Because Today’s Great Ideas start with Yesterday’s Foolish Thinking
The real peter griffin
I heard this woman on NPR saying “It’s just so real” in a way that just stuck in my head. So i made this bit to get it stuck in your head too -
(This picture doesnt have anything to do with this post – i just found it when i did a search for this title, i thought the track was weird on it’s own, but this picture really adds another level.)
Piezoelectrics are an increasingly popular “green energy” topic. Piezoelectrics are materials that generate a small voltage whenever they are mechanically deformed. Recently innovative solutions that use Piezoelectrics to harness energy have been tested on everything from roads to subway foot traffic. Innowattech is one company that has embedded their technology in roadways to harness energy from cars.
But there is a problem with how we are discussing this technology. Like anything that obeys the laws of physics, Piezoelectrics only generate energy at the expense of the system – it isn’t free energy. There are actually lot of great uses for Piezoelectrics out there, but we won’t discover them if we keep talking about Piezoelectrics as a “free energy” solution. If we look at this technology in terms of generating electricity, it is a failure. Piezoelectrics on roads take energy at the expense of the cars’ fuel efficiency, and Piezoelectrics under subway floors will make you tired walking through the subway just like walking on the beach.
Continue reading ‘Piezoelectrics: Cool, useful, but NOT an energy solution.’
Guess what the industry standard is for musicians to post their resumes. Yup, it’s still myspace. I just found this yelp thread – I’m glad im not the only one who thinks this is incredulous. I hope to launch a startup soon that will provide something better.
In the yelp thread, one comment mentions imeem. True, imeem is the best alternative, but that’s not saying much. It seems like imeem has still fallen into the same trap of being cluttered and slow to navigate. Plus if you’re hoping for something revolutionary, it sounds like imeem has been sued into lame duck status. Although that article has reason to be bias, imeem just feels stale to me the same way that myspace does. Then again i guess i have reason to be bias too.
I just wrote something I think is ridiculous, brash, and foolish. So naturally it’s perfect for this blog.
“Isms are where ideas go to die. Genres are epitaphs.” – me
Oh, and add arrogant to that list since i just quoted myself like a jerk face.
In wired’s business blog, epicenter, they report on a terrific service, TuneCore. The service lets an artist pay a one time fee to post their music on online stores like iTunes, and recoup ALL future profits from the sales. This is huge because it is one of the first steps towards ensuring that online stores have a complete warehouse of available media and not just the media of their corporate partners.
But the article especially focuses on a TuneCore experimental service: letting advertisers partner with musicians.
“Has there ever been a match like music and advertising? To oversimplify, bands have credibility and love but no money, while brands have money but no credibility and love.” Of course, as wired points out, “the majority of the Wired.com readers we polled — still think there’s such a thing as selling out.” Will bands want to endorse crappy corporations?
No. But this is why I have been advocating that bands should be able to pick the advertisers – not the other way around. This way, a band’s endorsement of a product is not a sell-out, it’s another artistic statement.
Continue reading ‘The long-tail market of Advertising with Local Bands’
Two questions:
1: How will media companies survive when content is free?
2: If I want fast internet-but only on the weekends- do i splurge for a 6 mbps data package or settle for 1 mbps?
What if Media companies should partner with ISPs to charge you per high res instant download. What if basic internet was free, but you could pay 50 cents to get an HD TV show instantly by spontaneously bumping up your bandwidth.
People care about high res media, but they care more about getting it NOW. They would rather youtube it than wait for the high-res version. And buying the full premium internet package is too expensive for many people who arent home most of the time anyway.
When you buy internet at a certain speed, it’s an artificial pipeline limit that the ISP imposes on you. The ISP has a real upper limit on their overall bandwidth because they operate at capacity: They have to keep the average usage down below their total capacity devided by the number of users. But any given user has a physical pipeline with the potential to function at the highest speed. In other words, when you upgrade to the max speed, the ISP doesnt add any pipelines, they just take away their speed limit on your account.
