Thinking by Peter Davidson

The much rumored deal between Yahoo and Ludicorp the parent of Flickr has finally happened. Despite assurances that they aren't going all suit on us I remain skeptical. If history holds it will only remain the cool service we all know and love for 6 months to a year until the now financially enhanced founders leave the picture. coughBloggercough

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tags: flickr | yahoo | boingboing

Here are my top 24 posts for 2004. Enjoy!

Thinking About Airports

Grocery Store Technology

The Counter Revolution

Superbowl Ad Tell Me A Story

The Future of Books and Authors

Well, It Works for Pharmaceutical Companies

The Latest For Starbucks

Thinking About Krispy Kreme

Thinking About Build A Bear Workshop

Hybrid Engines The New Intermittent Wipers

Experiencing Consumer Electronics On Vacation

BMW Becoming A Lifestyle Brand

Who Knows Where McDonald's May Take Your Order

Hope For Jobs Displaced by Technology

Aggressively Marketing DVDs Pays Off

Thinking About Women and Gadgets

Tips For Pitching Books To Bloggers

Thinking About Product Blogs

A Movie Marketing Experiment

Forget American Idol, Trains are The Killer App for SMS

Quick Thinking About Kmart Sears Deal

Live Tiny: The Next Big Thing in Cars?

People: The New Disruptive Technology

Airlines Should Partner With Super Brands

Read the archives of the Top24 project Thanks Todd for organizing this. Check here to learn how you can participate.

Why all the interest in iPods lately? The music distribution business is changing. This story shows just how significant the changes are.

Lower-than-expected sales for the single from Casey Donovan, this year's Australian "Idol" TV show winner, may be due to fans preferring to pay for downloads of the track. While Donovan's single "Listen To Your Heart" debuted at No. 1 on this week's ARIA chart, it sold far fewer copies than last year's winner, Guy Sebastian. According to music news site Undercover, Donovan's single sold 35,817 copies in its first week, while Sebastian's tune sold 128,679--more than three times as many.

Anticipating larger sales, Donovan's label Sony BMG reportedly had shipped more than 210,000 copies of the single to retailers. However, the single hit the shelves more than a week after Telstra's BigPond Music site began offering legal downloads of the track. A Telstra representative declined to cite download numbers for the track, citing commercial confidentiality, but said it was "far and away the biggest ever legal song download in Australia."

The whole "Idol" phenomenon has brought great changes to the music industry. In America the producers and sponsors have attempted to increase awareness and usage of text messaging. Hoping to ignite the US text messaging market.

Sounds like it would be smart for Apple iTunes to partner with American Idol this year to make downloads from the show available online. It seems tracks of the performances could carry a significant "day after" premium.

Rumors are flying around today that an iPod that receives and records satellite radio broadcasts is forthcoming from Apple as soon as January 11th. Wow, this would begin the wholesale disruption of the conventional radio industry. Already radio is loosing listeners to iPods and other MP3 players. This will be yet another opportunity to reshape the audience and the advertising opportunity.

Conventional radio like other conventional interruption models will slowly die as new alternatives emerge. What will sweep in behind the death of big radio will be a return to local radio programming offering a richness of programming and an opportunity for local advertisers.

What's old will be new again. Long live broadcast radio.

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Update: read more about XM Satellite Marketing

Seth points to the future in one paragraph of his post called Thinking About Digital Media

Can you make any money giving away an ebook? I think you can. I think you do when the idea spreads and people want to interact with you in other ways. And those interactions are the currency of the future.

Attention music labels are you listening. I have believed for a long time that music is and wants to be free. It's the experiences and information you build around the music that is where the future revenue lives. Just like movies on DVD and the added goodies, deleted scenes, alternate endings, etc.

Free content that engages a participant simply whets their appetite and primes them for additional interactions with the content creator. It's why Godin gives his dusty content away. The spread of ideas connected to Godin increases his new book sales and ups his speaking fees as demand increases to hear directly from him.

