Tag - business

Audible.com & iPod: Down the iTubes

September 12, 2005

Well, there goes a great partnership.

I watched the Stevenote in which Jobs announced the new iPod Nano yesterday. And saw what I hadn’t heard earlier: that Harry Potter is on iTunes. J.K. Rowling is putting her annoyingly adolescent but immensely popular books on the iTunes music store in audiobook format.

Hmmm. Guess who has been a great Apple partner – and who is still promoting iPods left, right, and center?

Audible.com, that’s who.

The biggest and the best
Audible is the biggest name in audio books … and unsurprisingly, Audible is the first link when you google for ‘Audio book’. They’ve promoted iPods for years now.

audible.com and iPods

Not out of some strange altruistic impulse, of course. iPods are what most people are using to listen to audio books. Well, at least those who are regularly spending money on new audio books.

That’s why iPods are plastered all over Audible’s homepage. And why you get a free one when you sign up for Audible’s service.

Whole new ballgame
But now Harry Potter’s on the iTunes, um, music store …. and I’m betting it’s just the beginning. What, functionally, is the difference between recorded music and recorded books, to a computer? None.

iTunes could become the biggest audio book seller overnight, if the right contracts could be signed, the right legalities observed, the right priorities set.

Money, money, money
I’m not guessing that Apple’s in any hurry. After all, the audio book industry is a fraction, and probably a miniscule fraction, of the music industry.

However, the potential profits are bound to be MUCH better – audio books sell for $10-25 – and my guess is that Audible takes a very retail-like 30-50% of that. A little different than the pennies Apple makes on song sales!

Harry Potter today …
My guess is that Harry Potter is simply a test case. If it doesn’t take off, no big deal. Jobs will try anything, once.

But if the $249 audio book package sells, and sells hard, Apple has a success story to take to book publishers all over the world. Publishers who are concerned about declining book sales. Publishers who are looking for ways to jazz up their industry. Publishers who are going to be interested in new revenue streams. And publishers who see an opportunity to increase their own profits as well.

A high-profile success story would be just the thing to get the ball rolling and speed up all the contracts and formalities … to get the publishers pushing each other out of the way in their rush to sign a deal.

If I was Audible, I’d be very, very worried.

Microsoft DRM Talk by Cory Doctorow

September 11, 2005

Ummm … if you have even the slightest interest in digital freedom, piracy, and/or consumer rights when it comes to electronic devices and products, you need to read this.

It’s gold, Jerry, gold!

Money back offers that make sense

August 29, 2005

I’m doing some consulting work for The Linguist … mostly blogging at the Linguist blog, and I’ve been thinking about money-back or risk-free trial offers that make sense.

Here’s one at Bigha. (I recently blogged about their Starseeker chair.)

It’s for a revolutionary bike – a very expensive bike. And there’s a money-back guarantee. But you’ve got to have given the product a real test – 240 miles of riding in 60 days. And there’s a speedo on the bike, so they can tell.

See how they justify how they’ve set it up – it makes sense, it’s defensible:

We ask only that you commit to giving the bike a real try. Averaging four miles per day is not hard to do. By trying the bike over a two month period, you can really get to know the bike and see how well it fits into your life. Then you can make an informed decision.

Since at the Linguist we know what people are doing on the site, we could do a similar thing.

I think it’d be worth trying.

iTunes price increase: the story behind the story

August 27, 2005

So, the labels want more for their songs.

It’s well known that many record labels aren’t happy with the ‘one price fits all’ approach to digital music sales taken by iTunes, and there is speculation that when the contracts come up for renewal early next year some labels may not renew them unless Apple changes its pricing strategy.

Well, there may be a little more to it than that. Jonathan Schwarz posted the following:

I was with the Chief Executive of a music company recently, who told me how thrilled he was to have a growing percentage of his revenues being derived from digital distribution. But there was one caveat – 95% of the digital distribution came through one vendor’s product and service (guess which), the owner of which had let him know his royalty stream was being radically reduced, unilaterally, in a new contract. No negotiation.

It’s not too hard to put 2 and 2 together.

