Christopher Herot's Weblog

SnapTell

I wrote something on QR Codes last month, which hold a lot of promise as a way of embedding information in an off-line context, such as a print ad or billboard, and tying that to online information.  Now SnapTell, Inc. of Palo Alto has come up with an elegant solution that doesn't require embedding any information at all.  The user snaps a picture of the ad with his or her camera phone and emails in order to be entered into contests, receive special offers, etc.  The current issue of Rolling Stone has five such ads (although one seemed to be missing), identified with a discrete logo.  A separate, full page ad from SnapTell explains the program and gives the email address [email protected].  The SnapTell site matches the photograph against their database in order to identify the ad.  The picture recognition appears very robust.    So far, I've received an MP3 inviting me to visit MySpace.com to get a  "valuable coupon" - worth a dollar towards a pizza (talk about indirection!), a free motorcycle ringtone from Allstate, shaving tips from the Edge Gel Girls, and a video clip from the Discovery Channel.  We'll also see how much more spam I get.

nclüdr

It's been several weeks since April 1st, but nclüdr is still around:

nclüdr is the social network where everyone and everything is your friend.

Be sure to check out the FAQ:

What happens if someone rejects my friend request? I have a such a hard time with rejection. 

You really don’t get it, do you? You’ll never be rejected. Everyone will love you. You’re thin and fabulous. Have you tried Lithium?

I have this uncanny ability to see things. Dead people. It’s important that they all be part of my network. Will the nclüdr allow that?

Absofreakinlutely. The entire universe—seen and unseen—is at your disposal.

I have no idea who is behind this, but the Wikipedia page has already come and gone.

ROFLCon 2008

I've been at ROFLCon 2008 at MIT yesterday and today.  The conference has drawn 700 participants, most of them young enough to qualify as digital natives.  The main topic was Internet Fame and appropriately enough the keynote speaker was David Weinberger who has extensively analyzed the phenomenon.  He observed how fame was no longer in scarce supply and thus Andy Warhol's statement that "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" to "everyone will be famous to 15 people."

The speakers were a comprehensive collection of people who have achieved fame or notoriety on or because of the Internet, including

• Kyle Macdonald, One Red Paperclip
• Joe Mathelete, Marmaduke Explained
• Ian Spector, The original Chuck Norris Facts
• Alex Tew, The Million Dollar Homepage
• Ben Huh (“Cheez”), I Can Has Cheezburger
• Stephen Granades, LOLTrek
• Dino Ignacio, Bert Is Evil
• Leslie Hall, Gem Sweater
• Justine Ezarik, iJustine
• Ji Lee, Bubble Project
• Jay Maynard, the Tron Guy
• Matt Harding, Where The Hell Is Matt?
• Rooster Teeth, Red vs. Blue
• Brad Neely, Superdeluxe.com
• The Brothers Chaps, Homestar Runner
• Rob, Kris, Matt, Dave, Cyanide and Happiness
• Christian Lander, Stuff White People Like

Most of these people did not set out to be famous, but did something personal that was just quirky enough to spread virally.  Once they achieved a certain fame, most of them were pursued by professional advertising and marketing people who wanted to figure out how to replicate their success, but most were at a loss for how someone could bottle it and sell it.  A few had made some real money - most had not "quit their day jobs" but they all seemed to enjoy what they were doing although there was a pervasive fear that it might be taken away at any time - not because of a collapse of a bubble but from a collapse of network neutrality.

Some photos here.

Art & Other Treasures at MIT

I arrived at MIT a little early for ROFLCOn, so I took a walk around the campus to visit some favorite spots.  MIT has some great sculpture erected as the result of a policy that sets aside money from each new building to incorporate art.  The best know is Alexander Calder's Great Sail in front of the Green Building.  It was controversial when it was installed in 1966, but was considered a classic by the time a similar controversy erupted around Louise Nevelson's Transparent Horizon a decade later.  For the first few years, it was "polychromed" several times, but now it is back to its intended black and is an accepted part of the campus.

One delightful surprise was Sol LeWitt's, Bars of Color Within Squares, which is in the floor surrounding the new Center for Theoretical Physics - a building within a building in a space that was formerly the Atomic Courtyard. 

I also visited some places on the Tunnel Tour.  Unfortunately the Tomb of the Unknown Tool is now blocked off to casual visitors and the Tomb II is in disrepair, but the tunnel system itself has been greatly extended.  One can walk indoors from 77 Mass Ave almost all the way to the Kendall Square T stop.

The complete photo album is here.

Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?

My home server runs Linux, but I recently came across this very clever viral ad campaign from last December for Microsoft's Home Server, including a "children's book" which contains endearing explanations of how the server came to be in your house: "When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much..."

You can purchase the book (for $5.95) from Amazon or read it at www.stayathomeserver.com where you can also view some videos shot in the style of Stephen Colbert.

