The Importance of Scheduling

A few weeks (read: months) ago, I wrote a post about The Economics of Dr. Horrible. In the comments, I promised a follow-up post about something I think is often overlooked in the brave new world of web series: schedules.

I know what you’re thinking: Who pays attention to schedules any more? Everybody just downloads or watches on iPlayer or timeshifts the shows they want to watch.

That’s true, but all those things still require awareness¹ from the audience that the shows exist. And that’s something that TV schedules have done very well for… well, a long time, really.

The importance of schedules can be seen from the on-demand movie systems where a given film starts every 15 minutes or every hour on the hour. Why does this happen? I would say that the main factor is The Paradox of Choice. In other words, when presented with too many options, people will prefer to go with whatever’s easiest.

In TV’s case, that would be whatever the scheduler recommends. Anecdotally, I’ve seen people in the video shop give up trying to decide what film to rent and just go home and watch whatever’s on TV. And I’ve seen myself tune in to watch a film on TV that I own on DVD - so I could in theory watch it whenever I wanted? Am I alone in this? It’s possible, I suppose, but I don’t think so. Of course, TV schedules are also used to “break” new shows: a new show will be scheduled immediately after an already popular show.

Tubefilter and NewTeeVee, the main outlets for web series news, are attempting to rectify this with Tubefilter Schedule and NewTeeVee Station. Not a bad start (and I think a proliferation of such sites would actually be counterproductive).

You can also subscribe to the Tubefilter Schedule calendar, which is nice. The problem with the calendar is that you don’t actually know what the new episode will be about. Obviously, this would only be appropriate for actual serials. Also, I’d like to see Tubefilter Schedule have a different layout on the site – I think a grid would be more useful, along with category filters and a “show today only” option.

I hope both sites continue to expand their coverage in this regard, as it’s critical if web series are to become a successful outlet for creators beyond those who are already established2.

¹ Awareness is something I’ve been thinking about rather a lot lately. More on that “soon”, perhaps.

² The question of how to give the schedule more prominence is left as an exercise to the reader. ;-)

Skip The Stepping Stones

Photo by Gladius

I’m impatient and shamelessly unafraid of failing.

So says Seth Godin, in this interview.

I can be impatient too, and especially so when I start something new. I tried playing guitar on a number of occasions when I was younger, but gave up because I wasn’t instantly amazing. However, sometimes I find something that I have some initial success with I’m also greatly attracted to. When that happens, I try to figure out the “short cut”, for want of a better phrase. People always say there are no short-cuts, just hard work; but I think there are short-cuts—it’s just that they’re harder work.

I released my first game in February 1996, and it was great to get a whole lot of fanmail directly from that. Then, instead of actually going off to work in the games industry and get experience that way, I worked on general software for a couple of years then just started a company with zero contacts. It was a huge and tricky learning curve, and although it ended in sadness, I wouldn’t swap the experience for anything. I didn’t go and do an MBA (and some may say that I should have done), but I don’t think I would have learned as much about life and about myself.

I’d been thinking about screenwriting since 1996 (strangely), and when I got around to doing something about it, my first attempt was shortlisted in a competition. I received extra training for it, and I’m drawn to writing more than ever. Currently, I’m thinking about how I can learn the most in the shortest amount of time. Working on Buffet of Death was great for this, but what could I do with more than 48 hours? What would happen if I just did something?

As a smaller scale example, I was playing Guitar Hero for the first time a few months back with some expert players. I tried the easiest song, and was more or less perfect (I like rhythm action games!). So then they tried me higher difficulty levels and trickier songs, until I was suddenly on one of the hardest songs on my fifth play of the game—and doing not terribly at it. That led to us wondering if just jumping in at the higher level would actually be better for mastering the skills for the game. I think we were almost right.

Do something small to learn the basics, then jump right in. Skip the stepping stones in the middle.

It will be scarier, you’ll have to run faster to keep up, and you’ll definitely make mistakes. On the flipside, you’ll have fun, learn lots, meet some amazing people and achieve more in a short space of time than many people achieve in a lifetime.

The Economics of Dr. Horrible

Jeffrey McManus has written a good article on the economics of Dr Horrible, using reasonable guesstimates on the numbers behind the scenes:

If the show sells 100,000 units on iTunes, he makes $229,840 $87,280; if it sells a million copies, he winds up making more than four million dollars more than $2.6 million on his original “low six-figure” investment. And that’s before the DVD even comes out.

