In his book The Paradox of Choice[not an associate link], Barry Schwartz says that, “20,000 new products hit the supermarket every year, almost all of them doomed to failure.” Supermarkets love to get new products, if they can be convinced that there are dollars to be earned by “renting” space to these. Because of this and that the shelf lives of almost all of the products are so short they want to have a steady stream of new products lined up. The buyers of supermarket are every busy breed scouting for new products.

The  web portals and content aggregators is not far from supermarkets.  The WSJ says, that

Big Internet companies such as MSN and Yahoo have small teams whose job
it is to “discover” these smaller sites before their competition does.
They scan the Web, attend industry conferences and hobnob with
start-ups to get names of talented but obscure content providers. Marty
Moe, vice president and general manager for AOL Money & Finance,
says he has started making informal deals with smaller blogs and other
sites in order to fast-track the process.

There are millions of content producers (including this blog) all vying for the scarce attention of users. The Yahoo and MSN try to be the middleman, the supermarket shelves for all these new content produced every second. There is not need to worry about the shelf life of these smaller content producers, there are millions to come every year. The only concern for the “buyers” in portal supermarkets is to find those handful of one hit wonders and get them to produce that one hit while occupying your site’s real estate.

Would you have read about this blog’s post on Sprint’s move to Tear down the walled garden if not for getting shelf space on GigaOm, a 7-11 (so to speak) of content providers?

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Advertisers insist on Prime Time because they can catch the whole demographics with one Ad. We stay tuned because the man on the TV said “8/7 Central” and sit through commercials because they subsidize our monthly bill. Or do we?

How are the changes in viewing habits affecting the ubiquitous 30 second Ads?

In a recent article, How the Ad World’s Dealing With the Decline of the :30 AdAge talks about the changes taking place in the creation of those 3 second Ads and the challenges in reaching the viewer. If the next generation isn’t going to wait in front of their TV for a program or sit through commercials that doesn’t even talk their language why are there Prime Time shows and why are nearly 60% of the Ads run during Prime Time?

“It’s easier for [agencies] to make money on a 30-second spot,” said Tim Williams, founder of Ignition consulting group. “They know the process. It flows through their system easily.” It’s not so simple for newer approaches such as viral and video tailored specifically for the internet. “[Agencies] don’t know how to price it; they don’t have the systems for it. It almost always becomes more labor-intensive.”

Status quo is simpler and no one gets fired for doing what the boss did. Finding a breakout solution needs effort and courage.

Now if you could excuse me, I have to stay tuned for my local news, I am awfully worried about that Dog that needs a new home.

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There is a big convergence going on between the world of Digital media and Environmental movement. I shouldn’t complain, being at Berkeley and part of the school known for its innovation, technology and Social responsibility. But I am a little perplexed by this combination of digital media (ads, TV, gaming) with green topics.
First there was a commercial that was shot in a carbon neutral way.

Then  EA announced  teaming up with BP to add Global warming to SimCity.

Now NBC Universal announced Green week with environment friendly green themes in all its shows. LA Times green blogger Siel says

Starting today, NBC shows — from “Scrubs” to “Days of Our Lives” — will feature enviro-based themes. The green-tint is part of NBC Universal’s “Green Is Universal” week, during which TV addicts can take in more than 150 hours of enviro-themed content.

I wonder how much of electricity will be spent at homes as people stay glued to their TV sets to watch 150 hours of green programming. May be NBC should use a Codec for these programs such that the progams will show only on TVs powered by  Green energy.
I also wonder if we a DMEC can get bigger sponsorship for >play 2008, if we added a Green theme to it.

There is a not so subtle battle going on in the iPhone relationship between AT&T and its arguably dominant partner Apple. When Apple announced capability to buy music from iPod  Touch and iPhone, they were very specific in calling the service as “iTunes Wifi Store”.

1. Why would they brand such a generic function after an access technology?
2. Aren’t applications access agnostic? All these need is an IP connection to run over any access link.
3. Following this branding, should they then call their current iTunes store as “iTunes Wireline”?
4. Since most people who access iTunes store from their computers access the Internet through Wifi, isn’t iTunes store, by Apple’s definition a Wifi store?
5. Some of the branding tag lines like, “GetiTunesNow or iTunes on the Go” are taken ( ignore for a moment that these don’t come close to Apple’s standards). Yet, Apple could’ve easily branded the new project in more generic terms than as Wifi Store. Why didn’t they?

It leads one to believe that Apple’s relation with AT&T is strict about what Apple can offer on the “Revolutionary Internet Device”. From AT&T’ side, it announced that it is now offering Pandora music service to its mobile subscribers. It should be noted that Pandora service is not like iTunes in the business model, the former is subscription based and the latter is a music store.

AT&T will charge $9 a month for the Internet music streaming service from Pandora. While the AT&T’s goal is create more users for its data services through services like Pandora, it probably also will get a cut from Pandora. If they had offered iTunes store on iPhone, Apple wouldn’t have offered them any cut from the 99 cents. Apple also won’t support Pandora on their iPhone. The relation between Apple and AT&T clearly is a one up event and not based on future possibilities.
So there is iPhone which can access iTunes Wifi store only through Wifi connection, even though AT&T is the only mobile service provider for iPhone.

There is AT&T’s Pandora offer to non iPhone subscribers.

If these are not the symptoms of a relationship on thin ice, what others would you look for?

