I was attending a LAN gaming session (aka. real “social gaming”) with a group of friends a while ago. Last time, we spent a lot of time installing (and updating) games and trying to get computers to find each other and I had to borrow someone else’s computer. This time, we were quickly up and running and I could proudly play on my MacBook Pro.

Sure, I had installed Windows 7 using Bootcamp on my Mac, because while VMware Fusion was okay for Tales of Monkey Island and even Torchlight, it just doesn’t cut it for hardcore gaming. The only game that I had any problems running over Bootcamp was, oddly enough, Postal 2. Otherwise, I was equal among my PC using peers. I had dreamed about this day.

But what really made things easy for all of us was Valve’s Steam, a gaming portal/service.

The iTunes model strikes again.

Steam ...for the rest of us

We have passed a long time the point where new games are automatically better than older just due to technological improvements. We were still playing games we played over 3 years ago, and some of them were “old” even by then, like Unreal Tournament 2004. The reasons for this are Windows XP and DirectX. These two technologies have enabled a decade of games that are still playable almost without any emulation. The biggest change is happening right now with multicore and 64bit CPUs.

What Steam has done is basically something that other forms of entertainment could learn a lot about, if they could get over their stone age business logic and hunting down their customers. PC game piracy has always been a problem and one reason why PC gaming today seems to be an afterthought to console gaming. Steam (and other similar services, like Impulse) mostly eliminates the piracy problem with a central authorization structure, but yet provides added value to the customer. You only need to install Steam on any computer and log in and you have access to all your games (provided that you have the bandwidth to download the over 2 GB that most games today use). This is something that isn’t possible with iTunes and only recently was possible with Spotify.

What really sets Steam apart here from other entertainment industry offerings is actual value for users. What Steam has done, is really catch the long tail of ecommerce, even though the concept of long tail has long since gone out of fashion. By being able to sell couple of years old games that are virtually impossible to find anywhere (legally) and for a fraction of the price is just amazing. I was able to buy Psychonauts, the most amazing game ever, for just 2 euros and even at the normal price of 9,99 euros it’s 1/4th of what it did cost on the shelves (and it still costs around 15 euros on Amazon). After the Steam’s holiday sales during Christmas, I found out that I had bought many games, mostly because the price was right.

Other benefits from using Steam is that all your games are automatically updated and even for some games, your progress and settings are saved in the “Steam Cloud” – allowing you to play seamlessly on multiple computers.

But there aren’t any games for Mac

The year 2010 turned to be a pleasant surprise for gamers, especially for those, like me, who have switched to Mac. First, Telltale Games announced that their games would be available for Mac as well. This was excellent news for all Sam & Max and Monkey Island fans who would no longer need to boot up VMware Fusion.

And, sure, there have always been Civilization IV and The Sims 3 for Mac, but having new, native games for Mac was excellent news. Clearly a certain threshold has been breached and the amount of gamers living in self-denial on Mac is now large enough that the market is suddenly viable.

Nothing could have prepared us, the people who still reflexivly keep our left fingers on WASD and use multi-button mice, for the annoucement from Valve that both Steam and Valve’s game engine Source would be available for Mac.

Now, I don’t see that this will mean that soon Mac OS X would be equal gaming platform with Windows, but it does warm my heart. I know that I still need to boot to Windows to really enjoy gaming. The reason Telltale and Valve have been able to pull this out is based on their choices to use cross-platform frameworks (like OpenGL) instead of Windows-only technologies like DirectX. You also need to keep in mind that both Telltale and Valve seem to have target audiences that use Macs and have both targeted certain niches, the former makes high quality “casual” adventure games and the latter high quality first person shooters for more “hardcore” crowd. It is unlikely that other game developers or publishers will follow suit. For a true revolution, Microsoft would need to not only port DirectX to Mac OS X but also develop it at same pace with Windows. Looking at Microsoft’s track record with Mac software, this is even less likely than playing Left 4 Dead natively on Mac looked a couple of months ago. The more likely scenario is that as hardware gets faster and emulating a graphics card gets more efficient, running even the most recent 3D games in VMware Fusion starts to be feasible. A possible scenario is also that through technologies like OpenCL, PC games aren’t as dependent on GPUs and DirectX as they are today.

On the other hand, this shows how Apple’s decision to invest in cross-platform frameworks like OpenGL, OpenCL and WebKit can really pay off in the long term. It also shows that being nice and having something like Bootcamp can be an advantage. I was really surprised how easily I could install Windows 7 on my Mac and how Apple had provided drivers for everything.

What Steam proves is that to succeed on the internet, you really need to be familiar with your customers and understand their needs and truly deliver superior experience and added value to them. This is nothing new, but somehow the rest of the entertainment industry seems to think that they can still get away with last century tactics.

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I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible.

Sarah Lacy writes about SMSONE, a ultra-local news provider in India similar to Outside.IN, a Union Square Ventures funded US-only company that provides news updates via the web. SMSONE does it, as the name suggests, via SMS. And it spreads through a franchising model, working with local entrepreneurs that pay a franchise fee and also collect a share of the advertising revenue from locally focussed businesses. It is able to do this because of something that apparently doesn’t exist in the US (but does in Europe): receiving an SMS in India doesn’t cost the recipient anything.

