If You’ve Got Unlimited Texts…Use Them

Followers of this blog know that I am not a fan of text messages or more specifically the crazy rates cell phone companies charge for them. These 160-character (and by the way, when’s the last time you got a 160-character message from someone) communiqués can cost 20 cents a message.

However, some people have avoided this problem by getting unlimited text messaging. One option to take advantage of this is to send and receive massive amounts of messages, but that doesn’t show much creativity. One way to really take advantage of unlimited texting is a new service called DotGo, which I heard about here from the good folks at technologizer.com.

DotGo allows you to send the domain name of a website in a text message to them. The top-level domain (e.g. .com, .org. .edu) will determine the number that what number you use for the text message. The number is actually spelled out using the letter values on the number pad, (DOTCOM address go to the number 368266.) which makes it easy to remember.

You are then sent a text message with a description of how to interact with the website you’ve entered. When you use this website techeap.com, you’ll get a list of the last ten blog posts (in 3 separate messages) and if you wanted to read any of them you would just reply with the number for that entry. Dotgo would then send you a series of text messages until the whole article is sent.

While this may not be the most efficient way to read a website, many other website are much more optimized to use this technology. If you use enter Google or Yahoo and a search term, DotGo will return some of the top hits. There is a simulator on their website, but it was not working for me when I tried it.

One very useful integration for me was with NJTransit. You simply send them the message NJTransit and the locations you want to go between, (for example “njtransit nypenn woodbridge”) and they will send you back a schedule of trains.

Some queries got returned faster than others and my tests were mostly done during off-hours, but the service was pretty speedy overall. While this certainly will not replace browsing on a web-enabled cell phone, if you don’t have an advanced phone and you need a way to get information, this may be exactly what you need.

The service is free, but some of the sites it has integrated with will have ads embedded at the end of messages about them. They promise and I haven’t gotten any spam or other unrequested messages from them. All of the tests I did, did not have any ads, but I’m sure that will change as the service matures.

Is this something that you might use? Let me know in the comments.

The Redbox of Doom

It’s the cheapest legal way I know of to see one new DVD release and this, if you take their word on the subject, means doom for the movie industry.

In my area, it’s called Redbox, but other similar companies include DVDPlay, Moviecube and DVDXpress. The idea is that you pick a movie from the machine, put in your credit card and out pops a DVD. You are charged a low amount (usually $1) each day that you have it out. If you lose it, you are charged $25 for not returning it and that’s the end of the transaction.

These machines usually pop out around grocery stores and pharmacies, which are very happy to have people coming back to them every day with a chance of picking up a few extra items.

The machines make money because there is very little overhead and increasingly they are able to get DVDs at wholesale cost, so it takes very few rentals to make a profit. Finally, some of the owners of the machines sell the DVDs as used after they’ve been rented out for a while, so they make money on both ends of the arrangement. Consumers pay much less for renting the DVDs than they would from a rental store and much less for buying a used DVD then they would pay for it as new.

Of course, as the New York Times reports, not everyone is happy with this arrangement. 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Brothers are refusing to sell DVDs to Redbox until 28 days after a DVD has been released. The thinking goes that who will pay full price to buy a DVD or rent it from the cable company with the markup that they charge when they can get it from Redbox for a dollar.

Sony, who is one of the companies that has signed a deal with Redbox, got them to agree not to sell their DVDs as used and instead the destroy the DVDs after they left the boxes. This is probably one of the best solutions for both sides, as DVD rentals can still happen at a reasonable rate, but the movie companies won’t cannibalize sales of their DVDs.

It will be interesting to see the development of this market as Blockbuster plans to enter the market with their own line of kiosks.

Have you used these kiosks? Are they in your area? Let me know in the comments.

Some of the Surprising Results of Content Piracy

Content piracy is a very controversial topic, and as a blogger focused on getting stuff on the cheap, it seem like an appropriate area to look at and discuss. As I suspect most people are deep down, I am generally anti-piracy. I feel that intellectual property is a meaningful term, and that content creators should be able to market their wares for some value in order to create additional content. I do acknowledge that industry forces put a stranglehold on some content and put it at prices that are not sustainable in the marketplace.

