There are many faces or aspects to what we call social networking. It’s a wide spectrum that spans the banal to the inspired. It is also heavily weighted at one end – the end where topics, comments and updates live in the banal and for this it can at times be maligned and easily dismissed. But people are using social networking for more then just posting glib remarks, tweeting about lunch or playing Farmville – they are also using it to organise in new, powerful and effective ways.

Take for instance the carpooling business Zimride – it has used the power of social networks, primarily Facebook, to create an effective carpooling system that empowers people to both save on transport costs and help work towards an sustainable future. I encourage you to watch the Current TV segment on about this company which I have embedded below:

Particularly of interest for me is how this type of social networking – this type of social organisation is providing yet another disruptive volley in the war between the traditional business models and the hyper-networked always connected models of online.

Businesses like Zimride should be an early warning sign that the online world has only just started when it comes to the disruption it brings to the old ways of doing things. When we see even public transport being influenced and redefined via these social networking paradigms it begs the question what can’t be affected by these rising trends.

That said, like we have seen before with incumbent industries like the music business – traditional institutions won’t just sit still either as there way of doing business is threatened – before social networking even existed as we know it today – back in 2005 a French bus company sued a carpooling group of cleaning ladies claiming that they were stealing their customers. As Clay Shirky has said:

“One of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem is that the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self preservation”

So the bus company is only interested is solving the movement of people via buses not actually solving the problem of mass transit. The music industry is interested in selling music not letting people experience artists. You get my point.

Now at this stage there are only 300,000 users of Zimride and mainly college and university students, buts lets not forget that Facebook itself is an alumni of these institutions and just like Facebook they have already started moving beyond their roots to include corporate businesses and even events.

The Zimride idea is simple, people friendly and approachable, so I can easily see it scaling beyond its modest efforts in providing students with that ‘cheap ride’ – this can work anywhere and with over 350+ million people now on Facebook – why not every city, every town, every village. Tell me then that this sort of scale doesn’t put chills down the spines of all those bus company executives out there or can’t create an effective alternative choice to the standard public transport network.

For a large part of my life TV has been the dominate form of entertainment and information, but then the internet showed up and changed the world.  Changed my world. It is also changing the world of TV, primarily the free-to-air model.

A show I quite like that is filmed in New Zealand called ‘Legend of the Seeker‘ has over the last 2 years been showing on Prime. That was until recently when midway through the current second season it suddenly vanished. When asking Prime why and what had happened to it – the canned response was as follows:

“At this stage, Legend of the Seeker is taking a break from schedule and will return later in the year. Dates and time are not yet confirmed, so please continue to check your listings as well as any on-air promo’s regarding this programme”

I particularly like the part that says “… check your listings as well as any on-air promo’s …” – who does that anymore?!

It begs the question do these guys get that the world has changed, and people’s expectations on how they consume media and entertainment have changed along with it.  The answer is – I guess not – given the TV industries lack of address around the increasing decline in viewership and on-air TV advertising.

We live in a world of on-demand. On-demand access to information, on-demand access to games, on-demand access to video and so on – to tell people that they must wait to check out ‘local listings’ and await the station’s ‘schedule programming’ before they can see it again – is ignoring the fact that the on-demand is where it is at.

Additional to this is the other step-change in peoples behaviour – that the internet has created an expectation that information is transparent and navigable. Either via good information architecture and UI or via Search. TV Listings both via set-top boxes or printed form are none of these. They suck basically. So when Prime decides to pull a show – you aren’t told and you can’t find out when it will be next on. In other words you can”t orientate yourself to the content and this is a big no no in the connected, always on, easily informed and searched world we are now living every day.

Look – it is a disruptive age. Online technologies and prolific broadband connect us in real-time with what interests us and is allowing us to bypass the traditional gatekeepers and middlemen. It is unseating the incumbent players. It happened for music, it is happening for newspapers and it is now beginning for television and movies.

For Prime, they need to realise they are no longer the gatekeepers to my access for television content – their programming schedules no longer control or dictate when I want to watch something. And frankly, they along with most of the industry need to wake up to this!

The TV series Lost just recently finished its final run season and given the shows cult status – the final episode was highly anticipated – so highly in fact that the finale was timed to broadcast simultaneously in several countries to avoid the show’s big reveals from being spoilt online as well as to try and curb piracy. None of this, however, changed the fact that the Lost finale has taken the title of the highest downloaded show on bit torrent ever – this bit torrent system is a hugely popular network for peer-to-peer file transfer and used in a large capacity for content piracy – music, games, movies and television are all traded in real-time for all and sundry.

