Reverberations

Microsoft, the object of hatred for a large geek pop (and wannabes), is actually far from over. They are as fierce competitor as one can be. Latest evidence - Microsoft creating a YouTube channel for promotion of Vista and Live brands. Significance of YouTube here is that YouTube belongs to its “enemy” Google. That’s atypical for an “an underdog beats the incumbent” story, so it very well might not be one.

“In Rainbows,” a new record album from an English band Radiohead, has challenged the traditional music sales model by allowing listeners to determine the price they are willing to pay for the album which is available for download on its website.

Figures coming out from comScore - an internet marketing research company - 38% paying an average of about $6 seem much more realistic than the numbers floated earlier - average price between $5 and $8 for 1.2 million downloads.

I’m one of those 62%. Radiohead’s music is decent but not my taste. But, had the album not been available for download, I wouldn’t even have heard of them or their music. Moreover, they probably made much more money from these downloads than they could ever make from regular album release.

Latest version of BitTorrent client (v 6.0), which is based on closed-source uTorrent (acquired a while back), has not been released, neither has been the protocol specs. The “official” BitTorrent client has never been very popular compared to other protocol implementations like Azureus and uTorrent.

Protocol specs, although technically closed, are available with very tightly maintained SDK license.  And, all previous version of protocol as well as the client are available openly.

In lifecycle of any technology “The step after ubiquity is invisibility“. I always hoped BitTorrent to follow that curve. Not anymore probably.

Just found this patent (#6,988,241) filed by IBM back in 2000 and issued on Jan 17, 2006.
From the abstract:

A method and system that that allows a designer to create “spreadsheet” web pages, which can then be viewed and used by the designer and/or by other users. The described embodiments of the present invention allow people to collaborate and to share spreadsheets over the web. The described embodiment allows a user of the spreadsheet to email the spreadsheet to others and to embed the spreadsheet into web pages owned by the designer or by third parties.

I’m not sure how this works but, if I understand this right, all those web-based spreadsheets apps by Google, Zoho and others are infringing.

It seems spammers have found the new avenues. First it was digg, then del.icio.us, and now reddit. And this time they seem to use down-voting bots to suppress legitimate posts and up-vote spam to make it more visible. Innovative eh!

While it doesn’t make much sense to spam del.icio.us for Search Engine Optimization, as its pages don’t get indexed by Search Engine bots

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex" />

digg and reddit both don’t have any such measures AFAIK. As if mail and blog comment spam were not enough of trouble, spamming digg/del.icio.us/reddit is walk in the park - for all practical purposes.

Now, whether ‘Collective Intelligence’ is flawed is a matter of debate. Apparently, whatever is done to facilitate ease of use to the user, equally works for the spammer. There in lies the challenge of user generated content. How insightful!

There has been plenty of talk about the Rise of Edge Content lately. Edge Content - the content provided by the long tail of [web] community. Blogs are the perfect example of edge content. While I agree with the idea of eventual prominence of edge content over a centralized system, I’ve certain issues with the general understanding of edge content.

Everyone (I’ve read so far), who talks about ‘the edge’, has a basic assumption that the content has to be created on the Web to be available to everyone, and then there would be various services to aggregate and serve that distributed content. Blogging is super-fine as a casual/amateur content creation tool. But then we need to look for more serious aspects of it. The anonymity of web is a huge road block in the availability of more meaningful content. And also, why limit ourselves to the web, what about the huge content available on desktops.

Content creators need to get their due not only in terms of credit, recognition and feedback, but also monetarily. Why take away that choice from the content creator. The proposed/existing aggregator model may do fine on the recognition aspect, but pretty much dilutes the monetary part. Also, we need a way to measure the access and profile of content consumers. Otherwise the whole edge content thing is a setup to lose.

I need to expand a bit more here, which I’ll do in due course of time.

