The IBM Social Media channel on YouTube has been posted several videos to promote aSmarterPlanet.com, all with the common theme of using data, computing and analytics to make our world run smarter. It’s nerd-tastic!
Once you look past the unnecessary (and unfunny) humour that they include in these videos, this really is a nice little series. They’re well made and very educational videos.
Here are the videos they’ve uploaded so far, I’d definitely recommend checking them out:
In the coming weeks Facebook will be launching a new “Dashboard” screen for their Applications. At first glance it has many similarities to the iTunes app store, but looking a bit deeper there also seems to be quite a few lessons that Apple could learn from Facebook’s plans:
The Dashboard
As you can see from the screenshot (click for full size) the new dashboard will have a much better layout than the existing list format. Links to the dashboard will sit on the left side of your home page and when clicked will replace your news feed with the new dashboard – like switching between live feed and news feed.
Facebook hope to encourage “discovery and re-engagement with games and other applications” and this is definitely a step in the right direction.
With a little luck it might also help clear up the news feed which can often become clogged with torrents of game notifications.
Applications vs. Games
This is one area in which Facebook seem to be leapfrogging Apple. The iTunes App Store has Games as just another category of apps (the most heavily promoted category) but Facebook is going one step further and dividing it’s applications directory in half, with users now having an Applications Dashboard and a Games Dashboard.
This is a great move by Facebook. Although there’s no technical difference between the two (a Game is just another type of app) from the average user’s point of view the distinction is useful. It also allows the Games Dashboard to include more game-specific features such as high scores and leader boards.
Integrating Social
This is where Facebook’s new dashboards should move into a league of their own. For the initial launch the social integration isn’t anything we haven’t seen before but it’s still a great demonstration of how any simple service can be greatly enhanced by integrating a social web. Here’s Facebook’s list of features they expect in the new dashboards from day 1:
It’s A Numbers Game
The motivations behind this move are pretty obvious once you understand the numbers behind app usage. Apple should have an advantage in this area because applications sit on the home screen of iPhones and are harder to ignore, yet some figures show that as little as 20% of all iPhone applications are ever used more than once. Data for Facebook apps appears to be quite similar, with the Top 100 apps having only 10%-20% of users being “active” in any given month.
Try Them Out
Before the official launch you can test them out to see what your dashboards will look like using these demo links:
What do you think? Will this help you get the most out of Facebook Applications or is just more intrusions into your home page? Will it make Facebook games an even more lucrative industry?
Advertising is buying customers. Advertising is spending money to talk at strangers. 9 times out of 10 it should be your last resort.
Try this – If your business has a marketing budget to spend ask yourself two questions:
1. What do I want to achieve by spending this money? Earning more revenue? Keeping customers? Getting new customers?
2. Where in my business do bottlenecks occur that stop me from achieving these goals?
Imagine your budget in a pile of single euro coins on a table. Slide each euro across the table one by one and place it in one of several pots, with a pot for each activity you’ll spend it on. As you lift each euro ask yourself some more questions:
If you want to earn more revenue what is the most effective use of that euro right now? Taking care of existing customers? Could it be spent developing new products or services they’d like to buy from you? Or improving customer experience?
If you need more customers you could spend the euro on making your sign-up process easier, or converting more casual visitors into paying users. You could make it easier for customers to tell their friends about you or improve your service so that they’ll want to tell their friends about you.
If you get to the end of that thought process and have no money in the advertising pot it’s not a bad thing!
If you can’t see any room for improvement in these other areas then it might make more sense to advertise. Only when you have your sign up process running smoothly does it make sense to spend money getting people to visit your site.
The problem is that many businesses decide on an advertising budget at the start of the year and then wonder how they can effectively spend it. A better approach is to ask how effectively they can use their marketing budget, realising that advertising is only one of the many possible answers.
Or am I being too hard on advertising?
Here’s some recent headlines from a few technology and marketing websites. Both are about different stories, but the headlines all effectively say the same thing.