US free-to-air networks show a clear downward trend even in 2008

And if people are not downloading the content illegally they can buy it online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble – many movies and TV series are available for purchase and shipping to New Zealand well before they show up on these shores on local TV or in the cinemas.

This matters. It matter because if you aren’t giving people what they want they will in today’s age, because of the change in expectations, go somewhere else to find it. They will use bit torrent to download it or buy the complete series on DVD from Amazon or watch it on a service such as Hulu, even buy it via Apple iTunes. More importantly, all of these services are a natural fit for the online culture of being connected, information transparent and on-demand. Free-to-air needs to rethink its model and approach and move to offering services that fit this culture or the eyeballs will continue to move elsewhere.

And if their eyeballs are somewhere else they are not on the adverts that are running on Prime or any other free-to-air model. A situation that the advertising industry is beginning to wise up to – Comscore and Neilson ratings continue to show that TV eyeballs are declining – so advertisers are starting to follow to the places they are migrating too and leaving behind empty Ad slots in TV land.

If the free-to-air stations can’t fill their advertising slots with Ads – where does this leave them – where will this leave Prime? Well potentially with empty coffers and struggling business model – now why does this seem familiar?

Twitter has announced the first parts of how it intends to make money. The Microblogging service that has taken the social media world by storm and has circa of 75 million Users has announced that it will be serving up a form of Tweet Advertising – a Tweetvert – that will appear when doing a Twitter search. The official name is Promoted Tweet and it will be restricted to a small number of partners on its initial launch.

Their take on this Google-esque adwords-like search advertising is that the primary form of this advert will be a standard Tweet. Advertisers will be limited to the same 140 characters that a standard tweet is composed of and they will pay to have it placed at the top of a Twitter search results page. Some have claimed that there could be issues with only having access to 140 characters to promote something, but personally I don’t think this is much of an issue, as this limited text usage has been a key part of the highly successful Adwords system used by Google for over a decade now and as we all know – this racks in the billions that power the Google empire.

Think how powerful it will be to have a market of 75 million eyeballs all looking at your Tweetvert

Twitter search is still very much in its infancy but this will change. The social stream and the emerging real-time flux that people are now absorbing as part of their daily info-consumption is only going to grow. Everyday more people join a social network. Just as web searching went from convenience in the early 2000′s to being the primary form of finding and locating on the web – so will this happen for social search. The difference is that this is not dominated by Google but by the social players Twitter and Facebook.

In fact, Google needs to start getting nervous on this. People are shifting on how they are engaging with the web – mobile is changing their patterns (as Steve Jobs so adamantly noted when he said no one searches on mobile – the truth of this to be determined) but so is social networking – it is possible now to simply keep abreast of news and events by following your social stream and information now comes to me via those associations whether it be from Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn – in other words – I don’t need to search for it – IT is already in my social timeline – I just need to click the link and I am there.

So how will this all work? Phase 1 of the Twitter model is putting a promoted advertising tweet at the top of tweet search results (again similar to the top spot in Google Adwords). However, it is not as simple as just putting it into the top spot by paying the big dollars for it – the Tweetverts will be subject to a value and relevance to the Twitter community and is so subject to a thing that Twitter calls ‘Resonance’. If the Tweetvert is not getting many clicks, being retweeted or getting negative feedback then Twitter will pull it.

Example of the new Twitter Tweetverts

This ‘Resonance’ is going to be interesting – I like the idea of it but it also sounds a little ethereal and doesn’t have the clear cut maths that drives Adwords via the ‘clicks vs bids’ model. That said, if they get it right it could be huge because what Twitter has is potentially the ability to monitor the feelings or vibes in its Twitterverse and adjust adverts as these feelings/vibes shift.

Phase 2 could be more interesting again. This involves introducing the Tweetvert into a Users timeline – this means that as I scan my tweet updates for what my Followers are tweeting about I will every so often encounter one of these promoted tweets.

Think how powerful it will be to have a market of 75 million eyeballs all looking at your Tweetvert; and no doubt it will evolve to allow people to create profiles of the types of Tweetverts they like – think of it as a reverse model of the targeting profiles an Adwords User can currently setup.

