| Why, Oh Why? |
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“Blippy is a fun and easy way to see and discuss the things people are buying. Automatically share your favorite purchases from iTunes, Amazon, Zappos, Visa, MasterCard, and more.” That is from the homepage of Blippy, which just launched as an invite-only beta service. My only comment/question is “Why?” Why would you willingly participate in something like this? This is simply a repackaged version of Facebook’s Beacon. And we all know how that turned out. Enough with the self-absorption. Link via TechCrunch. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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Comments (0)October 29, 2009
| Perspicacious Persimmon |
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Amazon has introduced PayPhrase, a way to create an easy-to-remember passphrase, coupled with a PIN, for express checkout without logging in. Works with partner sites such as Patagonia, too. Disingenuously Diaphanous? Nah … I’ll never remember how to spell it. Your PayPhrase must be two or more words, up to 100 characters long. No digits or special characters allowed. It has to be unique, since it’s tied to your credit card and shipping info. Bilious Bunion? Maybe … Let me think on it for a bit. Anyway, your PayPhrase can also be configured with controls such as monthly spending limits and email alerts that let you approve or decline a purchase. Jenkins Jeremiad? Bingo! Via NYT. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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July 24, 2009
| Book Review: Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson (2009) |
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Chris Anderson suckered me before, with his first book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. I’d enjoyed the article in Wired upon which the book was based — he’s the editor-in-chief of the magazine — and hoped the book would flesh-out the ideas he explored there. Didn’t happen — it seemed like he had said all he had to say in the article. So I made up my mind I wasn’t gonna buy his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Again, I’d read the article that was the prototype for the book, so I was in a “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” mood. But, on a whim I charged into the Borders in The Gallery 5 minutes before my train was due and snatched a copy off the shelf. (But not snatch-and-run. I paid. “Free” only goes so far with some people, like mall security, for example.) I’m glad I did. This time, Anderson really did a good job expanding his premise. And it’s a straight-forward one at that: our digital age drives the cost of creating and delivering content almost to zero. Not “too cheap to meter” — as Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, once predicted for electricity — but “to cheap to matter”. Thus, companies can create businesses based upon “free” and still make money. The trick is to know what to give away and what to charge for. Google, for example, does it every day — the search engine is free for everyone, subsidized by advertising paid for by businesses trying to get your eyeballs. How is this a revelation? We all know about advertising. Radio, TV, newspapers, magazines — they’re all subsidized by ads. How’s this book-worthy? Well, it’s not just about advertising. There are other ways to implement “free”. Flickr is free. If you want additional functionality, you can opt for Flickr Pro for $25 per year. At the massive scale the Internet provides, you can make a bunch of money if only 5% of your users opt for the fee-based version of your service. Get the idea? Personally, the story of the Brazilian musical group Banda Calypso really resonated with me. They give their CDs to street vendors who crank out lots of copies and sell them inexpensively. The vendors get to keep all the profit. Why? The band knows that their concerts are their main source of income. They’re smart. (And not greedy.) The cheap CDs stoke their fans’ interest and get their butts in the seats. I can’t help but think that if the music labels were this forward-thinking, they wouldn’t be in a death-spiral right now. A good read. Well worth 27 bucks, the anxiety of watching the clock tick away while the World’s Slowest Sales Associate rang me up, and the sprint to the train. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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July 23, 2009
| If You Take Their Money, You Gotta Play By Their Rules |
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Yesterday Zappos announced that it was being acquired by Amazon.com for more than $900 million. CEO Tony Hsieh put it in cutesy terms: “Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say ‘Amazon acquires Zappos’ or ‘Zappos sells to Amazon’. While those headlines are technically correct, they don’t really properly convey the spirit of the transaction. (I personally would prefer the headline ‘Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree …’) However, the reality is much different. Hsieh was apparently pressured by his VC investors to sell while the sellin’ was good. Even so, it’s a nice payday for some good people. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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July 21, 2009
| Barnes & Noble Gets Into the eBooks Thing In a Big Way |
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Yesterday Barnes & Noble announced “the world’s largest eBookstore”: more than 700,000 titles (including many new ones at $9.99), available from the B&N Website. They also introduced a free eReader you can download for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Mac and Windows desktops and laptops. And while they were at it, they also announced that they “will power the eBookstore for the Plastic Logic eReader device”, which should launch early next year. I installed the PC version of the eReader this morning and took it for a test drive. It allowed me to download a half-dozen free titles such as Dracula, Little Women, and Pride and Prejudice. (That’s nice, but unlike a certain Reference Librarian here at Jenkins, I’m just not that into Jane Austen.) Anyway, the eReader works pretty well, but it’s not the same as reading the printed word. I doubt that the eReader alone would make me switch to ebooks. And I haven’t used a Kindle at all — the price, though dropping, is still a barrier for me. But I’m keeping an open mind, for now. This article about the B&N launch from the NY Times makes an interesting point: $9.99 “has become the de facto e-book price since Amazon.com set it for Kindle sales.” That price annoys publishers the way that Apple’s $.99 price for songs from iTunes gave music labels agita. In another article, the Times discusses how publishers sometimes delay ebook releases so as not to negatively impact juicy hardcover sales: “At least one publisher has made a decision to withhold an e-book edition of a forthcoming book to preserve demand for a hardcover edition. Sourcebooks, an independent publisher, is releasing Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse, a novel aimed at children, in September in hardcover. It will hold back the e-book until six months later. Dominique Raccah, chief executive of Sourcebooks, said she wanted to prevent the cannibalization of hardcover sales. ‘If you as a consumer can look at a book and say: “I have two products; one is $27.95, and the other is $9.95. Which should I buy?”‘ Ms. Raccah said, ‘that’s not a difficult decision.’ Ms. Raccah said that because retailers like Amazon have set the standard consumer price for e-books, the publisher could only control when a book would be released in other formats. Delaying the release of an e-book, she said, was like publishing a cheaper paperback edition months after a hardcover edition.” Finally, there’s no word on B&N’s policy for remotely nuking your ebook collection should a publisher give the order. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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July 17, 2009
