Posts filed under 'BizExecToBe'
I’m impressed by Napster of late. They recently announced that users can now listen to every track in their catalog for free, up to five times. After five times, if you want to listen to it again, you need to either buy the track, or subscribe to one of Napster’s monthly services. In the meantime, as you’re listening to your free tracks online, you’re being exposed to various ads, whose revenue is then apparently shared with the music industry as its payment for the use of the free music. (Napster’s FAQ on its free music model is here.)
This seems to me to be a brilliant music model: the few second snippets offered in other music libraries are not enticing enough to cause me to browse to find new music which I might purchase from their stores. Napster, through use of this ability to listen for free, as well as its playlists, encourages me and makes it enjoyable to browse for those songs I would be willing to buy. No longer am I consciously shopping: I’m browsing, and impulse buying.
I wonder if the 5 listen limit is too high, actually. New songs only stay in popularity a short while. And there’s quite a breadth of material on Napster. Seems I could always be listening to new and interesting things, without ever really hitting the 5 song limit. Now, I’d need to be perpetually connected to an Internet connection, else I might want that song in my portable player. But I generally AM perpetually connected to an Internet connection… my portable player serves me at the gym, but not many other places. Napster might consider lowering that limit to 3… if I’m willing to listen to a song more than 3 times, I probably oughta pay for it…
May 3rd, 2006
Watch Out, Kids: With GPS Phones, Big Mother Is Watching
Rob Pegoraro notes a certain discomfort with WaveMarket’s location-based service that “enables enterprises and fleet managers to manage mobile assets”. There’s nothing new here, except perhaps a cost savings for the fleet managers. We were putting GPS receivers in trucks in 1994 for this very purpose. I was a lowly intern building out the functionality, but got to drive around in my oil-leaking Pontiac Phoenix with a GPS disc thingy attached to the top of my car and a mobile transmitter that would then transmit my coordinates as well as receive communications from the central system.
I well agree with Rob’s point, though, that “The whole idea of tracking your family in this manner is weird and alarming on some levels. So is the notion that we’re all so deathly afraid for our kids that there’s even a market for this.”. That’s the reality in our society, though, as alarming as it is. We worry about government spying on us, ostensibly to help keep us safer, and then pay to spy on each other in the same name of safety.
April 19th, 2006
Monday will be my first day with my new company. Few details here, for reasons of NDAs and just generally enjoying waiting to see this thing hit the scene. But it’s an exciting, unexpected jump to a startup. A chance to refresh my Java skills, build a very scalable site, be associated with something I expect will get household name recognition (as opposed to my current contract management system for the federal gov’t project) and help sheperd a new product to a successful launch. The first ad that I see in a big box circular, I’ll link in here. Heck, I’ll be hawking it here, snagging beta-testers, and folks to add some buzz. If you’ve got kids, specifically in the realm of, say, 8-12, keep an eye out here.
March 6th, 2006
My Grandma’s birthday is coming up, and, apparently like all Grandmas, mine’s notoriously hard to purchase buy a gift for. But I saw an ad for something called a Scooba: it’s a robot that washes your floors. Hmmmmm…. a bit pricey. But it’s older brother*, the Roomba, has been out for a while, and surely Grandma would even more appreciate a vacuuming robot. [Sorry, Grandma, still out of my price range.]
Like lots of consumers, I did my price-checking on Amazon. A search for ‘iRobot’ included these gems: Roor the Tiger, and Mooba the Cow. They’re costumes for your Roomba, both put out by a company called myRoombud. There’re also frog, pig, zebra, and leopard costumes available.
From the features description of Mooba:
If you own a Roomba, you know what I am talking about. Have you ever:
1) named your Roomba? 2) talked to your Roomba?
3) spent more time watching your Roomba than it would take you to vacuum the room(ba)?
4) bought a second Roomba so your first would not be lonely?
If you answered yes to any of the above, you are a prime candidate for an original RoomBud Roomba costume!
If you answered yes to any of the above, you’re a prime candidate for your own room with padded walls. Note that your Roomba will successfully navigate said room, and keep you company while keeping your floors clean.
February 14th, 2006
I’m taking a class called ‘Analysis and Decision-Making’ this semester at Loyola as part of my MBA. I knew I had learned something in the class as I sat pondering what to do about my take-home exam last night. I analyzed and decided that I should take the prof up on her offer to extend the deadline for the exam. This let me go to bed at 1 am last night, and be reasonably patient with my kids today. Score an ‘A’ in the dual degree of MBA/mommy-hood!
December 21st, 2005
Wow…. I was already impressed by the revenue streams being generated by ringtones: the idea is that I can assign some music bit to my phone, and even down to the phone number of the person who’s calling me. When my phone rings, I hear a bit of music that I like, and the phone company gets to charge me by the song for the privilege. The more different songs I apply, the more money they make, and the more my tastes change, the more money they make. Since it’s generally not very expensive to set up an individual ring tone, they get a nice revenue stream that I don’t notice as a significant outflow from my wallet.