Joss Whedon responded on Whedonesque thusly:

This was a sensible article on a subject that will, if we beret-wearing artistes have our way, will matter very much. And the guestimates were not far off, as far as I noticed.

This was obviously an experiment, and one which looks like it will be a huge success for all involved. It strikes me though, that much like the Radiohead In Rainbows experiment (which, interestingly, probably generated around $2.5 million), these experiments can only exist because of the high profile and existing fanbase that was created using the machinery the artists are trying to escape. Who knows how many column inches have been devoted to Dr Horrible and In Rainbows? All of it free, all of it driving the audience higher and higher, all of it generated from the fact that the creators were already famous and popular.

If, say, I was clever enough to have thought up Dr. Horrible, would have it had the same success? The answer to that is pretty obvious, sadly. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to perform the same scarcity trick that Joss Whedon has, which is what’s going to drive the revenue. Anything I might do on the web (at least in the near future… hah) will have to be similar to The Guild (which you should definitely watch, if you haven’t already) – long-lived, with merchandise and DVD sales. Although I suppose you could also have a pay-for-HD-download option – I don’t think I’ve seen that anywhere yet.

As an aside, I can’t believe that Dr. Horrible is region-restricted in the iTunes store. That’s just crazy.

(via)

Sports Economics

Ever since I read Moneyball by Michael Lewis, I’ve been tangentially interested in the economics of playing sports. In a nutshell, Moneyball describes how a baseball team (the Oakland Athletics) used statistics to better predict how successful any given player would be, rather than traditional methods such as “he looks good in a uniform”. This new approach helped Oakland be more successful than they had been previously, and also helped them continue to be successful when larger teams such as the New York Yankees cherry-picked their best players by offering ridiculous salaries.

It turns out that this sort of economic analysis has been going on for over 30 years in baseball, and is known as sabermetrics (see Baseball Prospectus for some examples). Similarly, American football is analysed on the same basis (check out Football Outsiders).

A couple of days back, Malcolm Gladwell posted about some analysis being done on basketball by Dave Berri. Berri believes that performing these analyses can help understand how to model human behaviour throughout economics.

After I read Moneyball, I mused on a football forum about it and how it could be applied to football, but was shot down both by people who didn’t believe you could analyse football in such a way (just as people shot down the baseball and American football analysts) and by people who didn’t believe that Moneyball and the success of Oakland was all it was cracked up to be (despite the fact that many other baseball teams now use similar analyses).

I don’t know if anyone else has been similarly inspired to do this or not, but I think it would be interesting to see. Originally, I thought that the biggest problem was getting hold of enough data to perform any kind of meaningful analysis, but I think a good place to start would be with the minute-by-minute match feeds that the BBC use:

I think these actually come from AP, or a similar agency, but it seems to me that you could begin to build up a reasonable database from these feeds. It would then allow you to start measuring defensive and offensive efficiency. Of course, the feeds are missing large amounts of data (which may or may not be available from Opta) that would be useful, but I think using them to start with would be a great starting point.

The Phone Book

Yesterday, I came home to find a new doorstop on my doorstep courtesy of BT – a 1,500 page telephone directory. I realise that there is a need for such a thing, but personally speaking, I am never going to use it. I have access to Yell, Google, and of course, BT’s online directory via my wonderful DSL line. It claims to be printed on 40% recycled material. I’d far rather it was printed on 40% less material, simply by providing the ability to opt-out receiving it.

Tags: business

Two Dot Overload

The other day I received an email (I think from Red Herring) which had a story called “India 2.0” – enough already! Thankfully, I’ve not seen a “Scotland 2.0” (although I think it would be a worthy endeavour, just please don’t give it that name – although you’d have to say it is better than “Smart, Successful Scotland”), and I’ve only seen “Games 2.0” mentioned once. As I write, “Family 2.0” has appeared on News.com! Won’t someone think of the children?!

Hotel Printing

Given that the vast majority of hotels are networked in some way, why don’t any of them have network printing available? It would be so handy to print things out, like web check-in confirmations, driving directions, and so on.

They could keep the printer at the front desk, and charge some small fee per page. I guess there would be issues of support, but if the printer was actually a network one, and/or if it supported Bonjour (nee Rendezvous) then at least Mac-user’s lives would be be easy!

