Recent tech news is that Google has puchased Metaweb. Very interesting for any post-structuralist tech heads is that Metaweb has been developing a search engine that searches for what it calls ‘entities’ and what most post-structuralist philosophers would call ‘events‘, Dan Nosowitz’s description:
Essentially, it views keywords, the way we search now, as an inferior search method to what it calls “entities.” Words can vary in meaning, refer to different things, have different levels of importance or relevance at different times, and often return inexact results. So Metaweb has created a constantly growing database, or directory, of 12 million “entities,” which are really just persons, places, or things, and all the different ways you might refer to them. Wording isn’t so important with Metaweb, it’s the end meaning that matters.
Once Metaweb figures out to which entity you’re referring, it can provide a set of results. It can even combine entities for more complex searches–”actresses over 40″ might be one entity, “actresses living in New York City” might be another, and “actresses with a movie currently playing” might be another. Instead of searching through that jumble of keywords, Metaweb would just connect you to those three entities, and file down your results.
The “end meaning”, hey? The difference between ‘wording’ and ‘end meaning’ is precisely what Deleuze investigated in one part of his PhD work published as The Logic of Sense.
‘Wording’ implies an easy relation between a well or resource of meaning that only has to be properly accessed by sense-making mechanisms. This structuralist approach assumes a meaning and then goes and finds examples of it through algorithmic (or intuitive, for the human cognition machine,) ‘categorical’ pattern recognition.
The ‘end meaning’ is something else. The importance here is the use of ‘end’ which implies a temporal process. Deleuze argued that ‘sense’ is actualised as the movement between at least two series (signifier and signified). Deleuze’s proposition is a stripped down version of what happens in reality as he goes on to trouble the structuralist dance between signifier and signified with a materialist variation so that ‘sense’ (any meaning, in identity, reference, etc.) is not the transcendental over-determination of a categorical structure, but the immanent actualisation of a feedforward loop.
Think of a marriage. The sense of ‘this marriage’ is the actualisation of relation of futurity (this marriage in the future present) that emerges from the present materiality (this house, this couple, these bodies, this argument/kiss/dinner/etc.) as it circulates as and within the present materiality. This is still far too simplisitic however, because there isn’t just one sense that can transcendentally unify all others; rather, there is a baroque multiplicity of senses and correlative events, all immanent to different temporalities (this life, this career, this dinner, this week).
This is very exciting as it signals a shift from the linguistic algorithm fetish of existing crypto-humanities researchers of the web to a far more complex appreciation of meaning or ‘sense’ where meaning is produced as a process and not simply accessed from an over-determining ‘meaning’ structure. It is a move from a web searchable only in terms of its categorical generality to one organised around an immanent specificity (i.e. what Deleuze and Guattari called haecceitties).
Online business models. I hadn’t thought about ‘business’ at all except in a critical (but not always negative) sense until about a year ago. Here is an abstract to a paper I have in the works. However, I’ve been thinking about business models for the magazines since I’ve been involved in developing a new online presence for some of them. This post is the result of some of the thinking I have been doing on the subject and has been in the works for a while now (several weeks). I’ve been thinking about it constantly but have little time to actually work on it.
I work at Express Media Group, which publishes a number of niche-market enthusiast titles. EMG is currently developing its online presence and is working on ways to successfully integrate print and online publishing. As well as working as a Production Editor, I’ve been involved in developing some of the websites for the motoring titles. The first new website up is that for Zoom magazine.
We have a massive advertising campaign starting tomorrow that requires the other websites to be up and I am waiting on our overworked web team to finish them. I look forward to seeing the results.
I’ve been carrying out research in my own time to think about new business models that integrate print and online publishing. I have no official role in this at EMG (yet), rather I have been treating it as an extension of my PhD research on enthusiasm in modified-car culture where I looked at the relation between the enthusiast media and the scene over a 30 year period.
I used philosophical concepts to examine the composition of power relations in the organisation of the scene (dispositif) and how this has changed a number of times over the time period (an event-based conception of history). Now it seems my research is going to be the most relevant if it is developed in a simple set of critical tools for understanding legacy business models.
