In answering this question I want to move beyond the obvious – that the politicians sold their own souls years ago, and that the media industry is the devil incarnate, and thus hungry for more.
This is of course another post about the Digital Economy Bill (and ACTA). Pieces of legislation that will trade our freedoms in exchange for securing the business models of the incumbent media distribution industry. Pieces of legislation that will put the felony into felony interference of a business model.
It should surprise only the most naive that this legislation is being penned by the representatives of the media industry (as we have seen from leaks here and here). I find it quaint that we have an industry association called the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) – for real – a trade association that supports the makers of phonographs. I wonder if they have a museum somewhere that I can see a phonograph (I vaguely recall seeing such things in old people’s houses when I was a youngster). There couldn’t be any clearer link between this dangerous law, it’s potentially catastrophic consequences, and the analogue world of yesterday.
Back to the politicians, the ones selling our souls. Why are they doing this:
- The media industry are gatekeepers to spin. Politicians need TV, they need the papers, they are utterly dependent on the media industry to get their carefully manicured message in front of a celebrity obsessed public. There’s no point in having an army of highly paid spin doctors if the media won’t play along. Giving the media people exactly what they demand is just part of the quid pro quo.
- The media industry are the gatekeepers to celebrity. Politicians are typically ugly and loathsome creatures. We don’t really want to see or hear from them. But if they’re up on stage with our favourite band then that changes things. Whilst the bands might have some say in which party they get to support, the industry as a whole has the whip hand.
- There is no longer an effective public service counterbalance. Since Gilligham/Kelly/Hutton the BBC has been emasculated. First it became the Blair Broadcasting Corporation, more recently the Brown Broadcasting Corporation – too terrified of having to give up another radio station, or digital TV channel or chunk of web presence if the political overlords tilt the balance further in favour of commercial media.
Of course with this in mind it should be no surprise that people haven’t heard of the Digital Economy Bill and ACTA – how would they without the media industry to spoon feed it to them – the same media industry that’s behind all this. They may be backward, but they’re not stupid. If you do one thing beside writing to your MP today about this scandal then tell a friend, a relative, anybody about what’s going on, because the papers and TV certainly won’t.
The message is clear. The politicians value the media industry more than they value you (and your vote). They’re sure that you’ll just suck it all up as part of your all sugar diet of celebrity. Prove them wrong.
Filed under: media, politics, technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: acta, BPI, debill, digital economy bill, media industry, phonographs
BEng MBA MIET CEng
Director
Capital SCF
Filed under: cloud, politics, technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: debill, digital economy bill, saas
Digital Economy Bill vs SaaS
This evening I was supposed to be doing a lightening talk on PaaS at London CloudCamp, which would cover the stuff that I did over Christmas and New Year. Hopefully I’ll get to do that another day, as right now I feel obliged to speak out about an amendment that’s been introduced to the Digital Economy Bill by the House of Lords. Here are the slides that I’m going to be presenting (register at http://cloudcamplondon7.eventbrite.com/ if you’d like to come along):
There’s been some good coverage already of the (unintended?) consequences of amendment 120. Cory Doctorow pointed out what this could mean for ‘web lockers‘, and Richard Clayton examines whether it’s intended to be a wrecking amendment.
My concern is that it could be used against Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers, especially their storage services such as Amazon’s S3. Such action could have enormous collateral damage on Software as a Service (SaaS) applications that rely on these underlying storage services. A good deal of the SaaS that I use day to day, that we depend on to run our firm, makes use of S3 and similar.
I hope that Richard is right, and that this wrecks a massively misconceived piece of legislation. I do however fear that there’s worse to come under the auspices of the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Whilst I’m as sick of the sight of knock off Louis Vuitton bags as the next man, and don’t want to be buying brake pads that are made from cheese, I have deep fears that ACTA will impose an international copyright regime that will break the Internet as we know it. Of course it’s hard to substantiate these fears as the whole thing is being negotiated in secret, and the established media aren’t doing much to report on it (as it’s their owners that we find behind the whole thing). The first step is to get the agreement out into open public debate – sunlight is a great disinfectant – and it’s good to see some steps in that direction coming from the European Parliament.
