Alex Hopmann’s Blog

This video clip says it all.

Earlier today I was listening on the radio to them talk about how 30% of the Bear Stearns stock was held by employees and many of them mostly had the company stock in their retirement accounts- hadn’t they ever heard of Enron?

Of course this is actually very common in the financial industry- I’ve heard of some of the top firms (I won’t name names) that do all their 401k match in company stock. Folks in the financial industry really should know better. I usually like to avoid government regulation, but it does seem like the sort of thing someone should investigate / question.

My buddies at Jackson Fish made the New York Times, with a picture even!

Congrats! They couldn’t have picked a better set of folks to be the “poster children” for the Seattle startup scene, although Jackonfish is pretty atypical as startups go…

Funny clip from the writers of the Colbert Report on the viewpoint of the studio execs.

In general I’m very sympathetic with the views of the writers here. If the pay structure for their jobs is supposed to involve getting paid when the studios make more money off a given work, the Internet and all other media should be included. Now, I’ve heard some suggestions that the writers want some form of fixed payments which seems like a bad idea since it would constrain how the programming can be used in this modern environment. But it seems easy to solve that by doing it as a percentage of revenue and then it should apply to anything.

My buddy Chris recently left Microsoft and went to join a new startup Deep Rock Drive which is doing online “live” music shows. Overall seems like a really cool concept and while they have the usual startup things to overcome, they already are up and running and it sounds like they have some cool deals on the way.

The one difficult thing for me to get my head around from the “consumer” viewpoint is that the experience is inevitably going to be different than the in-person “live” experience. So much about what I enjoy about going to see a live show is in the venue, the physical presence. Of course from my discussions with Chris they have all kinds of cool ideas coming that go way beyond the kind of ways you can interact with a band at an in-person event. Its one of those things where the Internet thing is just going to be different. The trick is to set expectations and understand how that different character will influence who becomes your audience and their usage patterns.

Anyway, this will be a fun one to watch- I’m hoping Chris will hook me up with a tour of their studios in Vegas soon.

Slate has an article on the economic analysis of whether newspapers should charge for their online versions. Now before I go on I should say that us Internet types are supposed to pooh-pooh these kind of analysis as “old school” and “not understanding how the Internet changes things”.

So I’ll get right on it. Don’t want to disappoint after all.
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My reading of this article is that all its analysis is in terms of traditional models. It asks the classic economic questions “does one product (the online version) act as a replacement for another product (the print version)”. And it looks at pricing/revenue models in terms of subscription vs. advertising. It suggests the big thing that has changed is that advertising on the Internet is becoming more mature and thus there is real money in it.

Of course the article totally ignores the ways in which the Internet is not like other media. Their analysis might be appropriate for comparing newspapers to TV news (with TV having free + advertising vs. subscription, not that anyone was crazy enough to try to charge for the subscription beyond the inclusion in the basic cable package).

What’s missing about the analysis of the Internet sites is a discussion of the effects of linking and search engines, and those don’t really have a comparison outside this new medium. By keeping lots of their content locked up inside a subscription site the NY Times and Wall Street Journal have by and large kept their content out-of-play from the rest of the Internet.

When looking at any Internet property, you consider three types of non-paid traffic sources- direct, referral, and search. Sure, there are some web-sites that people will regularly go to on a frequent basis just by typing their address into their browser, and relatively speaking a daily newspaper is a good candidate for this since their most important content has a low shelf-life and thus if you are prominent enough you will get a fair amount of direct traffic. But even among daily news a large amount of traffic can be from blogs, link blogs, news aggregation (like Google News), and search. These publications actually do tons of articles (food reviews, recipes, movie info, and more) that would be great targets for organic search and could generate substantial long term advertising revenue if they were available.

The NY Times had the worst of these worlds. Much of their daily content was available for free, but after a week or two it would get locked away. So they didn’t get the ability to really monetize that old stuff and people would be reluctant to link to their news since the links would go dead after a bit.

Hopefully with the recent changes these publications will actually join the web (the world of interconnected sites) and I’m expecting with the huge value of their content they will be able to make some great bucks off that.

Joel writes on outsmarting your airline. I do this all the time- use FlightAware and other services to tell when your incoming flight is actually arriving. Also as a pilot I have access to aviation weather and flow control information and I’ve often checked up on them when the airlines claim a flight is delayed due to ATC flow-control or weather. I’m estimate is that for the major airlines like American, United and Northwest, about half the time they claim delays due to ATC or weather its a lie. Which is not to say that the gate agents are telling a lie themselves- they may not know, but someone at the airline is. More often than not the cause is bone-headed airlines that have scheduled 50 of their own flights to take off or land at the same moment at one of their hubs, which is just inexcusably bad management.

