With recent eddys in the world of the finance business, transitions have been even more on everybody’s mind than usual. I was recently entertaining my Sister, visiting from Vancouver. We had already done the main highlights on earlier trips so we took a trip around Manhattan on the Circle Line Ferry. There are a number of points were the architecture or the derelict water front shows the changing priorities of the city and the country over the last one hundred years. The prominent Governor’s Island with a strategic view of the harbour. The emphasis on immigration in the early years of the 20th Century with new arrivals passing the Statue of Liberty and landing at Ellis Island for processing and continuing on to the purpose built train terminus on the New Jersey Shore. The importance of shipping and the role of New York as a trading port now displaced to the container ports such as Newark by the increasing competition for space and the efficiencies of larger ships which operate under their own power and don’t require the support of the tides to dock in estuaries. The warehouses lining the shore in easy access of quays. The closure of manufacturing industries in the many Manhattan and Brooklyn factories now located in cheaper locations many in cheaper labour markets. All of these changes have brought with them wrenching pain for individuals. Abandonment of well honed skills. The break-up of friendships in work teams. Nearly all these transitions occurring at the last minute with organizations clinging valiantly to the familiar until they relented in their final gasps.
It is really the individuals who cling to the familiar though and for natural human reasons. A life has been built around the environment. A life that works in that environment and all these changes require rethinking of attitudes, beliefs expounded and the learning of unfamiliar disrespected view points. We shouldn’t necessary tell people to enjoy these changes as seems to be implied by the ‘Who moved my cheese’ school of management. We wouldn’t however want metal smelting to return to Manhattan or for sailors to be at the whim of wind in their sales but we should instead understand that the transition is painful and that sail boats did have charm and sailors their skills but that unfortunately we are compelled by our competition for capital and thirst for growth to stay ahead of change if we are to have influence in the world.
Management, New York change, New York, transition
Newspaper readership is continuing to decline. We continue to read messages directly from companies and governments while still getting news of incidents from a traditional news source for free online. Layoffs at newspapers continue a pace.
The amount of non paid add space is noticably declining in a number of publications and even on television despite it being an election year.
Jeff Jarvis has posted a presentation on the current state of the news industry here.
Marketing, Society advertising, news, print
There is an interesting description of Googles browser internals here. Each tab uses a seperate process to make the browser far more resiliant to bugs and there are some interesting comments on their testing environment which allows them to run the browser against a million web pages programatically and assess the outcomes.
Technology cartoon, chrome, google, testing
The internet isn’t free. If you have a significant amount of traffic your hosting provider will start charging you or constrain your account in some way. When it comes to video content most amateur producers are using the likes of YouTube or BlipTV to distribute their videos. They are getting approximately half the revenue where there is any. The adds are typically a single placement before or after (‘preroll’ and ‘postroll’) or small adds popping up during the content (‘overlay’). The problem is that the infrastructure has to be paid for. In the case of YouTube it is being subsidised by Google as well as its original venture capital like the other players. Major players such as TimeWarner are receiving revenue from preroll and postroll advertising and probably paying fairly directly for their infrastructure and production overhead which is a large part of the slow provision of these services.
What that infrastructure costs isn’t clear but as a guide we know that at the retail level traffic costs are as low as 25c/Gb. A typical recurring video might be anything from 0.1Gb to 1Gb depending on the duration and resolution. That gives a cost of 2.5c to 25c per viewer. Google has bought a lot of fiber and will be able to serve video at a significantly lower cost by providing their own network. Others will be using brightcove etc. in order to get economies of network scale at some unknown cost. The retail figures give a range of cost range per thousand viewers of $25 to $250 for traffic charges.
Television advertising typically realises $30 per thousand viewers (CPM) but can vary from $5 to $50 depending on the region, time of the week and program. Internet video advertisements typically realize less than one dollar but fall within the range of $0.25 /CPM and $5.00. Television programs in the US typically include 12 minutes per hour or approximately 8 advertisements of 30 seconds in twenty minutes of air time. So television might realise $240/CPM for twenty minutes. Internet video might realize for preroll,postroll and overlay as much as $1.50 to $6.00 /CPM across a much smaller audiance.
So infrastructure costs need to be significantly lower or somebody else needs to be paying them to allow the current advertising revenue model to be profitable. There are legitimate reasons why internet advertising realizes a much lower CPM due largely to the low barriers to entry and resulting low premium.
There is an assumption that advertising will support internet video because television is supported by advertising but this doesn’t necessarily follow. The constrained access to television made it a premium product and added credibility to the content and advertising. The economics of broadcast television, which is still what provides significant theoretical viewer numbers to television, was based on a cheap distribution method which could be paid for with commercials. This isn’t necessarily true of an infrastructure which requires physical installation to the consumer’s premises and servers which consume over 1% of the electricity in the US. The energy costs aren’t decisive. It is the infrastructure cost that needs to be reduced, both for the servers and the distribution, if advertising is to be the sole basis of the model.
