A Fake Prison Break and the Power of Projection

Hot on the heels of my post about the potential uses for ever-smaller and more powerful video projectors comes a great example out of Holland.

It seems a Dutch magazine used video projection to make a point about a the growing issue of prison breaks in Belgium:

The video depicts a group of young guys hastily getting together a projector to fake a prisoner climbing out of his window in a famous prison complex called Bijlmerbajes.            LINK

See the video for yourself below and just try to imagine where this could go next…

The Future is Now, Ep. 2 – This One’s For My Dad (LG GD910 Wristphone)

Yesterday it was digital tattoos and today it’s this ridiculously sci-fi LG GD910 Wristphone.

This isn’t some Dick Tracy walkie-talkie for your wrist.  No, sir.  This wristphone hooks you up with two-way video conferencing.  For my father, who presently does some psychological counseling with patients via Skype, this little taste of the future, now, means that he can do his work while strolling through the park or lounging on the beach.

While not yet a flawless device, I can’t imagine it will take long before it they’ve worked out the kinks.

See for yourself in this somewhat cheesy promo video:

Japan’s Smile Scanners a Classic Misuse of Technology

As pointed out on the Freakonomics Blog:

Japan’s Keihin Express Railway Co. has set up “smile scanners” at 15 of its stations, where railway employees have their smiles assessed by software in the hopes of perfecting a customer-friendly look.       LINK

This is such a classic misuse of technology by a corporation.  The goal of the company is to provide more positive and friendly customer service but their technique of using a “smile scanner” is going to have the opposite effect.  Nobody likes to be forced into happiness and the employees will end up resenting the scanners, their bosses for making them use the scanners and the customers for expecting them to smile.

Instead, a smart company would try to figure out how to make their employees genuinely happy so that they smile because they want to smile.  This would create endless positive outcomes for the company, the employees and the customers.

Sometimes technology can look like it provides a quick fix when, in fact, it is just an illusion.

Billboard Drops Paywall, Adds Streaming for a Dime

Billboard.com, still considered the leading trade publication for the popular music industry, is dropping its paywall on its website, making all of their Hot 100 and related chart data available for free.

To be honest, I hadn’t known this info was behind a paywall.  I’ve never really done any deep music chart research.  Still, it strikes me as a wise move since I can’t imagine it is hard to find others listing this data for free elsewhere on the web, legally or not.

The stranger part of the Billboard announcement is how they are hoping to earn money from selling access to actual music.  Billboard, it seems, has a deep library and all the proper agreements in place with the labels so they are a natural source for finding music.  However, their plan is weird:

The site…will offer free music streaming and paid downloads, both powered by digital music site Lala. Users will be able to stream a song once for free, and then pay 10 cents to access it anytime thereafter.       LINK

It’s that last part that seems so weird.  You listen to a song once and then you pay them a dime to be able to come to the site and stream it again anytime you want?  What if you want to listen to the song on your iPod or on your laptop during a WiFi-less flight?  Even at the cost of a dime, it doesn’t seem like you are getting much for your money.

Plus, as we all saw with Amazon going onto people’s Kindles and removing books they’d already paid for, these licenses are absolutely nothing like actually buying the content.

Coke Fails to Block Sprite Blowjob Spec Spot – See It Here!

Just a quick follow-up to my previous Sprite Blowjob Spec Spot kerfuffle post…

While Coca Cola Company has been doing an ok job keeping the ad off of YouTube, below is proof that getting something off the internet is about as easy as stirring your cream back out of your coffee.

That’s via the Russian site TopNews and was the fourth link on a Google video search for “Banned German Sprite Ad.”

I hope Coca Cola is glad they’ve wasted all those resources on a fools errand when they could have been laughing it off and soaking up the free publicity.

Coke Calls Foul on Blowjob Ad for Sprite

As pointed out by Gawker, there is now a somewhat rich history of so-called “spec” ads that get released online and quickly disowned by whatever product was being shilled in such an unspeakable manner:

A spec ad—at least the ones you hear about—is basically an unofficial ad that will never get officially sanctioned by the brand represented. Often because of too much sexiness! For example, that JC Penney pro-teen sex ad that caused such a ruckus last year, on the blogs, turned out to be a spec ad. Ad people make spec ads for many reasons: to audition their work in hopes of winning an account, for ad competitions, or just because they are bored and horny.

