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Reading through the LA Times, as I do before The Oscars every year, I came across a fantastic Op-Ed written by a respected Hollywood author by the name of Neal Gabler. The opinion piece, titled “The Movie Magic is Gone”, explains how Hollywood is losing its place as the epicenter of cultural products and how movies are losing their relevance as the “barometers of the American psyche”.
And what is culprit? You guessed it… the rise of social media! As Gabler elaborates:
“All of this has been hastened by the fact that there is now an instrument to take advantage of the social stratifications. To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content. Television never questioned the very nature of conventional entertainment.
The Internet, on the other hand, not only creates niche communities — of young people, beer aficionados, news junkies, Britney Spears fanatics — that seem to obviate the need for the larger community, it plays to another powerful force in modern America and one that also undermines the movies: narcissism.
It is certainly no secret that so much of modern media is dedicated to empowering audiences that no longer want to be passive. Already, video games generate more income than movies by centralizing the user and turning him into the protagonist. Popular websites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, in which the user is effectively made into a star and in which content is democratized, get far more hits than movies get audiences. ”
What Gabler calls “narcissism,” I prefer to use the term “digital self expression”. And as I wrote almost a year ago in a piece titled “Social Networks are the New Media”…
“To some extent, self-expression should be viewed as a new industry, one that will co-exist alongside other traditional media industries like movies, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. But in this new industry, the raw materials for the “products” are the people… or as Marshall McLuhan might say, “the people are the message” when it comes to social networks. So for any player who seeks to enter this industry and become the next social networking phenom, the key is to look at self-expression and social networks as a new medium and to view the audience itself as a new generation of “cultural products”.
In the past century, the creation of cultural products was centered in Hollywood. Now, social networks are broadening the scope of cultural media to include “identity production” (a very appropriate term coined by danah boyd), all the while decentralizing the ecosystem out to the edges. For traditional media companies that are seeking to enter this space (e.g. MTV, Martha Stewart, etc.), it’s critical to follow the audience into the development of this new market by re-focusing core assets that have the capability to deepen the level, and heighten the production value, of self-expression. ”
What Gabler and I both seem to be focusing on is the very real possibility that what is truly disrupting Hollywood is not technology per se, but what the technology is enabling the audience to do and how it’s affecting the public’s “consciousness”. In other words, the future of Hollywood may not ultimately rest on issues like how well the studios transition their business models to adapt to digital distribution schemes or how they handle massive copyright infringement.
Instead, what Hollywood might look like in the year 2020 could have more to do with how studios develop new “products”… much like they did with the advent of television (when they created sitcoms, game shows, movies of the week, etc.). But this time, future Hollywood products will probably have to integrate and leverage the virtually unlimited digital resource of self-expression and social media.
At the end of the day, what we’re talking about is the emergence of a new medium with its own art form. And whether Hollywood will remain at the epicenter of future cultural production is the big question. For the first time, Hollywood should be concerned like never before simply by virtue of the fact that, this time, the means of production are now in the hands of the audience itself. What this implies, at the very least, is that the studios will have to increasingly democratize their business model. What does that mean exactly? Go ask the CEO of Veoh.
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Written by Robert Young on February 26th, 2007 with no comments.
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Vodafone’s got Internet brands on its mind this week, and announced today that the company will offer YouTube content to its mobile subscribers over Vodafone live. Like the Verizon Wireless-YouTube deal, it’s another one of those services where the companies will provide the user with “a daily selection of new videos” — i.e. a truncated lame version of the online service. Ah, well, it’s still a little closer to what we want from the mobile web.
And, it’s the third partnership between Vodafone and a major Internet brand this week! Thursday it was a deal with eBay to provide a mobile eBay application that enables users to browse and bid on stuff and buy fixed price products from cell phones. Earlier this week it was a mobile application for MySpace.
We guess Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin wasn’t kidding when he professed his company’s newfound interest in mobile social networks, mobile video, mobile advertising and advanced mobile applications. The company announced a mobile advertising deal with Yahoo last year. And he told Business Week that he expects all these mobile content services to generate 10% of the company’s revenue within three or four years.
Yowsers — that’s a huge amount of revenues. But the company needs to do something. The carrier reported an operating loss for the six months ending in September 2006. Voice revenues just aren’t growing like they used to. Like Om says here, a mobile operator facing the prospect of slowing growth does a lot of strange things.
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Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on February 10th, 2007 with no comments.
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If you like local politics, bureacracy and a drawn-out waiting game — tune into San Francisco’s ongoing Wi-Fi plans. I did yesterday, and spent three hours sitting through the city’s Budget and Finance Committee meeting, watching community advocates fight and supervisors play politics. One things for sure, the plans are as on-hold as ever, despite the initial approval.
A resolution requiring a more thorough study of citywide broadband options has made it through committee, and now awaits a vote by the full Board of Supervisors in two weeks. If passed, this resolution would delay any finalization of the contract with Google and Earthlink for at least a “couple of months,” according to Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, who sponsored the resolution.
The resolution was drafted after the city’s budget analyst recommended considering alternatives to the deal, which is being championed by the Mayor’s office. The board’s support for the contract is mixed. I have a hunch that the board will vote for further study, but will face a veto from Mayor Gavin Newsom that they won’t have enough votes to overturn.
The hearing brought out a number of familiar faces. McGoldrick, the resolution’s sponsor, sat in attendance along with committee members Chris Daly, Bevan Dufty and Tom Ammiano.
Daly can generally be counted on to oppose moves by Mayor Gavin Newsom, and may feel more strongly doing so now given Newsom’s recent rash of embarrassing personal news; Dufty, long considered a staunch ally of the mayor, has become much less predictable; and Ammiano, the senior member of the board, has been a champion of a municipally owned and operated fiber optic backbone network for years.
Google, which recently made a move into The City, was representated by Megan Quinn. She was joined by Alex Clemens, who’s Barbary Coast Consulting specializes in helping companies navigate the murky waters of San Francisco politics. Google is one of his clients, and I had received an email from him earlier in the week asking folks who supported the Google deal to turn out for public comment at the meeting.
And the public certainly did turn out to comment (video will be available here). In an unscientific survery, I counted about two supporters of the contract for every detractor, though Google hosted
a number of community events to drum up support during 2006. Members of the community who hope the deal includes funding for ‘digital inclusion,’ such as Sister Petra Chavez of Caminos, argued that the faster the deal goes through, the sooner they can begin working on bridging the digital divide.
Thankfully, all the discussion focused on the merits of the case — all too often in San Francisco, policy often boils down into a fight between the mayor’s office and the board, and considering Newsom’s recent struggles, it could have gotten very, very ugly.
For their part, Google doesn’t seem terribly discouraged. “We look forward to continuing our work with the Mayor’s office and EarthLink to provide free Wi-Fi access to the over 1 million residents and visitors of San Francisco,” said Quinn.
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Written by Jackson West on February 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Metacafe, the online video startup that was rumored to be close to an acquisition deal for $200 million or so last December, is getting a new CEO. Co-founder Arik Czerniak tells us that he is stepping down as CEO and will remain at the company focusing on products and strategy. Erick Hachenburg, previously of Electronic Arts, will be taking over as CEO of the company that has offices in Palo Alto and Tel-Aviv Israel.
