kelvin quee

Their album (above) is practically FREE. There’s a textbox (see below) where the price should be - You are free to key in any value! You can key in even “0.00″ (YES, I’ve tried) and the system returns a sarcastic “We value your custom. You’re currently in a queue.” Radiohead keeps their promise though and you’re later brought to a registration page.

The picture above shows me keying in $1.99 for the entire album! When you hit the “?” icon on the pricing line, it leads you to -

Hit the next “?” again and it says -

Radiohead, one of my favourite bands, have taken leadership again - this time in the distribution and pricing of their precious product - Music.

Trust that People Pay for Good Work
Trust is really important. As an artist, one must have trust his/her works. One must also trust his/her audience. Even though I’m free to download it off for free, I won’t. I’ll pay a price, a fair price, which I’m still deciding. It should be around SGD $6, I guess.

Nearly Every Cent Goes to Radiohead
From an economics point of view, note that it costs almost nothing for Radiohead to distribute the digital songs online. Including transaction costs, it may cost them just SGD $0.50 per album. As a music lover, I would rather pay $6 and be sure that nearly every cent goes to supporting the artist than to pay $19.99 to feed the entire music industry value chain (from the record label, the CD press, the logistics company, the music store, the landlord…).

In anycase, if I didn’t want to pay for the music, I wouldn’t have paid anyway and would have downloaded off Bittorrent/Limewire/eMule/whatever.

And, I’m willing to wager, that Radiohead would get far more revenue per album download than if Radiohead had went the conventional way of selling plastic CDs.

This is because most people would deem themselves to be paying for a service, than for a physical object. And, the price of service, as you would already know are highly inelastic.

Discouraging Piracy with an Infinitely Fair System
It also encourages would-be-pirates to pay for a small sum, thereby effectively preventing petty piracy. It feels good to be paying a small amount to enjoy music. It’s a ridiculously fair system of payment - You only pay for what you think the music is worth!

All in all, it’s a not a zero-sum game. In fact, it’s very much positive indeed. Who’s the one crying “Downloading is Stealing”?

Eat this, RIAA!

Related Links
1. Time Magazine - Radiohead Says: Pay What You Want
2. HOLY SHIT: Radiohead’s In Rainbows Out In 10 Days!
3. Radiohead Amazes Me

One of my favourite companies and one of which I follow almost on a daily basis does an about-turn.

Palm, the company that popularised the PDA, is cancelling its new flagship product, the Palm Foleo. You can read the company’s announcement (a blog post) here.

The annoucement came as a huge shock to me. Palm, a company which I’ll consider as relentlessly obstinate, seemed to have yielded to public pressure and its new shareholders (Elevation Partners).

While I’ll not consider the Palm Foleo as revolutionary, I would not consider it detrimental to Palm’s future. It would have been a fantastic deployment ground for its new Linux-based operating. I’m also expecting the new operating to be eventually take residence in Treos and Tungstens.

More later

Communications have taken a drastic change, now that the Internet has democratise communications. Individuals are now empowered to not only voice their dissatisfaction, but will also group together to amplify their impact.

And, be forewarned, choose to ignore the above at your own peril.

I know, I know – You have probably heard of the above a million times. Both the New Media (blogs) and Traditional Media have predicted the fundamental, disruptive change that is about to rock the world.

But where are the signs pointing to it? We do not want symptoms. We do not want clues. We want to see it happening.

While Robert Scoble, famed for Naked Conversations which he co-authored with Shel Israel, may very well have the first, documented experience with a company (Microsoft) grappling with blogs, Jeff Jarvis had a classic encounter (archive here) with Dell which is well-worth investigating. The incident triggered responses from hundreds of people who had similar experiences with Dell. The reactions of Dell throughout the entire process is worth studying. This incident, Dell Hell, will no doubt serve as excellent, milestone case study for Customers Relations in the future.

First, take some time to read a white paper (direct link) by Market Sentinel, Onalytica and Immediate Future at Public Relations Online:

1) Blogs are influential
2) Bloggers tend to congregate
3) Blogs have more influece than traditional media

While so, I would like to extend upon what the white paper has built upon to reach the following:

1) Blogs may have negatively affected Dell’s stock prices
2) Blog audience can be influenced

Blogs may have negatively affected Dell’s stock prices

A More Complete Screenshot

The following is a screenshot of Google Finance showing the Dell’s stock prices immediately after Jeff Jarvis’s post on his blog. As you can see, Dell had a bullrun ever since 2002 but suffered a year-long dip ever since Jarvis’s post on 21 June 2005.