When reading about this, I was immediately reminded of a similar business model employed by a Dutch entrepreneur in Russia, Ms. Annemarie van Gaal, founder of Independent Media, a company that distributed Russian versions of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire en Good Housekeeping (source). When she spoke at the Star entrepreneurial seminar in Rotterdam a year ago, she told us about how she differentiated herself from the competition (paraphrased as I haven’t got my notes with me):

The trouble with getting your magazines distributed in Russia was that you had to pay quite a lot of money (some would call it bribes) to companies that would then take care of it… badly. Instead van Gaal decided to do it differently. She would hire street kids to distribute her magazines, similar to the gold days of newspapers: the newspaper boy.

If you read Sarah Lacy’s account on Techcrunch, you’ll see that SMSONE does it similarly, hiring local kids, often without much education, to take care of distribution. Doing it via official channels is likely a nightmare over there, and centralising distribution kind of defeats the purpose of micro-news.

It’s a different way of thinking, which many of us westerners don’t have. I mean, would you entrust your products to a beggar on the street or to a street musician? Not only is it probably against the law (except if the government does it), we pride ourselves on our super-organised infrastructure, where anything from temp-workers to interns are there to provide companies with a flexible workforce, and anything from printing presses to mobile internet exists to produce and distribute your stuff.

Of course, I wouldn’t just leave you with these two examples. In the beginning of 2008, Boston Consulting Group published a study of “local dynamos”— domestically focussed companies, which use creative business models to capture value from emerging markets that are filled with challenges, like lacking infrastructure and low-income consumers. The map below shows how widespread these companies are.

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

• Shanda, a Chinese gaming-company, that, in order to combat software-piracy, focusses on providing interactive services through gaming, services that are impossible to pirate. And to overcome a lack of a financial infrastructure to pay for online services, they work with pre-paid cards.
• Indian CavinKare, which sells cheap sachets of shampoo through small local retailers, while using educational marketing to teach customers how to use their products.
• Goodbaby, which targets the many 1-child families in China, who are both willing to spend more on their child than multi-child families would, but are also in need of education.
• Amul, an Indian food-and-beverage-marketing-organisation, which collects and pays for milk locally, while tracking all operations via satellite and uses ERP solutions to make analysis based on the data and gauge whether future supply needs to be increased or decreased.
• Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods (Russia), which works extensively with local partners, and has devised leasing schemes for expensive machinery to boost their production and is able to serve 280 million consumers nation-wide.

The BCG, of course, takes the stance of its customers, Western companies, and the study is mainly aimed at how multinational companies (MNCs) can replicate 6 of these dynamo’s advantages, in order to compete with them. They are:

1. Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
2. Devising innovative business models that overcome local challenges – a logical follow-up to the last point, how to make money from the info you gained.
3. Leveraging the latest technologies – meaning that these emerging economies are less burdened with traditional infrastructure and quicker on the uptake of more affordable, newer, and easier-to-spread technology, e.g. mobiles.
4. Benefiting from low-cost labor and overcoming shortages of skilled labor – there’s two ways to look at this; a local workforce will be better equipped to interact on a local level, a highly-trained workforce will be better equipped to run a business. Tough call.
5. Scaling up fast – Russia, India, China, Brazil, etc. are all giants with the promise of huge rewards when you capture them. Many of these dynamos grow quickly through both through acquisitions and building up their network of suppliers and distributors.
6. Sustaining long-term hypergrowth without imploding – this kind of follows on to the last point

Some of the Western companies mentioned, which have managed to compete on a local level, include:

• General Motors, which has adapted its luxury-liners to meet the demands of its Chinese customers, who are usually sitting in the back;
• LG, in China, which has learned that the audio-quality of its televisions is more valued by its customers, who often reside in noisy environments;
• Carrefour, which has started to work with local municipal governments in China, as these don’t meddle in their operations like local dept. stores would, and are able to provide access to prime locations;
• Perfetti Van Melle, in India, a candle/chewing-gum manufacturer, which has found local means to advertise, interacts frequently with local partners, and has adapted its products to local tastes;
• and Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut and KFC, and has adapted its menus to meet local Chinese tastes, started a new food-chain aimed specifically at the market, and uses its international expertise to integrate IT, lean supply chains, and a higher level of food standards into their offering.

It shows the value of out of the box thinking in terms of reaching people, and I believe that traditional “Western” thinking should long ago have been thrown out the door anyway, particularly in light of the troubles that media-, automotive, and financial industries are going through. We are in the flux of disruptive innovation and only those quickest to grasp new technologies and ways of thinking are able to survive another day.

No shortage of lessons on that from entrepreneurs in emerging economies…

Vincent out

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From the European FT this weekend:

“Blackberry owners will soon be able to download music wireless tracks to an application that will help the smartphone compete with those made by Apple and Nokia. … Most tracks will not have copy protection software, which restricts how many devices the music can be moved to.”

