Archives For robertc
Adobe has/is killing off its Creative Suite as it moves to the cloud. The software that many of us know and love (InDesign, Photoshop, etc) is still available but only by subscription, while support of the existing CS6 package will be limited to bug fixes. There’ll be no CS7.
adobe.com…creativesuite already redirects to adobe.com…creativecloud
While this might only appear to be relevant to design geeks (I’m a Creative Cloud subscriber and can attest to the benefits of the model) it’s another step toward access models for digital content.
There is going to be a very, very big opportunity in bundling all this “access” into a single, monthly subscription (cable TV model for the internet).
Enable seamless transactional sharing between subscription and a la carte will be an interesting and profitable problem to solve. To that end I’m looking for a technical co-founder.
Elevatr, an app for helping entrepreneurs “turn ideas into businesses” got a run on Jason Calacanis’ Launch Ticker, where @jason commented:
There is now an App for developing an App business—it’s not a bubble. It’s. Not. A. Bubble.
Elevatr isn’t the first app (web or mobile) aimed at helping aspiring entrepreneurs build a business. There’s a tech gold rush, so to speak, and these apps are no more than pick and shovel equivalents.
Whether there’s a bubble, I’m not qualified to comment, but it occurs to me that the huge, easy to find nuggets have been unearthed and all the inane consumer apps one sees are people mining for the remaining specs.
The only way to “strike it rich” is to find a new seam, which means mining new ground.
(And that’s my metaphor quota done for the year, and probably beyond :-)
Meanwhile Hill Ferguson from PayPal – the granddaddy of digital payments firms – confirmed the company is keeping an eye on the crypto-currency.
“It’s the perfect currency by design,” he said. “I’m curious to see how governments respond to it and how regulation may impact consumers’ ability to get money in and out. I think it’s a fascinating phenomenon and we are definitely watching it.”
Ferguson also sounded a skeptical note. “What problem is Bitcoin trying to fix? There’s no clear answer.”
“What problem ..?” Is he serious?
Reading TechCrunch, Gaga manager Troy Carter says the next technology disruption in music will happen in terrestrial radio.
“I think the opening right is figuring out terrestrial radio, that’s the one space that Sirius could have done it with subscription radio, but you look at Clear Channel and CBS, it’s not what people want. People just get in a car and turn on a local station. It’s going to be interesting when you get in your car and you’re listening to a 17-year-old kid in Russia.”
TuneIn in the dash, problem solved, no?
Here’s the thing, the music industry doesn’t have a tech problem, it has a fundamental business model problem.
That’s much, much harder to fix and I agree with Carter’s sentiment:
“I don’t think tech has screwed the music industry, the music industry has to adjust to change. When people in remote villages throughout the world can access music, it’s a good thing.”
Consider this, aggregated rights owners use copyright to restrict legal access in a world without borders (the internet) under the mistaken belief that doing so protects their business, when the opposite is true. More on that another day.
Paperless ticketing is a controversial subject. People on StubHub’s side of the debate want consumers to exercise freedom with their tickets, and they are hesitant of any technology that allows a ticket issuer to command the resale marketplace. People on Ticketmaster’s side of the debate – which includes many artists and venues – want to limit resale on the secondary market and allow fans to have a better chance at securing tickets to in-demand events at face value.
— Billboard, California ticketing legislation favors Live Nation
Emphasis mine. First up, ticketing isn’t something I’ve thought about for a very long time. Nonetheless, here we are and so if I’m missing fundamental industry dynamics in the following hit me up in the comments ;-)
The problem isn’t that secondary ticketing marketplaces exist, it’s that the event routing, booking and/or ticketing process is so broken that secondary marketplaces exist at all. If Billboard’s assertion is true, that Ticketmaster wants to give fans a “better chance” by limiting resale, it is incumbent upon them to to fix the underlying event business* rather than rely on the legislature to embed market inefficiencies.
AB329 (to which the Billboard article referred), if it in fact advantages Ticketmaster over, say, StubHub, appears to be regressive, disadvantaging consumers who want to offload tickets whilst creating an opportunity for Ticketmaster’s TicketsNow to establish a secondary ticketing monopoly. Creating monopolies ought not be in any legislature’s remit.
Where it gets really interesting though is that AB329 says that a ticket might not actually be a good at all, but instead could be deemed by the seller to be a license to attend an event. That’s not an insignificant designation and means consumers no longer own their tickets. It also means that the seller can change their licensing terms at any time, and where that goes is anyone’s guess.
* Since Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation that’s eminently do-able.
I feel sorry for Peter Thiel. Did he really want flying cars? Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another. On the other hand, 20 years ago we had the idea that information could become available at your fingertips. We got that done. Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.
— Wired
With all due respect to Bill Gates, Thiel is talking about bigger innovation issues than whether I can find a movie review or avoid walking into a store to buy a pair of shoes.
As to whether information is at our fingertips, certainly much of it is, but volumes of important data that would benefit society still sits behind restrictive structures such as paywalls, or is locked up in the completely broken global rights management environment.
I don’t necessarily want flying cars but I would like to see the world’s information easily accessible by everyone. And for those who want/need to apply economic value to the data, for a reasonable price for all consumers.
Along with Thiel I would like to see global financial structures changed so that they benefit more than the “1%” (or inefficient and/or corrupt governments). I don’t agree that a payment gateway is the way to achieve this, and I’m working on my own solution, but there’s a lot that’s wrong with the world that 140 characters won’t fix.
(Australian) households face losing up to $109 million (USD112 million) from their family savings as the Federal government moves to seize cash from inactive bank accounts.
After legislation was rushed through parliament, the government will from May 31 be able to transfer all money from accounts that have not been used for three years into their own revenues.
You read that right. Australia ..! Seizing bank accounts.
Wow! Seriously funky soul from 1974. Shuggie Otis is currently on tour.
“In some ways, the education system has become a substitute for thinking about the future,” Thiel said at one PandoMonthly. “You go to school, and what do you do after high school? Don’t know, I’ll go to college. What do you do after college? Don’t know, I’ll go to grad school. And tracking credentialing becomes a way of avoiding thinking about what you’re going to do with your life.”
— PandoDaily, discussing Peter Thiel’s (inspired, imho) fellowship
Here’s the thing. The purpose of education is to generate workerbees for the industrial machine (or whatever the current economic iteration is … I think it’s the ‘creative economy’). Cynical world view perhaps, but that’s what it’s all about: satisfying most people’s need for safety, in this case via a job offering cash as an exchange mechanism for stuff like shelter and food, and industry’s need for units of input less expensive than the value of their output.
That said, there’s no doubt the education system is completely borked. But then that’s the entrepreneur in me speaking.
