August 19th, 2008
eBooks volume 3: What is the right price for a device that holds 100s of books?
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been conducting polls about ebooks as I think about doing some publishing. The overwhelming response to the polls has been that there is not a sufficiently broad selection of books available in e-formats, regardless of what format, whether for Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader or in open formats, such as ePUB, an XML-based format.
With all due respect to the people who have been posting that there aren’t enough ebooks available to choose from and that the readers (whether devices or software that runs on a computer or handset) are not worth the expense, the evidence doesn’t support that contention. This is a market that is developing along recognizable patterns. The issue is whether there will be more flexibility and useful features in ebooks or whether they will perpetuate the same limited use that we have in, for example, digital movies. Freedom to copy and share are only one aspect of the improvements available to customers in ebooks—the ability to cite, deep-link to specific pages of books one doesn’t own but which are referenced Read the rest of this entry »
August 12th, 2008
eBooks, volume 2: What’s the bridge document that would drive ebook reader adoption?
Last week, I ran a poll about the number of ebooks people purchased each month. The results suggest that most people don’t buy ebooks, but get them from various free sources, such as Project Gutenberg, Biblomania and O’Reilly Open Books. Fifty-nine percent of respondents said they bought no books during the month.
However, the buyers more than made up for the free reading public. If we take the middle point of each of the ranges of books purchased (e.g. 1.5 books per month for those who said they buy one to three books up to 11 books for those who answered “10+”), the average number of books purchased during a month for all 147 respondents is 1.45. This suggests that, just as “free” seeded the Web 15 years ago and throughout the Web 1.0 and 2.0 epochs, free ebooks are creating the basis of a profitable marketplace for authors and publishers who deliver new value to readers.
The next question to ask, though, is what you would like to read on an ebook reader or, for that matter, in a document on your computer that could integrate your notes and highlights from other forms of the same book. This would allow you to go back and forth between devices with the same book, which I believe is a critical feature for the success of digital documents, because we already do it with business docs, printed and digital books, but without any integration of these different engagements with the information we’re consuming (to some degree, collaborative editing of a document proves this idea is valuable–but it is the collective use of the information that makes new value available to people).
So, here’s poll #2 in this series: You should pick one kind of document that, if it would make you buy an ebook reader to use for both reading books and this kind of document, you’d become (or already became) a buyer.
Loading …August 5th, 2008
Cerf’s call for simple pricing: Net Neutrality all over again
Vint Cerf, one of the co-inventors of the underlying technology that makes the Web work, now Google’s Internet evangelist, has issued a call for throughput-based pricing by ISPs. This in response to the Comcast ruling by the FCC, which ordered the cable carrier to stop interfering with certain kinds of traffic, including P2P application data. Comcast has also floated the idea of charging more for users who transport larger volumes of data, an idea referred to as “consumption-based pricing,” as another way to enforce data frugality on users.
Cerf correctly points out that consumption-based pricing is bad for everyone on the Net, except the carriers, who can profit more from their carriage services when they are taxed by so-called over-users of things like BitTorrent. A robust Internet economy needs no barriers or, better, locks, like those used to move boats, which shut off or curtails a service when it consumes too much bandwidth. He suggests:
Rather than a volume cap, I suggest the introduction of transmission rate caps, which would allow users to purchase access to the Internet at a given minimum data rate and be free to transfer data at at least up to that rate in any way they wish.
Others have suggested that users should be able to contract for a “floor” capacity and that they might possibly receive more capacity if it is available. One problem with charging for total bytes transferred (in either direction) is that users will have no reasonable way to estimate their monthly costs. Clicking on a link can take you to an unexpected streaming site or a major file transfer.
That means, in a nutshell, that I should be able to buy connectivity from my ISP at a specific level, let’s say 6MBps, and use that 6MBps all day long every day, regardless of whether it is problematic to the carrier who sold it to me. The carrier’s only business is to support the throughput they sell. Of course, they can and should manage their network, but it would be misrepresentation to sell a 6MBps service and deliver only 3MBps or to stop providing 6MBps throughput after the user sent more than any arbitrary amount of data, say 100GB of files. Cerf continues:
For example, a broadband provider should be able to prioritize packets that call for low latency (the period of time it takes for a packet to travel from Point A to Point B), but such prioritization should be applied across the board to all low latency traffic, not just particular application providers. Broadband carriers should not be in the business of picking winners and losers in the market under the rubric of network management.
