services will offer us the ability to ship all or some of our music collection to what effectively is a hard drive outside our house or computer – essentially letting them live ‘over there’ or wherever that service lives, be it Amazon, Google or Apple. Load up a playlist and playback the music just as we do now.
A few things will change however that will drastically alter not how or what we listen to but what it will cost us to listen to what we now playback for free. And the changes are subtle but substantial. And these changes are all designed to generate money, a lot of it, for 3 separate entities; the music cloud service of your choice, the music companies and your local ISP.
What has been an essentially free activity for all of us (creating and playing back music on our device of choice locally), will now very quickly become an expensive one, remotely. The change has been slowly evolving – with the ISP’s like Comcast, Time-Warner and others that supply us leading the way. They have all decided to ‘cap’ and meter our bandwidth usage under various tiered plans. Just like we get our water and electricity usage metered, so will our ‘internet’ usage.
And that’s old news – I’m not telling you anything you have not already heard before. Soon, we will keenly be aware of how much data we will be using monthly. And now, the new music ‘cloud’ offerings will present us with tiered pricing plans to store our music monthly as well. You might have 10 gigs of music (which is NOT a heck of a lot, personally) today that you want to store on Google’s Beta Music Cloud Drive ( they are just being used as one example). For me, I’ve got a ton more than that and I add to that monthly. So initially, I’ll choose a plan for 10 gigs, but I am 100% sure over time, I will eventually double that.
In addition to those charges I want to turn on my ‘cloud’ player and listen to some tunes being played back at my home, through my PC piped into my speakers in the house. Well that used to be free when I loaded up my player locally on my PC. Now with my house being metered, here’s a rough idea of what I could be faced with.
1GB streamed per month = a little more than half an hour of music per day
3GB streamed per month = about 2 hours of music per day
5GB streamed per month = about 3.1 hours of music per day
For music aficionados, that is not a lot of time spent listening to my music. Now mind you, I don’t have to use a cloud service to listen locally – I can continue doing what I do now. But that also means I’ve got to keep a duplicate set of files. And it does not include any bandwidth for any other activities on the Internet during the month I engage in. If you have a iPhone or other device that plays back music, sure you can stream your collection from that same cloud service, but wait, there’s a data cap on your phone too. But wait, there’s more. The new Chrome notebook offers a plan too when you are NOT connected to WiFi – and it’s not cheap:
• Free 100MB per month (what you get with the first two years of ownership under the current plan): 1 hour and 45 minutes of music playback for an entire month
• $10 for an unlimited day pass: listen all day
• $20 for 1GB of data in a given month: a little over half hour of music per day
• $35 for 3GB of data in a given month: nearly two hours of music per day
• $50 for 5GB of data in a given month: a little over three hours of music per day
All of this cost and metering does not include monthly cloud ‘subscription’ costs. Put it all together and you might be looking at some heavy fees every month that you don’t currently pay storing and playing back your music collection locally or playing back on the road through your iPhone, etc.
Now I am a big cloud advocate – there are some big advantages clearly in storing your collection outside of your house. The biggest single advantage I can think of is a disaster – and they DO happen. Replacing a 60gig collection is not only time consuming and expensive but just go and try to remember what was in your collection of say 40,000 songs – good luck! This alone is reason enough to consider storing your collection remotely. Other disadvantages include getting the songs up there to start and you don’t want to move the collection once you are there. Ever try moving 60gigs quickly – there is no quickly. So choose your service very carefully!
While all of these new music services sound great and offer us new and improved ways to listen to our music, I can’t help wondering if one day a few years back the ISP’s and the music industry got together in one big Hotel room and figured this out as a way to get back all of the lost revenue that the ‘Napster’, ‘Kaaza’ and ‘Limewire’ era sucked out of them. Maybe they will get the last laugh after all. Here’s a better one – how would a Netflix for example, replicate a ‘cloud’ locker storage scenario for movies I might purchase? Could it? Just think of THAT cloud storage plan!! Ouch!
Sshhh!…what’s real reason why Comcast is buying NBC? TV Everywhere of course.
