The .XXX Domain Arrives, to a World That Has Moved On

The vast majority of .XXX URLs resolve to this screenshot, if they resolve at all

After 11 years of controversy, the .XXX domain name went on general sale last week. Meant to give pornographic sites a specific home on the internet, it was finally approved earlier this year.

Since the ICM Registry proposed the .XXX generic top-level domain (or gTLD) in 2000, supporters of the idea have gone through a roller-coaster of proposals, rejections, resubmissions, approvals and attacks. Meanwhile, the world has seen unlikely extremes unite to oppose a porn-only domain name, like the Bush administration, conservative groups, free speech advocates and the porn industry itself. Conservative politicians and activist groups were predictably upset at legitmating pornography; the porn industry and free speech advocates opposed the gTLD due to fears of censorship.

Prior to last week, the domain has only been available to limited buys in a “sunrise” period, first to established XXX merchants and then to non-porn companies looking to protect their brand names. This part of the sale has already been a PR disaster. Besides fears of censorship, detrimental legislation or being blocked by a firewall in homes or businesses, most successful porn sites have invested too much in their established .com identities. The .XXX suffix only promises to reduce traffic, while doing little to add anything. Besides being premium real estate, a .com address means that people who wouldn’t search for a porn site will find them anyway on accident (like hotmale.com or whitehouse.com, for those who are typo-prone). Why would they want to give that up?

It’s also been reported that universities like Kansas and Michigan and corporations like Pepsi and Nike are buying up any .XXX names that could be associated with theirs, so that they won’t be sullied by the name or an uncontrolled startup in the future. According to ICM, around 80,000 (of the 200,000 total addresses) .XXX names were bought in this early sunrise period, the majority of which will never be used.

This is what Stuart Lawley, the head of the ICM Registry sponsoring the .XXX gTLD, calls a “one-time block.” It’s a new arrangement for gTLDs. The .XXX gTLD is supposed to create a “more responsible space,” says Lawley. With a special dispensation from ICANN, ICM was able to take these names out of circulation without charging the normal annual fee. Registrants still have to go through the sunrise process and pay ICM a $200 registration fee and have their trademark validated.

Still, critics of the .XXX gTLD see the whole affair as an unfair revenue grab. The Association of National Advertisers and other business groups worry that the proliferation of gTLDs (including .XXX) could lead to a whole new round of domain squatters — unless established businesses preemptively pay up. Manwin Licensing, the operator of Playboy’s websites, and Digital Playground, a pornographic movie studio, are suing both ICM Registry and ICANN, claiming ICM is unfairly overcharging (10 times the amount of the .com name) for use of the TLD.

Lawley defended the higher price to Wired, arguing that it paid for the creation of the brand and trademark database and supports antivirus and secure micropayment systems built in to each website. ICM has offered to share its registry data with ICANN to help create a “trademark clearing house” for each new gTLD. Had such a database been in existence before the launch of .XXX, Lawley says, the one-time use registries may have cost only $20.

Even ICM’s Lawley, however, is worried that other gTLDs, rolling out beginning in early 2012, may be used by companies seeing more income potential in getting institutions to sign up defensively to pay continued fees.

Meanwhile, on Friday, the Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to ICANN urging them to reconsider the rapid expansion of gTLDs. While it may be clear that an .XXX suffix leads to a pornography site, scammers could still use lookalike URLs to spoof other businesses and elicit personal and financial information.

The FTC’s letter warns that a proliferation of new gTLDs, without a corresponding boost to ICANN’s compliance office and a complete and accurate whois registry database, could lead to “dramatically increased opportunity for consumer fraud.” (ICANN did not immediately return a phone call requesting comment.)

The only justification for new gTLDs, ICM’s Lawley says, is if they offer genuine services to customers like .XXX’s micropayment and antivirus programs. A domain name like .XXX “offers meaningful differentiation to the consumer,” Lawley says. Singapore, for example, a country with very strict web-censorship and a famous list of 100 blocked adult sites, announced this summer that they would not block the .XXX domain because the visual suffix is explicit in labeling the sites as pornographic.

The question is whether a new top-level domain on the open web is the appropriate vehicle to provide these services. Back in 2000, or even in 2004 when the .XXX gTLD was resubmitted, a premium domain name made more sense — it was the primary web currency. But in the age of Google, Tumblr, Facebook and abounding App Stores, this just isn’t the case any more.

The .XXX domain seems like it’s trying to build the web into something it isn’t: a highly regulated safe space.

Additional Writing and Reporting by Tim Carmody

Via: Epicenter

How Can Zynga Grow Its Social Farm Post-IPO?

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. Promotional photo courtesy Zynga

Zynga, the 5-year-old social gaming company that leveraged an early partnership with Facebook and unlikely hits like FarmVille into Web 2.0 gold, is now a publicly traded company. Its IPO raised a billion dollars on Friday, making it the largest IPO on a U.S. exchange since Google’s in 2004. That price give the company a market valuation of upwards of $7 billion. (If you include options, it may be as much as $8.9 billion.)

