Music: Too Expensive to Be Free, Too Free to Be Expensive | Epic MySpace, rumored to be on the verge of purchasing the free music streaming site imeem, is struggling to keep up with its own payments to music copyright holders, according to a top News Corp executive — a problem that has plagued every other licensed free music service. The digital music doubters could be right with the contention that advertising revenue can’t cover the costs of licensing music. Meanwhile, illegitimate free music sources continue to proliferate, rendering paid music subscriptions irrelevant for most music fans. Advertising was supposed to be music’s magic bullet, enabling fans to get the free music they’re going to find anyway while contributing at least something to copyright holder coffers. That dream is fading fast. As legitimate sources for free on-demand music dry up, fans will likely head back to file sharing networks, which is bad news for everyone involved in music — except for, perhaps, hard drive manufacturers. See Also:
APIs In The Late Afternoon After our weekly team meeting yesterday afternoon, I hopped into a cab to the far west side of manhattan to attend the Business of APIs conference. In the cab, I opened socialscope on my blackberry to check into twitter and saw this tweet from my partner Albert: Love APIs — so excited about @foursquare's announcement As I sat down with Quentin Hardy to talk about APIs, I wasn't sure where the conversation would go. Fortunately Quentin is a good interviewer and we had a great chat. We talked a bit about the foursquare api, and I mentioned that I am most excited about cool games that can get built on top of foursquare, like mob zombie. We talked about what is a real api, and I seconded our friend Joshua Schachter's assertion that a read-only api is not an api. That led us to Twitter naturally and I stated that the thing I want most from the Twitter api is sign up via the api. We tried charging for our API without much success. We also talked about "api failures".
Good Question! The Eight Best Questions We Got While Raising Ven Editor’s note: Guest writer Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate broker that seeks to give consumers the information and tools once limited to real estate agents. Previously, he was a co-founder of Plumtree Software, which had a public offering in 2002 but is now part of Oracle. Below he shares the best questions from investors during a recent fund raising. For startups, Christmas comes in November. Partners come back from vacation in September and deals start closing a few months later; since the credit crisis deferred fund-raising for most of the past year, November 2009 will probably end up being especially busy. Redfin is one of the companies that just closed a round. VCs are good at asking questions. Here are the questions VCs asked Redfin that changed how we think about our business. 1. 2. Good question. 3. We knew our margin before, but hadn’t broken the numbers down into their most easily handled form. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Way.
Getting the competitor analysis right when pitching | The Equity Jason Cohen has a good post on Venturebeat where he talks about four common ways that people turn him off in an instant. The whole post is worth a read if you are going to be raising money, but there is one point that he makes which I’m going to bring out here, and that is how to make a good competitor analysis. In Jason’s words: Let me guess what your feature-comparison chart looks like. Probably pretty close to the illustration to the right [above actually], huh?You have all the checkmarks, they have few. Jason then goes on to point out that your competitors may well be larger, stronger and more established than you, so it is a mistake to say that you are better than everyone else. This takes us to another area that a lot of people could do better, and that is defining their target market. As an example my dad’s company was a computer rental’s business. ).
The Word of the Year and How to Translate It This week, “unfriend” was chosen as the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year. In multilingual circles, this quickly prompted many — including us — to ask the question, “How do you translate that?” According to major media outlets (including the Telegraph, MSNBC, and many others), the term originated with Facebook. So, we went straight to Facebook to see how these community translation veterans rendered this celebrated word into other languages. The response? Locale/Translation ar_AR / ????? While we were glad to receive the translations for “remove connection,” our linguistic curiousity was piqued, and we had to ask, “So, if not at Facebook, where did ‘unfriend’ originate?” While it is unclear who first used 2009’s Word of the Year, people have been “friending” and “unfriending” each other since the advent of Livejournal.
Inc Magazine on Minimum Viable Product (and a r Inc Magazine has a great new piece up about the increasing use of the Minimum Viable Product by businesses (and not just startups). Here's an excerpt; some of my comments are below: One of the most gut-wrenching moments for a company is the rollout of a new product. A significant swing and miss can break a company's momentum -- and maybe its bank account. What sets this approach apart from practices like using focus groups is that companies base product development decisions not just on what customers say they want but on how they vote with their wallets.Read the rest... This article is part of a trend that has taken me a bit by surprise: the adoption of lean startup techniques outside the traditional domain of high-tech startups. Of course, as more people attempt to use the Minimum Viable Product as a tactic, there are a lot of misconceptions possible. But MVP is most powerful when it is used as part of an overall strategy of learning and discovery. And yet, even that is not enough.
