Archive for June, 2008
Is this the future of magazine publishing? Probably not, but it’s still interesting
The Magazineer has put up an interesting post about MagCloud, a print-on-demand service designed specifically for magazines. The content available so far isn’t particularly inspiring, but the idea itself is quite interesting.
But there’s still something about paper. It’s not just because screens suck to read on (they do, but that hasn’t kept us from doing it all day). There is an intimacy about a good book, a pleasure to the glossy pages of magazines, and, ironically, a permanence to paper. (How many times has a website you really loved simply disappeared?)
So what if we could combine the best parts of the web (no waste, personalized content, open to all) with the best parts of print (sexy print quality, permanence, no batteries required)?
For the last year, I’ve been working on a project with HP Labs called MagCloud. The idea is simple, really. MagCloud enables anyone to start a magazine - real, live printed magazine - with no giant pile.
Scotland’s booze ban: ignoring the obvious answer
The Scottish Government’s plan to ban alcohol off-sales to the under-21s but still allow them to drink in pubs tacitly admits what the real problem is: sales to underage drinkers - a problem with an obvious and simple solution.
As Hamish Macdonnell points out in The Scotsman:
At the end of 2006, there were 17,234 liquor licences in operation in Scotland. A total of 1,380 licensing offences were recorded by the police in 2005-6 and there were 167 convictions. But most of these convictions (83 per cent) resulted in just a fine. Only 30 licences were suspended during the year and only half of these were for off-sales.
In a recent test purchasing exercise, under-age teenagers were served 14 per cent of the time by off-licences. The figures for Lothian and Borders were the most alarming. Of the 51 off-licences tested, 17 failed the test.
What this means is that about a third of off-licences in the Edinburgh area are breaking the law and only about 1 per cent of licensees are having their licences suspended. That cannot be right.
He continues:
Yes, we have a problem with binge drinking, yes we have to do something about it but it would help if the current laws were enforced properly and effectively before we start telling students they either have to go to a party empty-handed or break the law.
It does seem unfair to tell everybody under the age of 21 that they cannot buy alcohol from shops in an attempt to catch an irresponsible minority.
It also seems misguided to change the law before the existing ones have been tried, tested and implemented as they were intended.
Great technology needn’t be expensive
I’ve got one of these, and it’s brilliant: a bit of plastic that holds your mobile phone when it’s charging.
Yours for five Euros. Buy two!
Almost everybody pirates music. Most of them would pay for it
Interesting numbers from a British Music Rights-funded study of 14-to-24-year-olds’ music consumption:
A full 95% said they’d copied music in some way or another at one time or another.
And 80% would pay for a legal subscription-based music service that would allow them to discover, swap and recommend music.
BMR’s Feargal Sharkey - yep, him from The Undertones - states the obvious.
First and foremost, it is quite clear that this young and tech-savvy demographic is as crazy about and engaged with music as any previous generation. Contrary to popular belief, they are also prepared to pay for it too. But only if offered the services they want. That message comes through loud and clear.
But the BPI’s rather weird response to a piece by BBC journalist Bill Thompson suggests that the message isn’t being heard by the record companies. No Rock ‘n’ Roll Fun does a typically excellent fisking of their press release, which [IMO] is a rather nasty attack by the BPI that, by design or by accident, misses the point of the original piece (which XRRF links to as well).
[BPI: Music companies are radically re-inventing their business models in response to changes in how music fans want to access music online.] Music companies have been forced to reinvent their business models faced with a changed world - but not in a way they can take any pride in, as they did everything to avoid getting to that point. And they’re still not trying to respond to how fans want to access music - unlimited, everywhere, for a fair price - as they’re still hobbling files, striking exclusive deals, locking formats, trying to find ways to gouge customers. Has any fan ever said “hey, you know what I really want? A music collection that I have to pay for every month or it’ll just disappear?” I suspect not.
What we have here is a situation where copyright owners simply aren’t meeting consumer demand, because they’re stuck in the mindset of what works for them, not the consumers. The internet gives the consumers the power, and the challenge for the music business is to find a way to make money from giving people what they want.
The best example of old-style music business attitudes I can think of is U2 manager Paul McGuinness, who pronounced Radiohead’s In Rainbows a failure because it was being pirated. Never mind that it generated a storm of publicity or that the album reached number one in the album charts; the fact that the free download ended up on torrents did Radiohead a favour. Delivering huge numbers of direct downloads isn’t cheap, and everybody who torrented In Rainbows saved Radiohead a few pennies on their server bills. So by torrenting the album, the pirates saved Radiohead money. Bloody pirates!
