Statistically speaking, there is a good chance you already have a Razr. If you don't, it's either because you resent their ubiquity, or you just wanted something a little more full-featured. So, whether you have the old Razr, or hate the old Razr, or simply want more out of a phone than just a phone, here's why you should take a close look at the Motorola's Razr2. And also why you shouldn't.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'll freely admit that receiving this phone made me giddy. Like it or hate it, the original Razr was an iconic piece of industrial design; it oozed coolness and sleekness and redefined how electronics can indeed be sexy. However, Motorola followed the Razr with a string of vowel-short failures like the ill-fated Rokr, the cool but impractical Pebl, and the tepidly-received Rizr. So when word came out that Moto was going to redo the Razr, technophiles everywhere saw it as the company's big shot at redefining its mobile phone line and creating another benchmark product. So did they?
Yes, I actually think they did. Or, at least, they half-did.
The hardware half of the phone is truly terrific. There's no plastic to be found; the screens are hardened glass, the interior is stainless steel, and the exterior is vacuum-formed metal (which I presume to be magnesium or aluminum). Whatever the chemical makeup, the phone has just enough weight to feel substantial and strong, and a thinness (11.9mm) that belies its toughness. The old Razr, while light and thin, set a new standard for the throw-away cell phone with its plastic everything and flimsy hinge. The new model has none of the frailties of the old -- it is a downright pleasure to hold, open and operate.
That said, when you do open and operate, you're greeted with a slightly cleaner, quicker version of the same old woeful Moto operating system. Oddly, Motorola took a somewhat backwards approach to revising the phone's interface; while its underpinnings are the new JUIX Java Linux platform, its appearance and menu structure are all too familiar -- not the usual visual rehab that most gadget companies opt for first. Hopefully in the future, Motorola will complement the platform's respectable guts with a less unwieldy interface.
What do I mean by "unwieldy"? Let's say you want to send a text message. On my ancient Nokia candy-bar, I click the left d-pad key and I'm immediately brought to a new message, where I can start typing. That's one click and I'm messaging away. On the iPhone, I tap SMS, hit the "create" icon, add a recipient and start typing. That's four clicks. On the RAZR2, you have to click an excruciating nine times before actually inputting any text. And once you're there, you have to manually set the typing mode each time to iTap, Moto's predictive text software, which adds another three clicks. Is this going to ruin my day? No. Is it going to make it more likely that I'll walk into a lightpole as I attempt to text and walk? Yes. Definitely yes.
There's also the issue of the touchscreen buttons on the face of the device. When you press a function key below the volume toggle, it reveals to you three buttons on the outer screen: one for the camera, one for the music player, and one for voice dialing. The problem with this system deserves its own paragraph.
Firstly, the buttons provide "haptic" feedback, which means that the phone vibrates lightly when you tap the touch-buttons. However, the feedback is a slow and inconsistent, so you really have to press and hold before the button activates (and the phone buzzes accordingly). This isn't how buttons work in real life, and thus, is not how buttons should behave virtually. Another foil: while it's cool to turn on the camera with the phone closed, you can't get it out of camera mode unless you open the thing and click the "end" button. Which prompts the question: what good is the external camera button if you have to open the phone anyway? I can't speak to the operation of the music button; Verizon seems to have disabled the music player capability on its Razr2. And the voice dialing, while surprisingly effective at comprehending the names of my loved ones, makes an absurdly loud beep every time its activated. As if using voice dialing in public isn't embarrassing enough already.
If you're wondering about the basics, here they are: the phone is quad-band GPRS/EDGE with 3G technology, and the HTML browser is fast. The 2MP camera actually takes beautifully sharp photos and includes zoom and video capture. Bluetooth, of course, 470 minutes of talk time, and 512MB of on-board memory (with a microSD slot for more). Motorola claims 330 hours of standby time, which seems a little optimistic in my experience. It charges and interfaces with the world via one proprietary USB 2 port. Sound quality was excellent, as was reception.
Yes, this phone requires a bit of cognitive load in even simple tasks. But the thing itself -- the gleaming, buzzing, whirring physicality of it -- more than makes up for its platform's shortcomings. The Verizon version clearly won't be great for media, as it has some of the all-too-familiar operation handicaps that make it impractical as a combination phone and Mp3 player. That said, it's a phone, and a very good one when it comes to the basics: sound quality, volume, reception, and durability. In short, it might not be so surprising anymore to see a paper-thin mobile phone these days, but that doesn't make the new Razr2 any less attention-worthy.