Filed under: cloud, politics | 2 Comments
Tags: acta, cloud, cloudcamp, debill, digital economy bill, iaas, saas
I’ve written before about my trusty Lenovo s10e, which I’ve had for about a year now.
Recently though I’ve been loving my little netbook a lot less, as the fan was making such an atrocious noise that people on the other side of my office were complaining. Sadly this seems to be a common problem.
Today I decided to dive in and have a look, using the hardware maintenance manual as my guide. There was nothing obvious wrong with the heat sink and fan assembly (other than the pathetic jury rig of spacers and heat conductive plastic). I was however able to remove the fan itself from the rest of the assembly (after taking out 3 more little screws), and it turns out that it’s held together by magnetic force, making it a snap to detach the fan vanes from the motor mechanism.
After putting on a dab of high temperature CV grease (of the sort that I have for motorcycle maintenance) I put everything back together and we’re back to silent(ish) running. Hopefully I’ll have a few days of happy use before my s10-3t arrives and the s10e heads into the family hand-me-down hardware cascade.
Filed under: could_do_better, technology | 5 Comments
Tags: fan, fix, hack, lenovo, noisy, s10e
3 MiFi mini review redux
A little while ago I wrote about my 3 MiFi. To cut a long story short I wasn’t impressed, and rather wish that I had sent it back and got a refund. My mood wasn’t helped by the subsequent price drop of the PAYG package from £99 to £49 (albeit without 3 months of PAYG data that I didn’t need in the first place).
Crippled
It turns out that the device can actually do many of the things that I wanted it to do, it’s just that Three had crippled it. The main problem is the removal of the web interface (though there are rumours that Three may sanction a firmware update that will bring it back). The web interface presents options so that the MiFi can be ‘always on’ (as I think it should be when powered up).
Unlocking
It seems that DC-unlocker is now able to unlock the Huawei E5830, so for €15 you can use it on any network. I’ve also read various reports that Three will unlock a MiFi for £15, which seems pretty reasonable. Sadly the web interface lacks the ability to reconfigure APNs, so if you’re swapping SIMs around then you’ll need to use the WiFi Manager application.
Sadly PAYG SIMs that you might use when roaming seem to be no easier to get now than they were 6 months ago.
Upgrading Firmware
After getting my MiFi unlocked I was able to get at the web interface by doing a firmware update, following the instructions I found here. It was a hairy experience, and at one stage I thought I’d bricked the device. Luckily it has a maintenance mode that I found out about in this Chinenglish upgrade guide, which is entered by pressing and holding the mobile dial button then the power button for 5 seconds (after which the signal LED turns red and the battery LED turns yellow). After going into that maintenance mode I was able to get the firmware updater to talk to it again, and eventually managed a successful update. Huawei certainly have some work to do on their firmware update software to stop it from being so much like playing Russian roulette.
Web interface
The web interface is basic but functional. Having found the default username and password (admin/admin) I was able to get in and set it up so that it would establish a 3G/HSDPA data connection whenever powered on (which I still think should be the default). It works reasonably well on my iPod Touch as well as my netbook (at least on FireFox), making it easy to check on device status without having to physically poke and prod at it.
Residual concerns
Battery life is still a bit of an issue. It’s probably enough for my daily commute, but anything longer than that means you need USB power from somewhere (and the cable to hook it up).
I’m still not entirely convinced by the sensitivity of the antenna and receiver (which may just have an optimal orientation that I haven’t figured out yet). My sense right now is that it’s not quite as good as my Novatel XU870, but probably better than most USB dongles. I guess in the non commuting use case it has the advantage that you can place it where signal strength is best, which isn’t so easy with something attached to your laptop or whatever.
