Business: April 2003 Archive Page

"Online advertising software vendor Unicast is introducing a new kind of Internet ad that doesn't just pop up over a portion of the browser but rather fills the entire screen of the computer user.|The New York-based company described the new unit as a 'full-screen, 15-second, 300k online ad.' Unicast promotional materials suggest the new format will enable advertisers to reach their audiences 'with the same impact' as TV."

--Unicast Introduces Screen-Filling Online AdAd Age)

Evil. Evil, evil, evil. Here's a quote from the old media troglodyte shilling for this monstrosity: "We believe that just like in television, the creative you build is what gets shown, the technology should not get in the way." I sure hope WebWasher blocks these. I won't link to or visit any sites that use these. I imagine that the indignity I feel is akin to that my students feel when I float the notion that maybe they should actually pay for the music that they are consuming. But there have got to be better ways to get money out of the Internet than sabotaging the user experience and making your readers' blood pressure surge. And if such ways aren't to be found in the old media/new media hybrids such as USA Today and CNN, then the Internet can continue to get along just fine without Madison avenue. (That sounds so dorky... but blogging is supposed to be candid, so I won't edit that out.)

"Virginia enacted a law Tuesday imposing harsh felony penalties for sending such messages to computer users through deceptive means....Public outrage at spam is causing states and Congress to start looking at stronger measures against it. The Internet industry estimates that spam represents nearly half of all e-mail sent. And a new report by the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday found that two-thirds of spam is sent with either false return addresses or a misleading subject line."

--Spam Sent by Fraud is Made a FelonyC|Net)

It won't work, but it feels better than doing nothing. The FTC Spam report is only availabe as a PDF.

"If you know where each truck and driver is, you can use your assets more efficiently--not just the trucks, but the warehouses that are waiting for them to pick up or the recipients that are waiting for them to deliver. In retail, if you can track products more carefully you can dramatically reduce shrinkage, or product that unaccountably disappears. Countering losses due to theft is one obvious benefit of better tracking, but a remarkably large proportion of shrinkage--as much as 18% in some reports--is put down to administration errors that can be targeted with machine-to-machine integration technologies." Carl Zetie --Machine-To-Machine Integration: The Next Big Thing?Information Week)

A bit dry, and a bit of a letdown after the sci-fi teaser in the title; but still interesting.

"A company is making two versions of the same product... One has a little more gold and foil on it, but they're essentially the same. One is $14.95; the other is $18.95." Not surprisingly, the $14.95 item is selling better. It's also the lower-profit product.|"Then a competitor comes in with a third product. Again, it's essentially the same thing, but a fancier version. And it's much higher priced: $34.95."..."[W]hat becomes the best-seller? Why, the $18.95 version, of course." Business professor Kent Monroe, quoted by Charles Fishman

[Via Robot Wisdom. The article also includes a good anecdote about Coke's attempt to float the idea of a vending machine that raised prices during hot weather: "Consider what the reaction might have been to this headline: 'Coke testing machine that automatically discounts prices in cool weather.'"--DGJ] --Which Price is Right?Fast Company)

"For all the glitz surrounding the unveiling Monday of Apple Computer's new music service, a quick look suggests that it's a solid, but hardly revolutionary, addition to the market....The integration between the one-click purchase service, Apple's iTunes music jukebox software and the iPod player goes well beyond what any other music service has done. It will genuinely make paying for music online easy, even an impulse buy, and artists and music labels see that as a big step forward." John Borland

--Apple's music: Evolution, not RevolutionNews.com)

Apple was and is in the hardware business; its job is to sell machines. The music is just a vehicle to sell the product, just like MTV and radio -- where the attention of the audience is the product being sold to advertisers.

"In an enormous blow to the music and motion picture industries, a Los Angeles federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against file-sharing services Grokster and StreamCast Networks Friday, saying that they can not be held culpable for illegal file trading done over their networks. | The ruling, made by U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson, represents an almost complete turnaround from previous victories the record and motion picture industries have had in cases involving illegal peer-to-peer (P-to-P) file trading." Scarlet Pruitt

--Judge Tosses Case against P-to-P NetworksInfoWorld)

The times, they are a-changin'. But the Hollywood and record company suits have deep pockets and much to lose. They'll keep fighting.

"A world population that peaks at 9-10 billion is not one in which we have to worry about Parson Malthus, the English 19th century economist who prophesied a future in which people multiply faster than the resources needed to sustain them and hence starve to death by the millions. Indeed, it comes as somewhat of a shock to realize that the age of the population explosion may be coming to an end. | Just thirty years ago, people like Stanford University's Paul Erlich were telling us that the Malthusian Angel of Death was at the door." J. Bradford DeLong --The Final Defeat of Thomas Malthus?Project Syndicate)

Google: "switch[ed] to Blogger": 165.
Google: "switch[ed] to Movable Type": 534Blogger vs. Movable TypeLiteracy Weblog)

"TypePad is the first new consumer-grade weblogging product in more than a year, but it shows a change in the marketplace: grabbing the new middle ground of users who want all the advanced features of a self-hosted weblog, but none of the tears of having to learn about Linux or Perl or FTP. This should elevate the standard of weblogs in general, as it does away with any correlation between technical skill and artistic merit. We will no longer be reliant on geeks for top quality weblog reading. It takes the seething masses and pulls them up to the same technical level as the best Movable Type tweakers and hackers."