It’s the word “most,” which has triggered today’s rant on PR, technology, media, and more. First of, what kind of statement is that most tracks will not have copy protection? Why not all, why not none?

Looking at the past, we all know that copy protection, aka DRM, has plenty of negative associations attached to it. And, as with most negatively perceived technologies, it has been hacked so often that the word “protected” has just become a PR term. Copy protection is not a feature, it’s a handicap, but clearly most songs on the Blackberry platform will not be handicapped, which is… a feature??

We all know that optimally, no producer (or organisation associated with music production) would allow music to be released DRM-free. But the very fact that protection means Zilch, means that actually there is no point to implementing any kind of DRM-system, except on the request of the owner(s) of particular songs (which probably happened here). So, instead of all or none, we get “most,” which is just BS. I already predict that this new initiative is going to fail, by the sheer indecisiveness of the PR message alone, which is a reflection of how little thought-out the business strategy must be.

My point in all of this, infused by a single expression of vagueness, is that somehow technology has spun out of control. There is a system of checks and balances in place, there is a self-correcting mechanism at play, but no one has the complete overview of how it works and when it will work. In the case of the recession, for example, things will balance themselves out again. And hopefully we will get a system in place, the more open the better, that will regulate what is happening. But there will very likely be many casualties of war.

In the case of media and profiting from it, it looks bad, very bad. The word “most” perfectly reflects the uncertainty of where it is all heading, but anyone can see that with production and distribution becoming cheaper and more decentralised, there is hardly any need for centralised music companies, except to build systems that track what is out there and rate it (e.g. CBS/Last.fm, Hypemachine) or to fund the more expensive part of the formula: getting on TV/radio (which will also disappear at some point) or setting up a concert (which will hopefully never disappear, but is hopefully self-sufficient).

Sadly, the only solution I see to saving “the industry” is to silo everything off, which is arguable already happening when you look at the behaviour of businesses like Pandora, CBS/Last.fm, and Hulu) and sue the crap out of anyone infringing. That would make everything nice and predictable again, but only if you could make it impossible to go from one side to the other. Star wars.

Some systems where this is the case, more or less, would be gaming consoles, and you would need the same for audio and video content. But because the light and the dark side (traditional media vs. new media vs. piracy) are not separated, you will continue to see a shift towards freeing everything until the only thing predictable will be that there is no money to be made from media, just from the products (e.g. merchandising) and services (e.g. concerts) around it.

Yes, I continue to be very down on traditional media. Feel free to lift my spirits in this area.

Vincent

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I’m a little sick with the flu, hence a few days off blogging, but I just wanted to share this with you (the video from vbs.tv does not seem to show up in the rss-feed).

It’s the story of Carlos Amorales, a Mexican visual artist, who does some pretty interesting things, including: graphic design, installations, performance art, and co-founding a record-label. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing (it’s only 14 min.!), worth checking out is:

• 01:15, when he shows how me makes his illustrations by keeping a digital database of images in different shapes. All in black, though he occasionally uses red. If you think these simplistic, then look at some of his installations (next point), and you see that these are just the beginning, really.
• 04:40, when he shows some of his installations and talks about how they give the audience the ability to enter the work. It made me think about how creative developers/artist can use the new technology of “augmented reality” to create layers above art-installations that take you more into the experience. Any museum I go to these days, I always get the audio-tour as  it adds to my understanding of what I’m seeing. The same could apply to pointing your mobile camera at it and seeing a visual augmentation. Of course, this is where those infernal copyright laws come in; I think this is something that should be done first with certain avant garde / independent artist, to show-case the potential…
• 09:20, when he talks about his record label, Nuevos Ricos (turn down your speakers before clicking this link), for which they created a manifesto, which included giving all the music away for free. Instead the focus was on performance, on entertainment. I mean, well it’s completely ridiculous and you can see that it’s more of an experiment to understand youth culture. At the same time, it is something that many anti-copyright people (including me) have argued for, that music should be about the performance, not about making money from a shiny disc / digital file. But in the end, maybe music/art should be about self-expression and we all express ourselves in different ways. Some, like the clowns in the video, who have very little musical talent, will prefer showcasing themselves. Others will prefer to just make music and make a living from that. We live in a very nuanced world, after all…

End thoughts, hope to be back this Monday.

Vincent

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My sentiments about online media aside (I think it’s despicable the way media-companies treat consumers, particularly outside of the US), it has always bothered me to use Last.fm for a number of reasons. Here they are:

1. Last.fm, apart from being happy to pull my listening data into their site, does not integrate with my listening habits Whats.O.Ever. My method for managing music, perhaps determined by owning an iPod, is entirely dominated by iTunes and the usage of the device itself.




2. Last.fm does not play on the road (let’s ignore the iPhone radio app and that eventually all devices will be connected to the internet)




3. Last.fm does not acknowledge that I give different stars (= degrees of love) to songs (instead I have to “love” a song manually).




4. Discovering new music through Last.fm’s radio does not easily lead me to purchase the actual song




5. One cherry on top is that Last.fm now wants to charge me for using the radio, even though I add to it by playing my songs.




