Respect, fame & money

Put together on November 11, 2009 2:22 pm by Dimitris

Will code for food...
Image by Sara Golemon via Flickr

These days everyone seems to be making an app store. I think it all started (or at least became popular) with the iPhone releasing their SDK or – or was it with Twitter opening up their API? And then Android, Facebook of course, Yahoo, MySpace as well as any startup with a few miles behind them are opening up their platform so that 3rd party developers can create value for whatever it is they are making.

And soon after that even more mainstream companies like Nokia and Vodafone weigh in by making their own platforms (more) available – something that should have happened much earlier actually.

The problem is that there are only so many people with the ability (let alone the interest and time) to actually sit down and create something worthy. Sure, providing a means to make something (i.e. some sort of income for the developer) out of the time and energy spent creating an app – like Apple does with the iPhone – works as an incentive. But what else can be used to grab the attention of the creators – something perhaps even more important than the attention of the crowds?

Some say – even more than money – giving respect to a developer/coder/programmer is enough to attract his attention. I guess it’s respect by demonstrating you’ve created something worthy technically speaking. It may also be respecting his or her values – e.g. by releasing open source or contributing to it if aiming for that community. Or you could show developers respect simply by admitting that they – collectively – know better and as such should be able to significantly contribute to (if not be in charge of) where your platform is going.

Or, finally, it could be a simple list of top peers whose first places they can aim to achieve. I guess that’s taking respect to a whole new level – and turning it into old-fashioned glory and fame among equals as well as the broader public.

What do you think? Is there another factor that developers covet?

tags: insight


Digg Digg | Del.icio.us Del.icio.us | Ma.gnolia Ma.gnolia | Newsvine Newsvine | Technorati Technorati

Large followings’ advantage

Put together on November 8, 2009 1:43 pm by Dimitris

Election night crowd, Wellington, 1931
Image by National Library NZ on The Commons via Flickr

In a previous post I mentioned that most of the Greek TV channels main asset is live content: sports and music events is content that cannot be found elsewhere (neither online nor in competitors) so it keeps viewers faithful to their brand.

But that’s not entirely true: live content is not their only remaining major asset much as TV channels like to think so.

They have something else – the effect you get when many people start and keep following a source of information (in whatever medium). It doesn’t matter how bad or good the information quality is, people will still follow it unquestioningly exactly because everyone else is following it.

It’s the same with the Financial Times (you read them to see what’s the information everyone else is getting), it’s the same with Fox News (you watch it to see how mass opinion is formed even though it’s well known it’s biased), it’s the same with sites like Techcrunch (you read their blog to understand what’s on the tech sector map currently – regardless of a million other worthy news that go uncovered by it) and the list goes on.

It’s basically about the basic need that we (or at least some of us) have to belong in some sort of social group – and sharing a news source enforces this. In other words, if everyone at your office keeps talking about how fun or interesting was yesterday’s X show on TV, if you don’t want to stand out too much from that crowd of your peers, you will eventually watch that show too in the weeks to come.

So if you’ve managed to create a considerable following you have – as a bonus – this card to play too. Of course this can only last so long and providing a relatively low signal-to-noise content can burn this asset too.

tags: insight


Digg Digg | Del.icio.us Del.icio.us | Ma.gnolia Ma.gnolia | Newsvine Newsvine | Technorati Technorati

Commoditizing live content

Put together on November 5, 2009 1:46 pm by Dimitris

IMG_8866
Image by Monica’s Dad via Flickr

As I said in my previous post, Greek TV channels most sought-after content is live events (sports, music etc) which cannot be found elsewhere (neither in competitors nor online). Securing licenses for such content turns out as a major asset for such providers – and I can imagine that this holds not just for Greece but any and all countries.

So what would it take for this last castle, which offers possibilities of monopoly to a single (or a few) providers, to fall? What would allow even live events to escape from the stranglehold of large, existing content providers? The making of a commodity out of watching live events could be (one of) the next big things if someone manages to get it right.

Now, most mobile phones can capture video these days and that’s a powerful medium that has remained rather untapped when it comes to live events. So here’s an idea: let’s assume we want to cover a live event, like a football game. All it would take would be to allow everyone who was planning to attend the event to sign up to also stream a portion of it. The streams from all users present at the event would arrive at a website dedicated to the event. There they would need to be synchronised (and perhaps even auto-selected based on quality) and then restreamed to visitors of the website in real time or semi-real time.

Now add to that that most such phones have or soon will have GPS information appended to them and you could even identify where in the event’s location the incoming streams originate from. Given enough people offering their streams, visitors on the website would be able to select a point of view and follow the event from it.