This is a big untapped market – it isn’t being done now, because ISPs don’t want to hurt their subscriptions of premium high speed internet packages. But when media goes to free, and data bandwidth follows close behind, it will make sense for media companies to try something like this. It’s not just about content anymore, it’s about being the fastest and easist path to that content. In order to survive, media content companies need to start partnering with content providers. If they can’t regulate the websites that are dishing it out, why not try regulating the bandwidth?
So long Listening Post. But don’t worry – they’re not going far. Wired magazine’s listening post is shutting down its webfront to join forces with the Underwire culture blog and epicenter business blog. The last few posts on the listening post offer a sampling of the promise, but also confusion about where the music industry will be headed. In any case is is certainly heading somewhere new, and fast. But the direction will depend on the contracts made between the major record Comapnies and music streaming sites.
The post “music sales forecasts might be silly,” reminds us that we can’t just extrapolate the trend of increased digital music and trust that iTunes will settle into that trend 10 years from now. The last few posts talk about music sites like Qtracks and Songbird that are a couple of the new players joining the ranks of imeem, last.fm, lala, etc. – services that will carry the torch of providing music to the next generation of listeners.
But in the haste to make these deals, the industry has thrown itself into an awkward growth stage. Qtrax promises the first legal p2p music sharing service to great fanfare and great embarassment when the record companies seemed to get cold feet at the last minute. An article from alleyinsider.com gives an example of how media giants are in negotiations that are as misunderstood as they are exciting – myspace rumored to start a “hulu for music” feature by cutting deals with record companies – the media is skeptical and confused; the details seem fuzzy.
Everyone knows at this point that free music streaming is the inevitable direction for music. The Record labels are caught in a tense predicament; they don’t want to be left be in the cold if the others make deals before them with the best services, but they also don’t want to lock themselves into deals without getting the most out of it – they’re record companies – believe me they know how a contract can screw you.
By the way, my online music service won’t deal with the record companies at all – I’m going to focus on the small independent artists first – give them the services that the big record companies have never offered to them at a fair price. I’m going to make something that will let the indie labels take over.
In a recent post about the music industry, I wrote a really randomly placed aside about the bailouts. I want to write a separate post about it here. The reason why is because I just read this in the New York Times December 7 2008 Soapbox/metrics – Amy Schoenfeld: (cant find the article online)
“The Treasury Department’s $700 billion buttress to the financial system was expected to enable banks to make more loans to companies and consumers. But the Treasury has indicated that the 52 banks already funded by the program have mostly used their investments – $161.5 billion so far- to bolster their balance sheets at a time when options for raising capital are slim. And analysts expect that the more than 100 banks that have yet to receive money will be similarly cautious.”
In my very finite wisdom I predicted this outcome. My reasoning was that just because the banks were enabled to make the loans, it didn’t mean they had any motivation to do so. Here is what I wrote (with a few minor edits)
Image from http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
In today’s Nytimes Thomas Friedman writes: “What book will our kids write about us? ‘The Greediest Generation?’ ‘The Complacent Generation?’ Or maybe: ‘The Subprime Generation: How My Parents Bailed Themselves Out for Their Excesses by Charging It All on My Visa Card.’ “
I’m not a student of economics. But I have spent my share of free time trying to learn a little about the subject and I’ve always been appalled by our discourse about national debt. It is taught that national debt is generally a good thing, and while it could be theoretically bad to have too much national debt, it’s not something we should worry about in the “complicated grand scheme of things.”
Even in this economic turmoil, while economists like Friedman make knowing jokes about the dangers of national debt, there isn’t any serious discussion about the particulars. We admit that our unprecedented bailout spending carries unpredictable consequences, but we don’t make any real effort to tangibly weigh the benefits of bailouts against the potential damage they cause. Instead we seem to weigh these decisions with historian anecdotes, congressional judgments du-jour, and columnist declarations of bewilderment about the unconscionable consequences of either decisions – to bail or not to bail.
I believe this impasse can be partly blamed on the way we have taken national debt for granted – we’ve never had to think about it before and we don’t know how to start talking about it now. Why is this? Because national debt is not a big concern as long as the US maintains its place as the biggest world super-power. We’ve never had to seriously consider the consequences of high national debt because we have never seriously considered the possibility that the US might someday slip from its world-power throne.
Continue reading ‘Our beloved National Debt: and why we don’t think too hard about it.’
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