December 4th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
G.E.’s decision to sell NBC Universal reflects the shifts in fortune that are battering the media business, especially network television. The broadcast division of NBC Universal could lose big, a remarkable downturn for a network that had earned roughly $400 million in past years.
Problem: the Internet has fractured audiences and few viable business models have emerged for the distribution of content online.
What the new Comcast venture looks like: Comcast will contribute its own cable channels, which include Versus, the Golf Channel and the E Entertainment channel, and a modest amount of cash, about $5 billion, to a joint venture in which it will own 51 percent. G.E. will retain a 49 percent stake, and would likely reduce its ownership over several years and in theory, Comcast-NBC Universal will be a company separate from Comcast’s cable assets.
Some interesting possibilities could be:
It could use its power in film, with Universal Studios, to expand video-on-demand offerings by altering movie release windows to make movies available on demand the same day they are released on DVD.
It could use its power in film, with Universal Studios, to expand video-on-demand offerings by altering movie release windows to make movies available on demand the same day they are released on DVD to all active basic cable subscribers that buy HBO and SHOWTIME or purchase at least 1 on-demand film per month.
Buying Netflix: Stream movies through this service coupling subscription on cable with certain consumer benefits through Netflix, i.e. day and date with DVD or perhaps even a scheme to stream films just released in theaters 1 time only to ‘frequent flyers’ or renters of the service, but at a big ticket price on-demand.
But here is the real reason why Comcast is buying NBC: TV Everywhere. “TV Everywhere” model, which promises to give their subscribers exactly what they want: anytime, anywhere access to any TV content. They have to do this to keep their customer bases and compete. In a TV Everywhere world, the role of the multi-system operator is diminished. Your cable or satellite TV provider will no longer be your only (legal) means of watching the current episode of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. In a TV Everywhere world, Curb Your Enthusiasm will be available on literally thousands of websites and mobile apps, as long as you can authenticate yourself as a paying cable or satellite subscriber with the HBO package. Comcast risks becoming a “dumb pipe,” providing little more than bandwidth. To avoid that fate, Comcast recognizes that it needs to move upstream and own or control the content itself, thus NBC/Uni. More to the point, a consumer COULD elect to turn off his cable basic subscription and turn around and subscribe to TVE thereby allowing him to see his basic cable channels but on his PC, phone etc. Now that Comcast owns content and some of those channels it can monetize the consumer whether or not they subscribe to the cable in the house or not.
In a TV Everywhere world, it will be a terribly crowded space, with a ton of noise and websites with similar content. The sites that perform best will be the ones that create the best user experience for viewing TV content – and right now, that’s Hulu ( and who knows, maybe Clicker ?). If Comcast buys NBC, Comcast will own about 1/3 of Hulu, providing an ideal launching pad for TV Everywhere it has a very passionate and loyal audience.
This online world is a very splintered and exceedingly difficult to measure, especially when you are asked to sell advertising against the content. The real problem is a lack of tools to properly bring the right economy of scale to online which equates to buying media in a traditional way. Therefore, instead of trying to monetize a cable channel online one by one, with TVE, you can monetize the whole package in a similar way that cable already is monetized. Its a structure already understood by the consumer now. Bundle a bunch of cable channels for a small monthly fee and let consumers have access to them everywhere, including home or NOT.
The Internet while very big, does not yet command the equivalent kind of media rates and fees that Cable or Network gets today. No agreed upon means of measurement exists to give advertisers a definitive ‘rate card’ for the internet. There is no Nielsen for the web, (yet, although it was announced yesterday by Nielsen that eventually, there will be). comScore, even though they do a great job with data can’t extrapolate the data to equate to viewers ‘watching a TV set’. Making the comparison when placing an ad on a video online and the same ad on TV impossible to compare TODAY. Hulu streamed 855 million video stream last month. What does that really mean? Did all 855m viewers who watched those streams watch ALL of each stream or were many of them counted as they ‘surfed’ through Hulu clicking on various videos for a few minutes or even seconds – were they counted among the 855m? What does 855m stream equate to in Nielsen ratings/eyeballs? Does anyone really know? Nielsen despite its shortcomings has some measurable statistics for this, but its still not apples to apples.
