John Wilson is fascinated by the application of technology more so than technology itself. Having spent 15 years working in and around capital markets involved in systems, process and projects, he has too often seen "solutions looking for problems" - he derives great pleasure in finding those problems and marrying the two up.
As I finished posting about Prince's new album, I was reminded of the balance of power game.
If you want a radio station to promote your product on air, you pay them. Radio stations pay royalties to artists to play their music. The Mail on Sunday has paid Prince to distribute his new album to their readers. Advertisers pay newspapers to include inserts in the newspaper.
Since 1978, Prince has released more than 30 albums. Most were as "Prince", some with The Revolution or the New Power Generation and some as . Not all of these albums were major releases or are still in print.
However, it's his new album that will probably be the most notable in music industry history. Why? Because, he will be the first major artist to both distribute his latest album via a newspaper and do so free to the consumer.
It has drawn not unexpected outrage/horror from the industry, most notably the record store sector as has been reported here in full by the Guardian.
"It's all about giving music for the masses and he believes in spreading the music he produces to as many people as possible," said Mail on Sunday managing director Stephen Miron. "This is the biggest innovation in newspaper promotions in recent times."
One music store executive described the plan as "madness" while others said it was a huge insult to an industry battling fierce competition from supermarkets and online stores. Prince's label has cut its ties with the album in the UK to try to appease music stores.
The Entertainment Retailers Association said the giveaway "beggars belief". "It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career," ERA co-chairman Paul Quirk told a music conference. "It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music.
"The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday."
High street music giant HMV was similarly scathing about the plans. Speaking before rumours of a giveaway were confirmed, HMV chief executive Simon Fox said: "I think it would be absolutely nuts. I can't believe the music industry would do it to itself. I simply can't believe it would happen; it would be absolute madness."
Wooooooooh, scary threat - we may not stock your albums in our stores if you do this. Perhaps they've not realised that a) there are alternate distribution outlets such as, say, iTunes for Prince, who will stock certainly it b) if I want the Prince album, I'm unlikely to be dissuaded from buying it because HMV don't stock it.
But the HMV CEO raises an interesting point, why is the music industry doing this to itself? After all, Prince's record company, Sony BMG, is one of the big guys, and not a scrappie indie looking to get noticed with a stunt.
Well, lets take a look at Prince. His album will get tons of publicity for this. A new audience may listen to an album that they would have never bought and in the process may be enticed to buy his back catalogue or go to his shows (he's staging an unbelievable 21 shows in the O2 in London - that's over 420,000 seats to fill and every seat will also get a free copy of the album). He's also "sold" the album to a newspaper - they don't get it free, so there's revenue there. As I understand it, these album copies won't count towards the album charts because they haven't been sold (I once discussed this with a big record company based in Hammersmith, as I was curious if the charts could be manipulated by giving tracks away free to get the star the publicity from having a No.1)
Clearly, if every artist did this, the publicity element would be lost because it wouldn't be newsworthy any longer. But is it a sustainable business model? I'm not sure, but today's model isn't working that well, so the industry has to experiment.
Ad funded is a model being tested by We7. Could "pay per as you go" be another model", in which you could perhaps pay the same royalties as on-air radio stations to listen to tracks in full? Before dismissing out of hand, remember the mobile phone companies saw enormous growth from pay-as-you-go, which was a model they never foresaw would be so successful. Likewise, who'd have imagined that people would pay a substantial premium for ring tones of their favourite songs e.g. £3 for a song chorus v 79p for the full track.
Perhaps Prince really is head of the Revolution in both word and deed.
Unfortunately, the Facebook app api may be turning into a millstone for some web ventures, rather than utopia..
I've been privy to a number of conversations recently where amongst the first three questions asked was "have you got a facebook app to go with this" - as though it is a "must have" if you want to be in the game. However, focussing energies here may be a distraction from getting the actual offering right.
It's all too easy to follow fads and fashion. Of course, smart entrepreneurs respond to opportunities but they also have to remain focussed on the core objective/target.
According to a recent academic paper that has been widely reported, Facebook is class ridden, appealing to educated WASPs (white anglo saxon protestants).
Well it's also noisy, albeit views diverge on whether this is a good thing. My friend, Nic Brisbourne of Esprit, posted that he liked it but would appreciate a few more noise filters.
I confess that I'm not contributing much noise - I haven't acquired the habit of logging in and updating my status etc but lots of my "friends" evidently use it to a significant degree.
Lots of noise has been generated from people signing up for apps & then delisting ie browsing. Sadly, when delisting there's no feedback on why they've delisted which be helpful.
Whilst it's easy to add Facebook applications, I've found few to date that have been compelling. Likewise wading through the directory is arduous.
Any ideas on how to get a better experience from it?
Many entrepreneurs I meet increasingly work as remote teams i.e. each person works from a different location, but is able to easily interact via devices like IM, skype, whiteboards, collaborations tools etc. Facetime together is limited to maybe a few half days or days per week.
Whilst I too use such tools, there is much to be said for "looking the other person in the eye" when chatting a concept over. So I will opt for video chat whenever I can (assuming meeting in person isn't an option).
For person-to-person video chat, skype is fine or MSN. But neither of these support multi-person. Hence, I usually opt to use userplane in these situations, which can be fiddly.
However, there has been a rush of new players recently, focussed on live broadcast from webcams, that I suspect could also be used for meetings and video conferencing. Operator11 is one such free service, providing a fairly simple method to hook up a Webcam and get going. It also lets you upload video clips but it's the capability to have multiple people drop in and out of a live broadcast, controlled from the browser, that most interested me.
You can also record, embed, and share their shows with others with 40 minutes recording time per "show"/meeting available for free.
Two other services I'm also trying are Mogulus and BlogTV. These have both been reviewed by Techcrunch recently.
The main problem I've encountered is that only the controller appears to have the option to see everything that's going on in one screen, and swap back and forth between Webcams on the fly ala TV show producer. I've yet to determine how to have all participants visible to everyone, rather than flipping the camera shot between people.
If this works, it would also make an excellent solution for most corporates too - most big companies rarely have enough meeting rooms for all the meetings people want to hold. If they gave everyone a webcam (leaving bandwidth issues aside), people needn't leave their desks to participate in meetings and voila, space problem over. It would also make impromptu meetings far easier to hold, not to mention the recording feature would ensure there was a record of decision reached (or is that an unlikely outcome at a meeting in a big company?)
Google have introduced a new means of delivering their news pages as illustrated here - news items are returned using photos and as you hover over the photos, so the related stories are served up in the right hand panel of the page.
Presently it only works for news from certain countries. The UK isn't included but the US is.
Women often joke that men find the word "again" to be terrifying in certain circumstances.
Repeat performances of the same quality are rare, yet investors will often back an entrepreneur that has succeeded in one venture in preference to a first timer or one that "failed". This suggests that they believe that the performance is repeatable or perhaps that successful ones are more likely to repeat their success. I've also had it suggested that investors prefer such entrepreneurs because it provides cover in case their venture fails i.e. saying I backed the founders of lastminute/skype versus a first timer won't land you in as much trouble.
Yet entrepreneurship is not a science. Ideas can fail to achieve traction or strategies be poorly executed. Sometimes successful ventures just got lucky.
In many ways it's no different from movies. If a film stars could guarantee hits, movie makers wouldn't have flops, but they do as the graph below shows.
I mention this only because in recent weeks, I've sat in a few meetings where I've heard people sharply inhale and adjust their posture when the entrepreneur has said it was their first attempt. It was almost as if this meant the venture was doomed. Worrying.
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. Not all of these albums were major releases or are still in print. 