There has been some stiff criticism, from lack of originality to mega-fail – some people likening the idea of Tweetverts in their timeline to that of television adverts – an old model they think should stay in the past.

It is probably too early to judge but I think it will be a winner – as I mentioned there are some interesting aspects too it and it will need to mature and bed in; until then, how successful or not the Tweetvert will be is still an unknown.

There is a great deal of buzz and hype around the emerging market of Geo-advertising – that advertising wonderland which will allows brands the ability to ping you with timely offers as they match your real world location with real world businesses that are offering deals or promoting brands and items.

Also known as contextual advertising this ad agency nirvana is about offering in real-time adverts that provide relevance to your current location – it does this via a mobile device which for most people is primarily their mobile phone. It works by broadcasting your location and from this advertisers can offer you things.

Things like – a free muffin with any coffee purchase as you walk past the local Starbucks, 20% of Nike Shoes as you head into the Rebel Sports store, buy one get one free on books at Borders as you wander on past. You get the idea.

Of course, for a lot of us the idea of this is appalling – we are assaulted by advertising 24/7 from street billboards to Facebook ads – the last thing we need is for this advertising to be pinging us incessantly as we move from location to location. It also quickly triggers issues around privacy – allowing some faceless corporate entity to monitor your every move as you travel through the world would make most of us sick. To that I would ask: What if it was targeted? What if it was user managed?

In effect you create a profile and just like dating you choose what types of brand entities can be matched to you

We all love a good deal? If you could control what, how and when such pinged adverts were sent and who had access to your location then it could be argued that this would be of some use. Relevant advertising has proven to be something that people / consumers are comfortable with. Emailed coupons / offers, Store Card promotions and SMS Alerts are all existing focused advertising that work and where people are happy to be included. These work because a) They are Opt-In and easy to Opt-Out of, and b) The Consumer has chosen to be included because the content of the advertising or brand is of value to them and they want to be informed – be it deals, new products or competitions.

Now imagine you could have this relevant value advertising space – let’s call it the Brand-Zone – with you 24/7 as you moved through the world. You setup you Brand-Zone settings with your preferred brands or businesses; the times you allow it to operate and the areas you allow it to detect or track you – in effect you create a profile and just like dating you choose what types of brand entities can be matched to you. Once you have done this you go about your life, only now when you walk past the local Borders it lets you know they are offering 40% of a full-price book; or KFC pings you with a discount voucher as you drive past in your car. Importantly businesses that you don’t want offers from are silent because they don’t match you profile. Welcome to the world where advertising is controlled by you and it is relevant to you.

This world is not far away – in fact I suspect that the rumors about Apple’s iAd product may involve some of these aspects. There are some things that need to be put in place however before this type of advertising model can fully develop. 1. Smart-phones need to become the primary type of mobile that people carry instead of the standard feature phone or basic call-only mobiles. 2. Phone OS’s need to allow background services – Android does this already – but Apple needs to embrace it for their iPhone OS (it should be noted that current rumors are that this will be addressed in the next update in iPhone OS 4.0), as well as Blackberry and Nokia.

And of course; 3. We need to have a Geo-advertising framework to be setup – who will be the first to do this will be of interest. It could come from a few fields but I think for traction will have to be Apple or Google. Google is the natural fit for this and given that their business model still runs on advertising you would think that they would be quite motivated to get this in play; but for all their great Android work they seem to be slow to start in the mobile advertising space.

The Brand-Zone is nearly upon us – for some this could be a very unwelcome addition to our already noisy, loud and dense consumer advertising world – for most of us I think it will be a boon – if only because it is yet another disruptive stake driven into the heart of the old world rules of top down thinking. The Mad Men agencies of Madison Avenue can no longer just put it out there and hope to touch as many eye-balls as possible via a mass broadcast because broadcast-type advertising is on the wane (just Google for stats on Radio, Television and Newspaper usage).

Targeted advertising is the future – so the possibility of having this Brand-Zone is appealing – a special zone that radiates from me as travel about the world providing me with purchase opportunities that I want – when I need them. It is yet another disruptive paradigm for the world of advertising and media. Once we control who, when and where a brand communicates to us – the territory changes – to be relevant and of value to the consumer will become the new currency for advertisers and the great thing is – we will be their bank.

I’m the first to admit I spend probably way too much time online.

Since about 1991, there has been less than a fortnight in days when I haven’t at least checked my email. And that was mostly because I was on a plane somewhere and couldn’t go online!