Furthermore, Hulu still has a long way to go to prove it can monetize its audience as effectively as its parent companies can do with programs viewed on-air. Why? Its uniques are flat. Hulu’s uniques are scarcely better than they were 6 months ago. Unless the unique number jumps in the coming months (which I doubt it will), Hulu will have to meaningfully enhance its value proposition to grow its audience (can you say “Hulu to-the-TV-via-Xbox/Roku/Apple TV/etc?”) says Will Richmond of Videonuze (Nov 30th 2009). He goes on to ask “What happens to Fox’s programs on Hulu should Rupert Murdoch expand his focus beyond his newspapers’ online content going premium? What if Disney decides to launch its own subscription services? What if Google or Microsoft or Netflix (or someone else) decides to open their wallet and make a bigger play in premium online video?” And, these questions become somewhat less mysterious now that Comcast has bought NBC/Universal.TV will NEVER be the same again.
Comcast chart above courtesy of VideoNuze.com
Posted via email from williamsager’s posterous
You’ll be able to go to Eagles.com (currently under construction) and get all their songs. They’re going to do it; it’s coming up in about 2 months.
November 14th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
And the music labels thought that the seas of music are calmer these days? Hoping to re-napster themselves and capture licensed music in a bottle this time around, the very core of the labels music is leaking and the ship might never really leave the store. The vast majority of music revenue is generated from its catalog. It sells way more than the current fare released on itunes, etc. ENTER: The copyright monster.
this looks very cool….
June 27th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_HnnBw-JCk&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
TV is coming to the iPhone and it’s free and it will ‘rock’ rumor has it.
May 16th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Word on the street is
Hulu will be putting out a free iPhone app very soon that streams full length TV shows using 3G and WiFi. And any hopes of AT&T charging for TV flew out the window. Guess Apple 
will be sucking wind about charging all of us now through iTunes to watch the same things. Wonder what that will do to iTunes sales of these shows. My hunch is not too much and if anything will make more fans and will increase ratings. Why? Why do I say that giving away ‘Lost’ won’t cause a loss of
sales of the same at iTunes? 
Because, if you are really a rabid ‘Lost’ fan, you will want to own it anyway, whether you get to watch last night’s season finale or not. Giving it away for free (and on a very small screen) only whets the appetite of those that might decide to sample the show using the app. Come ‘on everyone, haven’t you all
heard of piracy? 
Well, this is simply ‘legal’ . Have you ever heard of the WWF? (or WWE today). They still give away wrestling on TV daily on TBS and charge $ 39.99 or more for essentially the same show on PPV. It seems like someone in Hollywood may finally be seeing the light.
The video industry may be encouraging the very behavior they seek to stop.
January 19th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
A very good article from Rob Griffiths at Macworld. Its worth reading because he’s on the money here. Furthermore, what he does not mention is that a lot of the piracy actually stems from the employees at the studios themselves releasing DVD screeners out onto the web.
As a consumer of audio and video in many forms—CDs, DVDs, and online purchases—I find it interesting to watch as the various media businesses adjust to life in a digital world. On the music side of the world, it seems that (slowly but surely) they’re starting to “get it.” Consumers don’t like to be hassled by digital rights management (DRM), they want to pay a fair price, and they want to use their music on devices they own without worrying about format, rights, or permissions issues.
For the longest time, the music industry insisted on copy protection for online music sales, even though (higher quality) CD versions of that same music were (generally) shipped without any form of copy protection.
So at first, everything you bought from the (then) iTunes Music Store was protected by FairPlay, Apple’s generous (but still restrictive) DRM solution.
In June of 2007, though, the first chinks in the DRM armor appeared, with Apple and EMI announcing iTunes Plus, DRM-free music at higher bit rates for $1.29 per song, versus the 99 cents per song for the FairPlay-protected versions.
