Month: September 2006

And on to Vancouver, where Nettwerk are based. Clarence Fisher told me about this via his blog; thanks, Clarence!

Fundamentally, Terry McBride and gang at Nettwerk, having already challenged a number of traditional models in the music business, now go a step further. Put the album up for sale on MySpace. Give people the tools to play with it, remix it “their” way, do what they like with it. Encourage them to upload their remixes. And get the original band to comment on them. Co-creation.

Here’s the Wired article that covers the phenomenon. A few choice quotes:

• “The labels were never in the business of selling music,” says David Kusek, vice president of Boston’s Berklee College of Music and coauthor of The Future of Music. “They were in the business of selling plastic discs.”
• Musicians generally make very little from the sale of their records. The costs of production, marketing, and promotion are charged against sales, and even if they go multiplatinum and cover those costs, their cut of any extra revenue is usually less than 10 percent. On top of this, the labels typically retain the copyrights to the recordings, which allows them to profit from the musicians’ catalogs indefinitely.
• “The future of the business isn’t selling records,” McBride says. “It’s in selling music, in every form imaginable.” 
• ….the new model frees him and his artists from the overgrown bureaucracy of the music industry, and that means more money for everyone. He can book tours, sell ringtones, peddle songs to advertising agencies and, yes, give away free downloads without any of the complex, multiparty negotiations that once gummed up the works. “It used to take months to sell a frickin’ ringtone to Bell Canada,” McBride says. “With BNL, one phone call gets the job done.”
• “What other business splits up its key assets and sells them to separate businesses that wind up in conflict with each other?” asks Duncan Reid, a venture capitalist who now helps run UK-based Ingenious Music.

Read the article for yourself. And see why changes are necessary, and why people like Terry McBride and BNL and Nettwerk do what they do.

Have you ever had that feeling of being “sensitized” to a particular issue or concept, so much so that you find traces and images of it everywhere you look? I get that sometimes. It doesn’t last long, otherwise it could become an obsession.

Take today. There I was, laid up with the ‘flu, feeling like not doing very much. So I read and listened to music. And everywhere I looked, I saw IPR issues come streaming out.

So pardon the apparently random walk, and see for yourself what’s going on. This time I’ve broken it down to separate posts, hope that helps.
Free, but only for a while 

Let’s start with that august body, the Royal Society. They’ve done something amazing. I quote from their web site:

• Nearly three and a half centuries of scientific study and achievement is now available online in the Royal Society Journals Digital Archive following its official launch this week. This is the longest-running and arguably most influential journal archive in Science, including all the back articles of both Philosophical Transactions and Proceeding
• For the first time the Archive provides online access to all journal content, from Volume One, Issue One in March 1665 until the latest modern research published today ahead of print. And until December the archive is freely available to anyone on the internet to explore.
• Spanning nearly 350 years of continuous publishing, the archive of nearly 60,000 articles includes ground-breaking research and discovery from many renowned scientists including: Bohr, Boyle, Bragg, Cajal, Cavendish, Chandrasekhar, Crick, Dalton, Darwin, Davy, Dirac, Faraday, Fermi, Fleming, Florey, Fox Talbot, Franklin (pictured), Halley, Hawking, Heisenberg, Herschel, Hodgkin, Hooke, Huxley, Joule, Kelvin, Krebs, Liebnitz, Linnaeus, Lister, Mantell, Marconi, Maxwell, Newton, Pauling, Pavlov, Pepys, Priestley, Raman, Rutherford, Schrodinger, Turing, van Leeuwenhoek, Volta, Watt, Wren, and many, many more influential science thinkers up to the present day.
• After December 2006 subscribers to our subscription packages (S, A and B) will enjoy privileged online access to the archives. Private researchers will also be able to access individual articles for a small fee per download. To request further information please contact the Royal Society at [email protected] or view package pricing which includes ordering information.

Eh? Or as my going-slightly-deaf South African Seven Foot Tall primary school PE teacher Mr Deefholts used to say when he wasn’t sure of what he’d heard, “How much?”.

A fabulous archive. Available electronically for the first time. Free to all. But only for two months.

So what do they think people will do? Such a fabulous collection, all beautifully archived electronically, and now this. I applaud what they’re doing till the end of the year, but am at a loss to work out why they’ve done it the way they’ve done it. They have charitable status. Many of the papers are way way out of any copyright, even in this Mickey Mouse Nonsense world. Many of the papers were donated to them. The costs of creating the electronic archives have been sunk. If they were strapped for cash, then Google would have done the archiving for free. If they want donations to preserve the originals, that’s OK as well. But this neither-fish-nor-fowl situation? Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of a Con Sul Tant.

Have you ever wondered why India don’t have a team at the World Cup finals? [Here I am being obdurate and pedantic and loving it…. there is only one Open. And there is only one World Cup. There is absolutely no need to have adjectives before those words. Tautology bordering on treason).

You would imagine that a country with a population in excess of a billion may just be able to scratch up a decent soccer team. If, like me, you were born and raised in Calcutta, you would understand it even less. Because Calcutta is a soccer-crazy city. I would suspect that the brand awareness of East Bengal, Mohun Bagan (the oldest soccer club in Asia, dating back to 1889) and Mohammedan Sporting are individually greater than that of Sony, Microsoft and Apple put together, across the state of West Bengal as a whole.

I was brought up to love sport. And to go watch it. We had no television in the house. In fact, when I left India in 1980, I’d only seen a TV programme three times. And I could remember each occasion vividly. At the USIS, when man landed on the moon in 1969. Watching “I Love Lucy”, one of the first programmes to be screened, and wondering what the fuss was about. And trying to watch a cricket match at a friend’s house some years later while the adults were busy having lunch and arguing about cars and petrol. That was it.

