After months of complaints since the launch of the iPhone, Apple just announced the a Software Developer’s Kit will be released in February. Mac Rumors noted that the letter from Jobs suggested that they might use a digital signature to control who can develope applications, a strategy the Nokia is using.

For this reason, and the iPhone’s relatively small user base, I’m not sure that we’ll see the applications on the scale of Facebook. However, I’m looking forward to what software developers can come up with.

That being said, iPhone apps might be more profitable, because people are getting more used to downloading and paying for apps and content to mobile phones.

A recent Telephia report on mobile applications, found that in Q2 2007, 5% or 13 million mobile users downloaded a mobile app, which generated $USD 118 million. Compare that with Business Week reporting the estimate that the entire monthly Facebook revenue from widget advertising is less than $USD 1 million, or $USD4 million for the quarter.

So, I downloaded the album, which I paid $USD6. Frankly, for what is being reported as the death of the record label, it was a little anti-climatic. That is, I paid for a album over the internet that I could have gotten free. The album is good, sort of what we’ve come to expect from RH. Although, it usually takes me a few listening sessions for me to figure out what is going on in their albums. Now what?

For the second act, Trent Reznor announced that NIN has fulfilled their music label contractual obligations are now planning to go it alone, which isn’t all that surprising.

Starting your own record label or self-publishing is not a new thing, as seen with Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe started in the 1990, to cite one example. So, the real question still to be answered is, can this scale outside established musicians who admittedly benefited from aspects of the traditional music industry?

Will the home grown bands who grow a fan base through touring, myspace, pitchfork reivews and other grassroots efforts continue on a DIY career path or will they eventual jump to labels, as did Clap Your Hands Say Yeah?

Image source: In Rainbows

Way back in 1999, Public Enemy released “There’s a Poison Goin’ On” only on the internet, with indie label Atomic Pop. After sluggish sales, they eventually sold a CD version as well. I applauded PE for their efforts, although it wasn’t surprising with the outcome. Broadband penetration was much lower and PE has past it’s peak of popularity. Eight years later, the internet is buzzing with Radiohead’s announcement that they are releasing their latest record, In Rainbows, without a label. You can buy the disc set at a pricey £40.00 ($USD 80) or pay whatever you want for the download.

Of course, Radiohead is in a better position to do sometime like this kind of experiment, after having sold millions of records and toured extensively throughout the world. I’m sure the die- hard fans (of which there are many) will purchase the disc set. However, after Thom Yorke’s last album was circulating the internet months before its official release, Radiohead figures to try to recoup some of the lost revenue from p2p file sharing.

I paid £2.50. There is a £0.45 credit card process fee, which they only tell you about at the end of your purchase. I’ll give them a “free pass” on that one.

I got the download code, and will be able to get the album starting on October 10th. I’ll probably wait a few days, because I’m sure that their servers will be clogged at first. I’m not in a rush, as my Radiohead interest peaked a few years ago (I bought Amnesiac on the day it was released.)

I would love to see the numbers, and the distribution of what people’s willingness to pay for the album. It isn’t clear if this is sustainable for other bands, even famous ones. Radiohead is getting a lot of free press for being the first. The 10th band who tries this, won’t have the added benefit of extra publicity. I mean, I’m writing about buying an album on the internet.

I’m sure it will be available on the internet for free the day it is released. I could have gotten activation code for free as well, but I want to reward them for their efforts. I’m also buying the album for $USD5, which is actually how much it is actually worth to me. Although, it may be not be “rational” in the purely short term economic sense, I definitely wanted to reward Radiohead for working in this way.

the facebook app. Will I still care about facebook in six months?

Image soure: wikipedia

Americans love the underdog. Remember when seven years ago Google was a small startup, founded two smart guys from Standford? We has the same warm and fuzzy feelings about Microsoft in the 80s, when Bill Gates was everyone’s favorite geeky software boy wonder. It’s funny how, in typical American fashion, everyone roots for the underdog until it becomes the leader. At that point, the 90s era Microsoft and the current Google found themselves scratching their heads, thinking, “Where did our love go?”

We wouldn’t be so frustrated that Google is storing and analyzing all of our data, if they didn’t continually to offer or buy and integrate consistently superior products and services. Now that Google is the front runner, everyone has placed a bit target on the back of the company everyone seems to love and hate.