My solution to that problem thus far has been to simply ignore that content, but there are many out there who fell justified to in a Robin-Hood-like mentality of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Of course, there are other who simply feel that digital content should be free to sample and if you want to support a creator than you simply give them money directly in various ways.

I see value in both arguments, and I’m clearly not here to solve this issue today. Today, I want to talk about a couple of the interesting results of piracy and what effect it has a content creation and consumption. (I discuss torrents below, which are one of the most popular methods of content piracy) to find out more about this technology, check out this About.com tutorial.)

Slashdot had a very interesting post by a former indie-music producer who argues that The Pirate Bay (the most popular torrent tracker) hosting actually strengthens  the hegemony of the music industry. That is to say, piracy actually keep big industry content popular. I have heard arguments that content piracy is the best thing for independent artists because it gets more people to consume their content, but do these statistics prove the contrary. It is a difficult question, and I hope you check out the argument for more details.

One other interesting aspect of this discussion is the use of language by each side to describe its habits. Those who are using unauthorized content first called themselves file-sharers, casting themselves in a benevolent light. Then, the content industry labeled these people as pirates evoking greedy thieves, but this move backfired in the sense that these users took back the term to cast it in the positive ‘Disney-fied’ pirates as romantic, swashbuckling heroes. Things like The Pirate Bay and torrents (by definition, a turbulent, swift-flowing stream) evoke this romantic sense of the terminology. I look forward to seeing what the next volley in the language war will be.

As always, feel free to leave your thoughts on the topic in the comments.

Finally, on a completely unrelated note. Since one of my most popular stories last year was on the announcement by Apple of their by a computer get an iPod deal for students and educators, I wanted to mention that it has begun again this year. You can check out the details here.

When the Monolith Wobbles

At the beginning of this week, I was alerted by TechCrunch to a new service being offered to convert all of your old e-mail and contacts from places like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail into Google’s G-mail, so that you could start to become a G-Mail user.

G-mail is a great service for e-mail and I do a lot of my e-mailing from there. I was even considering discussing with my wife moving her e-mail from Hotmail to G-Mail. Then, the monolith wobbled, and I was reminded why having too many eggs in one basket can be a dangerous thing.

Let me explain. Google, in the political language of the day, is too big to fail. There are so many services that are absolutely dependent on Google to operate that if they fail, their entire business model breaks. Even more operations are severely hampered by an interruption in service and almost anyone on the Internet is at least effected. The Google monolith didn’t tip over on May 14th, but it did wobble a moment and woe to anyone who has become totally reliant on the company.

I first heard of a problem with the trending tag on Twitter #googlefail. (As a side note, this trend of forming a compound word out of the name of something that is ‘broken’ and “fail” is not a very useful one.) I clicked on an saw some people were not able to use the main search engine or access G-Mail. I quickly checked for myself and found it working. I then went to Google’s Apps Status Dashboard, which was created after the February incident where G-Mail went down for a period of time. Google had indicated there was a small service disruption.

Satisfied for the moment, I later checked Google News (Ah, the irony) to see if anybody had written about and found a quickly put together, but well written article by CNET describing what was known so far.  Included in that article is the very interesting story of someone on Twitter, who says that she was not able to access her bank’s website, because it uses Google Analytics to track user statistics.

This story, I think really gets down to the heart of the matter of where the real problem with Google lies. For many people, the first point of entry into the Internet is Google. Without it, those folks couldn’t get anywhere. For some websites like this user’s, without Google Analytics tracking your entry on to the website, you can’t even get on it. Without G-Mail, some business can’t take orders or execute their day-to-day operations.

So what does this mean for you? It means that you should think about how dependent you are on Google. I have G-mail, of course, but I also have a secondary e-mail on which I do a fair amount of communications. I also have other search engines on the ready if needed and know the addresses of many of the places I needed to go on the web manually.

Clearly, there is something to be said for not over reacting to what amounts to a couple hours worth of an outage but you should consider if the monolith ever does topple…how the Internet will look vastly different.

