Time For Warner Music To Fire The Lawyers And Promote Ethan Kaplan

from the just-a-suggestion dept

I'm at the Mesh Conference in Toronto this week, where I'm scheduled to give a talk on the economics of abundance tomorrow. The keynote today was an interview of Ethan Kaplan by Mathew Ingram. Kaplan, as many of you probably know, is the VP of technology for Warner Bros. Music. He's a smart guy, whose blog has been worth following for years. If you've followed his writings, it's been clear for quite some time that he deeply understands what's going on in the music industry, and how that relates to the changing marketplace. It seems so rare to hear a recording industry exec say things that make sense and that don't seem anti-consumer, that it really stands out when one does so. Specifically, he talked a lot about how a modern record label really should be focused on how to help use modern technologies to better let musicians connect with fans in useful and meaningful ways. And a record label has the resources and (should have) the skills to do that while allowing the musicians to focus on the music. As he noted, it really is all about cultivating the community of fans and helping that community come together and connect with both each other and the band. From that, multiple (lucrative) business models easily follow.

This fits in with a variety of themes we've touched on, from the role that is clearly still available for a smart record label, to the importance of concept of better connecting with your true fans. Kaplan seems to be very focused on positioning Warner Music to be able to enable that for every band the company works with. That's fantastic and very exciting (though, it's years later than it should have happened).

Unfortunately, though, it appears (at least in practice) that Warner Music focuses on using Kaplan's expertise solely on the technology side, rather than on the business side. Warner has been one of the more aggressive record labels in suing fans and suing any service out there that does help fans better connect with each other and the musicians. Warner still seems to be of the mindset that it absolutely needs to get a cut from any such service, even if allowing the service to promote its artists would help everyone long term. Warner is also run by Edgar Bronfman Jr., who (when he was head of Universal Music) kicked off the industry's plan to sue everyone, though he's since rewritten history to say that the industry went into a mistaken "inadvertent war" with consumers (it wasn't inadvertent at all -- Bronfman himself talked specifically about "armies of lawyers").

If Warner Music really wanted to shift its position, it should rein in its lawyers, stop worrying about "protecting" everything and focus on adding value and enabling new business models to flow from its stable of top musicians. Give Kaplan more control over the business side as well and see what radical new ideas come forth. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely to happen any time soon. It reminds me, tragically, of the story we wrote a few years back about MTV. The company had been lauded in the press for hiring a "chief digital officer," as if that showed that the company "got" new media. The problem is that thinking digitally isn't a separate job function. It needs to pervade the entire company. It needs to inform the thinking of everyone in the entertainment industry these days. And, indeed, just a few months after the press talked up the "CDO" of MTV, the guy was out of the job. It's great that Kaplan is inside Warner Music, helping to inform their overall strategy -- but he shouldn't be just a "tech geek" (even at the VP level). The digital marketplace is the marketplace for music these days, and Kaplan's insights into that overall space shouldn't be pigeonholed as "the tech stuff." It should be part of any music label's overall business strategy.

Filed Under: community, customers, ethan kaplan, record labels, technology
Companies: warner music group

CIOs Need To Learn To Enable, Not Lock Down, Technology

from the just-different dept

Information Week is running an article about the difficulty some CIOs are having with the fact that just about everyone is at least somewhat tech savvy these days -- often just enough to be dangerous. Combine that with the rise of online software in the "Enterprise 2.0" realm and the ability for technology to bubble up rather than come from the top down, and CIOs are finding that their job is changing in ways that they didn't fully expect. Some certainly don't see it as a problem, just a different kind of challenge, but it definitely seems like the very role of the CIO needs to change in some significant ways. Rather than managing all of the technology infrastructure of a company, they're going to have to figure out a way to focus more on enabling other parts of the organization to use technology effectively and efficiently. Obviously, letting individuals or even individual groups in the company set their own tech policy can lead to some problems, but it also opens up the ability for more creativity and new types of communication and apps to bubble up in a more useful manner. This reminds me of a post by Chris Anderson over a year ago. When he was asked to speak to a group of CIOs, he was amazed at how scared they appeared to be by modern technology, rather than energized. There was fear, he noted, that the position of the CIO could soon be extinct. If they're not willing to recognize how the world is changing, then perhaps that's appropriate, but there's no reason why a modern CIO can't focus on the enabling side, rather than the "lock everything down" view of the world.

Filed Under: bottom up, cios, enterprise 2.0, technology, top down

Forget E-Voting Problems, Now We Have To Worry About E-Census Problems Too

from the new-technology-isn't-always-good... dept

It looks like the US census is the latest process to be prematurely "automated" under the silly belief that computers automatically do everything better. Reports are coming out about how the new computerized census systems aren't just costly, they might also be inaccurate (bonus!). The system involves handheld devices for census-takers, but the devices are apparently not that intuitive. Thus there are additional training costs involved, and no one seems keen on paying for that. There are a few options here, including mostly ignoring the new system (which only cost $600 million in taxpayer money) and going back to a more manual process. However, the company that provided the devices insists the complaints are overblown and with just half an hour of training anyone could understand how to use the devices. Either way, it should be a reminder that any attempt to automate a process that uses the "just add technology!" component probably is going to be something of a disaster.

