inspiredworlds.com

At approximately 2.30pm on Monday AEST, U2 staged the first live streaming Youtube concert online. And I witnessed it!!

U2 is easily one of the world’s best known bands. It’s probably not the first band to stream a concernt online, but the first of the major bands to do so and to such a large audience. I’m by no means a huge fan of U2, but I wanted to be part of this historic and momentous event. Plus I got to watch a concert for free!

I tuned in for about 2 hours and watched it in between doing work. I had it streaming in the background and witnessed an awesome concert unfold. They played a lot of songs that I was familiar with but didn’t know the names of and got me reacquainted with a lot of their music.

There was a bit of lag at times (about 3 or 4), but overall the streaming was smooth and there were heaps of different camera angles. Considering that there were in excess of 1.3 Million channel views, that was a pretty impressive job by Youtube. Their cloud servers must have been running at max capacity!

Monetisation Streams

As I was watching it, I was talking to my friend @dacheah about the monetisation possibilities. I feel that this was a public demonstration of Youtube’s streaming capabilities. This was a free concert, but imagine how much advertising, publicity, and album sales were made in the lead up, during the concert and post concert.

On the right side of the streaming video, you could purchase a download of the album off iTunes. Or donate to Bono’s Red charity or find out new information about their new album. These are just the direct actions you can take. By using iTunes it allows people to make an immediate purchase and receive the album on demand, an even cheaper distribution method.

But what happened indirectly?

They were able to bring in people like myself who aren’t big U2 fans into their music. Created new fans and advocates of the brand.

Given all that is happening in the music industry with the profileration of free downloads and pirating, there needs to be alternative money stream. Stream the concerts for free and entice people to purchase singles, albums and merchandise.

However, I think the biggest play would be to charge people access to live streaming concerts. This could be Youtube’s monetization model, have people pay $5  -10 to watch a world class concert. You could potentially have a subscription service as well, whereby people pay a yearly fee and get access to number of online streaming concerts. I’d also pay for this.

The ability to use streaming online video is now quite easy. We used it for our basketball game via Livestream (formerly Mogulus).

Back of the Envelope numbers

Using some general online stats that only 10% of people would pay for an online service, lets assume that 130,000 of the 1.3m viewers would have tuned in @ $5 a pop (lower end of the scale).

$5 per viewer x 130,000 number of viewers = $650,000  Revenue

Video Costs

1. Streaming costs

Youtube offers branded channel but their not cheap. If you advertise more than $80k with adwords, you can get it for free. They also have free accounts as well at the public level. But I feel that its going to be bundled together with streaming, storage space  similar to how Livestream and Ustream do it. Let’s do a yearly calc based on Livestream current costs:

1 Channel with 25GB streaming, HD up to 1.7 MPS: $350 a month

20 premium channels with 200GBs streaming, HD up to 1.7 MPS : $1,250 a month

I assume that there will be an option in the future for premium users for 1 Channel with 200 GBs available for larger concerts. It could possible use Google App Engine or Amazon EC2 which will bring the cost down. However, lets go with $1,250 since this is a publicly available cost. Give that 130,000 viewers watching video could potentially smash the server, lets multiply the cost of streaming by 5 fold to be ensure there is enough capacity to handle the extra traffic.

I’ve chosen a yearly fee because the band will want to maintain it and possibly do a number of concerts.

$1,250 per month x 5  x 12 months = $75,000

Note that this is a variable cost because it can be cancelled or use more/less bandwidth. But you will probably want to retain it and the more concerts you do, the more the cost will be spread.

2.  Camera crew for 2 hour concert

Camera crew will be needed for full day to prepare, stream and record,  dismantle stuff. This staff is in addition to existing sound crew. I don’t want the regular sound crew worrying about online streaming in addition to the concert as well.

Lets say 5 are needed – one in the booth to check video, three camera people to give different shots (upclose, in the crowd, pan wide), maybe an extra sound guy. That’s 5. I use 8hrs for a full day required for a 2hr concert.

$80 p/h  x 8hrs x 5 staff =  $3,200

3. A couple of IT and social media guys

On standby to monitor streaming, computer/servers crashing, social media feedback, commenting, drive traffic – 3 staff. I’ve chosen the figure $120 an hour to get more quality staff with experience.

