Oh my giddy aunt. I talked before about how the digital applications of phones will increasingly replace the solid hardware we've grown up used to...
...I used the example of the iPhone camera apps which replaced the functionality of Lomo style cameras and so on.
Now, via Mark, I've just seen Square for the first time...
It's basically a 'square' device that plugs into the standard jack socket of ANY mobile device smart enough, and lets you receive payments for goods or services. Yeah, I know. REALLY.
So anyone from a street vendor to a design freelancer has an instant payment system available to them to receive their money.
Which in turn means everything from the chip & pin systems in shops to the invoice process for freelancers can now change, and be wrapped up in the device folk carry with them anyway.
If this isn't huge, I'll eat my hat.
Then buy a new one, from a guy in the street who's using the system that was even better than Square and hence freed him up to set up his hat stall...
The musician's lot is not a happy one. We know this, we've seen plenty of evidence, but here's another piece (via Dan) that just might give a sense of just how futile the act of making money from music is becoming...
Over on TorrentFreak (a blog covering all things around bittorrent
technology), there's a report on how much money Lady Gaga made from
Spotify for a million plays of her songs...
How much do you think? Go on, guess. A MILLION plays.
How about $167?
Or, if you prefer, 0.017 cents per play, or to bring it back to real money, 0.01p per play.
Now, you maybe don't know if that's a lot or a little, compared to what musicians may be used to receiving for plays of their songs.
Well, not so long ago in 2003, if a song of yours was played on Radio 1, you'd receive a massive £18.44. PER MINUTE (though of course the amount was less if you were on regional or local stations).
But still, one 3 minute play of a Lady Gaga song would make her £55.32.
Or indeed a THIRD of the totally amount of money she's receiving for a million plays on Spotify.
Much as I love Spotify, I really can't see how it's going to continue if the people who're making the content for it only receive such paltry rewards for their efforts. It's barely better than piracy...
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UPDATE...
So, the ever-on-the-pulse Dave Stone points me in the direction of this on Music Ally... a rebuttal, of a kind...
“Firstly, any payment to STIM would only represent a fraction of the payments rights holders receive and only for music played in one country (in this case Sweden) as we pay not only collecting societies, but also publishers and the record company to play their music,” says a spokesperson.
“Secondly, the figure (unrepresentative as it is) is from a short period just after our launch last year, way before we’d established ourselves as a music service and built up a large user base. Specific payments are of course confidential, but this is certainly wide of the mark.”
There's obviously more to this than meets the eye. Yet until someone clarifies how 'wide of the mark' it is, we'll never know whether artists are getting a good deal or not. I wonder if anyone will come out with some real figures..?
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ANOTHER UPDATE
So, Mat has found this... from Steve Lawson's blog, who's also done some quick maths on this, but using some sources suggestion that the real figures are ten times this (as the $167 is just a royalty payment... there are other things to include).
So maybe the decimal point needs to come forward a place... 0.1p per play.
And it points out that's she's also had 20 million paid downloads...
...but that this is a TOTAL figure across every platform, not attributable to Spotify, but rather to the promotional effort as a whole. She's not done badly, either way.
My point on the whole affair remains this though; compared to what they used to receive from listens to a song, there's another whole chunk of musician income that's disappeared.
Here's something cool that Dave told me about earlier. It's called Taykt (pronounced 'Take It'). It's really very simple as a proposition.
Need to set up a text shortcode?
Then just com to www.taykt.com, enter the keyword you want to use, and the message people get when they text... and you're off...
Wow, easy huh? Anyone can do it. None of this set-up fee, faffing with different providers and the like. No worrying about cost, as it's all just '25p+network charge'... so say 35p typically. Not too much at all.
I can already imagine lots of uses for this...
- small independent shops & bars could pick a 'word of the day' that's written in chalk above their counter or bar... if you text that word, you get back a token for half price drink that day, or 5% off your shopping.
- if you want to test the effect of sales by location, just set up slightly different keywords to text in, and monitor which works best
- not sure which offer is more appealing to people... offer a choice of words, and see which proves most popular
A really smart, simple service as far as I can see. Thanks Dave :)
Toshiba sent a chair into space. Yes, yes they did.
It seems that in the last year, lots of people have been 'sending stuff into space'. Students from Cambridge, and Spain.
Then there was the MIT & Canon camera one.
And I've just found out The Sun sent their 40th birthday edition up too.
(It looks kind of doctored, this image. But there's more authentic looking pictures of them doing it here)
Anyway, I'd like to propose that 2010 is the year that nobody sends anything up into space. Space is closed for sending stuff up into. It's been done. LEAVE SPACE ALONE.