As a follower of innovation, I’m particularly interested in Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of Creative destruction, which embodies the notion that innovation, particularly from entrepreneurs, creates products or services that displace market leaders. Creative destruction is powerful idea and an amazing witness in real time. I’ll admit that it’s too often trotted out to defend monopolies, without mentioning that people often are getting screwed while they wait for some upstart to knock them down.

We know that with personalized search, the acquisition of youtube and Feedburner, gmail, and google docs, Google’s privately owned servers hold more of our digital lives each day. When it is too much? This week, while the Economist is asking “Who’s afraid of Google?” Techcruch is touting Cuill (pronounced ‘cool’) as the one to watch.

This startup was created by Anna Patterson and Russell Power, two ex-Google search experts and Tom Costello, who founded of the search engine Xift. Cuill is claiming that their search algorithms and methodology require only 10% of Google’s index costs. Of course, this could all be vaporware, but they have Google’s attention. TechCrunch reports that Google has offered to buy the company, even before the launching of their search engine.

Knowing when a company controls too much power is a very difficult thing to ascertain, until it’s too late. We haven’t been successful at finding the sweet spot where the creative destruction of innovation can occur and flourish without putting the general population at risk. This point occurs at the intersection of innovation, access, and regulation.

Cuill might be the Google search engine killer or it might just be a media darling that dies a quiet death or lingers as an also ran. (There was a time when people thought that Real Networks was posed to challenge Microsoft on the web.) As the speed of innovation increases, what are the criteria and guidelines to know when intervene and level the playing field. Is this something that is even possible to know? If not, what is should be the role of publically funded innovation, as it is getting increasingly rare, as the US government in particular is shifting the responsibility of research and design to the private sector.

Image source: nytimes.com

New York Times reported that Nokia is priming a relaunch of the N-Gage after two failed attempts at providing a portable phone and gaming platform. Following two attempts to market the N-Gage in 2003 and 2004, Nokia pulled the line of devices from Europe and North America in 2005, after lukewarm sales, well below their sales targets. Not giving up, Nokia hired the legendary design firm IDEO, for a user-centric design approach for the next iteration. Now, the new N-Gage will allow people to play games with their friends and strangers, and try-out and purchase games from their phones. They will also know more about the skill levels of the other people they are playing against, so they can find people of similar abilities, which was a user need that was discovered through IDEO research. If the re-launch is successful, the N-Gage could become a textbook example of user need driven product design.

Combining a portable gaming device and a phone seems like a no brainer, but success has still been elusive. Besides Nokia, the other obvious places to look have been slow in making progress as well. Sony presents yet another example of the Japanese giant having a difficult time getting their individual arms to work together, but it looks like they are starting to work it out. After years of rumors, Sony has filed a patent on a mobile gaming platform that will combine the PSP with Sony Ericsson phone technology. Seeing that the patent was only filed in May 31, 2007, seeing a product to market in the US, could take time. However, as unwired review notes, if it can play PSP games, it could have immediate impact.

Putting aside the success of the DS line and the Wii console, Nintendo is still strangely silent, despite filing a similar mobile phone gaming patent way back in 2001.

Of course, Sony, Nokia, and Nintendo will also have to deal with the US carriers, who lean heavily toward restrictions on their ondeck services, as they too want to earn revenue from the mobile gaming market. It’s not clear to me, how the N-Gage will integrate with US mobile carrier services. I’m definitely going to follow up on the agreements that will be made, and how the services will play out. The complexity of the current system definitely makes it even more clear that, the FCC mandate of device and software interoperability for 700 MHz auction was important, even if some people think the FCC compromised too much.

Image source: flickr

I’ve recently been poking around in Facebook fairly frequently. It helps that I got a handful of invites, as friends migrated from MySpace to Facebook, and used the email addressbook suckers to contact me. Noah recently posted about Facebook, so I was inspired to add my proverbial two cents on the topic.

Over the last month, I am spending far more time there, than either I ever spent in MySpace or during my first foray into Facebook. The key difference between than and now, is that Facebook opened up their platform for developing widget by third party developers.

I’ll admit that last spring, I figured that Facebook was a niche social community for college students, which had passed its height of relevance. After it started opening its doors to high schools and then to anybody, I thought that the site was ruining its brand, alienating its power user base, and was headed to the social networking graveyard, right next to Friendster.

I was completely caught off guard, when they opened up their platform to let anyone release apps and widgets. That announcement was a game changing move and immediately drew my attention. It was especially well timed, as MySpace was being criticized for being a closed system, as seen in their blocking of Photobucket, the third party image / video service, from their pages just before they bought the company.