The 5 device limit for WiFi connections makes little sense to me. I get it that sharing a 3G connection with 5 laptops would probably be stretching things thin, but even on my commute I’d probably use it with 3 devices (netbook, iPod and BlackBerry) – so there’s not much to spare. A friend recently installed a MiFi in his rural house that suffers a lack of wired broadband. He’s very happy just to be online, and pleased that he often gets around 1Mb/s (sometimes a little more), but 5 devices goes quickly when you have a kids PC, a Wii, Nintendo DSIs, iPhones, netbooks etc. Of course most of these devices aren’t actually making use of the connection at any given time, but having to manually switch their WiFi on and off to keep within the connection limit will be a pain. I’ve suggested to my friend that he puts Windows 7 onto an old netbook and then uses Connectify to extend the WiFi bubble and work around the connection limit.
It’s still plasticky, though with the always on mode in action I can leave it in an old sunglasses bag and ignore the ugliness (and prevent scratches and other wear and tear).
For keeps
I’m well past being able to send it back, but with unlocked SIM capability and upgraded firmware that lets me do what I want with it I’m much happier with it. Happy enough that it will soon become my main means of mobile access as I ditch my old s10e netbook in favour of a new s10-3t ‘netvertible’ (which lacks the expresscard slot I need for my XU870).
Filed under: technology | 13 Comments
Tags: 3G, hotspot, mifi, mobile, review, wifi
iPod, eBook, dAllowance
‘Can I have an iPod Touch for my birthday?’ asked my five year old daughter yesterday (the birthday isn’t far away), ‘Susie has one, and she’s 6’. ‘No’, came my reply, ‘I gave you an iPod mini just a few weeks ago’. We’ve been going through a bit of an iPod upgrade cycle around the house since I filled up my old 1G Touch and decided to splash out on a newer 32GB model.
The physical kit is just the start of the problem though – what about content?
I was rather surprised to discover during my upgrade process that I didn’t have to rebuy my apps for my old iPod touch. It seems that the 5 ‘authorised’ machines that Apple allows me also translates to 5 devices worth of apps from a single account. To be honest I wouldn’t have minded buying Bejewelled 2 and Drop 7 again for my wife, as they’re only a couple of quid each.
Having a ‘family’ account for iTunes seems like a good plan (especially when it means that I don’t have to repeat buy the same stuff), but I sense trouble ahead…
- Firstly I’m not going to give my kids my iTunes password. Not only does it almost certainly break the terms of service (though why should I really care about that?), but it’s the digital equivalent of handing over an entire book of blank cheques. For similar reasons they also don’t get to have my eBay, Amazon or PayPal passwords (and I’ve started using two factor authentication for eBay and PayPal so that saved passwords don’t make my machine a soft target to work around this).
- Secondly what happens when they grow up and leave home? Do the mp3s that I bought for them (with my email address or some other identification almost certainly burnt into the metadata) have legal right of passage? When they are old enough to have a credit card and their own account will they be obliged to repurchase all of their old favourites? Will the ACTA empowered copyright goons at international borders be understanding when my daughter has married, but still carries content with her old the wrong name burnt into it?
- Thirdly I don’t always want to be the bottleneck on this stuff. If the kids want to spend their Christmas, birthday and pocket money on Hannah Montana mp3s, or Club Penguin or Moshi Monsters then I’d rather be out of the loop. If they wanted to buy the physical versions of these things (or even vouchers for some of the relevant services) then they can just walk into a shop and put cash on the counter.
What seems to be missing here is some sort of flexible electronic payments system for kids. Something that puts them in control of whatever allowance or gifts that they’re given (and let’s not forget that vouchers are like cash, only less good) – this needs to be better than cash, money that you can spend anywhere on the internet (that kids would go). Maybe when Rixty escapes from the US (and provided that it gets some broader adoption with the relevant services) it will be the thing? There is however a LOT going on in the payments world at the moment, particularly with prepaid debit, so plenty of scope for innovation and competition.