6. A second cherry on top is that Last.fm is now, indirectly through CBS, giving information about what we listen to and who we are, to the RIAA, a US organisation that probably also shares that information with other international organisations.




7. The only use Last.fm seems to have is vanity, in the sense that you can see what songs I loved (when I love them) and I can make pretty graphics of my listening habits (makes for an interesting poster).

So, as of this week, I am deleting my Last.fm account.

That doesn’t change that I am a fervent listener of music and it also doesn’t change that I believe deeply in the concept of sharing music. I like finding nice tracks to play at parties and equally I like finding tracks for some of my friends that I can only connect to online. There is no legal service that allows me to do this. As a matter of fact, in the Netherlands, I should even be paying a licensing fee if I play music in public or for too many people at once!!!

In comes Drop.io, a file-sharing service that recently added Facebook Connect as a way to share stuff only with your friends. Drop.io fills the void that Last.fm leaves in the following ways:

1. It has an integrated player that is very elegant and can also be accessed and added to via many different devices.




2. I can restrict access to my files to my Facebook friends only (evil internet lawyers can get lost).




3. It’s free for using 100 MB storage and charges a very fair $10 per gigabyte per year.




4. Any loss in statistical “vanity” data can be compensated by using iTunes and starring / sorting your files accordingly.

That’s it. Of course I will not be sharing songs that are copyright protected (and, of course, if we’re not Facebook connected, you will never know for sure )

Vincent

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If you look at the world of video now, there are a number of trends that reign:

• The shift from TV to web (Youtube, Hulu, iTunes Video, etc.)
• The shift towards gaming, aka interactive video
• The shift towards 3D cinema
• The unabated reign of piracy, which means that content-producers have to look beyond traditional media.
• The relative affordability of the home cinema.
• The rise of televised serials on par with movies in terms of budgets, screenplay, acting, and other qualities
• Something else? Please let me know in the comments!

It kind of makes you wonder whether cinema as we’ve known it is ending. Is cinema, in its constant drive to innovate, losing those things that made it great in the past? It took me something like reading “Hitchcock / Truffaut” to come to the conclusion that that is not the case. As the web2.0 boys like to write, “Shift happens!”

Case in point: when Hitchcock started making movies in the 1930s, they were silent. To give the effect of the sound of a man walking back and forth in the room upstairs in “The Lodger,” he used a glass ceiling. That’s right, you could actually look through the ceiling and see the feet of the man. Today, even a decade or two later, that effect would’ve been completely unnecessary.

Same as today camera rigs are becoming affordable to you and me, changes in technology can and will affect how we give visual meaning to a story. Because that’s what it’s all about, story telling, and the medium is simply the one that is the most effective for that.

There is perhaps a risk of focussing on form over substance. Many have predicted that in order for the status of proprietary cinema to be safeguarded, there would need to be a 3rd and maybe even a 4th dimension. My last IMAX-experience having been the two year old “Superman Returns” movie, I’m no expert, but I found it entirely unconvincing. 2009 is the year of 3D cinema, so I’ll leave it up to the more recent IMAX-visitors to decide whether 3D is as yet ready to replace 2D. I’ve heard critics say that “the screen just points at you,” which I don’t find particularly encouraging. At the same time, as equipment becomes cheaper and people experiment more, I’m sure a way to settle into the new medium will be found.

4D, which is the time-dimension, and in which you can find interactive media like games, and media spread across a longer period of time, such as TV-series, also holds much promise, perhaps more so than 3D. As a story-teller, imagine the potential of having the viewer co-create the story, or of having 50 hours of film to tell a story in. Amazing!

“Hitchcock / Truffaut” is a fascinating study of Hitchcock films, in the form of one long interview between Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut, and I encourage anyone interested in classic cinema to give it a read. It’s also about finding visual elements to tell a story and gives an insight into how cinema has evolved over the years. 4 Thumbs up!

Vincent

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There’s been a lot of discussions over the year about how to protect your pictures’ copyright (e.g.). The number one method appears to be watermarking, which makes sense, though it really won’t prevent anyone from still sticking that picture on a random site. I, personally, haven’t thought much about copyright, but of course, I am not making money from photography.

As I am buying my first SLR camera (a Canon Rebel XSI) pretty soon, I thought a little what I want and don’t want out of photography. I like to make good pictures of course. I like to become a master of the medium. I like to express myself. And, I’d like to be able to take pictures whenever I want to. But one thing I noticed, from taking over 5000 pictures with a Canon Ixus, with less than 5% with me in it, is that I also like to be a part of the picture-experience.

What inspired my idea was my recent upgrade to an Intel Mac with my very first webcam—that’s right, I never saw the attraction until now. It rules! To anyone used to video-Skyping, you’re familiar with the huge video of your friend, and the tiny video of yourself at the bottom.

So, I’m thinking, why not have the same thing for pictures? Taking a picture would then look like this:

Instead of having a pesky and rather ugly watermark, you can see who actually made that picture. You could of course have a little mini-cam in your camera, pointed at you and taking an up-to-date shot of what you look like — that one was taken while I had the flu, some months ago — but a static picture will do the trick most of the time.

