Month: March 2007

Check it out. MusicLoad, a big shot digital music store in Europe has reported that three out of four customer service issues are caused by DRM. The frustration is that the distributors are incurring huge costs. Not only do they get stuck with developing and dealing with DRM, but they are also creating virtual sandboxes that make competing much more difficult. In other words, DRM, such as FairPlay, make it very hard for new stores to sell their DRM (since it won’t play on iPods).

It’s the same old story with a new cast. Anyway, it’s March and two music stores have now come out against DRM in 2007. Let’s hope this all leads somewhere.

In a strange twist of events, a Google executive has confirmed the existence of a Google Phone. I have been corrected.

Apparently, this was an ultra-secret pet project of Larry Page. I still believe the time is not right for such a product, and it presents a strong conflict of interest for Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) to be on the board of directors of Apple.

I will say that the Google phone is not too much of a threat to the iPhone in that the iPhone targets style conscious consumers while the Google phone targets geeks and perhaps business people. We’ll see just how real this phone is when Google announces something officially.

People must keep in mind that Google must have thousands of products that don’t make it into production. While this product is more likely than others to appear on the market due to the backing of the founders, I don’t think it is poised to dominate the market, or even take a significant hold (at least today).

I don’t watch TV (probably the same with a lot of my readers). As a result, I didn’t know Apple is already airing iPhone commercials. The most interesting thing to me about the iPhone is how Apple plans on marketing it compared to how other phone companies have marketed their products.

This commercial is clearly a teaser to let consumers know the product exists. It doesn’t strike me as particularly creative when you consider it is made by Apple.

One of two things is missing from this commercial that exists in virtually every other iPod commercial:

1. Close-ups
2. An image that makes it seem cool

It seems Apple at this point just wants consumers who’ve never heard of the iPhone to see that commercial and ask, “Wait, what the hell was that little thing with the Nemo fish? I saw an Apple logo… But that wasn’t an iPod…”

Still, I was expecting something a little more creative for the first iPhone commercial. So far, they’ve failed, as a marketing team, to distinguish themselves from other phone commercials. But then again, distinguishing themselves is probably not a major concern at this point. 🙂

That’s right, Viacom wants a 10 digit sum from Google! They allege that YouTube has over 160,000 clips on their site belonging to Viacom. It seems Viacom is forgetting all about last month when they demanded YouTube take down 100,000 clips, which Google did. So what exactly is it that Google is being held liable for? Google is complying and taking down whatever copyrighted material gets posted. According to the law, that’s all they need to do to stay legal.

Just as ISPs aren’t held liable for letting torrent users download copyrighted material, Google has the same exception. This is the entire premise of how Google is able to scan and save the contents found on the Internet without liability.

Either way, the whole lawsuit is bogus. Had Google not complied last month, Viacom would have a case. But for all we know, the users that uploaded material could have been Viacom’s own employees. There’s no way to know, and this is exactly why the DMCA protects Google from liability.

For those of you wondering, Google is about 10 times bigger than Viacom. (Correction: Google is 5 times bigger than Viacom)

I keep getting phone spam from this one number and it finally got to me. I went and registered on the (US) National Do Not Call Registry. The process was amazingly simple.

1. First you type in your phone number.
2. Then an email address.
3. Then you click on a link they send you.

Done. For a government web site, I was impressed with its simplicity. Wait 31 days and then if I still get phone spam, I can file to have them fined of up to $11,000. Well, there are cases where companies have paid more.

Another relatively unknown fact is that the bill that introduced the Do Not Call Registry also created a law that allows private citizens to collect money from telemarketers.

For each violation of the act, consumers can sue for a $500 penalty. Violations include calling after a consumer has told a company to stop, or failing to provide the consumer with a copy of the firm’s Do Not Call policy.

Neat, huh? Stupid telemarketers.

Today the Google blog announced a new Google Local feature that shows pictures, reviews, and other information inside a frame when you click on an entry (see pictures). The whole thing is very slick and intuitive. Reviews and pictures are scraped and standardized from a wide range of sources, allowing for quick and informative assessments about a business. They use hotels as an example: to know exactly where a hotel is located, what its rooms looks like, and what others are saying about – all in one place – is extremely useful!

Over all, this alone makes for a great set of enhancements, but it doesn’t stop there.

What’s really cool is the second feature they announced: editable business listings!

As you can see, you can create or edit entries:

You can specify details such as a description, what credit cards you accept, exact operating hours (even supports multiple time ranges in a day), an official search-engine recognized link to your website, categories (e.g., movies, pizza, etc), ambience, average price, general menu items, dress code, and a variety of other customizations. You can also upload images that are officially associated with your listing. Best of all, all changes are then confirmed over the phone or a postcard. Nifty.

Another neat thing it lets you do it move the address marker (the little red thing). This is cool in that it can help you fine-tune exactly where your business is inside, for example, a mall. The interface for that is pretty neat: you get to drag the little target around and the “x” represents where the target will appear when you “drop” it (has a cool animation too).

All these features add up to a huge competitive advantage. Businesses that don’t have web sites (very common, still) can now be indexed, but they won’t appear on competing search engines! That’s a pretty nice tactical advantage against sites like MSN and Yahoo, assuming merchants sign up with only you. Of course, in the long term, such an edge will dwindle as business owners go modern and increasingly have web sites.

But the business that is most directly threatened is City Search. With Local search results directly linked off of their main search engine, they can easily skim traffic that would have otherwise gone to sites like City Search or Yelp. Having already spidered external listings, and having its own exclusive listings, I can see people choosing to use Google Local before other directories. Mind you, some percentage of the traffic will still end up going to the sites that the content is scraped from, but remember that if Google builds its own database, it is able to take a significant cut of the pie for itself without having to share the traffic. In the long term, this is a major threat to any business directory web site.