Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
I’ve blogged this before with respect to music, but I have been struck again today by the thought that in the digital world many media industries will simply be much smaller than they have been before.
You can argue this from the price side - the wide availability of illegal free copies of music and TV/films [...]
Now that is the definition of going mainstream!
According to a new book by data geek Bill Tancer, porn searches have dropped from 20% of the total to 10% over the last decade. That has got to be good news. Full report on Yahoo!.
As reported on ZDNet gamers are posting negative reviews of new EA game Spore on Amazon in protest at the games restrictive DRM. I don’t know how much effect it will have, but I like these people power stories!
Also interesting is that, again according to ZDNet, it is pretty easy to find pirated copies [...]
Amazon announced yesterday the extension of it’s paid video streaming service to Macs and televisions. Previously TV shows and movies were only available for download to PCs and Tivos.
Regular readers will know that I think this is the way of the future. In a world of ubiquitous networks streaming is superior to download - we [...]
I have probably bought more copies of Time Out than any other magazine, although sadly not recently, so it is with a little nostalgia that I relay the news from BrandRepublic and MobHappy that TimeOut is considering scrapping the cover charge for it’s iconic London listings magazine.
The option is to have a web based listings [...]
As reported on ReadWriteWeb yesterday Google plans to replace the words ‘Subcribe to this blog’ with ‘Follow this blog’ in the sidebar of every blog on Blogger.com around the web.
I’m constantly hearing stories of how small changes like this have a massive impact on key site metrics - e.g. conversion, and this could be the [...]
Techdirt has an interesting post this morning on Getting People to Pay for Investigative Reporting Directly. The idea, as reported more fully in the New York Times is that people club together to commission a piece on investigative reporting and pay in advance. Spot.us in San Francisco is offering just this service raising [...]
Tim O’Reilly has a post this morning about the growing trend for sites to link to themselves so they don’t lose traffic. I was called out for doing this the other day by Nils Geylen, which made me think about the issue for the first time, and it isn’t a good development.
O’Reilly cites numerous [...]
That is a feeling I have had for sometime and is re-enforced by the recent results from FT.com.
This is from PaidContent:
But, despite FT.com unveiling a new access model in November (giving five articles free per month, and a further 30 for those who register), we’re still seeing a plateau in paying subscribers. Results said subscriber [...]
Paul Graham of Y-Combinator publishes lists of what he thinks hot areas for startups. This helps channel his deal flow - this is, I think, a smart idea, and one of my motivations behind writing this blog. You can find his list here. The three that resonate most with me are:
3. New [...]