New thing seen out on Verizon’s site: ringback tones. Now I can assign basically my own call-waiting music on a per-caller basis: while my caller is waiting for me to pick up, they get to listen to the music I’ve pre-selected for them. Hubby gets something from his favorite band, mom gets “There’s a Tear in my Beer” (cause she likes it and I hate it and I never have to hear it on the ringback tone), the boss gets “Working 9-to-5″, etc, etc. And of course, if I’m a hip thing instead of a mostly not-hip thing, I need to change that music as the music scene changes. Verizon collects $1.99 per tone, with a monthly subscription fee of .99, thank you very much.
Apparently Verizon was the first major carrier to do it, starting in November 2004 (see MobileTechNews article. According to Engadget, a wireless carrier in Illinois was the first with the idea, and T-Mobile jumped into the fray. They’re really big in China, and there’s a whole site (Ringtonia) with news on ringback tones. There’s even links to how to get ringtones of animal sounds, ala “gorilla beating on its chest“. Now THAT would shake a meeting up!
October 15th, 2005
Got a spam comment today that made me laugh out loud. In amongst the porn spam (mature porn? uh, yuck!), the drug spam, and the vacuum spam (?), I had a spam comment from the Pampered Chef.
I almost left it up, just because it amused me so, in amongst the rest of the trash. I can imagine some housewife sitting at home, trying to expand her Pampered Chef sales so that she can get just one more plastic scraper to round out her set.
Pampered Chef: bringing the ingredients and utensils of spam to my website!
August 16th, 2005
Earlier this year I was given the wonderful opportunity to participate in a program called ‘ACTiVATE’. It’s a program out of UMBC (my alma mater) which pairs women with technologies out of local universities and research centers. The idea is that women would form businesses using these technologies and that the university that held the patent would get the licensing fees associated with use of the invention. This would also help the universities show compliance with federal regulations relating to use of federal funds: the government is very interested in seeing those technologies “transferred” to commercial companies.
The program paired a woman with a technical background with a woman with a business background for each project. There was a classroom component, with instruction in basic entrepreneurialism, and heavy mentoring. The women screened for the first year of the program were screened using resumes, essays, and interviews. The women came from diverse backgrounds, but many had many years of experience in their field and most had advanced degrees. I was inspired to be included in the program.
Sadly, my partner and I realized that our technology wasn’t feasible, due to lack of interest of the inventor coupled with the lack of the specific technical background of our team. That combo is a killer: if you don’t have the inventor’s ear and the team can’t compensate through its own technical background, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to determine what the reasonable bounds of the technology are. It also gives potential investors absolutely no confidence in the founding team. Our technology had already had 1 million plus invested in it by NASA (it’s actually going up in a satellite launch at the end of this year) and was only in the earliest stages of being able to be produced commercially. Neither my nor my partner’s piggybank was going to get us onto that playing field.
ACTiVATE would have been happy to have me continue. I personally wasn’t interested in continuing with another team’s technology: who wants to come in late to the game?
I learned a valuable set of lessons from the program, in terms of the real level of dedication needed to build a tech transfer business. Balancing that with work and family just isn’t possible right now for me. My FT job is already more than a FT job. I can’t handle another one.
I’ll be interested to see where my classmates end up: I’d love to see a couple of them heading companies that are recognized regionally as hot-shot startups. These women are interesting, are dedicated, and are really coming up with some great ideas. I’ll be happy to go to work for some of them someday.
May 29th, 2005
Jeff Bezos lists a new marketing concept on Amazon’s homepage this evening: Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime lets you pay a flat yearly fee of $79 to then get free two day shipping, and $3.99 overnight shipping. If you’re a gotta-have-it-now kind of person, this might be worth considering. $79 can readily be covered over the year, particularly since you can share the benefit with other family members. But this, to me, just highlights how much we’re willing to pay to have something _NOW_. This says some folks think gotta-have-it-now is worth at least $80 per year. Just like it bothers me to pay ATM fees, which are essentially fees for gotta-have-it-now money, it bothers me to pay shipping fees, unless the shipping fee + the cost of my items is significantly less than what I can get the item for locally – not a usual occurrence. My usual gameplan is to order whatever it is I need to order, and then fill in my order, if necessary, with wishlist items or Christmas gift items that I can tuck away for the future. That usually gets me to the dollar minimum for free shipping. That free shipping is slower than the overnight stuff, but hey, it’s free. I can use that shipping fee to go buy something else that I’d like, but isn’t a gotta-have-it-now.
I’m thinking $79 is a pretty high price point. I wonder if they’d have more success if they did it for a shorter time period – say $35 for three months. Then, you could subscribe if you knew you were going to be doing a bunch of ordering over that time period. Of course, then they’d get a bunch of revenue from this right around Christmas and see nothing the rest of the year.
This, of course, doesn’t apply for their various third-party areas. So, if you often buy used books, for instance, this just wouldn’t apply. And there are other various quirks to the program, including ways that Amazon can opt out of it for certain products. All in all, though, still an interesting idea.
February 5th, 2005
Seen in InformationWeek’s Jan 10, 2005 print issue: Mercury Performance Center’s ad, with the heading ‘Application Interrogation’ (Ad’s near the bottom of the PDF file). Ya gotta wonder what a US company is doing with this ad, given the Abu Ghraib scandals. Somebody in marketing just isn’t thinking…
January 18th, 2005
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