BlogSat

Once again, the student of business in me is going "wow" , the student of life in me is going "really?" For reasons too personally confusing to get into, I started watching the Teen Choice Awards. Don't worry, I tore myself away after about an hour after convincing myself this was not age-appropriate behavior, and after all the teenage screaming started to get jarring. Also, I was multi-tasking at that time, so it wasn't thaat bad!:) Anyway, the genius of Murdoch's minions was to come up with an award for the best celebrity MySpace page (" Choice MySpacer "....really) The business gurus may sneer, but there _were_ thousands of teenagers screaming. Think about it; the Teen Choice Awards (and by implication teens and all the celebrities nominated) were endorsing one particular social networking site on a national broadcast. Now that's good marketing. I don't know how effective it'll be, but it certainly can't hurt. In general, th...

Shashi Tharoor has been writing a column for the Times of India . Incidentally if you find a newspaper website thats less readable/more annoying than the ToI website do let me know. It used to be just the poor editorial choices on the front pages, but now its even the little things like knowing where to put the "Next Page" links, and the ridiculously indiscriminate use of ads and pop-ups. Anyway, its rare to find someone with Tharoor's incredibly eclectic background, gift for language , track record of professional success, access to knowledge and clearly ridiculously high IQ, writing on a range of topics of general interest, so today I enjoyed clicking through his columns over the last few months. Revisiting the ToI website also allowed me to read some articles from Gurucharan Das , whom I followed regularly for quite a while before falling off about a year ago. I've always enjoyed his insight and his concise, clear writing, even though his tone of disappointment a...

...the stock market that is. Random surfing led me the Economist website, and this article about MediaPredict . The site portrays itself as a virtual stock market game. Most current revenue seems advertising-driven, but as a side-effect it will generate information that is useful to Big Media. As the article explains: Artists or their agents post samples of their work (a book chapter, say, or a television pilot). Traders armed with a free wad of virtual cash buy shares in the material they feel has the greatest potential. The idea is that as traders buy and sell shares in competing content, the cream will float to the top—where entertainment-industry bosses can skim it off. I suppose this is another example of using the wisdom of crowds to gain greater insight and make decisions. The best example I remember reading about was when such prediction markets were used by a company to see when people in the company thought their product would ship, and that was management realized ther...

I'm a big fan of BBC radio . I used to listen to the online stream religiously for a while. I learnt two things today this week about the BBC that made me smile They have an incredibly ambitious Web 2.0 program (slightly negative tone to the paidcontent post though.) Given how much news tend to be over-sensationalized and needlessly analyzed today, I think its kinda cool that in 1948, the BBC radio broadcast said "There is no news today - goodnight." I can't find the link to the Economist opinion piece where I read it, but this a pretty funny spoof instead.:) They're responsible for the first three seasons of Coupling . Season Four was good, but... New ChiBus article out this week as well. Wrote it in a terrible rush, but it was the most fun I've had writing an article in a while.

I learnt something cool about the way the economics of Internet Radio work today. Too bad the entire industry had to get into danger ( BusinessWeek link) for me to get a chance to read about it. I picked it up at GigaOM , and then BlogMaverick (the one remaining concern I have about the Dallas Mavericks :)). So here's the super-distilled version without the actual numbers: The entity that sets the royalty rates for streaming songs is the Copyright Royalty Board (which represents those much loved people: the RIAA ). It upped the royalty rate from $0.0008 per performance to $0.0011 per performance this year, rising all the way to $0.0019 in 2010. The upshot is, given listening patterns and current subscription rates, (or rates available for ads served) there is just no way most streaming Internet radio sites are going to be able to stay in business. This obviously hurts the smaller stations the most, especially since they lost the option of paying as a percentage of revenue (and ...