One potential spoiler is that many services (e.g. Amazon) insist on a credit card for digital products (presumably because the know you customer stuff that sits behind these products provides a stronger anchor to a given geography so that content distribution companies can play their stupid games with windows). Maybe those companies don’t see kids as an important market? Maybe they think that by pissing them off when they’re teenagers they’ll be all the more keen to buy their stuff when they’re ‘grown up’ and allowed proper plastic? Or maybe something new will come along and dis-intermediate these people back into the 20th century where their business model came from.
Filed under: media, technology | 3 Comments
Tags: allowance, amazon, credit card, debit card, ebay, ebook, ipod, itunes, money, payments, paypal, pocket money
eBooks and price discrimination
The weekend brought a bit of a storm over Amazon booting Macmillan off its platform, which has brought lots of worthy analysis from Charles Stross, Tim Bray and others.
Perhaps I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that the whole problem with eBooks is that they have only one dimension for price discrimination – time. For dead tree traditional books there tends to be a conflation of physical form discrimination (hardback versus paperback) and time discrimination (the hardback gets released first), but there’s loads of scope for making things very special indeed – author’s signed copies, custom bindings and more.
I’ve been frustrated in the past by having to buy a heavy hardcover when I want to get the latest release from one of my favourite authors. I’d have happily paid much the same cover price for the smaller lighter paperback. So maybe price discrimination on time only can be made to work for eBooks. But, the medium does constrain choice from a distribution point of view – as the eBook device owner has already chosen physical size and weight, what the outside looks like (a leather binding to fool airline stewardesses perhaps) etc. I also wonder if cover art is dead (removing some cost from the overall value chain, but also end of lifing a small creative channel)? It is clearly going to be hard to make a bunch of bits special.
This is a very different phenomenon versus what digitisation has done to the music industry, where the ‘1000 true fans‘ approach allows more performers to earn a living being creative (and not have to have a day job). Books are not performance art. I don’t necessarily want to hear my favourite author read their work (live or on an audio book), I won’t go on their stadium tour, I may buy the T-shirt (and perhaps that’s where the cover art gets displaced to). Books are also BIG compared to songs, it takes months to write a novel (and many train rides and flights for me to read one).
As the value chain between author and reader gets squeezed we need to find some new local optimum where the author earns enough to keep writing, and the other ancillary people like editors get paid. I notice that whilst many of my favourite authors like Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross are keen to see their work in eBooks, and keen to avoid nasty DRM etc., they also seem go out of their way to support their publishers, editors etc. by not providing a side channel around them (where the fan could go straight to the author and pay them for content in certain forms). This contrasts with the possibilities that digital distribution opens up, which I experienced first hand when Craig Murray took the decision to self publish The Catholic Orangemen of Togo (having been threatened with litigation under the UK’s rather onerous libel laws). Having ordered a hardcover from Amazon that clearly wasn’t going to get to me any time soon I ended up cancelling my slice of dead tree and sending Craig what he said he’d get from the cover price (if I bought direct) and printed the PDF to read on the train. The economics of this transaction are interesting – cover price £17.99 (discounted to £11.87 on Amazon), profit to Craig £3.60 (only £0.80 from Amazon), cost for me to print 226 page PDF on my duplex laser printer £1.13. So…
- Craig doing his own distribution gets him £3.60/£17.99, or around 20% – and £14.39 is left on the table for ‘distribution’
- Me printing Craig’s PDF gets him £3.60/£4.73, or around 76% – with nothing left on the table for ‘distribution’
- Of course if abuse DRM hadn’t put me off buying an eBook reader then I wouldn’t have needed to do any printing at all
- Amazon selling Craig’s book gets him £0.80/£11.87 – just 7% – and £11.07 goes into ‘distribution’
Obviously Amazon is much better at ‘distribution’ than Craig is, but more obviously self publishing eBooks could totally ruin the ‘distribution’ business. No wonder Amazon is being heavy handed, but I sense that there’s more at stake here in the long run, and that the time dimension of how we consume from established authors is just the tip of a very large iceberg.