It just goes to show you that Moores Law seems to work for Space travel too. It now seems to cost $150 to send something up into space and have photographic proof that you did it. Imagine how much that would have cost in the fifties...
Ain't this the truth?
(Via Zoe P)
Huge, almost feverish anticipation swept the internet when Google wave was announced. The reality some weeks later is that people seem to be:
i) waiting for an invite
ii) have an invite, but haven't had the time or inclination to stop what they're doing and 'wave'...
iii) have an invitation, have tried it, but found no-one they want to wave with for any real purpose, so stopped using it
Why? Well, I don't think it's a 'product' thing...
What is Google Wave?
Ok, a quick recap and opinion on what Google Wave is... having tried it (I'm part of iii above), it's clearly going to be a useful improvement on email.
Going back to my third year physics, conventional email is essentially a series circuit. If one bulb goes, the whole circuit stops working.
(pics from here)
In terms of email, to maximise collaboration between 4 folk you'd send it to someone, who forwards it to someone else, who then sends it to someone else, and it arrives back in your inbox with input from everybody. Then everyone's input is included.
If someone doesn't send it on, the circuit breaks, and nothing happens... until, like Christmas lights, the bulb is replaced.
In comparison, parallel circuits don't need every bulb to work in order for the others to keep working. The others keep on working until you eventually replace the dud bulb.
If you attempt to make traditional email systems a 'parallel circuit' (usually by including everyone in the email all at once), then you undoubtedly end up with a disparate set of people's input strewn across different emails...
You get multiple iterations of the email, sometime simultaneously, which isn't really all that collaborative... and more often than not, he who shouts first shouts loudest in email chains...
Anyway, it's clear that Google Wave has been created to get over this problem, and it's clear we could do with something to help us over it... but why hasn't it taken off?
A fairly rubbish launch strategy
Google have launched things very successfully before using the 'limited invites' method... just think how precious Gmail invites were, and the great word-of-mouth that the service received from those who had it.
But why is it not yielding similar success for Wave?
Well, of course, it needs everyone to change system. If you were on Gmail, you could still talk to people in with work, hotmail, yahoo or other email accounts. Gmail spoke the same 'universal language' as the other systems, so still let people connect.
Wave's not like that. It demands that everyone signs up to Wave in order to do stuff together.
And here's the problem... if you have a limited invite system in place, but need everyone in any group that want to 'Wave' together to have an invite in order to make it work properly, then there's going to be an issue...
...essentially you've designed a beautiful parallel circuit, but you're only letting one bulb use it at a time...
Fixing the problem
So, how can they rectify this issue? Obviously they don't want everyone testing it at once... I'm sure there's all sorts of load testing issues and refinement stuff they're up to.
But perhaps they should change the way they distribute invites, or change the language they use to do it?
Ask people something like 'want to collaborate with others on Google Wave? Then write a quick outline of the project, give us the emails of the peopel you want to collaborate with, and we'll invite them for you...'
Rather than inviting people as individuals, invites teams of people as 'projects'.
And then all of those people will be able to see what Wave can really do for them...
Barcodes? The future of shopping? Is this some weird sort of retro post? Like when the newspaper does 'today in 1972...'?
Because, of course, there's nothing new about the barcode... it was first tested in US supermarkets in the sixties. As technology goes, it's as old as the hills.
So how on earth can it be the future of shopping?
Because what matters nowadays is not the barcode itself, but the reader...
Supermarkets (and now other high street chains) have been putting the control of scanning in the hands of customers for a few years now... not as an advantage to the customer, necessarily, but as an automation of a job that used to be done by checkout assistants.
(...the economic labour market implications of this helps explain why the five members of Girls Allowed had to find alternative employment...)
It's not really a move that's putting the customer 'in control' of course... the important part (price comparison with other possible competitors) is locked away.
With developments such as this, and through years of watching shop assistants at work, we've all been taught by the shops how to scan barcodes...
However... imagine you could take that barcode, and scan it with something else... something that lets you compare prices across every outlet, order it online... and essentially through market forces means that the price you pay becomes as low as possible...
Well, that scanner is here. And it costs £1.19. And it's an app for the iPhone 3GS called Redlaser...
It works like this; you fire up the app, and it uses the camera on the phone to take a picture of any UPC barcode you hold in front of it, as the video explains...
When I first heard about it, I expected it to work on things like books, CDs and the like... but then I tried it on baby milk...
...which quickly told me that our local pharmacy were charging £1.19 for something that costs £0.58 in Boots.
I still can't quite get my head around just how big a step this represents in the way our economy works... but it's taken me back to my Economics degree and a thing called Perfect Competition.
