Wine and Beer at Starbucks? Down Economy Requires Booze?
Schultz: “This is a time when every business can no longer embrace the status quo, and do everything they can to get as close as possible to the customer.” http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5179533n
Me: Totally right. But does a down economy mean booze should replace coffee?
Imagined Schultz: “If the customer can afford the higher cost, yes. But seriously, c’mon. We’re going to serve beer at Starbucks! Heck ya!”
Me: Heck ya!
Social Evolution – The Atomic Unit of Online Consumption
The atomic unit of online consumption has changed. People no longer want to download full albums, but prefer streaming songs. No longer are full newspapers the medium; headlines instead roll through RSS readers and news aggregators. We are watching more and more TV and movies when we choose – not at regularly scheduled times or in corporate theatres. And the power is shifting more and more in the direction of the consumer (from the content “owner” or “distributer”). It’s a beautiful time to join the content market!
The Atomic Unit of Online Consumption
There’s an intense debate in the US about the future of journalism. Some news organizations say that Google News and other news aggregators need to share revenue with publishers. While Google provides an easy way to opt-out from indexing, news sites need Google’s traffic to gain new visitors. “We don’t want to pull out of the digital ecosystem. We just simply want a fair compensation for the content that we publish,” says Jim Moroney, publisher and chief executive of “The Dallas Morning News”.
Newspapers can’t figure out how to adapt to the online environment and Google is an easy target. News aggregators and search engines are the new destination for news, since users can choose from a lot of different perspectives. Marissa Mayer, Vice President at Google, found an interesting correlation between news articles, songs and short-form videos in her testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet:
The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always disrupted by emerging media. For example, digital music caused consumers to think about their purchases as individual songs rather than as full albums. Digital and on-demand video has caused people to view variable-length clips when it is convenient for them, rather than fixed-length programs on a fixed broadcast schedule. Similarly, the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article. As with music and video, many people still consume physical newspapers in their original full-length format. But with online news, a reader is much more likely to arrive at a single article. While these individual articles could be accessed from a newspaper’s homepage, readers often click directly to a particular article via a search engine or another Website.
Changing the basic unit of content consumption is a challenge, but also an opportunity. Treating the article as the atomic unit of consumption online has several powerful consequences. When producing an article for online news, the publisher must assume that a reader may be viewing this article on its own, independent of the rest of the publication. To make an article effective in a standalone setting requires providing sufficient context for first-time readers, while clearly calling out the latest information… Read More.
What do you think?
Look What Happens While I Don't Post – 2009 pt. 1
I don’t post for a week or two and look at all the stuff that happens!
Brain-computer interface, developed at Brown, begins new clinical trial
BrainGate, an investigational technology being developed to detect brain signals and to allow people with paralysis to use those signals to control assistive devices, is about to begin a second, larger clinical trial. The system is based on neuroscience, engineering and computer science research at Brown University.
If you’re squeamish about eating sushi then we doubt this is going to help. Chef Robot, on display at the International Food Machinery and Technology Exhibition in Tokyo, is really just FANUC’s M-430iA sanitary food and pharmaceutical robot with a fleshy appendage — guess the rest of the human is right there on the serving tray.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley have developed an ultra-dense memory chip that is capable of storing data for up to a billion years (besting silicon chips by roughly… a billion years). Consisting of a crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle encased within a multiwalled carbon nanotube, the device can be written to and read from using conventional voltages already available in digital electronics today. The research was led by Alex Zettl, who notes that current digital storage methods are capable of storing mass amounts of data, but last just decades, while, say, some books have managed to last nearly a thousand years, though the amount of data they contain is quite small. The new method, called shuttle memory, is based on the iron nanoparticle which can move back and forth within the hollow nanotu . Zettl believes that, while shuttle memory is years away from practical application, it could have a lot of archival applications in the future.
People who may be affected by a class action lawsuit against Google have been receiving some interesting notices in their inboxes lately. It looks like certain AdWords advertisers are on track to split a $20 million settlement starting September 14th. The lawsuit stemmed from accusations that Google would sometimes exceed advertisers’ daily budgets. Google, while denying any wrongdoing, agreed to compensate them with $20 million in a mixture of cash and AdWords credits, and now it’s down to the settlement hearing in September to determine exactly what will happen next.
The Prerequisite for Success is Understanding the Difference between Order and Control
Understanding the difference between order and control is a prerequisite for success. Whether that success be success in the family, success in the workplace, or success in the marketplace, understanding the difference between what is controllable by oneself and what everyone|everything else is pushing toward is the common denominator of achieving success.
I’ve seen many businesses fail because the business leaders wouldn’t “give up” control. Marriages fail because a partner won’t “give up” control. Friendships, bands, political leaders, you name it. But “giving up” control is a misnomer. Rarely does that control exist in the first place. In business, the stability of market demand (order) sets the stage for the business leaders to market their product. In relationships, the emotional roller coaster of hormones and feelings (order) sets the stage for the relationship to take off. What is often perceived as initial control is usually a reaction to a broader set of causes and effects. As an example, imagine you’re playing a video game. You feel like you’re controlling the characters actions, but in reality, you’re simply following the path created for you by a developer team. Choosing from a set of actions you were allowed.
Choice still exists. Choice always exists. It is control that often doesn’t. So “give up” control. Find the order that exists in the marketplace | your relationship. React to that, instead of what you just want. Be aware. Be honest. Be successful.
The Prerequisite for Success is Understanding the Difference between Order and Control
What do you think about these thoughts on order, control, and choice? What are your thoughts?
- Megatrends and Blogging (problogger.com)
- AIG and the Drawbacks of Populism (themoderatevoice.com)
- What is Business For? (slowleadership.org)
- Twitter Dumbs Down, Removes @Replies (blippitt.com)
- Do we need minimum wage legislations? (citizeneconomists.com)
- GigaOM: Why Email Clients Need to Change (boxofmeat.net)
- Us Now: Democratizing democracy (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
Recession and the Aging Population
Particularly interesting article on Futurelab today on the effects of the recession being minuscule compared with population aging.
The International Monetary Fund estimates that the G 20 nations will, as a result of the recession, have increased their national debts by an average equivalent to nearly 25% of gross domestic product between 2007 and 2014. That is a lot of money.
BUT, to 2050, the cost of the economic crisis will be no more less than 5% of the financial impact created by the ageing of their populations. As the IMF says, “in spite of the large fiscal costs of the crisis, the major threat to long-term fiscal solvency is still represented, at least in advanced countries, by unfavourable demographic trends”.
More information is available in today’s FT. Looks like this recession isn’t the last of our world financial concerns. Hopefully the development of emerging technologies like AI and lunar mining help generate new industries and wealth. :)