Newspapers and Too Little Black Ink

As the Boston Globe continues its frenzied negotiation to continue operating with the New York Times Company (Stock Symbol: NYT), the entire industry is in a state of flux. What’s the problem? As with many things in the digital age, it is too expensive to create physical objects to disseminate information, but people are very hesitant to pay for information that they can get elsewhere for free.

The most recent example of this is the folding of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. Recently, there have been efforts underway by the staff of the newspaper to move the journalists to a digital format called InDenverTimes.com. After initially announcing that they wanted to obtain 50,000 premium subscribers for their venture, (note that this was at a newspaper that had a circulation at just over 200,000, so they needed a conversion rate of about 25%) they announced they were only able to obtain 3,000.

At this point the venture decided to downsize their operations, from what Poynter cited as 31 newsroom staffers and 18 contributors to a staff of 2 and no contributors. It is interesting that they have one staffer on “News/Business” and another on “Sports,” a noteworthy division of labor by itself. As the folks at Poynter point out, the previous line up was most certainly overly ambitious for what amounts to a start-up media venture. One might also notice on visiting the site is the lack of advertising. While there is an e-mail link to the advertising department at the bottom, nothing has come to fruition on the site yet.

As mentioned earlier, the industry as a whole is suffering tremendously and there are several factors, some obvious and some less so. The Internet is obviously a key component, but John C. Dvorak, a technology expert, and Marketwatch.com columnist, has an interesting argument that newspapers have become too flowery and aren’t doing enough local news. Given the pared down nature of the InDenverTimes, he might be a fan of simply having a news/business reporter and a sports reporter as the staff.

I believe that another important factor is simply a case of supply and demand. It is expensive and time-consuming to do actual reporting, while it is relatively cheap to do something like what I do. Basically, I just re-write and re-organize content that is already out there. In fact, it is so easy that there are many people (like me) who are willing to do this for free. This is where I think the enterprise of journalism is in the most trouble. There are enough people to do things that appear close enough to journalism to the average reader for free that the value derived from the customer for that information is cheapened to the point where it becomes not economically viable to create content.

I recognize that this is a controversial opinion, and I acknowledge that I may, in fact, be wrong. However, I’ll leave you with one final question, how much are you willing to pay for news content today? Whatever the answer, the newspaper industry thinks it is not enough.

I Fought the Cable Company and I Won

It isn’t often that you have much luck fighting against a corporation trying to get money off of your bill, but in these times of economic hardship, your chances are better than ever.

I use my own personal example as a case in point. Before things had gone badly in the economy, I had gotten Cablevision’s (that’s the cable monopoly in my area of  Brooklyn) “Triple Play” offering. Since I was getting both phone, Internet and TV video from them I was paying around $110 a month after taxes and fees. Things were going fine until their “promotional offer” expired and they let me know they would be jacking up the rate to something like $150 a month.

In response, I decided that I would be eliminating the TV video service and that I might take the phone off at a later date. As I canceled that service, they made some fairly pathetic offers to keep me in the fold, but I wanted the current rate I was paying and wasn’t going to accept any less than that. In any case, they did eventually let me cancel, and I went without TV video service for a little more than a month. At this point, it was costing me about $90 a month.

Then, one day my wife gets a call from out of the blue saying that they are willing to give us a rate better than our old one at $100 a month after taxes. My wife accepted, and now we are back with the “Triple Play.”

I inform you of this to let you know that there is hope if you play hardball with the cable company in these tough economic times. You may even be able to find someone to negotiate with before you have to cut off your service like I did.

I’ll leave at that for now and encourage you to comment on success you’ve had in dealing with tech companies in saving on your bills.

Finally! A Price War…maybe?!

There has finally been a development in the Mac versus PC war in a place where PCs have a distinct advantage. Microsoft has released a new ad telling the tale of Lauren, a young lady looking for a new computer. You can watch it here on the Microsoft site, but you have to have Silverlight (Microsoft’s free, but less-than-stellar video platform) to watch it there. You can also watch it here on Youtube. (I’m betting most of you are going to click on the second link.

