Mobile crowdsourcing

While microfinance continues to get a hammering in the press due to charges of abusive practices, techno startups may be paving the way for a fresh new approach to help the abject poor devoid (maybe) of endemic institutional corrupting influences.

Nathan Eagle here presents an innovative way to harness leading-edge mobile innovation on the phone to empower the poor in developing countries, starting with Africa. This will be a binary outcome - either hugely successful, a gamer changer and startlingly disruptive or be killed by self-serving market forces that perceive it to help the poor.

He launched his company txteagle last year and initial news is positive - a space to watch.

Satire

Don't always like Bill Mahr, but he may have got it at least half right on calling out Jon Stewart on this one.

With all due respect to my friends Jon and Stephen, it seems to me that if you truly wanted to come down on side of restoring sanity and reason, you’d side with the sane and the reasonable--and not try to pretend that the insanity is equally distributed in both parties. Keith Olbermann is right when he says he’s not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts, the other is very close to playing with his poop. And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance’s sake, that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism. There’s a difference between a mad man and a madman.

Stewart explains his intentions and defines the role of satire versus status quo polarized news reporting.

Hacktivists

Whether you think they are activists, hackers, wide eyed dreamers or just pure kids with a mental picture of the world that revolves around make belief digital games, there have been interesting pockets of innovation in bringing technology to the reach of the masses.

New generation hacktivists like Heap (open-source interactive mapping) and Haystack (internet security) claim they are not seeking silver-bullet solutions but scalable technologies that will unlock the one advantage the people always had—the sheer power of their numbers. “The technology variable doesn’t matter the most,” says Patrick Meier, director of crisis mapping for Ushahidi, “It is the organizational structure that will matter the most. Rigid structures are unable to adapt as quickly to a rapidly changing environment as a decentralized system. Ultimately, it is a battle of organizational theory.”

However, as Haystack's rise and fall showed us, there is complexity in these technologies that is often non-obvious.

The TED factor

TED began as a California-based conference in the 1980s named after its three initial subjects: technology, entertainment and design. It has expanded its subject matter and its geographical scope, holding conferences and making freely available videos of its speakers. Volunteers translate talks into more than 70 languages. Whatever you think about the original TED business model and the amazing speakers they manage to invite to their events, you have to be even more inspired by how it has spawned an after-life.

A tweet story

So I was probably one of the first 200 users of Twitter when it first came out. After two months, I tweeted, "I'm not sure where this thing is going and how useful it will be . . . ." and put my tweeting on hiatus for 4 years. OK, I was dead wrong! Now, Twitter appears to have taken front stage in the battle for your social networking attention. But usage levels are still debatable as twitter knock-offs try to advance the paradigm and the use of 140 characters to express a POV gets some people into serious trouble as noted by CNN's firing of a journalist over a seemingly benign tweet. It may not be relevant what position we take on the these side-effects of Twitter, but important to acknowledge there is a rising tide of potentially disruptive use cases for Twitter that will surely shift the game in certain situations. Much like FB, at some point the wisdom of crowds proves the value of a tool and we should expect to see some newsworthy applications of this technology in the near future.

Twitter's also a great example of VC startup's and why there's a need for different kinds of CEO's depending on the stage of the startup, interim CEO as they are frequently nicknamed. First Jack Dorsey, and now Evan Williams stepping aside after a two-year stint, we see the company preparing for the next big company creation phase shift. Dick Costolo hired a year ago as COO is taking the leadership position. Costolo was also an early investor in the company. Williams, who oversaw the web site's recent re-design, will remain at Twitter. But he will be focusing instead on product development. As CEO, Williams was able to grow the number of registered users from three million to 160 million. Now, the site is trying to make money off those users. Hence, the re-design, which allows Twitter to sell ads in a way that would not disrupt the flow of messages.

Here's a peek into the future of Twitter.

Here's a use of twitter in social activisim.

Here's how the law lags social media conventions

Freemium economy

The Most Important Things In Life are Free

Chris Anderson "the long tail" guy asserts that with more and more industry leaders turning their traditional markets on their heads by giving away their core product (from semiconductor manufacturers giving away GPS chips, to 1-800-GOOG-411, yahoo infinite email) in the hope of creating new "user generated markets", Chris points to a path that is now well trodden and being followed - whether it is the only successful path is less important. Here's his Wired article as well.

Music business model

How will a dollar of music revenue be distributed in the future? The chart above shows the progression of how a single dollar in music revenue has been distributed in the past as technologies have evolved.

Pre-1990, major labels were responsible for the entire lifecycle of music production and consumption.

During the 1990s, computers dramatically reduced the cost of producing music recordings and CD duplications, increasing the number of independent labels (Indies). The increased competition drove the costs A&R (Artist Development and Recording) and production down. However, to get music played on the radio and get CDs distributed to stores let alone acquiring shelf-space required the Indies to close a distribution deal with the major labels. The result: major music labels enjoyed oligopoly profits from their stranglehold on distribution.

Post 1999, the Internet downloads of MP3s became the number one method of consuming music worldwide. The vast majority of this music consumption and sharing is illegal and conducted over Peer-to-peer networks: under the radar.

2005 onwards, the opportunity in the new music economy is in marketing and distribution.

Michael Masnick (of Floor64) presents some astute observations on a potentially new business model for the music industry used by Nine Inch Nail's Trent Rezner. The core of the presentation is the "formula" that is the basis for making money in the music business in the digital era:

Music $$ = Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB)

There are many artists -- famous and not so famous -- who've been making use of this formula to create successful strategies for building up a stronger fan base, creating wonderful new works of art, distributing them out to the community and getting paid for it at the same time.

What made Reznor so interesting as a case study was the fact that he's done it so many times in so many different ways that he, by himself, represents a great example of how you can approach this simple formula in an infinite variety of creative ways.