But what’s in Zynga’s future? Earlier this year, observers thought the company could be worth twice as much. In trading Friday morning, the stock popped at $11, only to quickly drop and wobble back around and below $10. In the weeks, months and years to come, can Zynga build beyond the foothold in casual gaming it has today? Or will it fizzle out?

In its short history (extensively documented by VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi), Zynga’s already seen its share of controversy. The company’s long faced a reputation among other gamemakers for producing cheaply made, ad-supported knock-offs of successful games. Some of its advertising partners hustled users into signing up for real-world services and subscriptions in exchange for virtual goods, resulting in Facebook temporarily shutting down Zynga’s FishVille in 2009.

Earlier this year, CEO Mark Pincus and select early investors were able to use a buyback to cash out some of their stake in the company — at a substantially higher price than eventually set by the IPO — while prohibiting other employees from doing so and even reportedly leaning on them to give up their equity outright.

Even Zynga’s games themselves are controversial — not for their content, which is overwhelmingly benign, but the paucity of their mechanics and aesthetic appeal. In the universe of video games, a Zynga game is like a piece of fruit reduced down to pure sugar water. What’s both powerful and limiting about them is that they’re easy, time-intensive (in the aggregate), and pretty nakedly designed to generate money in return for simple in-game rewards.

Video game researcher and developer Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech, made a widely-praised (and surprisingly and non-ironically popular) parody of Zynga’s FarmVille called Cow Clicker. In Cow Clicker, “You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again… You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.”

“Currently, social games are financial instruments more than they are aesthetic experiences,” Bogost told me via Twitter. “In that respect, Zynga’s IPO is poetic and appropriate: the full conversion into arbitrage will be complete.”

What everyone, even Zynga’s detractors, seems to agree on (besides that its games are hugely popular) is that Zynga has been innovative in creating new business models for the industry, has developed some of the richest data and analytics tools in gaming, and has consistently and aggressively sought to develop popular new games, attract and poach new talent, and cut costs to boost profits. Video games can be art, but art has never been something Wall Street has really valued for its own sake.

Still, Zynga is vulnerable. For years, it’s been overwhelmingly dependent on Facebook. Facebook, in turn, leans on Zynga for its users’ huge time spent on site. Because Zynga uses Facebook credits exclusively for in-game purchases, Facebook gets a thirty percent cut of that money. In 2010, the two companies stared each other down over this deal before eventually agreeing to partner up and continue down their codependent road. But any volatility in either Facebook or the Facebook-Zynga relationship threatens Zynga.

Zynga’s also built most of its games in Flash, for the desktop web browser. It’s now on its way to building out to mobile platforms, using both native apps (for iOS and somewhat less so for Android) and HTML5. As computing and gaming go more mobile, Zynga needs to go with it. It’s an open question how completely the tried-and-true mechanics of Zynga games will translate to those form factors, especially in developing new games. The bored office worker is a different creature from the bored bus patron or patient in a doctor’s waiting room.

Also, Zynga has more competition than ever, particularly in mobile, as Apple’s Game Center, Microsoft’s Xbox Live for Windows Phone, Amazon’s Appstore and Google+ have added more social elements to capitalize on the boom in casual gaming. Some of these platforms are opportunities for Zynga, but also for competitors like Rovio, Electronic Arts, Activision and a slew of hungry startups looking for their own piece of the action.

Electronic Arts is a good counterpoint. The company makes big console games like the Madden football franchise and little casual social games like Scrabble (the official version of Zynga’s Words With Friends clone). It’s a much bigger company by revenue than Zynga. Orders of magnitude bigger. Yet with this week’s IPO EA has a lower market capitalization. To longtime watchers of the industry, this is absurd.

But four years ago, EA was riding high, trading at three times today’s share price. Its stock never recovered from the 2008 market crash. It looks likely to return to profitability (according to generally accepted accounting principles) in FY 2012. Even giants with decades of capital and customer loyalty have a hard time staying on top in the gaming industry, especially during a global economic downturn.

You could even argue that Zynga had benefited from the Great Recession. Not only are the games cheap or free to play, as FarmVille player Cheri van Hoover told Wired’s Chris Kohler in 2010, they offer “a neat, orderly place that I can escape to, and where things unfold in a relatively predictable fashion.”

“What these games give me is a sense of control over my life,” van Hoover said. In tough times, that must be worth something.

Via: Epicenter

Amazon Doesn’t Care About Your Local Bookstore

True Colors Feminist Co-Op Bookstore in Minneapolis, formerly Amazon Bookstore.
Photo by Ed Kohler; Used Gratefully under a Creative Commons License

Here are two surprising holiday shopping season success stories. They’re even more surprising because they seem to directly contradict each other.

First, Amazon, which has historically kept its sales figures for Kindle e-readers tightly under wraps, announced that it’s sold more than a million Kindle devices each week for the past three weeks. Priced between $79 for the new entry-level Kindle and $199 for the Kindle Fire tablet, that’s hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every week for the Kindle division, not counting books, videos and apps.

Second, brick-and-mortar bookstores, many of whom expected to take a steep hit from the boom in e-readers, are instead reporting substantial year-over-year gains this holiday season — big chains like Barnes & Noble and indie booksellers alike. (Major factors here include the demise of Borders as well as the success of tentpole titles like Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.)