| I’ll Believe It When I See It |
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Apparently Microsoft and Yahoo are close to an agreement to work together. This soap opera’s been playing out for a long time, so I’m skeptical. However, BoomTown’s Kara Swisher quotes someone as saying, “It is down to the short strokes, for sure, it is just a question if we can finally close this.” Here’s how the deal would work, according to Swisher: “While BoomTown has gotten several different versions of terms of the latest deal, they all include Microsoft (MSFT) paying Yahoo (YHOO) several billion dollars upfront to take over its search advertising business and guarantee certain payments back to Yahoo. There is also a display advertising element to the deal, which would likely have Yahoo take the lead in selling premium advertising for the companies.” Yahoo and Microsoft are meeting today. If the deal gets done, it’ll be announced next week. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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July 10, 2009
| Sixty Bucks a Year for the Online NY Times? |
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Or maybe $30. They’re testing the waters. It’s not stated specifically in the article, but I think these rates would apply to existing print subscribers, just like the online WSJ is $21 extra for people who get the dead tree version. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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June 16, 2009
| Microsoft Plays Whac-A-Fraudster |
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Yesterday Microsoft filed suit in U.S. District Court in Seattle against 3 members of a Vancouver BC family, accusing them of “perpetrating a massive ‘click fraud’ scheme on the online advertising network operated by Microsoft”. The defendants are brothers Eric and Gordon Lam and their mother, Melanie Suen. According to the NY Times: “Microsoft’s theory is that Mr. Lam was running or working for low-ranking sites that took potential client information for auto insurers. The complaint said that he directed traffic to competitors’ Web sites so they would pay for those clicks and exhaust their advertising budgets quickly, which let the lower-ranking sites that he sponsored move up in the paid-search results. When people clicked through to his site, it asked them to supply contact information, which he then resold to auto insurance companies, according to Microsoft’s complaint, which estimated his profit at $250,000. In the complaint, it also said it had to credit back $1.5 million to advertisers because of the Lams’ alleged fake clicks. Microsoft is seeking $750,000 in damages from the defendants.” It’d be nice if Microsoft could win this one. But it’s ultimately a game of Whac-A-Mole — another click fraudster will always pop up. ClickForensics estimates the rate at 13.8% for the first quarter of 2009 (down from the record of 17.1% set in 4Q 2008), but Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land says the rate is actually much lower. No matter — click fraud is always a good story for the mainstream press. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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October 1, 2008
| Brinkmanship |
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Wired reports today that Apple has threatened to shut down the iTunes Store if the Copyright Royalty Board votes on Thursday to increase by .06 the royalties paid to publishers and songwriters. That’s right, they’ll close down iTunes. Apple pays about $.70 per song to the record companies, with the royalties taken from that. Apple gets the other $.29. That’s not much of a margin for Apple. They obviously don’t want to have to absorb the royalty increase, nor do they want to raise the price of songs from $.99 to $1.05. In testimony [it's a ginormous PDF, so you're forewarned] before the CRB, Eddy Cue, Global Vice President of iTunes, said: “Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate iTS if it were no longer possible to do so profitably.” (Excerpted from page 3 of the testimony.) Why the brinkmanship? After all, Apple is a $98 billion dollar company. The royalty increase is like chump change, right? Let’s do the math. In 2007, U.S. music fans downloaded 844 million songs from online stores. (Source: WSJ, subscription required.) Apple controls 85% of that market. (Source: TechCrunch.) Apple makes $.29 from every song they sell. So their income from U.S. iTunes song sales is about $218 million. The extra royalties would be around $45 million, about 21% of Apple’s U.S. iTunes profit. So the royalty increase is, relatively speaking, significant. But does that warrant closing the iTunes Store? No way. Apple would sell less iPods — 3Q 2008 revenue: $1.7 billion — the real reason why iTunes exists in the first place. They just want to break even on iTunes. And they’re trying to get people’s attention, that’s all. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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September 8, 2008
| Like Google’s Not an Advertising Monopoly Already [UPDATED] |
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The Association of National Advertisers, which represents 400 companies, has publicly opposed the Google-Yahoo advertising partnership, announced in June to keep Yahoo afloat after it miscalculated mismanaged walked away from acquisition negotiations with Microsoft. (Coverage here and here.) The ANA feels that “the partnership will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising.” Let’s be real. Google controls more than 60% of the U.S. search market, no matter whose data you consider. Yahoo and Microsoft together do not equal half of Google’s market share. And together they’ve lost more than 4% market share in the last year. As I blogged last week, they own online advertising. Last December the U.S. Federal Trade Commission approved Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, the leader in online banner ads. We’ll have to wait and see how the Justice Department feels about their advertising partnership with Yahoo. Update, September 9: Looks like the Justice Department doesn’t feel too good about it. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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