A week ago Apple has confirmed the secure of another broadcaster on its iTunes Store - the prestigious HBO http://tinyurl.com/6fsn7p . I logged in into iTunes Music Store and counted over 60 networks in its TV Shows section - that's a lot! Quite comparable with any cable or satellite operator. And we're talking the big names here, not the noname brands Joost are trying to sell us as the next-generation TV, but the whole alphabet soup of ABC, CBS, NBC and now HBO.
I've heard several times in the past the claim the iTunes Music (and Video) Store is only the means of Apple to sell more iPods and iPhones, but I'm starting to believe now that the opposite is true. I don't think people are encouraged to buy iPods anymore because of the availability of music through iMS. People buy them because they’re cool and have a great UI. Using iTunes is more often than not the necessary evil of having an iPod. Which is exactly how Steve Jobs would like it to be. Being both Apple's CEO and the largest stakeholder of Disney, Jobs has a clear view out his window of the future of the media world. And in that future there's a value chain that begins with the networks and ends at your iPod, and Jobs wants to control both ends of the stick.
Forget about content democratization, long-tail and UGC, according to Jobs the world of the future is the same world of the present minus your cable operator and its primitive box. It's where content is premium, paid-for, globally accessible (or at least where Apple has a retail presence) and is delivered directly to your Apple mobile device.
There's only one piece missing to the puzzle - Apple doesn't really control the distribution of the content. Rather it relies on the services of a content distribution network - Akamai. Akamai had a very unstable year, with its stock jumping up and down ($25.00-$51.00 range over the last year), but it is still the leader in the CDN market. In my view, buying Akamai would make perfect sense for Apple who will gain a full control over the distribution of content. This could complete the transition of Apple from a computers company into a media company.
Here’s a prediction for you.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
PeopleRank - how important you realy are
With all the different social networking platforms around (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many many others), all exposing APIs allowing you to access the entwined web of social connections, mind the following interesting idea - PeopleRank.
I assume most of you are familiar in one way or another with Google's PageRank algorithm which is at the heart of Google’s search engine. The idea is that website pages are ranked according to their relevancy and their relevancy is determined by two main factors - the number of hyperlinks pointed to them and the quality of the hyperlinks, where quality is defined by the PageRank (a recursive definition) of the referring pages. So Google is constantly running over webpages and updates their PageRank in an iterative process.
The same can be applied over people to determine their online importance. Using social networking APIs, a person can be analyzed by these very same parameters - the number of followers to this person (that is - the number of people that consider him as a friend, not the number of friends he think he has) and the PeopleRank of the people referring to him.
Once we establish importance of people, the next question is how we use this system of ranks. Unlike PageRank, I can't see PeopleRank driving the mechanism of a search engine (not even people search engine), but there are other applications more suitable to use this database.
For example, consider viral marketing. It is a fair assumption that high-ranked people have better viral marketing abilities than low-ranked people. My hunch is that Michael Arrington and even Blonde 2.0 will get a higher rank, then say ... me. So, why not allow an advertiser or other parties who are interested in accessing a large and relevant crowd in an effective manner, to approach high-ranked people as marketing agents. A new business model may emerge, including paying money for these new marketiers in this value-chain.
That's only one example - feel free to use the comments link for other ideas for PeopleRank apps.
I assume most of you are familiar in one way or another with Google's PageRank algorithm which is at the heart of Google’s search engine. The idea is that website pages are ranked according to their relevancy and their relevancy is determined by two main factors - the number of hyperlinks pointed to them and the quality of the hyperlinks, where quality is defined by the PageRank (a recursive definition) of the referring pages. So Google is constantly running over webpages and updates their PageRank in an iterative process.
The same can be applied over people to determine their online importance. Using social networking APIs, a person can be analyzed by these very same parameters - the number of followers to this person (that is - the number of people that consider him as a friend, not the number of friends he think he has) and the PeopleRank of the people referring to him.
Once we establish importance of people, the next question is how we use this system of ranks. Unlike PageRank, I can't see PeopleRank driving the mechanism of a search engine (not even people search engine), but there are other applications more suitable to use this database.
For example, consider viral marketing. It is a fair assumption that high-ranked people have better viral marketing abilities than low-ranked people. My hunch is that Michael Arrington and even Blonde 2.0 will get a higher rank, then say ... me. So, why not allow an advertiser or other parties who are interested in accessing a large and relevant crowd in an effective manner, to approach high-ranked people as marketing agents. A new business model may emerge, including paying money for these new marketiers in this value-chain.
That's only one example - feel free to use the comments link for other ideas for PeopleRank apps.
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