NEW YORK — Amazon.com Inc. said Wednesday the company will launch a digital music store later in 2007 with millions of songs, free of copy protection technology that limits where consumers can play their music.
The Seattle-based company said music company EMI Group Plc , home to artists ranging from Coldplay to Norah Jones to Joss Stone to Pink Floyd, has licensed its digital catalog to Amazon, the second such deal in a month.
“Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO.
Digital Rights Management, or DRM, has been demanded by the music industry to contain piracy by preventing users from making multiple copies; but its critics say it restricts consumers and therefore hinders the growth of legal music uses.
Early last month, EMI said it would make its music available online without a key anti-piracy measure, becoming the first major music group to take the risk in a bid to grow digital sales.
With all music companies struggling from a drop in the sale of physical albums, EMI, announced its first deal with Apple Inc. and the iTunes online music store in April.
One indication of popularity of a band or music artist these days is how many friends they have on MySpace and how many times their music is played and commented upon. I recently came across a service that now helps you get those new friends. Contrary to the advice given in the classic Dale Carnegie book mentioned above, some new enterprising service provider, mysocialMarketing.com, now offers you a way to buy them. A package of 3000 to 6000 new friends is available for the unbelievably low price of US $149, a saving of $150 off the regular price. 10,000 profile views and song plays can also be purchased for an additional $299.
Here is one of their pitches:
"It's quickly becoming common knowledge that many major labels will not consider a band on MySpace unless they have at least 25'000 profile views! Don't miss out on that opportunity simply because of a technicality.Ok, time to level the playing field! We'll now send unique people to your profile to rank up your views and song plays lightning fast."
I am seriously reluctant to advertise them, but at the same time these types of services need to be exposed. This is really bad for social networking.
The Globe and Mail reported today that online advertising in Canada broke the $1-billion mark for the first time in 2006, and is expected to grow another 32 per cent this year, according to a study to be released today.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada, which represents advertisers, agencies and websites, said online advertising spending totalled $1.01-billion in 2006, up 80 per cent from $562-million in 2005. From a booklet available at their website, the Canadian Media Directors council puts all ad spending (2005) at 11.7 billion. A guesstimate total for 2006 would be around $12B or so, online advertising represents about 8.3% of the total.
Spending on online classifieds and directories showed the fastest growth, up 120 per cent to $273-million in 2006, according to the IAB. E-mail marketing grew 82 per cent to $20-million; search marketing grew 79 per cent to $353-million. And display advertising - the most mature online ad medium - grew 58 per cent to $364-million.
While a healthy Canadian economy has seen marketing budgets increase across the board, Internet advertising continues to show the greatest gains. Those findings are confirmed in a separate survey also being released today by the Institute of Communications and Advertising and Canada Post.
I remember a time not that long ago when if you wanted something written about you in the media, a campaign had to be organized. Usually you would hire a PR firm, put together a press kit and a roadshow, arrange appointments with who you felt were the influential writers in your domain and organize a big push to meet them all. A lot of work AND money.
Today, it's a little imagination, some video editing software, and in this case Google Earth and YouTube. In a campaign against forest giant West Fraser Timber, ForestEthics has produced a video that features a fly-over of logging in B.C. and Alberta forests created from satellite images downloaded from Google. The logged-over areas are juxtaposed with images of caribou, wolves and grizzly bears. The video details what the eco-group claims is clearcut logging in endangered mountain caribou habitat.
Whether you agree or not with the politics, you have to admire the creativity of the ForestEthics group. This slick video was quickly picked up by the media and is sure to create some very high level awareness of the issues the are promoting.
Here is how they did it. PR has clearly changed!
"YouTube is frequented from everyone to teenagers after school to reporters to customers who can now all see for themselves what West Fraser's logging practices look like," ForestEthics campaigner Tzeporah Berman said Monday. "Our staff made this video sitting at their desks in Vancouver. We were able to do a fly-over of West Fraser's logging operations using Google. We have never been able to do this so quickly before."