A year ago, I first ventured into Facebook, after chatting with a cousin who was in still an undergrad. Using an old grad school email account, I made a profile with the least amount of information they allowed. I found her profile listing 700+ friends, which was a little overwhelming. All I saw as I clicked around, was a lot of college kids and not much else, so I moved on to other concerns. My experience in MySpace was basically the same. I logged on just enough to see what it was about and to get to some walled content, like the Tracey Thorn page and blog, when her new record was coming out. But mostly, it just looked like a competition to make the most number of friends, which seemed like a lot of work. Basically there was little reason for me to go back to either site, after signing up for a profile.

Now with Facebook, there are the reasons to go back. I lost a couple of evenings playing Q-Bert in the retro-arcade application. The apps give me a reason to regularly return to the site, whether it is to see the cities friends have travelled to or getting your friends to compete with each other. The open platform is an easy way for developers to access a wired pool of users. It’s a great example of the gift economy at work.

Of course, in the end, the measure of success between the sites will probably come down to money. Just because I love free apps doesn’t mean that Facebook will ultimately be more profitable than MySpace or some other social networking site. It will be interesting to see who can monetize their user base more effectively, just as Andy Chen recently queried. Until then, I’ll be playing Centipede and wishing I had a track ball.

Image source: amazon.com

Currently, a campaign for the new book in the Jason Bourne series is plastered on many of New York’s subways. The timing of course coincides with the latest movie of the third novel starring Matt Damon. As I understand it, the novels have little similarity to the movies. After seeing the ad many times, I finally noticed the wording, “Robert Ludlum’s” in the title, which I realized implied that he didn’t write the book. The actual author Eric Van Lustbader is listed below on the book cover in the ad. As it turns out, Ludlum died six years ago. What is the implications of having other writers take the helm of a character after the original author dies?

This phenomenon isn’t new, as many James Bonds books and stories were published after Ian Flemming’s death. (What’s up with the JP initials? I’ll leave that one up to the conspiracy theorists.) Generally, these posthumous works are mostly amusing, and generally confined to the realm of genre fiction, either thrillers or mysteries. They do have two interesting potential effects on the ideas of intellectual property, which surround the ideas of authorship. On the short term, these works seems to support the status quo, that the owner of the rights, most likely the author’s estate, can and should commissions new works, which are sometimes based on remaining notes or drafts. Just because an author dies, doesn’t mean that the audience stops desiring new stories for their favorite characters. In this perspective, the owners will take a strong and closed intellectual property stance to increase the revenue generated from the new and old works. Especially if they own the author’s notes, the new books have a preceived legitimacy.

in the long term, however, this kind of cultural production starts to erode that legitimacy and further pushJames Boyle’s notion of the “romantic author” which supports the tightening intellectual property regimes that cross the bounds of reason and the original intentions of the copyright. In that, seeing Lustbader’s name associated with the series starts to weaken the brand. If they are of equal or perhaps even better quality of the original author, readers start asking what makes the original author so special? If the new books are bad, readers start questioning why one author gets the privilege of penning new works and they may be more apt to enter the world of fan fiction. Increases in fan cultural production will hopefully then add pressure against restrictive ip attitudes, which make the fan work illegal. The application and defense of an author’s rights extending beyond his death may actually encourage the weakening of those rights.

Image source: John Hoffmann’s Weblog

I’m back from a short trip to the beach, only to return to a massive thunder storms which lead to an extra long commute due to flooding and the sweet smell of raw sewage in Soho that was percolating in 90 degree summer heat. Ah… it’s good to be home.

With that said, let’s get back to Google. (Did you think I could go five posts without directly mentioning them?)

It’s funny because the spectrum auction has been a big deal in telecommunications circles every since the FCC made television broadcasters switch from analogue to digital, which freed the 700MHz band of spectrum in the first place. But Google makes news, and their public announcement of their concerns about the auction turns a business section article into front page news on the New York Times (albeit below the fold.) All this analysis leads to a lot second guessing. The what ifs and predictions can be fun and are an important part of the game, however separating the signal from the noise is difficult. More over, after a week passes, most people will move along with the rest of the blogosphere to the next bright and shinny news item, like the new iMacs. In the short window of coverage, it is easy to forget that Google has been concerned about access and pipes for a long time.

