Hi, I moved my blog to www.harael.com

Hi!

You can find all my new posts on my new blog Harael!

Txs for checking, I love you!

Simone

Free Music: Try BlogMusik before it’s gone

As TechCrunch pointed out, this is likely to be gone quickly.
Have no idea whether it’s legal or not (I hope for the guys behind it), but so far it ROCKS!
This is basically a iPod-shaped web streaming application (you can even save tracks if youlogin with your emal).

Click the link below to try it out!

blogmusik

Is piracy really hurting?

I’ve come accross this interesting post on how piracy may actually help legal CD and Software business. In my opinion they’re 2 completely different stories, so let’s get started from CD business.

CD BUSINESS
The author points out that he would probably never heard Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Pop” if he didn’t download it from Napster. That download eventually led to a trip to the near CD store where he bought his first Ramones’ CD. He liked it so much he spoke about them to a lot of people, that may as well brought more money into the music business.

I have no data in my hands (asking the readers: any good – and possibly free – site for mkt data out there?) but I have few doubts that piracy is hurting music industry or that it will down the road. The story above may have happened in late 90s, but today with more and more broadband out there (I always read 60% of US families, don’t know for EU) it’s way too easy to get your music conveniently and for free from the big P2P world.

I guess we should try to get out of any philosofical bandwagon and have a look at consumers’ real life. So, basically you have 2 options:

1. EITHER you get out of home, grab your car, ride for 15 mins (let’s assume you’re in a big city and the next music store isn’t 20 miles away), fight for parking (ok, that’s more of a european factor, but that’s a big one), get in the shop, find what you want (let’s assume you don’t waste 1 hour looking at that brand new iPod), get to the counter and pay 20 bucks knowing that 1 will go to the artist and 19 are wasted in distribution and lawyers’ bills to secure to justice that dangerous 18yr old guy “stealing” the same stuff from the internet.
2. OR you get to the P2P service you’re most confortable with, check for what you want, and listen right away. For free.

(there’s a 3rd way of buying a CD from an online store like Amazon but I don’t even want to speak about it for it’s sooo old fashioned…).

So, looking at consumers perspective, getting music online has simply TOO MANY BENEFITS vs buying a CD. But, even more importantly, they have NONE to buy a CD.
well, actually they have 3:

1. Audio quality: not a big one in my opinion, you have a big choice of high quality music in P2P services;
2. Bells & wistles: meaning the stuff that’s coming with a CD purchase other than music (you know, album arts, some writings from the band.. this kinda stuff). Ironically, these things are more and more squeezed from CDs these days, in an attempt to make more money from a decreasing mkt.
3. the 1 buck rule: That is, the one buck that, as stated above, goes to the artist. Everybody likes artists, especially artists whose music you like. This is the only BIG one reason, but it’s more of a reason to buy legal music than it is to buy a CD.

Looking at my personal experience (I mean, that of people I know, I NEVER downloaded nor bought pirated music, of course! ) these 3 drawbacks aren’t nearly enough to counterbalance the big benefits of getting music online.

So if you ask me:

is CD industry dead? My answer is YES.

Is it because of piracy? NOT ONLY, it is because of online music, both the legal one and the pirated. Piracy has the edge now because RIAA is blind (I’ll write about this in a later post).

Has Piracy ALSO helped Music Industry? YES. I know a lot of people that went to concerts of bands they knew downloading music from P2P. You know, at such a low price it’s easy to try new stuff out.

SOFTWARE BUSINESS

What really impressed me in the article is the software business part. Even if the author doesn’t dig really deep in there, here the assumption is basically that the big monopoly in the (consumer) software industry is being sustained by an ongoing stream of users that learned to use the software through piracy.

I’m buying this. The reason, differently from CDs, is that one of the 2 main competition barriers in the software business is the learning curve (the other being compatibility: you may be forced to use – say – Windows if your IBM AS-400 machine can’t “speak” to OSX. This barrier has weakened greatly in the last 10 years). Just imagine you’re a small/medium entrepreneur in Italy, you’re not developing software and your company isn’t crowded with computer geeks. What OS would you chose to buy? You have plenty of people that can work decently on Windows but know nothing about th Linux shell and won’t know what to do when mp3 can’t play on Ubuntu or OpenOffice makes a mess with that .xls file (’cause sorry, it does). Good decision.

