Business 2.0
Thank you to Business 2.0 for putting us on their map of the most interesting internet start-ups in Europe. You can actually read the whole magazine online. This specific article is on page 108.
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Mike Masnick and the Great Content Monetization Debate
Today we have another edition of Pressure Point, our occasional podcast. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a big fan of Techdirt, a popular technology news blog. With all the cluelessness out there, it’s refreshing to have a news source with such a level-headed and just plain intelligent view of so many hot-button issues. Because of my personal predilection for digital media, I follow their commentary on advertising, DRM and related topics particularly closely. It was therefore a pleasure to get the chance to discuss these areas with Mike Masnick, one of Techdirt’s founders.
Despite the fact that I agree with pretty much everything on Techdirt, I was hoping that we would find some bone of contention that would give the podcast more the character of a debate than a straight-up interview. (Let’s face it, I talk far too much to be a good interviewer.) This turned out to be the case, and after some insightful commentary by Mike on the evolution of advertising, we segued into a discussion about the merits and drawbacks of direct payments for content. As it turns out, we disagreed passionately and the result is a heated and (I hope) thought-provoking debate.
I was a bit flummoxed at the time by Mike’s contention that the principle of supply and demand implies that digital content, for which supply is infinite, must logically have a price of zero. As I wrote to him in a mail afterwards, I think the answer might be that the correct supply to measure is not that of a given piece of content (which is obviously infinite), but of a given type of content. Seen is this light, the supply is actually severely limited, and the pricing mechanism would act as expected, stabilizing to provide the correct level of motivation for people to create new content.
Download the podcast (high quality, 57 Mb) (low quality, 14 Mb)
Hifi streaming (128 Kb/s):
Lofi streaming (32 Kb/s)
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Beta Days
So, time for another beta update. It’s true: we expected to have the public beta out earlier this month and we’re late. Nonetheless, we’re really close. The main remaining tasks are getting our data center up to snuff (we do have some centralized elements, after all) in preparation from the (hopefully) upcoming onslaught, fixing some lingering bugs and performance tuning. Because of the fact that we’ve been in the public eye a bit more than expected, we’ve certainly taken more time with this release than we otherwise would have. There just didn’t seem any point in releasing anything until we’d taken into account some of the more pointed feedback from our private beta testers. I sincerely hope that the result will be a public beta that is more complete, more stable and easier to use than most. But we’ll let you be the judge of that.
We’re currently putting the finishing touches on our next private beta (version 0.36), which will be online in the next couple of days. This is more or less the version that will turn into the public beta. It has loads of cool new stuff:
- System tray icon (yay!)
- Use of BitTorrent when sharing files with multiple contacts
- Drag ’n’ share for text selections
- Drag ’n’ share for web images
- Grippy in share form to change size of message box
- Remove individual items from thumbnail panel in share form
- Share text from the clipboard
- New tab opened when “New in AllPeers” is clicked
- Thumbnails have a progress bar when downloading
- Download progress is visible in tab bar
- Much better user feedback when downloading
- Drag ’n’ share onto entire group
This is additional to numerous bug fixes and minor improvements. As you can see, we haven’t been slacking over the past couple of weeks.
We plan to have one final private beta, hopefully next week, focused mainly on performance improvements. We also plan to include support for external (i.e. non-AllPeers) torrents. I want to stress that we do plan to invite each and every one of our private beta testers before we put the public beta online. Once we’ve done that and assuming there aren’t any blocking issues, we’ll be good to go. Stay tuned!
Update: The new release is now online for all platforms except for Mac (we’re working on getting universal binaries built so that Intel Mac owners can run AllPeers too). We’ll be inviting more testers starting tomorrow.
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Look East and You Could Find….
I am probably not taking a risk by saying that the US will continue to be a hotbed of innovation for the foreseeable future, nor can I be very wrong if I say that South East Asian will produce more innovation than it does today. I may raise a few eyebrows, however, by saying that I believe “Eastern Europe” will produce some of the big technology hits of the next decade.
My firm has been looking at companies in “Eastern Europe” for a couple of years and it strikes me how many terrific ideas and great people we have come across. While the number of companies being created is still not important, it is the desire to try to create that strikes me – entrepreneurship by any other name.
I frankly thought it would take much longer for us to see entrepreneurship point it nose in the east. After all, 50 years of communism does take some getting over. The page has, however, turned. Allpeers and Quintura, an investment my firm is about to make, are both good illustrations of the region’s potential to innovate.
Look hard enough and you could find that diamond in the rough.
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Rocket… Kaboom!
One of the nicest things about being involved in the technology industry is that, unlike the teeming unwashed masses, we’re far too mature to be caught up in childish soap opera-style dramas. Or not.