Groundswell

When Josh Bernoff told me that he and Charlene Li were writing a book about social technologies my first question was how were they going to describe something so fast moving as social technologies in a medium as static and slow to produce as a book.  The answer, as evidenced in Groundswell is that they concentrated on the forces and trends behind the individual products and came up with a framework to evaluate new developments as they occur.  The authors also lived up to the principles they espoused in the book by setting up a web site to continue the discussion.  The result is a book that anyone running a business or responsible for marketing a product in the 21st century must read.

The book is targeted directly at the marketing executive in a medium to large company who may be seized by a creeping dread that something his happening out there and needs advice what it is and what to do about it.  The central message of the book is that the trend towards your customers getting things from each other - the Groundswell - is unstoppable, but that not only can you understand it and live with it but that you can thrive in it.

Anyone who has been working in the social media field will be familiar with the technologies described in the book, such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis and user-generated content, and will recall many of the anecdotes such as the Streisand Effect, but the book also presents a wealth of data on user characteristics and a series of enlightening case studies that derive from the authors (and their colleagues) research at Forrester.  Perhaps the most useful contribution is what the book calls the Social Technographics Profile - essentially a way of measuring how the target audience participates in social media, from the Creators who publish a blog through the Critics, Collectors, Joiners, and Spectators and finally the Inactives.  By assessing where one's customers fall in this space it is possible to make reasoned judgments about which social technologies will be most appropriate.

The authors also introduce the POST methodology: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology - assessing where the people one is addressing fall in the previously mentioned profile and the establishing which objectives make the most sense and what strategies and technologies best support those objectives.

The book presents case studies for the four objectives of Talking, Energizing, Supporting, and Embracing one's customers and gives plenty of examples of how to do each, and concludes with chapters on the organizational changes which are necessary and likely to result by applying the provided prescriptions.

In summary, Groundswell provides a comprehensive picture of social technology together with practical advice of how to apply it.  If you are in charge of your organizations marketing budget you need to read this before you go out and spend your money on banner ads.

Why Don't More People Use Facebook's SMS Applications?

Om Malik observes that SMS apps on Facebook get very little usage.  Although he found three dozen of them, the most popular only get around 500 daily users in an environment where games like Scrabulous get 1,000 times that.  He further observes that Facebook VoIP widgets suffer a similar fate and posits that despite Daniel Berninger's argument for the utility of a social directory, people in Facebook don't really want to communicate with each other in real time.

I've observed the same phenomenon but have a somewhat different theory.  Facebook encourages a definition of "friend" that encompasses a much larger group than those people I would want to interrupt with an SMS or a phone call.  If I know someone well enough to SMS or call them, I already have them in my contact list and synced to my mobile phone from which I can message or call them without opening any widgets.  There is still plenty of utility in tying Facebook to SMS - Facebook's own Mobile app gets more than 370,000 daily users, but it provides unique functionality such as broadcasting news feeds.  I think there is plenty of opportunity to use SMS as a way of connecting people with applications, but if two people just want to talk to each other they will reach for the phone.

Nantucket Conference Agenda

The annual Nantucket Conference has just announced their agenda for this year.   This event, organized by Alyssa Stern and Shayne Gilbert of Future Forward Events, LLC is the East Coast equivalent of D or Web 2.0, bringing together a Who's Who of entrepreneurs, investors, and press from throughout New England.  Again this year they've enlisted Scott Kirsner to help with the agenda.  Since returning to Boston from Silicon Valley, Scott has become one of the primary boosters of our local high-tech industry and the lineup is a good snapshot of where we've been recently and where we are going, and it includes a few "outsiders" who should bring a much-needed perspective to what can sometimes appear to be a self-contained community.

The conference is May 1-3 on, where else, Nantucket, which by then will have emerged from Winter but not yet be overrun with the Summer's crowds.  The event is invitation-only, but don't let that stop you,  You can request an invitation here.  I would recommend this conference to anyone in New England who is starting or running a high-tech company and wants to network with other people can help.

John Simson of SoundExchange at Harvard Law School

John Simson, Executive Director of SoundExchange, gave a talk yesterday at the Harvard Law School.  SoundExchange is a non-profit organization set up to collect performance royalties from digital media such as internet and satellite radio and distribute them to artists and record labels.  Simson and SoundExchange unabashedly represent the interests of the copyright owners in maximizing their revenue, but  Simson 's talk explained the motivations of all of the  stakeholders in this game and the complexities of arriving at a  fair  level of compensation in what is essentially a political process.

Simson traced the history of music copyrights from 1848 when French composer Ernest Bourget heard his music being played in a nightclub and refused to pay for his dinner.  The court ruled that he did need to pay, but so also did the café owner, leading to the founding of SACEM and 150 years of legislation and litigation as the recording industry and later radio, television, and the internet created new ways for people to obtain and listen to music.

