Mike Arrington singled out Amie Street – could do to the music industry what Digg did to the news industry. Artists can upload songs without DRM and they are free. As more people download the price goes up, so eventually the most expensive songs are the most popular.
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What is the right formula for a successful start-up? Mike Arrington offers what he calls “the magic forumla”. First, though, he tries to convince the audience that we are not in “bubble 2.0” . He cites two main reasons – Sarbanes Oxley has put considerable barriers for public companies and investors won’t accept unprofitable floatations. In addition, we are seeing companies fail. In the first internet bubble no companies failed; they were just rolled into other venture funded vehicles.
Now to the tips:
1. Have a good idea!
Either invent a market, destroy a market or remove friction
2. Have a business plan – though, not essential (see Digg)
3. Have a revenue model
4. Build it cheap, test the waters (Digg spent $2,000 building the site)
5. Avoid a high burn rate
However, YouTube didn’t do any of these things! But…they removed friction by providing a much needed service (IPTV not user generated video) and they were first to market. That was enough to compensate.
So what are the shared attributes of winners? passion, doing something extraordinary and he obvious. More importantly, what are the shared attributed of losers?
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I’m spending the day at Future of Web Apps, a two-day conference featuring some (what I hope are) interesting speakers, including Mike Arrington of Techcrunch, Kevin Rose of Digg and Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.
A few things I like about the event: there’s a system of stickers, for people with money and people who need money; and for people with jobs and people looking for jobs; all the seats are within range of power; there is wifi – but sadly not free. (15.30: UPDATE: it appears the organisers did spend the money on a really whizzy wireless network, but the telco cocked up and hence the fallback – BT OpenZone, which simply can’t cope with the volume! They promise to try to get it working by tomorrow).
A few things I don’t like: the (standard Kensington Town Hall) coffee costs £1.50 (when there’s a Cafe Nero just down the road; there’s not much imaginative use of web technology – questions could be gathered from the floor during the session online (especially as every third person has a laptop.
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Yahoo! recently launched Yahoo! Pipes, which is a Web 2.0 service for combining and processing feeds of any kind. The name is inspired by “pipes” in Unix which are simple programming functions which can be easily combined together to do much more powerful things, and that is was the new web service sets out to do. Lifehacker contributor Gina Trapani provides an excellent walk-through example of Pipes in use. The current arms race inspired by Google’s breathless pace of R&D is producing some really powerful tools which are sparking real innovation. Long may it continue.
The poster child of paid content on the web, Salon, now in its second decade, has announced price rises to $45 and $29 for the ad-free and ad-supported versions respectively, reports PaidContent.org. The online magazine subscriber numbers peaked in December 2004 at 89,100 and have been declining ever since. According to PaidContent there were 54,600 subscribers in September last year and the renewal rate was 59%.
Rachel Whetstone, European Director of Communications and Public Affairs, has posted a response to the Belgian Court’s decision upholding a complaint by Copiepresse, the newspaper group. She points out:
We believe search engines are of real benefit to publishers because they drive valuable traffic to their websites. If publishers do not want their websites to appear in search results, technical standards like robots.txt and metatags enable them automatically to prevent the indexation of their content. These Internet standards are nearly universally accepted and are honored by all reputable search engines. In addition, Google has a clear policy of respecting the wishes of content owners. If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we remove their content from our index—all the newspaper has to do is ask. There is no need for legal action and all the associated costs.
Sounds reasonable to me….
My colleague Chris Flook pointed me to this piece on the “B or not 2B” business-to-business blog in defence of the magazine. The piece is responding to the commentary around IDG’s statement that it was now reorienting around online. The piece argues that “magazines” will live on, even if print on paper isn’t the medium of choice.
There’s a great piece on Guardian Unlimited on RBI’s digital activities which puts all the work on blogs, forums and experimentation of all kinds in a very favourable light…
Scoble gives an example of how modern blogging techniques, properly applied, result in better reporting than was the case in the “fourth estate” world. He also makes a plea for better use of tools like Google Blog Search to ensure a broader voice is heard.