The most recent example of this trend is a spec ad for Sprite featuring a popular sexual act.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the spec ad was very popular and was generating plenty of views and mentions online.  While somewhat inappropriate, it certainly did a good job selling the product.

I’d love to show you the ad but Coca Cola Company, in their great wisdom, had the spot pulled from YouTube for violating copyright on the Sprite logo.

Who cares if the ad was popular are likely to put the word “Sprite” back in the minds of many a horny teen?

This approach of squashing what amounts to free publicity in the form of true fan dedication baffles me and makes it clear that old business models and practices have completely failed to take advantage of the opportunities presented in the digital age.

Kindle Actions Explain Popularity of Piracy

While the major publishers, studios and labels bitch and moan about how piracy is destroying their business they continue to make decisions that only reinforce the reason people resort to piracy in the first place – and no, it’s not all about price.

Take this for example:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.      LINK

Now, Amazon has backtracked slightly, claiming these titles had been released without proper authorization but that doesn’t change the underlying issue.  In the good ol’ Industrial Age, if you went to a store and bought a book and took that book home than that book was yours forever.  No matter what some publisher decides later, nobody could come into your home and take back that book without being charged for theft, even if they left a few bucks on the shelf.

In a similar manner, when I acquire a song or film or ebook via a file-sharing service and I download that file to my iPhone or laptop, that file is mine and, without a fair amount of hacking, nobody can take that file away from me.  I can move it around, copy it and even share it with other friends because it is mine.

With a Kindle, the fact is your never OWN anything.  All you really are buying is an extremely limited license to read the book on your Kindle unless Amazon decides otherwise.  This is not the same thing as buying a book.

Unless the major content distributors of the world figure out the difference they will continue to lose to the gray market that allows people to truly own their content.

thehumanprinter and the Value of Sweat

I’ve read an overwhelming number of posts about something called “thehumanprinter” this week.

As described by PSFK (the last post I read on the subject):

Adding an element of handcrafting to the mechanical process of printing, thehumanprinter is a group of people that translate and hand-render images in the style of a digital printer.

In the same vein as my Print/Vinyl post, this is another fascinating example of taking something easily accessible, and usually free, in its digital form – a photo – and turning it into something people will pay to own.

See, as digital photos approach a price a free, they lose a certain value as a collectors item, or something others might pay to possess.  But take that same image and recreate it through a painstaking human process with a resulting one-of-a-kind object and suddenly you have a potential business model.

Lot’s of lessons here, people, if you’re paying attention.

Five Bucks a Month for New York Times Online? Yeah, Right.

Lot’s of people are talking about a New York Time’s survey asking if folks would pay $5/month for full online access to the “paper.”

Gawker thinks its a great and necessary idea while Business Insider says they should charge more.

They’re both wrong.  Here’s why:

1) If the NYT erects a pay wall bloggers will be far less likely to link to them and their own readers will be less likely to share links. This is the life-blood on the online world and without it no site can survive.

2) There is FAR too little original content to convince readers to pay the New York Times for news that is widely reported by, well, everyone else.  Unless every single news reporting site agreed to similar pay walls (not gonna happen) the New York Times simple places itself in a barren desert with nary a reader in sight.

There are more minor reasons this would fail, but those are the big two.

Oh, and in response to Business Insiders comment that:

Kindle pricing also forces the question: If Times stories without video, without interactivity, without color — and without all the other stuff at nytimes.com — are worth $14 a month on the Kindle, why in the world is the web site only worth $5?

Except, how many Kindle owners are actually subscribing to the NYT via their Kindle?  Even if a good number are doing so, Kindle owners are by definition affluent and so what’s another few bucks.

Woody Allen Describes Web2.0 Biz Models in 1977

I was watching one of Woody Allen’s best films, “Annie Hall,” last night and a line jumped out at me.  It is during the party scene in LA, hosted by a completely smarmy Paul Simon.

As Alvy and Annie are walking around, we pick up snippets of conversation.  This one sounds exactly like nearly every web2.0 business plan I’ve ever heard:

Right now, it’s only a notion, but I think i can get money to make it into a concept and later turn it into an idea.

Yes, Woody Allen was way ahead of his time.  True, time has now caught up with him and perhaps sped on by, but in 1977 that man was the bleeding edge.