In a previous post here at DMEC, Matt talked about Yahoo moving ahead of others in mobile advertising. I remembered some data on web site access from Smart phones. Shown below is the graph with data sourced from M:Metrics. What is a Smart Phone is not well defined and the number of phones that can be qualified Smart Phones is not clear. The data shows Google at the top, with almost twice that of the second place player, Yahoo. With so much lead in website usage, it is conceivable that Google won’t yield its lead in mobile advertising to others. Another caveat is, this data from M:Metrics is at least six months old.

This article in Freakonomics blog is rich with quotes and references to many academic and non academic studies on the economics of videos moving to web and the validity of assumption that viewers are moving away from the living room to their computers.

Is Web Video Really Hurting TV?

The current conventional wisdom is that the rise of Internet video may mean the end of television as we know it — a view that extends to the music industry as well, as we’ve seen before. Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement suit against the Google-owned YouTube continues to lumber on, and the TV writers’ strike has led to speculation that the lull in new TV content could drive more viewers to the Web.

As Forbes recently pointed out, much of the TV industry’s anxiety is based on the assumption that entertainment viewership is a zero-sum game — i.e., if more people are watching programming online, then fewer are left to watch TV.

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There was a news from the least expected quarters on the signs of what is yet to come in search. You wouldn’t expect National Association of Convenience Stores conference  to give you guidance on the future of search. In the recently concluded conference, Gilbarco Veeder-Root a supplies of fuel control systems for gas stations announced a system that lets gas station owners:

… display maps, find local listings, and even print driving directions and money-saving coupons from Gilbarco’s Encore® dispensers with color screens and the Applause™ media system. The live internet connection means all information is in real time. The Gilbarco® Applause™ media system is the first content management system that uses Google’s world-class open content infrastructure to deliver valuable information at the pump.

Many advertisers have been vying for the attention of the captive customers filling gas. Now this display system is meant to display “aps on the pump’s screen and locate their desired destinations. They can also search Google’s local business listings by category (restaurant, hospital, gift shop, etc.) to find the nearest choices. Once a destination is selected, consumers can also print the driving directions at the pump. Easy-to-read instructions are printed on the receipt printer, making it convenient to take them with them in the car.”

There is one catch that wasn’t mentioned in the press release but was pointed out by IWeek,

The Google service will be very limited initially. Using the pump’s touch pad, drivers will be able to choose a category, such as restaurants, hospitals, hotels, or landmarks, and then pick a listing and print a map to the location. Retailers will choose the listings.

This may sound like a limitation to most, but I see this as the emergence of UG search results.  Imagine a common open platform like this that is available for every community and individual. The members then start compiling search results that they think are relevant to particular queries. May be they even decide the Ads they think are relevant. Just like the Gas station managers who pick only those attractions and restaurants that are are close by, the user search generators will focus only on content that are relevant to the particular locale they are in.  The multiple planes of separation now you can get very interesting, locale, interests, gender, income level, ….

This is User generated search. Or is this Search2.0.

Okay, let’s let that be the last this plus this equals that title on this blog… it’s almost as played out as the platform strategy. Anyway, there’s nothing I like more than discovering a cool feature or shortcut… i.e., ctrl+scroll up or down to zoom in and out of documents (ctrl+cmd+scroll on a mac). Just discovered another one–if you utilize tabs in Firefox regularly and hit the max number across your screen, you can scroll left and right on the trackpad to quickly display the tabs that are hidden beyond the screen width (on a Mac, hold down two fingers and slide side-to-side… this might work if you have horizontal scrolling enabled on a non-Mac). I often run out of tab room when I’m looking at a list of articles or search results, and I go through and cmd+click to open the interesting articles in new tabs for future reading.

Long term Google critic, Bob Cringely of PBS has this long piece on Google. It seem like the recent high of over $700 set by Google stock had triggered his post.

Cringely calls his post as, The Next Microsoft.

This strategy of getting start-ups to explain their business models and share their technologies was practically invented by Microsoft, which would then break off talks, start a competing product or service and use pressure on industry partners to put the smaller company out of business.

This is just one small part of his long tirade, he goes on to talk about AdWords and finishes with the “M” word (monopoly).

He should be on a >play panel next year for an entertaining debate.

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Live TV, except for telecast of live shows, isn’t truly live. It it timeshifted to a primetime based on your geography.
Why is there even a prime time?
Which came first? Prime time showings or viewing habits?
I can understand why a particular TV show can’t be shown before a time but why does it have to be exactly at that time? Why do I need to buy a timeshifting device like TiVO? In his blog post, Seth Godin asked What is the ‘live web’?

“TV works as a live medium because millions watch just a few channels. The web needs to be asynchronous because there are too many channels!”

I think that millions would watch million channels if it is as easy as an RSS feed on their TV. I see no reason to wait for Desperate Houswives’ Haloween episode if I know I can get it in my “TV RSS feed”. Pricing is not an issue as you and I already pay for the bundling and we are not going to ask for unbundled pricing.

The problem is not technology, it is the Ad dollars. But if the advertisers know exactly who is watching what show and at hat times and can bid for what Ads to show to them, based not only on the particular show but on the whole package of shows in a viewer’s “RSS list”, they will stop asking for prime time fixed showings.

The web wasn’t asynchronous to start with, but it was always On Demand.

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