Jobs is unhappy with getting only 4 cents or so from each song downloaded from the iTunes music store. The labels are already raking in the dough by getting the lion’s share of the 99 cents, but they also want more, especially the ability to charge more for popular, in-demand, recent music.

Two groups I’m not sure are in the negotiations are the clients – everyone who buys music – and the artists. One thing’s for sure: this is the wrong time to be increasing the price. Paid digital music is very young yet, and increasing prices could stifle the newborn.

I have to say I trust Jobs more than the labels, which have proved themselves time and again as souless profiteers. And 4 cents a track for the retailer is ridiculous.

But starting a fight right now is in nobody’s best interests, which is why my prediction is that this will all blow over. The two positions are likely just initial bargaining points, from which both parties can devolve into something fairly similar to what exists right now.

Free as a business model

August 10, 2005

Fred at A VC has a very interesting article on free as a business model.

I commented on his site, then realized that the comment was far too good to not post here too … So go read his post, then come back and read this.

😉

OK, time to chime in:

I’m starting up a division for Premier (premier.us/family) and do some marketing consulting for a start-up (thelinguist.com) so I read this article with interest.

I think that if you’re considering free as a marketing strategy, there are three key question to ask ask and answer in a very hardcore way:

1) who’s your customer?
2) how do you define your customer?
3) how will you attract that customer?

If you define your customer as the person who pays you, Google’s customer base just shrunk 99% – their customer is the advertiser. Everything else is just honey to bring in the bees.

To me, the lesson that the guy above with the Wiki isn’t getting is that giving the product away isn’t a good way to sell it.

Google’s product, from this perspective, is NOT search. It’s audience. Attention. That’s what Google manufactures. And then they sell it to their customer: the advertiser.

Fairly simple, really.

But it’s based on a very hard-nosed no rose-tinted-glasses focus on answering the key questions.

Creativity

August 7, 2005

You want to infuse creativity into your job, into your company?

It’s by Roger L. Martin, the Dean of Rotman School of Management, and it’s significantly insightful.

Google, Trademarks, and AdWords

August 1, 2005

There’s been a bit of controversy over the years with Google’s practice of allowing advertisers to set their ads to appear when someone searches on another company’s trademarks.

I never quite saw the problem with that, until a couple of days ago when, just for the heck of it, I searched for the word iTunes.

Here’s the result:

google trademarks

To the naive searcher, the first two links might look quite clickable … they seem to be exactly what you might want when you search for iTunes.

However, not only are both links unrelated to any of Apple Computer’s business or software known as iTunes, the ad titles are completely misleading, if not outright false: a surfer will not be able to download iTunes from those links. And in fact the links go through to a probably illegal free-for-all mucic downloading site … just the opposite of what someone searching for iTunes might want.

This is highly questionable behavior on Google’s part, if you ask me, and if I was Apple, I’d be asking some hard questions right now.

Apple product update cycle

July 27, 2005

So you want to know when it’s a good time to buy an Apple machine?

Well, you might get this page after a little Googling, and it’s a lot of fun, but what you really need is The Mac Buyers Guide.

Don’t buy before reading it, or you’ll be like my brother in law, who bought two Mac Minis last week ….

Safari RSS: a Cop on my Computer

July 25, 2005

OK, full disclosure: I use Safari for almost all of my surfing, as well as my RSS.

It’s good, fast, and aesthetically pleasing – an important aspect of a discerning computer user’s experience.

Since the latest update (I’m using Safari 2.0 build 412.2), I’ve only run across one site that does not work properly with Safari. And I know that developers of that site are seriously clueless – a Javascript on the page requires IE funkiness to work. OK, I can handle that. Not Apple’s fault.

But there is something that is Apple’s fault. And I’m particularly ticked off about it because it’s a design decision that Apple must have made to brown-nose studio and music company execs: Safari won’t download movies or MP3 files anymore.

It used to be very simple … be on a page, see a movie or hear a sound you like, click File -> Save As, and you’ve got it. No more.