Then, in September 2007, Amazon launched its own MP3 download service. Unlike the iTunes Store at the time, music in the Amazon MP3 store was (and remains) completely free of DRM. As a consumer, I was intrigued, and tried it out. While the Amazon MP3 store can’t rival the rich experience you get in the iTunes Store, it’s not a bad solution, and its download tool automatically adds my purchases to iTunes.
Finally, to put the proverbial nail in the DRM coffin, Phil Schiller announced at this year’s Macworld Expo that the iTunes Store was going DRM free—at the expense of Apple’s one-price-fits-all strategy. Over the next few months, the entire 10-million-strong iTunes Store music catalog will migrate to DRM-free versions (at higher bit rates)—Apple claims that more than 80 percent of iTunes music is available now in iTunes Plus format.
As a music consumer, I’m thrilled with this—no more do I need to carefully manage my authorizations for music playback amongst the various machines I use. I can burn anything I want, back up my songs without having to re-rip them, and generally not think about what happens to my music if the iTunes Store ever vanishes. With one click of a button, I can upgrade my entire library and be done with DRM…in theory, at least. (Of course, there are some issues with the upgrade plan, but it’s still better than DRM-encoded music.)
So it seems, finally, the music industry gets it. Given the chance, consumers will pay a reasonable price for unprotected, high quality music that they can use as they wish. Unfortunately, the video industry hasn’t yet apparently seen even a flicker of such enlightenment in the distance. You can see evidence of their confusion all over the iTunes Store, starting with iTunes Plus.
What about video?
iTunes Plus applies only to music in the iTunes Store, not to video (or audiobooks, for that matter). So while my music will be “free,” I’ll still be messing with authorizations for the video content I purchase from the iTunes Store. That’s unfortunate, and strange, given that the large size of movie files means they’re typically harder for consumers to distribute than relatively small music files.
Why is an HD movie different than an HD TV show?Beyond iTunes Plus, you can see more confusion in the handling of high definition (HD) content on the iTunes Store.
You can, for instance, purchase a TV series in HD and watch it on your Mac or Apple TV…but you can’t purchase an HD movie at all, and you can only rent them on an Apple TV, not a Mac. Why? What’s different about an HD TV series and an HD movie?
From my chair at least, nothing. I know, behind the scenes, they’re controlled by two very different entities, but as a consumer, such things shouldn’t matter. When I want to purchase HD content, I want to be able to use it on whatever device I wish, and transfer it easily between all such devices I own. The current model is just completely confusing, and makes no sense.
Of video and piracy
It really makes no sense when you consider that the video industry is taking these protective steps against those who are probably least likely to steal their content—consumers who have decided to purchase through the iTunes Store. We’ve made a conscious decision to buy our audio and video through the iTunes Store, and yet the video industry treats us as though we’re all pirates foaming at the mouth, ready to upload our freshly-purchased content to every pirate server in the known universe.
One way to really alienate your customers is to treat them all like thieves and criminals. (I’m not sure the music industry has fully learned this lesson either, given some of the RIAA’s tactics…but at least record companies are making strides on DRM.)
If I want to steal a movie, there are many ways to do so quickly and easily, as seen in the image at right. Using Tropic Thunder, the movie in my sample image above, it took all of one Google search to find literally dozens of different versions of the film, with varying levels of quality and features.
Quite ironically, a stolen movie is actually easier for the consumer to use than a legitimately-purchased copy of the same movie. A stolen movie won’t be DRM-protected, may be encoded at a higher bit rate (better quality) than a purchased version, and can be easily played on any device capable of playing back video. Why is it that pirates are rewarded for their actions, while legitimate consumers are punished and treated as if they are pirates? By making it difficult for honest consumers to purchase and use their products, the video industry may be encouraging the very behavior they seek to stop.
The pricing issue
My final annoyance with the video industry and the iTunes Store has to do with the pricing of TV series—another behavior that may drive otherwise honest consumers to take dishonest actions. The new season of 24 started recently, and for better or worse, it’s a series I enjoy watching. Given how much time I spend in front of the machine, however, I thought that maybe I’d purchase the 24 Season 7 HD season pass from the iTunes Store.
