For example, users with a RIM Blackberry two-way pager will be able to access a corporate order sales processing program to check the status of a customer order or back-ordered equipment and pricing via an application rather than a Web browser, Green said.
6:10:04 PM    comment   

"The solution is actually quite simple and requires only three steps:

1. Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
2. Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and retroactive to all existing works.
3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; they're consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I don't know about you, but I'm not much pleased any more."

These recommendations provide a solution for the problems on the production side of copyrights (and may be made a reality if the Supreme Court strikes down some of the last century's extensions to copyright terms), but what about the consumption side?  We should assume the following:

1. All copy protection schemes will fail.
2. Storage technology will soon make it possible for an individual to store a complete set of all movies, music, and books published over the last one hundred years. My estimate is that in twenty years personal storage technology will be at the 16 exabyte level (storage double in price performance every nine months).   The cross-over point where personal storage exceeds available copyrighted works is in ten years at the 500 terabyte level.
3. USB/Firewire technology will soon (five years) enable people to share data at 3.2 Gigabytes per second.  This is a movie or 1,000 songs per second (granted, this doesn't account for hard-drive I/O which is doubling every 2 years). 

So, we should assume the technology will make sharing content extremely easy and impossible to protect against.  The release of unprotected works (according to the Fraase plan) into the public domain would certainly spawn a new industry focused on digitizing, organizing and managing available content.  However, it doesn't address how copyrighted works would generate revenue for authors and artists on copyrighted works (whatever the term of the copyright).   

Clearly, the pay-per-sip model of content consumption needs to change to an all-you-can-consume model that's paid for on a flat subscription basis.  The value proposition is assured quality, speed, reliability, presentation, organizing tools, and service.   Fees to specific artists could be paid on a per use basis behind the scenes.  This would force a consolidation in the entertainment industry in order to amass the largest libraries of both copyrighted and uncopyrighted content. 

What would be the subscription cost?  Check my math and figures here (this is a back of the envelope calculation in the spirit of fun), but the total world-wide revenue of the US movie (~$40b), music (~$15b), and Book Publishing ($25b) industries is ~$80b.  On a per-household basis that is $60 a month (assume US has 110 m households) -- or $100 a month if only 65 m households pick it up.  So, it is possible to build a system, within the US alone that replicates all the revenue generated by the industries at risk with an all-you-can subscription model.  Granted, this doesn't include cable, TV, magazine, and newspaper publishers (that complicates the picture), but it points to a possible solution.  Also, it's clear that most people would still like to read bound books (but new personal publishing tech could make that possible at a low cost). [John Robb's Radio Weblog] [OMJ: My Organization]
5:09:25 PM    comment   

Here is what I consume in an average month:

>>>About, as a result, may break even on a cash-flow basis in the first quarter, according to the company, but revenue will be less than $50 million a year. Total new-media revenue is expected to be 8 percent to 12 percent of the $1.7 billion in sales Primedia expects this year.

But it is hard to see how that gusher of clicks (from About.com) comes with any viable business model that justifies the cost of the deal, a stock transaction worth $690 million when it was announced in October 2000 but $428 million by the time it closed the next February. Mr. Rogers says the company got crucial digital capacity without laying out cash it did not have and acquired $109 million in cash at the same time. <<<

The wild part about this is that the technology of About.com could be built better today for less than a hundred thousand $$ using Radio.  The key is decentralized publishing. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
5:06:39 PM    comment