An interesting contrast in airlines is our trip out to Minnesota two weeks ago. Outbound we flew Northwest. I just missed taking a photo of the gate sign showing our “departure time” as 10 minutes in the past. The flight was late (ok, it happens, no big deal) but they never bothered to try to keep people informed or update the displays anywhere.

Our return flight was on Sun Country, one of the newer-style airlines. The contrast was amazing- the return flight was also late. But they made announcements every 10-15 minutes keeping us updated on the status, they frequently updated the board with a projected (and fairly realistic) new boarding and departure time, and even suggested that people call ahead if they having someone picking them up to warn about the potential delay. It was the model of good customer contact through proactive honest communication.

I just don’t believe that its that hard for an airline to keep passengers and gate crews informed of what is really going on- heck, I was in Bend Oregon the other day being picked up by a friend in a small Columbia aircraft and could track his arrival with better precision than Northwest or the other guys would ever communicate to their customers. Travel can be complicated and stressful and if these big airlines would spend 10% of what they spend creating ads showing the beautiful travel experiences, on actually giving a better experience, people might not hate them so much. Instead they are just lazy and take the short cut of telling deliberate lies to try to placate their captive audience. Lets be clear- if it were not for government subsidies, the old guys would have already been out of business by now in a classic case of good capitalist “creative destruction” and there would be more room for the new guys like Sun Country, JetBlue and Southwest to replace them with good service.

Got the link in my email this morning. The download went flawlessly, all the concerns about Radiohead being able to deal with the infrastructure seemed unfounded. To be honest, it went more smoothly than my Amazon mp3 download experience since Radiohead just sent out customized links and didn’t try to do some wacky “you can only download once and you are screwed if the download fails” sort of thing. Its amazing how people can just make things more complicated for themselves (and their customers!) in unnecessary ways… I wonder if Amazon should try to block TCP-level retransmits to make sure you receive each packet only once?

Two things that could have been better- I wish the files were encoded at more than 160kbps. Its better than 128kbps but I’d rather see 256-320kbps to get much closer to lossless quality. I would have expected that with the band managing the process they would have cared about making sure their “product” was at the best quality possible, but then again most people won’t notice or care and I suppose it does preserve some value for people who buy the physical CD.

I also wish they had included some album-art files. Its nice to have them in Explorer / the Media Library and too bad they didn’t just include a few of the correctly named JPG files.

The music? Its almost beside the point right? Listening to it now. In any case the last few Radiohead albums took me a few play-throughs to get into so I’ll wait a week or so before making up my mind.

Radiohead just blew everyones minds and I suspect almost no one has actually heard their new album yet. The specifics around how they are releasing it are going to eclipse the album itself…

So this weekend they announced the new album In Rainbows. And in an unprecidented move its available in 10 days, not 4 months. Because you don’t have to wait for it to be pressed onto CDs and for the big marketing rollout. Its a download.

Not only that, but you get to set the price that you think is fair for it. I’d kill to see statistics on what people choose to pay. Heck, given how screwed mosts artists get by their labels, I bet Radiohead could get more cash selling the market research than the typical band gets for the album (not that this would be consistent with their style).

Apparently after the last album their contract with their label expired and they just decided to not renew. So far it seems like the new approach is going well for them- their blog says that the site has been experiencing difficulties from extreme load.

For what its worth I’ll share what I decided to pay for it. 3.99 pounds. Which comes out to a bit more than $8 US, or about the same price as downloading any of their other albums from Amazon. Except of course this way the band presumably gets most of the money, no middlemen.

So, a big round of applause for Radiohead, and if anyone still thinks the music industry in 5 years is going to look remotely like what it used to look like 5 years ago, I’ve got a quality bridge to sell you in New York…

I just noticed they had an older Radiohead Knives Out Download (3 songs) for $1.87. For a single where you aren’t going to see them lower than $5.97 in physical format this is extra-great.

or Radiohead Knives Out Download ($1.87)

I was just checking out the Amazon MP3 Downloads service and so far its two thumbs up. You get high bit-rate MP3s (256-320kbps) with no DRM protection and prices that range from $.79 to $.99 a song. Even better they often discounts if you download a whole album. EMusic is still less expensive, but Amazon expands the mix quite a bit by carrying major label artists.