I am for any experiments that might point to the future business model for the entertainment industry. The movie and music industries are shifting there can be no doubt about it. Cnet reports an experiment that I think could have some real lessons for the future of movie marketing:

At the center of the Convex Group's plan is a low budget Christmas movie called "Noel," directed by Chazz Palminteri, that will debut in up to 10 U.S. cities on Nov. 12. On the same day, the disposable DVD can be bought for $4.99 through online retailer Amazon.com.

A little over two weeks later, the movie will air once on cable television network TNT, which Convex hopes will only spur greater ticket sales and higher revenues from the DVDs, which become unplayable 48 hours after their air-tight package is opened.

Convex is playing with the existing linear business model that wrings as much profit out of each phase of the channel from theatre to TV as possible. They are betting that by simultaneously releasing the film in multiple channels they will simply increase the available revenue pool. This is interesting and may be successful on a small scale without competing product but at scale I don't think it's integrated enough.

The DVDs should also be available on the way out of the theaters showing the film. Those who have just seen the film are the most likely customers to purchase the DVD. Goodies, extras and even alternate endings/beginnings should be added to the DVDs to further motivate sales. Even a cliff hanger resolved on the DVD could build buzz and huge sales. The bonus opportunity is the ability to load the DVD with sponsored messages and promos/trailers for upcoming releases.

The planned one time airing on cable TV could also encourage buyers to purchase the DVD from Amazon to see the ending and the extras.

The movie and music industries are scrambling to adapt from a controlled scarcity model to an uncontrolled digital world of abundance. It is the power of good stories well told that hold the answers. Studios are learning the power of story extensions like video game tie ins that put the viewer inside the story. They're slowly learning the lessons of extra features that motivate DVD sales. Some flirt with direct to video sequels.

Movie producers need to understand that they are telling a story across multiple formats and distribution channels. The real money is not in the theatrical release but in the DVD sales, Toys, Video games and the set up for future stories. The focus will shift from theatrical release as the premiere event to the theatrical release as a skillful marketing event for the additional formats channels and formats for the same story. The theatrical release will be tailored and designed to promote the purchase (or download) of the DVD and or the video game. Admittedly it's a fine line. To much a commercial and the audience will be turned off. Done skillfully the potential upside is huge.

I'm reminded of the serials of the 30s and 40s that motivated theater goers to see each weekly installment of the story.

Enough for now. I think I'll go watch my DVDs of Alias. I'm totally hooked on the story.

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Have you noticed that there are exciting things happening as we all try to shake out the implications of the Internet on Intellectual Property. I don't intend to rant at length here about one position or another I just want to point to some interesting happenings.

I have already mentioned the work of SF novelist/activist/blogger Cory Doctorow. Two of Cory's books have been released for free under a Creative Commons license which permits derivative works and performances for non commercial purposes. This has led to a long list of text formats and even some creative works.

Trevor Smith has whipped up two amazing remixes of Eastern Standard Tribe, my new novel. The first is a "speed-reader," based on the research of Xerox PARC researcher Rich Gold, which flashes the book, one word at a time, up on the screen, at a high rate of speed. It is astonishingly readable, and makes you feel like you've found a back-door to your brain's comprehension nodes. The second is a "PurpleSlurped" version of the book, in which every paragraph is given its own link, so that one can easily refer to a specific passage of the text. [link]

see "speed reader"

see "PurpleSlurped"

Just days after it's release, Lawrence Lessig's new book Free Culture, is the focus of some creative remixes. One blogger has kicked off a project to create a distributed audio book by asking interested individuals to each record a permissible "performance" of a chapter from the book. Lessig loves the idea! So do others around the blogsphere. I myself have already downloaded and enjoyed Chapter One.

These pioneers are finding new ways to release their ideas into the world to foster discussion, exploration, creativity and change in how America and subsequently the rest of the world normalizes and legislates intellectual property rights. Besides that I just think it's great marketing. Everytime the blogsphere buzzes about what these guys are doing their personal stock goes up.

Seth Godin points us to this article about the LA band Particle. I agree with Seth that this is the future.

People in the business of creating, recording, distributing and performing music must come to the understanding that it's all about the experience. The music is free it's the experience that people are paying for.

