How to make money in media when copying is easy and digital transmission is essentially free:
If you are a media exec and you look at your product and at the end of the day it’s a digital file that can be copied, then you have a serious problem with your format. Think of your product like a pie chart of the value you are giving the consumer. If 100% of the value is in that file, it is not a sound approach for defending the future of your business. However, if a portion of the experience is derived thorough an integration with a Web component that will yield additional value in functionality or social elements, then it will be more sustainable. There are many such examples emerging in the app store (I am T-Pain, TapTap and many more). Applications that let consumers interact with the media. Create things and share them with their friends. These will not only make the consumer the one who markets your product, but also create an unprecedented level of engagement. That level of engagement will directly map to reduction in piracy as consumers will pay for this experience and wont be able to copy it. Sell access and experiences, not media files.
I recently chaired a session and spoke at the Asian Conference on Education (ACE 2009) in Osaka, Japan. I could hardly have enjoyed the experience more – thanks to UBC and the Master of Educational Technology program for making it possible! More details on that later.
But first, I promised during the talk that my presentation and notes would be made available online … so here they are.
Note that they are very text heavy. This is not at all my standard practice (I usually have very few words on a slide, if any) but is good manners for an international conference where English is often the second or third language of most participants. Many people I’ve met in business and academics around Asia and Europe who know at least some English are better readers than speakers or listeners … so providing the written words as well as the spoken presentation provides much greater opportunity to grasp the meaning.
I must say I completely enjoyed this conference. Many conferences are wonderful because you have opportunities to meet so many different people from so many different places … but this one was special because of its international character.
For me, the highlight (beside the session, which went extremely well and was well-attended) was personally meeting and talking to people from Indonesia, the Phillipines, Ireland, Scotland, Japan (of course!), Taiwan, Turkey, Malaysia, Borneo, Canada (yes, there were a few other Canucks there), and the US. It’s a great pleasure to talk to people of all different backgrounds and perspectives.
# Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
# Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
# Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
# Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
# “We’re starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.
# “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
# There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
# “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
# It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.
I’m sitting in my hotel room on the 30th floor of the Ritz-Carlton in Osaka at 5:35 AM, Sunday morning, reflecting on my Japan experience so far.
First impressions are only first, and I have 5 days in Tokyo to add to them, but they tend to last. My first impression is that Japan is by far the most foreign place I have ever visited – foreign in the sense of profoundly different, unknown, out of my experience, and even potentially unknowable.
I’m no Marco Polo, but I’ve been to Romania, many countries in Western Europe, Northern Africa (Egypt), mainland China, Taiwan, and all over the US and Canada. So I’m not unfamiliar with being in places where few if any speak my native language. And it’s not unusual for me to be an ethnic minority when I travel. But there’s something about the incredibly different language, the different characters/letters, and the different social customs that just make Japan qualitatively different.
More than that, there’s something about the monoculture of Japan – those are the words of a native Japanese from a talk at the ACE 2009 conference yesterday – that make Japan the most foreign place I have traveled. I’m used to being the only white guy in a room or a train station. But it’s outside of my experience to hardly see a black person, an Indian, or even different Asian ethnicities.
Add it all up, and you have countless experiences that your brain just can’t interpret … can’t file away in the right slot … can’t process and understand.
For example, I walked into a shop a couple of days ago, my first day in Osaka, and I could not determine what the store sold. Imagine that – being in a store and not being able to understand what was actually for sale! There were obviously products available for purchase, with price tags, and product information, and people paying, and a cashier – all the familiar archetypes of “store” from my Western, Canadian experience. But the products appeared to be small pieces of paper, or cards – about business card sized. They weren’t phone cards, weren’t sports trading cards … and I could not determine what precisely, they might be. Nor could I and the salesperson communicate.
The experience – just one of many similar – stretches your brain’s expectation engine and challenges your ability to understand, predict, and therefore feel a (false) sense of control that tends to put you at ease. So in Japan I am always wandering and wondering: what is this? is it what it seems? is that person speaking heatedly to another angry, or just speaking normally for Japanese? what is this building for? is “arigato” (Harry without the H, French for cake – gateau – with a long O at the end) OK for thanks, or is it too familiar?
Being a complete naif and newbie in Japan means that I can somewhat safely wander around like a medieval village idiot: investigating the obvious, pursuing the mundane, and capturing a gestalt of “japan-ness,” or, to be more honest, “my Japan,” the Japan that I hazily grasp.
The beautiful and glorious thing about travel like this, of course, is the ability to step out of MY mundane, and MY obvious, and pass through the wormhole to an alien culture and learn and re-learn the world anew. Here I am alien – even gaijin – and therefore I have the freedom of the outsider to observe and see, and the curse of the outsider to always be on the fringe. It is strange and exhilarating and enjoyable and challenging. And it’s also exhausting.
People will pay for content if it is necessary, irreplaceable, and unshareable. Businesses excited about the first five words of that sentence don’t understand how constraining the next seven are.
Initially, any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs the balance between focal and peripheral attention. This was true as early as the invention of writing, which Plato complained hollowed out focal memory. Similarly, William Wordsworth’s sister complained that he wasted his mind in the newspapers of the day. It takes time and adaptation before a balance can be restored, not just in the “mentality” of the reader, as historians of the book like to say, but in the social systems that complete the reading environment.
1. A day-long workshop that engages 10-40 people (employees and stakeholders in a client organization) in a learning and brainstorming process that helps participants develop a stronger understanding of social media tools and strategies.
2. A workshop report summarizing the long list of ideas generated by the workshop (typically 50-100 ideas).
3. An options document presenting 3-6 options for social media projects. These options typically synthesize the ideas prioritized workshop participants, distilling and enhancing each option into a summary concept that our team thinks has strong potential.
I’m looking for hotels in Tokyo for an upcoming speaking trip to Japan, and ran across the Sumisho.
It looks like it could be OK, but it’s hard to tell given the Japanese/English fusion (Engrish) it’s written in.
The Nihombashi which stops the vestiges of Edo. As a hotel of peacefulness, Sumisho is nochalant, and it is warm in it, and it has treated the visitor to this ground that is full of rich humaneness.
Please take in everywhere the merit of the sum to which the heart is softened, and though you are hotel form, use as the base of the Tokyo walk by Sumisho which valued the atmosphere of a tasteful hotel, and a place which relieves the tiredness of business.
Well, you can’t beat that!
I’m fairly used to Chinglish after trips to Taiwan and mainland China … but Engrish is a little new to me. I think I like it!
Some pictures from my recent trip to Portland, OR …
We were meeting a group of people at Intel, which has a fairly major presence in Portland. It was my third visit to an Intel office – head office in Santa Clara (Silicon Valley), Intel Shanghai offices, and now one of their Portland offices. I had a 4-hour presentation (!!!) which went extremely well, thankfully.
And, as you can see above, I was fortunate enough to have an afternoon in Portland to do a brief photowalk. The side-benefit? It was the first Thursday in the month … and every first Thursday Portland art galleries stay open late. So it was very enjoyable to stroll downtown and stop by at least 15 different galleries.
My favorite painting of the night was this one by Claudio Tschopp:
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