Berman, a veteran eco-campaigner, said that the new technology can have the kind of impact within minutes that it used to take months to achieve.
"It would take us months to gather the footage. I can remember flying to meet customers in Europe with a videotape in hand that I would then put into their machines to show them. What we are doing today is fast, it's immediate, it's fool-proof and it has a huge reach."
"User-generated content is actually on the road to nirvana, but it's not a sustainable model in itself. In all that content, which today's companies view as frankfurter meat, undifferentiated slurry, a medium for unwanted hitch-hikers, is the idea for the next iPod, or the formula for peace in the Middle East, the campaign platform for the President we'll elect in 2012, perhaps even a solution for global warming. You just have to believe that intelligence isn't concentrated among the people who rose to the top of the 20th century's ladders to believe that there are nuggets of wisdom waiting out there for the taking, among the minds that created all that UGC."
I have to agree. Buried in the massive growth of user-generated content is nuggets of gold and pearls of wisdom beyond on imagination. Our challenge in the upcoming years will be to find ways to more quickly bring this information forward to people who can use it. Sadly, it's not easy.
One of my favorite blogs to read at the moment is the Lefsetz Letter. Bob Lefsetz is one of those entertaining irreverent writers that takes daily shots at the music industry. His post today is "The World Is Flat" and gives us a very nice concise analysis of the current state of the music world. It is definitely worth reading and digesting. Why? What's happening in the music world is happening in a lot of other industries as well. Pay attention!
Quote:
It’s a changed world. And the world will keep changing. If the old players don’t get up to speed it’s not the worst problem, new entrepreneurs will find a way to create a new business. But the old players are a drag on the system, they’re lumbering giants inhibiting legitimate progress.
The days of dictation are done. The labels and their MTV and terrestrial radio cohorts are no longer all-powerful. If a record sucks, people won’t buy it. They know that it sucks from Web word of mouth, from hearing the tunes online, DOWNLOADING THEM BEFORE THEY’RE FOR SALE! The solution is not to try to inhibit the exchange of information, but to deliver higher quality product that the audience raves about as opposed to decries. Oh, it’s tougher. Then again, it’s tougher being IBM in a changed world.
Update: Bob added another installment on the same theme today, "Where Are We Now"
Quote:
I believe the overall music business pie, the total revenue achieved, can be greater than it’s ever been, if the acquisition of music online is paid for instead of slipping through the fingers of an industry that only wants to sell songs a particular way. Shouldn’t be tough to get everybody to be a music customer, if the buy-in price is low enough, if they can sample and acquire a mass for a reasonable fee. But is everybody going to buy the same limited amount of product? Absolutely not!
We’re living in the era of niche. Broadcasting is dead. Just ask NBC, which reported its worst prime time ratings EVER! People can now get what they want, exactly what they want, and they tune out everything else. So, if you’re trying to assemble a mass, you’re screwed. Hell, just look at the SoundScan numbers. What, there’s one platinum release this year (Norah Jones)?
The major label model is history, except for the few superstars left. Everybody else is going to have to slug it out in the trenches.
I think Cisco believes that the world of work will change a lot more than it already has over the years since the dot.com bust.
I also remember a few years back learning that Cisco was involved (in alliance with Electronic Arts, I believe .. I'd have to go back to the source, a book titled Work 2.0) in some quiet research about the use of video game principles and techniques in workplace application. I was doing the research because I was trying to convince one of my then clients that the video-game idiom would be found in more and more workplace productivity and learning applications in about ten years (that was five years ago).
Anyway .. Cisco just forked out a lot of moolah for a web service that helps people conduct meetings online .... a really lot of moolah, $3.2 billion !
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Cisco Systems Inc. said Thursday that it has agreed to acquire the online meeting company WebEx Communications Inc. for about $3.2 billion in cash.