A lot of stories like this pop up around the web and although they can be quite interesting to read, the underlying trend is nothing new. An offline equivalent might have a headline like:
In this hyper-connected world we’re all starting to realise the power of interactivity (or it’s evilness), but let’s not underestimate the power of the lazy person inside all of us that just wants to sit back, relax and passively consume.
Leave a comment…. if you could be bothered typing 😛
I’m a big fan of the VlogBrothers, two brothers who make daily youtube videos addressed to each other (but also to a wider audience). In today’s video one of the brothers, Hank, attempts to give the other brother – and the rest of the viewers – a quick overview of “Ecosystem Services“. To quote Hank directly:
“Ecology is a fascinating and complicated science. But if you mix it with the fascinating and complicated science of economics, you end up giving value to the things our world does for us.
Those things, in ecological lingo, are “ecosystem services” and you can actually put price tags on them.”
It’s an interesting video and a great introduction to an area of economics that I had never really considered before:
I just got this in info in an email from O2 (I’m a registered iPhone developer), some interesting numbers:
Edit/Update: It seems that they just sent me a summary of Mulley Communication’s iPhone survey results…. from 2008!
Everyone loves The Inventor. It’s pretty easy to see why: She is the person who got the ball rolling, he was the bright spark who came up with the idea, they are the people who created new products, services, systems and thoughts that provide great improvements in our everyday lives.
Accordingly, we’ve structured many parts of our economy and our legal systems to protect and encourage them. Concepts such as patents, copyrights and intellectual property were established to give inventors and creators and extra degree of protection.
A few hundred years ago, when these protections were first being conceived, it was understood that they were short term taxes on society to reward creators and inventors, with the hope that it would have a net positive societal benefit in the long run. Giving inventors a short-lived monopoly over their new idea was a ‘necessary evil’ to give them the incentive to create, without which (it was assumed) much less invention and creation would be done, which is a bad thing indeed. Short term pain, long term gain.
Here is an excerpt from a speech given by Lord Macaulay in 1841 to the British House of Commons as they discussed a new copyright bill:
The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures. I admit, however, the necessity of giving a bounty to genius and learning. In order to give such a bounty, I willingly submit even to this severe and burdensome tax. Nay, I am ready to increase the tax, if it can be shown that by so doing I should proportionally increase the bounty.
Macaulay’s argument is very well reasoned one – If giving the creator a legal monopoly over the ownership of their thoughts and inventions can be proven to increase the benefit to society (more/better books, music, products, services etc.) then it is a good thing.
Now here’s the problem – The bounty isn’t worth the tax. Don’t get me wrong, I do think that the total benefit to society of new inventions, works of art and creative thoughts are hugely invaluable, I just don’t think that the original creator should be credited with providing most of the benefit.
The Innovator
This is where I draw the distinction between the Inventor and the Innovator. The Inventor creates the new idea, but it’s often The Innovator that brings it to market. Without The Inventor we would have no new ideas, but without The Innovator those new thoughts might never reach people to provide a benefit.
Wired magazine’s recent article “Time Your Attack: Oracle’s Lost Revolution” provides a perfect illustration of this. The article discusses Larry Ellison’s failed attempts at building a cheap Net PC:
They imagined a simple machine that would eschew software installed on a hard drive in favor of accessing applications online. Data — videos, documents, pictures — would be stored in Oracle databases instead of on the computer itself. In place of a robust operating system, this machine would work with programs and files through browsers like Netscape Navigator.
In essence they were coming up with the idea of net books and cloud computing – as I’m sure many people at the time were. The article continues:
It was a powerful idea, one that would enchant companies and analysts throughout the IT industry. But it would ultimately fail.
This is an example of how an idea that we know is great (because net books are selling like hotcakes) can still end up failing. If we had applied our inventor-centric view of the world to this idea back in 1999, we would have been happy if Ellison had acquired full intellectual property rights for his idea. After all, he was the idea man and we needed to reward him and others for coming up with great ideas.
