Newspapers

Mark Cuban posted an interesting idea for a way to save the newspapers from their slow collapse. The basic premise is that newspaper or for this matter any content provider would close their content to the general public but provide it to anyone who cable or satellite provider subscriber and they would. The cable companies would pay a nominal fee for this exclusive content. Overall, this is an interesting idea but I am not sure if it is really executable especially with the growing ubiquity of open wifi networks. Also, I am not sure if I want to give cable or satellite companies more power as what content they can or will provide. This week On The Media had a 3 good stories directly related to this topic that are definitely worth listening to:

The first is about a micro payment service called Kachingle that is trying to generate revenue for newspapers by having people willingly make a small payment for the content they consume. This sounds interesting but I am not really sure how many people would sign up for such a service or if they did sign up I am not sure how many people would refill their account:

The second story is about how comcast, the nations largest cable company, restricted what some of their subscribers were doing online under the guise of QOS:

And lastly, the third related story is a discussion about the ramifications of the demise of the newspaper industry and if it is worth saving:

Personally, I do think newspapers especially investigative journalism (on all levels local, national, and international) is very important and needs an outlet. It is debatable if newspapers are the appropriate venue for such journalism but that is, in my opinion, the only reason newspapers need to be saved. The biggest problem seems to be that the newspaper industry has been extremely slow to adopt to new technology and make necessary changes and modernizations in printing and distribution models in order to remain efficient and profitable.

40 Degree Day

The other day it was more like a 67 degree day and it reminded me of the scene above from my favorite show of all time, The Wire (if you are sensitive about street language don't watch the clip, if you already watched the clip and are sensitive about street language sorry about that and don't be so sensitive they are only words). If you have never watched it please do it is like reading a great novel all 5 seasons are absolutely thrilling. During the absolutely beautiful day I had lunch at the shake shack and then sat and enjoyed the a couple of hours of leisure time at the Madison Square Promenade, which has done wonders for the once crazy intersections of Broadway, 5th Ave, and 23rd Street. The video below was being shot while I was out there and I decided to take a timelapse photo series, which thanks to my new Mac Book was a 5 minute project to put together.

 

New Job

I accepted a job as Director of Customer Acquisition @ Dada Entertainment a online mobile content and music retail social network. I know there is a lot going on there but it is an interesting business model and the social aspect seems like a no brainer for music but I have not seen anyone doing this. I guess MS is doing something similar with Zune and their "welcome to the social" but I never really dug into it to really know what the social part of Zune was beyond sharing tracks from Zune to Zune.

I have done a bunch of customer acquisition work on the agency and client side and so this should be a fun job as it is in a small environment and with a cool product (see here for a better view into the product). They have also been keeping a company blog which gets periodically updated with top 10 tracks downloaded and major company announcements. During my many interviews there was a brief discussion about adding more to the blog which hopefully I will be able to help with. 

The new gig starts in 2 weeks on Monday March 2nd (unless my background check doesn't come out clean; insert Taliban joke here). In the mean time I will be reading more of stuff like this:

The Marketing During the Recession series of blog posts from TrendWatch. (they are up to #6 and while I think most of these rules seem pretty standard good business practices it is always good to focus on the fundamentals especially during tough economic times.

The Freemium Business Model several blog posts from Andrew Chen, a really smart and interesting blogger. Although, the freemium model doesn't directly apply it still gives a good view into how others are building and growing successful business online.

Also, Blog Maverick, Babbling VC (side note I went to HS with Paul we sat next to each other in AP Physics and Trig he was smart back then and is still smart), GigaOm, Scobleizer and Darren Herman have all had interesting posts about start-ups and business in rough economic times. 

I would imagine my poker and basketball consumption will decrease while my cookie consumption will probably remain constant hopefully I can increase my running and start doing some morning runs especially as the weather starts to get nicer. 

Finally Done With PC

Yesterday my trusty Sony VAIO, which was ruined by windows vista, started its decent into crapping out. I was playing some online poker and was pretty deep in two tournaments when all of a sudden the computer just shut down. So i quickly turned it back on but realized that it was running off the battery even though it was plugged in. I unplugged it and tried a different outlet to no avail. At this time I noticed that I had about 2 hours left on my battery and if I was going to go real deep in either of these tournaments 2 hours was not going to be enough time. (This is the most I will ever talk about poker on this blog especially boring hand details like this) About that time I got QQ in the small blind with a middle position player who shoved about 10 big blinds all in I called and I was off to the races against his AK. The flop and the turn were all low cards and he hit one of his 6 outs with an Ace on the river. Oh well that didn't cripple me but put a pretty big dent in my stack. Several hands later I have QQ again in 2nd position when the under the gun player makes a standard raise. I decide to shove all my chips. It folds around to the big blind and he shoves in as well, he and I have about the same chips. The original raiser tanks for a while and decides to make the hero call with A10 of spades. The big blind had a weaker Ace. The flop brought 2 spades and the lovely turn brought a spade giving the guy who made a really bad call for most of his chips the nuts, knocking me out. In the other tournament I was short stacked and shoved with it was folded to me in the small blind with J9 suited and the big blind woke up to 66 and he held. So now I was out of the both tournaments with only about 1 hr and 20 min left of the battery so I shut it down. In the morning I tried to play around with it to see if there was anything I could do but no luck so I decided to go tot he Apple store in SoHo and get a Mac Book. I thought about the Mac Air as there was a refurbished one on the Apple site for $1000 but decided to get the regular Mac Book. There are 2 models and I decided on the cheaper one since I am not really doing a ton of high powered  computing. So far it has been a pretty smooth experience but there are minor things I am going to have to get use to since I have been using a PC all of my computing life. I can't with until google releases chrome for a the Mac as I think it is a faster and smoother browser than safari or explorer. Everything else has been pretty slick. I created a movie with some photos I took from my flight from LA to NYC at take off. See below:

From now I guess I am now one of those "Mac" people. Now I just need to figure out how to get all the music, photos, and other files off of my dying VAIO and on to my shiny new Mac.

Brand Tracking in a Web 2.0 World

Brand tracking has always been an Ad Agency function that is shrouded in a bit of mystery. Now it is more than ever important to know how people perceive your brand and what kinds of conversations they are having about you. For small start ups who can't afford an agency to track brand perceptions there are several DYI ways to get a good pulse on what is being said about your brand. 

Ice Rocket blog search has a great function called Big Buzz that will give you a running timeline of anything that is said about your brand. People are also using Twitter to track what people are saying about brands, below is a map of tweets about brands during the Superbowl (found in the NY Times)

Facebook groups are also a good way to see if there is any positive or negative discussions are happening about your brand. Ultimately, you have to be vigilant about about keeping a finger on the pulse otherwise you will be caught off guard when something good or something bad happens.