Not A Good Name

This morning at the train station, I noticed some GNER staff who were checking the tickets of people boarding the 9.30 train to London King’s Cross. Not an uncommon sight really, but on the back of the orange visibility waistcoats that the staff wear was their team name:

GNER Revenue Protection

Now, that might be an accurate reflection on what they are doing when they are double checking valid tickets; however, it seems to me that the message they are giving is one along the lines of “we think you’re all stealing from us, you dirty low-life varmints”.

Travel Schedules For Calendars

Following from my Flight Schedules For Calendars post, it turns out that Expedia can indeed send me a vCal/iCal attachment of my hotel stay. However, I’d really rather not have it run from midnight on the day of arrival to 23:59 on the day of departure. It kind of gets in the way of the other things I have on there. I assume they can send flight schedules too, but I didn’t book flights with them this time.

Flight Schedules for Calendars

Do you know what would be useful? If airlines and travel companies, when they confirm your flight schedule, also sent you the schedule as a vCal/iCal attachment so you can just import it to your calendar program. That’s what would be useful.

In The Air

Several airlines have had per-seat in-flight entertainment systems on all seats on their long-haul planes for some time now, but I think they are missing a trick when it comes to building in some extra cool features for the captive audience which they have.

I’m able to create a custom playlist based on the (reasonably broad) range of CDs which they have on the system (although I do hope they are digital rather than physical discs!). However, I can’t save it (and given that I have a frequent flyer number, it’s not like they couldn’t uniquely identify me) for future reference. And wouldn’t it be cool if I could share it with other flyers? Including people who were on future flights?

Apparently, Virgin Atlantic now offer the ability to message other passengers — I’m not sure exactly how this works, but it certainly seems like a good start. Movies are all well and good, but with an increasingly Web 2.0-savvy audience perhaps the in-flight entertainment industry could start learning some lessons from the recent successful web applications such as Flickr and del.icio.us, or even just the iMix feature in iTunes would be a good start :-)

Second-time Around

Ev has a post about second-time entrepreneurs which links to another article (Mr Gutman: Second-time entrepreneurs about how people who have been there and done it successfully motivate themselves.

Speaking as a relatively-successful-at-the-start-but-ultimately-failed entrepreneur, I’d have to say that the lessons learned are pretty much the same, but perhaps weighted in a different way. I don’t think it’s a case of people working smarter rather than harder, because I think you have to work smart and damn hard to make it work—but working hard doesn’t necessarily equate to long hours (that wouldn’t be very smart now, would it?). Working smart and hard is what a lot of the Web 2.0 companies are doing: less is more, agility (in all aspects), involving end-users from day one, all that jazz.

I’m still motivated to create something, whether on my own idea, or on an idea that I buy into. I don’t think I’ll ever drop out of the start-up lane. It’s too much fun! And even when it isn’t fun, I’d still rather be doing it than working as cog in a giant machine where I don’t have any impact whatsoever.

60 Seconds Or Less

Synchronicity in action: Joi Ito writes about Dan Gillmor’s “One Minute with Dan” podcasts.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was messing about with my 7610 and noticed that the built-in recorder application only allows for 60 seconds of recording, even with a memory card in the phone. I figured that they might be good for podcasts which bore names such as “Random Observations” or “Thought for the Day”—interpret those how you will.

Tom Hume wonders about the utility of small podcasts, but do they need to have value other than entertainment?

Competing from the Niche

Related to my post about niche retailers competing against Wal-Mart-a-likes, comes this post over at News.com detailing some of the niches being filled by Netflix competitors. The niches aren’t just regarding audience segmentation, there’s also a business model twist in there.

Every Tail Has A Head

The Head of the Long Tail:

The Long Tail is great, but it does not work if you don’t also offer all the products at the head of the tail.

The Short Tail: Mobile Content Deck:

The deck, as the industry terminology goes (basically the interface on your mobile service through which you enter these content services), has a very limited inventory, and whatever ends up on the deck sells in bucketloads. Those which do not make it, do not. At all.

When we were (ultimately futilely) rebuilding The Games Kitchen, this was what we were trying to achieve. The problem was that it was difficult to get what would be considered the products at the head of the tail (although we had terrific co-operation from everyone else). Off-portal sales just weren’t much of a priority for the bigger players.