What do you think? Should photo-pubishers like Picasa, iPhoto, Flickr, etc. integrate such a feature? Would it have any useful function to you, as a photographer or as a viewer? Share your thoughts!

Vincent

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Just one post this week, it is again the busy period in Vince’s house. This last week, I’ve read two predictions, both, by coincidence, based on the role-model of Apple. The first was David Carr’s, who asked for an iTunes for news in the New York Times. The second was Ian Betteridge’s, who predicted an iPhone-style app-store, controlled by Apple, for all of the Mac. Let me address them both here.

News… what has that looked like over the years? We had print, which lead to books and perhaps pamphlets. Let’s just jump to the 20th century. We’ve had the onslaught of the marketing age, which also made newspapers big. People have never paid for news really, they pay a minimal fee for the price of the paper, the rest of which is covered by advertisers. Then came the internet and it all went down the toilet. You, me, everyone imagined they could be a journalist, even if it meant just copying the text word-by-word of what someone else had written.

Compare that with music. It started with the production of sound, live performances, then the reproduction of sound across various media. The business-model was 90% of the time a straight sale. Music speaks to our brain, differently from the way news does (it’s all drama anyway, right?), and we are hooked on it, like a drug. So we pay and we pay and we pay. Then comes the internet and the magic of painless reproduction and distribution. The power-houses that are media-companies were slow to catch on and it’s pirate-city all round. CD sales go down! In comes smart Apple with their silly little white box with one button and saves the whole damn industry! We think, oh my god, Apple saved retail! What Apple in fact did was close the loop again. Instead of artist -> CD -> shop -> CD -> consumer, we now have artist -> mp3/4/5 -> iTunes -> iPod -> consumer. Everyone wins, though most of all, Apple.

What is the key here?

• For one, music isn’t news. As I pointed out, music is a drug, while news is a duty. Music is fun, while news is … interesting? We can live without the news, believe me, we can’t live without music.
• Two, news was never a powerful business model to begin with. Since the days of Soap-operas, all media has been owned by advertisers, who somehow have made this industry survive, even though no one was really willing to pay for it. Yes, we can also live without television, but we can’t live without music.
• Music is also a tightly controlled product, it’s expensive to make music and to get it into your ears. News, on the other hand, the media has long learned how easy it is to copy-paste.

The internet has shaken both industries and much more so news. Because its sugar-daddies, the advertisers, suddenly realised that they could get away with no longer paying for the expensive process of print and distribution, as well as having many more options to advertise online. The power-position, which was already unbalanced in the first place, has shifted even more in the direction of the advertisers.

For music, the power of supply continued to be in the hands of the media-companies. In case you haven’t noticed, those are some powerful companies and the world of music and other entertainment media is locked down with some big nails—Pandora, Hulu, Joost, iTunes, take your pick, chances are that most of these are not in your country. The internet has had an effect, to be sure, but they control the supply and they have lot’s of money to change things. They finally got iTunes to succumb as well, with their now variable pricing.

There is no analogy here and no matter the superficial similarities and the coming of the “iReader,” there never will be. News will never be something that we want to pay for. Who wants to pay to hear that Hurricane XX has killed millions, or Region YY is filled with starving children, or that Region ZZ has weapons of mass destruction? Because, that, unlike the stories we may read on the internet, is what news really is: making us aware that our planet isn’t all that. Give me a good song any day over having to hear that!

Just briefly, the iPhone store translated to Macs. Why it’s different: it’s i…Phone, the most locked-down technology on this planet. Vs. the PC, which is the most unlocked technology on the planet. Need I spell it out?

The greater point I’m making is that frequently “visionaries” and “entrepreneurs” write their business plan or manifesto stating that because X is so, my business will work that way too. Analogies, taken too loosely, will kill your business and rather than taking the words of visionaries at their face value, we should work it out: Was X like that really, and is your business like that really too? Chances are… it’s not.

Vincent

(man, I love it when I can pump out all this text in 15 min. or less)

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Hi, Fidji here. In the context of my thesis on the democratization of art via the Internet, I had the chance to interview Alain Romang, in charge of the online communication of Les Abattoirs, a modern and contemporary art museum based in Toulouse (France), which has developed a real Internet strategy to reach a new audience. I find really interesting to understand how the Internet, based on open access, has been used by museums, which have tried for a long time to cultivate their sacred atmosphere, whereas their mission is to make their collections as accessible as possible. Here are the most interesting pieces of the interview.

What is the purpose of the online communication of the museum? Attract different people on the website, or in the museum, or is it essentially a loyalty tool?

The first objective was to give some elements of information on opening hours, driving directions… to an audience that starts all its searches on the Internet. Our stats prove that most of the site visits are related to the planning of a visit to the museum. But what we appreciate is that the Internet is also a way of preparing people to the visit of the museum by giving some background on the artist, so that they really can make the most of the exhibition. We can also follow-up after the visit by providing tools to go deeper into the understanding of a particular piece. In terms of finding a new audience thanks to our online initiatives, it is clearly one of our objectives but we haven’t done any survey to prove that it is working yet. Let’s say that we strongly suppose the correlation between the increase in number of visits on our site and the increase in number of visits of our museum.