Cerf is saying “6MBps should be 6MBps,” which is the Network Neutrality position I and others have advocated along with him all along. Last year my former ZD Net colleague George Ou and I had a long, ugly argument about this issue, at which time he said Cerf did not take this view.
Once again, Vint Cerf has taken the position that bits should not be monitored for data type, network service type or volume delivered, except with respect to the amount of throughput the customer pays to receive at any given moment during the day. That is the definition of Net Neutrality: Traffic is unencumbered except with regard the guaranteed bandwidth the customer has paid for, so that low-latency traffic falls to the lowest guaranteed speed that the customer paid for at their network endpoint.
How does that affect the typical ISP customer: As media migrates to Internet Protocol, IPTV services, for example, will operate based on the throughput available to each end user rather than having all IPTV traffic or one user’s IPTV traffic slowed or stopped because they’ve watched too much video on the Web. Rather, everyone would get their full paid throughput whether they were watching IPTV or chatting via IM or playing World of Warcraft.
Cerf’s approach does allow for someone to pay less to get a lower top-speed at busy times, but it doesn’t allow the carrier to arbitrarily choke off any data stream at its whim. A deal is a deal, so to speak.
CNET’s Marguerite Reardon misinterprets Cerf’s idea as “Internet speed limits,” which implies that the carriers can impose a limit, but like the German Autobahn, Cerf is suggesting that the left lane have no speed limit as long as you can pay for the speed. If I have paid for the Ferrari that can travel at 40MBps, then I should get 40MBps, regardless of what everyone else is paying for their speeds and the type of traffic I am sending over the network.
NOTE: I have corrected the error in the original version of the article, which said the FCC fined Comcast. It did not. Rather, the Republican Chairman of the FCC went out of his way to admonish the company publicly and held out the threat of fines, saying the FCC had sufficient power to enforce its decision, if Comcast did not comply in order to head off Democratic legislation which would increase regulatory oversight of telecommunications carriers. I apologize for the error, which was one of haste and not intentional.
August 4th, 2008
Kindle, Sony and eBook readers: How many a month?
I’m doing a bit of research on the question of ebooks and the appropriate formats to use in publishing some research and archival content I have. Do you have an Amazon Kindle, Sony Portable Reader or another favorite eBook format (Please add your comments on devices and formats in TalkBack)? If so, how many titles do you purchase each month (that is, how many individual ebooks and subscriptions to newspapers or magazines)?
Loading …August 4th, 2008
TeachStreet: Starting something big in lots of little places
TeachStreet’s launch of a Portland, Oregon, version of its teacher-student connection services has a lot to teach us about the evolution of Web services. The service, which lets students search for local teachers and teachers to offer classes to local and national student audiences, is where education is going: Toward increasingly customized one-on-one learning.
The company has had its Seattle community up for about five months and it is well populated with Seattle classes. For instance, if I wanted to sharpen my bonsai skills, there are six beginner-level courses in bonsai in Seattle now, among more than 55,000 classes offered nationally. Portland classes, for example, launches with 488 yoga and 188 meditation courses,among many others, according to TeachStreet. Students can create profiles of their interests and post reviews of their experiences in class.
TeachStreet is the Learning Annex for the 21st century and more, if teachers realize that their services are truly valuable outside the mainstream school and we find a way to validate credits for academic courses that doesn’t involve school district bureaucracy. The future of education lies in this kind of ad hoc learning facilitation. TeachStreet already lets you explore background information about teachers, it is a reasonable leap to imagine a day when the company helps students verify their own learning credentials.
TeachStreet is free. The presence of Google ads on the pages points to a business model that profits from creating and helping teaching stars with everything from marketing and advertising to scheduling and credentialing. There are a variety of “freemium” services that can ride atop the robust traffic created by free class listings, just as EBay and Craigslist have spawned complementary economic systems.
Despite the IT industry’s self-absorption with the early adopter (who’s the top Twitterer, FriendFeeder, or at the top of AllTop), the real action in Web (1.0, 2.0 or whatever.0) community building comes much later on the adoption curve, where IT meets traditional inefficient markets, when slow-adopters start to move en masse into online services. One of those moments that tells me there are legs in all sorts of social-enabling services happened on Friday, when a state legislator I know invited me to be his fourth Facebook friend. Facebook isn’t trendy for the digerati anymore, but it is still gathering new members because it is becoming commonplace to track friends online. The masses are coming.