Czerniak tells us that the guard change “is great news for the company,” and Hachenburg “is a guy who is going to lead us to the next level.”
Metacafe has been adding other new executives recently. In January the company said it had hired Mort Greenberg, VP Sales, Allyson Campa, VP Marketing, and added Bud Colligan as its Executive Chairman. Metacafe, also opened a New York office “to better serve its advertisers and media partners.” The company has raised at least $19 million from investors, including Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners.
In December TechCrunch reported that Metacafe’s acquisition deal might had fallen through because of traffic concerns, and cited Comscore numbers that showed the startup had a 25% traffic drop in monthly unique vistors — from a high of 4.2 million in September, to 3.1 million in November.
Numbers compiled on NewTeeVee from Comscore for the month of December, show that Metacafe had 2.95 million total unique visitors for that month (U.S. audience). Numbers from Compete compiled on NewTeeVee say that Metacafe is ranked #14 with a 1.3% market share and 1.57 million unique monthly visitors, also based on a U.S. audience.
Hitwise data says comparing Jan-07 versus Dec-06, the market share of visits to the site among all U.S. web sites increased 1% — that’s in contrast to the company’s growth between Jan-06 and Jan-07 where Hitwise says its market share of visits to the site increased 912% among all US websites. That year over year traffic boost came as a result of the company sharing the advertising revenues with video creators — an advantage now blunted by YouTube’s recent announcement.
It seems like the traffic concerns are real, and the company is looking for ways to turn around revive a traffic decline. Investors, for one, are always eager to press for the symbolic change of the guard when things go south. The new ceo will have his work cut out for him, trying to revive the company and beat its competitors
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Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on February 7th, 2007 with no comments.
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Zun.k.ed, verb – partnering with Microsoft on an evolving platform, betting the farm (and your future on it) only to find that Zune is going to leave you out in the cold.
A few months ago, when Microsoft’s integrated digital music and media plans aka Zune came to light, we wondered about the plight of Microsoft partners who spent millions of dollars developing an ecosystem around the Microsoft Windows Media platform, only to find themselves competing with the Barons of Redmond.
The word double-crossed came to mind, though I went with a more poetic headline. It wasn’t the first time Microsoft had left some of their partners pissing in the wind. CrunchGear has a delicious little rumor that indicates that well, it might happen again.
Apparently, there are plans afoot to make a ZunePhone that would work with the Zune marketplace and rest of the Zune ecosystem. (Insert your usual judgement and betting probability filter for blogosphere rumors coming true here.)
If true, we can’t exactly fault Microsoft for taking its telephony destiny into its own hands, but one does have to think about those poor souls who are betting the farm on Windows Mobile.
(And also wonder about tossing aside all the money and effort that has been put into making that a viable platform — one which is actually getting better — though the UI still seems like something designed by a person with limited sensibility.)
Of course, there would be arguments that Windows Mobile is more for the enterprise and high-end corporate users (true to a large extent), but imagine the chagrin of the handset makers who dreamt of scale, and signed up for Windows Mobile, only to find themselves competing with ZunePhone.
Zunked again!
PS: I am not going to make any cracks about iPhone and zPhone. Oh wait, I just did.
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Written by Om Malik on February 2nd, 2007 with no comments.
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The Wikipedia profile of Phil Kerpen, a Beltway insider and policy director for Americans for Prosperity, should be enough of a reason for us to not take him too seriously. At least not when it comes to issues pertaining to technology, network neutrality and broadband.
His politics notwithstanding, his column over on Forbes.com, Internet Super Traffic Jam, blaming network neutrality for what he thinks is a coming traffic jam is just asinine piece of drivel, which doesn’t take into account how networks are built and how technology has evolved.
Kerpen uses a study by Deloitte & Touche, which says that the Internet backbone speeds are going to be reduced to a crawl if there isn’t substantial infrastructure investments and deployments, to argue against net neutrality legislation. DT, Accenture, McKinsey and others showed their true worth when they advised companies like Enron. So why take them seriously! But that’s a different rant.
The infrastructure investments in the backbone have been an ongoing process. Level 3 and Global Crossing, despite all their issues, have been using technologies such as boxes made by Infinera to lower their costs, and add more capacity. Since Kerpen doesn’t actually link to the study, we are left to wonder what his conclusions are based on. It looks like DT doesn’t even believe there’s a problem, since another research paper there predicts that “unrelenting progress in processing power, network bandwidth and storage capacity” will let electronic games proliferate.
What you’re seeing in Kerpen’s missive is another offering from the “telco chorus,” a group of bloviators who are paid either by conservative advocacy operations, or indirectly supported by telco contributions. These astroturfers have been outed before, and their goals of trying to provide “expert” or “unbiased” opinion are pretty transparent.
It’s surprising that a generally reputable outlet like Forbes is giving airtime to someone like Kerpen and his by-the-Ma-Bell book net neutrality opinions (service providers need incentives to invest!). Even if Ed Markey & Co. get a net neutrality bill to the President’s desk this year, there’s no guarantee it will be signed. The only thing stopping providers from building the network of the future is their decisions to spend money elsewhere, like in spending $89 billion to buy BellSouth and its networks of the past.
Luckily, the industry has innovators like Cisco building its CRS-1, and deployers like the folks behind the 10-gigabit Internet2, who are helping build the bigger pipes of the future. The “Internet is falling” argument is just another telco talking point, tailor-made to add more FUD instead of clarity to the debate. Too bad Forbes doesn’t have the time to find writers who actually know what they are talking about.
(Om Malik contributed to this post.)
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Written by Paul Kapustka on February 2nd, 2007 with no comments.
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Fox Interactive Media, after a period of relative quiet, is getting acquisitive again. The company is said to be in talks to acquire Strategic Data Corp., a company based in Santa Monica, California, that helps online publishers optimize their online advertising yields.
Talks are at an advanced stage, though no deal has been finalized. Fox routinely talks with various start-ups with an eye on possible acquisition or an investment. Fox Interactive spokesperson declined to comment.
If the deal does close, then it would be the second deal by News Corp.,-Fox Interactive this year. Earlier today, News Corp., took a 10 percent stake in a company called Roo Group; a fact that apparently wasn’t known to the FIM Group, up until this morning, when the Wall Street Journal reported the story.
Strategic Data Corp., (SDC) however would be an ideal acquisition for Fox because it would help them boost the revenues off their MySpace and other web properties. SDC claims that it has technology that “typically achieves network wide revenue increases of 50-150%.”
If true that could give MySpace revenues a rocket like boost. MySpace has notoriously low CPMs. MySpace page views however continue to grow. According to comScore, Fox Interactive had 39.5 billion page views in November, primarily driven by the 38.7 billion pages consumed at MySpace.com.
SDC and FIM have a bit of a history. SDC counts Intermix, the parent company of MySpace (prior to FIM acquisition) as a client. We chortled a little when we read this description of some of their clients.