You offer the possibility of accessing 2000 pieces of art virtually: do you think that it is possible to feel a real artistic emotion on the screen of a computer?

It is almost a philosophical question, but yes, I sincerely believe it, at least if we believe that there are several types of artistic emotions. In the physical museum, there is a relation to the architecture, to a particular atmosphere, and also the intervention of simpler things such as the reaction of other visitors, that you obviously don’t have online. Which is why you really need to use the most appropriate tools online to compensate this, and some virtual exhibitions have clearly manage to achieve this goal.

Do you think that there is a risk of cannibalization of the offline by the online, if most of the collections are accessible online?

I think that the contrary is more likely. I feel that a certain audience, who is not used to visiting museums (for geographical, cultural or sociological reasons) will be more likely to plan a visit to a museum if it had the opportunity of discovering some pieces online. I believe that both experiences are interesting: the Internet is for example much more appropriate for educative purposes since we can put more information online. The two experiences feed each other but there is no cannibalization.*

What are the different objectives of the tools that you use: video, blog of the museum, Facebook page?

The blog allows a better reactivity. We have created it to talk about news of the museum, events or marginal subjects with a more original view that don’t fit within the website. The possibility of commenting is also interesting, since it is, at least for most museums, a new kind of interaction with the audience. And obviously it improves our referencing on search engines thanks to more content and key words.

Concerning pictures and videos on Flickr/Youtube, it is part of the mission of archiving of the museum, but also allows new interactions: Flickr announced the creation of « pools », which will allow visitors to post their own pictures of the museum directly in Les Abattoirs’ Flickr space.

Facebook is more of an experiment so far. Of course the idea of federating a community around the museum is really interesting, but so far we’ve been there only because it is a tool with an amazing growth and I didn’t want to be “late” on such a tool. And thanks to all the new apps, we find new useful modules to add every day, so it forces us to keep being innovative.

What are the next steps to be sure that your museum will remain on top of the new Internet initiatives?

So far we are focused on improving the current tools: redesigning the blog, feeding Flickr and Youtube, expanding our Facebook network. We also want to develop podcasting, targeted to specific exhibitions. Finally, there is the debate on the presence on Second Life: we have done a simple ROI calculation and it seems that at this stage, the time spent to create Les Abattoirs in Second Life is not justified by the frequentation. Of course it creates some media exposure, but we don’t want to do that only to appear in blogs and newspapers. We want to launch this initiative only when we will have more visibility on our return on that, especially since the hype around Second Life is already declining. But we are watching it closely.

* A survey realized by the Institute of Museum and Library Services proves Alain’s point: it shows that people connected to the Internet go to museums 2.6 times more than people without any access. Among the respondents, 45% have visited both a virtual and offline museum, 50% a real museum only and 5% a virtual museum only.

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I was just commenting on Vince’s last article Copyright or the Right-to-Eat and realized that my comment was getting so long that I should better write an article on the subject. This actually funny because I was about to write a piece on exactly the same subject, and for most of it with the same opinion, because I attended on Friday a conference called “New Media Artists and The Law” organized by California Lawyers for the Arts and I wanted to share the thoughts of this conference on this blog. It gathered Emily A. Berger, Intellectual Property Fellow with Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons, and Joel Slayton, Director of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media, and exploring the ways copyright laws are implicated in new media art and the challenges artists face in this evolving area of the law.

In direct connection with Vince’s article, Mike Linksvayer, VP of Creative Commons defended the idea that there are plenty of ways to make a living while giving one’s art for free. But I had the same issue as Vince’s about the status of the artist in our society: what does this reveal if people are not willing to pay for art anymore? I personally believe that the Internet and the culture of gratuity and open access is an opportunity for unknown artists because giving their art away for free allows them to get some market traction and then, be able to sell some “derivatives” of their art, and make money that they wouldn’t have made without this strategy. So for this specific kind of people, I would say that it shouldn’t be an ethical problem to make money on things that are not the product of their art itself, because the product of their art itself wouldn’t have generated any money otherwise. But of course there is the other portion, which can have an opportunity of making money from its art directly, but which will start feeling a certain pressure to give this art for free. I was kind of shocked during this conference to hear artists in the audience speaking about offering their art on the Internet as a fatality, a trend they were obliged to follow, as if the “Myspace success story” was the only hope left. But as Emily A. Berger mentioned during the conference, referring to Chris Anderson’s article “Free”, you will always have free to compete with you: so either you try to make it better than what is offered for free, or you try to tackle the niche of people having more money than time (the iTunes niche, which, with the right pricing, is actually not a niche anymore), or you make it free and find ways to make money otherwise.  An excellent article from Kevin Kelly called “1000 True Fans” argues that an artist only needs 1000 True Fans to make a decent living, since a True Fan, that you can “recruit” via the free offering, will after that be ready to pay for anything related to you. And he also mentions that the Internet allows you to reach this number more easily than traditional channels and therefore find a middle way between the long tail and the superstar.