But Ellison didn’t get the monopoly on this idea and right now we can all agree that that is undoubtedly a good thing. In the decade since then there has been a slow and steady growth in the area of cloud computing and an explosive growth in the sales of net books. This has come about through slow but steady improvements, incremental upgrades, iterations and developments by thousands of people, none of whom necessarily “invented” the original concept. This is the value of The Innovators. They take an invention and bring it to market, make it more efficient, make it affordable, create smarter distribution channels to get it into peoples hands and improve it again and again over time.
When considering the total benefit for society that comes from a new technology like this, it is obvious that the lions share is created by The Innovators and not The Inventor. Consider all the benefits we get from the modern aviation industry. A small (but significant) portion of that is from the Wright Brothers, but the majority is from all The Innovators in the industry over the last number of years.
A Note of Caution
Recognising the importance of The Innovator can help us view the modern legal system from a different perspective. Intellectual property concepts were always intended as a means to an end. They granted creative businesses and individuals a certain amount of protection so that in turn they could provide a benefit to society.
But how do they affect The Innovator? As you might have realised by now, their affects can be quite detrimental. If Larry Ellison and Oracle had spent the last decade suing and intimidating any small company that tried to progress the development of net books and cloud computing we certainly would have been worse off than we are today.
Great new internet services that provide us innovative ways to discover content (like YouTube, google, spotify etc.) seem to be getting sued for copyright infringement almost every other day. Any time an innovative technology is released it seems inevitable that it will be sued for patent infringement, most likely by a competitor jealous of the success they couldn’t achieve – most often because they didn’t give customers the same level of value.
Is The Inventor’s bounty worth this tax? I don’t think so.
We need to realise that ideas by themselves do not provide huge benefit to societies, the value lies in making them a viable reality. A new technology will often remain an unwanted product until someone makes it simple and easy to use. An invention is no use to me unless I can afford to get my hands on it. I can’t enjoy a new song if I can’t first discover it then listen to it. A great book is no use to me unless I get to read it.
The benefit of The Inventor is rarely felt without the work of The Innovator and we can’t afford to keep punishing one to protect the other.
A few months back I was watching Apple’s Rock N’ Roll event (this post has been in my drafts half written since then!), and one thing mentioned that really struck me was the number of registered iTunes users who have registered credit cards – a whopping 100m.
I’ve seen the comparisons done between social networks (“omg, Facebook is bigger than Brazil!”), but hearing the iTunes figure made me realise that I have no clue how that stacks up against the other big hitters in the online world, so I did some research…
Ebay – 88.4 million
Paypal – 75.4 million
Skype – 480.5
Facebook – 300m
iTunes – 100m
Gmail – 146m
Yahoo Mail – 285
Windows Live Mail (msn/hotmail) – 343m
Wikipedia – 10.5m registered (only 148k ‘active’)
I’m still shocked that iTunes has more credit cards registered than Paypal, that’s a very impressive asset. I’m going to try dig up the equivalent for Amazon, but it’s tricky to find. The skype numbers should be taken with a pinch (or a truckload) of salt, as their definition of “Registered User” is basically any skype account ever created, including ones that were never used, have been inactive for years or multiple accounts for the one person.
I thought some graphs might be nice so I did that too:
Ebay – All users, excluding users of Half.com, StubHub, and our Korean subsidiaries (Gmarket and Internet Auction Co.), who bid on, bought, listed or sold an item within the previous 12-month period. Users may register more than once, and as a result, may have more than one account.
Paypal – All registered accounts that successfully sent or received at least one payment or payment reversal through the PayPal system or Bill Me Later accounts that are currently able to transact and that received a statement within the last 12 months.
Skype – Cumulative number of unique user accounts, which includes, among other things, users who may have registered via non-Skype based websites and users that have more than one account.
Wikipedia – Active: Users who have performed an action in the last 30 days.
Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Bing Mail, Ebay, Paypal, Skype, Facebook, Wikipedia,
Let me know if there’s any other companies you want me to add to the stats.
There has been a lot debate online recently surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s change of mind about paywalls for his online newspapers. I’ve been reading a huge number of arguments on both sides (including a 40min video interview with Rupert himself) and am sad to say that most of them seem to be missing the point.