$120 an hour x 8 hrs x 3 staff = $2,400

Total costs

$75,000 streaming + $3,200 camera crew + $2,400 IT staff = $80,600

$650,000 Total Revenue – $80,600 Total Cost = $569,400

That’s approximately $570,000 profit.

I haven’t included advertising costs, but this could be done in conjunction with their concert promos i.e. a URL at the bottom of the concert poster, twitter updates / facebook updates, email, radio. The cost of this should not significantly increase current advertising spend.

Of course not all bands are going to have this kind of fan base like U2. Smaller bands can cut costs by hiring less staff, opt for a smaller online account, but I dont see how they couldn’t take advantage of this.

Plus you also need to add in the profit from ticket gate receipts, album sales, tshirt sales, iTunes downloads, etc….

Final Thoughts

Online streaming simply provides an additional revenue stream for music bands via concert. I’m sure some bands and event planners are concerned that people might not turn up to a concert if shown online for $5 instead of a concert ticket price of $130. But nothing beats seeing something live.

However, there is going to be a significant number of fans that can’t afford the ticket price, cannot make it due to work / commitments or are simply living overseas. Surely this can be monetized! Your providing them with the chance to also participate in the concert, be a part of the crowd, and sing along.

Side note: Youtube has also introduced paid search for video,  and the videos shows up as a sponsored link. There is also Google Music Search, which produces results for all the different music services.

I’m out like Mogulus,

Matthew Ho.

I’ve finally setup my travel blog! Its currently sitting on a subdomain.

Check it out here.

I’m going to Vietnam soon and will blog about it over there. I’ll also post up pieces of writing I’ve done in the last couple of years, as well as travel tips.

I’m out like the travel bug,

Matt

I first heard of anyclip when they received runnerups in the techcrunch50 awards. So I signed up to the private beta immediately to test it out. I’m still waiting on my invite though.

Now, I’ve just seen the demo video and I really dig it!

A service that lets you find “Any moment from any film ever made”. That’s a very powerful tagline. Kinda like the Bill Gates vision “A computer on every desk”.

Watch the entire video for the demo and the questioning.

FYI the guys on the judging panel are:

- Scobelizer (Robert Scoble) is a huge tech blogger, former Microsoft guy

- Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook and co-founded Napster, Plaxo and Causes. And now joined Yammer!

- Reid Hoffman, once an aspiring Academic and Rhodes scholar (i think), founder of Linkedin and mentor to many of the top web 2.0 CEO’s

- Dick Costas, founder of Feedburner, Head of Google Social Products, and now COO of Twitter

- Mike ?, he used to be chief engineer at Mozilla Firefox, now Chief Engineer @ Facebook.

As you can see, its the who’s who of Silicon Valley.

Essentially they:
1) Aggregate short form video (less than 4 mins)
2) Allow people to metatag and categorise
3) have monetization models so you can buy the video or download or rent it

There are valid questions around legals, getting buy-in from the studios re content and also discovery.

Discovery is a good point, because that’s how I find a lot of interesting content on youtube from browsing other videos. I also think its going to be an incredible challenge getting the studios on board. But they did it with Hulu via a JV.

Ultimately, the guys behind it are right suggesting that it reinvigorates our love of movies. By me watching that scene from the Big Lebowski, I wanted to go to the video shop and rent it immediately. It might encourage others to go find the torrent, but they were never going to buy it anyway.

My other question is that can’t Youtube do all of the above? Youtube’s biggest problem at the moment, is that the most watched videos and biggest traffic driver is amateur videos. Not professional. If the anyclip guys have figured out a way to automatically tag, categorise and scale it, that could be a winner.

I’m out like long form video,

Matt aka Inspiredworlds

I met the Chk Chk Boom girl, Claire Werbeldoff at the Adknowledge Social Media Conference. She’s a nice person but an accidentally superstar. Said some crazy things and gained international fame via youtube and viral. The question is whether she can maintain the momentum.

I’m out like chk chk boom,

Matt

I will never understand why people do sports like this….it must the rush, the adrenalin, overcoming your fears and the risk involved. I cringed when I saw some of those injuries.

Anyhow, this is pure co-incidence – but at work we did a creative exercise where we created online display ads for a fictious energy drink, Fuqu. Then I came across the new Redbull website. I really like what Redbull is doing with its video content. They are positioning it with an adventure / extreme sport image. Redbull is associated with skateboarding, BMX riding, flying planes etc… It’s very cool.

I don’t really drink redbull these days (as they are bad for your health!). However, their videos are very slick and their marketing strategy is very good, particularly with social media. Check out their facebook page and integration with twitter. Redbull sponsored athletes provide Twitter updates and the feed is aggregated onto the facebook page.

I’m out like major wipeouts,

Matt

About two weeks ago, David Meerman Scott came to Australia to talk about social media. He’s a best selling author on Amazon on PR, marketing and social media topics and his books have been translated into 22 languages!

I heard him speak at Social Media Club Sydney (SMCSYD) and also had the opportunity to have breakfast with him and some other Sydney bloggers. He also had a speaking engagement in Melbourne.

You can read about the events from David here and from Jennifer Frahm (the organiser).

Here’s a pic of the breakfast:

He spoke about buyer personas at SMCSYD – understanding who the buyer is and talking to them in their voice. I thought he was a really good presenter, fun and engaging.

The most compelling thing for me was the idea of giving content away for free. He gave an example of a dentist in boston writing an ebook of Oral sex and health which went viral. It was niche, eye catching topic and controversial and something people want to know about. He’s also a great example himself, as he gave away a few chapters of his current book, World Wide Rave. He also has a free ebook out as well (like the full thing). I actually read the free version of World Wide Rave, liked it, then went out and bought it.

I think a lot of organisations are very scared of using this tactic. They like to build walls around to capture data, and monetise. Don’t build the barriers up. Just give it away for free – don’t coerce them. It will generate more online buzz, be easier to share your idea and thoughts, and if people are interested in you, they will subscribe to hear you……..voluntarily.

I’m about halfway through the book and I got him to autograph it! Check it:

I also helped out in the online marketing of the event as my company, ND sponsored the event in Melbourne. A bunch of my colleagues contributed using our various skill sets from:

• online display ads: nextbrett
• Email marketing: James, Tiff, Me
• Blog: James
• Twitter @socialmediamc: James, Me
• Eventbrite & Copy: Tiff
• And Matt Edge who brought us all together.

If I have forgotten anyone, please feel free to shoot me =) I believe there is an interview video floating around somewhere, so hopefully it gets uploaded soon to the interwebs.

There’s some other bloggers who have blogged about it here:

Iggy Pintado

Justanotherprblog

Online Marketing Banter

Servant of Chaos

If there’s any other blogs out there, let me know and I will link through.

I’m out like World Wide Rave,

Matt aka Inspiredworlds

The internet has fundamentally altered the business models of many industries.

One of these is the content industry. We have seen recently that the Readers Digest filed for bankruptcy. News Ltd posted a $300m loss in the last financial year.

The World Wide Web can give you almost unparalled access to any kind of information that you want. Its changing the way that we read the news and how much we pay for it. If I can access information anywhere, will I be prepared to pay for it? Will users be prepared to pay for it? And how can publishers and content producers make money from it? How does this affect online services?

At the same time, it is also altering our view of online services.

I’ve just started reading Chris Anderson’s “Free” book which has inspired me to write this as well as the current debate around this topic. The problem is that everyone now expects everything to be free. Chris Anderson’s discusses this briefly, on the divide between the older generation (30+) who are skeptical about anything offered for free, and the younger than 30 (gen x & gen Y) who have grown up in this free era.

Free online services but at what cost?

We get email services for free – gmail, hotmail, yahoo, et al. And these are all really good email services. There’s almost an unlimited capacity of email storage now. Gmail offers 7GB storge for free (Seven! that’s right). Sidenote: You can actually upgrade to 10GB – 400GB for $20 – $400 USD.  Except the cost of free email is advertising. And most people are willing to put up with it.

Free wifi is available in many cafes, particularly in Starbucks in the US – but there is an expectation that you will buy a Starbucks coffee in exchange for the price of free internet access. Its really an economic cross subsidy. Give me one service in exchange for paying for another, which allows the provider to make a profit margin. Free internet means you will stay longer in the cafe, sipping more cups of coffee whilst browsing the internet.

Many internet services like Huddle.net, Yammer and countless others more offer you a good service for free. They try to entice you by giving you a basic version and hoping that a percentage of users will upgrade to the paid version (when the 80/20 rule kicks in). It forces these kind of companies to be innovative and their competitors as well. Because if I’m not using their service, I could easily jump onto their competitor’s service. 20% of the paid/enterprise customers are subsidising the 80% free customers.

This is the same thinking behind the next release of Microsoft’s office 2010. They’ll give you a web version for free, most likely stripped down. Because if your not using this, your going to be using Google docs which is free.

I use Huddle, a project management software and it gives you a certain amount of capacity for free. It’s quite convenient, and I am seriously considering paying for it to use in my church for project management. I just need to investigate how it would work with many users, etc… I would consider this, because I have used the free service and seen how useful it can be.

The CEO of Box.net, which offers a similar collaboration/storage solution, said this gem of a quote:

“Free is not a business model. It is a distribution and marketing tactic”.

I agree with this 100%. You cannot last in a business environment (especially in a harsh GFC climate like now) without thinking about how you will eventually monetize your business. Free can only last for so long. Really its for marketing purposes, to allow users to sample your services and provide stickiness. If your service isn’t good enough, I’m just going to go somewhere else. So it keeps these online service providers on their toes.

With Google, they provide such superior search services (bing who?), it keeps drawing you back. They surround the organic search results with paid advertising in the form of search engine marketing on the right hand side. And I am perfectly cool with this, as are many other people. It’s done in a way that is unobtrusive and occassionally offers relevant paid results. Not that I have ever clicked on them, but someone must. Right?

I remember hearing one of the google maps engineers who was asked why does Google provide the google maps API? It’s really comes down to advertising. The more you use google services, the more advertising you are exposed to. However is the cost of free……… advertising? In relation to Google services, yes. Because Google typically starts its services with free and needs a way to monetise its services. It’s really a advertising/media company which also has a side business selling enterprise apps =)

You can provide a free service, but there needs to be something else which is making money. Anderson uses the example of King Gillete who gave razors away but made money through the sale of blades. Wow you with one hand, take your money with the other.

Its the same example for VCR’s/Playstations/Computers, etc… Subsidise the sale of hardware, so you’ll buy the software. Its the software / videos/DVD’s which have a higher profit margin and you’ll consume more of once you have the hardware.

I actually think that they could offer the iphone for almost free or heavily subsidised. And make the money back through apps. I know there’s a group of people out there that refuse to pay for apps. But there’s enough people (a minority) that will pay, and scaled over the millions that own iphones, its enough to generate significant revenues for Apple and the developers that create those apps.

So what’s the deal with online news content?

If I want the latest news, I can jump onto news.com.au and read any of the articles. If they build a paywall around it, I’ll just go to New York Times. I’m really only one click away. Or more likely, I’ll just search in google and end up reading an article from Google news, which is the king of all aggregators. They suck in content, strip it down and spit it out.

You can’t simply just aggregate content. Because you’ll just be re-aggregated by someone bigger or some other new service. It’s a continual battle. You need to produce original content which draws people in and they want to share.

The news industry is very different to many other industries because of its dynamics which focus on content, editorial standards, readership/subscription model, rapid distribution of news, classified advertising, etc…

I spoke about it with David Meerman Scott about it briefly this morning and he had some thoughts around creating customised content based on the user’s preference. I think this idea is worth exploring. As I’ve stated before, the business model of the  news industry needs to change. The question is – to what? What will people pay for?

You can’t just give stuff away for free. Their is a cost involved. You need a cross subsidy or some way to generate income back in return – whether through advertising ala google, or a freemium model.

But give me the news that I WANT, on demand and I might pay for that. I see BBC news and also news.com.au moving to this model. They allow you to rearrange the content based on what I want to read. Allow me to select my preferences. Perhaps they can build some intelligence around my behaviour. Understand what I like to read, what is sticky to me, what engages me, what I share with my friends. What conversations I am having on facebook, twitter, etc… about your news article.

Feed that loop back in. Know that I am interested in sports, particularly basketball & football. Hip hop music, international affairs, quirky news articles, etc… Make sure these kind of articles rise to the top. Create me an igoogle type portal or a popurl interface.

I would consider paying for this type of service. Would I consider paying on a ala carte basis per article? No. I would pay a monthly fee and consume as much as I could. If it works for Pay TV, this could work for news as well. Even though there is free to air tv, people pay for premium tv services that offer a greater variety of shows, and latest movies. Give me somethign superior to what is free, and I believe users will pay. It works for huddle, yammer and other online services. Why can’t it work in the news industry (despite its different dynamics)?

I don’t believe that the news industry should solely rely on advertising to monetise content despite the advances of advertising technology. Consumers are sick of pop-up ads, pop-unders, take over ads, pre-roll ads, banners. That stuff doesn’t work anymore.

If you know me, I’m a big fan of Mark Cuban’s blog, and he’s also got some ideas around this which are worth reading.

I’m out like free content,

Matt aka Inspiredworlds

I have just completed reading the two speeches given by John Hartigan, Chairman and Chief Exec of News Ltd. I actually read the wrong speech – there is one from 2007, but the one I was really after was from 2009.

My current thoughts are:

1.  The availability and immediacy of online news is disrupting the traditional business model of newspapers.

In the past, newspapers used to rely on selling copies and classifieds – where the real money is made from the rivers of gold. Well that’s all changing. Although, sales of copies haven’t declined in the same manner in Australia as the US or UK, its going to eventually happen and follow the same trend. People, especially younger people are used to looking at news online now. I don’t even have time to read the paper these days, but I will access news websites during the day. The notion of reading a printed newspaper is dying since people are time poor. The only person that I know that has the time to read a printed newspaper is my dad because he’s retired.

Its comes down to convenience and accessibility. I can read whatever I want – I can check out NY Times, Chicago Tribune, Daily Telegraph, BBC news. All within a few simple clicks.

2. The rise of citizen journalism

Regular people (i.e. non-journalists) that blog, twitter, post youtube videos, flickr photos have created the notino of citizen journalism. And its growing in importance. When an event occurs, particulary an accident, regular people are there already on the spot, before the professional journalist. News breaks out immediately. People can post updates via twitter, take pics with their phone, shoot mobile videos and post to youtube etc… The raw eyewitness accounts can be terrifingly engaging and accurate. It happened with the Bart shooting which I blogged about, Hudson plane crash, etc..

But of course we still need professional journalism, to vett the stories and break out the latest news. It’s a shame that  Australian journalism is at its lowest staffing levels in 25 years. Quality journalism is vital to a thriving democracy and must be maintained to have freedom of speech.

3. The multitude and breath of news available online has lead to the popularity of aggregation web sites.

Hartigan derides aggregation sites hard like Huffington Post, Crikey, Mumbrella. I’d also add in Digg and some of the other social bookmarking sites. The latter are probably not to the same degree, but in essence they are all content aggregation sites. Although he doesn’t like them and is basically calling them second rate journalism and killing the industry, they do have an important role to play.

We’re increasingly time poor people, with even shorter attention spans now. I find it incredibly difficult to sit down and read a book now, let alone a full newspaper article online. We scan articles. We look down the page and scroll and hit next. Aggregation sites like Digg and Huffington Post give you a short snapshot of the full article. If I am interested, I will click through and read the main article, which is written by a professional journalist. At the end of the day, if the summary and the article is relevant and good, the news website still gets the traffic.

When I have the option of reading a million news websites, its a buffet of choices. If I can get a 30 second takeaway, I’ll take it.

Aggregation websites syndicate content. Sure, if they weren’t available I would have went to news.com.au or nytimes.com. But aggregators still push traffic to news websites. Google News and the like should be seen as partners rather than competitive threats. And aggregators and the audience still need quality news.

4. Paying for online content

I’ve been reading the NY Times blog debate by several prominent media people and academics about this issue. In a online world where free seems to dominate, will people pay for news content? Is there a business model around this?

Hartigan thinks that people will pay for engaging, quality content and so does Joel Kramer, editor of Minnpost (Minnesota Post) in the NY times article. I would tend to agree with this.

It is a pain when you try to read older articles on some websites and you are told that you need to be a paying member. I don’t have a problem with this model – latest news free and older content that is archived you have to pay for. Typically its 7 day old material is free, older stuff is paid. Or basic news free, premium content paid (more in depth articles or exclusive articles). There is a business cost involved to produce the content, pay the journalists wage, and to store it.

If the content is good, people will pay for it.

Its the freemium theory – basic version free, premium version paid.

Perhaps this is the online business model that newspapers need to adopt. It’s been adopted by a lot of content heavy websites now. ESPN has been doing it for ages with their “ESPN Insider” membership. However, sites like bugmenot help you get around it =)

The problem is as I have discussed with a friend, if people are currently getting it for free then they’re get used to it. They’re going to be quite annoyed once they have to pay. You need to set the rules early with your audience. However, if the value proposition is strong enough and explained well i.e. paying for premium online content & cost to the business of producing, it can work even if the audience is used to it being free.

One of the threats is that there are many subsititutes. That value proposition only really works if its quite good and they are not substitutes available. With so many news websites available, I can easily go somewhere else which is free. It’s almost as if the news industry has to work in tandem in oligopoly type fashion. Its a matter of survival.

The news industry HAS to evolve and adopt an online paying model. It might be the model that Hartigan described where they provide customised premium content based on what you are interested in, combined with print.

——————————————————————–

More sporadic thoughts to come on this topic of the future of journalism and news.

I’m out like print,

Matthew Ho.

1. PaaS – Platform as a Service. Now, I have become very interested (some may say obsessed) with the idea of the “cloud”. Its so elegant yet so simple. Store everything in the cloud i.e. online. I do this already with gmail, ical, google docs, wikis, Sales Force, book marks.

Its the idea that I don’t need to be at “my computer” to access all my information. I don’t need to carry around a USB stick, I just sent it to my gmail account. I can access my bookmarks via a bookmarking service like Delicious. I can access these bookmarks from any computer in any location. It is the same with google docs – any document that I make on google docs is available online. Google & delicious has become my computer, hence its so attractive.

This has spawned the idea of software as a service (SaaS) – you dont need to install any software on your computer. You just access it online. It’s the whole idea of Mailout, an application I support. You can access this email platform online, upload your database, push out emails from any computer. I use sales force for the same reason – all my business contacts, leads, virtually an entire CRM system is online in the cloud. Accessible when I want.

Now platform as a service I just came across today. I signed up to Force.com, an extension of salesforce.com. Its basically a platform from which I can build apps for my business. I can utilise existing apps, customise existing ones, or just create new ones. Its hard to describe but you can virtually create anything and its 5 times faster building an app on this platform than without one.

I love this idea. It’s like igoogle or even wordpress. The widgets are out there, I just plug them in or I can create them. PaaS and SaaS is just a smart business move. I save on the infrastructure, installation, running and customer service costs. The biggest impediments to these services are:

- Investment into existing infrastructure: If I have already spent several million dollars on servers and software, do i have an incentive to switch to the cloud? These are sunk costs which cannot be recovered.

- Security concerns: CIO’s and management are understandly terrified of having their information in the cloud. it presents a new security risk. Information could be more readily breached by external parties, because it is not restricted to people phyically present in the building.

- Uptime: its hard to put a guarantee on uptime (i.e the amount of time that the service is running and not down).

2. Conversations eventually move to email – where the heck is Wave?

Recently, a friend of mine posted a status update on facebook. Then I responded to her status update. However, I wanted to talk to her privately so I direct messaged her on facebook and we started talking using that format. She then emailed my gmail account. However, since I was at work I wanted to use my work email – it just made it easier to consolidate the conversation in one place and keep it going

This happened with other peopel as well. We start talking over facebook email or twitter direct message, but if we want to maintain the conversation, it has to go to email. It is just more convenient, i can write longer message and I can search and go back. I don’t always want to have public convo’s or perhaps I want to send an attachment.

What I find interesting is that if someone wants to talk to me, the conversation will eventually move to email.

That is why I cannot wait for Google Wave to arrive. Something that allows for me to converge my social networks and email together.

You can also see that Facebook’s strategy is starting to move away from a gated community. Facebook connect is great little login tool for other websites. You don’t need to sign up to another website, you just use your existing login details. But this is a post for another time.

3. Mobile Banking - I can’t wait for this to become mainstream. On Monday, I had dinner with a few people and I paid for someone as they didn’t have enough cash on them. The next day they transferred the money to my bank account. Another situation occured, where I sold a friend an entertainment book but they didn’t have enough money so they transferred the money later that day.

What would have been awesome is some kind of payment system for banking to occur on the spot. This is where mobile banking can come in. If we are at the dinner table and someone owes you money, they could transfer the money over their mobiles. Now mobile banking does exists via apps on iphone or simply logging in to your bank account on your internet enabled phone. However, it is not seen as secure nor is it widely adopted. Its actually been available for around 2 years, but hardly anyone uses it  - only early adopters.

This is better than smart cards with stored value. Having a phone which can transfer money would enable micropayments to be made. Pay your friend $20 for movie ticket, or $5 for buying you a beer, or split the bill and pay them $40 for a meal. A daugher ask her father for $100 to go shopping. Instead of reaching into his wallet for cash he can zap her the money via his mobile.

Studies show that if you lose your wallet, on average it takes around 2 hours for you to realise. If you lose your phone it takes 20mins for you to realise it is lost. And for those that say its not safe to do phone banking – people said the same thing when credit cards and ATM’s were introduced. It just needs wider acceptance and adoption – and this will occur over time. We are living in a cashless society and this will eventually become the norm.

4. Digital Radio is here but not widely adopted

I spoke to Daniel about this a few months ago and it has piqued my interest again as a contact of mine has started selling digital radios. It will be like digital TV. The signal will be clearer than analogue. Ability to go back and replay the broadcast. Essentially you need, a digital radio to be able to get the signal. You can also listen to radio stations overseas. Also, digital radio will have information that is broadcast with the sound – words, pictures, links, etc… Its a more interactive version of radio.

The radio sets aren’t cheap – they retail for about $280+ and none of them look particularly visually appealing. At the moment, its more for early adopters. This stuff is standard in Europe though.

It actually only went live in May 2009, so watch this space.

5. The possible uses of social media on B2B relationships: This is somethign I will explore in another post. TBC.

I’m out like software on your computer,

Matt

I never seem to have time these days to update my blog. Five years ago, I used to update it every few days, but now its once every few weeks. Here are some thoughts I’ve been meaning to put down:

Location based information is the future.

Information by itself can be useful. But information in context is so much more powerful. Having information readily available, when you need it and tailored for where you are located significantly increases its relevance.

A device that is powering location based information is the availability of the internet on mobile handsets. I recently discovered how useful this was when using some new apps on my android phone. A little light bulb went off in my head.

Here are two examples.

1. Quickpedia: Essentially this is a wikipedia client for my phone. It allows me to quickly look up information. One really useful section or tab in the app, allows me to see information about the area I am in. It uses my GPS location and grabs wikipedia information about the landmarks near me and the general surrounding area. That is incredibly fun and useful.

2. Places directory: This is an app made by googlers in their 20% time. based on my GPS location, it tells me about the following that is nearby – bars, restaurants, ATM’s, hotels, cafes, etc… It also gives me the reviews and ratings of these places, approximate distance from where I am and a one touch button to call the place! Amazing stuff. It pulls in all the information from google maps.

Location based social networks

I believe that having social networks down to the granular levels of location e.g. neighbours talking to each other will be the next step. It is a logical extension of what happens in the real world. Though you may not really talk to your neighbour in real life, you may be more willing to converse with a neighbour who might still be viewed as a stranger online.

Whilst its great to talk to people on twitter, facebook, et al from Sydney, Melb, USA etc…I would have also have a use for information about my neighbourhood from locals about where to buy the best coffee, what people think about the drycleaner, walking in certain streets may be dangerous, etc…

Whilst large online communities are popular, we’re seeing a move to smaller microcosms of activity like Ning. People forming their own social networks based on common interests. Locality will be one of these interest groups. For example, an online community for Bondi residents, North Shore, Paramatta, Geelong, etc…

I’m out like your local neighbourhood watch,

Matt