Cisco, the leading maker of routers and switches that direct data over computer networks, said it will pay $57 per share of WebEx. That represents a 23 percent premium over WebEx's closing price of $46.20 Wednesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Shares of WebEx soared $10.53, or more than 22 percent, to $56.73 in early trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Cisco shares lost 6 cents to $25.79 on the same exchange.
Cisco said the acquisition has been approved by both boards and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007. Cisco said it expects transaction to have an immaterial effect on its fiscal year 2008 earnings after one-time charges are subtracted. The total purchase price will be about $2.9 billion when factoring in WebEx's $300 million in cash on hand.
The San Jose-based company has recently made a number of acquisitions branching out from its core business of supplying networking gear and into communications, social networking and other areas that help drive traffic over the network and increase demand for its core equipment.
Glenn Greenwald's clear warning this morning about the infrastructure of a surveillance society ...
The Bush administration has created vast and permanent data bases to collect and store evidence revealing the private activities of millions of American citizens. When the FBI obtains information essentially in secret -- with no judicial oversight -- that information is stored in those data bases. This is all being done by the executive branch with no safeguards and no oversight, and the little oversight that Congress has required has been defiantly and publicly brushed aside by the President, who sees legal requirements as nothing more than suggestions or options which he will recognize only if he chooses to.
That is the constitutional crisis that we have endured under virtually the entire Bush presidency -- the crisis which, for the most part, our mainstream political and media elite have collectively decided not to acknowledge.
... comes on the heels of last night's Leonardo Institute's annual Leonardo Lecture, delivered by Boing-boing co-founder, cyberactivist and sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow. He delivered a bright and snappy talk (he's good .. clear, down-to-earth, understatedly yet pointedly funny and sarcastic (in an unique Canadian way , I'd say) ... he happens to be Canadian and so carries, I believe, a Canadian-ish perspective on culture in North America and the world kind of mien, if you know what I mean.
He drew a nicely synthesized and coherent verbal time line about the evolution of the Web, the cognitive processes we've been undergoing as we read, watch, think, write, publish, click and exchange through the Web, where ideas, concepts and creative works come from and why a fundamental revamping of copyright and digital rights issues is necessary and hasn't happened yet, and the dangers of a surveillance society ... all key aspects within or related to what I call wirearchy - organization and governance stemming from being wired and interconnected in pervasive ways in the course of many basic human activities.
Cory related an interesting story that for me distills much of the mental and cultural shaping we are undergoing / living in a world in which we are penetrated and surrounded by integrated and interconnected information technology. The well-known aphorism "First we shape our structures, then our structures shape us" also comes to mind.
He started with his love-hate relationship with Disney's Magic Kingdom (saying it was only natural that his first novel was titled Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom), and how the entry to Magic Kingdom now requires fingerprinting (though Disney takes pains to emphasize that they are only taking "an imprint of the unique characteristics of the shape of your finger" (not sure I have that as verbatim from Cory), but the point was they are not recording these characteristics for the purposes of fingerprinting. But once captured on a mass basis, these would or could be available to the users of the Total Information Awareness data bases, for example.
However, if you don't want to be fingerprinted but still go visit the Magic Kingdom, you can go and present additional identification .. in other words, be shunted over to another passport line where you are checked out a bit more. So he says he and his friends do that when they go. One time when they went, he and his friends were declining to be fingersussed, slowing down the entry line when a 10-year old kid behind them piped up something like (no verbatim) ... "Come on, it's how you get in". Cory's story made the point of how if we are not careful, if we do not watch the watchers and use our fundamental right to not agree, it all too easily becomes just part of what we do .. and it feeds the databases.
Anyway, a good talk though the issues are familiar to me. Cory knows his stuff. It's also always interesting to be in public places and listen and watch as more and more people are connecting more and more of the dots about the Intertubes and its sociological implications.
Several cable television veterans are putting their band back together and taking their act to the Internet.
