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Behind the scenes of Obama Girl

The videos of BarelyPolitical.com are becoming more and more funny, and more and more seen.
One dutch TV channel interviewed these guys

As Ben Relles describes, this would not have been possible in 2004, even if Internet was already extremely popular by then. This phenomenon today is empowered by Web 2.0, and the YouTubes, Facebooks and hundred of thousands of bloggers.

Amber Lee, Obama Girl, admits the Crunch on Obama clip was shot in just 6 hours! The means to produce quality content are so inexpensice these days, that it is unleashing a tsunami of creativity from a new generation. MySpace, YouTube and viral blogging are providing a mass distribution power rivalling that of TV stations.

How did BarelyPolitical and its Obama Girl became such a hit in such a short time? The mavens-connectors-salesmen, Stickiness factor and Context of the Tipping Point should explain the theory… but the practical implementation is a secret for me yet, except for the Stickiness factor that I can see it is very well provided by Amber. The Obama Girl does stick.

Posted in Internet, Media & New Economy | 1 Comment »

Microsoft Apocalypse 2018

April 2018. DIGooGle makes popular a GigaCrunch post: Microsoft Apocalypse

Vista was the beginning of the end. A few years after its launch, the debacle was inevitable. First the SMEs and SOHO abandoned Microsoft when it stopped Windows XP support. By that time Google had launched G-Enterprise, consisting of Google Apps + Skype Enterprise Edition + Salesforce.com + Goobuntu Enterprise Desktop + Android Nomad Office. To this package companies could add Google Shared Drive, as a common network storage, and Apps Engine to develop the company Intranets, Extranets and any company web application.

SMEs, fed up with Microsoft tyranny on expensive licenses for  Windows, Office and Exchange,  moved to G-Enterprise. Not only companies saved licenses, but also increased productivity, shifting employees mindset to use network collaborative tools like Google Docs, Salesforce or Skype. Meantime, the Cloud on which these tools resided was safely managed by Google. Microsoft SaaS offering came too late, and no one trusted Hotmail as a serious email for work.

Multinationals followed the G-Enterprise trend some years later, hitting severely Microsoft licenses sales, with the Server segment already dominated by Linux.

On the consumer front, Apple ended being the winner. After some Microsoft viral campaigns that destroyed Microsoft image, consumers were embarrassed of admitting they had been fooled to buy Vista. Apple got even more iconic and stylish, and not having a Macbook or an iMac just meant you were not in. Some teenagers issued (and won) lawsuits against their parents for the emotional damage of forcing them to use a Windows PC instead of a Mac. Linux still commanded some market share, thanks to LinuxMCE, mainly used by lovers of P2P file-sharing free content. Linux remained the warranty for freedom against any monopolistic move from Apple.

Such was the hit taken by Microsoft with its loss of licenses income, that it was forced to split and sell its two profitable businesses: 

• first the gaming business went to Google that transformed the console into Gbox360 featuring targeted advertisement within the games, 
• then the on-line business, branded Yahoo Live, went to News Corp, that had already acquired Facebook years before

Microsoft software license business was finally acquired by IBM, still nostalgic of a decision they should have made 40 years earlier. Microsoft was merged within IBM Lotus division, that surprisingly still managed to sell to banks. Windows was renamed OS2 Warp Second Edition, and IBM licensed it to Lenovo PCs and Thinkpads.

A sad ending for a company that transformed the world with its software.

Note: This fiction prediction might not come true. We expect Microsoft puts the means to avoid it.

Posted in FictionPrediction, Internet, TOP Popular Posts | 1 Comment »

Mobile Music keep growing in Japan

Thanks to KDDI Lismo music service, 90% of the digital music sales in Japan comes from mobile, according to Wireless Watch Japan. The Record Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) has reported 2007 figures, with total sales increasing for third year in a row, and with an spectacular 91% increase in Mobile Music downloads.

Quoting Music Media Watch, :
“Total music sales for 2007 in Japan came to JPY 466 billion (US $4.66 billion). While CD/DVD sales declined 4% from the previous year, digital downloads jumped up 41% to JPY 75.5 billion (US $755 million), comprising 16% of all music sold in Japan. Mobile downloads accounted for JPY 68 billion (US $680 million), more than 90% of the total figure for digital sales.”

Japan is the biggest mobile music market in the world, fifty times bigger than the German one. This raises 2 questions:

1) Would it be so successful if the RIAJ had imposed a tax on mobile phones to account for (or rather to legitimize) piracy?

