blog.teekay.me

The major labels are well known for making increasingly ridiculous inititatives in order to ‘safeguard’ their own material, but this latest attempt to stop Ok Go’s latest viral video “less viral”, is just absurd.

You must have heard of Ok Go. The hipster-cum-rockers who released their treadmilling ‘Here It Goes Again’ of seventeen takes to critical acclaim and almost 50,000,000 YouTube views on their official account alone, have engineered another highly sophisticated, impossibly co-ordinated feel-good video that they want the world to see. Their record label disagrees.

Embedding is disabled for the video, which prevents me from posting it here, or anywhere else on the internet, besides YouTube. EMI supposednly want to do this to prevent any loss of profit from the lack of advertising outside of the YouTube page, but really… won’t sales increase from people seeing it around the web anyway? And Ok Go’s current success stems almost entirely from that first video, so why should EMI let them die again with pointless restraint when ‘This Too Shall Pass’ could rebirth them from the ashes.

I’ve recently learned about Square: the latest startup of the Twitter-famed entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, and what he promises to be a revolutionary system for electronic payment.

The premise is simple: a wireless, cell-network based credit card reader - so simple it’s been done before, dozens of times; Apple already does this in their retail outlets, using modified iPhones and scanners to complete customer purchases from anywhere with WiFi, but Square is different, it revolutionises the payment processing of plastic by bringing the technology to everyone through a small plastic reader.

Square itself is a small attachment to any device with a 3.5mm audio input, that’s your iPhone, iPod touch, Zune HD, Windows Mobile, Android or even a laptop. The Square software then decrypts the audio back to a number and sets up the transaction. A quick signature from the payee on a touchscreen interface and you’re away. Square is s hosted service too, so the moment a transaction is completed a receipt is available online and confirmation sent by email or SMS. This transaction recording also allows companies to be informed when a repeat customer buys their tenth coffee: no more paper loyalty cards to be punched.

It’s simple to see now how Square is a technology full of potential: from coffeehouses to craftsmen to craigslisters, Square allows credit card transactions with existing hardware, no payment gateways, anywhere with a 3G signal. So when will Square reach you? “We’re trying to get the cost down significantly and just give them away”, says Dorsey in an interview of CNBC, “We’re aiming [a rollout] for March”. Dorsey wants to see one of these plastic squares in the pocket of every American. Some have criticised the operation, saying that Dorsey has developed technology with no use: with Japan already moving to a cashless economy using mobile phones as payment devices - but a cashless society is fragile with frightening Orwellian allusions, people like to be able to access their money in physical form, it makes them feel safe.

But there are of course downsides: Square is going to face the same if not higher levels of fraud as other gateways and will have to put up contingency funding; in it’s current state, Square cannot be used in the UK and other countries with the EMV standard for credit-security as it just scans the magnetic strip which doesn’t hold the encrypted PIN - it is effectively extending the use of a fundamentally insecure system. Square have also, so far, only invested in the iPhone, and although they promise to roll this out to as many devices as possible, it makes you wonder if the service will always be biased towards Apple’s mobile devices. While still in beta, with twenty locations currently trialing the device across the startup-heavy San Francisco, it will be interesting to see this product evolve and if what seems to be a brilliant idea can become a lifechanging reality.

The BBC today, in the wake of News International’s move to monetize its online news, has announced it has “no intention” of charging for its online content; this is of course no surprise, as British license-fee payers are effectively paying for the online service already. News International’s Rupert Murdoch, however, as part of a private enterprise, has previously been on the record for saying that he intends to begin charging for online content from his British newspapers. How he wants to do this is unknown, though it is presumed that it will be in the same vein as The Wall Street Journal: this publication, also owned by Murdoch’s group, charges a $1.99 subscription per week to its services, displaying a “Subscribe to read more” after so many words of an article.

Murdoch was recently quoted for saying that he would remove his results from the online search engine Google News. This is confusing to say the least, especially as he was incredibly angry at Google for “stealing” his news for their users. But all Google does is index content - it sends a robot to each website which trawls for changes and uploads them to their servers. There is a simple way to block Google from doing this, or any search engine for that matter, and it is to place a text file in your root directory stating which robots you would like to allow access to. Today it has emerged that Microsoft’s new search service Bing has offered to help Murdoch in removing his content from Google. This would be a hit for the emerging searcher, which would block Google from the newspapers but subtly allow Bing to index content. Would this gain any users though? Or is it simply a PR strategy made to inform Googlers that Bing actually exists?

There is another simple explanation why Mr. Murdoch has not blocked Google or partnered with Microsoft yet: Google is the biggest search provider in the world, their .co.uk is the top search provider in the UK: blocking them would be a financial nightmare, The Sun, particularly, would lose revenue rather than gain it. To every Sun there is a Mirror, and a Mail, and a Star - that’s three papers reporting the same content. If The Sun blocks Google they lose visitors from that source to their competitors. If the Sun monetizes their content they will lose even more. It is not as if The Sun is something special, like The Wall Street Journal - something well regarded in the financial circles. Considering the cost to buy The Sun for a week, at current prices, is just £1.40 in London, it’s hard to imagine the Sun being able to charge a subscription that will make more money than their current advertising model while appealing to enough users. Though it is a high selling newspaper, it hardly has the unique journalism required to be able to sell online content directly to consumers; their audience more likely to read a physical newspaper than search through internet pages. And if they wanted to, surely they could just check one of their competitors sites (which will gain viewers and thus advertising revenue).

I can see the model functioning for The Times: the journalism is improved, the focus is different, the audience has changed; but in a generic tabloid newspaper such as The Sun, what makes it worth it?