But I’m tired of all this talk of information overload and internet addiction.

In fact, I have never bought the addiction bit, especially after I interviewed a woman making millions in the US by providing counselling services for those trying to cure their “internet addiction.”

Her brilliant scheme involved people chatting to her for an hour a week after handing over their credit card details and she would help them over a course lasting many months.

The irony was they logged online to her site from anywhere in the world to do this, and I suspect, once wowed by her sympathetic warm approach, got addicted to her pay-per-hour chatline and kept coming in and spending.

Good on her. The Internet has given many a snake oil salesperson a new vehicle and there are always suckers who fall for it.

I was reminded of all this when I kept seeing pushed on social networking sites (Oh the irony again!) the last week the word Reboot.

This was advertising a new scheme by a non profit orgaisation comprising Jewish “Internet entrepreneurs, creators of award-winning television shows, community organizers and nonprofit leaders” to obey a new commandment on the Sunday.

They advocated: Rest on the 7^th day of the week by switching off all things technology based. No facebook, twitter,internet or phone.

The National day of unplugging lasts from sundown Friday Us time to sundown Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.

Let’s hope those makers of ridiculous reality TV shows also agree not to have their shows screened on Sundays. Or any day, would be even better, please.

One Dan Rollman says technology is overtaking our life – some of us highly addicted people are even carrying around our phone. Clearly things have gone too far and this is a serious global issue.

CNN reports him saying: ”There’s clearly a social problem when we’re interacting more with digital interfaces than our fellow human beings. Rich, engaging conversations are harder to come by than they were a few years ago. Our attention spans are silently evaporating.”

And how did he express these thoughts to CNN? He sent an email to CNN saying so. It sounds to me as if he is the one with an addiction problem. Couldn’t he have picked up the phone and spoken to someone? So email was his first port of call? Go figure.

He urges us all to participate in his new Sabbath manifesto:

1. Avoid technology.

2. Connect with loved ones.

3. Nurture your health.

4. Get outside.

5. Avoid commerce.

6. Light candles.

7. Drink wine.

8. Eat bread.

9. Find silence.

10. Give back.

I have this mental picture of us all gathering around candles in some early century religious ceremony in a monastery for a day while our loved ones are busy trying to ring us on the iPhone to tell us to get back to living.

Like many religious cults, the principles are hard to argue with and have some merit for most of us.

What’s odd is that he has set up a website with the name the Universal World Record Database, which sounds like a branch of Scientology and people are encouraged to discuss online which principles work and which should be tweaked.

But isn’t that going to fuel my addiction? I might even get so involved in the debate, I start doing it on my iPhone when I’m not by the computer.

I wish him well in whatever he’s trying to achieve but let’s not give people a guilt trip and make them feel attached from using any technology one day a week.

For some of us, it’s an essential way to keep in touch with family and friends. And it’s the way we do things now, the way we get information and entertainment.

I pity those with a genuine addiction to something that is genuinely making them ill or unhappy. There are forms of conventional and unconventional professional help for them.

The rest of us have discovered those 90s buzzwords that it’s all about “moderation” and “a life – work balance” that make us supposedly happy balanced souls.

If you really do spend all your working life online, it may be a good thing in keeping you out of other trouble – or you may be covering up other real issues in your life, such as loneliness or inability to engage in acceptable social behaviour. Or it may just be fun and informative.

Whatever it is, you need to work it through, not go through a prohibition one day a week.

I don’t remember that working when they closed pubs on Sundays.

TiVo pioneered the TV set top box revolution before digital video recorders became commonplace – but is this further proof that every new piece of technology has its day?

TiVo has launched with much fanfare in NZ but it’s not the TiVo in the USA in that it’s locked in with Freeview and not SKY and therefore does not give you the choice of recording hundreds of channels.

My experience of TiVo in the states was impressive when I discovered if you were a Simpsons fan, the magical machine could sit at home while you were out and record every Simpsons episode on any of the hundreds of cable channels you were subscribed to. But that was in it’s infancy. How the TV world has changed.

Cable operators now offer their own set top box, the audience is moving to watching TV on demand on the net or downloading TV programmes, legally or illegally. The TV audiences like the TiVo concept of watching exactly what they want when but now there are many avenues in which to do this, without being tied to a TiVo solution.

Not surprisingly, the New York Times notes the same observation and reports today that TiVo “has been struggling for years as cable and satellite companies offer set-top boxes with their own digital video recorders that allow people to pause and digitally record live television.”