The general character of these legacy business models is mostly well understood. The current public workshops being hosted by the FTC are working on the issues and problems of “how the Internet has affected journalism”. The FTC has posted a Staff Discussion Draft paper that explores some of the points raised over the course of several months worth of hearings. In the first few pages of the paper (2-3) the FTC outlines the general problem with legacy business models faced by all print-based publishers. I have extracted the three main points below:
1. Newspapers’ revenues from advertising have fallen approximately 45% since 2000. For example, classified advertising accounted for $19.6 billion in revenue for newspapers in 2000, $10.2 billion in 2008, and is estimated to be only $6.0 billion in 2009.
2. With the advent of the Internet, advertisers have many more ways in which to reach consumers, including, for example, through a marketer’s own website or through topical websites that relate to the products that an advertiser wants to sell (e.g., a soccer blog for soccer equipment). Search engines also provide sites for advertising related to particular search queries.
3. Although some types of online advertising (e.g., advertising targeted to a consumer’s known interests) can generate greater revenue than other types (e.g., banner ads), the vast supply of online sites for advertising reduces the amount that an online news site can charge for advertising at its site. This means that online advertising typically generates much less revenue than print advertising (often described as “digital dimes” as compared to the dollars generated by print ads). It appears unlikely that online advertising revenues will ever be sufficient to replace the print advertising revenues that newspapers previously received.
First year journalism students are taught about the ‘news hole’ well in the actual publishing business there is often an ‘advertising hole’ as well. As more advertisers have moved online to directly target the niche market enthusiast communities that the advertiser services, there are less advertisers looking at print-based advertising. Of course, this is a generalisation as there are many enthusiast communities, of mostly older enthusiasts, that have not gone online.
All is not lost, however. There are other ways to sell advertising beyond simple ‘display’-type advertising. Dan Blank has a good post up from over a year ago on different sources of revenue for online media publishers.
The main goal here is for editorial teams to be pursuing fewer standalone articles that rely solely on CPM ads, and look to more integrated packages that build many products from a single effort.
For the last six years or so I have long looked at this from the flip side. Media events assembled from a series of inter-related texts. Often these texts are assembled around a non-media product, so a product is doubled as its media-based simulacra. It was the basis of my work I carried out on exchange to Sweden during my PhD looking at media events not as the media coverage of an event, but the event produced through the media.
In social media circles posting the same material across a number of channels is called ‘content leverage’. So a Facebook post about a blog post describing a Youtube video is Tweeted. At EMG I have been working on producing media content from single opportunities that can be distributed across a number of media channels. So far the best example of this was an ECU guide in Zoom issue 147 that is currently on the stands. I have several hours of video that I shot and I am currently editing to be posted to our Youtube channel and posted to our blog. Here is an example:
The real problem with thinking about new business models for niche/enthusiast media that integrate online and print elements is that most of the current discussion about the state of print media has been about ‘hard news’. Niche/enthusiast media and ‘hard news’ work following different journalistic models of content production. For example, Blank writes:
An underlying theme in many of these is to create evergreen content whose shelf life is longer than a news article – with multiple segments that extend the ways you can market it and sell it. Focusing on business needs beyond the cycle of “breaking news” may diminish the reliance on the single revenue model of advertising.
We already do this to a certain extent, but we are going to be doing much more of this style of content production and it is going to be a real challenge for editorial teams working under increasingly tight deadlines (we make a magazine per week on average!). To make this possible Blank has two suggestions:
1) Editorial teams mapping out a product roadmap, not just an editorial calendar.
2) Editorial teams working more closely with their sales teams to come up with these ideas, and ensure that the sales dept has this information with enough time to test the market, and ideally, sell these products.
Working closer to advertising sales teams is not a problem, the other challenge, beyond deadlines, is getting a sense of what is happening in the scene. There is so much activity nowadays that to track it all, even just all the online activity, for the scene in Australia is a full-time role.
So where to go from here? I am currently rewriting some of my PhD research for a draft paper about legacy media business models for niche/enthusiast media.
