Monthly Archive for April, 2010

Wanna listen to some forwardness?


To Rococo Rot, my favorite German electronica triggered post-rock band just released a new album, Speculation, and it is as unpretentious, precise and amiable. While the music is elegantly dressed as usual, this time it is also wearing a t-shirt that says in a minimal, but a bit playful font: Krautrock. Partly it was recorded at the studio of Krautrock legends Faust.

Still it decently brightens up your flat, curiously exploring a musical corner here and a noise there, as the bass of Stefan Schneider and the live drums of Ronald Lippok meet up with the sprinkled digital textures of his brother Robert Lippok – read more about it in David Sheppards fine review at BBC music. And .. oh yes, I remember doing one of my first interview with them in 1996 for a techno magazine called Frontpage, back when I was becoming a pigtail wearing music critic hanging around in clubs wide-eared and with pricked up eyes.

These days they are on tour, and I am gonna see them tonight when they play at Southbank Centre where there is Berlin Sound night. Next they will be in Bologna, Venice, Dresden and Schondorf, Zurich, Hamburg, Koeln, and many cities more. Get the sound here, and don’t miss their nice way playing live as they have this nice self-evident way of communication while playing. I like.

23/04/10
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On the transformation from revenue stream to revenue delta: the Apple revenue cake

Writing a book about digitalisation and news organisations at the moment I am naturally interested in, yes, revenue models. I believe that there is a transformation of business models in a digitalised world, therefore I am collecting material for the thesis that today companies need to change their business models from a revenue stream to a revenue delta. Apple – bitten into by a software engineer who lost the new iPhone over celebrating his birthday with German lager – is a good example.

Announcing its spectacular profits yesterday, it reported to a surprised Wallstreet that its revenue was up 48% to $13.5bn. Well done. However, it is interesting to have a look which are the best selling units of the company as we still have the image of Apple Inc. as a company who makes its money with computers. Computers? It sold nearly 11m iPod music players, nearly 9m iPhones and only 3m computers – not to speak of the 15% revenue share Apple gets from the iTunes store.

It would be interesting to learn more details about the Apple revenue cake, if anyone knows where to find more business details, or another good example, please let me know.

Obviously one big player doesn’t fit my thesis: Google. 97% of its revenue stream is advertising. However, it is interesting that Google is eagerly busy developing a potential revenue delta as there are several new approaches besides search, like developing its own phone, inventing a new browser and OS, or taking pictures of the world for Google map. Google functions according to the old rules, but it read the sign of the times, we might say.

21/04/10
. 4 Comments

100 million users and other new Twitter facts

Not only me and my friends had a real nice night at London’s Old Blue Last while the noise music of Gamble Lee blew us away. This morning I recognised, Twitter had a real night out, too. Okay, an awesome US day, or maybe even a week.

After the announcement to make a bit of money with promoted tweets this week, the next good news followed with the Library of Congress deciding to archive every little single public tweet. The tweets will become public with a six month delay, in the meantime users can use Google as they announced a new tool that allows users to search, select and “replay” what people said on Twitter.

Google also announced to apply the People-who-liked-also-bought-algorithm to followers. Yes, followers. Find new living newspapers with the help of Google’s Follow Finder. Won’t work out for me. In a quick test where I follow finded myself that thing showed people or institutions I decided not to add because I already get them on Facebook or neatly sorted in my RSS-reader.

But back to Twitter, leading character of this post. Later on, the founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone shared some numbers at the Twitter conference in San Francisco as Nick Bilton reports, and they are looking good.

Twitter has 105,779,710 users.
Twitter users generate 55 million new tweets a day.
The Web site continues to grow by 300,000 users a day.
75 percent of Twitter’s activity comes from outside Twitter.com.
Twitter search receives 600 million search queries each day.
There are now more than 100,000 registered applications.


Surly, compared with more than 400 million Facebook users Twitter is a small player, but the way Twitter is taking its time to develop a sustainable business model is quite impressive.

Yesterday, Twitter announced a feature called Point of Interest which allows you to include in a tweet exactly where you are. Twitter asked the developers at the Chirp conference to think about it and take it further. Yes, local is the new social, and after content was king, now meta data became the new queen.

For journalism this will become quite important, not only because it makes it easier to check a source, but because journalists will have to consider including more meta data in their own pieces. Twitter encouraged already media companies to curate Tweets as the Guardian already does.

By the way, Even Williams explained frankly that Twitter deals with the fact that it is hard to get. Presenting a screenshot of a Google search for “I don’t get” to Claire Can Miller of the NYTimes, he showed that “I don’t get Twitter” was second only to “I don’t get drunk I get awesome.” Well, that doesn’t matter. It’s complicated seems to be the motto of the 21st century, anyhow.

15/04/10
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iPad – The day after

Why was everybody talking about a gadget that basically does the same things as your computer, some of them maybe with a little twist?

Yes, that is the most interesting thing about the iPad, the fact that the whole world was getting crazy about it, even before it was shipped. Is it magic, as Steve Jobs suggested? No. Let us have a guess: The iPad reflects a change that happened in the last decade.

Before we digitalised information, now we need to digitise situations. Here, the iPad is just the beginning. There is more to come.

Therefore the iPad doesn’t change a thing, it just reflects precisely what already has changed. Who wants to sit at a desk to watch some YouTube videos or read the papers? The iPad is about a situation. It is lovely, and hangs out with you. Sounds perfect to me.

This is obviously the change that Apple understood: It is not anymore just communication that is affected by digitalisation, but situations. And we don’t want to go to our desk to initiate them. Digitalisation disseminated from the PC to the laptop to become even more mobile – a companion in whatever we do.

Now, there is a pad for it.

It looks like a success. Sold out, and the critics love it, too. From Gizmodo & Mark Wilson to the New York Times & David Carr to WSJ & Walter Mossberg everybody is positive about it. Well, nearly everybody. Cory Doctorow wrote about Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t either):

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps.

Well, you can program one, too, but he has a point here. As Jeff Jarvis says, the iPad has a tendency to turn us back into an audience again. Apple has to live up to its new role as a content gatekeeper. Yes, Apple became a publisher in a certain way. The trending job of the future? It will be good bye web designer, hello app designer. Don’t you think?

4/04/10
. 8 Comments