And it reveals that last November, TiVo said its subscriber base fell by 21 percent, to 2.7 million, from 3.5 million the year before. In the hope of becoming noticed again., the company is about to launch yet another set-top box as if we really want to add to the clutter gathering around our giant TV sets.

Called TiVo Premiere, the new slender hardware will put regular program listings from cable and satellite on the same page as related material from the Web.

For example, a prominent search box on the service allows users to look for, say, “The Office,” and quickly find the regular TV listings of forthcoming episodes as well as older episodes for rent on Netflix and Blockbuster, outtakes and deleted scenes from You Tube , and merchandise related to the show for sale at Amazon. TiVo’s chief enthused:

“This takes broadband and broadcast and puts them all together as a single experience. You have your cable box, your movie box, your music box, your Web box and your DVR all in one.”

Call me different but I’m not sure that, when I want to watch an episode of Lost, I also want to see what Lost dolls Amazon can sell me or go to the Lost website all at the same time.

It feels like that nasty experience of being bombarded by an avalanche of spam pop-ups when you go to a Web site. I have a feeling this is evidence of desperate times for TiVo to appear relevant

And I predict it won’t save them..

Movie critics need to go and find a new career.

It’s over. No-one wants them anymore or cares.

Brutal, but that’s the new world.

Today, leading movie industry Bible, Variety, laid off its two best-known critics, longtime chief film critic Todd McCarthy and chief theater critic David Rooney. Variety calls it an “economic reality.” True, but why are critics not the mainstay of an entertainment magazine or section anymore?

As Los Angeles Times puts it today, also with brutal honesty:

“Virtually every survey has shown that younger audiences have zero interest in critics. They take their cues for what movies to see from their peers, making decisions based on the buzz they’ve heard on Facebook, Twitter or some other form of social networking.”

It notes how irrelevant the critics are becoming, even for older audiences.

The conservative Wall Street Journal’s famous critic moved from page one of the arts section, to page three and now you may find him somewhere on page five.

Other critics elsewhere have moved completely off any page.

Today word of mouth about movies happens before any marketing blitz can take effect.

The low budget horror Paranormal Activity,” camcorder shot for a mere US$10,000, somehow made US$100-million-plus at the box office, when it normally would have gone straight to DVD and be seen by a few cult movie buffs. It had no star actors, came out of nowhere but had a scary enough trailer and catchphrase.

But the real impact happened when people saw the first screenings and texted and tweeted and facebook’d that this was a movie you needed to see.

The movie makers now have, justifiably or not, enough money-making cred to consider asking famous horror director Brian De Palma for the sequel. Of course, a similar low budget and quickly forgettable movie Blair Witch in pre-social media days discovered how the web alone could be used to generate interest in a movie. But back to the poor old critic.

The sad fact for them, not us, is that the internet has given us all an easy and quick voice and respect each other’s opinion, not someone who has been crowned The Critic. I

follow blogs and people on twitter, whose opinion on music and movies I respect. I check the “community” rating on movies, games and music on sites like movie’s Rotten Tomatoes and metacritic as a guide to what the critics would call the dumbed down masses think.

Thanks to that mass public opinion, I have caught several enjoyable movies in the last year that the high and mighty critics rate poorly and think is beneath them to praise.

We’ve become bored with waiting for days for  the paid critics to digest something and then we have to wadie through a thousand word essay, sprinkled with clever-dick obscure references and pseudo-intelligent plays on words.

Today, I picked up the printed programme for a film festival about to hit my town and gave up trying to work out what each movie was about. I’m sure there were a few I would like, but the programme is a cryptic crossword.

Let me pick a movie at random from the programme.

This one  is a must see for its

“daring proposition in an era that frantically insists upon marketable conformity. This makes Gentlemen Broncos as daring as the latest work of Hess’ other American Eccentrics peers Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson. In Gentlemen Broncos, sci-fi’s poignant charms even coexist with churchgoing – note the quilt hanging in Benji’s bedroom of Jesus riding Barney the dinosaur. It’s all part of our authentic and poignant cultural mess.”

If only critics would learn the art of communication all over again so I can understand a) what the movie is about and b) whether I might like it.

Oh hang on, I know where to find it. On twitter. From people like you.

I haven’t had a fixed line at home for about four years and haven’t missed it. I spend the money on wireless internet and a mobile.