Next New Networks, a New York-based Internet start-up run and backed by former executives of MTV and Nickelodeon, will announce plans today to begin a series of video-oriented Web sites — what the company calls micro-networks — on niche topics like do-it-yourself fashion, comic books, car racing and cartoons.
[Snip ...]
Next New Networks plans to blend elements of old and new media into a type of hybrid entertainment that is different from traditional television and user-generated sites like YouTube. Its various Web properties will revolve around professionally produced videos of three to eight minutes, which it plans to pitch to sponsors as safe and predictable places to advertise online.
Many of the programs will solicit contributions from their audiences, but the company will screen submissions before they approved as final product. The company plans to generate some programming itself while also identifying talented video contributors and bringing them into the Next New Networks fold.
It is starting with six Web sites, including Fast Lane Daily (fastlanedaily.com), which features a daily news program for auto enthusiasts, and ThreadBanger (threadbanger.com), which offers a five-minute weekly show with MTV-style anchors who discuss the homemade-clothing culture.
Mr. Seibert, the creative director, is bringing two existing video sites to the network: Channel Frederator (channelfrederator.com), a weekly program on animation, and VOD Cars (VODCars.com), a curated collection of video clips from the car culture.
The founders believe the Internet offers a programming opportunity similar to the early days of cable, which traditional media firms are not exploiting.
“The nature of big media companies is about incumbent brands and repurposing and refashioning their material for the Web,” said Mr. Scannell, the chief executive. “We have no incumbent brands. We’re a white sheet for creative people.”
Mr. Miller, who left America Online last October under pressure from his bosses at Time Warner, cited the founders’ cable experience as the reason he is backing the company.
“To me these guys are returning to their roots,” he said. “They are unshackled from large media environment where it is much more about what your quarterly goals are, and can go back to developing new networks and ways of communicating with audiences.”
In part, Next New Networks is also challenging the idea that the chaotic terrain of sites like YouTube and MySpace can be a friendly place for advertisers.
“Video sharing is awesome, but advertisers are knitting their brow,” Mr. Scannell said. “They want to know what they’re backing. There is a place for brands to deliver something that is consistent.”
John Geraci, a well-know builder of virtual communities
A high-profile investor and lots of high-profile angels and advisers .. in the first camp Union Square (Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham) ... and in the second
We've still got a great list of angels involved as well. Marc Andreessen just wrote in out of the blue to say that he really liked the site, and to ask if he could help out with the financing. Esther Dyson, John Borthwick, George Crowley, and Richard Smith -- it's a fantastic list of people to have behind you. (Along with our other founding investors, John Seely Brown, Mark Bailey, and Andy Karsch.)
Neighbors are registered users of outside.in. Each neighbor has a profile page that shows a bio, photo, neighborhood, website, plus all the stories, comments, and places they’ve contributed to outside.in. (Right now it’s a little tricky to find a specific neighbor, much less communicate with them — but we’re working on it!)
Stories and Comments are the content you add to outside.in about your area. When you add them to the site, they appear on the home page of the area you specified for everyone to see, as well as on your neighbor pages.
Stories are content that comes from other sites, like blogs or newspaper websites, that you submit to the site via the submit a story link in the right column of the page. Add stories to outside.in that relate to your neighborhood and that you find interesting and want to share with your neighbors.
Comments are content that you write yourself, directly to the outside.in website. You add comments to Places, which are any location or venue in your area. Add a comment to any Place you want, either to point out something you like, or just to talk about something interesting in your neighborhood.
Places can be everything from restaurants to playgrounds to schools — or even more subjective categories (most dangerous intersection, best spot for winter sledding.) Any story or comment can be attached to a Place. The cool thing about these Place pages is that the become an archive of everything that’s been said online about a given place — comments from outside.in Neighbors, blog posts, newspaper reviews, discussion threads.