As an aside, and as a semi-follow-on from GDC, I find it a little sad that the mobile games industry (the downloadable part of it anyway) is barely 3 years old and already it’s in need of exploding, almost as much as its larger cousin is in need of it…

Toy and Games Retail

Seth Godin writes about something I’ve thought for a while now: that specialist retailers can indeed take on the large discounters:

The answer is to tell Walmart to go away. Toy companies are beginning to discover that they can’t win this game. The answer is to find a new and better and more consistently profitable way to launch the remarkable stuff… Over time, consumers will be trained that the toys they need are only available in places that aren’t Walmart.

Now, I’m not saying for a minute that I think that people will stop buying toys and games in Wal-Mart or Tesco or wherever. However, I think there is a need for somewhere that can demonstrate new games and toys to parents and kids. In fact, capture the kids attention and they’ll bring the parents with their money.

On so many occassions now, I’ve bought somebody a game as a present from Cheap Ass and they love the games, and go out and buy it and other games for their friends and families too. But it can sometimes be hard to find them. Dave and I have talked about this on and off, so it’s nice to see some validation of our ideas from somewhere else :-)

User Registration

So I was on News.com, and I was checking out their news alert emails (I won’t bother asking why this isn’t available in RSS), and was presented with this form.

My question is, why doesn’t a log in form like this actually double up as a registration form? Then, if the site really wants more information about me, it can request it (although unless there is some form of incentive, it’s unlikely I’ll respond). It obviously won’t work for every site, where more information might be necessary (shipping info, for example). But in fact, if that’s the case, why bother asking me to register at all? “Here’s my email; send me stuff please.”

And if I need to edit anything, I can click a button and you can just me a one-shot link to my email to verify that it’s me.

The New New Way

The power of blog marketing and word of mouth (Signal vs. Noise):

... if you have an idea for something (a business, product, service, book, whatever) get out there and do it. Make it great, keep your team small, keep your overhead low, treat your customers with respect, get it in front of the right people, and the market will take care of most of the marketing for you.

This goes along with a lot of my own thinking over the last year or so, now if only I could find the time and necessary motivation to test out the theory for myself…

Personalisation, or P13N, if you will

Russ is talking about making money from customisation and personalisation (which I coined the term P13N for a few years back; turns out BEA already used it according to AcronymFinder: let’s co-opt it) from seemingly pointless bits of content:

I personally wonder how big it’ll be for mobile data services. My original assumption about ringtones was that it was the music people were interested in, but it looks like it may just be the customization and personalization.

Saw-You already have their Wee-Mee’s integrated with MSN Messenger in Europe, and I believe it will be available via network operators soon as well.

The charge for creating a Wee-Mee is anywhere between £1.50 and £6.00, which is as much as people charge for games. It’s a strange situation where people are paying as much for a piece of content which has negligible creativity behind it than for a game which has many man-months of effort into it.

There’s some weird market forces going on there that I need to get a handle on.

My take is that the market always pays for what the market wants, and what the market wants is self-expression. Whether that’s through avatars, wallpaper, ringtones, themes, cases, fascias or even signatures in message boards or email. Hell, Nokia have an entire series devoted to self-expression (the 3xxx series handsets), and Motorola’s latest ad campaign is called “My Moto”. These guys already understand that (the fact that Neowiz expect revenues of $65 million this year is further evidence of the opportunities here).

This sort of incremental content platform has been around in many guises, in many niche areas over the years, but it’s never been so prevalent and available as it is now.

And even better now that we’re all suitably digital, we can take this to the next level by applying the principles of mass customisation to content. Hint: “the assembly of a product or the rendering of a service from pre-configured modules or components.“

Other TradTunes Problems

Further to my plea for TradTunes to address their underwhelming launch, I noticed afterwards that they don’t have a blog to respond to the charges levelled against them. I also note that they don’t even have RSS feeds for news and new additions to the catalogue. Even MSN Music has RSS.

Sigh… Sometimes I wonder if companies over here are actually paying any attention whatsoever to what’s going on.

