newnetland

European Tech Analysis

The networked individual

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The networked individual

“Woolf’s famous line – “on or about December 1910 human character changed” – haunts the present. Sometime during the 2000s a combination of technology, broken economic life-chances and increased personal freedom changed human character all over again. From the demonstrations on Tahrir Square, to the small exam revision groups organised by women in hijabs in the coffee bars just off Tahrir Square, we are beginning to meet a new kind of person: the networked individual, with weak organisational loyalty, multiple personas and whose consciousness is produced by continual, multiplatform communication.”

(via Fusion newsletter)

Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job — The Message — Medium

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Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job — The Message — Medium

As it turns out, organizing the world’s information isn’t always profitable. Projects that preserve the past for the public good aren’t really a big profit center. Old Google knew that, but didn’t seem to care.

The desire to preserve the past died along with 20% time, Google Labs, and the spirit of haphazard experimentation.

Google may have dropped the ball on the past, but fortunately, someone was there to pick it up

Bad Assumptions

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Ben Thompson on Bad Assumptions:

“last quarter Apple’s revenue was downright decimated by the strengthening U.S. dollar; currency fluctuations reduced Apple’s revenue by 5% – a cool $3.73 billion dollars. That, though, is more than Google made in profit last quarter ($2.83 billion). Apple lost more money to currency fluctuations than Google makes in a quarter. And yet it’s Google that is feared, and Apple that is feared for.”

We live in a very strange media world.

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While building free hike calls, we kept two things in mind. Firstly, India is a very cost sensitive market and as a result we’ve ensured that our service is extremely efficient on data. It means our users can pack in many more minutes per MB when calling on hike. Secondly, we’ve made hike’s free calling service available globally in over 200 countries. Hikers from India can now speak with their loved ones in India and across the world for free.

Introducing Free Hike Calls

Change is upon voice calls. Price for contracts will not change but functionality will.

https://newnetland.com/2015-01-while-building-free-hike-calls-we-kept-two/

Zoë Keating and the problem with streaming services being shop *&* record collection

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Zoë Keating on YouTubes terms for its subscription service:

This new music service agreement covers my Content ID account and it includes mandatory participation in Youtube’s new subscription streaming service, called Music Key, along with all that participation entails. Here are some of the terms I have problems with:

1) All of my catalog must be included in both the free and premium music service. Even if I don’t deliver all my music, because I’m a music partner, anything that a 3rd party uploads with my info in the description will be automatically included in the music service too.

2) All songs will be set to “montetize”, meaning there will be ads on them.

3) I will be required to release new music on Youtube at the same time I release it anywhere else. So no more releasing to my core fans first on Bandcamp and then on iTunes.

4) All my catalog must be uploaded at high resolution, according to Google’s standard which is currently 320 kbps.

5) The contract lasts for 5 years.

Ben Thompson wrote a piece analysing Keatings position and YouTubes terms, coming to a rather simplistic conclusion:

In fact, while Keating may be a radical, I think she’s also entirely rational: I’m increasingly of the opinion that all-you-can-eat subscription services like YouTube Music Key or Spotify are a downright bad idea for niche artists.

I can see where he is coming from but I think he is missing a rather large part of the picture. Namingly how people consume music once they are on one of these streaming services.

While it might be a a bad deal for Keating it doesn’t necessarily mean she can stay off streaming services and make her fans pay for downloads forever. With on demand streaming services the shop (you get access, you pay per flatrate) is simultaneously your record collection (‘saved’ music, playlists etc.).

This means for musicians being on a streaming service or not has more implications then just deciding where and how to charge. It directly affects where and how your music can be listened to.

Here is a thought experiment. Why is exponent.fm, Bens podcast, free? It is high quality niche content. According to Bens original point in the article he shouldn’t put it out for free. At least not all of it, but instead charge the few who are interested in it. Why isn’t he doing that?

Play it through in your mind. The podcast only works with a private feed after you paid for it. How are you going to listen to it? In the browser, like an animal?

The best of the best podcast clients on iOS and Android can not be used for this.I don’t think that this is acceptable friction for most of the paying users. Hardly any one would use an inferior player to listen to content they had to pay for when at the same time everything else comes with a better and unified user experience right over there, a finger tap away.

The whole eco system and its network effects matter. They are putting constraints on what musicians like Keating can sensibly do.

Friction matters. And in this instance it increases with every new user of one of those streaming services. It’s another persons music collection an artist like Keating doesn’t want to be in. And now we haven’t even talked about discoverability on these services. (which becomes more and more important.)

I feel for Keating. Because I also think the people at YouTube know this. Hence their terms and ‘negotiation tactic’.

[Broadly speaking, all this (how you organize your consumption) is why flatrate subscription services differ across industries (movies, music, books, etc.)]

Estimating G+ User Activity: 6.6 million active users

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„dredmorbius“ (on Ello of all things) about Google+ User Activity:

Summary of findings:
There are about 2.2 billion G+ profiles total.

Of these, about 9% have any publicly-posted content.

Of those, about 37% have as their most recent activity a YouTube comment, another 8% profile photo changes (45% of all “active” profiles).

Only 6% of profiles which have ever been publicly active have any post activity in 2015 (18 days so far).

Only around half of those, 3% of active profiles, are not YouTube comments.

That is, 0.3% of all G+ profiles, about 6.6 million users, have made public G+ post in 2015. That’s ~367,000 users posting daily if each posts only once (the actual post frequency will vary somewhat).

(via Chris Messina)

The State of Consumer Technology at the End of 2014

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The State of Consumer Technology at the End of 2014

“Microsoft still sells a lot of Windows licenses, and businesses especially still rely on Office. Still, it’s striking how unimportant Microsoft’s defensive move into browsers ended up being, especially when you think about…

Google seems strong, but as I’ve written previously, there is a lot about the company that feels like Microsoft: just as Microsoft jumped into the next epoch at the OS level for defensive reasons, Google too jumped ahead, also at the OS level, and also for defensive reasons. “Free” figured prominently in both strategies, and in the long run, it’s worth considering the possibility that Google’s Android dominance will have as much long term value to the company as Microsoft’s dominance of browsers – i.e., not very much at all. Ultimately, I expect an increasing amount of Google’s energy to go towards taking away what Microsoft has left: Chromebooks versus Windows, and Google Apps versus Office

Facebook is in a unique position: while they were started as an Internet company, they were an exceptionally young one, and have clearly made a successful jump to mobile. Their position in mobile, though, while secure, is by no means dominant, and it’s interesting that they are in fact following the Microsoft/Google playbook: both the WhatsApp and Oculus acquisitions were about securing a stake in the OS for the next epoch”

Politico & Axel Springer buy European Voice, rebrand it as Politico in spring 2015

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Politico & Axel Springer buy European Voice, rebrand it as Politico in spring 2015

POLITICO & Axel Springer Announce Joint Acquisition of European Voice – POLITICO Press Release:

POLITICO and Axel Springer, the owners of the POLITICO joint venture in Europe, announced today that they have acquired EUROPEAN VOICE and will rebrand the respected Brussels publication as POLITICO in the spring of 2015.

Bad news for Europe. Axel Springer, a big German publisher of among others the popular tabloid ‘Bild’, is the leading force behind the ‘Leistungsschutzrecht’. That is an ancillary copyright intended to make Google pay press publishers for showing snippets in search results and on Google News and got introduced last year.

Axel Springer is very aggressive in every imaginable way. (except for the innovative kind) Due to the popularity of Bild they have a lot of power in Germany. Expect them to try to influence the EU to very hardly regulate Google and other US tech giants.

It will be interesting to see wether Politico will allow that kind of instrumentalisation of the publication. The relationship could easily become contengious over this. Because while Politico does this to extend its business, Axel Springer does it to extend its power in the EU.