Geosign, a startup that raked in $160M in VC funding, blew up one year later after its business model — gaming the Google search engine — was effectively shut down via a change in Google’s algorithm. Read more here.
Sphere: Related ContentI just returned from a trip to Japan. What amazed me was that I did not hear any mobile phones ringing in subway cars or trains. Neither did I hear (or see) people talking on their phones. I was so eerily quiet. But people are using their phones — texting, reading mini-novels, playing games, looking at video. Everyone’s staring into them, oblivious to the other passengers. Note that in Japan, nearly all the phones are the flip model (none of them from Nokia).
What accounts for the silence? On the shinkansen (high-speed train) people are requested to put their phones in silent mode. If you want to talk to someone, you have to do it in the area between the carriages. As a result, even though the subways and trains can be very crowded, it’s more civilized experience unlike in Europe or the US, where people chat loudly and talk about their personal problems within earshot of everyone. I also noticed that when two or more people are talking in a subway car, they do so in hushed voices.
I witnessed the same thing in a cafe at the train station in Kyoto where I was having coffee, waiting for the shinkansen to Tokyo. The guy sitting next to me suddenly rose and ran outside when his mobile phone rang. He did not take the call in the restaurant.
What amazes me though is that during the week and a half that I was in Japan, I did not see one person violate this “rule”. Not even the wildly dressed young guys with punky orange hair boarding the subway in Harajuku (a Tokyo district where a lot of young people hang out). Think of the thousands of people who use public transport in Japan.
What does this have to do with i-mode?
i-mode is a wireless service launched by NTT Docomo in Japan which provides access to mobile Internet sites. In other words, it delivers online content to mobile phones. It’s popular in Japan because on those long boring commutes and subway rides, people can simply stare at their phones and view the content. Since they don’t talk on their phones, it’s the one thing that occupies their time and allows them to not have to look at other passengers.
NTT Docomo entered into partnerships with European telecom operators a few years ago to launch i-mode in Europe. It was a flop everywhere. I know that in the Netherlands, KPN Mobile is giving it away and even then, most people I know who have it, rarely use it.
Why? People talk on their mobile phones in the Netherlands (which irritates other passengers but the chatting commuters don’t care). They don’t have such long commutes either. Many people bike or drive to work, too. Europeans and Americans are more “PC centric”, that is, when they think of online content, they like to look at it on a computer.
Sphere: Related ContentI live in Amsterdam, everyone should know that by looking at my Facebook profile. Yet, Facebook has inserted this ad for Blockbuster in my news feed. Totally irrelevant to me. This is nothing more than SPAM. In a few months, my news feed will be clogged with utterly useless ads. How do I opt out of Facebook spam?
I have written in the past about Blyk, a mobile virtual network operator in the UK, that offers free mobile phone calls to 16-24 year olds in exchange for receiving ads via SMS or MMS. According to this article in the The Times:
The response rate to Blyk’s advertising campaigns, which take the form of text and picture messages, is, it says, 29 per cent. That is more than double the typical response rate to direct marketing and a figure that independent analysts say is extraordinarily high.
Many people are skeptical about the free-calls-for-ads business model since it hasn’t worked in the past. Blyk, however, targets a particular demographic, young people, and they are focusing only on the UK (for now). I can only think of similar free-WiFi-for-ads models such as MetroFi’s and EarthLink’s. EarthLink pulled out of the metro Wi-Fi business and MetroFi wants cities to become anchor tenants; it seems they have abandoned their original business model which had 2 elements: (a) free WiFi with ads; and (b) WiFi with no ads, but pay a fee.
For a Wi-Fi service provider to succeed on the ad model, it needs a lot of people using the service and the “right” people, i.e. the users that the advertisers on the network are seeking to reach. There are a few ad-serving companies targeting ISPs that have launched recently: NebuAd, JiWire (although they’re not a startup, they launched their targeted ad serving business last year), and others.
Nonetheless, I think it is great that people are experimenting with different ways of delivering wireless services to people.
Sphere: Related ContentA study conducted by the Stichting Kijkonderzoek (SKO) in the Netherlands estimates that 28 percent of Dutch households has a DVD or hard disk recorder that allows people to view TV shows and movies whenever they want, and skip advertisements. One quarter of households already has a flat screen TV. Digital TV is growing as well: 8 percent of households have a satellite dish and 4.6 percent have a subscription to Digitenne (KPN Telecom’s digital TV service).
Watching TV via the computer has already increase dramatically. At the end of last year 17 percent watched one or more TV programs on the computer. This is 5 percent more than the year before.
As more people are able to skip ads and watch TV on demand, where does a company that sells detergent advertise? How do brands that traditionally have managed to force people to watch their ads on TV deal with the new reality?
Sphere: Related ContentLast night, as I watched Steve Jobs announce movie rentals on iTunes and re-launch the Apple TV, it dawned on me that Apple has just driven a stake into the heart of the cable TV industry. The speed of cable TV’s demise will depend on how fast Apple can get films and TV shows from all over the world on iTunes. Here’s what Apple is offering:
Using the Apple TV box hooked up to your flat screen TV monitor, you can watch any content from movies to TV shows to YouTube videos, Flickr photos, video podcasts, your own video clips, anything you want.
So why should anyone continue to pay money every month to a cable company (and rent a set top box) to watch the same movies and TV shows that are on iTunes? It does not give you access to YouTube, video podcasts and other content on the Internet. You can’t watch your cable company’s offerings on your iPod or laptop while you are in an airplane.
Apple’s offerings also just killed the video rental industry. At $2.99 a pop, I would not even go down to the video rental store in the middle of a stormy winter day to rent a DVD. I can just rent it on iTunes and download it to my devices at home.
What gets me really excited is that iTunes could be the repository of films and TV shows that we never see on cable, in the cinema, or in our video rental stores: older films, movies made by independent film makers in different countries, TV shows in other parts of the world, and documentaries. Just look at the video and audio podcast offerings on iTunes. They even have iTunes University where you can view physics and English literature lectures given in top universities in the US.
When I watched Steve Jobs give a demo on how easy it is to rent and download a film, I’d say people-friendly video on demand is here. Not the clunky, horrible BBC iPlayer (which works only on Windows), but a way to find and watch video that doesn’t make you pull your hair out.
So why continue paying a lot of money for cable TV service? All you need now is a fast Internet connection at home!
Sphere: Related ContentNot exactly a business you can do in your pajamas and quite hazardous but fascinating and rewarding if you are up to it: opening a restaurant in Kabul (Afghanistan). A number of foreign women have opened restaurants in Kabul according to Women’s eNews, offering Thai, Mexican, Filipino, Indian and other kinds of cuisines to residents. It’s not for the faint-hearted. Entrepreneurs must meet United Nations security specifications, which means stationing armed guards at the doors and installing barbed wire around the perimeter. On the other hand, there is a large group of expats and Afghans working in Kabul, who are willing to spend money for chicken adobo and lamb tikka masala.
[via Broadsheet]
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