2) Will the 3G iPhone be able to grab a significant share of this market? Will the iPhone succeed in Japan?

Posted in Asia Pacific, Media & New Economy | 1 Comment »

Why Google should buy Skype

Add GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Salesforce.com and Skype in a package. Is there a better value proposition for SMEs and SOHOs for their IT and Communications infrastructure?

Add a Linux distro for the business desktop, supported by Google, and you have a killing package for the small and medium business, with an unbeaten TCO.

Google is determined to enter into the corporate market, as the recent partnership with Salesforce.com demonstrates. Large enterprises and multinationals might be reluctant to outsource part of their IT to Google, arguing concerns on security. Yet Google Data Center is more reliable than most corporate data centers. A fire two years ago in their Data Center sent hundreds of servers into ashes. No Google end-user was impacted.

It might take longer to convince large companies, but for SMEs the proposition is too strong to be neglected. Skype, with SkypeIn and SkypeOut, plus Google reliability, is a terrific solution for enterprises, benefiting not only from cheap voice, but also from IM, Videocalls, file-sharing, and potential integration with Gmail and Google Apps.

Microsoft should be worried.

Posted in Internet, Telecom | 3 Comments »

Nokia disappoints, Google exceeds expectations

Nokia Q1 results have disappointed analyst, even if revenues grew 28% YoY to reach $20 billion and net profit reached $1.9 billion, up 25% from last year. Nokia shipped 115 M handsets in Q1, 27% YoY growth, with strong performance in emerging markets (Asia, Africa and Middle-East). Still Nokia lost market share from 40% to 39% worldwide.The average price per handset decreased to $125, from $132 in the previous quarter and $141 in the first quarter last year, consequence of the price pressure in emerging markets, and of losing ground on the high-end market to iPhone and Blackberry.

Despite the double-digit growth in revenues and profits, Nokia shares lost 13.5% on Thursday. The market seem to discount a decrease in margins as a result of the loss of brand leadership to iPhone, the threat of Android following iPhone’s revolutionary concept, and the erosion that Blackberry takes on Nokia sales to business customers.

The Market is re-positioning Nokia from the top high-end brand to the top brand in emerging low-price markets.

Meantime, Google exceeded expectations with a 42% YoY revenue growth up to $5.2 Bn, with a net profit growth of 30% to $1.3 Bn. The paid clicks in the first quarter were up 20 percent from a year ago, against the reports from comScore, the Web audience measuring firm, warning a sharp decline in clicks. Google stock surged 17%. The potential Microsoft-Yahoo merger creating a stronger competitor to Google does not seem to worry investors either.

See more details on NYT’s:

Nokia Disappoints Investors With Forecast

Google Defies the Economy and Shows Profit Surge

Posted in Internet, Telecom | No Comments »

How much is Skype worth?

eBay announced results, and Skype was part of them. Skype revenues have increased 61% year-on-year to reach $126M. Skype added 33M new users for a total of 309M. Skype makes most of its revenue with SkypeOut, where the tariffs barely cover the interconnection costs to finalize the calls in the telco’s networks. So even if revenues grow, the margins are still slim, and there is no outlook that the margin will improve unless there are new (paid) features or the business model changes.

Even if the number of users would grow exponentially, that would also have an impact is cannibalizing SkypeOut, as some users move from traditional phones to Skype, making SkypeOut not required to reach them.

Being optimistic we could forecast net profits in the range of $10-$30M per year, that at a Price-Earning Ratio (PER) of 15 would value Skype at a maximum of $450M.

As a user, Skype rocks. Technically it is superb: very wise P2P concept, high voice quality with bandwidth adaptation, very decent videocalls, IM, file sharing, SkypeOut…  Even with a proprietary technology, non-IMS compliant, it delivers all that IMS promises to deliver. Absolutely great.

But the value to the user is not necessarily related to the market value of the company. eBay is aware of that, and according to GigaOM, expect news over the weekend. TechCrunch predicts that an alliance with Google could be coming.

Posted in Internet, TOP Popular Posts | 1 Comment »

Born to run

After the experience of watching Vista SP1 clip, you deserve to listen and watch the actual Boss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6se90rFN1qI

I hope it made you forget  Vista video.

Posted in Inspirational | No Comments »

Vista SP1 video: Is this a viral marketing campaign from Apple?