Now I find myself contemplating bonsai classes at TeachStreet.
It’s a sign that a market is realigning, that a new consolidator of information is afoot.
TeachStreet embraces the mundane topic of finding a belly dancing or massage teacher, making it easy and convenient to find classes online. That’s interesting, just as classified advertising is when you realize those mundane 8-point classified ads was responsible for much of the profit margin at newspapers. When you factor in how much money is wasted in the coordination of education today, TeachStreet is downright fascinating.
July 31st, 2008
Google goes investing
The news that Google is close to launching its own venture capital fund may raise a lot of hopes, but the history of corporate investment isn’t fantastic and comes with a heavy price for portfolio companies that win a corporate sweepstakes. It also tells a lot about Google’s own sense of its ability to innovate from the inside—that doesn’t mean they don’t think they can innovate, but that it may be more strategically advantageous to do it from the outside. Because Google’s brand comes with baggage that could turn off would-be collaborators and partners.
First, let’s look at the reasons Google might take a position in a startup rather than what it has done before: hire an engineer and give them a budget. At their core, all corporate investments are strategic, based on calculations about where the market is going and where the investing company wants to be. I worked with SoftBank back in the mid-90s, for example, where the goal was to be everywhere in the Web market. It was a strategy that paid off through sheer volume of investments, but also cost a tremendous amount in under-performing or lost investments.
A strategic investment by Google will certainly involve the likelihood that the company they back will do one of the following: a.) drive the sharing of personal information and browsing history by users, so that Google can better target its ads; b.) engage in organizing of information, whether through automation or user contributions to a taxonomy, in order to better surface data from the Google index; c.) drive traffic that can be monetized with Google ads, or; d.) provide an underlying innovation that transfers key user experience from the desktop to the cloud. The first three breeds of company can exist outside Google, but the last, the desktop-to-cloud innovators, are on a fast-track for acquisition.
But the problem from the perspective of any of the first three types of companies is that they will have an investor who has services on which they will need to rely for monetization, which relegates them to becoming an appendage of Google Adwords network. It is very hard for a company to tell an investor “no, thank you, we’d rather go with your competitors.” it happens, but it doesn’t happen easily.
The innovator, on the other hand, will be in a position where the exit Read the rest of this entry »
July 27th, 2008
Video messaging: Every mail a pitch for attention
EyeJot’s David Geller sent me an email that grabbed my attention the other day. In it, a video image of Geller told me about the company’s new attachment features and he pointed below the video frame to an attached file. This is enterprise gold, because in the increasingly confusing datascape that is a company the image of another person can galvanize our attention.
The video message also works as a “PR pitch,” because video can’t support the impersonal mail-merge that simply inserts a name and sends the same message to thousands of journalists and bloggers. Video within the enterprise has the added benefit of telling the recipient at a glance who is asking for their attention—the ability to do attachments, which EyeJot just added this past week, links that visual context to a call for action, whether it is “read this document,” “edit this document” or whatever the requested action may be.
That the whole service exists in the cloud makes this an intriguing supplement to the standard enterprise messaging system, which tends to close the channels of communication behind the firewall. I am not sure that EyeJot will not need to ship a device that sits behind the firewall to accommodate IT security concerns, but the current design supports what I believe is essential to the success of the enterprise: permeability.
It’s critically important that IT recognize that every message contends for the reader’s attention and that within the enterprise an image of the boss or a trusted colleague is going to have more impact than a text message. Tools like this help us focus on what matters to our companies.
July 14th, 2008
Amanda Chapel, aka “Strumpette,” needs some tough love
I had a strange Twitter back-and-forth with “Amanda Chapel,” the pseudonymous authors of a PR blog called “Strumpette,” about the nature of the hacker ethic. I personally don’t think the hacker ethic is very effective as a counterpoint to the system of intellectual property it decries, because hackers seem intent on getting rich one way or the other. “Amanda” apparently agrees, because she/he/they wrote that it was “bankrupt.” Nevertheless, Amanda had to find a disagreement in order to continue her/his/their snarky schtick. I asked “Amanda” why she/he/they thought the hacker ethic, which is characterized by an often over-simplified Hayekian-libertarian approach to markets, exists outside the current economic and philosophical system and ended up being confronted with a number of epithets and was told “[Amanda doesn’t] entertain opinions, period.”
