Author Archives: Matt

Some details about the Netflix rate hike

Quote

Posted on by
Reply

Via ahknight:

Netflix WI subscribers passed a certain number specified in the contract with Starz and Sony and so they lost the right to stream that content. After some talks they came back online and now, one week later, Netflix is breaking apart their WI subscribers from their DVD subscribers. I find it hard to consider this a coincidence.

Keep in mind also that in the last week we heard the news that while their current licensing is around a couple of million a year that by the end of 2012 the licensing costs are projected to be 2.1 billion-with-a-B dollars a year. They only made about $130M in profit last year. So while this rate shuffle is annoying, by the end of 2012 it’s just going to get plain bad, and it’s not Netflix doing it — it’s the studios.

Portland tech incubator lines up some pretty serious clout

Posted on by
Reply

Mike Rogoway reports this morning on the Portland Incubator Experiment, part of the Wieden+Kennedy advertising firm, backed by Coca-Cola, Nike and Target.

They’re taking applications for a three-month program for 8 to 10 startups. They’ll pay a $1,000 stipend for up to three founders, a place to live and mentoring in exchange for a six percent equity stake.

I have no idea if those are good terms or not, but there does seem to be a sizable benefit in having access to some big brains. I’ll be interested to who this attracts and what comes out of it.

The importance of stating the obvious

Posted on by
Reply

A primary issue with developing anything out of thin air is the tendency for discussions to quickly move from idea to solution, then include a little strategy on the backend for good measure. This works fine if you find yourself with a pool of oil under your car:

Oil’s leaking. Where’s it coming from?
The engine. Looks like a seal’s gone bad.
Better replace the seal.

But when you’re trying to create niche products, market to a particular group, or turn content into profit, the “quick start” method can lead to some problems:

  • Half-baked strategies
  • Wasted effort
  • Mixed messaging
  • Incomplete campaigns

So while I’m a fan of brainstorming and getting things hashed out quickly, it’s important to start with a problem statement: What problem is this thing trying to solve?

It sounds obvious, but everything stems from that. Knowing the problem (and, hopefully, the desired outcome) even in general terms helps to bring focus to the project. The brainstorming can come after everyone knows the lay of the land clearly. I’d argue that your creative process is even more effective when the goal is plainly stated, since I firmly believe limits enhance creativity.

Getting down to basics

Posted on by
Reply

Last night I had the chance to speak to a group of new media/journalism students at Oregon State University. I always try to be relevant and upbeat about the tools available now to working journalists and the entrepreneurial spirit that defines success now in the field. But I’m always excited about the depth of questions that come from the students, and challenged in trying to respond to them.

We talked about a whole range of topics:

  • The role of professionals in growing sea of amateur journalists (my take: field guides and fact-checkers);
  • Whether tools like Twitter are effective for reporting in rural and impoverished areas (Increasingly, yes, though it’s important to keep user demographics in mind and not report exclusively from the Internets);
  • The critical mass of connectivity (Interesting to see what mobile phones have done in the digital divide);
  • Threats to digital information flow (What’s the bigger threat: a great big government switch, net non-neutrality, “filter bubbles”?)

I’ve been struggling with how to pick up the posting schedule since I left daily journalism and now focus more on audience development and product development and kind of lost my way about what I wanted to say here. Now I see that getting down to the basic elements of building community, developing information products, content strategy and refining workflows might be the way to re-energize.

Thanks to the students for highlighting this.

For them, here are links to some of the items I mentioned:

  • Storify: Make stories using social media
  • CoverItLive: Embeddable liveblogging app
  • Eli Pariser: Beware of online ‘filter bubbles’:
  • Clay Shirky’s now-legend Web 2.0 keynote:

Doc Searls on staking out beachheads for TV

Posted on by
Reply

Doc Searls makes several great observations about where television’s going, especially in light of Al Jazeera’s online streaming (free of goofy cable restrictions) and complete ownership of news coming out of the Middle East for the past month and more.

Most compelling are his reference to Terry Heaton’s beachheads, each of which set a goal for capturing an aspect of online viewership without necessarily obsessing over “where the money is.” Heaton likens it to Wayne Gretsky’s “skating to where the puck is going to be”:

This strategy is to get us ahead of that and let the revenue grow into it. None of these will break the bank, and they’ll position us to move quickly regardless of which direction things move or how fast.

We all know how well the strategy worked for Gretzky.

Will Ping break Apple’s Reality Distortion Field?

Posted on by
Reply

"In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack" (via wikipedia)

For the first time in a long time, we’re really hearing from Apple users that one of Steve Jobs’ products is weak, at best. Maybe Ping isn’t quite ready for primetime, or maybe it’s all-too-blatantly a scheme to get iTunes users more deeply entrenched in the store, pandering to stars that record execs want to push. Either way, between the iPhone’s antenna trouble and recent disappointment over iTunes’ “social network,” Apple’s had some issues.

Dave Winer sums up the essence of the problem as Apple being green, ill-experienced, in knowing what customers want. I think that’s true, and wrote about the company’s denial of (and need for) market research a year ago. But I also think that behind that research needs to come a little humility about where great ideas come from.

Not to dredge up Windows v. OSX angst, but Microsoft’s ads for Windows 7 (the ones about new features being “my idea”) are a pretty cool foil to Steve Jobs’ elitism. Who hasn’t thought about a feature that would make something easier to use or more accessible? Maybe none of Windows 7′s features really came from customer ideas, but the pitch is near perfect: We’re listening to you and it shows in the stuff we make.