On that note, let’s return to 2005, when the internet was abuzz with rumors of Google buying up “dark fiber” and their mysterious job postings.

At the time, Robert X Cringely (who made the great documentary Triumph of the Nerds, not to be confused with the movie about a nerd fraternity of a similar title.) commented upon the dark fiber speculation and the even cool super-secret plans to building their own Internet using home grown US$500 million mobile data centers housed in shipping containers.

Two years later, we haven’t seen or heard much more about these plans. It is also interesting to note how Cringley opened his article:

“Google’s strengths are searching, development of Open Source Internet services, and running clusters of tens of thousands of servers. Notice on this list there is nothing about operating systems. There are many rumors about Google doing an operating system to compete with Microsoft. I’m not saying they aren’t doing that (I simply don’t know), but I AM saying it would not be a good idea, because it doesn’t play to any of the company’s traditional strengths.”

Two years later, Google hasn’t created a new internet, nor they have entered the desktop OS market. Although, they have rolled out word processors, spreadsheet, photo album and calendar tools to join their email service which launched on April 1, 2004, which overs a lot of people software application needs, even it isn’t specifically called an OS (but if it walks like a duck…) And Sun created something that looks a lot like what Cringley was talking about.

The internet is full of rumors and wild guesses at future actions. Cringley is smart enough to know that he can’t see into the future. Further, he is humble enough to put a section which lists his predictions and review his track record when he does make a prediction. He is currently batting 0.533, which is say that he is right a little more than half the time.

This abundant media speculation is good when it focuses national attention on important, but often dry, issues as interoperability and access to wireless networks and services. Getting people to wonder why they can’t use their mobile handset on a carrier of their choosing and why they can’t control their on-deck applications are important first steps to insuring fair and reasonable telecommunications policy. However, the telecommunication industry can change surprisingly quickly. Historic perspective helps put these changes in context. Amid these changes, we have to remember where we’ve been before, and even where we thought we were going.

Images source: upgrade:travelbetter.com

With all this Google and spectrum talk swirling the internet and news media, I keep coming back to Wi-Fi as a good way to contextualizing the importance of having open networks and services, as well as open applications and devices. There are of course, many differences which I’ll identify, but the similarities are important and insightful.

Wi-Fi has exploded in the past few years. As with many overnight success stories, this one was twenty-five years in the making. In 1985, FCC opened several bands of high frequency wireless spectrum for unregulated use. This move allowed people to transmit over these frequencies without a license, as you would for radio or television. The spectrum 900MHz, 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz was (in hindsight) amusingly named “garbage bands.” Because they were used by medical equipment and home appliances including microwave ovens, they were considered to have limited telecommunications value.

In 1997, the turning point of Wi-Fi was the adoption of IEEE 802.11 standard by the Institute Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which was nearly ten years in the making. With a standard in place, developers could make devices and applications that were interoperable with each other. Developers chose the 80211b flavor in the first wave of products, because it was least expensive, albeit slow. Faster flavors of the standard, such as 802.11g and 802.11n, are now being developed and brought to market. The early application of 802.11b shows that the agreement on of a standard is just as important as what is agreed upon. As commercial products began rolling out, “Wi-Fi” was settled upon as a term for this new technology, because “IEEE 802.11b compliant” wasn’t as sexy.

Two points to take away from the spread of Wi-Fi concern standards and the open spectrum. First, the adoption of the IEEE 802.11 standard allowed for interoperability. Because products could easily to talk to each other, the chances for wide-spread use increased. Second, providing open spectrum expanded development, because
anyone from the size of Cisco and to the individual members of the Toronto Wireless Users Groups to develop and experiment with Wi-Fi. As well, it vastly expanded its usage by people. (Imagine if everyone who wanted to set up a Wi-Fi network needed to apply and pay for a broadcasting license.)

Wi-Fi will soon face competition from other wireless alternatives, like the results of the 700 MHz auction or WiMax, which is faster and has roughly 100 times wider range. These telecommunications technologies require towers and infrastructure, which have price tags that run in the billions of dollars to implement in the US. Big upfront costs means that big entities are involved like telecoms, industry disruptors like Google or Apple, or governments. Even if the FCC mandated open networks and services (which it did not,) standards and truly fair pricing would remain challenges to seeing levels of innovation and adoption on par with Wi-Fi.

Some good, accessible readings on the topic:
A Brief History of Wi-Fi, Economist, June 10th, 2004. (subscription required)

“How Wi-Fi Works”