The recent Toyota recall is more about a panic over the forthcoming fully-automated automobility than it is about actual threat, as I argue in a new piece over at New Matilda.
Tim Burrows has written up an account of the Toyota Yaris ad affair. The ad itself. Tim’s account follows the timeline of what happened and outlines it with a kind of decision-tree logic that makes it exciting and dramatic as we get to find out how this epic fail was distributed across a number of decisions. This is a far more productive way to account for failure than a juridical mode, which simply seeks to attribute blame (or minimize it) because these complex interactions across a number of actors in the affair (various ad people, agency people, Toyota people, etc) all contributed to the end result.
I posted a comment in response to another commenter, Schaden Freude, who ironically expressed caution about being too critical of the advertising campaign behind the Yaris affair. It annoyed me because it expressed a naïve position that social media was something that everyone has ‘experienced’ but was still trying to figure out. This is nonsense. My original comment:
Nonsense. Using social media is not some big experiment where the outcome is an enigmatic divination of public will and/or stupidity. ‘Experience’ in/with social media is not what is required. What is required is a critical understanding of the specific function of deploying the various ’social media’ tools as part of a well thought-out PR strategy and highly tactical management of these tools as a campaign unfolds.
Brands go viral in a media ecology, ’social media’ is a collective term to describe very different tools to manage the circulation of this brand in the ecology. Without the very active, hands-on tactical management of the virus-brand you simply have a bunch of people ticking boxes for a PR campaign recipe about what social media options they think are a good idea.
Think tending to a brand garden and not baking a brand cake.
Another commenter, sven, asked me to explain what I am talking about, which is fair enough with my mixing of metaphors and hastily-assembled text. (I am busy at work, now doing freelance!!) I don’t really care about the ad. My point is not about the lack of taste or the efficacy of shock-values in viral marketing. My point is about the lazy use of social media. Social media is not an ends, it is a means. (EDIT: Or here for a timely post by Neil Perkin.) What do you with social media? You can:
1) Host the conversation. Discussion about something between interested parties.
2) Extend the event. Off-line reality can be extended online, like friendship networks mapped on facebook, but more specific, so this night out discussed with the actual people that were there (or who would’ve liked to have been there). It gives the discussion an affective glue through an assumed shared sense of purpose.
3) Cultivate enthusiasm. Cultivate, yeah? Like a garden… Social networks online and off-line organise around people’s interests. When you use social media you want to tap into social networks. So you need to understand these interests or the stronger version of interest, enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a force, it is a resource, and what I wrote my PhD about.
There is little point using it for anything else when current techniques will suffice. Social media is used because the ‘media’ bit serves as part of the infrastructure of the ‘social’ bit.
So if the enthusiasm of people is a resource and harnessing it is contingent on extending their social events by providing the infrastructure for ‘discussion’ (in the broadest sense, sharing stuff, etc), then Toyota’s campaigner strategy should have been to:
1) Target the specific enthusiasms pertaining to the demographics of the market segment they were trying to capture.
2) Then target the specific social media platforms and niche groups of this enthusiasm/interest. Simply setting up a group on Facebook group is like walking into a newsagent and blindly choosing a magazine within which to run advertising. There is myriad number of possible ways to connect with the market segment.
3) Help encourage the rituals of sharing belonging to the cultural formations organised around these enthusiasms and other kinds of activity (producing, distributing, circulation of knowledge, etc.).
Why didn’t they target a niche social group where there is a crossover between rudimentary video production skills and a partial interest in the car? And if they don’t have the production skills? Why not set-up your own website with short video tutorials on how to make videos? Provide a resource that will catch people’s interest in the social media infrastructure of your own making. You could run two competitions. With the other being awarded to the best video about making videos. How many people would want to watch those? Have a forum where people can swap tips about video production, etc. Provide the resources to sow the interest and then cultivate the enthusiasm. Didn’t they already do this with a music DJ/mixing site where you could make your own tunes?