Our clients include large ad networks, web publishers, and advertising supported software (“adware”) vendors, serving millions of dollars of popup and other ad types from thousands of advertisers across thousands of publishers and sites every month.
Honesty is typically a great policy, except when admitting that you do business with adware vendors.
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Written by Om Malik on January 30th, 2007 with no comments.
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The first DEMO convention of the year starts Tuesday night down in the So Cali desert, where 68 startups will try to get noticed by the 700 or so expected press, VCs, and industry execs. For every Skype or Ironport that have launched products at the show, there’s hundreds of Browsters or Filmloops that make up most of the flock. We’ll try to make some educated guesses, though lively presenters and good business plans often have an inverse relationship.
A quick look at the math: say there’s 600 paying attendees at an average $2,250 per person fee, and 68 demonstrators pay $18,500 a pop, means Chris Shipley’s show could be raking in more than $2.5 million for the event before expenses. Cha-ching in Palm Desert!
According to DEMO rules what the companies will launch at the show is embargoed until tomorrow, but since the presenter list is public, we thought we’d take a quick look at some of the attendees pre-announcement day.
Personal publishing across media: Dublin, Ohio-based Nextumi will be there and one of the cofounders says the company will launch “share2me, a ubiquitous sharing product to permit crossplatform, multimedia sharing.” Redwood City, CA-based Vuvox says it enables its users to publish personal channels with digital content, with the tagline ‘your visual voice.’
Startup product I already use regularly: TeleFlip. Easiest way to send a text message from your PC to a cellphone, just send an email to ‘PHONE-NUMBER’@telefip.com. I have no idea how they’re going to make money, but I love this service.
Online video: With all the online video startups out there, there’s still even more launching or unveiling new products at DEMO, like Magnify.net, Eyejot, Blinkx, SplashCast, ClipSyndicate, Jaman, and Panjea. Details from Liz on NewTeeVee tomorrow.
Mobile: I’ve skipped DEMO the past few times as Web 2.0 washed over the place, but more and more startups are outlining mobile ambitions there. Bling Software says it has the industry’s only AJAX based client for mobile applications, Buz interactive does a mobile personalization service (more details tomorrow), and a launch from Mobio, a company we covered last year.
WiFi Aid: The WiFi at DEMO will probably be too impacted to work, but a few companies are betting on the ubiquitous WiFi trend. We’ve checked out Devicescape’s download, which helps with browserless access to WiFi networks. Spanish startup Whisher, which has the tagline ‘WiFi Reloaded’ opened and then locked its beta site already.
Established companies trying for some DEMO juice: Adobe, Alcatel-Lucent Ventures, Seagate, Symantec, Wyse - hey there old timers.
Worst named DEMO companies: Boorah — boo. Jaman, say it with a rasta accent — now it’s pretty bad right. Buz Interactive and Me.dium — maybe the lack of the domain name of choice (Buzz Interactive? Medium?) means they lose out on the moniker of choice (pure speculation). Oh well, names aren’t the end of the world.
Most of these companies, like the Kleiner Perkins Caulfied & Byers-backed content recommendation site Aggregate Knowledge have raised money in the past 18 months. Many are also using DEMO as a venue to look for another round of funding. Which ones do you think are worth investing in?
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Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on January 30th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Featured and Software 2.0 and Mobile and Startups.
While low prices and huge inventory are the main attraction at Amazon.com, the site’s reviews have emerged as an essential online resource. Now, a new generation of start-ups wants to take on the shopping giant by spreading reviews across the web.
As PowerReviews CEO Andy Chen puts it, he’s building a “next-generation Epinions.” His competitors in the distributed reviews space include Bazaarvoice and European-oriented Reevoo. Today, a new start-up, Ratepoint, is throwing its hat in the ring.
Boston-based RatePoint has raised a little over $1 million from Prism VentureWorks, .406 Ventures, and its founders, who were part of the team at GeoTrust, which they sold to VeriSign in September.
The start-up has gone from concept to launch in four months, an impressive feat — but then again, that might just show how wide open this category is. RatePoint makes a toolbar (as of Sunday night, only available for Internet Explorer) that aggregates user ratings. Toolbar users will see reviews weighted to emphasize other users with similar tastes.
“A five star for me is not always a five star for you, it might be a three star,” explains founder Chris Bailey. For now, the user reviews are only of URLs, so the tool the service most closely resembles is probably StumbleUpon. Product reviews are in the works.
PowerReviews, which has $6.25 million in funding from Menlo Ventures, Draper Richards, and company founders, is taking a slightly different approach, though its earthy green and cutesy star design is pretty similar to RatePoint’s. We’re pretty sure PowerReviews came first.
The company offers review software and management for retailer web sites — for instance, Walgreens — and distributes the reviews across its 80 customer sites, taking a cut of ad and product sales. Its staff of 18 does a diligent job of quality control.
Until now, PowerReviews’ reviews have only been available on customer sites, but the company plans to launch a portal in the next few months. Since the review templates are extremely specific, the portal will provide some interesting side-by-side and tag-based comparisons. It will also expand a revenue stream of sponsored listings (though sponsorship does not affect search ranking, says Chen).
I saw an early version and liked it, though I felt like the site could really benefit from being mashed up with price comparison, local availability, and color tools. How many shopping web sites are you going to go to that don’t actually sell products?
Both companies’ ideas are interesting, but my hesitance towards installing yet another toolbar makes me prefer PowerReviews’ approach. Reevoo uses primarily email surveys (to ensure customers have actually bought a product), which also seems a little too onerous.
By staying focused on reviews, the companies are ensuring that they always stay relevant to consumers. However, they’ll only become useful — and profitable — when they elicit a whole lot of participation. Amazon may be in need of some competition on the reviews front, but it’ll be hard for any site to emerge from the pack.
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Written by Liz Gannes on January 29th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Featured and Software 2.0 and Startups.
There was no mention of the word “broadband” in the President’s State of the Union address last week, an omission of little surprise given everything else that’s going on. Still, it may have been tacit acknowledgment that yet another Bush administration campaign goal — universal broadband access by 2007 — will fall by the wayside.
Granted, the President and the nation should focus first on pressing matters like wars and health care. But that doesn’t mean it’s OK for U.S. politicians to ignore this country’s broadband infrastructure. In fact, without political leadership and national-goal objectives, the current dismal state of American broadband penetration isn’t going to get better soon. The combination of archaic regulations, big monopoly service providers and the perform-now mentality of Wall Street simply won’t allow for any risky experimentation or network buildout that doesn’t have fast, demonstrable ROI. So we need politicians to take charge.
Already, you see such leadership happening on a local level, with municipalities and even some states drafting their own broadband plans, usually revolving around wireless (because wireless technologies offer the attractive if unproven idea of circumnavigating the telco infrastructure to deploy faster technologies more quickly). Maybe starting locally is the best way to go, since experiments can happen faster and more methods can be tested. Given the current President’s preoccupation with weighter matters like Iraq, and the current apparent unwillingness in Congress to take on big-picture telecom reform in 2007, local experiments may be all we have for the near-term future.