Earlier today I read Adrian Weckler’s article ‘The case for a paywall for Irish newspapers’, and decided to write my response in a post here, and to summarize my thoughts on the debate in general.
Paywall or Die?
Ardian makes many of the points that are being made by journalists and newsfolk around the world, that the business model is collapsing and they can’t afford to keep giving it all away for free. He finishes his article with the question:
But if the choice is a continuous decline in circulation figures or a paywall, it’s not really that tough a choice. I mean, ask yourself: what would you do?
The fundamental problem in the paywall debate, but the one too often overlooked, is one of supply and demand. The question the article asks is “Should we decide to command a price, yes or no?”, but economics tells us that the only question one can really ask is “Can we command a price“.
As a simple analogy, imagine one major Irish newspaper put up a paywall, but none of it’s competitors decided to follow suit. This paper obviously wouldn’t do so well, most of the news stories would be available in the other major publications or elsewhere online, it’s own articles wouldn’t be shared, tweeted or linked to as much as other papers and it would also lose the water-cooler effect if much fewer people are reading it.
This is the best analogy I can think of to describe the problems I see with an industry wide paywall – but the problems that afflict that single newspaper would hurt the whole industry, and the competition would be from other online news sources, international papers, bloggers and independent journalists.
The Economics
If you view news as a commodity, it can be fairly undifferentiated. If you take my analogy above, there are some people who would stay and pay for the subscription, but most would not. This is because the news is largely the same to them regardless of the source.
It is also served up at a near zero marginal cost. Think about it, how much does it cost the Sunday Business Post for each additional article read by a new visitor (or even – how much does it cost yourtechstuff.com?). In economics, when the market is competitive, price will always fall to the marginal cost. If you’re in an industry with a marginal cost of close to zero, it will be very, very, very difficult to command a price.
The Business Model
So back to the closing question, paywall or death? As always, (and without wanting to sound like a Carlsberg commercial) there’s a better third option here. This is a business model problem that newspapers have. In print, they have little competition for audience attention, and therefore can sell that attention for a high price to advertisers. Online, this is not the case, and so the price the can command for advertising is much lower. They therefore need a new revenue model, and here’s my suggestion for how they should get started:
Always remember that standard news articles cost nothing to distribute, attract an audience and command no price, so if you’re going to publish them, keep them free. Then figure out how to convert a proportion of the readers of those articles into paying customers.
If you want to charge your readers (or a subset of your readers), start by asking what value you can add to your service to make it worth the price. This is the biggest flaw in Murdoch’s plan – he’s wants to introduce a new price, but without introducing a new clear reason for his customers to buy. Some publications, like the WSJ, already add value by offering in depth insight into content for a specific market. This is one option, but it does leave you open to new competition that could easily offer the same content for free.
Preferably this new revenue model would involve selling new scarcities, such as personalisation, physical products, access to ‘behind the scenes’, or an editors time (e.g. letters to the editor can be read by everyone, but only written by subscribers – or better yet a discussion forum with the editors, accessible only by subscribers).
Here are some quick examples of news organisations leveraging free news articles to sell scarcities (there’s obviously not too many examples though, otherwise the industry wouldn’t be in such a pickle!):
So that’s my input and advice for this debate, and can be summarized in these two lessons that I learned on my first day of Leaving Cert Economics:
Youtube annotations allow video creators to add clickable links to certain parts of their videos. This was originally designed to create simple transitions from one video to another, but as with all technologies the best results have come from putting it to previously unimagined uses.
Here are four of the best examples of how it’s done, and one cautionary tale.
To promote the new season of the TV Show Dexter, the US network Showtime created a mini-game called ‘Where’s Dexter’ – a video version of ‘Where’s Wally’. The game has several levels, with the prize being a viewing of the trailer for the season.
Hank Greene (of vlogbrothers) used Youtube annotations to create an interactive video quiz show called Truth or Fail.
And just to balance things out, here’s a video I consider to be a bad use of video annotations. Links that let you control the camera angles of the video. There’s nothing wrong with it in principle, it just seems as if they made use of the technology simply because they could, not because it would lead to great content.