A complete reversal of corporate culture isn’t going to happen, but doing a little listening isn’t going to hurt. If Apple combined their art of craft with transparent customer service, they’d be unbeatable again.

On pandas, lobsters and apps that rock both.

Posted on by
Reply

If you can get through the panda and lobster analogies for how we interact with Google and Facebook (it took me a little time, but I’m onboard now: pandas are searching, eating machines; lobsters find a trap and get stuck), Adam Rifkin has an interesting post about corporate culture at Google and how the company’s focus on search makes them less suited to building killer social applications.

Rifkin’s got good points and if Buzz was any indication, Google’s probably not the company to build the next super-wow social app. Rifkin’s concerned because of a list of stats about ad traffic on Facebook and Twitter as a growing force in search. It’s true that the online market is more diverse than it was even a couple of years ago. But while Google would be crazy to sit idly by while others slide into the driver’s seat, especially in the search market, I think it’s most critical to understand whether you’re creating for pandas or lobsters and embrace that completely.

I’d be interested to compare traffic across all of Google — especially their API — with Twitter and Facebook. I’m not sure what you’d find, but my experience is that I’m searching on google.com much less but their applications (especially on my Android phone) are so much more a part of my daily life than ever before. So I’m an even more efficient panda thanks to Google’s ability to put leaves right where I need them. I’m also pretty protective of the relationships I’ve made on Facebook and Twitter and very aware that the three don’t often cross very naturally.

My point in this, really, is threefold:

  1. Rifkin assumes that success for Google must include a beatdown of Facebook and/or Twitter. I disagree. Understanding the kind of service you provide and (better yet) knowing the type of audience you’re serving is more important than trying to beat someone else at their own game. Today’s news of Google acquiring semantic search company Metaweb is more exciting to me than yet another social app.
  2. If the Internet has taught me anything, it’s that there’s room enough for more than one big player, especially when each completely rocks their specific niche. The days of “one ring to rule them all” are over. Thanks to Frodo. And networked computers.
  3. The message of “Knowing Thine Audience” is hyper relevant to content strategists as well; it’s what keeps getting newspapers into trouble because it’s so easy to bounce between the first and best sources. General interest is as bland and unattractive as it sounds. Find a niche and rock it.

With quality information, everything else falls into place

Posted on by
Reply

More than anything, the real shift in the practice of providing information, whether it be about an organization or a product or a community, has been the demand for quality information. There’s an interesting post over at the Nieman Journalism Lab today that captures the cause of real angst into a real simple statement:

Worry less about journalism and more about quality information, however it gets gathered and distributed.

There’s more history and philosophy about the Knight News Challenge, and it’s worth a read. But for a tweet-worthy synopsis of what every 21st century information worker’s primary goal should be, there’s the take away.

App is the new Web. Yeah, but whose app?

Posted on by
Reply

“App is the new Web.” What happens when the 25-year-old Internet meme “Information wants to be free” bangs up against the power, ease and financial promise of the app?

I’m usually pretty skeptical of claims of “x is the new y,” but the phrase came from a trusted source and linked to an interesting piece from On the Media featuring Michael Hirschorn talking more about his recent article in Atlantic about the future (end?) of information freedom.

IWTBF is credited to Stewart Brand, who made the observation at the first Hackers Conference in 1984:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

The notion of information wanting to be free also changes depending on how you define “free.” Free as in “no cost,” or free as in “no boundaries?” Most of the Internet world chose the former definition on the way to the latter. Now, it seems, apps might offer a way for those companies to get paid for content again. Says Hirschhorn of the New York Times:

I think that The Times will be able to offer what is more a reading than a browsing experience through their apps. It’ll be a more organic multimedia experience. It’s something that feels like you should pay for it. And they will stop putting that content on the Web. They haven’t said that yet, but it’s pretty inevitable because otherwise what’s the point?

There is no point, if you’re the Times. Or any number of media companies that start salivating at the notion that readers will pony up cash for news and information. And Hirschorn more than hints at the image of Apple’s Steve Jobs and his squeaky-clean version of the Internet (in partnership with content producers) battling it out with Google’s approach to wrangling the Web’s chaos.

That’s a fine image, and it probably fairly describes the current landscape. But let’s take a bit longer view, say, 2012, and look at the vision laid out by Robert Scoble in TechCrunch, in which information silos break down into a seamless integration of location-awareness, consumer patters, social connections and spontaneity, an idea that highlights the middle of Brand’s statement and, in my opinion, the most important one: “The right information in the right place just changes your life.”

I’m not sure my life has been changed by an app yet, but I’m incredibly pleased with the idea that I can find nearby restaurants and know how they’re rated. Or make note of places that I want or need to visit and have a reminder in my pocket. None of this continues to get better, however, if information remains in proprietary silos. Maybe you’d get one app-reality on the iPhone and another in Android, each with their own officially-licensed database and user interface. Blah.

All of this may be more true of “produced” content than of We’re only beginning to address the potential of millions of tweets per hour, the 72 percent of bloggers who write for fun and the 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.

The fact is that much of the really interesting and powerful information being leveraged in apps is created by users: Yelp reviews, Tweets, Facebook updates, blog posts (and recommendations) and more. I’d add that the issue of ownership of that data remains to play out.

I think the specific note here is that shared information wants to be shared. I don’t care whether my sister has a Blackberry, my friend an iPhone and myself an Android. If I click to share, I’d like all of them to be aware of it. If not, I (and most others) will look for some way to make it happen. Because one thing we all should have learned about disruptive technologies by now is that they, by definition, won’t favor the status quo.