From this news item in Infotoday-

Citing the desire to create new revenue streams for authors, mega-publisher HarperCollins has announced the first free Web-based, ad-supported, full-text business book. Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own by Bruce Judson is now available on the author’s Web site, where an affiliate link to Amazon, not the publisher, can also be found. Not only can the book be read at the site, but it can also be searched. HarperCollins Publishers is calling the project a test of a new business model. Some self-published authors also offer ad-supported books online, but HarperCollins’ move is the first by a major publisher.

And about the revenue model and rationale behind the move-

Company spokesperson Erin Crum said: “We are exploring how online advertising programs can add value for publishers and authors. The results will be measured by the income generated through ads, number of page views and visitors to the site, and by sales of books from the site. If successful, this kind of digital product might be a new format that supplements the paperback edition.”?

Ad-supported media is here to stay. Television has shown us so far that even though advertising is overrated, it works.

How does P2P file-sharing affect music sales? I found this interesting paper on relationship of economics of P2P file-sharing by David Blackburn,a Harvard PhD Student, mentioned at “The Long Tail” (and posted it on Slashdot faithfully). I also found this compilation of studies on P2P.

The findings are not surprising as the paper essentially states the obvious. The hits at the top of the charts lose sales, but the niche artists further down the popularity curve actually benefit from file-trading.

“Artists who are unknown, and thus most helped by file sharing, are those artists who sell relatively few albums, whereas artists who are harmed by file sharing and thus gain from its removal, the popular ones, are the artists whose sales are relatively high.”

But then some of the conclusions are shocking, e.g.

“File sharing is reducing the probability that any act is able to sell millions of records, and if the success of the mega-star artists is what drives the investment in new acts, it might reduce the incentive to invest in new talent. This is, at its heart, an empirical question which is left to future work.”

Is finding new talent outcome of investments by big labels. Hardly!

With so much ‘noise to signal’ ratio in music industry, big names give headstarts for sure, but they hardly have incentives to find new talents in an economy of abundance. Big companies were relevant at the time when technology wasn’t cheap and cost of producing and marketing music prohibitive- not anymore the case.

P2P notwithstanding, independent music is going to proliferate on its merit. Music needn’t big names to sound good.

I believe that peer-to-peer is the future of content distribution over Web. In a progressive step, NBC Universal has agreed to make few movies available for on-demand downloading via peer-to-peer distribution early next year. The P2P technology partner is Wurld Media.

The business model built around P2P might be in a nascent stage as of now. But, with the proliferating bandwidths and aging traditional business models, it is poised to evolve.

From a news item at Reuters, the proposed revenue model goes like this-

Peer Impact users will be able to view the films for a 24-hour period once they hit the “play” button on their computers. The file will remain on a user’s computer for 30 days in an effort to hasten the download speeds of other Peer Impact users who purchase the same titles, because P2P gains speed and efficiency with each additional copy of content on the network.

Consumers log on to the secure network, where they can preview clips of all available content. Payment is due upon checkout…

With the market capitalization of more than $83bn (as I am writing this) Google riding over its phenomenal share price advance, having defied most predictions by more than tripling in the ten months since the firm made its stockmarket debut at $85 a share, has leaped into FT Global top 100, a jump from 279th as on March 31, 2005 to 95th as the ranking been compiled on stock value as of June 30.
The leap is unprecedented by any standards. Yet few people are casting doubts over the long term sustainability of Google valuation. There is lot of mist built around Google, as this article in The Economist mentions that

Now valued at more than $80 billion, Google has left in the dust the other three internet Wunderkinder—Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon—and even passed media stalwarts such as Time Warner. How does Google do it?

At least in part by shrewdly manufacturing a winning mystique. No outsider today can prove definitively that Google is not an office park full of geniuses who could at any moment announce, simultaneously, world peace and a cure for the common cold. That is because no outsider today can say anything definitive about Google at all. This is intentional. Google makes itself totally opaque by camouflaging itself with lots of what journalists call “colour�?.

Interesting take on an organization, that is widely respected and admired even by the techies all over the world, even though it failed to push any significent advances recently in its core area of searching in the world of ever increasing content to explore. Though the recent surge in the popularity of AJAX techniques (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) can be attributed to its use in Google’s Gmail, Google Groups and other prominent interactive applications.