Piper Jaffray's predictions for online ad spending keep going up, and are now expected to go beyond the $80 billion mark by 2011. Higher growth rates at the close of 2006 are one factor, but the research firm points to the people as the true driving force. As more consumers take the reins when it comes to controlling their media diets, and spend more time online and creating their own content, advertisers will continue to boost online budgets. Several prognostications are made in the firm's new "User Revolution" report, including the domination of video online, a Google dynasty, and the death of the portal.
In December, Piper Jaffray & Co.'s Internet ad revenue forecast for 2011 was at $78 billion, but today's report raises that estimate to $81.1 billion. "We have more confidence in the growth rates," of the Internet, said Safa Rashtchy, managing director, senior Internet analyst for the company. According to Rashtchy, when measuring Internet ad spending, the firm includes search advertising, display ads, text links, video advertising and e-mail, but excludes mobile and iTV.
The explosion of niche content online and the related segmentation of audiences will continue to drive online ad spending by small advertisers that otherwise cannot afford mass market vehicles. This "will actually give more power to small advertisers," Rashtchy said. Still, big brand advertisers will continue to shell out the lion's share of online ad dollars, he continued, noting consumer packaged goods and automotive advertisers will maintain their big spender positions. "Over time, there won't be much difference between the Web and the rest of the media channels….It will reflect overall advertising dollars out there," he added.
From this report on CNN, it's about what you would expect ... cultural differences yield a difference in look, feel and dynamics. I expect we'll see more and more of these kinds of cultural shadings and nuance, and that there will come to be observable patterns in how people share, comment and use advertising in such a space.
The tools and services offered by Qumana are designed from an ease of use point of view, and hopefully offer little in terms of cultural barriers to their use. The content assembly and advertising selection and placement capabilities we offer users let them make the choices and stay in control of what they want to do and how they want to do it.
If we had an arrangement with a major Japanese advertising supplier, the users of Mixi could go about assembling and publishing content, and could use advertising supplied by Mixi in a work-and-revenue sharing arrangement .. getting content into circulation with appropriate Mixi-approved advertising woven into the content.
Mixi is projecting 4.8 billion yen ($40 million) in sales, mostly advertising revenue, for the fiscal year through March, more than double what it made the previous year. Its initial public offering last year earned more than 6 billion yen ($50 million), catapulting Kasahara to dot-com stardom.
Fumi Yamazaki at Technorati Japan, a blogging search company, isn't too upbeat about MySpace's chances in Japan as people usually don't want to switch social-networking services.
"Mixi and MySpace may be able to appeal to different needs," she said. "But there are some hurdles MySpace needs to overcome."
Even MySpace Japan Vice President Naoko Ando acknowledged MySpace isn't about to put Mixi out of business, but she believes Japanese can use both.
Ando is hoping that Japanese may want to check out American musicians, who offer tunes, messages and virtual friendships on MySpace. The site plans to use its Softbank partnership to sign on Japanese artists.
MySpace also has strengths in video sharing. It's among the leading sites where users post video clips, but MySpace does not yet offer video sharing in its Japanese service and is trying to win over copyright protection groups here, said Softbank spokesman Takeaki Nukii.
Mixi started offering video sharing earlier this month.
For Windows users, here's a new and improved version of the Qumana offline blog editor.
The gradual introduction of the new improved Blogger platform coincided with our ongoing search for the best way to make Qumana work effectively.
But .. we are pleased to announce that the most recent version of Qumana for Windows ... available for download here ... now works with the new Blogger platform.
We have more stuff coming along soon, and don't forget to try out the versatile Q-Ads tool, a browser extension for adding advertising content to a range of blog platforms
We're still looking for someone with the appropriate Java 1.5 experience to help us adapt the Mac version of Qumana. If any of you out there know of anyone with great Java and Mac OS skills, please point them (or yourself) our way.
Qumana has been selected as one of the select IT companies in British Columbia on Rocket Builders ‘Ready to Rocket - Ones To Watch’ list for 2007
Compiled by the Canadian-based firm Rocket Builders, the ‘2007 Ready to Rocket - Ones To Watch’ named a small select group of British Columbia technology companies gaining traction within the information technology trends that contribute to faster growth than the IT sector as a whole. These companies represent high-potential growth in revenue and profile and that are beginning to be of real interest to potential partners and venture capitalists.