Hurry up and make this happen
Firms are still faffing about the Universal Power Adapter:
In China, where 500 million cell phones were manufactured last year, the government has regulated that all cell phone chargers, including those imported, have a standard USB interface and output voltage, so consumers don’t need a new one with every new phone.
Such regulations are unlikely in the U.S., but if the industry doesn’t get its act together then the federal government may start to intervene in some way
A tale of two ISPs
Last weekend, my ISP - Bulldog - wrote me a letter. Good news, they said. Now we’re owned by Pipex, we’re migrating all our services to Pipex ones. You’ll be getting 8MB broadband. Hurrah!
Hurrah? Arse, more like. I’m currently on a 20MB service, not an 8MB one. I tried calling, but tech support and customer service were closed. So I emailed Bulldog customer service asking why they were downgrading me and what I needed to do to continue with a 20MB service. To date, they haven’t replied.
So I’ve switched ISP to, of all people, O2.
The connection isn’t perfect - O2 appears to have the worst DNS servers in the world, but you can fix that by using OpenDNS instead; for no good reason my authenticated SMTP server was blocked, so I had to change a port number - but these are minor issues. My router’s reporting an 18MB connection and Speedtest.net tells me 14MB, which is pretty much what I was getting with Bulldog - but O2 is half the price of Bulldog.
Because I’m already an O2 customer, the 20MB service is £15 per month with free 24-hour customer service. And so far, the customer service has been brilliant. Text message to confirm that the service is being set up. Text message to tell me the activation date. Text message to tell me when my free router (which I didn’t want, but they send it anyway) was going to be delivered. Text message to tell me when activation was complete. Text message to confirm that they’ve tested the service and I should be getting what I’m paying for.
Of course, it may all go completely tits-up now I’m a customer, but I’m really quite impressed by O2 so far - they’ve done an excellent job of making me feel that they give a toss, whereas Bulldog has done the opposite.
A little bit of politics
Irrespective of your political leanings, you have to admit that David Davis, who resigned from his post as Shadow Home Secretary to protest the 42-day detention rule, has a point:
Yesterday this house decided to allow the state to lock up potentially innocent British citizens for up to six weeks without charge.
… And because the generic security arguments relied on will never go away—technology, development and complexity and so on, we’ll next see 56 days, 70 days, 90 days.
But in truth, 42 days is just one—perhaps the most salient example—of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.
And we will have shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world.
A CCTV camera for every 14 citiziens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with 1000s of innocent children and a million innocent citizens on it.
We have witnessed an assault on jury trials—that balwark against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state. Short cuts with our justice system that make our system neither firm not fair.
And the creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.
The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws that stifle legitimate debate - while those who incite violence get off Scot free.
This cannot go on, it must be stopped.
Napster bad! Bloggers bad!
Is Metallica engaging in internet tomfoolery all over again? Seems so: writers who blogged about a playback have felt the chill hand of the ageing metallers’ lawyers.
The Quietus and other websites ran pieces on the album, but were quickly contacted by Metallica’s management via a third party and told to remove the articles.
Baby Bigmouth reviews the iPhone
While everyone was getting excited about the iPhone 3G, Baby Bigmouth was getting excited about the current model: she grabbed it out of my hands, attempted to eat it and burst into tears when I took it back. She’s never like that with toys usually…
iPhone again: GPS and the future of Facebook
Although yesterday’s Apple demos went on a bit, the one for social network Loopt was interesting. Thanks to the iPhone’s GPS, it enables you to see your social networking friends on a map and message them - so for example if you’re in New York with time to kill, you can see if anyone you know is nearby and say “fancy a beer?”
So far there’s been lots of talk about location-aware internet stuff, but it’s hardly captured the mainstream. Location-aware Facebook - or a new rival that does the Facebook thing better, which could be Loopt; it’s available as a Facebook app already - could be massive. And that’s just the most obvious example. Scratch your head for a bit and all kinds of interesting location-aware apps spring to mind. Looking at a car and want to know if there are other, similar ones nearby in other dealers? Want to find a restaurant near you but would like to see the menu, customer comments and so on? You get the idea.
I know Loopt isn’t iPhone-exclusive, but it’s at its most impressive on the Apple machine - which, of course, also offers a peerless mobile internet experience (especially now it’s 3G). Same applies to other location-aware mobile services. So what does the iPhone bring to the party? Combine a good mobile web browser, easy application development (so I’m told; I’m not a developer) with access to the GPS functionality, reasonable price plans, low purchase cost and the likelihood that the iPhone’s going to sell absolute shitloads, and you’ve got a potentially amazing platform for location-aware internet stuff.
None of these things are new, but then Apple doesn’t usually invent; it perfects - and to me, it appears that Apple may have done exactly that with the mobile internet. Things are about to get very interesting.