That to me was the way of the future. I think it quaint to have a phone at a fixed place in the home to which I have to rush if it rings.

I was unconvinced when I also bought one of the first cordless phones, which you could wander around the house with. Like the remote control, I couldn’t remember where I had left it so it was stressful when it rang and also the battery would go flat when I wanted to use it. The reach of the handset was barely to the gate.

The mobile is small enough to carry around and I could also take it out of the house anywhere in the world. If people find a way around getting broadband without needing a fixed line and breaking the bank  (I use wireless internet), then fixed lines will be dead. They already are in the winds of most kids and teenagers and people under 35 who carry a mobile.

So it’s no surprise that today, long time respected tech research company Gartner is reporting that in the fourth quarter of last year, the market registered a single-digit growth as mobile phone sales to end users surpassed 340 million units, an 8.3 per cent increase from the fourth quarter of the previous year – but what is interesting is confirmation of other trends many of us have predicted for years.

The mobile devices market growth is being driven by growth in smartphones and low-end devices. So both ends of the market are growing meaning that the better off can move much of their internet use to a smart phone, while others can forget about fixed lines and use a pre-pay phone for texting and calls. And what massive growth in smart phones – globally a 41.1% increase in the last quarter with Blackberry and iPhones controlling 14.4 and 19.9% per cent of the worldwide smartphone market. As far as non smartphones,  Samsung was the clear winner among the top five with market share growing by 3.2 percentage points from 2008.

Once again, Microsoft has dropped down the list in another category – mobiles. Android  increased its market share by 3.5 percentage points in 2009, while Apple’s share grew by 6.2 percentage points from 2008, which helped it move to the No. 3 position and displace Microsoft Windows Mobile.

I’m still not sure about Android and Gartner makes an interesting observation, which means predictions for Android still deserve to be treated with caution. It says: “Android’s success experienced in the fourth quarter of 2009 should continue into 2010 as more manufacturers launch Android products, but some CSPs and manufacturers have expressed growing concern about Google’s intentions in the mobile market. “If such concerns cause manufacturers to change their product strategies or CSPs to change which devices they stock, this might hinder Android’s growth.”

Maybe it’s just Google envy.

The movie industry is fast disappearing down a rabbit hole and may never re-emerge.

The latest tiff between areas of the movie industry shows once again, how many major businesses still don’t get the fact the world – especially their world – has changed and it’s not the cosy comfort zone it used to be.

They have to fight for a slice of the pie, that pie is getting smaller and the only way everyone will pay their bills and survive in these difficult times is to accept the consumer wants to get things when they want and have a range of choices.

On the latter, the British cinema chains and the movie industry giants both fail.

Their industry is not in a good state so it’s extraordinary that want to use the consumer as the meat in the sandwich to make their Excel spreadsheets rosier.

DVD sales in the recession have slumped by 10 per cent.

Movie chains are struggling but live in hope that if they install expensive new 3D equipment, moviegoers will flock and all will be saved. Unfortunately not every 3D movie is going to be as spectacular and interesting as Avatar, although the new Tim Burton 3D Alice in Wonderland is about such a much-loved tale, it could appeal as well. But Disney decided that it needed to get the DVD of Alice out within 12 weeks of its theatre release in the hope it could sell.

Two of UK’s three big chains baulked at this and decided not to run the movie at all. One has now negotiated a deal but the other, the giant Odeon chain, won’t budge. Right on D-Day, Disney is still trying to save the disaster as it faces losing a huge slice of potential earnings in the UK because so many cinemas won’t be showing it.

What none of these businesses consider is that the consumer is the big loser whatever way it goes.What the consumer wants is choice. The day a movie come out in the cinemas, they want to choose to see it there, buy the DVD or download it and watch it on my computer.

DVD releases seem to be getting pushed further and further back to the point I have lost interest in getting say 2012 whenever it comes out because the movie is now such a distant memory.

Even more ridiculous, I think that DVD is already out in some countries but not others.  If I’m still interested, I’ll wait until I rent it one day from a DVD hire store.

Continuing with their arrogance, Warner Bros decided to restrict sales of its DVDs to US Netflix and Redbox’s $1 kiosks until 28 days after they are released and other companies plan to do the same.

3D movies are hard to illegally download so with that in mind, and with tougher laws pending around the world to stop Bit Torrents, we’re entering a new smugness era from the entertainment industry, who think they are back to dictating the rules.