The Yaris campaign management did the complete opposite of this process of cultivation. Instead they ‘did’ social media by assembling all the ingredients assumed to be correct, i.e. Facebook and Twitter, without actually understanding the ‘social’ bit of ‘social media’. The use of ‘social media’ was completely ineffective.
Monetizing Enthusiasm: The Missed Opportunity of Social Media and Car Enthusiast Magazines
Abstract: The publishing industry that services the scene of modified-car culture in Australia has largely missed the boat when it came to moving from being a once profitable commercial print industry into a profitable social media enterprise. This paper explores the reasons for this failure in the context of the last 30 years of modified-car culture and the enthusiast media industry that developed around it. A number of possible approaches are proposed for monetizing enthusiasm through social media that should be useful for other enthusiast scenes.
When post-structuralist marxists become capitalist.
I wonder where Christian is on McKenzie Wark‘s diagram of what Jodi Dean called his Grand Unified Theory.
Wark’s diagram represents social classes/subjectivities not in relation to the means of production, but in relation to the labour of capitalising on opportunity.
I have recently written about sharing (halfway down the post) in the context of new experiences producing new configurations of intimacy and estrangement. Cathie McGinn has an interesting and, for me at least, provocative post on her blog about the tension between the public/private distinction and the socio-technical convenience of sharing online. She argues that bad behaviour online is often justified by the trigger of emotional states. This seems logical, most bad behaviour by well-adjusted adults is often due to being upset. I want to propose an alternative to the possible cause of why this is happening.
Rather than being lawless and consequence-free, thus implying that what one does online is of little importance, I suggest the opposite is true. When you write under your own name and write about your own life in such a way to share it with whoever cares to google you, there is a burden of absolute importance placed on what you share. Everything written has to be worthy of your life and the future consequences of your life forever archived in the global google database.
There is ethical challenge here, of having to be worthy of one’s own life and the events that constitute it. It means that if you do want to share, then you’d better live in a way that is worthy of sharing. I believe this is what Cathie meant by everyone living in glass houses. This is not about living an exciting or hedonistic existence, but of living a reflective and satisfying one. Therefore, if there is a trend toward so-called ‘peep culture’, then it is not about the tabloidisation of everyday life into bite-sized titilation of 140char or less, but a far more ethical mode of existence.
Problematic for me is the discourse of adolescence and adulthood that Cathie draws upon to make her point. I have talked about adulthood and this notion of ‘growing up’ in the past. We “grow up online”, she is concerned with the “genuinely awful behaviour performed by otherwise functional adults”, which reminds her of her “giddy immediacy of my teenage years”. I have little time for fuckwits online or off. If people want to carry on like fuckwits online, then the solution is not to barricade their online personas with a firewall of anonymity, but to become better people and stop behaving like fuckwits! LOL! Of course, we have the distinct capacity to emphasise and to care for others in need. Sometimes this means forgiving others for social transgressions, and going to war against bullies with a brilliant fury when they start picking on people. People need to be worthy of the capacities of social communication technologies, rather than sublimating them into their fragile egos.
Well, just because something is being played everywhere else on mainstream radio, does that mean that it doesn’t deserve a place on Triple J? Deserve the airtime?
Well, we’ve got a brief; we’ve got a charter that says that we should provide young Australia an alternative to what they’re getting elsewhere, to a certain degree. That’s a big part of our charter – that we don’t just mimic what is already out there in the marketplace. Mind you, it’d be good if commercial stations that get new licenses could also abide by that…but that’s another conversation point.
Coming back to those artists that are being played on commercial stations elsewhere: Kanye West, Lily Allen, Ladyhawke, Cut Copy, the Presets…all of those acts were started by Triple J. All of those acts got their first airplay on Triple J. All of those acts have had absolute consistent airplay on Triple J – every one of their songs have hit the mark, and we’ve played every single album they’ve put out, or tracks thereof. Now, with the Sneaky Sound System stuff, we didn’t support them in the beginning. We felt like that band was going to go somewhere else. That band was designed for commercial radio. There was no need for us to go there.
So anyone that criticises us for not playing them – just because they’re Australian, just because they’re independent: fuck you.