Anyway, I’m going to send a note to the TradTunes team, and we’ll see what happens…

Convergence Is Bunk

As I’ve said before, starting with this post about device divergence, I really don’t believe in convergence. And now I find that Laura Ries, guest blogging on 800CEOREAD, writes:

For at least a dozen years, however, the business media have been filled with stories about ìconvergence.î Categories would be coming together. Television with computers, for example. Companies, especially in the high-tech industries were spending billions of dollars trying to accomplish this with very little success. In studying history, we found that the opposite was true. Categories did not converge; they diverged. The mainframe computer, for example did not converge with any other category. It diverged, creating endless opportunities to build new brands. Apple, Dell, Compaq, Microsoft, Intel, etc.

Although I use the word divergence, there is always that central pivot point around which the divergence occurs. But to suggest that there will be just one device which we use to do anything and everything is, to my mind, misguided to say the least. Kitchen devices didn’t converge into one big box of tricks just because they all had electric motors.

Turn of Phrase

In this post about a Bluetooth-GPS, Futurismic hit upon a phrase I’ve been looking for to sum up my feelings about the 100+ year hype for convergence (see here, here, and here):

It’s not about carrying fewer devices: it’s about having to hold fewer devices in your hand at the same time.

Opening Netflix

Netflix, Open up or die by Phillip Torrone is a great feature piece over at Engadget which I read earlier today. (As an aside, why don’t Engadget allow trackbacks? Update: I contacted Engadget, and received a reply from Peter Rojas within seconds! Apparently, they are planning to add them in due course.)

There are some great ideas in the article itself, and a few hidden in the comments as well (such as seasonal subscriptions for students and so on); it’s well worth a read.

What’s of more interest to me is as to whether or not any of the UK based equivalents such as Webflix, DVDS365 and the other one which has raised a lot of funding but I can never remember the name of (so that’s not a great start for them, really, is it?) have any idea about these things? DVDS365 seem to have more of the iTunes Celebrity Playlist type chart listings (although not many), but where are the iMix equivalents? I haven’t signed up for any of these services, so I don’t know if they even have “People who liked this also liked…” recommendations. I would hope that they do, but…

I mean, it’s nice that these companies have brought the Netflix model to these shores, but why do British companies never go beyond just making a carbon copy of the original business? There’s no reason why they should wait and see what Netflix does next before building community features or whatever else into their platform. Yes, it might add a little to your development cost, but otherwise everyone is just the same. You need something to differ from the competition, otherwise I’ll just choose whoever is cheapest.

Update: While commenting on the entry, I had the idea that there’s no reason you couldn’t provide access to this kind of service via mobile phones. Of course, if they had an open API, some clever clogs would probably build it on their behalf. Don’t get that kind of fanaticism for UK companies…

Interesting Experiment?

I had an idea for something that would make an interesting web and social experiment, based on a microcontent type that everyone knows and loves: recipes.

Now, I know that there are sites such as AllRecipes, but I don’t believe that they actually reward the people who submit recipes.

So my idea is this: create a website in which all advertising, syndication, affiliate, and other revenue streams are pooled together. The site itself takes it’s running costs + 7% (say), and the remaining pot is then split proportionately between active participants of the site (people who submit popular recipes, recipes which are used in cook books, and so on).

You could also have co-ops coming together: at the Wife’s work, there is a cookbook for sale each year in which all proceeds are contributed to the charity Water Aid. The cookbook is full of tasty cakes, but of course has a fairly small readership. Imagine instead that the recipe contributors could add those recipes to this magical site, and receive a regular stream of money to send to Water Aid, making it easier than trying to co-ordinate all the smaller payments together.

Now, I’ve absolutely no idea if this would be practical or viable, but I thought it was worth throwing out there to see if anyone had any further ideas on it…

Further Social Software Thinking

Following my post about a combination of LinkedIn and Plaxo, I had an IM chat with Martin about where the best place to keep your identity and related information actually would be. Martin was adamant that it should not be server based: it’s your identity, after all. My main concern was a) not everybody has a personal website; and b) how on earth does your average user go about generating FOAF? (Actually, does anyone know how to generate FOAF? ;-))

I started wondering out loud about how such a thing might work, and it seemed obvious that some sort of p2p system would be in order.

Following from that, I read this post by Marc Canter about Huminity getting funding, and then this post by LoÔc Le Meur, which have conflicting viewpoints about the best way to manage all of this.

As I said in my first post, to get the best value from this, people who know you shouldn’t have to manually update your information everytime you move house or change job. LoÔc wants different levels of protection for information (which seems reasonable); and Marc doesn’t want his network/identity tied to an individual device.