There are a number of factors that make music copyright complex, from the evolving concept of intellectual property which attempts to balance compensation of creators with the benefit to society, to the variety of stakeholders: composers, musicians, music publishers, radio, movie, and television producers, and listeners of all types.  Add to that the way digital technology enables making cheap, perfect copies and blurs the distinction between performance and ownership and you have a world in which there is little precedent for how to apportion the benefits and the spoils go to whichever group can muster the best lobbysists as well as the best arguments.

Simson, who was a musician and an attorney before becoming a registered lobbyist himself described his education into the ways of Washington, where legislators are expected to vote on 2500 issues a year and may only be expert on five of them.  As said was explained to him, a congressman looks at his mail.  If it is all on one side, the decision is easy, but if there are even a few letters on the other side, he will go talk to a colleague who is an expert, such as Rep. Howard Berman (D-Cal) on entertainment law.

One thorny problem is the way business models are evolving on the Internet.  This manifested itself in the debate over the royalties that Internet radio would pay.  The largest Internet radio sites have plenty of subscription and/or advertising revenues and can pay royalties similar to those paid by terrestrial radio, but the smaller ones may have no income at all.  Given the way the Internet economy works, some companies may eventually monetize by building a large user base and then being acquired, as happened when Last.fm was purchased by CBS for $280 million.  It seemed that Simson and the interests he represents are pained by this scenario and if they can not partake in such gains would prefer to see all Internet radio pay on a per-use basis even if that prevents some of them from getting started.  I asked him after his talk if SoundExchange would be open to more creative financial arrangements with emerging businesses.  He said they would gladly participate as a clearing house for anything the Internet companies and the artists could agree upon, but the anti-trust exemption SoundExchange operates under limits its abilities to initiate schemes outside what the Congress has defined.

One interesting bit of data was on the long tail nature of Internet radio.  SoundExchange brings in $140 million per year in revenue which is split 50/50 between the performers and the owner of the copyright of the recording.  There are 31,000 performers SoundExchange has tracked down who represent 75% of the performers share of the revenue.  However, there are another 40,000 performers who have yet to be tracked down.  Most of them are owed $50 or less, but occasionally SoundExchange gets in touch with one and sends them a check for $8,000 or more.  Simson said they are always glad to get the money, but these days people are very suspicious when they get an unsolicited email or a phone call from a total stranger offering them a check.  [The preceding paragraph was edited to incorporate comments I received.]

Another aspect of the long tail is the need to get accurate data on which songs are being played.  When SoundExchange compared the results of using the sampling done by ASCAP and BMI to getting actual census data, they found that the sampling method missed 41% of the artists and 26% of the titles.  This phenomenon has caused no small amount of grumbling from "middle class" artists who are waiting for their first royalty check and SoundExchange would like to avoid this problem, but the Internet radio businesses have claimed that gathering this information is too cumbersome and expensive.

After the talk, I asked Simson about Pandora.  They have been paying SoundExchange as if they were an Internet radio station, but under the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995 (DPRA) the license which SoundExchange administers does not apply to an "interactive service" which is defined as "one that enables a member of the public to receive, on request, a transmission of a particular sound recording chosen by or on behalf of the recipient."  One could argue that since Pandora creates a separate stream for each user that it is "interactive" but no one wants to rock the boat right now since (a) they are paying real money, (b) there is no other convenient way for Pandora to pay, and (c) there are other pending cases seeking to define what is interactive.

In summary, Simson's talk highlighted the complexity of innovation in music licensing.  The only thing everyone can agree on is that the music industry is in trouble and needs new business models.  This talk illustrated how challenging that will be.

Publishers Sue Georgia State University

Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications filed a complaint yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, accusing Georgia State University of violating their copyrights by making digital "course packs" available to students on the University's Library Web site.  This is the first such case to involve digital distribution, but is similar to a 1991 case, Basic Books v. Kinko's and a 1992 case, Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services (MDS), that involved arguments over what constituted fair use for printed course packs. 

The controversy stems from section 107 of the copyright act which states that fair use includes making "multiple copies for classroom use" but then goes on to say that in any particular case this must be weighed against the effect of the use upon the potential market for the work.

Both Kinko and MDS were decided in the lower courts in favor of the plaintiffs and ultimately settled, so there is no nationally binding precedent.  Also, both of the previous cases involved for-profit ventures.

The publishers are a little bit ahead of the music industry here, in that they have already established a mechanism through the Copyright Clearance Center for electronic licensing of course materials, although it is not possible to tell from the Web site how much the fees would be.  How this case gets decided may determine what the ultimate business model will be for unbundling chapters of books just as the music industry has grappled with unbundling of albums.

Other coverage:

• The New York Times ran a long article on this case today in the business section.
• The Association of American Publishers issued a press release.