Well, this is a problem. Not because I can’t steal music and movies anymore – I never used it for that anyways. But I happen to blog for The Linguist, a language-learning start-up in Vancouver, Canada. And we put out a newsletter with I Make News. The newsletter is done by someone else, and the easiest way for me to get the files and submit them to our podcast directory (which is listed on iTunes, by the way) is to just suck them off the newsletter, upload them to our site, and that’s that.

Or, that should be that. Safari won’t let me suck the podcasts down. A File – Save as on an audio file results in a 4 Kb ‘audio’ file on my desktop. Double-clicking that file opens up iTunes, and precious little besides. Certainly not the podcast I’m hoping to capture.

Well, Firefox to the rescue. Firefox isn’t a cop on my own computer, wagging its finger at me every time I do something that it thinks is a problem. But I shouldn’t have to open up a new browser to do something fairly standard, fairly obvious.

This is disappointing.

But the biggest disappointment is that Apple is a company founded on enabling people to do cool stuff with technology. Disabling the existing functionality to save files is a step backward, and a rejection of that heritage.

The zen of failure

July 25, 2005

Joel put out one of his patented Joel on Software briefs today, and there’s lots of good reasons to go check it out.

This one was worth the price of admission for me:

The Creative Zen team could spend years refining their ugly iPod knockoffs and never produce as beautiful, satisfying, and elegant a player as the Apple iPod. And they’re not going to make a dent in Apple’s market share because the magical design talent is just not there. They don’t have it.

Basically, this is the Pareto Principle in action …

On tradeshows

July 11, 2005

I happened to check the Fog Creek Software intern midterm report a week ago or so, and was struck by a number of the thoughts.

This was the first trade show Fog Creek had ever attended. The truth is, a trade show is not a very cost-effective way to reach potential customers. Given the cost of travel, hotels, the booth, a thousand bucks for nice brochures, and everybody taking a week off of work, it’s a really expensive way to get in front of prospects, especially since I can write an article on my website and get in front of 1000 times as many people.

But that’s not really the point: the point is to have interactive experiences with your customers. You can try out lots of different pitches and really listen to how people respond to them, which is something you can’t do in non-interactive marketing like web sites and magazine ads. I learned this from Eric Sink, who wrote a great article on the topic, Going to a Trade Show.

This is incredibly unbelievably true. I just did the exact same thing at the National PTA conference in Columbus Ohio. And the value is incalculable.

Why?

Because you fail fast.

The perfect 9/11 business

July 11, 2005

Ok.

Air travel is slow because security is high, and therefore inconvenience is enormous.

What do you do? Go back to buses, baby.

But this ain’t your daddy’s bus!

Dell Hell

July 9, 2005

Whoa. This is good stuff.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen/heard top execs in major, major companies rave about Dell. They think that Dell is the absolute best for exactly two reasons:

1) Dell is cheap
2) Dell delivers machines quickly

The only problem is that top execs NEVER have to deal with support issues. Some slob in IT does. And therefore it’s the slob in IT who knows more – really knows more – than the pinstriped exec.

Two fun searches for anti-Dell people:

1) Dell customer service problems
2) Dell hell

Many execs – mostly bean counter types – are prejudiced again Apple for price reasons. Well, expensive can be measured lots of ways.

Google @ lightspeed

July 6, 2005

I don’t know if I’m the only one noticing it, but Google seems a LOT faster these days.

Not in terms of returning search results; it’s always been fast at that. What I’m referring to is the googlebot’s crawling and archiving speed. And the speed with which crawled resources make it into the live searchable database.

I remember, maybe 4-5 years ago, it took something like 30 days for spidered sites to get updated in the live searchable database. These days, it’s almost instant.

Case in point: a couple of weeks ago I added an (incredibly basic) site for my company, sparkplug 9. Then I linked to it from this site. But I didn’t expect to hit Google for a week or more, or perhaps longer.

Wrong!

Simply out of perverse curiosity, the very next morning – perhaps not more than 10 hours later – I googled sparkplug9.

In shock, I noticed that the site was already spidered, in the database, and searchable.

Wow!