Report from the 50th ATA conference « Musings from an overworked Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in ATA, Random musings, Translation. trackback Opening Ceremony of the 50th ATA Conference I have finally worked my way through all the mail, bills, errands, etc. that piled up while I was traveling to Myrtle Beach and NYC. It didn’t help that I immediately got slammed with work (not that I am complaining about that!!!) when I got back from the conference. The view of Times Square from my hotel room The hotel bar As I’m sure you have read everywhere else, this year’s conference had a record 2,300+ attendees. Michael Wahlster presents the ins and outs of Twitter to a packed room The presentations were without a doubt top-notch this year. Amanda showing off her double microphones and conference badge My presentations were very well-received. Tuomas at the start of our presentation I was most excited about my second presentation of the conference, Making Portable Document Format Files Work For You, with Tuomas Kostiainen. Presentation at the SDL Trados booth Like this:
Creating sustainable competitive advantage No successful web company (not eBay, Flickr, Amazon, Facebook...) succeeds because of a significant technological barrier to entry. It's not insanely difficult to copy what they've done. Yet they win and the copycats don't. Few organizations succeed in the long run because of proprietary technology. Not Starbucks or CAA or Nike, certainly. Not Caterpillar or Reuters either. Technologists often tell me, "this product is very hard to build, that will insulate us from competition and protect our pricing." So, what to do? The reason the internet is such a home to wow business models is that it's easier to create a network here than any other time in history.
CRM Provider Partners for Multilingual Customer Care In a February 2007 report on multicultural marketing, we highlighted the importance of customer relationship management (CRM) software in improving the quality of interactions with multilingual clients and prospects. Last month, machine translation supplier Language Weaver and newly-minted translation management system (TMS) provider Sajan announced multilingual support for RightNow Technologies' CRM solution at the latter's 2009 Summit. CRM software can do a lot to improve how well a company knows and treats its customers. At its simplest, it can automate responses to common queries, suggest responses to less usual ones, filter out spam, ask respondents about the appropriateness of the answer they receive, and route messages based on the skill set of individual customer service representatives. More evolved systems tailor interactions to individual or demographic preferences. Language Weaver previewed its integration into the RightNow Agent Desktop through the TranslateNow button.
Notes on business sustainability – Joel Andren on Zynga | The Eq Joel Andren posted a couple of weeks ago on Why Zynga couldn’t go public soon enough – in which he notes that everything is great at Zynga right now (revenues on a tear, Farmville is hot, Cafe World is getting there) but postulates that ‘their current efforts have probably reached their apogee without making significant changes to their ecosystem’. Hence they should get out while the going is good and IPO. I’ve got no inside track on Zynga buy Joel’s analysis is interesting and can (and probably should) be applied to most internet businesses. He has a ‘customer ecosystem’ model into which he has plugged Zynga: And by way of explanation: If a company is strong, it will have three of four squares rated green. I like this model a lot. To comment on Zynga’s red squares: We have seen the danger of Facebook dependence before when iLike was only able to sell itself for $20m.
Buyers Join Forces to Tackle the Translation Quality Conundrum We've written extensively about translation quality from the buyer's perspective, arguing that companies purchasing translation services should assume a more proactive role in defining their requirements, developing their own metrics, and communicating with suppliers about how they intend to evaluate their performance. Last Friday, we convened approximately 30 delegates from the industry's largest buyer organizations for a Common Sense Advisory colloquium hosted by Google in Mountain View, California. In our earlier research on buyer-defined translation quality ("Buyer-Defined Translation Quality," Aug08), we revealed the findings of interviews with 28 companies that translate hundreds of millions of words into multiple languages each year, most of which spend in excess of US$1 million on translation services annually. The report answered the question, “What does translation quality mean?” Few buyers formally measure translation quality.
Fast, good, cheap, and something else | The Equity Kicker Just about everything we buy these days is a premium product in the sense that we could either get by without it or go for a cheaper alternative. We live in an age of abundance and to make a product stand out enough to get bought there has to be something special about it. A lot has been written about this from the perspective of individual products and markets, often stressing the importance of great service, product quality, going the extra mile, and brand values like authenticity. Tara Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor is a great example of such a book, with a particular emphasis on communities. I am currently reading Peter Sheahan’s Flip which takes this thinking and makes it more general, arguing that that for a new consumer product to compete these days fast, good and cheap isn’t sufficient, you need something else on top, an X-Factor. This is different to 20 years ago when the received wisdom was that a business needed only two of the faster, better, cheaper trio to win.
The Other Immigrants Most Startups Should be Deer Hunters This post is part of my series “Startup Lessons“ Elephants, Deer and Rabbits – Some thoughts on start-up segmentation Nearly all of the mistakes I made at my first company I fixed by the time of my second company. I know that this advice won’t apply to every possible startup – but I think it applies to many. When you start your company the very first question you need to ask yourself is which kind of customers do you want to serve. Make sure you know what the size of customer you want to serve is, what the people in a company of that size do, the problems they have, the features that will resonate and the channels you’ll need to sell into and service that customer. I’ve stated my animal bias in the title – but each can work for different business types. Elephants: It is very tempting for many start-ups to hunt elephants. It’s tempting on many levels to be an elephant hunter. Here is the real world story. The problem is that they were initially very easy for me to find. Rabbits: Deer: