inspiredworlds.com

We’re back into the swing of things for 2010, and I’d like to write about a couple of things I’ve seen in the last 12 months in the digital world. I don’t like to do predictions because the web moves so fast and technology is changing at such a fast pace. But I’d like to tell you about services I am using and what I want to use more of. I’m going to start with Foursquare in 2010.

The reason that I am writing this post is because I went to a presentation on the future of digital in 2008 and one of the speakers was Michael Kordahi, Microsoft Evangelist for Microsoft Surface which I have previously blogged about. One thing that stood out was how he said he had to bring his clients along with him for the journey, as he’s often so far ahead and in a different space. He does that with his blog and that’s what I am trying to do too!

Foursquare

An app that I’ve been using quite a lot in the last few months is Foursquare. I’ve actually been wanting to write about this for a while but I wanted to evaluate the service for a few months first.

Foursquare

I had signed up about 6 months before it was available in Australia and there were only a few Aussies on the network. I must admit that I sign up to a lot of services that I hear about on tech blogs. I’m one of those people that like to experiment.  I noticed a lot of them were tweeting about it on one day and some had added me – that’s when I realised it was available in Aus. There were a flurry of blog posts from local tech / internet peers in the few days after it was released in Australia.

I could see that there was a lot of potential. Foursquare is a location based social networks where you could update your location using your mobile.  I was already using my mobile a lot to update my status using facebook and twitter. I also noticed that a lot of my friends were updating with location based tweets/fb updates saying which restaurant they were at, which country they were travelling to, etc….. Everywhere I was going, particularly on the trains, out in the clubs/bars, people were accessing the internet on their smart phones and logging into facebook/twitter with location based information. It just made sense. I was already experimenting with Google Latitude, BrightKite, and then GoWalla so I could see the space was hotting up.

Where are your friends and what are they doing?

The thing I like about foursquare is that you can see where your friends are and what they are doing. Often when you are out, you might just miss them. The next time you see them you’re like “I can’t believe you were there! I was there too!” or “You just missed me!” or you call them and ask “Where are you tonight?”. With foursquare, I know exactly where they are (if they choose to disclose this information). I can find out new venues which my friends are checking out, and it encourages me to go there too.

There are also some other interesting outcomes. An example from last Friday, I was at the Arthouse for my high school reunion. One of my colleagues was meeting up with another friend at Arthouse. He saw on foursquare that I was there! So he walked around looking for me, and I found him!

You choose to follow people in your network and I try to find similar minded people and see where they hang out. I also like seeing who else has checked-in to a venue. So social networking is an important element in Foursquare.

Where are your friends?

Tips

You can also get tips at venues ala eatability. I love going to a restaurant, check-in to a venue and reading the tips other people have left. One of my favourite restaurants at the moment is Chat Thai, in Sydney’s chinatown. I read a tip on Foursquare to try out the strawberry blend. I did and it was awesome! If I eat something which I like, or have a tip on my favourite dish on a venue or even a bad experience, I will write about it on foursquare. I also leave tips which other people may find helpful. For example, at Museum station, I left a note saying that some of the entrances close at 8pm (it might be earlier), but thats useful for people to know.

Gameplay addiction – The checkins

Another element that is quite addictive and in my opinion makes it standout is the gameplay. When you enter a venue, you can checkin. You find the location using your phone – it will pull up a list of nearby locations or you can enter your own. After that, you choose to check-in to show you are there and it will notify your network. You get points for checking in. If you have 3 or more checkins, you can become Mayor of the venue. That is, if no one else is already Mayor. If someone else has more checkins, you have to have more than them to take over as Mayor.

In fact, I’ve been battling for control of Museum station for some time now! Another user had 10+ checkins at Musuem, so I decided to check-in twice a day (when I arrived in the morning and left at night). I became Mayor and then someone else overtook me. Now I have to get back on top again!! That keeps me coming back to Foursquare.

I’m currently holding down two mayor-ships (is that a word?). I’ve the mayor of Equilibrium (World Square Pub) and Bikaner Namkeen. I’ve actually reached super-user level 1, so I have the authority to edit and merge venues, which I intend to do with World Square Pub.

Player please! Get crunked! And more foursquare badges

You also get points for checkins, but I don’t really care too much about the points. What I do care about is the badges. There are different badges for various purposes. Your first checkin gets you the “newbie” badge. Then there are badges for 10 checkins, 25, and 50 (they must be unique venues). The interesting ones are “local” (3 x in one week), “crunked” (4+ checkins in one night), and my favourite “player please” (checkin with 3 members of the opposite sex).

If you want a good post about the check-ins which foursquare pioneered, read this from the Scobelizer, someone I respect who blogs about the social networking space and the web in general. He talks about how the other social networking services are going to start adopting checkins as well, including Facebook, Twitter and Yelp.

Opportunities for business

There are some exciting opportunities for business. Potentially they can send out location sensitive offers. If you happen to walk past a venue, they could push out a notification with an offer to entice you in e.g. free entree with every meal. Alternatively, offer discounts to people that checkin. I’ve seen examples in the US of offering discounts to people that are Mayors of venues.

I must admit I’ve become a bit of a mini-evangelist for foursquare. I have convinced several people from work to sign up as well as some of my friends and associates. Now that I’ve got a fair amount of people on the service, its becoming a lot more useful. So don’t delay, signup!

I’m out like threesquare,

Matt

Having an order take 10 business days to process after being promised it would take 3 – 5 days?

Calling up 3 times to chase it up?

Not knowing the cost of services you are purchasing?

Signing up to paid membership with benefits, yet not being able to fully understand what it is you are paying for?

Repeating your details every time to different suppliers, who are interconnected?

Lost in a sea of jargon and complicated concepts?

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If these exist in your industry or company, it probably wouldn’t be very succesful (unless of course you are a monopoly).

Well this is my experience with the healthcare system and my private health insurance provider.

I sure I’m not the only one. I’m rather pissed off at my health insurance company and the general lack of communication and cohesion in the industry.

Accessible medical information online

Firstly, I am annoyed at having to repeat my details to every single supplier along the chain. From the various doctors, specialist doctors, specialist specialist doctors, hospital staff. Don’t they ever talk to each other – instead we’re handling around letters of recommendation, x-ray diagrams, medicine prescription slips, etc… Couldn’t we have a centralised database where we can access all our medical data in one place? If there was an emergency and you were admitted to hospital, they could easily pull up all your medical records. Or perhaps, I could stroll into any medical office to see a specialist and they would see all my details.

There are privacy issues with such an approach, but a user and supplier would be greatly convenienced if such facilities were available. I noticed that my health insurance supplier has a member log in available, but it still doesn’t tell me what benefits are available for my level of cover. Wouldn’t you think that this would be a very basic information request?

Instead, we are left to call up and be put on hold for 5 minutes or more, whilst listening to “we’re busy, please call back during quieter times” messages. What kind of business are they running?

I’ve come across several initiatives one of these being Google Health (y’all know Google is in everything), where the information is stored in the cloud. There’s also Glide Health which I saw during TechCrunch 50, where all the information is accessible from the platform – family medical history, past medical results, etc… I was quite impressed when I saw the demo.

Managing my health provider information and claims

Everytime I need information, I generally need to call up. In fact, it is written in the forms please speak to your “doctor, hospital, health care provider”. Why can’t these parties also collaborate in giving me information, instead of me making 3 separate requests? Well its, 5 actually because there’s another party involved. I have no doubt that these parties are NOT working together unless I give them the information. Rather there should be one central place where they can be notified of what is going on and I can see the progress.

Also, if I have to put in a request or claim, I need to chase it up – 3 times. No one within the organisation has been notified to progress the request either. Per above, there should be a tracker of all claims and requests. A bit of transparency and openness would do wonders for this industry, which thrives on people not knowing what they are paying for and charging them every month for it.

Making sense of medical insurance

There’s a lot of jargon used in this industry and when you speak to people on the phone, I do not feel that they are very good at explaining the concepts to you. I’ve read my policy and FAQ on the website, and its only having asked someone working in the industry and speaking to my health fund and doctor a few times that I have understood what is going on.

But I still don’t have a sense of how much I’m supposed to be paying, even though I’ve paid for most of it in signficant out of pocket expenses – cause I’m still waiting for one person in the supply chain to get back to me.

I could have done more research and asked around, but you don’t really have a choice in these matters. Sometimes you just need to get things done. I feel like the public (especially people like myself) need greater education on our health system and how it works.

And I’m starting to understand the divide between the public and private health insurance industry. With a private hospital, there is little waiting time if you have private health insurance and are willing to pay for the extra expenses. However with the public system, it is free or your health fund can cover you as a private patient in a public system. But the offset is that there is a waiting period. It could be anywhere from 3 to 6 months or longer.

I’m out like our health system,

Matt.

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.

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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.

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 came across the article today – its pretty funny.

Twitter impersonations are a problem on Twitter, but at least this one was obvious and very witty. It’s a fake twitter account of Stephen Conroy, Communications Minister.

Read about it here and on mumbrella.

Fake Stephen Conroy = Leslie Nassar

I’m out like the fake Stephen Conroy,

Matthew Ho.

I really like this video which unspy posted on my blog earlier.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRKc_-VqJm0]

To me its just not fair that hedge funds and corporations can manipulate the stockmarket. It’s the notion that there is no such thing as “market correction” or equilibrium. I believe George Soros said this as well in his book. It’s not a science because there’s humans involved. 

Financial market regulation was an area I could not ignore in my studies as a lawyer and accountant. In fact, I did a thesis on it =P Shenanigans and antics pulled by Jim Cramer’s days as hedge fund don’t give normal people a chance in the stock market. They’re shifting huge piles of money around in back rooms to create artificial lifts in stock prices or spreading rumours to make a stock go down. Essentially, they are screwing with people’s money and the overral stock market. It’s nothing new, its always been going on. 

The fact is that some CEO’s have lied and financial reporter’s don’t do enough digging around to reveal the truth. Financial reports don’t necessarily tell the truth either – sometimes the real info is hidden deep in the notes or in off balance sheet financing and never reported. If it is so opaque what trust do we have in financial markets? There always seem to be a hidden truth and unbelieveable faith that things will get better and an ideal of constant growth.

It’s tulipomania all over again. Check this from wikipedia:

“Tulip mania or tulipomania (Dutch names include tulpenmanie, tulpomanie, tulpenwoede, tulpengekte, and bollengekte) was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the newly introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed.[2] At the peak of tulip mania in February 1637, tulip contracts sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble.[3] The term “tulip mania” is often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble”

I’m out like the bubble bursting,

Matthew Ho

Last night I watched American Gangster (again!) featuring Denzel Washington, one of my favourite actors. I’ve seen it before when I was visiting New York in a Times Square movie theatre. Denzel, uses the “johnny law” phrase a few times when talking about paying off “Johnny Law” i.e. paying cops to turn a blind eye to his nefarious activities.

I’ve always been curious about technology and the law. And now more so. Technology is an evolving beast, where the business models are constantly changing and new competitors, trends, viral campaigns emerge overnight. Whilst the law is seen as conservative, slow to adapt, and very traditional. Generalisations yes, but ask any lawyer or laymen and they’ll agree with these perceptions. Evidently, these two are at opposite ends of the spectrum. The law seeks to maintain order and protect society, yet also to enable the creation of new ideas and businesses. The internet is disruptive, fast moving, changing and global in its reach. Law is often seen as jursidictional, often applying to only member states (i.e on country by country basis) unless treaties are ratified by Member states.

On Wednesday morning, I attended an Advertising and Marketing law CLE. What is a CLE? It means “continuing legal education”. For those that are unaware, I’m still a qualified lawyer (amongst other things) and to maintain your status as a lawyer, you need undertake ongoing education. It might involve some lectures, preparing presenting a lecture, or watching some videos.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this lecture but went with an open mind. I heard the following lectures:

1. New commercial models in advertising and marketing using the internet 
2. Comparative advertising 101
3. Copyright in advertising
4. Children & the law

Topic 1: New commercial models in advertising and marketing using the internet 

They were well presented, but the most useful to me was probably Internet Business models by Peter Leonard. Peter is a partner at Gilbert & Tobin, and counts Google amongst his clients. He described some basics about adwords and how it worked – I knew most of this stuff since I do some work on adwords. However, he had some really interesting points on whitelisting v blacklisting of keywords, something which I was not aware of. 

Blacklisting of keywords

Apparently, some brandnames are “blacklisted” on google, so advertisers can’t use them. For example, “Toyota” can only be used by Toyota. A car reseller, wholesaler, etc… can’t use that term. People are very careful which words they blacklist since it does not enable to aforementioned parties to advertise on google. And google applies this policy on a global basis. So if Toyota actually had a reseller in china under a distribution arrangement, they could not buy that keyword to sell a Toyota car.

Contextual and behavioural advertising

The other relevant thing he discussed was contexutal and behavioural advertising, which is becoming quite a big area in the online marketing world. Advertising has always been about relevancy and recency. Erwin Ephron developed the recency theory which is about showing someone an ad when they are in the mood to purchase. The idea of “top of mind”. It’s not about showing them an ad 3 times to get it to stick, rather at the right time when they want to buy. I believe that is what behavioural advertising and contextual advertising seeks to do as well – tying relevancy and recency together. 

 Behavioural looks at your past behaviour on the internet – which websites you’ve been to, how you use the internet. Contextual advertising is 3rd party advertising based on the content on the website (i.e. your current session on the web).  The whole idea is to serve you more relevant ads. Websites now, may reserve a space on their site for advertising local content to you based on your IP address – you’ve probabaly seen it! Look at an American website, yet its giving you ads for Australian flights or credit cards. Online advertising has gotten smarter. It was really insightful because at ad:tech and even in my work, these are topics which people are talking about. third party advertising, serving of ads, affiliate marketing, etc… On the flip side, there are privacy concerns, because your ISP tracks where you’ve been and keeps all the information about each individiual user. To me, this is also two competing concerns – serving you more relevant ads v capturing your private information.

It enhances the user experience and the advertising by having geographically and behavioural based ads, but aren’t you worried that someone is keeping tabs on you?

Other interesting points he discussed was how keywords get bought, and the difficulty of proving trademark infringement for keywords. Since the prices and the allocation of paid ads on Google was constantly changing, its hard to prove in such a dynamic environment. 

I must admit the other seminars weren’t as relevant to me or as interesting, hence my interest did drop off. Copyright issues in advertising were ok, about database compliation and the rights attached to that. Children and the law & comparative advertising was extremely boring, but still handy to know. I learnt that advertising needs to get clearance from legals, very important so you don’t get sued (!) and meets all legal and regulatory requirements. Also, there’s so many various regulatory codes for each type of media (radio, tv, outdoor) and legislation. 

I’m out like Johnny Law, 

Matthew Ho.

I visited ad:tech sydney again on day 2 (Wednesday, 11 March 2009). This time I arrived later in the afternoon at 2.30pm. 

I was there to help out with the exhibit. I was at the Next Digital stand from 2.30 – 4.30pm. I also took a bunch of pics and posted them on Flickr and below as well.

It’s interesting being an exhibitor as opposed to a visitor walking around on Day 1. Some people walk up to you just to chat and find out what it is about, others have an interest or something they want to pitch at us. I think the most important thing is to be nice and have a casual chat. Not everyone is interested in hearing the marketing spiel and you have to be ready for all types of questions.

There’s a lot of people at ad:tech that are very tech savvy, and you have others there for the 1st time who looked like they just walked off the street. Overall though, it seemed pretty quite and there was not a lot of people walking around. It look like ad:tech was winding down on Wednesday afternoon.

Next year, I’d like to go to some more of the seminars, possibly even the paid ones. I hear the chatter on twitter from following the hashtags (#atsyd, #atsyd1, etc…) and there seems to be a lot going on.

When I look back, I realise that I have progressed in this industry and it is a humbling experience that a year ago, I wasn’t even working in digital. Now, I had the priviliege and the opportunity to talk to people at ad:tech as an exhibitor about online marketing regarding email marketing, analytics, etc… They say that 1 year in online is equivalent to 7 dog years. I believe that’s so true. Online just moves so fast, new things are emerging all the time. As I’ve heard people say, it may be changing but the fundamentals haven’t changed.

Overall, ad:tech was very good for checking out some new things. One of the most important things I was exposed to was affiliate marketing and traffic marketing, and different companies in this area. These aspects about online marketing I would never had learnt about sitting at my desk at work.

I’m out like ad:tech,

Matthew Ho.

I’ve been watching these videos for the past hour or so. They’re very interesting, particularly given the current financial climate.  There’s been a feud brewing between Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” and Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show. 

I’ve actually got one of Jon Stewart’s books on my shelf (its brilliant!). FYI – Jon Stewart is a comedian. These two networks are supposedly sister networks as well. Watch these unedited & uncensored videos, they are very insightful – I was addicted! (note: the daily show posting these vids on their website)

Part 1

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYWwBG7RDfE]

Part 2

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyyOfAfrt9U]

Part 3

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7og_2XjrhI]

Based on what I have seen, Jim Cramer was pummeled by Jon Stewart. It was a three round knockout, that destroyed Cramer’s credibility. However, Cramer accepted too much blame. Could ANYONE have predicted some of these crisises and collapses?? If you put yourself out there and tell investors to buy Bear Stearns and then it crumbles, should you accept some of the blame? 

It reminds me of 5 – 7 years ago when people were recommending Enron, Worldcom, etc… and then they collapsed. I don’t think the CNBC network and Jim Cramer should be solely to blame, even though they made those recommendations. Yes, they could have done more due diligence, but it is a crazy stock market out there. Cramer should have stood up for himself more. Jon Stewart didn’t even give him much of a chance to respond either. He just kept knocking him down blow after blow.

The impact is once in a life time, however similar “shocks” have happened before. See Enron bust, Dot.com bust, Asian Crisis, and Black Monday 1987.

I’ve never doubted that there is manipulation in the stock market, some legal, and some illegal.  

Here’s the original video Jim Cramer did a few years ago, discussing how hedge funds manipulate the stock market:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M-OiXUhZNE]

I’m out like Jim Cramer’s career,

Matthew Ho.