While I am definitely taking it simplistically here, as I will not be able to prove a relationship between Dell’s stock prices and Jarvis’s post, it is still a interesting coincidence worth exploring.

Since the factor that most influences stock prices is the market’s expectation of the Company’s future performance, it will not be unreasonable to think that blogs have tainted the market’s perception of Dell. More importantly, the blogs have had enough power to prompt major print publications around the world to further extend the consequential effect of Jarvis’s post, such as Business Week’s Hanging Up on Dell. Jarvis’s Open Letter to Michael Dell probably destined Dell for a major embarrassment.

Blog audience can be influenced

The Opinion Distribution bar above represents the entire audience of a particular blog. The small, green portion on the left is made up of people who supports the opinion of the blog. If you feel for Jarvis’s cause in his post about Dell, you belong here.

Similarly, the small, orange portion on the right is made up of people against the opinion of the blog. Therefore, if you do not agree with what Jarvis’s has written, in the sense that you are actually on Dell’s side, you belong here.

Both of these small groups of people are of opinions strong enough to actually comment on Jarvis’s blog or to even write an article on their own website/blog linking back to Jarvis’s post.

More importantly, we have a huge yellow bar which represents people who often do not have an opinion. These are people waiting to be influenced and it represents an opportunity for companies who want to influence the public’s perception about themselves.

What Can Companies Do?

1) Accept Blogs - There is no denying the influence of blogs. Most major companies are already using blogs in one way or another. IBM blogs, Sun blogs and even Microsoft blogs. In fact, Microsoft’s positive reactions to pressure from both internal and external bloggers have led to a greatly improve MSN Spaces.

2) Create alliances with chief influencers - Identity them. Do a search for them and see who has been writing about your product. More effectively, see who has been writing about your competitors. These bloggers are people you want to watch. These are people you want to influence. Link to them. Comment on their blogs. Show them you care about their opinion.

3) Have a blog - Even the obstinate Dell has one with One2One (since July 2006), though the reactions from bloggers haven’t been positive.

One year on from Dell Hell, how has the world changed? Have more companies started to accept the influence of blogs? Have more companies started a blog? If you haven’t started considering whether your company will benefit from the use of blogs and online media monitoring services, you should.

Blogs are channels in which individuals use to influence the mass. Bloggers can either be the spokesmen of your company or your arch enemy. Fortunately, most of the time, popular bloggers give honest, constructive feedback (like Guardian’s Technology blog).

You only need to listen.

References (besides the links above):

Dell Takes One Hell of a Blogging, Direct; 10/1/2005, Vol. 17 Issue 13, p10-10, 1/5p
How one man’s Weblog became Dell’s nightmare, Beth Snyder Bulik. B to B. Chicago: Sep 12, 2005.Vol.90, Iss. 11; pg. 47, 1 pgs
Blog of the Week: Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine (Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Inc.)
MSN Spaces, First Take (A Jupiter Research Business Weblog)
What The F***2 is with Dell Technical Support?! (Jeremy Zawodny)
The impact of one blog on Dell (Business Week) (With revealing comments)

Kelvin Quee is a keen observer of the world of blogs and New Media. He is developing strategies on how companies can utilise them to their advantage. If you are interested in this topic, either to apply the methods or simply for research, let him know.

For all the fanfare about Web 2.0, New Media, User Generated Content or <insert Next Buzzword Here>, take note.

Have you ever wonder why, despite all the buzz-fuzz-wozz-luzz, it seems that your colleague next to you is still not visiting Digg? Ever wondered why most people are still using their crippled Hotmail accounts instead of the AJAXy, pow-wow Gmail with unlimited flexibility? Ever wondered why, despite the popularity of Flickr, most people are just using it as yet-another-site-with-good-storage and are not exactly tagging them as Flickr hopes everyone will?

Probably because all the crowds that are using Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, Flickr, Gmail or the Next Big Thing is, unfortunately, the same-old-crowd. Recycled crowd. All these great websites are all probably used by the same group of people with a few differences here and there but, still, probably no larger than the entire size Slashdot crowd.