Yet if you only paid attention to debate on the internet, you would think that Amazon and local bookstores were locked in a zero-sum fight to the death. Battle lines have been drawn, with writers at The New York Times leading one side and Slate the other. It’s knives out from here to Christmas.

I want to show how this entire argument pitting local book stores against online-bookselling juggernaut Amazon is based on profoundly flawed premises. It misses the significance of Amazon’s transformation of retail — not just books — as well as the transformation of literary culture that’s been wrought by the web. And not just Amazon.

These arguments, reducible as they are to the back of a 3-by-5 card, are almost always actually symptoms of something much more complicated that’s harder to wrap our heads around. It’s like being given an advanced calculus problem and not knowing where to begin — so you treat every letter “x” as if it were a multiplication symbol instead of a variable, because that’s a problem you know how to solve.

Instead of really grappling with these transformations, we’re fighting an over-simplified version of the last war: local versus global, real versus fake, the future versus the past, and the savvy versus the sentimental. We’re falling into these traps because we don’t know what else to do.

Slate Pitches

There’s a fun wordplay game on Twitter, particularly popular among journalists, called #SlatePitches. The premise is that you come up with the wildest, most counterintuitive headline for a fictional article, one so willfully contrarian that it could only run in Slate. Occasional contributor Malcolm Gladwell cut his signature “we all think this, but it turns out that…” teeth there. And its writers and editors have consistently been willing to swing for those fences ever since.

So it wasn’t especially surprising to see Slate technology writer Farhad Manjoo write a blistering essay titled “Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller,” arguing that independent bookstores are “the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find,” and that we should thank Amazon’s Jeff Bezos “for crushing that precious indie on the corner.” Local bookstores’ loss is actually offset by a gain in economic efficiency, and translates to a net advantage for writers, readers and other local businesses. Forget arguing that widely reviled quasi-Christian sludge-rock band Creed is actually criminally underrated — Manjoo’s ode to Amazon was the true #SlatePitch come to life.

Now, Manjoo’s attack on local bookstores was actually a response to an correspondingly windy, yet weary op-ed in The New York Times from novelist Richard Russo. Russo and other authors, including Stephen King, Dennis Lehane, Anita Shreve, and Ann Patchett, as well as Authors Guild president Scott Turow, took exception to a promotion Amazon ran on Dec. 10. Customers using Amazon’s Price Check smartphone app — which allows comparison shopping between retail stores and Amazon.com by scanning a bar code, snapping a picture, or entering text — would get an extra 5 percent off their purchases if they completed the sale through Amazon.com.

“My writer pals and I took personally Amazon’s assault on the kinds of stores that hand-sold our books before anybody knew who we were, back before Amazon or the internet itself existed,” writes Russo. “As Anita [Shreve] put it, losing independent bookstores would be ‘akin to editing … a critical part of our culture out of American life.’”

The argument that seems to have particularly upset Manjoo came from Ann Patchett: “There is no point in fighting them or explaining to them that we should be able to coexist civilly in the marketplace,” Patchett said. “I don’t think they care. I do think it’s worthwhile explaining to customers that the lowest price point does not always represent the best deal. If you like going to a bookstore then it’s up to you to support it. If you like seeing the people in your community employed, if you think your city needs a tax base, if you want to buy books from a person who reads, don’t use Amazon.”

While sincere and moving, this is an easy argument to knock down. So that’s exactly what Manjoo does.

Tiny indie bookstores don’t employ many people or pay much in the way of taxes; why shouldn’t I be more worried about Amazon putting a massive store like Best Buy out of business? Likewise, I can get better, lengthier recommendations from my online friends or third-party reviewers at Amazon than I can from most bookstore employees — and about books that I know are interesting to me, not them. And ultimately, it’s not as if the bookstore has artisans in the back hand-sewing signatures to the spines of hardcovers — no matter where or how you buy the book, you wind up with the same mass-produced object, born in a warehouse, delivered on a truck. It’s no more a local product than is a bottle of Coca-Cola.

Nostalgia for the independent bookstore is nostalgia for an elite literary culture that never existed for the vast majority of people. Ultimately, for Manjoo, the most important part of developing a vibrant literary culture is “getting people to buy a whole heckload of books.” And that’s what Amazon has done exceedingly well.

Amazon’s games beyond the game

Now, as entertaining as this argument is, we’ve actually jumped over something that’s crucially important. Russo mentions it explicitly; Manjoo refers to it indirectly. But both of them acknowledge it only to ignore it.

Amazon’s Dec. 10 Price Check promotion specifically excludes books.

That’s right. You can use the price check app to shop for books, and maybe save some money, but the extra 5 percent off deal Amazon was offering was for electronics, toys, music, sporting goods and DVDs.

This is because Amazon simply doesn’t care about independent bookstores. Little bookshops are not even on Jeff Bezos’ radar anymore. He and Amazon are after bigger game: Best Buy (who have pulled bar codes off their products to defend against precisely this), Wal-Mart, Target, Toys”R”Us, Costco, and Macy’s.