Like many things in Economics, Perfect Competition was just a theory based on unattainable assumptions... infinite buyers & sellers, costless transactions, zero entry/exit barriers and so on
...read the wikipedia entry here for a full explanation)...
...but the one assumption that is close to becoming fulfilled by Redlaser is Perfect Information; prices and quality of all goods in the market are known to every seller AND every buyer.
Perfect Competition as a theory has many ramifications... but perhaps the most important is this; it becomes impossible in the long run for any company in the market to do any more than cover their costs.
So for instance, if I have perfect information about everyone who sells Aptamil baby milk, and there is no 'transaction costs' which set any seller apart (e.g. I can order from all store in bulk via the internet), then I'll always just order the cheapest one.
Which means for both the retailer (Boots) & manufacturer (Aptamil), I'll only ever give them the least possible money for the baby milk.
If everyone did that, for every product, that manufacturers and retailers would only ever break even, as market forces will continually drive down prices...
(Now, that's not of course how everyone behaves now... but it's got me thinking of something that's worth a separate post. And I think there's more implications for the Perfect Competition hypothesis from the internet too, but I'll go in to them on another separate post too...)
So we'll all have perfect price information, but what about the other half of Perfect Information; the quality of products?
How can we possibly begin to share the information about a vast array of products across society in a way that bypasses manufacturers and retailers...
...oh, hang on, right you are...
Whatever it is you're buying nowadays, there's a discussion/forum/review on the internet from other people which will guide you as to the quality of the product you're looking at.
What does it all mean?
Well, in a world where people have access to Perfect Information about just about every market, what implications does this have for branding?
Is traditional branding a mechanism that only works to protect price premiums in a world of imperfect competition? Will I find out about the quality of products from other people, then the cheapest place to buy it via mechanisms like Redlaser?
I'm certainly going to be thinking about this a lot more in the weeks to come... probably at 4:00am when I'm feeding James with all this bargain baby milk we've been buying...
I just saw this on Mashable... Barnes & Noble (US book retailer) are launching a 'Kindle Killer'... it's called Nook apparently...
There's a huge part of me that's becoming increasingly sceptical about the whole eBook market (especially at the prices people are asking for them). For various reasons...
"It's like the iPod for books" say some folks. Well, no it's not. The iPod was different. It replaced other expensive devices (walkman, discman, minidisc etc) that people had to carry to listen to music. A £200 iPod replaced a £110 discman or whatever. That's a good deal. Paying $279 dollars for a Kindle or Nook where no device existed previously... doesn't seem like a good deal
Then there's 'e-ink'... the ability of the Kindle et al to 'look like a printed page'. Wow, you've spent all that time, energy and money to make something that looks like a static printed paper page. Brilliant, well done. You've just given everything on your device the exact same limitations that printed books have...
But the major thing bothering about me is that fact that the tablet is coming...
And not just Apple; Microsoft, Dell, Asus, Toshiba... everyone will make a tablet, like every phone manufacturer is trying to make an "iPhone"...
When tablets become competitively priced, you can pick up an device that let's you do everything an an eBook lets you do and everything a laptop does to boot (edit documents, surf the web, watch video et etc)...
...then why would you bother buying an eBook?
Winning the eBook war is a little like becoming the king of the
dinosaurs... it may be good for a while, but something big's
coming to make you all extinct...
I liveblogged the Guardian Activate Conference in July. Now that the videos of the speeches are online, it's a good time to revisit some of my favourite things from the day... I'll post up one video every few days or so...
Werner Vogels, Amazon - "Your worst nightmare on the web... you throw a party, and a MILLION people come... how do you cope with that?"
The area of cloud computing is increasingly fascinating... people are creating things around computers that they may need a phenomenal amount of storage space and processing power... but only for a brief period of time.
For instance, the Google Monopoly game which launched over the last week needed a lot more server power than they expected it to... and as such crashed on and off for about a week. They've just had to restart the whole thing all over again today...
I found Werner's talk huge interesting, because of the comparison he draws between computing nowadays, and electricity in days of yore.
Companies in those days needed electricity to do whatever it is that they made money from.
Werner's example is a brewer in Belgium, but we have our very own relic of this age in the Gym breakout area in our building...
(It's a particularly rare example controlled by table football...)
Think how mad it would be nowadays to run your own generator for a resource that comes out the wall, on tap, whenever you want it.
That's essentially the proposition for 'cloud computing'... computing that becomes a resource to be scaled when needed, and switched off when it's not.
It touches on a previous post about working spaces I wrote a while ago... when computing becomes as free and easy as electricity to access, it'll be interesting to see how we all work together.
