mathewingram.com/work

Note:

I originally wrote this post under the impression that IBM was launching an online Office suite based on Star Office, but instead it has launched a free downloadable office suite. My apologies.

As expected, Google has finally launched its long-awaited PowerPoint-style presentation app — Google Presently — which was discovered by the ever-resourceful Ionut Alex Chitu earlier this year. It’s the final piece of Google’s online Office-style suite, which it is now pushing to sell to corporations in direct competition with Microsoft’s Office.

And now IBM has decided to awaken from its slumber and get into the game as well, with the launch of a Lotus-branded free suite built on Sun’s Star Office software, called Lotus Symphony. An IDC analyst tells the New York Times:

“I.B.M. is jumping in with products that are backed by I.B.M., with the I.B.M. brand and I.B.M. service,” said Melissa Webster, an analyst for IDC, a research firm. “This is a major boost for open source on the desktop.”

As the NYT story points out, this is also another big gesture of support for the Open Document Format, which Star Office and Open Office use and which Google’s document services also support. Microsoft, of course, is championing a competing format. And Mike Masnick notes that Yahoo’s purchase of Zimbra means there could soon be another large competitor in the free and online Office game.

Anyone want to buy Zoho.com?

After many rumours and crossed fingers (at least on my part), the New York Times has finally bitten the bullet and removed the pay wall from its website. Columnists and other content have finally been set free to find an audience wherever they can — and that’s not all. The site is also removing the pay wall from its newspaper archives going back 10 years.

Not everyone is celebrating the death of Times Select. Former journalist Mark Potts — co-founder of Backfence.com, a “citizen journalism” site that recently shut down — still thinks the pay service was the right idea, but says the newspaper chose to put the wrong content behind the wall. He thinks in-depth and feature coverage should have been charged for instead of columnists.

I happen to think Mark is wrong. In any case, I think allowing bloggers and other sites to link freely to columnists and other writers at the Times will help increase the discussion around the issues the paper writes about, and that will benefit the Times in the long run. It may be hard to prove that case to the CFO with hard numbers, but I still believe it to be true.

If anything, however, I think the decision to remove the pay wall on the archives could be even more important than the removal of Times Select. This is clearly a “long tail” gamble if ever there was one, and it will be interesting to see whether the newspaper can make that work economically. I would suspect that if it even manages to sell a few ads on archived pages, it will exceed the amount of money it made by charging for its archives.

Update:

More on the New York Times decision from the always insightful Mike Masnick at Techdirt, from Scott Karp at Publish2.0, from Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis — who calls it a “cynical act” that was “doomed from the start” — from Jimmy Guterman at O’Reilly and from online media pioneer Scott Rosenberg of Salon. And of course the big question still remains: Will the Wall Street Journal be next?

(for anyone who’s interested, here’s a piece I wrote on Smilebox.com for globetechnology.com)

Andrew Wright, a Canadian who made his way from Alias Research to Microsoft and then to Real Networks during the 1990s, says he had an epiphany of sorts while building the RealArcade gaming unit, which would eventually become a $100-million-a-year revenue generator for Real Networks.

The epiphany had to do with the target market for RealArcade’s casual computer games. Over time, it had become obvious that the main market for such games wasn’t kids — although they were an important market. The biggest market segment by far, however, was women, specifically stay-at-home and working moms.

Why? Because games such as Bejewelled were intellectually stimulating, but were also simple enough that they could be completed in minutes — perfect for a mom with dozens of other things on the go, and only a few minutes here or there to relax and do something fun.

Mr. Wright took those insights with him when he left Real Networks and started building his own company: a combination greeting card and photo-sharing/scrapbooking service called Smilebox, which launched last year. Much like RealArcade, the service is a combination of Web and desktop: users install a small application, but it is tied closely to the Web.

Continue reading “Profile: Smilebox mixes Web and desktop”

It’s hard to argue with the point of view advanced by Randall Stross in a New York Times piece this weekend — namely, that Apple could be doing a better job of capitalizing on the stumbles of Microsoft Vista. For every guy like billionaire Mark Cuban who switches to a Mac, there are about 95 people buying machines with Vista on them, and that statistic hasn’t changed all that much despite the so-called “halo effect” generated by the iPod.