Perhaps a nice concept but where’s the catch? Actually there are two.

For one thing, we’re used to watching content from a few given angles and changes between them are managed by a single human being – the event’s director. Having the viewing experience be governed by whomever happens to be holding his mobile up at a given time and place, will definitely result in a dizzying reproduction of the event. Camera and sound quality will change abruptly along with location, stops will be inevitable, essentially no commentary will be possible, etc. At the very least it will take some getting used to, at worst it will be unwatchable. There is an answer to that however and it is of course adequate – and committed – streamers.

For another, a streamer will need a considerable incentive to do it. Holding a mobile up and stable for any amount of time will make the event less enjoyable for him and even more importantly streaming video will pump his bill by quite a bit if not on an ‘unlimited data’ plan. Obviously the platform which will organise and offer the content of the streamers online will have to share some of its revenue with the streamers – or at least those that offer the best quality streams and whose streams are the most viewed.

Overall, the experience will be pretty much nothing like what we’re used to but I think it’s terribly disruptive if you think about it. Using such a platform, a group of people can organise and relay an event pretty much on their own.

tags: idea


Digg Digg | Del.icio.us Del.icio.us | Ma.gnolia Ma.gnolia | Newsvine Newsvine | Technorati Technorati

Live content matters

Put together on November 2, 2009 5:30 pm by Dimitris

A few months back I was talking to a guy who works at the Greek subscription channel Nova and he was telling me that the content most sought after by TV channels is none other than the coverage of live events. In Greece this means mostly football and basketball games and perhaps to a lesser extent other sports and music concerts.

Sports from childhood. Football (soccer) shown...
Image via Wikipedia

And there’s good reason for that. As broadband use and torrents’ downloading increases any type of content other than live offered by the provider can be found online. Films can be downloaded, news and information can be found in many more sources online, even TV series produced explicitly for (and by) specific Greek TV channels can easily be found online if one knows where to look – as fast as a day after they air. And that knowledge becomes less and less obscure – in fact most of it is quite well-known.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s legal or not – which in most of the cases it isn’t. People’s morality (and even their desire for high-quality) will most often be put aside in the face of a free, effortless choice without side-effects.

So the providers are left with only the content that cannot be found elsewhere: live events. And now as internet TV becomes the next battle zone for those providers a prime prize is them.

tags: analysis


Digg Digg | Del.icio.us Del.icio.us | Ma.gnolia Ma.gnolia | Newsvine Newsvine | Technorati Technorati

Question search engine

Put together on October 29, 2009 12:15 pm by Dimitris

Questions
Image by Oberazzi via Flickr

These days, if you think about it, it’s super easy to find the answer to pretty much any question we can think of – perhaps excluding very exotic and obscure issues. A simple search engine query is all it takes. If you allow for asking questions to other individuals (who might be keepers of such exotic information), email and the social media are also relatively simple tools to employ when getting answers.

So if it’s not about having the answers, what is it about?

Often, it’s that we don’t know the questions themselves. Picasso said that “Computers are useless, they can only give you answers”. This holds true for the internet as well – and highlights our information overload in conjunction (and contrast) to our knowledge deficit.

Think, however, of a search engine that would accept keywords or entire passages for input and return interesting questions based on the content submitted. As artificial intelligence is not that advanced yet (right?) to create such questions from scratch, that search engine could at least find relevant questions already posed by other people.

And why would that be useful?

For one thing for educational purposes. Questions can lead a mind along a learning path it never knew existed. In particular, when it comes to life-long learning on specific subjects or to educating oneself on a subject, it would be valuable to have the right questions as guidance.

And that’s the other thing. Questions identify what’s important. They pick out what’s worth thinking about and they allow the rest to be ignored. They generate focus and meaning.

And the best thing is that in our current situation the answers to those questions already exist. The web is teeming with FAQs, mailing lists, newsgroups and papers addressing particular and broad questions. So, questions can act as ‘lenses’ that allow us to change focus and evolve our knowledge from one piece of information to the next.

I wonder if it’d be possible to create a service which when fed with a paragraph from a news article or a blog post, it would identify its main keywords (think the top 3 or 4 words in its tag cloud) and supply right next to that text some relevant questions. These questions could be found by as simple means as querying Google with the main keywords and keeping only sentences with a question mark at the end – just that. Such results would also be accompanied by a link to the text following the question – presumably the answer.

Wouldn’t such a feature provide additional valuable content to existing text?

(By the way, such a service could also be integrated quite well with the ‘paragraph summary’ platform I described in this post)

tags: idea, question


Digg Digg | Del.icio.us Del.icio.us | Ma.gnolia Ma.gnolia | Newsvine Newsvine | Technorati Technorati