Business Models

From Jeff Whatcott's post 6 days ago:

"Michael Cote over at Redmonk just posted a writeup and analysis of our conversation about Acquia this afternoon.

"I always enjoy talking to the Redmonk guys. They listen actively and push back in real time if needed. I always leave the conversation with more than I brought into it and I always know where they stand (no surprises). If only all analyst conversations followed that same pattern…"

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What was AT&T's vision of the Internet? Movies on demand? Bridges without stopping to pay toll? What about he CRAZY stuff, like: Meeting without your shoes on?! Faxing from the beach? Tucking your baby in from a phone booth? Who the hell knows what a phone booth is?

Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons has been coming up on my radar alot over the past few weeks. Now, Creative Commons happens to be one of the clients I manage, so I guess that's not too surprising, but I'm talking about outside of work. For example, this blog post at World Changing is an interview with LL about CC's Developing Nations License. As usual, innovative and thought-provoking ideas from CC. The idea is this: keep your copyright in the "developed" world while distributing it freely (with attribution) in the developing world.

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A brief look at YouTube's most popular videos of the day, and what do you find? Cingular with the #1 video?! (391,397 views today alone!) Yep, the name of the video is "Cingular presents: YouTube Underground!" Cingular nabs the "Viral Day Action" award (VD Action) with this clever bit of marketing... a video announcing a YouTube contest for the best band, video or song on the hugely popular video social networking site. And, only a day after Warner Music signed a deal with YouTube - agreeing to a new royalty-tracking system... A good week for the 'Tube.

Isn't it fun to come to somebody's house and scan their bookshelves or their CD collection to peer into their souls? It's like a holographic UPC code, the soul signature of a person expressed as an array of what interests them and what you share or don't share. If the library belongs to a potential love interest, you might raise your eyebrows at finding How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad: And Other Spells for Love, Wealth, Beauty, and Revenge or The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.

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Recently, I finally saw the movie "The Corporation" [ 1]. After seeing enough movies critical of modern life to not get too depressed, the movie did leave me with a somewhat balanced combination of fear and disgust. However, I realized there must be a way to improve on things. Yes. I am an optimist [2]. When I first studied sociology I learned that social structures can take people and make them into who they are. A prisoner and a prison guard [3] were normal people created by experience is one of the best known examples of institutions creating kinds of people. In relation to the movie, a central theme was that because corporations are legally considered human beings with all the same rights as flesh and bone human beings, and because corporate laws require profit, expansion, and self preservation, corporations [and therefore people] behave in a psychotic manner.

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If you use MySpace, you probably aren't old enough to remember the rise of Friendster way back in 2003 as one of the first social networks. Well, it turns out the US Patent Office just awarded Friendster the patent on social networking. i.e. a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.� After burning through $15 million in venture capital and yet to make a profit (despite 9 or 10 million users) Friendster is still in the shadows of the $500 million dollar MySpace purchase.

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While I generally like the idea of "re-use" and swapping and freestore and all that, I can't see how this company Zunafish.com will work out. Basically you have to trade items one for one with other users, and the items must be of the same category. So I have a dvd... "When We Were Soldiers" let's say. You watched it, and once was enough, so you think, let me put it up for trade along with these other 20 war and Mel Gibson DVDs I will never watch again. Some one sees my list of movies and figures I are a war movie buff, and they have "Saving Private Ryan" so they offer to trade... But I am a war movie buff, I already saw "Saving Private Ryan".

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Good article in The Economist on open-source software and how the model adapts to other businesses: http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5624944 Offers good arguments for the continuing rise of open-source, as well as its possible demise.