The level of taste is not there. Whether a spoof or the real thing, this video of Vista SP1 is making Microsoft image sink even more, compared to the stylish Mac OS X.

If this video is part of a viral campaign, the awareness has clearly been created, but the associations that the video inspires are far from helping Vista and Microsoft. Microsoft should better start renewing their image. Soon people will be embarrassed to say they have Vista, and be associated with the level of taste of this video.

Just have a look at the blogsphere reactions: TechCrunch, Engadget or The rise and fall of Microsoft’s civilization: Caught on video.

Do you know anyone that is embarrassed to say they have a MacBook or an iMac?

Posted in Digital Home | 2 Comments »

Mobile Web: emerging or dying?

WAP was one of the big disappointments of the mobile industry in the late 90s. Mobile Internet would be enabled by WAP, that would allow Internet access adapted to the small screens and lower processing power of the handsets of the time.

Telcos invested a lot of money to deploy the first WAP infrastructure and first Mobile portals, only to find that the service was completely unusable: too many clicks, too slow. On top of that operators tried to peel the onion with a too high price for mobile data, as they benchmarked WAP data rate with the price per byte of SMS (outrageously high, in terms of Euro/Byte). The failure was such that WAP was renamed Wait And Pay by the users, and mobile operators did not recover their investment.

Since those days, a lot of effort was put by operators to create better Walled Gardens, with downloads (games, ringtones, music tracks, etc), video-streaming and other WAP applications. WAP still requires a significant amount of Interoperability Tests (IOT)  and WAP pages adaptation to guarantee applications will work. Usability and usage have increased, but still the penetration of the service is rather low (13%). Applications developed for Symbian, Blackberry and Windows Mobile, such as Google Maps, Gmail client or MobileTV Rich Media Clients have improved user experience, but still required important adaptation to keep up with the evolution of handset models

Only with the arrival of the iPhone and its Safari browser, Mobile Internet is beginning to show signs of success. As commented in previous post, 85% of iPhone users access the web from the handset, compared with a 13% of the overall market. One of the keys for this success is the performance of Safari rendering regular web sites. Such is the success of iPhone/Safari, that many mobile applications developers are seriously considering to drop any more native Mobile Application, and just focus on websites designed with mobile in mind.

As web based applications improve - and they have improved a lot; see Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube or AdobeTV -, and as handset browsers get more powerful, supporting JavaScript and Flash , there will be a bigger trend to write apps for these mobile browsers. Applications will work  similarly in the desktop and in handsets such as iPhone or Android. Furthermore the browser gives enough abstraction to avoid handset adaptations and porting applications to different mobile OS’s.

Is this the end of native mobile applications? Will mobile handsets connect to the Cloud sooner that PCs?

Posted in Internet | No Comments »

Internet TV: Everybody wants to play

Last week we commented on the move of Adobe into Internet TV - beyond the pure technology role they already play in YouTube. After testing Adobe Media Player, I like it specially for the control it gives you to decide what to watch every night, compared to regular TV. Technically, in slow broadband connections the streamed programmes do not play optimally, with too much re-buffering. I would have preferred a progressive downloadapproach, such as the one YouTube uses: i.e. you can start watching the show before it is downloaded, but once downloaded, you can watch it as many times as you want without any buffering, as the file is in a temporary folder in the local drive.

There were more Internet TV news last week, which ReadWriteWeb compiles and comments:

• Blockbuster moving online after recent acquisition of Movielink, with plans to launch an Internet TV set-top box, a la AppleTV, Netflix, Tivo or Vudu.
• BBC iPlayer will be made available in Nintendo Wii console, what would make Wii a stronger player in a field where it is lagging behind PS3 and Xbox360. The iPlayer will use the Web browser with flash support in Wii. More than 42 million programmes have been accessed through iPlayer since Christmas 2007 launch until March.
• Babelgum, Joost competitor, is moving from purely content distribution to content creation by setting up a $10m production fund.

Everybody wants to play in Internet TV. This is becoming a threat to telcos that have deployed IPTV. While IPTV is still superior in terms of user experience and it is able to appeal to a wider audience (not necessarily techie or PC savvy), Internet TV just make use of the increasing bandwidth available to offer Internet TV with a global reach, not tied to a broadband access provider.

Exclusive content (like football, NBA or F1), ease of use, and user experience will keep IPTV differentiated for a while. As Internet TV catches up, IPTV providers will need to add more applications to still win the race.

Posted in Internet, Media & New Economy | No Comments »