Filed Under: census, technology

Hospitals Should Tread Carefully On Hygiene Monitors

from the beeeeep! dept

Researchers have invented a device (via the Raw Feed) to remind hospital workers to wash their hands between patients. Bad hygiene is a serious problem in hospitals, because diseases can be spread from patient to patient. Unfortunately, doctors and nurses are often in a hurry and forget to wash up. The device tries to increase washing rates by installing infrared sensors over patient beds. When a health care worker comes near a patient, the system will try to detect whether the health care worker has washed his hands since seeing the last patient, and beeps if he has not. It's a clever idea, but it seems to have a few problems. For one thing, it sounds like it only detects when a worker has disinfected using special alcohol dispensers included with the system. A soap and water washing doesn't count, as far as the system is concerned. It also can't detect if a health care worker has gone near a patient but not touched him or her. The big problem such a system would face is having health care workers view it as an annoyance rather than an asset. If the system frequently beeped at them when they weren't doing anything wrong, they might start ignoring or even trying to disable it.

I think the key to making it work would be to make sure hospital workers view it as a helpful way to improve their own performance rather than a way of nagging them or penalizing them when they forget to wash their hands. Wearing the things would be irritating enough without having to worry about getting disciplined when the system made a mistake. One good approach might be to allow workers to disable the beeping feature, but continue collecting data about hand-washing rates. Even if the data weren't perfect, it would be good enough to collect data on hygiene rates in different parts of the hospital. Those parts that showed lower-than-average hygiene could receive additional training.

Filed Under: hospitals, hygiene, technology

Ordering Your Meal Via A Computers: A Gimmick Or Useful?

from the may-depend-on-your-mood dept

I recently flew on Richard Branson's new Virgin America airline, and one of the nice features was the fact that you could order food or drinks via the touchscreen on the back of the seat in front of you. It made the process a lot more efficient. Apparently, a number of restaurants are starting to feel the same way, as these electronic menus are becoming more popular in restaurants. What's interesting, though, is that people seem to have widely divergent views on the things. Some people love them, and find them more useful, while others think they're an annoying gimmick. The restaurants have found that people tend to spend more, and restaurants probably save even more money on needing a smaller wait staff. The article notes some other innovations that are being tested, including the idea of allowing people to order in a restaurant using their own laptops or mobile phones connected to the restaurant WiFi network (which may run into some problems concerning an Apple patent on the concept). Of course, those restaurants still need waiters to deliver the food -- unless they follow the path of the restaurant we described last summer that had built a somewhat complex set of metal rails.

Filed Under: e-menu, restaurants, technology

Often Technology, Not Politics, Drives Policy Changes

from the technology-matters dept

Computer science professor Matt Blaze critiques a recent New Yorker profile of Michael McConnell, the man who is leading the Bush administration's charge for more warrantless wiretapping powers. I hadn't realized until I read Blaze's post that McConnell was also responsible for the clipper chip, a hardware crypto device from the early 1990s that would have given the government a "backdoor" to intercept encrypted communications. The New Yorker profile suggests that the clipper chip was killed by political pressures, but the reality was rather different. The decisive blow against the chip was Blaze himself, who discovered and published major security flaws in the chip's algorithms in 1994. Even if Blaze hadn't found those flaws when he did, the more fundamental problem was that the clipper chip relied on the fact that computers weren't yet fast enough to do secure crypto in software at reasonable speeds. But as Moore's law continued to improve the power of desktop computers, hardware crypto acceleration became unnecessary. And because it's a lot harder to stop the spread of software than of hardware, government officials realized that they no longer had any hope of limiting who would have access to the technology.

This may be a reason not to be too pessimistic about the long-term outcome of the FISA debate. While it looks likely that Congress will capitulate to the president and grant him broader wiretapping powers, peoples' privacy is likely to be driven more by technological changes (say, the availability of encrypted VoIP software on cell phones) than the exact rules regarding when warrants are required. It remains to be seen whether technological progress will strengthen the government's eavesdropping capabilities faster than it strengthens individuals' ability to evade it, but either way, policymakers' choices will continue to be sharply constrained by changes in technology.

Filed Under: politics, technology

Australian High Court Judge Recognizes That Technology Outpaces The Law

from the recognizing-the-obvious dept

One of the key themes around here for a while has been that technology has a way of making certain laws either obsolete or antithetical to their intended purposes. Often, however, lawyers, judges and politicians have a difficult time recognizing this. That's why it's at least somewhat encouraging to see Australian High Court Judge Justice Kirby publicly recognizing that computer code tends to make laws obsolete or meaningless. "It was a good moral and ethical principle to keep people's control over the usage that was made of the information... And then along came Google and Yahoo. And when the new technology came, there was a massive capacity to range through vast amounts of information. The notion that you could control this was a conundrum." However, while he does realize that technology can make laws obsolete, his solution is still to push for more laws: "To do nothing is to make a decision to let others go and take technology where they will. There are even more acute questions arising in biotechnology and informatics, such as the hybridization of the human species and other species. Points of no return can be reached." It's an interesting point -- though, he doesn't exactly explain what those points of no return are (at least not in the article that quotes him), and why the law would do a better job preventing those points from being reached than technology itself. In some ways, this is merely echoing Larry Lessig's concept that "code is law," though Lessig better recognized that trying to regulate technology with regulations was likely to be a lot less effective than regulating technology with technology.