Updated to add and moments after I pressed publish another great piece of commentary from Charles Stross. I think we can agree on the end game ‘the correct model for selling ebooks (profitably and at a fair price) is to establish a direct-to-public retail channel, like Baen’s Webscription subsidiary. Oh, and once you’re there, you can ditch the annoying DRM.’ All I’m left wondering is how much of a role publishers will have in that direct-to-public channel, especially for new authors?
Filed under: marketing | 1 Comment
Tags: books, ebook, economics
With the launch of the iPad now a few days behind us, and the dust beginning to settle I thought it was time to reflect on what this is going to mean to the marketplace.
Firstly this is a device for ‘normals‘ (though I do like the term ‘muggles‘). It is intended for the consumption of media, not its creation. It was not really made for the geeks that have spent months drooling over what it might be. Many of those geeks will buy it anyway, but I suspect that there will be a hefty side order of remorse with many of those purchases.
Firstly this is the end of the beginning. Tablets have been around for a while now (and I really liked my X60T) but Apple has shown the world how to do this stuff properly. Prediction 1 – by the end of 2010 the market will be flooded with copycat devices, most of which will run Android.
Secondly, the convergence of netbooks and tablets is starting to happen. One of the CES launches that I missed at the time was the Lenovo s10-3t. It lacks the HD screen and built in 3G that I’ve been hoping for, but I may just have to get one anyway (particularly as fan noise from my S10e is starting to drive me mad). Prediction 2 – the needs of ‘creative’ users will be served by similar form factor devices that run ‘desktop’ type operating systems like Windows 7 and Chrome.
It’s worth taking a look at the media that underpins the consumption experience on these devices (and think about their relationship with sales portals like iTunes):
- Music – I’ve had an iPod since before iTunes came to the PC, which was well before the store came along. I’ve never much liked the iTunes model, which is why the only thing I’ve ever bought there was RATM last Christmas (and I didn’t actually listen to that track). There is now plenty of choice around where to get legal mp3s from, and services like TuneChecker that will find you the cheapest source for what you want. Those that find a close coupling between the iTunes store and music on iPods/Phones/Pads really put the mug into muggle.
- Video – I use my iPod touch a fair bit for video (and used it a lot more before getting a netbook, though these days it’s been relegated to the backup device when the netbook battery can’t hold up). I don’t use iTunes for video either – there are plenty of tools out there that will create me a suitable mp4 file from whatever the source happens to be. Clearly there can be copyright issues going down that track, and I’ve moaned before that the market isn’t really satisfying it users, but I won’t hold my breath for a pragmatic solution.
- Books – this seems to be where all the action is right now, with a fierce battle brewing between Apple and Amazon. I’ve yet to see any meaningful detail about the iBook application, its relationship to the iTunes store, and just how horrible the DRM will be; but I’d be amazed if it’s not horrible. Of course Amazon already have a Kindle app for the iPod/Phone, so surely users can choose between two different types of abusive DRM (provided that Apple don’t use the AppStore approvals process to edge Amazon out). Of course when the various flavours of AndroidPad come along they too will probably get a Kindle App. Part of me wonders whether Kindle (the service rather than the device) will become sufficiently ubiquitous that people will ignore its limitations, but I think that the more open tablets that will follow the iPad into the market will create a demand vacuum for open eBooks. Predicition 3 – if Amazon or Apple can find a way to do DRM free eBooks, where they preserve the rights of the buyer more strongly than the rights of the ‘content owner’ (aka content distributor) then they will clean up, otherwise they’ll be leaving a gap in the market for a new player (and let’s not forget Google here).