Amazon is a retail and technology company of a scope and potential that’s simply unprecedented in our history. Books and digital reading devices — even as they’re selling by the millions of units for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every week — are a Trojan horse.

Conservatives vs Futurists

Why, then, did the debate over Amazon’s Price Check promotion find its flashpoint with indie bookstores, rather than big-box retail? It’s simply because it’s a debate we’re used to having. Neither Russo nor Manjoo are actually contrarian at all, except to one another, in the same way that neither Republicans nor Democrats are likely to say anything far outside conventional political orthodoxy.

These positions are so well established, particularly when it comes to books, that I was able to name each of them more than two years ago in a series of posts that ended up as an essay in The Atlantic called A Bookfuturist Manifesto.

Manjoo (at least in this essay) is a classic technofuturist, characterized by an embrace of new technologies and delivery methods, irreverence toward traditional vehicles of culture, and an embrace of a spiritual Darwinism that says that institutions that can’t adapt to the future should die and make room for the new. Only an extinction event can kill off the dinosaurs and allow the mammals of the future to thrive.

Russo and his allies, on the other hand, are what I call bookservatives. Bookservatives identify the essence of literary culture with a specific (and largely contingent) technological and social arrangement governing the production, distribution and consumption of literary material.

Now both the bookservative and technofuturist positions have some truth to them. There really are parts of our literary culture that do hinge on institutions like the local bookstore; a transformation in these conditions transforms the culture itself, in ways that hurt some actors and help others.

However, both positions need each other, as a rhetorical enemy. They’re both also governed by a kind of historical myopia that locks out other kinds of arguments and analysis that would throw the whole debate into question.

Queequeg’s coffin is Ishmael’s lifeboat

This is the piece of the argument that The Toronto Standard’s Navneet Alang finds missing:

At no point is anyone discussing models that eschew the predatory, big-box mentality of Amazon and the economically inefficient, possibly-obsolete model of the indie seller. This is all to say nothing of rethinking the book itself or its importance as the locus of intellectualism… To side with either the futurists who wish to turn all media into a hyper-commercial entity driven by the logic of the market, or the conservatives who wish to bury their heads in the sand and fight to keep things as they are, is to cling to one half of a sinking ship.

To try to understand the transformation of the global publishing and retail market; to cope with the fact that our digital tools and the emerging culture associated with them don’t just transform local commerce, but the very idea of a local community itself; to see the accelerating demise of the local bookshop as an institution as something that has happened not over five or 10 but 50 to a hundred years — all that requires calculus, and all we have is arithmetic.

Amazon didn’t happen to your local independent bookstore; America happened to your local bookstore, from television to Waldenbooks.

However, that doesn’t mean that traditional literary culture has to go extinct; it needs to evolve. We can (and do) have co-operative stores owned and operated by their patrons; we can (and do) have specialty stores where specific communities can come together, grouped by literary taste or politics or sexuality or genre; we can (and do) have new models of self-publishing, both print and digital, flourishing outside the boundaries of Amazon or any of the other emerging giants of distribution.

In last week, Comedian Louis C.K. made over $500,000 in sales for an independently produced and distributed download-only comedy special from over 100,000 fans through his website. Meanwhile, not-so-famous graphic designer Frank Chimero raised over $100,000 from just over 2,000 fans for an independently produced and distributed book available in multiple formats, print and digital, The Shape of Design, through Kickstarter.

This is, and should be, a time for experimentation. Nothing is inevitable, so much is newly possible, and so very little is definitively finished.

Remember, it may be true that mammals, not dinosaurs, came to dominate Earth’s land masses, at least for this tiny sliver of our planet’s history. But even now, dinosaurs didn’t vanish from the earth; they’re still here. We call them birds.

Original: Epicenter

Google’s Year in Search Yields Depressing Results

This is just sad.

Thursday marks the 11th year of Google’s Zeitgeist project, in which the company delivers a cross-section of our culture via the top 10 fastest-rising searches on Google.com. Sadly (yet not surprisingly), searches for tween celebrities and high-profile murder cases topped the list; apparently, Casey Anthony’s “not guilty” verdict is more earth-shattering to users than an actual earthquake.

Googlers of the world were most interested in Rebecca Black, Ryan Dunn and Casey Anthony (numbers one, three and four in the top 10 fastest-rising searches on Google.com) than they were about the Japanese earthquake (number nine), the only important major world event to make the list.

One of the dumbest trends in history, planking, was the fastest-rising image search in the United States. Even Justin Bieber couldn’t keep up, coming in third to someone I’ve never even heard of (hard to do for someone who spends her days on the internet).

It’s less depressing than say, reading a page filled with vitriolic YouTube comments, or taking a glance at Facebook’s year in memes. I find it remarkable, though, that the momentous events of this year — one in which civilians deposed dictators, our country was engaged in two wars, famine spread throughout east Africa and natural disasters destroyed whole communities — Rebecca Black was what we had to see.