They forget the consumer – that’s you and I – will end up saying we don’t really need to see Alice In Wonderland in the cinema or on DVD and find ourselves bothering less and less with movies.

I have already got to that point of not buying DVDs – and looking at the slump in DVD sales, the rest of the public seem to have got to that position as well. So it won’t be hard to break the movie habit. It has already started.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/valkyrieh116/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Does Flash only have 36 months left before it is relegated to the graveyard of Internet history – a relic of a earlier digital era?

I, like many have discussed the future of Flash recently in light of Apple’s position on it. Apple’s position was initially passive, they simply refused to explain the lack of support for it on the iPhone OS – now it appears to be open hostility, in light of some recent comments made by Apple founder Steve Jobs to Executives at the Wall Street Journal.

For my part, my discussion with friends and colleagues has ranged across the merits of Flash vs HTML5 or AJAX. For those who argue for it, their strongest point has been that there are simply things you can do with Flash that cannot be done with these other internet technologies. At first blush this sounds like a solid position, except for one thing – I have heard this before.

Back in the 90′s when CDs were king and all the world was nuts for Seinfield and the Simpsons, at this time another Adobe product was a dominate player in the world of interactive multimedia content – it was called Macromedia Director (Macromedia was aquired by Adobe in 2005). The internet was still young and new and awash with the experimental; but it was very slow – internet time was bookmarked by the connect button and that wonderful sound of the dial-up modem interfacing with a cyber landscape that was still fresh. Multimedia, video, fluid animation and sophisticated interactivity on the web was limited or crude – at best a pipe-dream – then along came Flash; and all that changed.

W3C technologies don’t require a plugin – to be installed – they are there built into the Browser model – ready to go and ready to work – a nice paradigm I would add for the coming age of internet appliances (iPad anyone)

The clever product, initially an Animation tool, was rapidly embraced by designers and quickly grew to encompass the world of developers. It revolutionised the experience of interactive content on the Web and as it did this, the throne of Interactive CDs dominated by the world of the Director software tool was quickly threatened. At the time, the very arguments that are being made today for why Flash will remain king or at least relevant, were made a decade ago for Director.

But Director is not relevant anymore – you can still get it but like Vinyl records it is relegated to a niche space – for the curious or the nostalgic. It was deposed by its baby brother because it did something that Director didn’t, it played well with the Internet. In contrast to Director, it produced small files, that were easy to deploy and distribute, a build once put anywhere on the web methodology. Director was none of this – it created large files and required compiling for different Operating Systems and needed to be distributed by CD.

The same change is happening again, AJAX and HTML5 and CSS3 – web standards – are a packaged set that allow developers and designers to produce the same results that can be done with Flash – but not everything…

But not everything for now!

Flash originally didn’t have Video support and for a long period this still gave Director a leg-up for a set of needs in the market and then Macromedia added it. This was the death knell for Director. The death knell for Flash will be in similar fashion – one possible scenario could be that unlike Flash – the these W3C technologies don’t require a plugin – to be installed – they are there built into the Browser model – ready to go and ready to work – a nice paradigm I would add for the coming age of internet appliances (iPad anyone). Such a development allows one to fit better then the other and this is where the apple cart is tipped.

There is concern about Apple’s stance on Flash – feelings that they will do it damage. Apple does have influence and weight as a corporate entity but they won’t be the ones to kill Flash – Flash isn’t on the iPhone and won’t be on the iPad either – who cares – Android and Blackberry and Nokia and Palm support Flash – and Android is growing rapidly as a mobile platform – it won’t be long, I suspect, before it will overtake Apple’s iPhone/iPad OS as dominate mobile device OS – but this probably won’t save Flash either.

I think Adobe has left it too late to change a shift in perception. They have squandered the Macromedia legacy and grown fat and lazy on their acquired product line – they are in danger of repeating Quark’s mistake of arrogant complacency by holding a dominate position in the market only to be dethroned by a younger more agile and hungrier player – in this case a new HTML standard (the irony of this would be heavy).

The biggest use of Flash is Video playback (amusing given the points about Director) – but HTLM5 does this just as well if not better then Flash. Adobe should have been pushing Flash in new directions – like Macromedia did when it was still in charge – like introducing Video or creating Actionscript. Adobe should have moved Flash forward by making it mobile device friendly much earlier. They didn’t, they haven’t.