--Bloggers Tool Up (Six Apart announces TypePad)Guardian)

It's good to see competitors emerge -- that will delay the (inevitable?) transformation of Google/Blogger from cool innovators into stuffy bad guys.

"By the time this child graduates from high school, her brain will have absorbed 350,000 television commercials, 100,000 alcohol ads and a daily barrage of sex and violence. If that doesn't turn you off then nothing will."

--TV Turnoff Week -- April 22-28Adbusters)

Umm... why does it start on Tuesday? That's probably an old ad. That's what you get when you mix text and graphics -- it's harder to keep your information current.

"In 1999, Fanning, a 19-year-old Boston-area hacker from a broken home, stumbled on the idea for making digital MP3 files easy to find on the Net. Teaming up with fellow geeks he knew only through online chat rooms, he crafted a simple technology that allowed millions to swap music collections free of charge. The operation moved to Silicon Valley that same year, where MTV and other media outlets converted the hackers into heroes, until the music industry squashed the company in court." Brad Stone reviews Joseph Menn'sAll the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning'sNapster. Menn argues that it was actually the greed and thuggery of young Shawn's shady uncle and buisiness partner John Fanning who doomed millions of teenagers to (sometimes) have to fork over money for their music. --Napster's Autopsy: Tracing a Music Rebel's Rise and FallM$NBC)

"The most common password was 'password' (12 per cent) and the most popular category was their own name (16 per cent) followed by their football team (11 per cent) and date of birth (8 per cent)." John Leyden --Office Workers Give Away Passwords for a Cheap PenRegister)

"Although bell curve distribution is still considered normal, a surprising number of economic and social phenomena now seem to follow a different arc. Instead of being high in the center and low on the sides, this new distribution is low in the center and high on the sides. Call it the well curve." Daniel H. Pink --The Shape of Things to ComeWired)

"Usability has two roles: to set the direction for the design and to check that the design works. The second has gotten the most attention since it is the simplest: just run a user test of any Web site and you will quickly have a long list of things that must be changed to make the site easier to use. But it would be better if we didn't get these problems in the first place, and that's why usability also needs to set the direction for the design. Before any design has been done, a development project should conduct a series of user research to discover users' needs and the types of designs that work well or that cause problems for users." From an interview with Jakob Niesen --Jakob Nielsen, Author & Web Site Usability GuruPublish)

"Perhaps it was the sight of Captain James T Kirk scribbling away on his executive starship tablet. Maybe it's the recurring dream of reducing computing to its simplest, starkest elements -- a screen, an input device, perhaps some sound. It could even be the thought that with the technology now just about able to do it, a wireless PC screen is a really cool idea. Whatever the thinking behind Microsoft's Smart Display technology -- a battery-powered notebook screen without a notebook, linked to a PC by wireless networking and taking stylus input -- it doesn't seem to have included what users actually want....Tablet is the wrong medicinal analogy: suppository more adequately describes the Smart Display experience. Most of this is due to the failures of Microsoft's basic idea, although ViewSonic must bear some of the blame for not really trying to ease the pain." Rupert Goodwins

--ViewSonic Airpanel V150 [Review]ZDNet)

Micro$oft's business plan, which involves releasing sub-standard software to a captive audience and then charging users to upgrade every few years, simply will not work on hardware -- at least, not as long as there are still alternatives.

The bottom-feeding 419 scammers are exploiting the Iraq war now, according to this Spam I just received: "First let me use this medium to introduce myself , I am Mohammed MARGAI from KONO district north of Baghdad IRAQ from the family of late Alhaji Mustafa MARGAI THE FORMAL MINISTER OF PETROLEUM AND NATURAL RESOURCES."SPAM Scammers Capitalizing on Iraq WarLiteracy Weblog)

"I've collected hundreds of rejection slips from agents, producers, and studios. Recently, all this changed. I wrote an article last year called "Hacking Las Vegas" (Wired 10.09), and the next thing I know I'm being approached to turn it into a movie starring Spacey.... But I've heard rumors that have made me question my confidence - whispers of a dirty little industry practice that has brought me here to Utah on a mission both personal and journalistic.|I've been tipped to the network of semisecret cyberhallways, called tracking boards, that are open only to the most elite power players in the industry....They may seem innocuous at first glance, but the boards are where a writer meets his fate." Ben Mezrich --To Live and Die in LAWired)

"Only a few years ago professors rarely encountered marketing in the Ivory Tower. When we did, the marketing had substance -- book dealers with free review copies of books, office-supply vendors with reorder requests, discounts on scientific or literary publications, and the like.|Now we're deluged with ploys that have little to do with our academic interests or lifestyles, simply because we visited an Internet site or ill-advisedly clicked. We're list-served, spammed, flamed, taunted and, occasionally, tempted. But mostly we're desensitized by hundreds of unsolicited pop-up offers transmitted daily via dozens of gadgets at home and at work." Michael Bugeja