Marketing, Video advertising, iptv, tv, vblog, Video, videoblog
Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar
If you have ever lived in New York you will vaguely remember the posters of Dan Smith offering to teach you guitar. It is posted in every shop window across Manhattan. What it does to an individual to have such a public persona I can only guess at but over several variations of the poster he has presumably found that it is a message that works. It is quite noticeable that several others have tried to copy his general format for other services such as a local PC repair guy.
I always I assumed that he had some distributor posting the flyers up. There are several groups who post posters on temporary construction walls around town for record companies and film studios. However I would have been wrong. According to an article here by a David Kaufmann, who applied for lessons in order to get the back story, he actually manages to post all of the flyers himself. By doing so he is able to charge double what several reputable schools charge for guitar lessons and has people pre-book for a course.
The latest version of his poster with a milder demeanor and a seated position can be found on flickr here.
The prevalence of his marketing campaign has also let to a number of spoofs including for the film, The Love Guru, but an impressively long list was collected by tinagirlspy@flickr.com below. I’m very impressed that one person is able to get so much publicity and operate it all as a one man band.
Everything from songs….
www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com/music/boutique/da n_smith_will…
To interactive internet games…..
pixtrak.com/
To youtube videos…
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBFV7HjHlnU
www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGwywSdq1M0
To countless imitators and/or parodies of his flyers-here are just a few…..
www.banterist.com/images/dan_edelweiss.jpg
bp1.blogger.com/_I2Yp45zmusc/RbDLiIUP4FI/AAAA AAAAADU/yb34…
bp3.blogger.com/_I2Yp45zmusc/RauSG4UP4DI/AAAA AAAAAC8/SwPL…
beersforbarcelona.blogspot.com/2007/01/dan-sm ith-will-tea…
thecrespo.blogspot.com/2005/11/new-york-fans- of-guitar-le…
bjornturoque.com/images/134579482501_3300.jpg
However, these ones are the only ones that are actually funny:
www.planetofthegrapes.com/pages/publicity.php
…but that’s because the guys in Nuclear O’Reilly ROCK!!!
Not to mention various blogs and articles – and two of the writers took a lesson with Dan just to write about it! Check it out:
www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/nyregion/thecity/1 7guit.html
gridskipper.com/travel/new-york/dan-smith-has -taught-me-g…
www.reuters.com/article/sphereNews/idUSN28577 49420080228?…
Even John Mayer has gotten into the act…..
nymag.com/news/intelligencer/21352/
He now has a video up along the same lines as the flyer at: www.dansmithwillteachyouguitar.com
It took me some time to get to putting my own photo at the top of this blog and a suited photo on the corporate site I still find to be one of the scariest disembodied photos on the internet. It really does appear that every small consultancy shows their principal, management or leadership team but there are also some examples of people who maybe took it too far, as maybe Dan Smith has. The variety ranges from the tasteful to the salesy to the excessive. Or maybe they all work!
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Marketing, New York dan smith guitar
A new visual search engine has been launched by a Canadian company TinEye.
Instead of entering text describing an object such as the phrase “tiger jumping” you upload or provide the URL of a photo.
But this is far more than a simple file search. I tried with jpg and gif photos and it found both file types on the internet regardless of which I provided. It even found photos where they had been cropped or the colour and size changed.
Passing it a collage of several photos it was able to identify other photos containing one of the component photos.
Clearly it is performing a rapid search in its database for some kind of signature of the visual look of the image and this is allowing a range of images containing that pattern to be identified.
It would seem to be mainly useful for researching the origins and usage of a photo in order to obtain, or identify abuse of, the usage rights.
I was very impressed with the tests I performed.
If you would like to give it a go it is at http://tineye.com/
I would be intereseted in hearing where people find the limits are. I ran out of good tests without hitting a problem.
IP, Toys photo
Scott Shaffer has nicely written up a decision by the US Patent Office to reject 95 patents in the area of visual / bar code recognition. There are a large number of dubious patents in the field that have been successfully blocking a number of ventures (By causing liability concerns for funders), including one venture of mine, in the area of visual code recognition. Many things in the field have been too obvious for too long but not quite implementable outside the lab, due to other technical availability limitations, so companies have spent their time filing patents around the subject.
The decision is one less hurdle for the project which got as far as a prototype before we realized what the patent situation was. It seems that several other related patents should fall for the same reason which is going to allow progress in the field once more. The immediate beneficiaries are OEMs using UPC and other bar code scanning solutions and users of QR Codes which are a direct rival of a proprietary NeoMedia code pattern which has sold partly on the patent liability fears NeoMedia and others were able to point out.
IP
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