Leaving broadband build outs to the big telcos and cablecos — an idea that probably passes as strategy for the current administration — isn’t going to get us to ubiquitous broadband anytime soon. Both Verizon and AT&T are struggling to bring their networks up to speed, and are likely to focus on providing services to high-paying customers first to satisfy Wall Street.
As long as there aren’t too many more Katrina situtations to expose the underlying fragility of their networks, the telcos and their armies of lobbyists and lawyers should be able to stand their ground under the current byzantine structure of telecom laws, moving forward on a timetable that benefits their shareholders first. That’s as it should be for any public company worth its market cap. But is it good policy for all?
In the meantime what’s not happening is anyone building new networks on a national basis for the greater good. Rich folks with disposable incomes should have no problems. The worry should be about the classrooms and homes of mainstream America, and whether or not broadband will allow everyone a chance to participate or prepare for the digital economy of the future.
We are headed for problems as a nation if the best thinking that comes out of Davos is that YouTube is going to pay for videos, or that Bill Gates thinks the Internet will give us better TV. Now that politicians are finding the Internet as a communications vehicle, they should focus a bit on the medium as well as the message. Because it needs their help.
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Written by Paul Kapustka on January 29th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Featured and Broadband.
Perseverance is one quality Steve Case has in abundance. When almost everyone had given up on America Online, he plowed ahead, somehow managing to keep going.
It took over a decade, but eventually America Online soared. He will need the same steadfastness and patience for his latest project, Revolution Health, which he started in July 2005.
Case, the former CEO of America Online and chairman of AOL Time Warner, launched Revolution LLC with $500 million of his own fortune, according to BusinessWeek. The Revolution Health Group is one of its projects. Revolution Living is the other. Since its launch, RHG has acquired six start-ups and invested in another (InterFit Health) to form the core of RevolutionHealth.com, launched Monday.
“It took a long time before people believed in AOL,” Case said in an interview. “I feel the same way about health care.” He did acknowledge that the current task was tougher, but added that the opportunity was larger.
No one can deny the fact that navigating the health care system, or simply finding relevant medical information can be a migraine-inducing exercise. A simple trip to the eye doctor can often result in a hernia-inducing paper trail. “There is a lot of frustration with the whole system on all sides,” Case says, and often “[the] consumer is on the fringes. We want to put them in charge.
“Most people when they look for health care or medical information, they go to a search engine, and are served up links,” says Case. Not an ideal scenario, especially if you as a consumer are searching for information relating to a particular ailment.
Case wants to offer an easy to use, well-organized health information portal populated with professional data from institutions such as the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and Harvard, with of course social networking built in.
The service also includes interesting medical tools, such as Symptom Checker. “I am a father of five and when one of the kids falls sick on Sunday morning, it’s straight to the emergency room because you just don’t know what’s wrong, and that’s quite frustrating,” he says.
There are some feedback mechanisms that can help patients make informed decisions. Visitors can rate their doctors and healthcare providers, helping share their experiences with others. “We want people to come here to stay healthy,” Case says.
Good point! Suffering from a bad case of lingering flu (thus explaining my prolonged absence from the blog) today seemed like a good time to figure out ways to quit smoking. At Revolution Health, it took less than five minutes to find the discussion forum where I should ideally be able to interact with others who have kicked the habit. The forum was devoid of messages, but I am quite likely to return.
Nevertheless, it also represents one of the many challenges facing Revolution Health. It faces competition from established players like WebMD. Then there is the little issue of company charging fees from customers. There are a growing number of start-ups who are chasing similar opportunities, by focusing on lucrative vertical opportunities. Some wonder if Revolution Health is trying to do too much?
Case explained that what RH is trying to do is what online brokerages did for personal finance. What’s the point of a personal portfolio if you can’t manage your stocks, mutual funds and other investment vehicles? And what good are they without solid research and data? “What we need is a simplistic approach,” he says. Everything neatly packaged - the kind of packaging that helped millions ease onto the Internet!
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Written by Om Malik on January 23rd, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Featured and Startups.
It has been a while since I sat down with Angus Davis, co-founder of voice applications service provider TellMe. I have known Davis and his co-founder Mike McCue for years. We met in an era when most Oracle employees wanted to work at Netscape, where the two of them were. (These days I guess Google is the company on people’s wish list to escape the evil clutches of Larry 1.0.)
TellMe powers the 411 services at major telecom service providers, mobile operators and large corporations like FedEx. It is a boring business, but hugely lucrative, enough to make TellMe a likely candidate for an IPO offering later this year. But Davis dodged those questions, and instead we ended up talking about a staggering work of Jobs’ genius – the iPhone, which could also very well be Steve’s WaterWorld.
Given that Angus and I match John Madden in cumulative age, it came as no surprise that we were a tad cynical, and perhaps skeptical of the device that promises to do it all. After all, dialing a touch screen phone when driving is kind of difficult, and of course our senses have been programmed to use the 12-key pad.
Chattering like yentas aside, we did marvel at the phone’s user interface – fluid, dynamic and simple. The kind of fluid dynamism you can see in the Apple TV or on Front Row. It might be worth whatever it cost to build.
The New, Fluid Interface
The commonality amongst those three is their ability to bring into focus the feature or functionality that you want to use, and fading the rest in the background. The simplicity triggers usage almost intuitively. While these are three Apple products, they portend a new trend, the emergence of a more fluid and active user interface.
Apple is not alone in thinking along these lines, because you can find other examples, though not quite as polished or fully evolved.
The Nokia N80 and N73 have a multimedia key that opens up a multifunction window that is navigated using a tiny navigation stick. Some of the Sony Ericsson phones have an almost-dynamic UI, and so does the BlackBerry Pearl from T-Mobile; they only limit it to the Faves feature. A few phones from Samsung and LG have dabbled in this, though most have stopped short of Apple’s efforts.
It is easy to have a static interface when all you want to do is look up a phone number or send a text message. The emergence of the active and fluid user interface stems from the trend that the devices are becoming multifunctional, and complex.
One of the big challenges when it comes to adoption of converged devices has been their complex and confounding user interfaces. Citizens would happily sacrifice convenience of one-device-to-do-it- all in favor of simplicity.
This is especially so in the case of mobile phones that are now masquerading as everything from music players to Internet tablets. To navigate through the wide array of features using a classic user interface is quite challenging.
Intelligent storage drives and multifunction CE devices are also ideal for this new fluid interface, only exposing the functionality you want to use. The gaming consoles have been testing this idea and we can very well expect more UI experimentation in the near future.
Not Just for Devices
The fluid interface is not just for devices, and thanks to Web 2.0 technologies like Ruby and Ajax, you are also seeing the fluidity come to web and web applications, and perhaps it will soon trickle down to enterprise applications.
Netvibes and Pageflakes are good examples of rudimentary interfaces that depend on fluidity. Digg Spy and Cloud View are other examples of a fluid UI. The commonality between all these services is that they are dealing with massive amounts of information, just like the new CE devices.