...and it can be kinda cool too. OK, latest way to waste time: " Brothers and Sisters " on ABC's online site. The show isn't exactly riveting, but I'm still kinda riveted. It's very family-ish, and I tolerate Calista Flockhart , like Rachel Griffiths and some of the other cast, so I'm along for the ride. The show is kinda like a PG-rated, less interesting, more sappy and less controversial version of Six Feet Under . But what's almost more interesting to me are the advertisements in between. Each episode has a different sponsor: Intel, Toyota, Fidelity etc., and the few spots in between sections of the show (the equivalent of the commercial break) are each 30 seconds long and I thought were more effective than a TV ad might have been. Some of them were straight commercials, but others were creative little games that you couldn't help getting engaged in. The take-away is they did provide ( warning: MBA phrase coming) "more value" to the...

...is that someone's already thought of it first. Someone said that to me in my final year of engineering. I had just pitched to him my idea for a final-year project, with conviction only possible when you're still under the legal drinking age, that it was the most brilliant thing since sliced bread. A grizzled veteran of the software industry, he begged to differ. He pointed out a couple of other systems that did something very similar. I responded with, "It doesn't matter who gets there first, but who makes the most noise about it." Yeah, I was pretty amusing at 20! Something similar happend to me just now. I've been reading about DRM issues quite a bit lately (for class cases and projects.) I'd thought to myself that the content owners (and the DRM solution providers) were thinking about it all wrong. A good fix would be to tie digital rights to the user, rather than devices. It's not a perfect fix, but the shame could be a powerful tool (especiall...

OK, I can't decide if this ad is cute or annoying. So, I've been skeptical about video advertising in general, but this was kinda cute and it did get the message across: Gmail works again spam. It's a good example of the Google synergy game: Youtube meets gmail meets Adsense .

Ahh...the world of movie piracy can get so very amusing. I'd read reference now and then to The Pirate Bay , but never bothered finding out what they were. Their Wikipedia entry is hilarious. The short story seems to be that they used the Swedish copyright law (or rather the lack of one) to run a torrent indexing site (and apparently a very successful one.) Just for fun they sent rude replies to all the threats they received. They made the standard rule of the new Internet work for them: get the eyeballs, get the money. A Swedish newspaper reported they had an ad take of $75K a month! The best part of the story is their attempt to buy Sealand . As digital copyright law, and international law, struggle to catch up the world over, there won't there be many such opportunities and instances?

Mark Cuban's blog is a surprisingly good read. Now, my first introduction to Mark Cuban was seeing him randomly shout at an NBA referee; and not normal crazed-fan shouting; this was more like criminally insane, violent shouting. This has been a fairly common sighting at most Dallas Maverick's games over the last few years. It's really easy to not believe he actually founded and sold Broadcast.com (to Yahoo for something like a billion), which is how we bought the Dallas Mavericks in the first place. Oh, I really like the Mavs, but I don't think they'll ever win the NBA championship. I'll take that back; "ever" is too strong. This bunch of players, as brilliant as they are, are not destined to go all they way. I can't explain it; I just feel it. Leave it at that. Anyway, back to Mr. Cuban. I've been following his blog for the past couple of months and he's surprisingly articulate and insightful sometimes. This post is not his most insigh...

The movie was good, but Borat is really enjoyed best in small doses. I think he was much more effective on the TV show than in the movie. Will definitely catch Bruno if and when that gets made. His acceptance speech (below) is priceless. Enjoy it while it lasts on YouTube.

The post below just turned out to be a bit of rant on jargon, but originally it was this post on the Long Tail blog that caught my attention. This line is a trend that I see more and more in others as well as in my own behavior of late:"The future of media is to stop boring us with news that doesn't relate to our lives." Yikes, me no likey this idea of the future. Increasingly I choose the news and the entertainment I consume; to be more specific I can choose to a much higher level of granularity what to use and what to reject. I don't watch TV or flip the newspaper pages cover to cover, I select shows to watch on my PC and just click on those links (or sections) that I know I'm already interested in. While most of us agree this is generally a good thing, it does end up meaning there is a higher probability of being too narrow in focus, or if you're a believer user-ranked content (e.g. Digg ), what you believe a particular crowd thinks is generally important...