You can watch the unwinding of the dialog here and here.
Amanda’s is small mind(s) in action (and yes, that is grammatically as close to correct as I can get without more gratuitous use of forward slashes). I try to understand where disagreements arise, because that’s how we can all improve our thinking. I tried with “Amanda” to point out that we don’t really disagree about the value of the hacker ethic. The phony distinctions between liberals and conservatives, for example, have prevented real engagement with precisely the same ideas stated in different terms for the past 28 years, when Ronald Reagan abandoned the traditional Republican commitment to liberal principles, at least in word, as the deeds of the Republican administrations have only magnified the power of government vis-a-vis the individual.
The thing is, I have often thought “Amanda” made some constructive interventions in the mindless chatter of Web 2.0 with her/his/their contrarian posting and tweets. It’s as though Godwin’s Law kicked in, in a different form, this time proving that as the length of time a person tweets increases the more likely they are to accuse someone of “blowing arrogant bullshit.” Call it Ratcliffe’s Corollary and think of me well when I am gone.
Our discussion of an unpublished academic article that Amanda said supported her/his/their position that the hacker ethic is a bankrupt extra-capitalist (specifically, she/he/the wrote “anti-property”) movement quickly devolved into Amanda resorting to name-calling. This is the kind of self-important amateurish blowhardism she/he/they generally decries, but it appears “Amanda” is merely playing at controversy Read the rest of this entry »
July 9th, 2008
Check out the bionic neck
I’ve told you about my disc replacement surgery, but I’ve never shown you. Here’s an X-ray from my most recent follow-up appointment with the doctor who did the surgery. As a trial patient, I have agreed to go back after three weeks, six weeks, three months, six months, a year and 18 months after the operation to fill out a questionnaire about my pain, the progress since surgery and my ability to work, exercise and so forth. It’s the price of my surgery.
Today, they asked me about how soon after the surgery I had sex… and some other things, like how long it was before I could exercise. I won’t tell you how long it was, but when it came to sex I was only one day behind the leader among the 10 people in the trial! Yeah, sex!!
This is something that you won’t be seeing from most doctors for as long as half a decade. I’m incredibly fortunate to have been in this trial.
I’ve begun a blog about spine research and medicine, since this is going to be a life-long concern for me. If you are interested, please check out SpineScienceBlog.com/drupal. I’ll be happy to answer questions and, more importantly, use whatever paltry cred I have as a blogger to ask questions of docs and companies for you, at that blog.
July 7th, 2008
Demographics forging a new Net market: It’s not your kids’ Web
It’s easy and fashionable to talk about “digital natives” that have grown up online, but the demographics of the United States are shifting radically to the grey and Web services developers should heed that news and make changes in their products and plans as a result. Old coots, like me, may hold the key to your future.
Advertising Age offers a fine summary of the demographic changes ahead in an article posted today (sorry, it’s a subscription site). The key figure is that the average head-of-household in the U.S. today is 49.5 years old and that 80 percent of the growth in number of households during the next half-decade will be “among those headed by people 55 and older.” These are also the people with the most money to spend in coming years.
The number of households headed by 35- to 44-year-olds and 45 to 54 year-olds will actually decrease by one percent in the next five years.
What does it mean for developers? Well, first off, you’d better start thinking about the size of type and detail in graphical components used in your designs. I know many older people who cannot read anything on a mobile phone. The iPhone appeals to older people I talk to because they can zoom in on the type. One of the winning features of the Amazon Kindle, based on my talking with people about mine, is that the text size can be adjusted to accommodate poor eyesight.
But take it a step further—the CAPTCHA challenges used by many commerce and comment systems are virtually impossible to read without being able to zoom in to see the letters more clearly. CAPTCHA phrases that frustrate older people who cannot see as well as a 20-year-old could be costing you 20 percent of your conversions, based on the number of people over 50 using the Web today, and it will only get worse.
Another feature of this older Web, according to Ad Age, is the potential for a significant change in the risk tolerance Read the rest of this entry »
Mitch Ratcliffe is a veteran journalist, media executive and entrepreneur. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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