A freaking lot of people learned how to use Windows on a pirated copy. I learned how to install an OS this way, I learned how to solve 2.000 Windows problems this way. All this I brought into the company I work in, and it really helps me with my everyday job, saving the company time and money.

Then I bought a Mac

As the author rightfully points out:

“Imagine the following scenario. Windows Vista is released, and it’s Microsoft’s perfect world. It’s completely unbreakable. No one that didn’t pay the release price of $199.00 USD (source) or greater is boned. The fact that users will not be capable of having it at your home to try it without an investment of more then $200.00 could be exactly what Linux zealots have been waiting for all along.“

Bottom line: Windows and Office wouldn’t be so dominating if it wasn’t for a stream of piracy-skilled users coming year after year.

Have you ever wondered why the DB mkt is so much more open (think Oracle, IBM, MS and various Open Source offers) than OS mkt and Personal Productivity mkt? Because nobody other than geeks ever needed a DB for personal use!

What’s amazing of this theory is that Windows and Office business model doesn’t look so different from an Open Source company’s one. You give your thing to as many people as you can – for free – and then charge specific users like companies for special uses. Only difference being special uses are… ehr… all uses. But you got the point.

Saturday’s Quote

” The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

Hunter S. Thompson

Who is crazy?

Dilbert Blog.

You should go there, read it all, bookmark it, put it on your feed reader, print it, send it to your parents, sister, son, dog, read it all over again, keep your browser always open just to make sure it’s still there.

Really.

It’s as simple as that

Apple’s new strategy for Mac Mini

Yesterday I posted (together with other 49.379 bloggers, and counting) about the “strange” launch for Apple’s new iMacs and Mac Minis.

Weird as it may seem, the buzz hasn’t been about these new Macs, but about what’s going to be unveiled during Apple’s keynote that is going to be held on Sep 12th in San Francisco. That is, what has such an importance for Apple’s future plans to keep out of the show two of the best selling products for the company (all indications point to a movie download service, but there could be more).

But I also see a dramatic change for Mac marketing in the Mac Mini (non) announcement: since its first release in January 2005 the Mac Mini has been marketed as the “little brother” of more advanced Macs (iMac and PowerMac), meaning both smaller AND less powerfull (it always had lower performing processor vs the iMac).

Today, comparing the Mac Mini in its cheaper configuration with the cheaper iMac (see below), the Mini doesn’t look so small anymore.
Other than the “DNA difference” of the iMac having a built in LCD, they both have new generation Dual Core processors (with a slight advantage for the iMac UPDATE: processor-wise the iMac has a bigger advantage than I first thought, for iMac is using the 64bit version of the C2D while Mini uses the 32bit; I guess we’ll have to wait for the first benchmarks to see what it does mean in real life, I don’t think we’ll see the 1,5X Apple is claiming but this difference may become significant overtime. txs browse for the hint!), enough RAM to run TWO widgets at once, and so many connection options your neighbor won’t have any problem watching movies stored in you hard disk (you know… those movies).
Speaking about HD, that seems to be now the main difference, with the 60 gigs of the Mini clearly not enough to handle today’s amount of media content stored in your computer.

Even the point of the Mini being a cheaper/stripped down version of the iMac can now be argued.
400 bucks difference isn’t that much to have the privilege to enjoy your 17″ screen, 100Gb more space in your HD, and the cool enclosure (ok, it’s no cheap either, but let me get to the point).

It looks like Apple understood the main reason people bought the Mini isn’t just money (you can still get much better bargain with the same old boring windows-based machine in the shopping center near you).

Almost every Mac Mini owner I knew (myself included), bought and Apple screen to go with the Mini. That’s hardly a money-saving choice. What I’ve seen in the Mini is the chance of getting a tiny, cute, design oriented Mac that you can easily place in your living room without having to feel ashamed.

Ok, you might say, then buy an iMac! No, because a built-in monitor isn’t necessarily an advantage. First, I liked the Apple screen design more than the iMac’s. Second, I wanted to retain some flexibility not to trow away the poor (and expensive) monitor when I wanted to change my computer just because Steve rolled out the new, beefed up, Intel based version of the Mac (ok, I didn’t know that it would have happened, but you know this business works like this).