The big interface shift is part of the technological evolution. During the last century, the automobile business started out Model-T but then evolved to different models, each with a different look and feel and a different dashboard, the UI of that business. It has continued to evolve and become more dynamic as complexity of the box-on-four-wheels has increased.
The computer business has gone through the same evolution. I remember the punch cards, the DOS interface, Windows 3.1, the Mac, the OS X, the Windows XP and so on. (Interestingly, the Xerox inspired icon-driven Mac UI changed the way we interacted with computers.) Computers had screen real estate and helped popularize the “menu” and “windows” system. But with mobiles and CE devices that menu-windows paradigm doesn’t quite work as effectively.
The fluid UI is the natural evolution. In an era where hyper commoditization is part of doing business, UI and by extension the user experience is the crucial barrier to entry. Apple’s iPhone is a collection of commodity chips, hard drives and whatnot dressed up in a pretty shell. It is the UI that makes it intriguing enough to worth waiting for.
Our skepticism about it being a potentially costly debacle aside, both Davis and I are waiting for the iPhone, just to get a close personal look at the user interface. (At least that’s my excuse for getting one!)
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Written by Om Malik on January 19th, 2007 with no comments.
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Lately, I’ve been thinking through an oft-discussed scenario involving MySpace… one that I have good reason to believe is now highly likely in 2007. What if MySpace suddenly decided to put up tollbooths and all the players within the MySpace third-party ecosystem had to start paying the mothership access fees?
Without doubt, a strategic shift in policy by MySpace along such lines could cause significant ripples, if not outright panic, among many of those vested in the MySpace economy.
While I can’t reveal the “deep throat” reasons for my speculation, let’s discuss some of the more publicly-known factors that could influence such of move:
- With the departure of Ross Levinsohn as the President of Fox Interactive Media (“FIM”), the MySpace economy lost its best internal corporate champion and defender of the Web 2.0 “open & share” ethos. While the cofounders of MySpace, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, are also net-savvy and remain ostensibly in charge of the social network, they are no match when squaring off against Peter Chernin (COO of News Corp) and Peter Levinsohn (the new head of FIM). The loss of Ross was a tremendous setback to FIM, and it looks like the pain will be felt by hundreds of entrepreneurs as well.
- Unconcerned by the virtues of operating under Web 2.0 principles, the aforementioned two Peters of the old media guard live by a different ethos: money and control. And as MySpace continues its quest for improved monetization, their objective to deliver a “clean” environment to major advertisers is increasingly aligning with their vigilant efforts to improve safety & security.
- Given such internal momentum, Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam has identified its existing level of openness to its third-party ecosystem as the number one threat to its unifying objectives.The problem here, of course, is the everlasting delicate balance between openness and control. The question is, which is the optimal path to continued growth and sustained profitability? In my view, it would be very premature and self-destructive for MySpace to close up now as social networking monetization schemes are in their infancy and the major innovations are yet to come. Put another way, while extracting rents from its third-party ecosystem may prove financially beneficial in the short term, such a strategic shift may sow the seeds of its destruction in the long run.
- As I’m told, one of the key drivers for MySpace to start charging their ecosystem has to do with YouTube. Specifically, FIM wants to monetize all those YouTube videos that are embedded within MySpace pages. Now that YouTube is owned by Google, internal forecasts are estimating that MySpace can add as much as an additional $500 million in revenues to the existing agreement they have with Google (which is guaranteed at $900 million of revenues over 15 quarters). That’s a lot of cash, and who can blame them for wanting to secure that income stream? But if MySpace starts charging YouTube, do they have to set up tollbooths for everyone else? They’re pounding their heads against the wall on this one.These are vexing issues and I empathize with the management of FIM and MySpace.
- And let’s be clear, erecting tollbooths is not the same as closing up behind walls. It’s a monetization strategy that could conceivably add much to the bottom line — something Murdoch insists of all his companies. At the end of the day, there’s only one thing that we can be certain of: the current relationship between MySpace and YouTube will not continue as is. MySpace will either move to monetize the relationship, or it will cut YouTube off. In either case, it will set a new policy for the third-party ecosystem.
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Written by Robert Young on January 16th, 2007 with no comments.
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It all began with an anonymous tip, about a new service called Shadow Number that allows you to make private calls from your mobile phone, while still retaining your privacy. Their sales pitch: ShadowNumber keeps your play life private.
Their flyer led to their Web site, and a click later it revealed that the Menlo Ventures-backed TalkPlus, a VoIP start-up was powering this new service. Their tag line: Calling for a Playdate!
… Instantly alter your caller ID, Shadow Number keeps your play life private.…
While the company made a couple of announcements at CES, there was no mention of Shadow Number. The company domain name is registered to a Toronto-based Canadian company called Contact Privacy, though it shared the name servers with TalkPlus. So we decided to check in with Jeff Black, CEO of the company.
“Shadow number is our brand for the alternative market,” Black explained it to us. “We are uncomfortable with putting our TalkPlus name, and are using the Shadow Number.” Black describes the “alternative market” as the adult market and that is on the fringe of that adult market.
Despite their self-claimed value propositions, most if not all VoIP start-ups face an uphill battle in terms of mass scale adoption. The desire for anonymity, especially when indulging in naughty activities, might be actually be their savior.
There are many reasons why people might want to keep romantic liaisons anonymous, from the simple (you’re just flirting) to the more complex (use your imagination). There is also a measure of safety in anonyminity, and the desire to keep potential stalkers at a hidden-number distance might well be an attractive service.
TalkPlus is just the latest amongst the VoIP start-ups to use the anonymity sales pitch. Jangl has signed a deal with Match.com, while Vivox has signed a deal with the WorldFriends’ Networks.
Some of us (including yours truly) may find Shadownumber’s pitch a tad distasteful, but it is an ingenious way for a fledgling start-up to popularize its offering. “There are certain markets that we think will have higher adoption,” Black said. It is a time-tested model for new technologies – go adult and go big.
Many new technologies — like VHS and DVDs, and more recently Video over the Internet — owe no small part of their early success to adult entertainment, which spurred people to jump through technological hoops they might not have otherwise. As long as no laws are broken, why shouldn’t VoIP benefit from satisfying the same desires?
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Written by Om Malik on January 15th, 2007 with no comments.
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Never mind net neutrality, I want my privacy. As in packet privacy. The telcos say they need to sell non-neutral routing of traffic to recover the cost of building broadband networks. Moving from the Internet, where a packet-is-a-packet, to something that looks suspiciously like the 20th century telephone network requires remarrying the content and connectivity that TCP/IP divorced. It requires deep packet inspection. It requires looking at the content of communication.
AT&T does not plan to roll out two physical pipes to every end point in order to sell Google enhanced access. The new telco plan calls for content-based routing to separate traffic into media and destination specific VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). Laws exist to address the substantial privacy threats created by the fact telephone companies know Mr. Smith called Mr. Jones, but the privacy risks associated with “content routing” replacing “end point routing” enter an different realm.
Coping with billing disputes still means retaining data. Under what circumstances might a third party get access to the data derived from content routing? Content routing in one context enables content filtering in another. Lessons Cisco accumulates in providing content filtering equipment for the Great Firewall of China apply to directly to content routing ambitions of telcos in the U.S.