Flash hasn’t evolved quick enough for this new world of the mobile device or angled itself high enough above what can now be achieve with W3C standards. I think they may have left it too long to fix this – in which case it will be process of watching its slow decline into internet history where it can meet up again with its older brother Director.

A month or so ago, the global media was obsessed about global warming and the climate change conference.

How come there’s a wall of silence about another global issue where controversial movement is taking place?

A secret global internet copyright deal has been negotiated by the European nations, NZ, Australia, the US, Mexico, South Korea, Singapore, Jordan, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.

The deal, documents about which are now spilling online, means ISPs must snoop on their customers to see if anyone is downloading stuff that affects copyright.

Those who have drafted the treaty think it’s watertight in stopping downloading.

The bill’s main points:

• it become illegal to share copyrighted material
• it’s illegal run a site that indexes where you can find the stuff
• It bans BitTorrent and other P2P networks
• There’s also reference to “border measures,” which means scans at customs for what’s on your USB drive or laptop.
• All countries introduce a ’3 strikes and you’re closed down’ rule where the government can stop you getting back on the net if you breach the ISP warning thrice and you become blacklisted.
• And the ISP will be in trouble if it doesn’t co-operate as it would be taken to court and the owners punished.

France didn’t wait for ACTA – it’s become the first country to already introduce a three strikes law with French president Nicolas Sarkozy warmly welcoming “the future of a civilised internet”. No doubt that’s how other leaders see it, thankful the wild west of the net will be over and countries can at last control it.

The amazing thing about this deal – called ACTA (Anti-counterfeiting trade agreement) – is that it’s been done quickly, without the public anywhere being allowed any debate about it.

Somehow governments are rubber stamping it without letting their citizens in on it , until it’s too late.

The world is only learning about it because someone in Canada slipped up and mentioned it was happenig.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that :”Given the speed with which this treaty is being negotiated, and its potentially significant impact, the lack of transparency in the negotiation process and failure to provide citizens with an opportunity for informed consultation is extremely concerning.”

And just as fascinating is that NZ will host the next ACTA meeting of the nations involved in Wellington in April.

Is this really something NZ wants to be seen as leading the world? Apparently so.

I hope they have invited Iran and China. They will be able to fast track the measures by sharing how they control the population’s internet use.

I predict Apple will build its own Ad Network – one based in the emerging sector of geo-location and contextual marketing. Why? Because services as well as products are what they do. Apple changed it’s name back in January 1997 from Apple Computer to just Apple – the reasoning stated by Job’s during a Macworld keynote was that it had been recognised by them that Apple was more then just computers. And why not, they have an extensive portfolio of offerings that span the retail sector to online distribution.

Alongside their core markets of hardware and software, they have created successful markets in the digital music business, are gaining traction in the digital distribution of movie and TV entertainment and have proven that people will pay for bitsy applications which are the core of the successful Apps store.

It is really the first positioning steps in creating a fully fledged geo-advertising network

Recently, alongside the launch of the iPad they have jumped into the digital book market with the soon-to-launch iBookstore – a direct stab at Amazon’s core marketspace.

So the recent announcement that it will ban or reject applications that are built primarily for the purpose of pushing geo-contextual adverts – shouldn’t come as much of a surprise – as it is really the first positioning steps in creating a fully fledged geo-advertising network. Google has the search and banner advert market more or less sewn up, and trying to topple this king-of-the-hill has proven to best even the two other big gorillas in the internet corporate zoo – namely, Yahoo and Microsoft.

However, one area that Google has shown to have an Achilles heel is in geo-contextual advertising (as well as Social but this is a whole other post) – they don’t seem to get it – which is great for those that do – Apple created the iPhone (and so invented what is really the neo-pda market) and although they haven’t shown all their cards yet I think they get the value of geo-contextual information – and one type of information is advertising.

Their recent purchase of Quattro Wireless has given them an pillar in moving forward with creating services and products that take advantage of this next step-change in the advertising model. But to make this compelling and to ensure the model is not tainted by what Apple would view as heathen or experimental attempts by others – that being either smaller ad networks or back-shed bit players – they have headed it off at the pass.

In the coming months it will be interesting to see how this area develops – especially with the iPad in play and what I am sure will be a new iPhone on the market by mid-year. Along with rumors that Apple will allow some type of background services for Apps – we can expect the Geo-contextual space to grow massively over the course of 2010.

Photo Credit: OeilDeNuit