Personally I think that’s a bold move. They now have two “consumer” desktop lines that satisfy different consumer needs, both extremely consitant to their brand equity. That usually pays out.

So, what’s next?

Become a del.icio.us power user

Blogger David Brunelle posted a great article on how to become a Delicious Power User.
For those of you who don’t know what Delicious is, it’s a social bookmarking site or, in plain english, a place where you can:

• store your bookmarks so you can access them on multiple computers;
• share them with your friends or just anybody;
• discover new stuff;

The last one is in my opinion by far the best feature of Delicious.
Basically the fact that a lot of people bookmarked a site/blog/wiki/whatever is a “signal” that it may be an interesting one.
No matter who you are or what you do, I strongly recommend to try it out!

New iMac and Mac Mini unveiled

With a surprising move, Apple quitely introduced a substantial upgrade to their iMac line.
Main changes are:

1) 24″ version (to go along with 17″ and 20″);
2) 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo processor (with clock speeds from 1.83GHz to 2.33GHz);
3) Brighter screens;

The weird thing is that this upgrade was widely thought to be unveiled during the media event that Apple is holding on September 12th 2006.
Now the event seems to be fully focused one the big news, that should be the introduction of a movie download service for the iTunes store.
New iPod Nanos with colored metallic enclosure are also expected for the event.

Update:
Right after the iMac appeared on Apple’s site, new Mac Minis also popped out (biggest upgrade here being the Intel Core 2 Duo).
These moves make me wonder what the hell Steve Jobs has in store for keynote in Frisco (Sep 12th). Is it really just the Movie download site (as bold a move this would be in my opinion)? Can we expect the long awaited “true” Video iPod?  Whatever it is, I got this strange sensation that it’s gonna be BIG…

How to upgrade RAM for your Mac

One of my favourite lifehack blogs, Lifehacker, has posted this useful article on how to upgrade your brand new Mac’s memory without having to sell your car to afford Apple’s premium price.
If you’re going to buy a new Mac I strongly suggest to take the smallest possible amount of memory and upgrade yourself following these great tutorials.
To be perfectly fair, always check your countries laws about warranties and the Mac warranty (or just ask any lawyer friend you have – and you definitely should have at least one) for some of these procedures may void your warranty in some cases (weird, but true…).

Web 2.0: Google’s Market Research Agency

For those of you living on Pluto (RELOCATE!!!) Kiko is – was – a neat ruby on rails web-based calendar. For the average Joe, not that far from GCal. Long story short, by the time GCal rolled out the nice guys at Kiko were pretty much f**ked up.
The guys were smart enough to realize they were done and decided to call it quits, blaming Google to be as a treath as MS for young internet companies (many agreed, many others did not).
The company was placed on an auction on eBay and sold for about $ 250K.
Now, I have no idea what the plan was: whether they simply wanted to sell (writely anybody?) and make some money in the process or they felt they could really lead the web calendar scene for years to come. What’s worth noting, in my opinion, is that many of the thousands web 2.0 companies risk to die of the same disease. Will Yousendit survive “Google Send” or whatever they call it? Right. What this crowd of little guys is doing is basically serving as a market research agency for Google and Yahoo. For free. Either there’s a market there, and the big guys are jumping in, or there’s not, and you’re done anyway. So the point isn’t much about Google or Yahoo being evil, as much as it is about: shouldn’t a start up have a strategy that goes farther than simply gathering users?
Paul Graham (partner at YCombinator, VC from Mountain View [!!!] that funded Kiko) said in his interview to Techcrunch:

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don’t do that, it won’t matter how clever your business model is.

Great quote, isn’t it? But even when you have something people want AND a business model, you’re not done yet. Well, having those 2 pieces together may as well make your life shorter, for it makes your research so much clearer for anybody. Simply eniugh, you’ve gotta build your barriers to keep people put of your garden(take Squidoo, Feedburner and Ask.com as examples of good barrier building sites other than the obvious ones). So my 2 cents for anybody working on a start up (and for myself!): Build a wall or you’ll end up playing Google’s game.

Update: Kiko’s buyer has been revealed as download site (and most recently backoffice solution provider) Tucows, read their point of view here.