Triple J’s Hottest 100 of All Time has been criticised by various people for the lack of female vocalists. My friend Mel Campbell writing for the awesomely titled The Enthusiast described it as an embarrassing shortcoming. Mel argues that there is a “danger [...] that people use these lists to create an imaginary musical landscape that subtly omits the contributions of women.” And extends this critique to isolate a further “danger [...] that radio music directors can look at these lists and think, ‘Clearly people don’t want to hear songs by women.’” Mel then analyses the distribution of female workers across the main organisational structure of the expanded Triple J enterprise, which includes radio, magazine, television, but curiously no web? The organisational structure of a given istitution that serves as part of a scenes infrastructure is important. Various popular culture and music scholars have highlighted the importance of various kinds of businesses in the consiution and robust survival of a given scene.
I want to draw a connection between the critique of the most recent Hottest 100, mostly from the Left, and the more common critique of Triple J, mostly from the Right, that argues that Triple J is ‘out of touch’ with youth. I thought someone needed to defend Triple J. Firstly, the critique of the gendered nature of the Hottest 100 of All Time is problematic, not because it is wrong, but because I so far haven’t read anything that goes far enough. The Hottest 100 of All Time is merely symptomatic, the structural conditions of the social milieau to which Triple J mostly belongs needs to be critiqued. Secondly, the naysayers who argue that falling listener share in the radio ratings is evidence of a failure of Triple J and key Triple J personel is essentially flawed. I don’t think the people that make such criticisms are stupid, they just have accounted for the shifting terrain of the media landscape and how young people use various mediums to get their media.
Considering I cracked 30 earlier this year, I can’t be considered youth anymore or even young adult. Kate Crawford’s book Adult Themes explored the problematic location of people like me that haven’t yet assumed the specific roles associated with being ‘adult’ and yet retain tastes and cultural practices that are more ‘youth’ than ‘adult’. It means that I am writing about Triple J not as part of their target audience, but from somewhere on the periphery. I grew up listening to the Jay’s, my listening practices began just after they became a national radio network. I can distinctly remember laughing with my brother as the old Triple J announcer/personality and ‘resident dag’ Maynard Crabbes offered commentary while Pseudo Echo’s Funky Town played: “Guitar solo! weeeEEEheeEE” “Synth solo! waaAAAhaaaAA”
I spent many nights of my youth with the radio on as I drifted off to sleep. It was my connection to a world bigger than the comfortable and loving surrounds of the familial home and mainstream tastes of my mates that I with which I grew up. It was an opening on a world that I had little idea about. At this particular point in time, Triple J was almost solely a radio station charged with the responsibility of providing an alternative to the commercial radio stations. Various youth subcultures were given ‘air time’ and the more generalist shows played music that was at the time literally ‘alternative’ to the other radio stations and often produced by ‘independent’ record labels.
The alternative music generes were almost always collapsed into ‘alternative rock’. ‘Indie’ music hadn’t yet become a genre and actually referred to the structural conditions of music production. Now ‘indie’ is a genre, as is ‘alternative’. The structural conditions of the production of music has largely been elided as the big labels realised they could buy or create boutique labels in house for the purposes of capturing a slice of the various indie/alternative niche markets. This quasi-Marxist critique of the relation between Triple J and the music scene needs to be revisited in light of the Unearthed competition, created largely in response of the Indie-fication of the mainstream.
As Will Straw and other popular music scholars have argued there has long been a gendered binary within popular music between a feminised ‘pop’ and a masculine ‘rock’. The ‘games of distinction’ belonging to rock that valorised masculine cultural qualities of music, such as toughness, loudness, frankness, etc. were mapped on to the genre of indie/alternative as signifiers of the separation from the feminised ‘pop’ mainstream. (This argument is not entirely accurate the ‘mainstream’ side of the genedered binary had the big hair/cock rock bands of the 1980s and early 1990s.)