Free iPod with Mac: Apple Canada Needs to Join the Party

June 29, 2005

It’s been well-reported that Apple is offering a free iPod Mini with every new Mac purchased by students before September 24th.

But only in the States.

Ouch, that hurts. I’m a university student in Canada (taking a Masters program in Educational Technology) and qualify for the educational discounts. And, I’m planning to buy an iMac G5. I’d really, really like a free iPod mini with it.

So the only question is: Apple Canada, are you going to join in on this promotion?

It’s a brilliant promotion. iPods are hotter than plasma, and Apple needs to spread that halo to its computers. Joining this promotion can only help Apple Canada make some significant market share inroads … and would give me a free iPod.

Otherwise, I’ll have to seriously consider buying it in the States, and seeing how much it would cost me to bring it back to Canada.

Update (June 30)
Please see comment below – Apple Canada IS participating in this program. Excellent!

Bye-bye Flickr

June 20, 2005

It’s a little annoying, as a Canadian, to see this sort of thing …

The Flickr team has up and moved this week to Californ-i-a and has been singing Beach Boys songs non-stop since arrival. And you’re moving too!

We’re moving each and every pixel, bit, and byte, all your data, lock, stock, and barrel, from our humble server shack in Canada to our new server palace in the U.S. of A!

This process will begin during the week of June 28 and will result in speediness, stableness, and happiness. For more information, please visit the FAQ about the data center move. http://www.flickr.com/help.gne#94

Thank you, Flickreebies, for making Flickr such a wonderful place to share, connect, and befriend. We love you! (In an entirely non-creepy way.)

– The Flickroobies

Flickr, of course, was bought by Yahoo! a while back, a US corporation, and apparently they’re moving everything and everyone to the States.

I live near Vancouver, Canada, right around where Flickr was born and grew up, and it’s a little sad to see it go.

Successful non-technical technical resumes

June 6, 2005

I was recently asked for resume advice by a developer who is applying for a new position that requires some management skill and experience, and thought that it might be interesting to a wider audience.

Because even though you’re a technical person, and you do technical work … your resume should not necessarily be technical. Especially if you’re going up the food chain a little into – ugh – project management.

What you are trying to do is sell yourself to $boss. When you are selling something, it’s always a good idea to understand the product, but it’s a better idea to understand the customer.

In this case, understanding the customer means understanding what matters to $boss, in what order of priority. To understand that, you have to both put yourself in $boss’ shoes, and you have to ask questions.

I can speculate about what $boss wants, and I’ll list a few things, but your best chance to is get in touch with $boss when you can, and spend a few minutes on the phone with him. Just ask questions, and listen. This also gives you a personal connection with $boss that will stand you in good stead as you enter the interview process.

Some of things that I think will matter to $boss include:

– how does your past history indicate that you have managed projects and people before?
– how will this department work with other departments in the future?
– why is hiring you not a risk for me?
– what management style will you adopt?
– how global is your sense of all that $this_company does?
– what does it mean to you to no longer be coding all the time and instead managing at least part-time?
– can you communicate technical things to non-technical people?

It’s all about crafting a story that is truthful, hangs together, and compellingly presents the case that your history, your experience, and your personal attributes all together add up to a package that will blow $boss’ mind in terms of performance from this department. If you’re any good, you have the elements of a compelling story, but you need to present the things in each project you’ve worked on in order to SHOW that.

Not that my resume is the be-all and end-all, but take a look at my resume online:
John Koetsier’s resume

Notice the focus on accomplishments, and the presentation of everything in terms of business objectives and achievements. So, an example of this might be that “networking an office” is not in your resume, but “building a network to allow computers to exchange business information, enabling employees to have access to needed data quicker and easier.”

This is just an example. And you have to be careful that you don’t talk about “digging implements” when you’re actually talking about shovels. It’s got to be real.

But you have to speak the language of business. $boss is a businessman. $boss doesn’t know, and doesn’t really care, about technical mumbo-jumbo and languages and protocols and networking and so forth. What $boss wants to know is: can I rely on this person to run this department efficiently and effectively?

And, if I hire this person, will it turn into a problem for me later?