“Companies that make our annual ‘Ready to Rocket - Ones To Watch’ list come from a variety of technology businesses and industry sectors across British Columbia, and Rocket Builders has a credible track record of identifying these emerging companies,” says Geoffrey Hansen, managing partner at Rocket Builders. "Many promising companies are too early in commercialization, too early in first revenues, or in transition to new markets or business models. Based on the potential of their technology alone, we recognize their potential in a "Ones to Watch" list."
About the Ready to Rocket 25 and the Ones To Watch
Each year, based on analysis of trends that will drive growth in the information technology sector, Rocket Builders identifies twenty-five (25) private companies that are best positioned to capitalize on the trends for growth. This selection methodology has been an accurate predictor of growth with "Ready to Rocket" companies exceeding the industry growth rate. Also, many of these companies raise investment capital and each year many of the profiled "Ready to Rocket' companies are acquired. To be eligible for selection to the "Ready to Rocket 25" list, companies must be a nominated Canadian-Controlled Private Corporation, and have a commercialized product on the market that has customers and is generating ongoing revenue.
Additionally, Rocket Builders also identifies early-stage high-potential companies it places on its 'Ones To Watch' list
"Many promising companies are too early in commercialization, too early in first revenues, or in transition to new markets or business models. Based on the potential of their technology alone, we recognize their potential in a "Ones to Watch" list." Visit: www.readytorocket.com
About Rocket Builders Rocket Builders is a market strategy and consulting firm focused on helping technology companies to capitalize on market opportunities. Since 2000, we have been engaged in market research, market planning, business development initiatives, strategic selling, and product launches for over 100 organizations. As a service to the local community, each year Rocket Builders shares its insight on market trends to showcase the most promising information technology companies in British Columbia through its “Ready to Rocket” event. Visit: www.rocketbuilders.com
The recent announcement that YouTube will share advertising revenues with members who contribute their work to YouTube is yet another marker is the steady march towards dissembling the structure and dynamics of the traditional broadcast media industry.
The other service cited in the article has been sharing revenue for a while, but is not the Web 2.0 darling status acquired by YouTube based on it's acquisition by Google.
Qumana's business model has since the beginning been based on sharing advertising revenue with users who use the Q-Ads service to attach relevant advertising to their social media content.
The bulk of social media sharing (the 'social' in the term social media, tho' there's more to it than that) still happens on and in blogging networks, and IMO this is unlikely to change in the near future.
As advertising gets more and more relevant to niche markets, and gets easier to identify, pull and place into or alongside media-born work created by personal publishers, we believe that Qumana's value proposition will get stronger and stronger.
Joe Eigo, a martial arts expert in Toronto, used to pay hundreds of dollars a month for computer and hosting services to distribute his own acrobatic and martial arts videos on the Web, in the hope of raising his profile in the TV and film industry.
Today, not only is he able to distribute his content to millions of people at no cost using a popular online video-sharing site, he has also been paid nearly $26,000 (U.S.) by the site owner.
Welcome to the new world of user-generated content on the Internet. What some people consider quirky material at best, companies are increasingly starting to view as a valuable asset. So valuable, in fact, they're willing to pay for it.
Metacafe, a private firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., and Tel Aviv, has been paying thousands of dollars to participants for over a year.
Every video on Metacafe that is watched more than 20,000 times, and is rated 3 out of 5 or higher by viewers, starts earning the producer $5 for each subsequent 1,000 visitors.
Metacafe rates Mr. Eigo as its top earner. One of his clips has been viewed more than five million times and has helped him attract the attention of several producers and film companies, he said.
“It's an amazing opportunity for anyone who wants to produce their own material now. The Internet has become more popular than television,” he said.