Thankfully, it’s not all tweens and “Beliebers.” Following the earthquake in Japan, more than half of the countries in the 2011 Zeitgeist searched for the latest news on the quake. Thusly, in America, the top three searches shortly thereafter related to charitable giving focused on helping provide relief to the Japanese who were afflicted.

On Google News here in the States, the Occupy movement was the second fastest-rising search, topped only by Hurricane Irene. Occupy — which spread like wildfire over Facebook and Twitter in a relatively short period of time — highlighted the ways in which social media spreads grass-roots movements rapidly, much like they did in North Africa last spring.

It’s interesting to look at global and domestic trends based on Google searches as well. Ikea and Wells Fargo were some of the most sought-after destinations. And despite its lackluster sales, people still seemed interested in the HP TouchPad. More so than the iPad (at least, as product searches are concerned).

Using search-engine data to gauge the state of our culture doesn’t always yield the results we’d like. Still, is it not fascinating to have an anthropological look into information, culture and how trends spread over the course of time?

As far as Bieber is concerned — well, we can’t be serious all the time.

Origin: Epicenter

Commentary: Driver Distraction, the NTSB and a Siri-ous Problem

Arguing against anything intended to make drivers drive to the exclusion of all else is like being against apple pie. You may have your reasons, but nobody wants to hear them.

That said, the National Transportation Safety Board’s non-binding recommendation that (nearly) all use of mobile communications devices behind the wheel smacks both of a genuine frustration with the inability of most of us to show sufficient self control, and a bit of overkill brinksmanship intended to instantly elevate the discussion into the public zeitgeist. Nothing gets attention like saying “Never!”

The NTSB directive would exempt “devices designed to support the driving task,” such as GPS units that connect to your phone, voice-control mechanisms that are built in to vehicles, store-bought GPS units from the likes of Garmin, Magellan and Tom Tom, or even the mapping and navigation functionality built into some smartphones. One of the most unsung features of portable GPS devices is that they do support Bluetooth and communicate with any Bluetooth-enabled phone, which is, at the high end, all of them.

Which brings us to Siri, the Apple “personal assistant” built into the iPhone 4S.

Continue reading ‘Commentary: Driver Distraction, the NTSB and a Siri-ous Problem’ …

It might not have been the NTSB’s intention to give automakers a guaranteed upsell for factory-installed dash units “designed to support the driving task,” or to encourage smartphone technology like Siri, or to kill the hands-free peripheral business, or to give cellphone makers and wireless companies agita as they figure the angles. But in the highly unlikely event that all 50 states actually do heed the NTSB’s call, Siri-like tech is exactly what would provide the safety buffer the agency is trying to build, allowing consumers to bring their own solution to any car rather than buy more expensive cars (or abstain altogether). It’s another potentially huge endorsement for the smartphone as an empowering human peripheral which not only connects us to information and each other in remarkable ways, but is increasingly becoming a truly universal remote, wallet and personal monitor.

With most in-dash GPS/entertainment consoles, voice commands begin the process, which is about as distracting as asking a passenger where she wants to eat. With Siri, one must still push the home button, and that is a bit more friction (though not much more, if placed a certain way in a certain pocket, in my own unscientific testing). On a phone the “prompt” problem is a software design issue, but it is more difficult to solve because phones are used in multiple contexts with a variety of social and ambient noise considerations. The driver’s seat is exactly one, predictable environment.

Whatever the politics and science of the NTSB’s timing and reasoning, it’s not about denying the driving public the visceral joy of texting behind the wheel. It’s about minimizing distractions so people don’t get killed because of a trivial pursuit.

But there’s another problem as you go down this philosophical road. Teen drivers are notoriously bad driving risks for a number of reasons, including lack of experience. It is also true that they travel in packs: Put three to four teen passengers in an automobile driven by a fellow teen and the kid behind the wheel is going to be much more prone to causing or falling prey to an accident because of the all the socialization going on.

The NTSB has never suggested a rule against distractions caused by people, which I have always thought is a much greater aggregate problem vis–vis driver concentration than everything else put together. We may have irrational visions of immortality when it comes to speaking on the phone — even placing a call — or texting when driving conditions seem calm. But in this regard drivers misjudge their abilities and road conditions when an accident inevitably occurs. By leveling the playing field to “never” the NTSB is saying it doesn’t care how adept or conscientious you are; collectively we suck at this and shouldn’t be allowed to do it anymore.

On the other hand, drivers often have no control over cabin noise, how loud the radio is, being asked questions, even being touched by the front-seat passenger in a sudden stop or lurch. All of these things are everyday occurrences for most everyone. It’s doubtful their effect has been, or even could be, empirically quantified to the extent that laws or suggested rules could be drafted. But I would postulate that every accident which isn’t primarily due to bad road conditions or machine failure happened because the driver wasn’t sufficiently focused on the task at hand. Sleep deprivation notwithstanding, other people probably make up the bulk of that problem.

Don’t get me wrong: I could live in a world where it was a crime to text behind the wheel, if doing so required the use of one’s hands and meant that one’s gaze left the road for the smallest amount of time imaginable. This seems to be one of those happy situations where tech, policy and the public good seem aligned or at the very least amenable. It may be “overkill,” but I choose to take it as a bold, out of the box challenge to fix this.