The telcos do not claim a right to listen in on calls to enforce the business versus consumer pricing policies. What makes it appropriate to use packet inspection to accomplish the same thing? The pitch for content routing gets presented in terms of quality of service guarantees that benefit users, but there are other customers for content routing. Law enforcement and criminal enterpises will have plenty of uses for data obtained through deep packet inspection. One can imagine champagne will flow at the NSA should the telcos get their wish.
What is driving telcos’ desires to charge by the application?
The fact that their delivery pipes are being commoditized. Internet access pricing reflects the cost of building broadband networks (e.g. location, bandwidth, performance, and reliability), so moving a video bit costs the same as moving an email or voice bit. This turns the traditional telco pricing model (charging more per service, or per minute) upside down. Packet inspection would allow telcos to charge more for high-bandwidth applications, or to charge for preferential treatment.
One such method is already in practice: The Verizon Wireless EV-DO broadband service does not suffer net neutrality obligations, so the Acceptable Use Policy includes prohibitions against using VoIP applications. Verizon cannot enforce the provision without content routing (aka content filtering). So Verizon can and does track bit consumption and boots customers who take the advertised “unlimited usage” too literally. But just counting bits does not work where bits carry different values.
Content routing does not entirely shift the balance of power toward carriers. People sensitive about who might get access to their communication already implement encryption that, by definition, defeats packet inspection efforts. The decline in trust between carriers and users shows up in the growth of so called Darknets (encrypted communication among a closed group of trusted end points.) Progress toward implementing content filtering will turn the entire Internet dark, so efforts to make encryption illegal will likely follow any success in undermining net neutrality obligations. And then how secure will your bits be?
Daniel Berninger is a Washington, D.C.-based financial analyst working for Tier1 Research. He is a veteran of the telecom industry.
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Written by Daniel Berninger on January 15th, 2007 with no comments.
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Steve Jobs is a great storyteller. If he were a fiction writer, he would stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Tom Clancy and John Grisham. Mesmerizing in prose, master of the climax.
Today’s performance at the Macworld Keynote was no different. We hyper clicked, reloaded websites and traded SMS messages trying to find out more details about new iPhone, the real thing, not the poser that came to market a little while ago.
And how he teased us, taking two hours to let us know that it will be available in June 2007. And even though it is going to cost an ungodly amount, there is a good chance we might get one. But that is not the real story of the day. The real story of the day came at the very end of his keynote.
“From this day forward we’re going to be known as Apple, Inc. We’ve dropped the computer from our name.” And then he quoted ice skating legend Wayne Gretzky. “‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it’s been.’ That’s what we try to do at Apple.”
That also might be the epitaph of the PC era. And it is sweet irony that the company that sparked off the desktop computing revolution is the one announcing its passing.
Dropping Computer from its name is a sure sign that Apple, from this point forward, is a consumer electronics company, a mobile handset maker - one that also makes computer hardware and software as well.
Like the iPod, the iPhone may feed off the computer, but it can leave peacefully without any dependence on a desktop. A Wi-Fi enabled device, it is should ideally be capable enough to do direct downloads from the iTunes store, no desktop necessary. (Time magazine says it is not possible, so who knows!)
Apple is making the phone do all things a computer does – surf, email, browse, iChat, music and watch videos. Nary a keyboard or mouse in sight, and everything running on OS-X.
While I am not suggesting that this replaces our notebooks or desktops for crucial productivity tasks, the iPhone (if it lives up to its hype) is at least going to decrease our dependence on it.
Quotes via Engadget. Photos by Niall Kennedy via Flickr.
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Written by Om Malik on January 10th, 2007 with no comments.
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The trials and tribulations of the competitive voice service provides such as Vonage, have forced venture investors to look at startups that marry VoIP to mobile phones. Any application that can lower the high mobile phone tariffs can quickly gain traction. And that is enough for investors, who ready to put down mega dollars.
You might have heard of names like Jajah, iSkoot, Mobiboo and Fring, with some of them getting big cash infusions from the likes of Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures. Add Truphone to this list. The UK-based mobile VoIP startup has raised £12.5 million ($24.5 million) in Series A funding from Wellington Partners, Independent News & Media, Burda Digital Ventures and existing investors Eden Ventures and angel investors.
The company plans to set up what it describes as a global Mobile Internet Network Operator. The company has signed up deals with Wi-Fi network operator The Cloud, which lends some credence to its claim.
Much as I like Truphone the application, I find the company has an uphill climb. The fancy MINO acronym might sound impressive but in reality Truphone will be fighting the battle for cheap minutes, which is great in early days but then it quickly gets old.
The only reason I use them is because the calls are cheap, cheap enough to make me wonder what really is the margin for Truphone after it has paid off the incumbent who terminates my call in India.
With multiple phones to support, one cannot overlook the problems and costs involved with developing and deploying software to many different mobile platforms. This at a time where there are competitors popping up all around them. Of course, what is to prevent the Vonages of the world to play the same game?
Here is the twister: if Truphone becomes really popular and is embedded in all phones, then you can make free calls to other Truphone-enabled phones. In other words no revenue opportunity, just like Skype. Forgive me for thinking, that this investment is laced with a dash of irrationality.
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Written by Om Malik on January 10th, 2007 with no comments.
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If you are a Sprint Nextel customer, at some point you have suffered from dropped calls. It seems that malaise is spreading to the service provider itself, which has hit a massive air pocket. The company today gave a guidance that could make anyone cringe. The news was so bad, that the company had to cut 5,000 jobs. Quick recap of the bad news:
- In the fourth quarter ending December 31,2006, Sprint Nextel lost post-paid 306,000 subscribers, the only metric that counts amongst the Wall Street types. Analysts had estimated a loss of about 250,000 subscribers to defect to other carriers. UBS estimates another 330,000 will be gone in the first quarter of 2007 and expect these losses to continue.
- The capital expenditures are going to be up in 2007 to $8.5 billion versus a shade over $7 billion in 2007.
- The company will spend $300 million on WiMAX in 2007, and more in 2008. No idea, how much, though they did promise coverage for 100 million possible customers by then. Chicago and Washington DC will be their first two trial markets for WiMAX.
- 2007 revenues are going to be flat when compared to 2006, remaining in the $41-t0-$42 billion range.
- The good news is that a lot of that money is going to be spent on 4,800 new cell sites, which will raise the total number of Sprint cell sites to 67,000, which compares favorably to 45,000 for Cingular and 26,000 for Verizon.
- The company is planning a new CDMA based product for Boost customers that uses CDMA network and offers unlimited calling.
The company lost more than expected post-paid customers in the fourth quarter of 2006; will spend more money and will have a flat 2007 in terms of revenues - that’s a left-right-left combination that could leave any investor KO’d. Sprint should count its blessings that all busy bodies, aka bloggers and reporters, are in Las Vegas attending the CES.