In any case, Lauren is looking for a new laptop with a 17″ monitor, “speed” and a full-size keyboard. Although, with a monitor that big, it would be pretty embarassing if they couldn’t get a full-size keyboard. Microsoft says to her if she can find a computer under $1000 with those specs she can keep it.

First, she goes to the “Mac Store,” and finds the only laptop she’ll get for under a grand there has a 13″ screen. Looking forlorn, she says, “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.”

She then goes to Best Buy. (The only way you can tell this for sure is by slowing down the video and looking at the employees’ shirts.) She quickly finds the machine she wants and gets it free from the folks at Microsoft.

There are a couple of things to take away from this new attack by Microsoft. First, but less importantly for what I’m interested in, Microsoft has basically conceded that their computers are not cool. This is an interesting move considering all of the effort that went into the “I’m a PC” campaign. I suspect this was something they were willing to give up for the overall thrust of the commercial.

Second, Microsoft is finally attacking Apple directly. For a significant amount of time, Microsoft’s strategy seemed to either be to simply ignore Apple and hope they went away or to promote their own brand and not acknowledge Apple as a competitor.  That has not worked too well for them, so it seems logical for them to take another approach.

Finally, and most importantly for my purposes here, they are attacking Apple on price, an area where Microsoft and PC have a significant advantage over Apple. For the same amount of money, you are going to get a significantly greater amount of processing power and memory from a Windows PC than from one of Apple’s products.

The hardcore computer users among us would say that people should continue that argument to its logical conclusion and use an open-source operating system like Linux and pay simply for the hardware that is needed. However, for the bulk of users this is basically irrelevant, since there are many people who would find many distributions of Linux completely foreign and gladly pay for the familiarity that Windows provides.

In any case, I am very interested to see what Apple decide to do about this attack. Will it unveil some new Mac vs. PC ad that turns this around on Microsoft? Will it ignore and just be content with being cool? Could they actually…gasp…lower prices?

In the current economy, price is becoming a very significant sticking point and if Microsoft were able to succeed in convincing people that buying Apple computers is an extravagant expense, they may have a significant chance in taking back some of the market share that Apple has slowly been taking from them, at least in the short term.

I will definitely be keeping an eye as this develops, and thanks to Channelweb for alerting me to this story here.

The Paradox of Tech Thrift

If you’ve been watching the dire economic news, you may have heard of the economic theory called the “Paradox of Thrift.” Wikipedia obviously explains it better than I can in a few words, but basically if everyone saves their money at the same time, that money will be worth less since there is so much more money floating around. That combined with decreasing demand means that job elimination and a lack of raises means the ability to save is threatened.

Like many economic cycles, it is sometimes a difficult one to break out of.

I bring this point up to discuss a comment I saw in TechCrunch about Twitter using its search functionality as a way to monetize their business with advertising.

A commenter “alex” responded to the article saying “No ads, no ads, that’s why it’s so special right now. I know I am wishing into the wind.”

I don’t begrudge Alex the wish that micro-blogging service Twitter no run ads, but it occurs to me that every method of monetization that they might try is going to be odious to somebody. Let’s go through some examples.

1. Twitter would not work if users had to pay for the service, so that clearly isn’t viable.

2. As Alex shows, people would prefer it if Twitter didn’t have ads.

3. Sell out to Google and let them figure out how to monetize it. This leads to monopoly concerns.

There are a few other scenarios that are discussed here, but these all follow these three main criticisms that I outlined above.

Basically, people don’t want to pay for things and they don’t want to see ads. This, of course, isn’t limited to Twitter, but shows a severe problem in this Internet age, a problem that websites like this one make worse. We all want something for nothing, and too frequently we’ve been getting it. On this website, I have tried to discuss how the service that are offered are monetizing their efforts, but my focus has been on decreasing the cash outlay of the user. The point Alex brings up is relevant as well; your attention and time is also a valuable quality that everyone wants to maximize.

So where does that leave Twitter and other websites actually looking to run a business and not a charity? The best solutions that I have seen come across are ad-based revenue generation and “free-mium” service websites.