But while all this talk is perfectly understandable in the case of the music industry which is a market based on volume, it is a totally different story when it comes to visual arts. Which is why I have trouble understanding a copyright law which seems to tackle all the artists as if they were a unified world facing the same challenges. And this is also why I welcome initiatives like Creative Commons which allows people to give away some of their rights when they feel that the copyright law doesn’t answer their needs and that these new licenses can benefit them, as long as (and this is a major risk) it doesn’t put any pressure on other people in the industry to do the same. But how do you adapt these notions of derivatives in the case of visual arts? It is way harder for a painter to get True Fans, and even if he manages to get some, I am not convinced at all that a person falling in love with the image of a painting will be ready to buy a T-shirt with this same image: it is just not the same feeling. The visual art market has somewhat been already confronted to the same kind of problem outside the Internet, like how to monetize a happening or short-lived works of art. When Christo decided to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, he had to find ways of monetizing a work of art that was offered for free to the inhabitants of these cities, and therefore he sold some pictures of the different stages of the experiment. But, to go back to Vince’s point, this is Christo, and a lot of people are interested in those pictures, whereas an unknown visual artist doesn’t have the traction.

Actually, the major paradox is that only artists who would manage to sell their art directly are able to sell derivatives in a significant amount, whereas the starving artists who would be ready to give their art for free and make a living by selling derivatives don’t have the market traction to generate enough interest around their derivatives, especially in visual arts. And after all, even if Emily A. Gerber said “get your art out there by any means, get market traction and after that you’ll see”, a thousand fans is a pretty large number don’t you think?

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This morning, I read an interesting piece written by Steven Poole, and just had to comment on it. In it, he discusses his book, which he released for free (and DRM-free) around the net, and which has received ca. 30,000 downloads so far. But he also discusses the idea of artists, or creators in general, making money, and how that + giving away stuff for free, doesn’t compute.

He also refers to what he calls the “Slashdot argument,” one, I should add, I’ve used myself several times, that (music-)artists should keep giving away their creations for free, because it’s possible, and instead collect revenues from live-performances. As a counter-argument, he uses the programming-profession:

Oh Mr Freetard, you work as a programmer, do you? How interesting. So do you perform all your corporate programming duties for free, and earn your keep by selling personally branded mousemats on the side?

It is actually interesting, because the live-analogy actually applies to programming also; where is software slowly but surely moving too? Towards hybrids, like Software-as-a-Service, Software+Service, and other incarnations, as well as a 100%-on-the-internet model. A hybrid model is, incidentally, also the way gaming-companies like Shanda combat the problem of piracy in China.

But a large part of what he’s saying, I do agree with. Releasing your stuff online, for free or a freemium, is most suitable to artists whose concerts are sure to be sold out: NiN and Radiohead. Plenty of artists, like my mother who paints, just want to create art and sell it; not release it for free and do crazy live stunts to earn a living (even though that’s what’s entrepreneurship is all about).

I guess, when he calls for a renaming of copyright to Right-to-Eat, that perhaps he has a point. There are plenty of people out there, who don’t get copyright, don’t care about it, or justify it through a self-serving argument.

I don’t particularly think that prosecution works that well here—crime is global, while crime-prevention is local—but perhaps we need more education; perhaps we need the equivalent of pictures of blackened lungs on cigarette-packs to be extended to media? The only problem with that are videos like this (couldn’t find the original, so enjoy the parody), which, ironically, mainly target those people who paid for a DVD, while pirates smartly removed that “feature” long before releasing the DVD into the wild. Or perhaps we do need DRM, like the kind that Steven Poole refers too, tying you to your Kindle or iPod?

It’s definitely a tricky situation, and I’m not sure there is an easy answer that works for everyone. I’ve heard of people pasting a big copyright-sign across their pictures; of authors, who read chapters or the whole book for free through a weekly podcast, while selling the book on the side for the impatient. And of course, of Radiohead and NiN, both of whom are huge artists, but who didn’t exactly employ an all-your-eggs-in-one-basket formula either.

But what about my namesake, Vincent van Gogh, an incredibly talented, yet socially awkward individual? If we expected people like him to “perform live” to earn money, perhaps we would have never seen his art today.

This piece is written by Vincent van Wylick, co-author on Tech IT Easy. The picture is courtesy of csauce.wordpress.com.

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For our first post in 2008, what about looking back at 2007 ? Any decent tech-related blog should go through the ritual overview of last year’s tech headlines. However, feeling quite lazy today, I finally chose to come up with a (personal) list of the big winners and losers of the year elapsed, which is a less exhaustive yet quicker way of recollecting the main events of the twelve last months.

Let’s begin with the flops:

1) Netscape. Last October, the last version of Netscape, Netscape Navigator 9, was released. In fact the browser was no more than a revamped version of Firefox 2 – fair enough, the Mozilla project was launched by Netscape after all. But apart from a tiny number of geeks or nostalgics, the Internet users did not see the point in using it rather than Firefox and its thousands of available plugins. Even the buggy Safari made larger inroads in the PC market. AOL finally discontinued the browser at the end of 2007 and announced it would no longer develop newer releases. RIP Netscape, Long Live Firefox !