Back to soccer. As a child I’d been told that India had actually qualified for the World Cup Finals in 1950, only to be disqualified later for refusing to put boots on. And I’d filed it under my childhood equivalent of “urban myth”. But later on I found out the truth. One, India did qualify; but only because their  qualification opponents all withdrew. Two, India did not really get disqualified later; they withdrew because FIFA insisted that no player appear barefoot, and the Indian team weren’t having that. That sounds about as believable as the USA-England scoreline that year…. :-) Read all about it in Wikipedia here.
India is currently ranked 137th in the world, and have recently announced some sort of tie-up with Brazil, across a number of fronts, including soccer. Park that to one side for a while.
While studying the nurture-versus-nature debate, I came across The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, published recently. I have not done any more than skim it, I need time. But the elevator pitch appears to be, Nurture Wins. Motivation and Perseverance and Coaching and Training Wins. Every Time. But it takes as long as it takes, usually Ten Years. If you want to see a summary of the book, which resonates with a lot of other things I believe in, you could do worse than read the latest issue of New Scientist, which reviews it here, but all too briefly, the rest is behind a paywall.

So I thought to myself. India. World Cup Finals. Ten Years. Which means qualifying for the 2018 Finals. From 137th to Top 10 in a decade, because of Nurture.

You see, ever since I read Porter’s Comparative Advantage of Nations in 1990 (an aside, try linking to that book!), I’ve always believed I understood why, say, Pakistan produced excellent squash players, why Germany had no real golfers until Langer, why Sweden had no world-class tennis players until Borg. Availability and opportunity. The willingness and motivation may be there, but there needs to be much much more. Opportunity. Availability.

That’s why the web and social software excite me so much. Opportunity. Availability.

Take a look at what Clarence Fisher is saying here. Fantastic stuff. Keep it going Clarence, your post is the kernel for this one.
All this drum-banging about social software is not because I own stock in one or more of the firms that produce them (I don’t. In fact since 1987 I have never owned stock in anything other than the company I worked for). It’s not because I think it’s cool and I want to be noticed. I’s not because I have nothing else to write about.

So why is it? It is because I care for disenfranchised people, and want to make a difference. Particularly because I grew up in Calcutta, I have always felt I understood something about the haves and the not-haves, the contrasts were stark there. And somewhere inside of me, I guess I think of myself as a street kid born into almost-bankrupt almost-nobility, yet with immense privileges and access.
What I see now, and what I have seen for the last twenty-odd years, is the emergence of a whole new set of sharp-contrast urban and suburban societies. But this time they’re in the West, so they don’t get called slums or shanty towns or anything like that. People use euphemisms like inner cities, urban degeneration, sometimes even admitting to terms like “underclass”.

This sharp-contrast society is everywhere. Worldwide. East and West, North and South, developed or not. And there’s a whole generation, maybe two, who are out there, without access or choices, living hand-to-mouth and primarily on their wits. Some angry, some depressed, some apathetic. Many with no options apparent to them but some form of crime.
And their primary fuel? Peer respect and recognition. You can’t blame them. Nobody else appears to care for them or even acknowledges their existence.

I think social software can go a long way in motivating people like that, giving them their dignity and self-respect back, giving them access and options they have never had.

For “education” read “anything you like”. For “disenfranchised inner city student” read “anybody”.

This thing we call social software is huge. It will take time. But it will happen. And we must do what we can to embed this thinking, this paradigm. In enterprise, in education, in government, in healthcare, even in world trade.

Markets are conversations. Conversations happen between people with relationships. Trust and transparency are the glue to relationships. Transactions are a by-product of the market, not the objective.

And social software helps us make this happen.

I read Economics at university. Many years ago. And my father used to keep telling me that the most dangerous phrase he’d ever heard an economist use was “Let us assume that…”.

So when I studied perfect markets and perfect information and rational behaviour, I understood the assumptions and understood that the assumptions were wrong. But it didn’t matter, or so I thought, since all we were doing was building theoretical models.

When it came to “perfect information”, I was naive enough to believe that the only constraints to perfect information existed in the technologies used to transport that information. It was only as I began to understand how organisations worked that I realised just how naive I was.

But there were parts of me that still believed, And so as Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder marched on, and the web became reality, I could see a way of using social software to inch towards perfect markets in some very specific niches.

Two niches in particular.

I wanted to be able to build a list of requirements using a wiki, and I wanted to be able to go through the search, price discovery, and fulfilment stages of purchasing something that meets those requirements via a blog.

Which brings me to this story in the Telegraph blog, pointed to me via Ross and Alexis. Thanks, guys.

When we look at the problems of requirements capture and their consequent impact on project costs and delivery, we need to look at ways to improve this process. We understand about time-boxing and time-placing, we understand about scope creep and requirements creep, we understand about extreme programming, pair programming, fast iteration. So why can’t we see that we can capture, share, iterate and evolve requirements much more effectively using wikis? I’m confused.

There ought to be a law that says “Information tends to go corrupt when hidden, and tends to corrupt those who participate in the process of hiding the information.”

We waste so much in the procurement process for the same reasons. We don’t use the tools we have to discover what’s out there. We don’t make the process a participative one. We make it worse by allowing the tenderers better access to the requirements than anyone else. I’m confused.

As with wikipedia and with the celebrity blogs, there will always be vandals, some in the interests of art, some in the interests of “freedom”, some for the heck of it.

But you don’t shut down record stores because Banksy makes a statement about Paris Hilton.

You don’t shut down museums because Marcel Duchamp puts a moustache on a copy of La Gioconda.

So why do we do this? Why do we have so much fear of perfect information? So much so we blame the tools, the people, everything.