If we follow the post-structuralist feminsts in their separation of gender and biological sex in the production and distribution of difference throughout cultural formations, then the problem with the Hottest 100 becomes slightly different. The Hottest 100 of All Time is explicitly sexist due to the lack of female vocalists and preponderance of all-male ensembles. It would seem that Triple J remains properly configured around the sexist binary that defines appreciation of indie/alternative popular music. But if the question is posed in terms of gender and non-hegemonic masculinities, then the critique of the sexist character of the Hottest 100 of All Time loses some of its sting. A simple perusal of the list will demonstrate what I am getting at.
The other potentially more damning critique is that Triple J is ‘out of touch’ with its target audience of youth. Ratings figures are mobilised to demonstrate Triple J’s falling share of the radio listener pie (hmmm, tasty!). Radio listeners? How much of the Triple J enterprise is focus on the radio? If the Jay’s have lost some of the percentage share of the radio listeners in their target markets, then this is good thing. Listener numbers have been dropping for years, which is why ethically bankrupt people are on mainstream radio to try to grab attention anyway they can.
Triple J should be understood as a brilliant example of an old media model adapting to the new media landscape. I have often listened to podcasts, particularly of the nightly current affairs show, Hack. They have expanded into television with Triple J TV. Are the ‘ratings’ for these other media ‘channels’ taken into account when Triple is critiqued rather simplisitcally in terms of raw radio listener numbers? Nope. The other radio stations are dying slowly and fucking painfully for the rest of us mildly-sane people. The expansion of the Triple J brand into cross-media opportunities afforded by ‘new media’ is a very interesting model for the rest of us who may work in an old media industry who has yet to grasp the distributed character of brand management. The biggest success story is Triple J’s Unearthed competition. It largely uses popular music radio’s ‘old media’ function to valorise some music over others through exposure connected with the ‘new media’ function of connectivity. One of my students from a few years ago was in a band that won the NSW section of the competition and I witnessed exactly what happened in terms of exposure and new opportunities.
The contemporary Triple J has a strong and resonant identity across Australia, if not the world. Triple J is an icon of popular music and youth culture. It has inherited a cultural values and practices that emerged when a radio station was merely a radio station. There is a burden of cultural inheritance that has stumped many a canny media operator, my own experience is in the magazine industry certainly supports the thesis that many managers don’t really know what to do, even yet, after 10-15 years of the net. Triple J is not just a radio station, yet it has reinvigorated the best elements of the function of a radio station in different ways across a number of media channels.
Here are some results from links and ideas various people have sent from my post to the cultstud list and blog several weeks ago. Here is another post. The reason I am posting this to my blog now is because Google Android’s mobile operating system has received some positive critical comments regarding its barcode scanning application (see end link below).
David Silver let me know about Microsoft’s endeavour to produce a Windows Mobile Media (WMM) based application for scanning barcodes with mobile devices and sending phones to urls, the Advance User Resource Annotation System (AURA). Senior Research Sociologist leading the Community Technologies Group, MarcSmith, on the system. An interview with him on CNET. Paper by Smith. A video where he explains the logic behind the system. As the above video attests ‘bringing people together’ means bringing ‘consumers together’, but because of the capacity to collectively annotate any barcode, it doesn’t just have to be ‘consumers’. A paper on a field test of the system. Here is a forum post by someone who explores how to actually use AURA as part of the test beta.
Beyond the Microsoft horizon there are many other interesting devices and systems that had been developed. There was also the Cuecat system (and fiasco!). Bryan Behrenshausen pointed me in the direction of http://www.nearfield.org/ which seems to be a group of Nordic researchers investigating the design potential of RFID systems. Bryan writes “I like the Touch project because it’s run by a collective with such varied backgrounds — computer science, sociology, anthropology, design, communication studies, etc. Consequently, the project can examine the history of touch, embodied practice, design directions, and social consequences of/for these new technologies.” He also pointed me towards the Barcode Battler, which is not a post-human rearticulation of the aspirational Australian lumpen proletariat, but a game that involved collecting bar-coded playing cards and using this proprietary reader to ‘battle’ (like a precursor to Pokémon or something).