I hope this helps.

3.9 Million Customer Records

June 6, 2005

As Slashdot just mentioned, UPS apparently ‘lost’ 3.9 million customer records that Citigroup was sending to a credit bureau.

Yeah right.

UPS loses what, less than .1% of all the packages it sends through? I couldn’t find a number online, but it has to be vanishingly small. We send hundreds of packages via UPS every month, and I’ve never heard of anything being lost, ever. And somehow this particular one ends up lost?

Suspicious. Very suspicious.

How crazy-stupid can you get anyways, sending 4 million client records via UPS? Some talking head at Citibank had this to say:

Beginning in July, this data will be sent electronically in encrypted form,” said Kessinger, who heads the company’s consumer finance business in North America.

And it took this kind of situation to give you that idea? Criminal.

Business Blogging: Here come the ghosts

May 30, 2005

Blogs are wonderful animals, fresh and new, clean and sparkling, hi-tech but with a delightful aura of amateurism clinging to them. Right?

Hah!

Just as for years business books by the bigs of the corporate world have been written, co-written, and ghost-written by professional writers hired by the big names underwriting the biz bios, blogs are being invaded by the pros.

When I say “professional blogging,” I don’t necessarily mean people who earn money off their blogs, or even people who blog about their company. I mean the ad agencies and PR firms that are now starting to offer blogging services.

I suppose it was inevitable … as blogs have become the topic du jour of the chattering classes and the method de rigeur for grassroots marketers, we’re starting to see the astroturf sneak out.

Here come the ghosts – long live authentic voices!

Blog as if your life depended on it? Whatever

May 16, 2005

So … Tom Peters isn’t blogging anymore?

Hugh over at Gaping Void points out that Tom, after recommending that people “blog as if their life depends on it,” isn’t blogging anymore.

Well, what a shock. Guess what: the web itself, and blogs in particular, are disruptive mediums. In other words, they’re tools that underdogs can use to gain a foothold. Sort of like a tailor from Savile Row. Or a disaffected adman from New York.

But Tom’s already at the top. He’s doesn’t have to claw and scratch and fight his way up. He’s got the books, the $20K, $50K, $75K speaking engagements.

What the heck does he need a blog for?

The big wide world of corporate blogging

May 12, 2005

Corporate world – hello. This is me. I’m blogging you.

The web is jumping or has jumped on the idea of corporate blogs. So it’s just natural, I guess, that I did too.

I’m currently writing for The Linguist, and though it’s a bit early to unveil the blog, I can’t resist. So here it is.

Yummy!

OK, I am “The Apprentice”

May 9, 2005

As recently mentioned, I’m doing some work for TheLinguist, the best (OK, I’m biased) place to learn English as a second language on the internet.

I watch The Apprentice and really enjoy it. Although of course Trump does get annoying from time to time … especially when at the beginning of this season every time he showed up on camera there was a massively cheesy royal-like musical intro bit. And I don’t think there’s an episode in which Trump has not managed to work the word “billion” in – he pronounces it “bi-yion.”

But I think I learn a lot from seeing how people interact, how they lead, how they follow, when they give up, how they persevere, and the ideas that they come up with in their impossible, 1-2 day business tasks. Some of the things I’ve learned are: ask the clients what they want, stupid. And, don’t be content with the most obvious means of marketing.

I’m trying to apply that now to my role with The Linguist. The learning methodology, and the technology Steve Kaufmann and Mark Kaufmann have built are unique in the field of language learning, and extremely effective.

The challenge is marketing a great solution from a tiny company to a huge world.

Stay posted for more …

SchemaSoft Kills Microsoft Deal After Apple Takeover

April 26, 2005

Schemasoft, the Vancouver data translation company that Apple just acquired, cancelled a multi-million dollar deal with Microsoft just the day after the acquisition closed.

I spent the evening at Vancouver Enterprise Forum and talked to someone close to the company.

Apparently, although Apple has been Schemasoft’s biggest client for some time now, Microsoft was also a client. Schemasoft, as I reported here used to do a lot of work with clients who needed document translation capabilities. The work Microsoft was asking Schemasoft to do involved document translation for mobile technologies. I don’t have any further details on that. As a side note, all of Schemasoft’s other clients are now being served by another company.