Photo by irina slutsky/flickr. Used with gratitude via a Creative Commons license.

Credit: Epicenter

Spotify vs. Rdio: Who Has The Exclusives?

The new generation of streaming music services like Spotify, Rdio, and MOG have more music than you could consume in a lifetime. But how much of it would you really want to listen to?

There’s no shortage of great roundups and reviews showing the pros and cons of each service, but they rarely talk specifically about the different music you can find on each. They’ve all built impressive catalogs, but it’s nearly impossible to tell from casual browsing which artists and albums are exclusives for each.

Fortunately, both Rdio and Spotify offer powerful developer APIs, making it simple to compare the two. (Sadly, MOG doesn’t offer an API, so isn’t included.)

For this test, I needed a large set of popular, well-loved albums to test. I used the top 5,000 albums from Rate Your Music, the quirky 11-year-old online community dedicated to rating and reviewing music. These albums span all genres, from klezmer to chiptune, with a total of 2,282 different artists across 70 years of recorded music.

I used the Spotify and Rdio search APIs to look up each album, and checked their streaming availability in the United States. (Rdio uses the IP address to determine country of origin, making it impossible to query other countries. Spotify, on the other hand, returns a list of every region the album’s available.)

Note: The results aren’t perfect. Spotify and Rdio often have slight differences between artist and album names, which can deliver false positives. Let me know if you spot anything amiss and I’ll correct it.

Results

Of the top 5,000, about 44% were available on both Spotify and Rdio. 4.8% of the albums were only available on Spotify, while a further 6.8% were only available on Rdio. Overall, 56% of the albums were streamable on at least one of the services.

Labels are still withholding most or all of the albums from many popular artists. The Beatles, King Crimson, AC/DC, The Eagles, Tool, De La Soul, Peter Gabriel, Led Zeppelin, and Metallica are nowhere to be found, as well as most of the best albums by The Kinks. Music geeks will be sad to discover that Frank Zappa, Coil, Spacemen 3, and Joanna Newsom are all missing, as well. This landscape will constantly shift as labels change their minds; Arcade Fire was added to Spotify yesterday, and more than 200 indie labels left the streaming services last month.

But what about albums that are exclusive only to one service? The results surprised me. Spotify has a reputation for having a deeper catalog, but at least for historic critically-regarded albums, Rdio has a better selection of both popular and obscure artists. More albums in the top 5,000 were available on Rdio, and they offer exclusive access in the U.S. to huge acts like Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, the White Stripes, and Queen.

Top Exclusive Artists

Here’s a list of the top 20 artists exclusive to each service, with the number of exclusive albums in parentheses.

Only on Rdio	Only on Spotify
Bob Dylan (12)	My Dying Bride (4)
Pink Floyd (8)	Miles Davis (4)
Bruce Springsteen (7)	Candlemass (3)
Miles Davis (6)	Funkadelic (3)
The Gathering (5)	The Pretty Things (3)
Blind Guardian (4)	Current 93 (3)
Can (4)	Darkthrone (3)
William Basinski (4)	Underworld (3)
Iced Earth (4)	Katatonia (3)
Stars of the Lid (3)	CunninLynguists (3)
The White Stripes (3)	Charles Mingus (2)
John Williams (3)	Mahavishnu Orchestra (2)
Queen (3)	The Jesus Lizard (2)
Nevermore (3)	The Misfits (2)
Thelonious Monk (3)	Klaus Schulze (2)
Charles Mingus (3)	John Coltrane (2)
Bill Hicks (3)	Galaxie 500 (2)
John Coltrane (2)	Silvio Rodríguez (2)
Camel (2)	Secos & Molhados (2)
Keith Jarrett (2)	maudlin of the Well (2)

Note that artists like Miles Davis and John Coltrane appear on both lists because of how prolific they were. Both are well-represented in Spotify and Rdio, but some critically-adored out-of-print albums are unavailable on both.

Top Exclusive Albums

Digging into the albums, Rdio wins again. Nine of the top 100 albums are only found on Rdio, while only one is exclusive to Spotify. In fact, there are only 32 albums in the top 1,000 available on Spotify alone. Below is the top 30 for each service, along with their Rate Your Music ranking.