The graphic above (created by the stunningly simple and powerful Gliffy) best describes what I’m talking about. The entire rectangle represents the entire online population with the smaller red rectangle as the fraction of the Internet population actively visiting and using all the buzz website. It is definitely over-represented here, with the actual proportion at least 10 times smaller.

What I’m trying to drive at is that it has always been the same group of people visiting using the same few services. The pie, referring to the number of people using the buzz-fuzz services, was never enlarged, the only exception being Flickr which appeals to a drastically different crowd.

New startups need to take note that it’s not enough being Yet-Another-Digg or Yet-Another-Flickr. Whatever you are doing must capture and enlarge the pie and to allow more people to participate in your creation. Gliffy might be a notable application that is ridiculously easy and fun to use. Good luck with your next venture!

I’ve learnt a huge amount from the iX Conferences that I’ve attended. Firstly, it’s the Academic Conference held at SMU which is free of charge for students. Next up, it’s the iX Congress which I had the fantastic opportunity to both attend and speak at.

Over time, I would probably share more and more of the knowledge that I’ve gained here but here are 2 most important lessons that I’ve learnt which I’ll translate to you, from my own perspective.

Flickr and User Generated Content

Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo! gave a insightful presentation about the acquisition and further development of Flickr. More importantly, he talked about the phenomenon of User Generated Content.

User Generated Content is probably as old as the Internet itself, but it was elevated (or, deprecated, depending on your point of view) to buzzword status with the prominence of Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia. Afterall, wasn’t the BBS and Usenet filled with User Generated Content?

What Flickr and YouTube did right was giving users means to easily upload content into a space that was easy and pleasant to use. With that, there was a torrent of Content flooding it, which immediately created the next Problem which turned out to be an Opportunity.

Organising Content

Horowitz then brought the audience back to the days when the Internet was at its infancy, during the days when Yahoo! was starting out. Webpages were organised into categories and sub-categories, a method that was tedious for the maintainers of the service, but wildly effective.

But the web grew too big and such a method, instinctively, would be too tedious. A search method is needed, but search results were too off tangent most of the time. It wasn’t until Google’s Pagerank when search results were truly relevant.

Flickr faced the same problem, but probably more difficult. There’s no way, at least no accurate and fast means, for an indexing service to organise videos. It’s then clear that the only way is through Tagging and passsing the work back to users.

But would users do the work?

It turns out that users would, even love to, tag their own content, provided that the system is simple and enjoyable to use. There is no content management system as complex and as effect as the human mind. It seems to be the Occam’s Razor to a very complex problem and one that is startlingly effective.

Of course, if you look at it from a System Designer’s point of view, it’s a dream come true, to be accurate, their Wildest Dream Come True.

Give users the facilities and they create, share, upload, organise, rate, review and comment on all Content. It’s almost like an Autonomous Content Generating Machine. What could be better?

We now all know that Flickr and YouTube are sitting atop gold mines. If, somehow, they manage to put advertisements that are acceptable by the users, it will prove to lucrative.

And, guess who’s doing all the work? You.

== To be continued ==

Bootstrap Singapore is an initiative by Rizuan and I to form a Bootstrapping community in Singapore.

Bootstrapping is a form of entrepreneurship whereby little emphasis is placed on fundraising and all the other details of forming a company. Attention is placed on where it really matter, that is, actually doing it. Entrepreneurs then leverage upon on each other’s abilities hence getting the jobs done cheaper and faster.

A mailing list has been formed. There are plans to organise monthly meetups once we hit a critical mass.

Join us to see how we can help one another and promote the spirit of bootstrapping. For more information, contact me or Ridzuan.

Find out more about bootstrapping here:
Singapore Entrepreneurs
Wikipedia - Bootstrapping
Bootstrap Network

I’m twiddling with the concept of Personal Marketing.

If you are interested in exploring the opportunities, please give me a buzz.

Or, watch it grow at 359d.com.

Wired Podcast has Joanna Glasner commeting on the irrationality of the current music model (CDs, mp3, Itunes and all).

Which suddenly inspired me about a possible new model.

Watch this space.

http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/podcasts/index.blog?entry_id=1408418

Update (25 Feb 06): The Observer has a article, Striking a Bum Note, that goes about the same tune as I had in mind.