Jeremy Allaire has talked before about using an IM-style buddy list to offer different levels of protection, and Blogware has just added this feature to their system.

Here are some early thoughts from me: where do I keep my digital business card, and the vast majority of my contact’s details? In my mail application, which is tied to the desktop. Marc’s image of being tied to the desktop misses out the fact that many modern desktop apps are designed to be run with a network (to wit: iTunes). So why not use one of the new generation of information clients such as clevercactus or Chandler as a platform to build an intelligent contact manager (uh, sorry, I mean social software)?

What do I mean? Well, a desktop app can provide web services too, right? And the <cloud> element of RSS 2.0 seems to provide SOAP meets RSS functionality (or push-me-pull-me, if you like)

So, our intelligent contact manager (ICM) starts you off with a wizard, to walk through the creation of your FOAF file. It might ask you for a few friend’s websites and try to auto-discover their FOAF file, or maybe we’ll publish FOAF hyper-links on our business cards. In this way, the ICM starts to build your network.

Then, ICMbot runs in the background, and starts following the FOAF links on out from your friends, further developing your network. Additionally, the P2P element of the ICM provides a way to search for people or contacts in companies that you might already know and have lost track of, or you just want to find a way to get in touch with them. Once you have found their information, you can start figuring out how to get to them via your network.

iSync-a-like functionality will then make sure that your phone, PDA, website, CRM tool and whatever else is kept nicely up-to-date without you having to worry a hair on your pretty little head about it.

The important thing is that all this happens without the user knowing anything about the underlying acronym soup!

Finally, Marc talks about people having Friendster parties—by which he means that people at parties gather round a PC and look at each other’s connections. Well, wouldn’t it be even cooler if you could do that from your phone? It would now know all your connections, you could scan the location with Bluetooth and see who else you could connect to (and it would also store those links for re-syncing with your mail app when you get back). Imagine how that might actually be useful at trade conferences, rather than just messing about in the kitchen at a party…

Keeping Up With Your Network

I’ve been reading with interest a lot of the stuff about social software, mainly via Marc Canter. I’m most interested in LinkedIn, which is aimed at professionals who can use the system to find a route to someone they need to reach, and do so via a trustworthy series of friends. Outside of this, I’ve recently received a bunch of emails from Plaxo, which allows you to maintain an address book automatically, keeping track of when people change jobs or whatever.

Last weekend, it occurred to me that these two concepts would actually be far more powerful—not too mention useful—if combined, allowing your contacts and networks to be fully up-to-date, all of the time. Allow for import and publication of FOAF data in a way that’s actually comprehensible to ordinary people; provide web services for accessing the data so that tools other than Outlook can access it; provide iSync-like synchronization capabilities; and so on.

A conversation on #mobitopia today prompted me to post this concept: LinkedIn was a topic of discussion, and someone asked somebody else if they were still in X position at company Y. That’s when I knew that the idea had value.

I’d build it myself, but I don’t have enough time to do all the other things I want to do… Such is life.

Novell Ripe for Acquisition

To complete my trilogy of speculative posts, this story reports that various analysts think that Novell is there for the taking by IBM, AT&T or Lucent.

Strangely, before I read this story, I was chatting with Martin (actually, whinging about Solaris might be more accurate) and I said that I thought Sun should acquire Novell. I think it would make a lot of sense, especially as the consensus seems to be that Scott McNealy really needs to pull something dramatic out of the bag to keep Sun in the game.

Of course, the fact that IBM took a 5% stake in Novell might be a thorn in such a deal, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t allow IBM a veto if an offer for the company came along.

Mobitopia

A couple of weeks ago, the kind folks over at Mobitopia invited me to join their esteemed ranks, and today, I finally made my debut. You can read the article here.

developer.symbian.com Redux

I’ve been mulling over Ewan’s recent posting regarding Symbian’s approach to managing their developer program, but I’m going to go a bit further and question Symbian’s future based on said approach.

Everything Ewan says is exactly right, with the exception of this seemingly innocuous statement:

Nobody really wants to spend a huge amount of time and money doing it

Symbian should absolutely spend time, money and a whole load of effort on their developer program.