Then I saw the cost, a whopping $68, and changed my plans. Nearly $70 for something that has no physical media, would be very difficult to resell (is it even possible?), and is encumbered by DRM! You can’t even burn it to a DVD for use away from a computer or Apple TV (even the non-HD version is expensive, at $45, and non-burnable, like all iTunes Store videos). So I’d be paying $70 for basically nothing more than the right to watch the video on my Mac, iPhone (non-HD, of course), or Apple TV. (Even old versions of TV series are outrageously priced—the seven-year-old 24 Season 1 (non-HD) is still $40!)
As it turns out, I can actually watch 24 for free (and legally) on Fox’s Web site—and in full-screen mode, the video looks quite nice even on my 23-inch LCD. Sure, it’s not available on all my devices, but if what I really want to do is watch something on my Mac, free sure beats $70.
If I really want 24 on all my devices, and I find the $70 to be a huge burden, another quick trip to Google finds that all four episodes of the new 24 season are readily available online. Legal? Not even close. A tempting alternative for those who aren’t able to afford $70, or perhaps live outside the geographically-restricted area where they could buy 24 even if they wanted to? You bet.
So by pricing the season at a somewhat ridiculous price point, Fox has not only lost a sale, but has probably encouraged people who would otherwise give it money to go find alternative solutions. For me, I would’ve gladly paid about $30 to $35 for the season pass—the ability to watch on any device would be nice, and I’d love to feel like I’m supporting the series.
Instead, I’ve chosen to do what I’ve done the prior years—record 24 on my Tivo, and then watch it (skipping commercials) on the big screen. Not as convenient as having it available everywhere, but $70 is simply well past my cutoff point for a convenience cost.
Some shows get it, it seems. You can buy 16 30-minute episodes of The Daily Show for $10, or about $1.78 per hour of entertainment. Contrast that with 24, which will cost you $3.80 per hour (I’m using the actual show lengths here, i.e. 21 minutes or so for The Daily Show and 44 minutes for 24). But The Daily Show is an exception; current seasons of most TV series seem priced to dissuade purchase, rather than to encourage purchase.
I firmly believe that if the prices were to be halved, volume would increase dramatically—and it’s not like there’s much direct cost in producing the downloadable version of an already-filmed TV show, so almost all the money the studios would earn through increased volume would be profit (less what they must pay out in commissions, of course). So why are they asking such outrageous sums for current (and non-current) TV series?
Hopefully the video industry will see what the music industry has done and take steps to adjust its rules on HD content, its stance on DRM, and its pricing policies. As things stand now, however, video producers are treating their customers like thieves, and encouraging them to find alternative solutions that are less costly, unencumbered by DRM, and more agreeably priced. Some alternatives are legal, others are not…but no amount of protection on iTunes Store videos is going to change that fact. Pirates will pirate, and the current iTunes Store video rules hurt only those who seek to legitimately purchase their content.