Filed Under: code is law, law, technology

China To Disable Great Firewall For The Olympics?

from the firewall,-what-firewall? dept

While the Chinese government has, at times, been known to deny that it censors the internet, it's a well-known phenomenon. In the last year or so, more and more details have come out about how the process works. Last fall a disgruntled censor explained the massive bureaucracy that goes into determining what is and what is not appropriate. There have also been reports noting the tens of thousands of people who are involved in censoring the internet, and how the system also relies on "volunteers" to both look out for "bad" content while also adding good content.

However, most of those reports focused mainly on the people side of the Great Firewall. Reader Jon now points us to James Fallows' more detailed look at the technological side of the Great Firewall, and the different methods that are used to block sites. Apparently, China has gotten a lot more sophisticated over the past few years in blocking sites. All traffic in and out of the country is monitored, of course, and it's now possible for the system to ban specific pages or articles that have objectionable content, rather than blocking an entire site (as it used to do). There are times when it will still block entire sites, but they can be a lot more narrowly focused. Another interesting point is that China is now using that same Firewall in two directions: if it doesn't want outsiders to be able to access certain documents, it will block foreigners from reaching certain sites within the country as well.

Perhaps the most interesting revelation, however, goes back to the ridiculous denials by Chinese officials that the Great Firewall exists. According to Fallows' sources, during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the Great Firewall will be mostly turned off, so that visiting foreigners won't notice any problems accessing foreign sites, and will (or so officials hope) tell people that the concept that China is blocking many popular sites is simply a myth.

Filed Under: china, great firewall, olympics, technology

Just Copying Someone's Technology Isn't Enough

from the much-more-going-on dept

When discussing patent related stories, people often claim that without patents, copycat companies would simply copy everything and put the original creators out of business. There are a number of reasons why this isn't true (and plenty of historical evidence that it's not true at all), but for a good example of this at work, just take a look at Google. Google is by far the dominant search engine out there, and it's only been growing. It was first to market with a quality search engine, but many studies have pointed out that Yahoo and Microsoft have both caught up (and possibly passed) Google in terms of search quality. And yet, Google keeps growing. There are plenty of reasons for this, from Google's "celebrity" (as the article implies) to Google's clean interface to people generally trusting Google more than those other providers (to date, Google has done much less to piss off most people). None of those things have anything to do with the technology alone. There's this view among patent system supporters that the technology is everything, when it's really just a component in terms of what makes a business. Copying the technology is one thing, but there are advantages to being first to market, executing well, treating customers right and building a reputation. Just copying someone's technology won't get you very far on most of those other points, and shows that focusing solely on patents as a competitive advantage is unlikely to get you very far.

Filed Under: execution, marketing, reputation, technology
Companies: google

Hey MySpace, Aren't You A Little Late To The 'Portal' Bandwagon?

from the retro dept

Brian Stelter opens his piece on MySpace on a generally positive note, suggesting he was intending his write-up for the New York Times to be a sympathetic look at the company's relationship to its corporate parent, owned by Rupert Murdoch. But the article ends up painting a picture of a site without a clear vision of its future. In probably the most damning paragraph in the article, an advertising executive says that the MySpace's parent company had envisioned the site as a portal, but that he "thought they would be much further along with that today." For about a decade, websites have tried to mask their lack of focus by labeling themselves portals. A decade ago, that strategy worked pretty well for Yahoo! in 1996, when it had enough content to really make it stand out from the crowd. But it's hard to imagine that a similar strategy will work in 2008. Users have many more choices and more sophisticated tools for finding the content they need, so the attraction of a one-size-fits-all portal is much lower.

I suspect that the fundamental problem is that it just doesn't make much sense for an "old media" company like News Corp. to own a tech startup like MySpace. They key to MySpace's success in the years before the acquisition was precisely that the company didn't need to produce content; users created "content" of their own by swapping messages, posting pictures and music, etc. Social networking sites are fundamentally technology platforms that enable users to share their own content with one another. Trying to produce "original content" for the site is a step in the wrong direction. There's no way they can satisfy the diverse tastes of their millions of users, but they can waste a lot of money trying. And while MySpace focuses on becoming more like the mainstream media, its competitors—especially Facebook—are working feverishly on enhancements to their underlying technology platforms. Meanwhile, the MySpace user experience continues to deteriorate. I regularly get spam from other MySpace users (although this has become less common in recent months), the site is littered with gaudy banner ads, and I encounter error messages a lot more frequently than I do on Facebook. These are the sorts of problems that an 80-year-old newspaper mogul like Murdoch just isn't going to know how to deal with. He is, by all accounts, a brilliant businessman, but he's not a technologist, and it was probably a mistake for him to buy what was fundamentally a technology company.

Filed Under: content, portals, social networks, technology
Companies: myspace, news corp.