I'm going to try to be equitable here, because no one needs to read another anti-Vista rant or Apple-is-God paean. Windows does some things very well; its Previous Versions feature in Vista, for example, has rescued a number of my precious documents from user-induced oblivion. That said, it's hard to be totally even-handed when Leopard (aka Mac OS 10.5) so handily outshines any other computing interface heretofore created by human beings.
Hold the hate mail -- I promised more than a simple paean, and I'll deliver. I've been using Leopard for only a few days, and it's already changed the way I understand the limits of a personal computer. However, I don't think much of that has to do with Apple, or how great Apple is, or how badly I wish I had invested in them in 2002.
OS 10.5's New Look
What does that mean, anyway, that Leopard has changed "the limits of the personal computer?"
Well, for one, I've long taken for granted that my Desktop space is a finite, two-dimensional work area that can fit only so much stuff. I can see Firefox and Mail together, but if those two applications are active, then I can't see iChat behind them. Most users (Windows folks included) have become accustomed to tabbing through applications, hiding or minimizing windows, and closing unnecessary programs to clear up screen real estate. Cue a new feature called Spaces, which is the most welcome addition to my life since Red Bull started making the big cans.
Spaces in Action
Spaces, in a nutshell, allows you to have "virtual desktops." You can select which applications you want to operate on which desktop. I, for example, have my Adobe suite to run on one "space," which I distinguish from my entertainment "space" (iTunes and iChat), and my small applications "space" (Dictionary, iCal, and Address Book). If I click on Address Book, say, all the crap on the screen shoots off to the side, and I'm greeted by all the open apps in my small applications space. If I tab back to Photoshop, all those small apps are cleared off the screen, so that I only see my Adobe programs. If this is getting too metaphysical for anybody, Apple's site explains it aptly.
Now, before any Apple-hating turbo-nerds comment that this feature is not new, save your breath. Yes, virtual desktops have existed in Linux for a while now. So have many of Apple's core features and technology (including their much-vaunted Mach Kernel). That's why Apple deserves some credit, in my opinion: not because they're an innovator, necessarily, but because they're excellent at surveying the technological landscaping and cherry picking the most effective technologies. But that's far from saying that they deserve all the credit.
Take their "multi-touch" technology -- the feature on the iPhone that allows you to pinch and stretch photos to enlarge or shrink them -- as another example. Multi-touch: also not a new idea. For one, a company called FingerWorks developed it, and Apple secretly bought them out in 2005. NYU computer science guru Jeff Han also developed a futuristic touch-based interface a couple of years ago which you can watch (and drool over) below:
Okay, that video was cool, but stay with me. Time Machine, another one of Leopard's flagship features, is also not new; all it does is take regular ole auto-backup software and integrate it into the OS. It's not magic. You still need an external hard drive. Time Machine is simply a smarter application of an existing technology.
What I'm getting at here is more an assessment of Apple's sound business strategy than its cult-inspiring design or technology. Apple didn't have to radicalize the MP3 player before succeeding with the iPod, and they didn't invent much for Leopard, either. But what they consistently do better than anyone else (ahem, Redmond, Washington) is take stock of what smart people are doing on the fringes of the Valley. They look around, asking, Where is the VC money going to these days? Who's doing something that will simplify, rather than confuse, the lives of computer users? As it turns out, the answers to those questions usually lead Apple to folks who have done the heavy lifting for them, and it's simply their willingness to throw money at the idea that gets them ahead in the PC space. Microsoft, with their gobs of capital, has yet to figure out how to do this effectively; they get in too late, with too little (see Facebook; Zune).
At heart, it doesn't really matter if you like Apple or hate them. Leopard's salient improvements will trickle down to the next version of Windows, as well as the next round of cell phones, public computing systems, and handhelds. As more companies look to Apple for copycat material, more of what makes the Mac OS great will improve computing on the whole. Apple may have only 6% market share, but it's safe to bet that whether or not you intend to, you'll eventually be loving something about Leopard. So save yourself some time, give in, and try it now.
This morning I had the pleasure of disagreeing vehemently with an online column entitled "Pitfalls of Marrying an Entrepreneur." The column's thesis seems to be that spouses of entrepreneurs should be prepared to take a back seat to their mate's business. Here's how they put it [n.b., emphasis is mine]:
[Entrepreneurs] feel they have a mission to create. And something in life normally has to give. That means a partner must be accommodating: willing to sacrifice almost everything for the business and willing to put up with the ego of their ambitious other half.