Machine readable codes have a long history. Ted Striphas sent me an article of his on the function and history of code-based ISBN technology in the ‘back office’ of the publishing industry. He observes that the gradual introduction of the machine-readable coding technologies intensified the productivity (or, in Marxist terminology, increased the production of surplus-value) of logistics workers in the mega-bookseller companies such as amazon.com. It transformed the character of the industry from one that was slow and full of logistical redundancies to one that was streamlined by databases. The barcode becomes a literal representation of the exploitation of workers in an intensified Taylorist enterprise where workers are continually assessed by overseers for efficiency in the rate of logistical processing and dispatch. Ref: Ted Striphas “Cracking the Code: Technology, Historiography, and the “Back Office” of Mass Culture” Social Epistemology Vol. 19, Nos. 2-3, April-September 2005, pp. 261-282
What I am imagining is an inversion of this process. Not to sabotage the logistical chains of contemporary consumer culture, but a repurposing of the barcode and the database. Deleuze writes about code as the numerical language of control:
In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password [...]. The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it.
For anyone who has grown up in this culture, and especially those who have worked in the service industry, all this is obvious.
Erik Hermansen discusses the logics behind ‘push’ versus ‘pull’ uses of barcode readers. He describes barcode readers as the killer app that will get people using the new feature laden smartphones:
Cell phones will start pulling information off the internet about products and companies. And nobody will be able to control it except the people doing the pulling. Who wins or loses when everybody gets the information they want to make spending decisions?
The consumer wins. Obviously. Dramatically. How many bad decisions have you made with no greater input than a price tag, product packaging, and the advice of a 19-year-old wearing a tie and sneakers? No more, my friend. Head into those flourescent-lit aisles armed with knowledge.
The mobile manufacturers win, because technology-assisted spending is the killer app that will finally cut through feature apathy. People are buying these sophisticated machines that they don’t really understand, so they mainly just use them as phones. Most people have figured out SMS and ring tones by now, but beyond that, the non-geeks don’t care much about all the bells and whistles. To make people truly interested in what mobile devices can do, a “gateway” feature with real-world value is needed. Save money on your shopping bill–everybody gets that, so lead with it!
1) Idea behind technology: Nationalistic Singstar editions.
Names: Singstar Australia Day Edition, Singstar Independence Day Edition, etc. these are only examples, as each national market would have its own particular name.
Description: Sony can tap into the affects of the popularist nationalism. A Singstar disk installment that collects all the popular pop and folk anthems for each respective country. Imagine how many they would sell for backyard BBQs for Australia Day for the Singstar Australia Day Edition? “Tie me kangaroo down, sport” “Down Under” (already on one of them) “Great Sourthern Land” “My Island Home” “Waltzing Matilda” some Bee Gee action, bit of Acka Dacka, and some latter day tunes like The Living End, maybe some Kasey Chambers and so on. Ok, so Australia is one market, perhaps a useful test market, but imagine the US version of Singstar Independence Day Edition (or Singstar Fourth of July Edition). Money maker, Sony!
2) Idea behind technology: Digital marking device for teachers.
Names: Tacticle Digital Editor (TDE) or ‘teddy’ .
Description: This technology would combine slim PC-based digital book or document reader + a touchscreen + some software not unlike Word’s “track changes” function. This is to address the problem in marking where 90% of students get 90% of the same comments. Markers and examiners can then have the text open on the screen and a menu of comments on one side of the screen. While reading the assessment the marker can touch the screen to highlight, drag and drop comments from the menu, and a plug-in a USB keyboard to add comments. The device would have a ‘comment library’ which markers would add to and swap. It could be connected via wifi to the big plagiarism checker search engine/databases as well as other databses such as bibliographies to provide further direction for reading material to students. I am thinking as a university educator, but it would be very useful for any text- or print-based design work. The core principle is having a portable ‘sandbox’-type interface that receives tactile input to control digital data. It would be much bigger than a PDA, I am thinking about the size of a superslim 19-inch LCD screen. It would also function as a basic PC (ie with a retractable stand, so it becomes a monitor, and USB/WiFi/ethernet connections).
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