Google will buy Apple by 2011, Part 2
March 16th, 2008 § 15 Comments
Many of you had some interesting reactions and comments to this prior post. Thanks for your comments. Let me try and explain why I believe this will happen in one form or another in the next 3-4 years. Many of you have stated that Google can’t afford Apple as the market cap is too big for them to swallow today. True. But it’s not today I am talking about. 3 years on the web is like 21 years on the planet (web years and dog years are nearly equivalent). First, as you know things change rapidly on the net faster than anywhere else. Google MAY be able to grab the rest or nearly 100% of the market share in search over the next 3 years – and that share will increase their value (and market cap) tremendously. To do this, they will not need any hardware, nor will they need to introduce any gadgets/phones, what not. Its 100% software driven. And, given that the web will have an increasing percentage of ‘vertical’ search (vs. the Wal-Mart Google engine of today), Google will also begin to focus its sights on those verticals as well with its huge pile of cash. Google will buy their way into any search vertical they might miss. And that doesn’t take into account non-web advertising like billboards, radio, newspapers and traditional TV +. Now, let’s look at Apple. The market for cell phones is in a state of flux. How many iPhones can one buy? Saturation will occur and sales will eventually have to slow. Competition will appear and market share will s-l-o-w down and decrease over time. When Jobs makes the iPhone carrier-neutral, the walls all come down. So, how do you ‘sell’ more cell phones to people that they don’t need? One possibility is to give them away with advertising. Second, while ‘Goople’ may seem far-fetched to us today, lacing cell phones with ads (think Android) AND perhaps computers with ads or instead of buying an office suite from MS, using GoogleDocs with ads instead to help increase market share over the PC doesn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. Would I choose to use a cell service that gave me a free handset combined with no monthly charges in exchange for watching a few ads? Could I and would I use that combination to replace my land-line eventually thereby sneaking this combination right into everyone homes? Would I choose to get a free laptop that does the same type of thing? I might. Would developing countries whose cultures don’t have the money to buy computers and cell communications use such a computer or cell phone? I bet they would.
The same way Apple introduced their new thin laptop without the traditional bells and whistles of all other laptops sounds so much like what Google did when they introduced Search and Adwords, then slowly but surely introduced itself into other traditional media, while their competitors just scramble around to keep up, and can’t so far. And finally, a merger or some combination of the two is not unthinkable. Both company cultures are similar in so many ways. So, think a new form or type of combination or new venture between the two. Maybe not an outright purchase NOW, but its not impossible in the future.
iPhone on WiFi for free…experiment over.
March 11th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
My friend who DID have an iPhone that he bought off of eBay that was ‘jailbroken’ finally decided to become ‘legal’. We played with this ‘free’ wifi calls for nearly 6 months. He did save a few coins from his sprint bill, did make and receive calls for free and had practically all of the other goodies on the iPhone working OK, but its not quite there yet. Meaning, we estimated that about 60-70% of all calls were either dropped or not received by him. This made the iPhone really not usable for business and a bit annoying. So, after nearly 6 months, he walked into an ATT store and is now totally legal. We enjoyed hacking the iPhone and making it do what its not suppose to do, but in the end, getting phone calls was key and until wifi gets stronger and the hand-offs’ more seamless, we will wait.
FREE! It Changes Everything
March 2nd, 2008 § Leave a Comment
There is an article by Chris Anderson in Wired (actually an excerpt from his upcoming book ) and its some great reading. I am putting up part of it here and link back to the original below.
“Between digital economics and the wholesale embrace of King’s Gillette’s experiment in price shifting, we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly. How big a deal is that? Well, consider this analogy: In 1954, at the dawn of nuclear power, Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, promised that we were entering an age when electricity would be “too cheap to meter.” Needless to say, that didn’t happen, mostly because the risks of nuclear energy hugely increased its costs. But what if he’d been right? What if electricity had in fact become virtually free?The answer is that everything electricity touched — which is to say just about everything — would have been transformed. Rather than balance electricity against other energy sources, we’d use electricity for as many things as we could — we’d waste it, in fact, because it would be too cheap to worry about.
All buildings would be electrically heated, never mind the thermal conversion rate. We’d all be driving electric cars (free electricity would be incentive enough to develop the efficient battery technology to store it). Massive desalination plants would turn seawater into all the freshwater anyone could want, irrigating vast inland swaths and turning deserts into fertile acres, many of them making biofuels as a cheaper store of energy than batteries. Relative to free electrons, fossil fuels would be seen as ludicrously expensive and dirty, and so carbon emissions would plummet. The phrase “global warming” would have never entered the language.
Today it’s digital technologies, not electricity, that have become too cheap to meter. It took decades to shake off the assumption that computing was supposed to be rationed for the few, and we’re only now starting to liberate bandwidth and storage from the same poverty of imagination. But a generation raised on the free Web is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming the world in the process. Because free is what you want — and free, increasingly, is what you’re going to get.”
Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail. His next book, FREE, will be published in 2009 by Hyperion.