2) YouTube users. In 2006 many people and corporations discovered YouTube. In 2007, many people and corporations tried to use YouTube to their own benefit, mainly for promotional purposes. The result can be just disastrous, like this EU-sponsored video.

3) DRMs. Since the DRMs were first introduced many pundits were skeptical about its virtues. After all these systems were mutually incompatible, introduced unwanted restrictions (such as preventing you from ripping music on CDs, which is absolutely legal as long as CDs are kept for a personal use, etc…).

Step by step, the vast anti-DRM movement strenghtened in 2007. EMI was the boldest major, the first to disavow DRMs, soon backed by music industry giant Apple (which also happens to sell PCs). Universal followed, and now Warner may have hammered the last nail in the DRMs coffin. SonyBMG, anyone ?

4) Apple TV. Steve Jobs is always bragging and this is becoming quite unbearable. Yet there is a subject on which he should really shut up right now: AppleTV. This expensive and limited multimedia set-top box was a massive failure, such a failure that in fact Steve Jobs refused to unveiled the sales figures of the little marvel. In fact the whole concept of multimedia set-top boxes seems quite lousy or at least immature for now. It might become more interesting when people finally get HD TVs though.

5) Optimus Keyboard. The vaporware of the year? In fact this next-generation keyboard, with keys that are actually tiny screens displaying dynamic pictures, was highly expected – and not only by the fools who pre-ordered it in May 2007. The product is still “in development”as of today…

Runner-ups: Mac OS X Leopard, Windows Vista

Not everything is gloomy in the high-tech world. Here are the Tops:

1) Facebook. With almost 60 million active users and a valuation well above the $10bln, everything is rosy for 2007’s most successful social network. Despite some recent mistakes, Facebook might very well be the next Google.

2) iPhone. OK, it has no 3G nor GPS, the touch keyboard isn’t convenient, and Apple’s third party application limitation policy is just loathesome. Yet the iPhone generated a huge buzz for Apple, sold quite well, and instantly unlocked the industry – competitors just have to innovate or lower prices. Why complain ?

3) Wii. The epitome of Blue Ocean strategy, the Wii turned out to be a considerable success this year, with almost 5.8 million units sold. The production facilities just cannot follow.

4) Zune. Zune’s latest avatars, which seem to have been more than inspired by the highly successful iPod, are quite decent MP3 players. So decent that they made it to the top-list of Amazon’s best sales last November. But since one of our flagship contributors no longer works for Microsoft, there is no need to insist to much on that point now.

5) Tech IT Easy. With a steadily growing reader base, we are happy to say that Tech IT Easy finally succeeded in finding its place amongst the blogosphere, and satisfying our readers. We hope 2008 will see even more improvements, blogposts, recruits, comments, and an even larger traffic.

Runner-ups: Twitter, Netvibes, Blackberry.

What is your list then ?

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That is the question…

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=pr7lDlUfw9w]

Video not available anymore, find it here.

What do you guys think?

via LittleGirl

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“Yo, ho, haul together,

never shall we die.”

Let’s be clear from the start: piracy is a plague. The world would be better off without it, and I condemn it completely.

However! There are, to my mind, interesting lessons that can be learned from piracy, lessons that could change, in the long run, the panorama of music and video industries.

“Haul together, never shall we die”. Though, I admit, the reference to Pirates of the Caribbean is a bit dodgy, it nevertheless illustrates that piracy is a massive phenomenon that has always existed and will continue to exist. In response to this phenomenon, music and video industry majors have reacted, understandably, by raising barriers and making it harder to pirate material. Needless to say these efforts have always been followed by corresponding hacks allowing to overthrow protection. So on one side we have companies investing, often heavily, to try to protect material, and on the other side we have an unidentified mass of hackers working freely to allow an even broader mass of pirates to have access to music and video. It seems to be a lost battle for industry majors, but they really have no choice if they want to make at least some money.

But does someone have a choice?

The problem with digital media, the majors claim, is that it can be easily copied and distributed for free. It is certainly a problem for companies that actually make money by copying and distributing. However, companies are not alone, for we have not yet mentioned the central characters here.

The artists themselves. Yes, of course they suffer from piracy, but it seems to me that they suffer only because they rely too heavily on the industry as it is today –i.e. roughly as it already was before the digital era arrived. It is astonishing that such a dramatic technical revolution has had this little impact on the industry organisation. Artists now have technically all the necessary means to make their creations available to the entire planet without putting a single penny on the table –apart from the actual production costs.

A whole world of possibilities is open, for those who stop a minute to think out of the box (to name one, sellaband.com, for instance). Imagination has rarely been scarce for business models, and the spur of piracy should, well, spur the mutation of the music and video industries.

So artists, if you want to make a CD, go ahead, but you’re warned: it WILL be pirated. Industry majors, if you wish to continue making them, go ahead, but they WILL be pirated.

It’s high time to stop whining about the whole situation, and get a move on, create, make money in unexplored ways, and, since it cannot be eradicated by fighting it, keep Piracy to the 20^th century by making it obsolete.

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