So why hasn’t Apple done a better job of converting people into Mac owners? Because Steve Jobs doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the PC market, that’s why. I admit that I have no evidence whatsoever for making such a statement — other than the obvious, which is the fact that the company doesn’t even have anyone on the board dedicated to the Mac, as Stross details in his story. It seems fairly clear that it isn’t as important as the iPod business, and that Apple may not even care about winning more of the corporate market, which is what it would take.

Still, I can’t help but have the feeling that Steve-O’s sights are set a little higher than chewing another percent or two out of Bill’s overwhelming market share in PCs. I think the iPod got Apple started down the personal electronics and entertainment road, followed by the somewhat lacklustre AppleTV, and now the iPhone and the iPod Touch have moved the company into mobile.

Wayne Gretzky wasn’t the best hockey player because he handled the puck all that much better than everyone else (although he did). It was because he didn’t just skate to where the puck was, he skated to where it was going to be. I think Steve is trying to do the same thing.

I had almost forgotten about the rumours from six months or so ago that media and entertainment giant Viacom had bought a stake in Tagworld, a MySpace-style social network that I tried a few times and quite liked, but which never really seemed to get much traction, despite being well-desgined. Now it appears the rumours were true: Viacom has used the company’s technology to build micro-networks for its various brands.

According to the description on TechCrunch and in a Fortune magazine piece written by my old pal Richard Siklos, Viacom is not trying to create a simple MySpace knockoff — which I give them credit for. What they are trying to do, however, sounds much more difficult in a way: they are creating micro-hubs for artists, shows and channels (such as MTV and The Comedy Channel), and then allowing users of one network to move content and profiles and other data in between the different sub-networks.

The project is called Flux, and it apparently includes not just Viacom properties and portals but also other non-Viacom sites such as the website for the band The Pussycat Dolls and a skateboarding site called Sk8site.com. As Richard notes, users of an MTV site can even copy and paste videos or other content from their MTV pages to a MySpace page.

In effect, Viacom is doing the opposite of what MySpace has done, and is trying to tie together existing networks rather than creating its own. “We’re not trying to own a social network, build one, or compete with one,” says MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath. “We’re embracing them all.” PaidContent, meanwhile, says the Flux project is old news, and that Viacom is just cobbling together old projects and trying to make them seem like a coherent strategy.

In their eternal quest for a bigger wave, surfers have been known to fly out into the teeth of oncoming monsoons — and apparently they also go to the Arctic, where they wait until building-sized pieces fall off 800-foot-tall glaciers and then surf the resulting waves (while dodging the pieces). In places, the water they are surfing in is only 18 inches deep.

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/271548172

It’s funny how all those press releases that the record industry sends out about the costs of music piracy rarely ever mention “fair use,” a concept that is an integral component of copyright law in most countries. It’s as though the idea never existed. But then, admitting that copyright regulations are a tradeoff between two opposing forces — fair use and creative control — would get in the way of pushing the whole “downloading is theft” idea.

To counter some of those one-sided arguments, we now have a study from the Computer and Communications Industry Association that says fair use of copyrighted works generates $4.5-trillion in economic benefits. As Mike Masnick notes over at Techdirt, you could quibble with the methodology of the CCIA study, but it is no more one-sided than all the anti-piracy “facts” that get circulated by the record companies. Says CCIA president Ed Black:

“Much of the unprecedented economic growth of the past 10 years can actually be credited to the doctrine of fair use, as the Internet itself depends on the ability to use content in a limited and nonlicensed manner.”

According to one measure used by the study — “value added,” or the difference between an industry’s costs and the gross economic output it generates — fair use has contributed substantially more to the U.S. economy than the copyright business has (although there are problems with this, as Nick Carr describes in his own inimitable style). The study itself is here.

As the Inquirer points out, the amount of value created by fair use may even be higher than the CCIA study estimates, since much of the economic value that is generated by the music industry is driven by publicity and media reports — both of which would either not exist, or wouldn’t be as powerful, without fair use. Not surprisingly, Google has a pro fair-use post on its public policy blog.