A recent posting by Joel Spolsky gives a great example of how a developer program should be run, and Symbian need to be aware that Microsoft will (and are) applying this same approach in the mobile space, making sure that developers have all the latest information and everything they need to get started at a very reasonable rate.

Symbian will claim that they do this via their partner program, but look here to see what that offers. Nothing much of interest, and that’s just not good enough—especially for $1,000! Here are some of my own suggestions as to how they might start fixing this apalling state of affairs:

• Symbian need to hire some people as their Developer Relations team, if they don’t already have such an initiative;
• Each and every device licensee (e.g., Nokia, Siemens, Sendo, et al) should second a group to this team;
• The team can be geographically dispersed, but should of course meet regularly “for real”;
• Each device licensee should move all their information, sample code, tools, and so on across to the new Symbian hosted site, redirecting from their own sites where appropriate, providing a single point of contact for developers;
• Handsets should be available in copious quantities to developers who sign up to the “professional” developer program, thus seeding the market;
• The team should work to provide detailed documentation about porting between Series 60 and UIQ, for example, what the differences are between handsets, and how to best create applications which can be quickly ported across all handsets;
• The team should be highly visible, not just in terms of responding to queries or monitoring newsgroups/forums, but in terms of calling developers up, and talking with them.

The Developer Days are a good intiative, but more — so much more — can and needs to be done. I know that a worst case scenario for Symbian is (probably) that it is subsumed by Nokia, but I don’t want that to happen. Microsoft understand that a platform succeeds not through top-down dictatorship (that’s merely how you maintain the success…), but through seeding the market, creating a viable economy for third-party ISVs to succeed, thus driving greater demand for the platform because the applications are there, thus driving higher demand for the applications, and so on.

So my message to Symbian should be pretty clear: “You can’t afford not to do this”...

Remote Controls

While I’m on the subject of hi-fi equipment, why hasn’t anyone used Bluetooth in remote controls for consumer electronics? It’s such a pain when the sensor is particularly sensitive, or (as happens a lot to me) a dog stands in the way of the transmission.

Or, if someone has used Bluetooth in this way, why didn’t anyone tell me?

Feed the Artists

So, now that I’ve actually got Tapestry up and running, I’m going to talk about a concern I have about the feeds themselves.

While Dilbert is massively syndicated, collected in numerous treasuries, and used in a variety of books such as The Joy of Work, earning Scott Adams a decent living, PvP (for example) does not enjoy the same trappings. By providing a feed for lazy people like myself, I’m taking eyeballs away from the site, meaning the site sponsors won’t get as many views, potentially leading to loss of earnings for Scott Kurtz. (Perhaps I’m overegging the success of the feeds, but I’m sure you get the idea.)

This disturbs me. I’d rather not be responsible for someone else’s loss of earnings.

What I’d really like to do, is have an ad-free feed from the PvP site, and Scott charges $2 or $3 per month for the feed (he keeps all the money). Making the feed password protected would allow for this, but of course, this requires the RSS aggregators to support HTTP authentication. Since most aggregators tend to have their viewer components based on IE or Mozilla, then I suppose this should be mostly in place already. Is there a list which details aggregators and whether they support HTTP authentication (or HTTPS)?

Content may not be king...

I stumbled across this article, in a way that I only could on the Web. Its basic premise argues that connectivity matters far more than content.

It’s a well written piece, thoroughly researched in a way that this response certainly isn’t, but I do feel it rather misses the point.

Although it is certainly true that content and networks don’t mix (Disney/ABC, AOL/Time Warner, etc), to say that content is immaterial to the power of connectivity is a bit too extreme. There may well be more money to be made as a pure network company in the digital era than as a pure content company. And I’m not arguing against the fact that people like to create their own content (by talking) and that this spurs further network growth.

But content doesn’t come before the network, whether it be a paperback book distribution network, a CD distribution network, or a wireless network that people download games over. Content doesn’t need to fund the network as the paper argues, since the point-to-point communication that so attracts the end-user has already done that. Content builds on the plinth that the network provides, adding value to the network. above and beyond what it generates by itself.

So yes, sociability is a strong draw for people; but so is content that they can consume.

The paper also skirts around the fact that a purely digital content business is very highly scalable (just ask Microsoft), and although it spends a paragraph on how a fresh entrant into the music industry could compete with far lower overheads than “old-style” competitors, there’s no follow up.

So content may not be king, but it certainly isn’t a pauper prince…