At one point in the piece, the author refers to entrepreneurs as "empire builders" who are "never satisfied." Empire builders? Are there not plenty of business-owners who a) start a business to sell it quickly or b) establish a successful business and just ride the wave?
When one starts a business, there are two options: success and failure. But "success" has some sub-options that can actually be quite beneficial to a marriage -- or friendship, or any kind of relationship.
Yes, surely there is the example of the entrepreneur who starts one [insert your business here] and then gradually expands with entities in every county in the state. But that is damn hard to do. Most people, whatever their ambition, don't have the mental resources to oversee, say, 10 dry cleaning stores; those "empire-builders" are the very small minority. Do I feel sorry for their spouses? Maybe. But my guess is that this 1% of entrepreneurs is not married in the first place. And if they were, they aren't anymore.
What about the other 99% of entrepreneurs, the ones who present so many "pitfalls" to their potential mates? They take those sub-options of success, presuming their business succeeds at all. They can sell the venture, make a nice sum, and either return to their sinecure stress-free, or retire completely. Or, they can take their business to the logical equilibrium between success and self-sacrifice, and just be happy with it.
Take, for example, the owner of Skimshop.com, a boardsports company based out of Connecticut. It's owned by an acquaintance of mine, and he runs it out of his home. He's in his early 20's. His parents are his only two employees. Has the business scaled up? Absolutely; they do sales volume that increases almost exponentially every year. But, as with many Web businesses (and an increasing number of entrepreneurs are Web-based), that doesn't mean that he buys a massive warehouse and hires 1,000 people. He and his parents do all the Web design, shipping, and accounting, because that's what's most manageable; if he expands beyond that, he's out of his comfort zone, and he's risking his business.
The phenomenon of the entrepreneur with the MBA is a relatively recent one; entrepreneurship programs are sprouting up at universities all over the country, but most of the folks that start businesses don't have the knowledge or inclination to be "empire builders." What they do have, however, is creativity, drive, self-confidence and dynamism.
Of course, I shouldn't presume they succeed; in fact, a huge percentage of aspiring entrepreneurs simply fail. So if you're thinking about marrying someone who's successfully birthed a business, rejoice: they're capable, smart, and able to plan long-term. I'd be more wary of the folks who attempt to start a business, fail, and give up, than the ones who aspire for empire. Those are the people that might lack the persistence and passion to shoulder a marriage.
So go ahead, marry your potential dry cleaning magnate. Chances are, he or she will be more interesting than that accountant you dated a few years back.
In my hands I hold the HTC Touch, a compact take on the touchscreen smartphone. Is it cool? Yes. Does it one-up a certain Apple phone? No. But you can think of this Windows Mobile-based device as more fun than a Blackberry, and more business than the iPhone. But it's no mere copycat; the HTC has some cool interface tricks up its sleeve that are sure to make other smartphone owners covetous.
The Touch, which will be available for $249 with a 2 year contract, hits the market on November 4. Its biggest advantage is its size; if you've ever lugged around a bigger smartphone, you know they can feel like bricks. The Touch is sized at just 3.9 x 2.2 x 0.5 inches, and weighs a scant 4 ounces -- perfect for a shirt pocket or tiny purse. So how well does it actually work?
The Touch runs on Windows Mobile 6, with a few HTC enhancements. The phone's home screen is a "today" plug-in that shows you everything from calendar appointments to weather conditions to ringer profiles. There's a lot going on here -- when I handed the phone to an unwary friend and asked him to figure out how to actually make a phone call, it took him a minute. But once you learn to interpret the home screen's layout, there is a surprising amount of information on hand at-a-glance, information which can only be had on a Blackberry or iPhone after a little navigating.
When you do navigate around the Touch, you find it is of two personalities: its more apt, useful HTC facade, and its clumsier Windows underpinnings. To their credit, HTC (and Sprint) have made their plug-in features quite useful: the "Touch Cube," for example, is a brilliant way to get more real estate out of a smaller screen. Swipe your thumb up the home screen, and you get a Palm-like grid of icons with shortcuts to Internet, IM, Mail, SMS and other useful stuff. Swipe horizontally across that grid and the whole screen rotates like a virtual Rubix Cube, revealing a grid of shortcuts for your favorite contacts. It's simple, intuitive, and finger-based operation like this that has made Apple's iPhone so popular.
