It must be one of those weeks. This morning I got a skype message from my friend, Ervin, in San Francisco, to tell me the sad news that Bruce Jackson had died in a plane crash in Palm Springs over the weekend. Bruce was one of the legends of the live sound business in Australia [...]
Amazing isn't it…? There are only two major recording artists that are not legally available as digital downloads – one is AC/DC and the other is The Beatles. But someone has now put together all of the Beatles songs and videos into a “YouTube” styled interface so that you can access them all in one [...]
This is the third article in this series entitled: The Economics of Video Entertainment Part 1 Here Part 2 Here For the last couple of days I’ve been leading up to talking about the individual value proposition as to why people purchase, watch, read or listen to certain types of content. Hedonic pricing [...]
Of course there is no free lunch… Someone, somewhere pays. The problem for a lot of businesses nowadays is that they have come to expect to get paid not one, but at every point that their particular piece of IP is used. The place where I think the classic 'free' model got started was Dolby. [...]
Last Friday in a Swedish Court, the four pirates were awarded four years of jail time and financial damages against them (for running a Google search engine) of over three million dollars. In February three Thai CD Pirates were handed out jail sentences under a year each and fined $14,200 each for pressing 306 [...]
On Monday I am going back to California. I have meetings planned with several VC's to talk about Vquence – and at their request too. And also want to try to close at least one potential customer and establish a working relationship with an agency that is a specialist in online campaigns that cross from [...]
(This is the first in a series of writings about emerging business ecosystems in social networks – with particular reference to video sharing) I have been thinking about the whole issue of getting clarity about the business ecosystem that we all operate in. And it is amazing to me that even quite senior managers in [...]
It's no surprise we like video. It's the future. So good news. Today we announce a heavyweight contender launching into the video arena. We know it remakes content on the web. Why? Chris Gilbey founded it with a very fine technology thinker, Silvia Pfeiffer. The company went public today in Sydney and Santa Monica. Read [...]
A friend of mine catches BART into San Francisco each day. He gets off to catch a company shuttle each morning. The company he works for – Dolby Labs – has a small white bus that holds 10 or 12 people. Very modest. For the last month since he started this routine he has been [...]
Vegas at the CES. This is the most extraordinary place during the Consumer Electronics Show. First to get out of your hotel you have to walk past the gaming tables and slot machines – acres of them – in order to get to the exit. Then to go somewhere you have to line up for [...]