Yesterday, Smartmobs pointed to a BBC story noting a practice shop owners are calling "digital shoplifting." The story comments on young Japanese girls who send camera phone pictures of new dresses or hairstyles they are seeing in magazines to their friends for their opinions. The Japanese magazine publishers are complaining that this is costing them sales.

Does this sound familiar? Yes and no. The magazine publishers fear the napsterization of their content. They see this as individuals "republishing" or "copying" their copyrighted content. They see what is going on with the music industry and file sharing and they are scared. As this micro content sharing proliferates in this form, and the capturing of video, audio and text, content producers will instinctively and reflexively react by tightening the control over their content. Magazine publishers will want to "shrink wrap" their magazines to avoid people stealing the content with camera phones or portable hand held scanners. (I often carry a pen scanner to capture text to my PDA) The result is predictable. Without being able to browse through a magazine people will be less likely to buy it. The "solution" would be far worse than the "problem."

This I think is completely the wrong approach. Just as the music industry is making a mistake by seeking to prosecute it's own (former) customers, print publishers who misunderstand the potentials of new digital communication technologies may just cut their own necks by holding too firmly to their precious content.

What's needed is a deeper understanding of the social dynamics that are behind this type of micro content sharing. What's really happening here is buzz marketing. When someone sends a camera phone snap of a picture from a magazine seeking to inform and solicit an opinion from another person they are directly or indirectly creating buzz for that magazine. The first question the recipient will ask is where did you see this picture. They will discover that the place to see cool new content or content they might be interested in is in xyz magazine. This is peer to peer marketing. Something I think the magazines should welcome.

It's gonna be a great future.

The recent story about fans suing the band Creed for a bad performance points to an opportunity to capitalize on the value of a performance experience. Up until now the pricing and profit potential of a performance offering has been based on fixed prices. Theatre, concert or movie tickets have been priced in advance at levels set by the producers. If the actual experience called for a different price it hasn't been possible to make adjustments on the fly. Sure people have been able to demand and receive refunds when things go wrong, but what about increasing prices if things go really right?

If you have a really good experience at a concert what do you do? You buy a T-shirt and a CD on the way out. Concert promoters know that the increased revenue opportunity for exceeding audience expectations is in the increase in souvenir sales. Often there are complex revenue sharing arrangements between vendors and promoters.

Do you think the Creed fans who felt they didn't receive a concert experience worth what they paid (to the extent that they are suing to get their $54 back) were quick to get in line to buy T-shirts and CDs? What is needed is a system of pricing performances that reflects the quality of the performance itself.

Some time ago Coca-Cola had a PR blunder when they introduced a vending machine that increased the price of a coke when the machine sensed an increase in ambient temperature. People felt this was opportunistic capitalism at it's ugliest. Never mind that children do it at a young age with their first lemonade stand.

At first glance a system that can increase the price of a performance based on the quality of the experience can be seen as opportunistic capitalism. However, the system would be a win-win situation. Producers and performers would be highly motivated to produce the highest quality experience for their audience. Ticket buyers would feel the got a say in what their experience cost them.

How would it work? Staying with our example of a concert. Ticket buyers would via a website nominate critics to attend the concert. These critics would be evaluated and selected by their online profiles and criticisms of the performers past offerings. Quality would be mediated by a trust and reputation management system. (like ebay, Amazon.com, Slashdot, etc.) A range of potential ticket costs would be determined. Say $50 to $150. The performers would be motivated to deliver a $150 experience. Concert audiences would agree in advance to pay what the critics determine. The critics, kept honest by the reputation system, would evaluate the performance and determine the ticket price. Credit cards would be charged sometime after the show.

The prime benefit of a system like this is that peripheral issues important to the audience experience can affect the revenue picture. If the promoter doesn't provide adequate security, toilets, or parking this can be reflected in ticket revenue. Fair for the audience and highly motivating for the promoters and performers.

With all of the variables in staging quality experiences variable pricing structures are necessary to provide the best value to audiences and fair rewards to performers and producers.

Riddle me this: Why does it cost the same to see an Oscar winning film and a film that critics hate? Why do movie theatres respond to increased demand for tickets to popular movies with increased supply(more screens and seats) rather than increased ticket prices? Broadway doesn't work this way. Just try to get tickets to the Lion King or The Producers.