Google – cult or corporation?
Fixing the UK’s broadband crisis: Spiked’s Traffic jam debate
If you throw a rock in the air in London on any day of the working week, chances are it will land on a New Media conference. These are primarily social gatherings for the same group of academics and media hangers-on, and you can bet they’ll be Twittering. (I’m often invited – usually it’s because … Read more
Bringing it all back Hume: Anton Wylie
A philosophy of science that may be the best thing we’ve ever run WiReD magazine’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has just seen the end for scientific theories. And it is called Google. The concept of the mind, and by extension that of a person, was also affected, with far reaching implications. In psychology, Behaviourism was one … Read more
“What powers a solar-powered snail?”
Boffins have slammed examiners in England for setting school children seriously dumb questions. The Royal Chemistry Society said that the science exams for 14 year olds includes questions such as, “What powers a solar-powered snail?” The Society’s chief executive Dr Richard Pike told us that while the syllabus and text books covered a broad range … Read more
Flush away the Eco Slums
Who would have guessed that in 2008, a pledge to give British people flushing toilets would be a shock vote winner? The Conservatives this week promised to scrap the Government’s plans for 15 “eco towns” which will potentially house 100,000 people. These have been heralded as a new era in design, but you need to … Read more
Legal P2P ‘by year end’
Legal broadband subscription services that permit file sharing may appear on the market by the year’s end, according to music industry sources – after government intervention brought both music suppliers and ISPs to the table.
The UK would become the second country after South Korea where the music business has agreed to offer licenses to file sharing services in a bid to reverse declining revenues. The co-operation follows the intervention of “Brown’s Fist”, the former advisor and Parliamentary Under-Secretary at BERR (the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform) Baroness Shriti Vadera. Vadera is understood to have threatened both the ISP and music businesses with reform and policy intervention, threats which encouraged both parties to open negotiations.
The government is understood to be extremely reluctant to intervene with legislation as it threatened to do earlier this year, and cross-industry agreement to offer attractive consumer broadband music services would mean it wouldn’t have to.
No deals have been signed yet and significant details have yet to be addressed. These include the royalty share between mechanical, sound recording and publishing rights holders, and administration issues. A significant amount of music released has never been licensed digitally – so should a music service provider ignore it, or attempt to pay the owners? As for price, this will be determined by the ISPs. However, sources are confident that Q4 2008 or Q1 2009 will see such the first of these offered to the public.
The move would represent the most radical supply-side reform ever considered by the music business in the modern era.
Farewell then, Symbian
Ten years ago to the day, I attended the surprise foundation of Symbian. I was in Norway and sorry to miss the event today that closed the chapter – and probably the book – on the great adventure.
I find it exquisitely ironic that the philosophy behind the decision to end Symbian’s independent existence as a joint-ownership, for-profit consortium has its roots in the Microsoft antitrust trial. Symbian was created because the leading phone manufacturers desperately wanted to avoid Microsoft’s desktop monopoly being extended to mobile devices. They didn’t want a dependency on high license fees, rigid requirements and poor code.
Well. Philosophy might be a grand way of putting it – it’s more of a fashionable buzzword. This is the idea of “multi-sided markets”, which when you get down to it, is really just a fancy way of describing cross subsidization. The case for a “multi-sided business model” was made in an economic defence of Microsoft’s strategy of bundling Windows Media Player with Windows in the EU antitrust case. So take a bow, economist Richard Schmalensee, Microsoft’s favourite economist. It was Schmalensee who in the US antitrust trial argued that the true price for Microsoft Windows should be around $2,000 per license. The idea that emerged from the EU trials was that WMP created a “platform”, and therefore consumer benefits. The idea here is that Nokia, which now entirely owns Symbian, will cross-subsidize the market by giving away the Symbian OS, er … platform, royalty free.
How the iPhone puts a bomb under mobile networks
If you think everything that could have been written about the iPhone already has been written, prepare to be surprised. One vital aspect of Apple’s strategy has been overlooked – with multi-billion consequences for complacent network operators. Over at Telco 2.0, the blog of analysts STL Partners, we learn that networks who partner with Apple … Read more
EMI hires the Biggest Brain in Sadville
How desperate is EMI? Desperate enough to hire the co-founder of Sadville? Amazingly, yes. Not only is a graphics programmer joining the storied British music group as head of “digital strategy” – he cheerfully admits he doesn’t know anything about the music business. And he doesn’t even like music – he’s only bought five albums in the past eight years and three of those are by Rush.
Welcome to EMI, then, Linden Labs co-founder Cory Ondrejka.
Why didn’t Nokia become the next Sony?
When, a few years ago, I described Sony and Nokia as the only two companies who could call the shots in consumer electronics, a few eyebrows were raised. Sony, yes. But Nokia?
I anticipated that success in smartphones would be a beachhead into a bunch of other consumer electronics markets. Few noticed that Nokia already made TVs and set-top boxes. It had just launched a games console, too.
In fact, Nokia had began planning for “mobile multimedia convergence” in the mid-1990s, when it began sniffing out a next-generation operating system – it eventually opted for Psion’s Epoc, which became Symbian OS. For years Nokia put its best brains on the task – and sat back and waited. And waited.