It is interesting to note that as soon as Philip Mansfield, the former CEO of Schemasoft, told Microsoft that he could no longer pursue the deal they had been working on, he was told to immediately destroy all documents that Microsoft had sent Schemasoft during the course of the project.

Some other interesting sidebars:

– All quality assurance activity has been transferred to Apple HQ … primarily to minimize chance of information leaks on new products.

– As soon as the deal closed, Schemasoft employees received all new hardware and software from Apple. According to my source, this included, for each employee, the following:

Why the PowerBook and tower I have no idea, but yes, I’m envious!

First Cardinal Sin of Project Management

April 25, 2005

This is the first (and maybe the last) in a series that I am planning to write on that most horrible, boring, awful, and necessary (but black) art: project management.

(Actually, here’s the second sin.)

First Cardinal Sin
Starting before you are ready.

This pathetic platitude is amazingly often ignored by smart people who should know better (yes, that includes me).

Why? Human nature. We want to feel progress. We want to get going. We want to see some visible results. As Paul Graham says:

In fact, this is a constant problem when you’re painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you’re so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you’re kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it’s too late.

(source)

In fact, the first parts of a project should not show any visible progress at all. The first parts of a project should be spent on painful, tedious, and critical steps: project definition, specifications, details, outcomes.

Typically, the first answers that you come to when doing the pre-work for a project are the wrong ones.

– First, you don’t know enough yet to get the right answers.
– Second, you’re asking the wrong questions.
– Third, you’re not really trying to find the answers, you’re trying to put an X in some checkboxes, so you’re just going through the motions.
– Fourth, you keep thinking about how great it’s going to be to work on the project, and what it’ll be when it’s finished, and those rose-tinted glasses are impairing your vision.

So. Get away from the keyboard.

Start thinking. Sketch it. Put it away. Re-think it. Draw it again. Iterate until you have a breakthrough.

Now you’re getting somewhere.

Threadless: a new kind of business

April 14, 2005

If you haven’t seen Threadless yet, you’re missing something.

This is an incredibly cool company – the motto is “nude no more” – that has outsourced product development to …. you. Unbelievable, and incredible (which are two words that, when you think about it, actually mean the same thing).

You want to design a T-shirt? No problem!

Grab a template. Submit it. T-shirt designers just like you all over the whole world will score it. And then Threadless just might actually make it … and you just might score some cash and a store credit. Is that cool or what?

And the designs are incredible – as you might well expect, this company having opened to doors to let all the talent in the world participate.

Check out Lemuria. Or Blame it on your TV. Or this one, this one, or this one.

Very, very, very cool.

This company could not exist without the internet … 15, 20 years ago this company was probably inconceivable, not just impossible.

It makes me wonder what else has become possible right now that we are not doing simply because our blinders are on and we are lacking the Eureka moment to see the blindingly obvious (after someone else has done it) new opportunities.

Branding in a brave new world

March 7, 2005

Branding is something that executives and marketing types love to talk about, advertising companies love to shout about, and most people know very little about.

The problem is not only that branding is one of those insubstantial wispy things that are hard to measure, it’s also changing. Fast.

Take this quote, for example:

Consumers demand marketing that’s based on their needs. Saturated by thousands of advertising messages a day, marketing-savvy consumers recognize and reject the overt “brand building” tactics of traditional advertising agencies in favor of relevance. As a result, marketers that attempt to build brands based on emotion, design, and charisma are more likely to undermine their efforts and underestimate consumers than they are to succeed.

This is from an article at Evolt that argues that search engines are your customers. What the author really means is that people will believe that your product/service/company is relevant to them if it places well in search engine results.

Traditional brand executives and marketing people don’t have a clue what to do with this. For them, the Cluetrain Manifesto is an actual train, and the light at the end of the tunnel is a locomotive’s searchlight.

For them, conversations with clients, in public, in the open, in ways that are saved and displayed to others, are deathly frightening.