--The Seven Digital SinsChronicle)

Here's one of the 7 virtues: "E-mail Abstinence: Use the medium to praise colleagues, schedule meetings, and distribute agendas, along with other mundane tasks. Never correct, set the record straight, or criticize anyone via e-mail or attachment." This is excellent advice, though very hard to implement in cases where your only contact with a person is via e-mail. I often invite students to run thesis statements by me before they start working in earnest on their papers. It would be hard to give honest feedback if I practiced e-mail abstinence (as Bugeja defines it). I do think it's a good idea to ask yourself, "Would I like this e-mail to be pasted up on my office door?"

"The Sims Online married a hot concept -- multiplayer online gaming -- to The Sims, the best-selling PC game series of all time. In addition, it was designed in part by Will Wright, one of the game industry'smost renowned developers. All of this combined into a rich maelstrom of hype: The Sims Online was featured on the cover of the Nov. 25, 2002, issue of Newsweek and GameSpot posted a 13-page behind-the-scenes feature. Mainstream press and hardcore game publications touted The Sims Online as the first mass-market online game. | Then the reviews came out." --Ethics in Videogame JournalismOnline Journalism Review)

"With the burgeoning Sars epidemic spreading fear among travellers worldwide, the Hong Kong tourist board must be ruing the day it commissioned a series of magazine ads telling readers a visit to the city will 'take your breath away'. Shortness of breath is one of the main symptoms of Sars - severe acute respiratory syndrome..." Jason Deans

--Hong Kong in Hot Flush over Ad BlunderGuardian)

Incidentally... why is AIDS spelled in all caps, but Sars with only an initial capital? Both are acronyms, and both make pronounceable words. Who decided that?

Why is such a high-tech nation eschewing texting? | The short answer is that, in America, talk is cheap. Because local calls on land lines are usually free, wireless operators have to offer big 'bundles' of minutes?up to 5,000 minutes per month?as part of their monthly pricing plans to persuade subscribers to use mobile phones instead. Texting first took off in other parts of the world among cost-conscious teenagers who found that it was cheaper to text than to call..." --No Text Please, We're AmericanEconomist)

"Fleishman posted the book online in PDF format last month. He expected a few hundred downloads. Instead, it was grabbed about 10,000 times in just 36 hours.|It took Fleishman a couple of days to realize how much traffic the book was attracting. But by the time he pulled the file offline, he was on the hook for downloads of about 250 GB of data. Fleishman estimated the charges for incremental bandwidth would set him back $15,000 or more."

--Download Fiasco a Downer No MoreWired)

This is a followup. Fleishman had already collected $1700 in donations to help pay for his bill, but he can breathe freely now -- he pulled the file offline just before his ISP would have started charging him for the bandwidth.

"Bidding on the auction site eBay ended Friday after a month on the Internet auction site with no offers reaching the minimum reserve price. Amboy, with seven residents, has a listed value of $1.9 million, but the top bid reached only $995,900.|Amboy has a post office, motel, cafe, gas station, church, gift shop and two landing strips."

--California Town Fails to Sell on eBayAP/Seattle Post)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

"The government is not a grotesquely inefficient and expensive IT customer by accident; it's GI&E by design. It is in the best interests of proprietary vendors for the government to be painful to deal with precisely because it sets up barriers of entry to innovation and entrepreneurship.|If the government truly was a 'better' customer, it would be able to negotiate better terms and introduce better IT innovations faster into its infrastructures. The fact that the government is, on average, a mismanaged IT laggard is an unambiguous market signal that success has little to do with technical excellence or performance and more to do with the ability to cope with all the costs that serving this kind of client imposes." Michael Schrage --The Awful CustomerTechnology Marketing)

"University officials say once file traders are notified they're breaking the law, they don't tend to repeat the offense. | But some believe the recording industry is so fed up with the continuing problem of illegal file swapping that it's trying to send a message to administrators and students."

--RIAA Hits Students Where It HurtsWired)

I have neither a financial nor an emotional stake on the music piracy issue. From this standpoint, I can see the industry has made billions of dollars by carefully training youths to indulge their passions and disdain all authority. It's little wonder those same youths turn a deaf ear when recording executives and artists start preaching ethics and morality.

"A gentle waterfall pours from the cliff into a large aqua pool. The rocks are molded concrete and the pool reeks of chlorine. Under clear resin, our tabletop bears a colorful design of the Mayan alphabet and calendar. Down one level to the right is an area with carpeted steps and a large video screen playing cartoons -- a sideshow for children not sufficiently captivated by robotic iguanas.... Can someone who knows only censored and stylized depictions of the natural world -- Disneyland, PBS, The Nature Company -- ever love and understand the wonderfully complex original?" Julia Corbett --Robotic IguanasOrion Online)