Only on Rdio	Only on Spotify
4. Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon	63. The Zombies – Odessey and Oracle
6. Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here	104. Candlemass – Nightfall
7. Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited	231. Funkadelic – Standing on the Verge of Getting…
19. Bob Dylan – Blonde on Blonde	288. The Jesus Lizard – Goat
25. The Clash – London Calling	290. The Pretty Things – Parachute
29. Bob Dylan – Bringing It All Back Home	326. The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra – The Jazz Comp…
30. Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks	362. Klaus Schulze – X
51. Pink Floyd – Animals	428. Sodom – Agent Orange
85. Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan	459. Danny Elfman – Edward Scissorhands
103. Bob Dylan – Another Side of Bob Dylan	472. Galaxie 500 – Today
107. Bob Dylan – The Times They Are A-Changin’	494. Current 93 – All the Pretty Little Horses
121. Dr. Dre – The Chronic	502. Secos & Molhados – Secos & Molhados
149. Stars of the Lid – The Tired Sounds Of	515. maudlin of the Well – Bath
164. Camel – Moonmadness	546. Sun Kil Moon – Ghosts of the Great Highway
174. The White Stripes – Elephant	550. Anathema – Alternative 4
175. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago	618. Darkthrone – A Blaze in the Northern Sky
196. John Williams – Raiders of the Lost Ark	666. The Byrds – Fifth Dimension
218. Popol Vuh – Hosianna Mantra	685. The Gun Club – Miami
224. Jethro Tull – Nothing Is Easy: Live at the Is…	751. Autopsy – Severed Survival
246. Albert King – Born Under a Bad Sign	772. My Dying Bride – Turn Loose the Swans
278. Keith Jarrett – Vienna Concert	775. The Jesus Lizard – Liar
304. Dead Kennedys – Plastic Surgery Disasters	785. Vektor – Black Future
320. Thin Lizzy – Black Rose: A Rock Legend	787. maudlin of the Well – Leaving Your Body Map
331. Magic Sam – West Side Soul	790. Jean Michel Jarre – Oxygene
369. Bob Dylan & The Band – The Basement Tapes	797. 16 Horsepower – Secret South
387. Eric Dolphy – Out There	803. Riverside – Out of Myself
393. Blind Guardian – Live	804. Darkthrone – Transilvanian Hunger
425. Devin Townsend – Terria	846. Nino Rota – Amarcord
468. Strapping Young Lad – City	859. Suede – Suede
489. Pretenders –  Pretenders	900. Darkthrone – Under a Funeral Moon

Unless you’re a huge fan of Norwegian death metal, it’s hard to see this as anything but a win for Rdio.

The fact is that both services have done a tremendous job of building the celestial jukebox — with a couple of high-profile exceptions, nearly everything you’d ever want to listen to is available at your fingertips.

Now, one huge drawback of using the Rate Your Music list is that it skews towards older album-oriented music geeks. That’s great if you like Ornette Coleman and Galaxie 500, but not so great if you like Drake and Katy Perry.

Next week, we’ll set the controls for the heart of mainstream music: the Billboard charts, analyzing every charted single in the top 100 from 1955 to the present. This will give us a completely different view of their catalogs, focused on pop singles, past and present, instead of classic albums.

Want more? Ed Summers did his own fascinating deep-dive into Spotify and Rdio uses top album lists from Alf Eaton’s Album of the Year list collection, and published the results on Google Fusion Tables. Also, try Matt Montag’s Music Smasher, a tool that searches Rdio, Spotify, and Grooveshark.

Original: Epicenter

Apple Founding Document Auctions for (Gulp) $1.6 Million

If they’ve got the Apple brand, even used paper commands a premium in marketplace. Some $1.6 million.

Of course, these aren’t just any papers, and this isn’t just any moment in time.

The papers in question comprise the contract which formed Apple Computer Company on April 12, 1976, and are signed by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, the Pete Best of the computer revolution who got cold feet and bailed on the company before it got off the ground. And the timing could not be better: The recent passing of Jobs and the elevation of Apple to one of the most valuable companies in the world makes these particular documents quite something just now.

Sotheby’s had put a pre-auction estimate of up to $150,000 on the lot, and tweeted the result of what was said to be a sparsely attended auction. Bidding started at $70,000 but crested at $1 million after only 10 minutes, CNN Money reported. The winning bid was $1.35 million and, with the auction fee, the total is just shy of $1.6 million. The winning bid came from an unidentified telephone buyer.

The documents record one of the strangest — and briefest — episodes in computing history. Wayne was recruited by the two Steves to provide some adult supervision, and was given 10 percent of the nascent company to 45 percent each for Jobs and Wozniak. This stake gave him the power to broker every decision the boys disagreed on, enormous leverage to have shaped the early direction of Apple.

Alas, it was not to be. Wayne was so afraid of the Steves’ lack of business experience and personal assets that he feared creditors would go after him when, he assumed, things inevitably went bad. So Wayne got himself out of the deal less than two weeks later, for $2,300. If he had been able to keep that stake all these years (and didn’t make some horrible early decisions) it would be worth just south of $40 billion, making him as wealthy as Larry Ellison — the world’s fifth richest person last year, according to Forbes.

Cashing out on Apple was a big mistake by Wayne, of course. But buying these documents for so much might turn out to be a relatively small one: Only time will tell if this investment proves to be a better one than acquiring the more than 4,000 shares of Apple stock the winning bidder could have bought instead.

Credit: Epicenter

It’s Social, Social, Social At LeWeb 2011

PARIS — “Launching a product during LeWeb week is like whispering during a death metal gig — very difficult to get heard,” tweeted The Next Web’s Martin Bryant a few days before LeWeb 2011 kicked off last week. It is true, the Parisian tech conference has become a giant among events of its kind. This year it lured 3,000 or more delegates and created a lot of noise.