I was chatting with a friend of mine yesterday about what it takes to build a successful business (though I suppose my opinion will carry more weight after I’ve actually done so). I told him that the single most important step is to choose the right partner. This is even more important than having the right product and business ideas; those will change anyway as your project matures. In the case of Rocketboom, it’s clear that something about the partnership was working. But egos come into play when things are going well. Nothing fails like success, or something like that. I’m guessing both parties may grow to regret that they didn’t do more to make a fruitful partnership work.
What struck me most of all was that Amanda Congdon, a rare example of a genuine new media star, was so anxious to go to Hollywood and become a “proper” actress after Rocketboom, ehm, took off. I don’t have any direct experience with Hollywood, but by all accounts there’s tremendous competition to break into the entertainment biz, with a huge failure rate and a tiny percentage of stars. I dare say most aspiring actresses would give up waiting tables in a heartbeat for a chance to create and control their own successful brand on the web. Giving up that opportunity to go swim with the sharks just doesn’t feel right.
That said, I simply can’t understand how Rocketboom failed to capitalize financially on its popularity, at least to the extent that its budding celebrity could afford to pay her rent. If the business types had held their end up, perhaps the appeal of new media stardom would have been easier to appreciate.
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AllPeers Review in Japanese
If you can read Japanese, there is a review of AllPeers from a beta-tester here. If you are like me and you can’t read japanese, you can always look at the pictures!
Thank you Asao and Mata Atode !
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Thank You for Smoking
One of our favorite topics here at Peer Pressure is how, when and why Europe will be able to compete on an equal footing with the U.S. (particularly Silicon Valley) in the software development industry. Thankfully, Robert Scoble has provided us with the definitive answer: ban smoking.
Oh, puleeeeeeaze!
First of all, the implication that geeks are somehow less likely to be smokers than the general population is, in my experience, complete hogwash. When I worked in Germany, there was a cute cartoon on the wall with the caption “Entwickler sind entweder Kettenraucher oder militante Nichtraucher” (developers are either chain-smokers or militant antismokers), with the requisite illustration of a guy with cigarettes protruding from every orifice while his colleague in the adjacent cube donned a gas mask and double-fisted air-freshening aerosols. Californians are rarely smokers, which I suppose is what got Scoble all confused. Frankly it’s sad that someone could come to Europe, ignore its incredible cultural, linguistic and culinary diversity; gorgeous architecture; open-minded, well-informed, liberal attitudes; rich history spanning millenia; and so forth and come out of it with a single pithy conclusion: it smells.
Smoking doesn’t have much going for it (and I say this as a constantly-quitting smoker), but civil liberties do. Seen in this light, holier-than-thou bellyachers are as much of a threat as toxic smoke.
For a somewhat more insightful view of where Europe stands in the global software arena, you could do worse than check out my podcast with AllPeers investor Mark Tluszcz.
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Mozilla and Market Forces
At the risk of seeming narcissistic, I can’t resist reposting my comment to Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker’s musings on the danger of organizations getting too comfortable and set in their ways. I frequently read comments about AllPeers along the lines of “oh god, why won’t they just let my browser be a browser.” Answer: that’s the whole point of Firefox.
For what it’s worth (as an outsider but a very active participant in the Mozilla ecosystem), I don’t see this problem at Mozilla. It only takes two people for someone to feel that their ideas and opinions aren’t being given enough weight, and this dynamic is amplified in larger communities. Success is not defined by universal warm fuzzies… mediocrity is. What is needed is a meritocratic framework for filtering out the best initiatives, something that Mozilla excels at. Great programmers who make great contributions are going to be taken more seriously when they come up with kooky new schemes, and this is exactly as it should be.
The process you describe is precisely what I see happening constantly at Mozilla. Someone writes something the wiki, people comment, things eventually get implemented, tested and find their way into the software. Granted, it’s much easier for the leading lights of the community to get their initiatives noticed, but that’s unavoidable.
Which leads me to Mozilla’s real trump card: its extension mechanism. Over a year ago, we started working on an ambitious extension to add P2P networking, identity, presence, services integration, local storage and much more to Firefox. We had no experience with Mozilla or visibility within its community. Nonetheless, we were able to add all of these capabilities to the browser, with extensive support and assistance from people who were willing to lend a helping hand just because we were asking for it. Of course, this is no guarantee that our work will end up being valuable to Mozilla. The important thing is anyone with an idea and the initiative to bring it to fruition can extend the Mozilla platform and let the market will decide whether it’s interested. Harnessing market forces in this way is by far the most powerful protection against organizational sclerosis.
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