In many ways you could predict that this was coming. In Septmeber 2006, Sprint COO Len Lauer quit the company. A month later Tim Donahue left the building. While trying to predict the future because of these developments was akin to reading tea leaves, still two senior executives leaving in quick succession is always a red flag.
Beyond the numbers, Sprint-Nextel’s problems stem from their dual network strategy - CDMA and iDEN. CDMA is doing fine, iDEN is a mess and causing customers to cancel and switch to other carriers. And Sprint-Nextel will remain a mess up until a point when its one network. And if that was not enough, Sprint-Nextel’s decision to add yet another networking protocol, WiMAX, to the mix is only going to create bigger headaches for the company. In a note to his clients, UBS analyst John Hodulik writes, “We believe the company remains committed to WiMAX but is re-evaluating its projections on the project.” Re-evaluating to slowdown, would be a good move at this time.
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Written by Om Malik on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Updated: 8.58 pm: A few minutes after we had ordered our dinner at Mehfil Restaurant in San Francisco’s SOMA district, Scott Rafer, chairman of Orlando, Florida-based MyBlogLog, checked his Blackberry Pearl, and broke into a smile.
An unusually intense man, it was an unusual sight to see him smile. He typed out his response, and asked his lady friend to press the little Pearl to send the email. “It’s done,” he said, referring to the sale of MyBlogLog to Yahoo.
Though we have reported on the deal in the past, including this morning, when Marketing Shift reported that the deal was done, only to pull out the story a few hours later. I refrained from asking Rafer, who is a close friend. We normally don’t discuss business, the only reason our friendship has survived the trials of time. But this was special, and he shared his big news, though we had planned to have dinner almost a month ago.
Rafer declined to comment on the rumors about the price, and I didn’t press him for the details. Whatever the amount might be, it is clear that five-employee company (including Rafer) have done well, primarily because the company was completely boot strapped and raised zero dollars in angel or venture capital investment.
The team is going to join Yahoo and will be based in Berkeley and San Francisco and will be part of the Yahoo Developer Network. Most will report to Chad Dickerson, Sr. Director, Yahoo! Developer Network. This is part of Yahoo’s efforts to become increasingly social. Given how much effort Yahoo is putting on their Panama advertising platform, there must be some publisher-advertising angle to this deal, something we will discuss with Yahoo executives at the next opportunity.
More than the actual deal, it is the company’s past that makes it an interesting story. It was nearly eight months ago when I met Eric Marcoullier at yet another dinner with Rafer.
Marcoullier, who is based in Orlando, Florida had started the company with Todd Sampson in 2005. The two are fifth grade buddies. Eric had been trying to get bloggers to use his traffic measurement tool, though for some odd reason I did not bite. Rafer had contacted him via LinkedIn, and convinced them that they were sitting on a bigger opportunity than plain traffic measurement business.
Rafer suggested the company become a distributed social network, an idea that has been championed by Josh “Da Konnector” Kopelman of First Round Capital. Kopelman was one of the investors in Feedster, Rafer’s previous start-up, that is apparently limping along despite numerous setbacks. Soon there after, the MyBlogLog widgets started to show up on blogs, and a certain buzz started to form around the company. Since then 45,000 folks have signed up for the service, which is described as a blog-based social network.
In Fall 2006, at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Josh Kopelman hosted many start-ups in his private suite, and it was here he introduced MyBlogLog to some of the Yahoo folks, and soon the rumors of a pending deal started to fly. However, it was only this evening that the deal closed.
Footnote: This just might be one of the first few virtual company acquisition. One of the founders lived in Massachusetts, while another called Orlando his home, along with two other developers. Rafer lives in San Francisco. And they met on LinkedIn. Yup, something for our friends on Web Worker Daily to chew on!
Photo by Chasse Carroll
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Written by Om Malik on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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The madhouse that is the opening day of CES is over and one thing is clear – CES has become more and more about mobile devices. Yeah, it’s always been a well tread topic at the show, but as faster and bigger wireless networks come online and the always-on mobile broadband connection becomes a reality, the main events and gadgets across the CES show floor are following suit.
Gates pushed the point last night, and the two morning keynotes on the first day were from the chiefs of the world’s largest mobile phone makers, Nokia’s Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and Motorola’s Ed Zander (check out our latest Flickr photos).
Zander and Kallasvuo both dished a flow of new devices and services from the companies. The ra-ra fest is just what the companies need to help them forget about some of the clouds that have appeared in the mobile phone market — slower than desired growth in matured markets where sales are replacement phones, while emerging markets are growing well but buying up cheap phones.
Zander used the morning to talk about how Motorola would help consumers take their music and media with them wherever they are through the company’s mobile phones and digital living room devices. “Content moves with you,” he said and tried to illustrate the point by riding around the stage on a yellow bike decked out with a mobile charger. Later he demoed the company’s place shifting FollowMeTV technology, which allows users to view video, pictures and music in the living room on devices like digital cable receivers and on mobile phones.
On the music front Zander announced a partnership with Warner Music for the company’s mobile service and showed off the MOTORIZR Z6, a Linux-based music phone. Like Nokia did earlier this year, Motorola is pushing a music platform with both services and devices, and betting music will help sell its gear.
Kallasuvuo’s keynote was up second and on a slightly smaller stage at the Hilton, but filled with some sweeter devices. The company has been focusing on converged devices and recasting its phones as multimedia mobile computers for awhile, and today showed more of this plan. Kallasuvuo displayed the N93i video phone, an upgrade to the N93 we’ve been playing with, but the new one has Six Apart’s blogging service Vox integrated. Kallasuvuo said on mobile blogging and Web 2.0, “It’s the mobile device that will become the main way for people to participate in those communities.”
Kallasuvuo also showed off the N76, an eye candy slim phone, which he called “truly beautiful,” and the next version of its Wi-Fi-based Internet tablet the N800, which we can’t wait to check out. He mentioned that Nokia and Skype will develop a mobile Skype experience over the N800. He also showed a near-field communication mobile payment phone, the 6131, which Nokia is using in trials in New York. Whew – that’s quite a line up.
The companies are both hoping that all the flashy new phones and services announced this morning will help bring them the pickup they’ve been needing. Last week Motorola said its fourth quarter sales and earnings would be lower than it had previously forecast after slower sales of phones. That sent Moto’s shares down the most in more than four years (according to Bloomberg) and took Nokia stock in its down draft. Nokia’s third quarter earnings fell a bit while its sales rose, partly due to a drop in average phones prices, from a growing demand for cheap phones in countries like India.
Don’t get me wrong, sales of mobile phones are growing every year, and totaled 251 million units sold in the third quarter of 2006, according to Gartner — that’s a 21.5 percent increase from the same period last year. But the companies are in a bit of a bind. Matured mobile markets like many European countries, Japan and Korea and the U.S. are mostly buying replacement phones — a harder place to get growth. Emerging mobile markets like India and China are buying up phones quickly but it’s largely low cost handsets.
It’s a squeeze that the companies hope can partly be overcome by fancy handsets with features for music, the web, and video, among other things, that will convince consumers who already own a phone to get a new one. That’s one of the reasons why we get all these nifty new phones and services at CES every year.