We’re used to an ad-based system from newspapers, TV and radio, but as people move over to iPods and on-line news consumption, people are getting less tolerant of advertising. Meanwhile, there is so much competition among free services that sometimes “free-mium” models can’t catch on.

What will happen? That’s hard to say, but I point you to the paradox of thrift. I’ll suggest to you that whatever the result. It will not be good.

Call Waiting and Privacy

The excellent publication Wired had a good article on a new service offered by a company called TelTech systems called TrapCall. The main function of the service is to circumvent the privacy block that can be used on the Caller ID service, so that people can’t see who is calling them.

The interesting thing is that this is a service that is probably not very well known and most commonly used by telemarketers to prevent you from knowing that you are about to get a sales pitch. There are two ways to use this privacy block, first you can dial *67 before the call and use the block only when you would like, or you can have your phone provider put a permanent privacy block on your line so that all calls will come up on Caller ID as private. (There’s actually a bunch of these “star codes” that still work. Check out this site for a bunch more to try, beaware that your phone company could charge you for some of them.)

The way this service works is that as you receive a call you can hit a button on your phone that will forward the call to a toll-free number. Since calls to toll-free numbers are always revealed to Caller ID regardless of the privacy settings, (because the receiver is paying for the call) TrapCall now has the information of who is calling you. They forward this information on to you, and now you know who is calling you and whether to pick up the phone or not.

I have not tried this service myself, but Wired says that it works pretty well. It seems to be a very clever use of technology, and they work on the “freemium” economic model, where the core service is free and you can pay to gain advanced relevant features that may be useful to you.From a technological standpoint, I think that it is a good product that could be successful.

I’m more concerned about the privacy implications. Wired describes the anger of domestic violence groups that are concerned that court-required phone interaction between abusive partners and victims could lead to information about their location being revealed.

My concerns are not nearly so serious, but it seems to me that a person ought to have the right to make a phone call without announcing who it is in advance. Of course, the person on the other end of the phone has the right not to answer the call. By taking away the rights of the parties involved, situations like the ones described by Wired can arise.

Thanks to my colleague Steve for pointing this story out to me.

The World of Digital Comic Books

I was able to go to New York Comic Con this past weekend. While I’m not a huge reader of comic books, a number of people in my life are, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to find out more about the hobby and industry.

First off, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank Peter Rios and Bryan Deemer of the Comic Geek Speak podcast for offering me a great amount of insight into the state of the industry and interesting things going on there.

I was also able to speak with Chuck Moore who handles marketing for a new venture called Comics XP. I had heard several people mention this new innovation to me while at the convention, and while the site is still not fully implemented yet, they are have a very intriguing business plan.

The idea behind Comics XP is to serve as a warehouse for independent comic book creators for digital content. Initially, I believed that this was a totally new way of doing business in the industry. Marvel has been doing something like this for a couple of years now and has an offering of over 5,000 of their comics on a subscription basis of $10 a month or $60 for a year.  DC, the other major comic book publisher, offers comparatively very little of their content digitally at this time, and it will be interesting to see how their methods work out for each of them.

Comics XP, though, would serve as both a social networking tool for comics and a store for content. They would also work on a a la carte basis. Comic book creators who aren’t in a position to transition their content to the digital realm, or those who just want to increase its visibility could both use the site. It serves as both a marketing tool and a revenue generator as Comics XP would share revenue with the content creator. Moore envisions it as the “iTunes of Comic Books.”

This is the sort of thing, in my opinion, that this industry needs. As the guys at Comic Geek Speak podcast pointed out to me, while there is a lot to be said about the feel of paper comics, the costs involved in producing them are going to be an increasingly large drain on the industry.  I will be watching this industry to see if it needs to and is able to develop a viable post-print business model.

To get back on point as far as the blog go, the costs of digital comics are drastically different from those of print and some of those savings will certainly be passed along to the consumer as the Marvel site and assurance from Comics XP tell me. As digital content in all areas grows more and more prominent, generating revenue off of this content will become more and more crucial if want more quality content to be generated. With these two pressures pushing the industry, only time will tell what the results will be.