- Something else worth dwelling on here is that the iPad isn’t a direct competitor for an eBook reader like the Kindle. There are compromises each way in terms of display quality, battery life and flexibility. I’m still not entirely sure whether I’d like (and be willing to sacrifice the space an weight to) another device just for eBooks, but it’s a largely academic question until somebody starts selling eBooks that I’m willing to buy
- Games – people will want to run games on these things. Popular stuff will be ported across platforms. Gaming won’t be a major factor in product or service choice.
- Web – the iPhone revolutionised browsing on the move, and web access will remain an important piece of the tablet experience. All devices will end up with a good enough browser, and people are going to have to think a bit harder about the bits where we do text input (URLs, search boxes, forms) to better suit those with no keyboard.
Commercially I think the iPad will be a success, following the usual Apple formula – by being a premium price high margin product for people that care a lot about design and an integrated end to end user experience. I don’t think that this will be a slam dunk for Apple though (in the same way that the iPhone has been). The iPad will succeed in the same way as something like the MacBookPro rather than the iPhone.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 6 Comments
GDrive
I’ve been a keen user of Gmail since its earliest days, and I also use Google Apps at work, so I’m not surprised by the excitement around the launch of what people are calling ‘GDrive’, which is actually just a new feature of Google Docs that allows arbitrary files to be shared.
What is a little disappointing is the 250MB file limit. Cory Doctorow speculates that this is ‘more to do with keeping the MPAA happy than any kind of technical limitation'[1]. Whilst 250MB is loads more than most of the file sharing services allow, it’s still a painful limitation. One of the challenges I face each year is sharing video of my kids doing their nativity plays etc. with far flung family members. This year I ended up with three files – 200MB, 243MB and 360MB (oops – that’s blown it). In the past I’ve used BitTorrent to share such files, but it’s no fun getting elderly internet civilians using things like Azureus (a client I gave up long ago in favour of uTorrent, which sadly lacks the built in tracker functionality that’s key to this use case).
This year things were much easier, as I used SMEstorage, which is a cloud storage overlay service. The first two files went up with no problems at all, and I think the various grandparents were much happier when they got a simple email with a URL. The third file gave me a bit more trouble, but the outcome was a really cool new feature…
SMEstorage lets you use many of the cloud storage providers as a back end, but comes with some of its own storage so that you can get going (I think this is hosted on Amazon S3). It turns out that I’d blown right past my quota of 250MB with the first two files, but it’s great that they’d let me overcommit by ~190MB without complaining. Initially I put the last file onto S3 (luckily I already had an AWS account), but I was keen to see if there was a better way of using the free storage services. What the SMEstorage guys then came up with was a chunking mechanism, so that a file can be divided up into small enough pieces so that the back end doesn’t complain. With the launch of their revamped site happening today I’m led to believe that chunking will be available to everyone.
There’s lots of talk about how much cloud storage costs, and most services offer some initial capacity free, but here’s one idea:
- Google Apps standard edition with a domain registration costs $10/yr.
- Standard edition allows up to 50 accounts to be created.
- Each account comes with 7GB of storage for email, which SMEstorage can use (in 10MB chunks).
That’s 350GB for $10/yr, which is 63x cheaper than S3 (before we start counting transfer fees). Also I’m not counting the 50x 1GB that the new Google Docs feature would give, so that should really be 400GB for $10/yr, which would cost $720 on S3.
Maybe Google will close the door on this if it gets too popular, but I would speculate that by then the marginal cost of cloud storage will be low enough for few to care.
[1] It astonishes me that the media distribution industry continues to fail to grasp that making life inconvenient for the masses has no impact on ‘piracy’. Whilst this measure may be pretty effective at stopping somebody less technical from sharing their kid’s nativity play it fails to appreciate the asymmetries involved. It only takes one technically savvy person to work around this limit and share Avatar (or whatever is flavour of the month).
Filed under: cloud | 2 Comments
Tags: aws, bittorrent, cloud, gapps, gmail, google, s3, SMEstorage, storage
Chris Swan's Weblog 