Photos via Flickr
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Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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CES 2007: A casino conference room full of pale gadget fan-boy bloggers, doe-eyed PR reps, and pre-market electronics, means one thing — I’m in Vegas for the next few days for, what else, CES. The desert is cold, and Barry Manilow’s face is everywhere. I just got back from the first official event of the CES circuit, the standard CES “Unveiled” event, and true to tradition there were not many major unveilings. But it’s always fun to get a taste of some of the goods that CES has to offer before the rush of the week, and in a room that’s quite a bit smaller than the football stadium-sized Las Vegas Convention Center.
Check out some of the photos I took with the Nokia N93, which I managed to pry out of Om’s hands for a few days to take to Vegas. The two below are from the convention center — DivX is finally promoting Stage6, and Verizon bombarded the press room with fiber-based demos. It’s not too bad for a 3.2 megapixel mobile camera phone. We’ll try out some video this week too.
This year is also the 40th anniversary of the event, so I guess its officially over-the-hill now. Andy Abramson says its getting revitalized, but the blogs that are making news have been doing this for several years now. Maybe there are just that many more now.
At the Unveiled event, LG was showing off some of its latest phones like the QWERTY-based enV, the CU400, which is an HSDPA push-to-talk phone, and, of course, the Chocolate in many flavors. What they didn’t have at the booth was an LG MediaFLO phone, which I’m thinking is going to be the center piece of Verizon’s press conference on Sunday. MediaFLO USA also had a running demo of its mobile TV service, but over a weird clunky demo device. They have promised the real thing tomorrow.
Not to be outdone by their LG, Samsung showed off their own nifty new phones - the X830s, the Ultra Music phone, the i760 super slider, and the not-so-nifty large-text phone for the senior citizens, the Jitterbug.
Samsung is not just a mobile phone company. It is also showing off both very large and small screens, from a double-sided 2.22-inch LCD that shows different images on both sides of the same screen for mobile use, to a 70-inch diagonal HD LCD TV panel. Then there’s Samsung’s mobile video tech news, which we’re looking to find our more about.
The Axion “IPTV Box,” looked like something I would actually use, and is launching sometime in the summer — it’s a small mobile monitor that runs online video connected wirelessly to its broadband-connected base station. No PC required. I tried to duck past the WiMedia UWB section but I got roped into watching their demo-only UWB Kodak camera. Stop teasing us. Of course robots always have a way of upstaging the group, particularly if they come in the form of a Singing Elvis or a robospider.
The event wasn’t a blockbuster, but it’s better than bumming around my hotel. Somehow I thought it was a good idea to stay outside the city and rent a car, so I found myself in the city of Henderson, sandwiched between a bar called Mugshots and an industrial plant. This is my fourth CES, but my first and last time doing that.
More Photos on Flickr
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Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on January 7th, 2007 with no comments.
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The most important market challenge for social networks in 2007 can be summarized in three words: monetization, monetization, and monetization.
Regardless of whether social networks will splinter into niches and verticals (e.g. sports, pets, moms, teenage girls, etc.), regardless of whether social networks adopt interoperability (e.g. OpenID), regardless of whether individual profile pages morph into widgetized and personalized start-pages, regardless of whether 2007 will be the year that social networking goes mobile… all such market development activities will prove secondary to a much more fundamental issue.
And that issue is whether social networks can innovate on the revenue generation side of its business model sufficiently to pull its average ad rates out of “junk” status into “premium” rate levels (e.g. from today’s $0.50 CPMs into something closer to $10 CPMs).
Towards such ends, there are four critical success factors that any innovation in monetization scheme for social networks must adhere to:
Social networks, and online communities in general, are terrible platforms for advertising formats designed for any type of call to action. As such, Google Adwords-type direct-response PPC ads have proven highly ineffective. On the contrary, the significant opportunity for social networks is to become highly-efficient branding vehicles. In fact, it is my prediction that social networks will prove themselves to be the most effective brand communication platforms on the Internet.
As we all know by now, social networks are a new media for self-expression and communications. And since the core revolves around people (not products), it is vital that any innovation in brand communication include the active and explicit participation of those people within the process itself. In other words, people themselves are the platforms, capable of message amplification and network effects, and they should be treated as brand re-communicators, not just end-receivers. So just don’t advertise at them, advertise with and through them.
Given the extreme pressure to monetize with low CPMs, many of today’s social networks are way too cluttered with ads. Virtually every pageview that is generated carries an ad. This is highly wasteful and counterproductive, for both users and advertisers. Instead, improved methods of monetization yielding higher CPMs, must correspond with a reduction in the volume of ads. To some extent, old-fashioned artificial scarcity must be imposed on available ad inventory in order to achieve improved performance and satisfaction for all parties involved.
Scalability is key; therefore, automation is critical. Google represents the best comp here. Every scale-enabling innovation that has been built into their Adwords & Adsense platform, from Do-It-Yourself purchasing to auction-based pricing to placement by performance, even the fact that they take credit cards, are all key reference points for anyone seeking to optimize monetization within social networks. The need for scalability also implies the capability to service the needs of smaller advertisers, alongside the big Madison Ave spenders.
The bottom line of all this for anyone running a social network already, or if you are in the process of building a new one… make sure that everything you do is designed to maximize monetization, as the difference between success and failure will rest on this metric. For instance, if you are creating a niche social network, do so in order to fetch high CPMs. If you are going to widgetize profiles, make sure it results in an enhanced path to monetization. 2005 and 2006 were years that proved that social networks were not a passing fad, but superior monetization is what will prove key for social networks in 2007. Consequently, it’s likely that M&A activity will also accrue towards those who are able to crack this nut.
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Written by Robert Young on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
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EXCLUSIVE
Modeo, the mobile TV company owned by Crown Castle, plans to announce on Monday that its service is live in New York city, in what the company is calling a ‘beta commercial launch.’
There’s a bit of hand waving involved, as the beta service is closed to the public and will be open only to a select group, which the company says will have several hundred users. The company had been shooting for an end of the year launch, but will now make the announcement at CES next week.
The service will launch with video and audio content, and Modeo said it will use the beta group to get feedback throughout the first quarter. The company still has no carrier deals to announce or a timeline for when (if?) the service will be available to the public and outside of New York. The beta group will be using the DVB-H HTC-manufactured smart phone, which it showed off last year — we’ll check out their demo at CES at the Microsoft partners booth.
The beta launch is good news for Modeo, as it can try to use this to get a carrier deal, and good for companies like Nokia that can finally show off DVB-H gear stateside on a live network. But a closed launch is rather underwhelming. I got the feeling that the next quarter will be Modeo’s make it or break it time. If the beta service goes well and deals follow, the company could survive. But, hey, let’s be realistic, the CEO just bailed, that’s not a good sign.
Especially since Qualcomm is planning on launching its MediaFLO mobile TV service in the first quarter of this year and has been besting Modeo on carrier deals. I wouldn’t be surprised if Qualcomm made a launch announcement at CES, too. Only they’ll probably have more details of when consumers can actually start buying the service.
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