Yes, we were essentially bombarded with launch announcements last week. Spotify launching Last.fm-meets-Pandora service Spotify Radio, Deezer launching its music streaming service in 200 countries and Karl Lagerfeld launching an online fashion collection with Net-A-Porter, to name a few.

What crystallised through plenty of startup news was that the official conference theme “Social Local Mobile” was wisely chosen as a roundup of 2011.

Take the media, for instance. When Ogilvy Mather’s Thomas Crampton asked the audience “Who here thinks Twitter is media?” a fair three quarters raised their hands. This raises the old question: has “old school media” given way to more social, local, mobile ways of sharing news?

“Traditional media has a very difficult time producing truly local content in an economical manner. They can hardly make money from it and so cover local things less — local publications are going away,” said President of AOL Brad Garlinghouse.

“The news used to be delivered to you? You don’t want that anymore,” Bruno Patino of France Televisions Group added. “We want to engage in social conversation. What is changing is the control of the system [the media] used to have. We’re still in the game, we just don’t control it anymore.”

Continue reading ‘It’s Social, Social, Social At LeWeb 2011‘ …

Original: Epicenter

YouTube for Schools Keeps LOLcat Videos at Bay

YouTube announced the release of YouTube for Schools on Monday, a control mechanism which limits students to educational content on campus networks.

Essentially, it’s the perfect tool for network administrators and fussy librarians to keep students away from lolcat videos, all the while steering the kids towards what they’re actually supposed to be doing — studying.

With the flick of a switch, admins can restrict YouTube access solely to videos found on YouTube EDU, a destination site within YouTube that curates all partner educational content into one central location. While users have always had access to YouTube EDU, the new YouTube for Schools network extension will make sure that students are actually learning while watching online videos in the computer lab.

The partner content includes upwards of 450,000 videos from major educational institutions like the Smithsonian, TED and the University of California at Berkeley (this author’s alma mater). To make sense of the trove of content, users can navigate the different videos by subject matter or grade level, and teachers can run down a list of all hosted content to use in lessons.

While YouTube for schools isn’t a major launch for the online video behemoth, it’s indicative of the direction the site has been moving in over the past year. Instead of being a mere repository for uploaded user-generated content, YouTube has spent much time courting content providers and media institutions to bring more original content to the site. In November, YouTube inked a major content sharing deal with Disney, bringing web-exclusive shows to the platform in an attempt to draw in younger audiences. And in October, YouTube announced it would launch dozens of new online channels, organized around specific topics and featuring a mix of original and user-generated content.

The company finally tied everything together in early December, launching a complete YouTube redesign that put far more emphasis on channels and content than ever before.

The educational sector, then, is a natural extension for the platform. It’s yet another channel that needs its content distributed, and the more places YouTube can get its new user interface in front of consumers, the better. Ultimately, YouTube’s aim is to increase “stickiness,” or the amount of time a given user spends on the site. That means further acquainting users with the new interface by getting more major institutions to use YouTube as a delivery platform.

Whatever the case, it’ll most likely cut down on jerks in the school library hogging terminal spots and watching viral videos.

[Photo: Rego/Flickr]

Original: Epicenter

Craig Newman: Is Crowdfunding the Next Big Thing or an Invitation to Digital Fraud?

It’s an innovative financial tool that has great promise and great peril. Crowdfunding could aid investors and small businesses, at a time when they both desperately need help. Or crowdfunding could become an efficient, online means for defrauding the investing public.

Its future is in the hands of Congress. Crowdfunding began over a decade ago, when struggling artists and musicians used this method to raise online donations from their fans. More recently, some start-ups and other small companies turned to this technique when traditional sources of capital dried up. Crowdfunding sites like Kiva, a non-profit micro lender, report that they have arranged upwards of $250 million in financings for small companies.

There would undoubtedly have been far more crowdfunding in recent years, but this financial tool has been hobbled by U.S. securities laws. These laws, which are intended to prevent fraud and market abuse, restrict companies from selling their stock directly to individual investors over the Internet. As a result, businesses have had to structure their crowdfunding in unusual ways—either as donations or interest-free loans, where lenders would get their money back only if the company remains in business and is able to repay the loan. Individuals contributing money thus get no economic benefit from their actions.

Congress is now considering legislation to change all this and to allow smaller enterprises to sell their stock online. On November 9, 2011, the House of Representatives passed The Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act (H.R. 2930), which would create an exemption from current securities registration requirements. It allows companies to raise $1 million annually from individual investors ($2 million if the company provides audited financial statements). Investors would be limited to investing in any year the lesser of $10,000 or 10% of their annual income.

A similar bill is making its way through the Senate. The Senate Banking Committee has scheduled hearings on December 1, 2011 to review the pending legislation.
No one would dispute that the securities laws need reform. Certain outmoded provisions need to be revised so that businesses can raise capital more easily and efficiently. And the need for reform is particularly acute now, when many small companies, especially start-ups, are unable to raise desperately needed financing. Their traditional lenders have become few and stingy, and they are frozen out of the securities market by the cost and difficulties of complying with current securities laws.

Continue reading ‘Craig Newman: Is Crowdfunding The Next Big Thing or An Invitation To Digital Fraud?’ …

By: Epicenter