And yet, buried in the bowels of the Touch are slow, frustrating Windows features that are best avoided at all costs. The phone comes with a stylus (two, actually), adding to the impression that it can't quite decide what to be. Pulling out the stylus is asking for trouble, as buttons on the Touch's screen can be impossibly tiny, even for a pen tip (the on-screen keyboard, for example, has individual keys that are no bigger than the "e" at the end of this sentence.) The OS is often laggy, byzantine and visually unimpressive, and the pokey 400Mhz chip doesn't do much to expedite things.
Once I disciplined myself to avoid using the "Start" bar (and therefore, the stylus), the phone became a much more friendly and practical companion. The physical buttons, especially the volume slider on the side, have great tactile feedback, and the phone feels meant for quick, one-handed touch operation in a way that bigger phones aren't. Internet and data transmission over the CDMA connection was reliable, but definitely not fast. The Sprint TV feature, by contrast, was impressively quick and streamed well, but I couldn't find much to watch.
The camera, while only 2 megapixel, is a surprisingly capable addition to the Touch, with adjustments (like white balance) not oft found on a camera phone. It also has a proficient video mode, the limitation of which depends on the size of the microSD card you put into the phone. Creative options don't come at the cost of business functionality, however; you still get push Outlook (Exchange-ready) email, Microsoft Office functionality and a mobile Adobe PDF reader. And while this phone can do a lot, it doesn't do it quickly; processor-intensive tasks like editing documents and photos sometimes make the OS hang.
Battery life was impressive, especially in standby; Sprint claims 250 hours, and while I did use the phone periodically, I was surprised to have it last days at a time without needing any juice. Claimed talk time is 3.5 hours, which my use confirmed.
Unfortunately, I can't speak to the usefulness of the ActiveSync software that comes with the Touch, as it's XP and Vista only, and we're a Mac shop here. However, on its own the Touch has some great interface capability, if slightly marred performance by a clunky OS and a slightly underpowered processor. If you're a power user or a creative guru, look elsewhere; the Touch might have a full version of Office, but it's no executive companion, and it's not super-handy with media. However, if you're a regular person (with a regular budget) who likes a light, usable phone that can work as well as play, the Touch might be a perfect match.
If you've ever been tempted to call Twitter useless, reconsider; the service is allowing thousands of Southern California residents to stay safe by receiving up-to-the-minute geographical information about the spreading fires. Twitter's short, instant updates are perfect for bare-bones, factual updates, and and it's not the only Web service helping out panicked Californians. Several Google Maps mashups have emerged with dynamic blaze information and evacuation details, and a number of blogs are tracking the destruction chronologically to allow people to predict if their homes will stay safe.
Luckily, technology is serving SoCal while officials are struggling to; according to one former California State Fire Marshal, citizens' courses of action are often decided on an individual basis with only the information at hand, since "fire officials don't know exactly when evacuations should occur." However, the Internet is famous for its vulnerability to misinformation. Should people switch off their computers and rely on TV news to get more credible and actionable information?
According to one San Diego-based writer, Twitter has been invaluable for his family; he's discovered three feeds that are providing neighborhood-by-neighborhood information on the spreading danger. Luckily, one of the feeds is operated by a local news station, so he can be fairly sure he's getting reliable reporting. Each of the feeds is easily tracked, since every tweet is tagged "#sandiegofire" and therefore more easily searchable. Because the fires can damage ISP infrastructure in the area, many users have signed up for text-message tweets on their cellular phones in case their land-based internet connections are destroyed.
Google Maps are being used by several outlets, not least of all the Governor's office, to provide zoom- and pan-able maps of fire locations, shelters, evacuation zones and destroyed neighborhoods. Good ole fashioned blogs are also proving invaluable; the blog Cat Dirt Sez is providing a credible running list of destroyed properties and homes gleaned from information from the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Luckily, it seems that reliable news sources as well as citizen journalists have teamed up, whether wittingly or not, to provide a series of informational sources that can safely trusted at first glance -- or cross-referenced for accuracy. However, this begs the question: shouldn't technology be preventing disasters, instead of simply abetting disaster response?
As it turns out, large swaths of multimillion dollar homes have been untouched by the blazes because of experimental landscaping technology meant to stem California's susceptibility to fast-spreading fire. As the Union-Tribune reports,
Probably the most dramatic example of [preventative landscaping] is Cielo, a development of 178 multimillion-dollar custom homes that escaped damage despite a blaze that blackened hillsides all around it.
It's quite amazing,” said Mike Andrews, a superintendent for Rancho Cielo Estates, developer of the subdivision. “When you look up at the homes from the bottom of the hill, you see that the whole hill is black until you get within 100 feet of that house, and from there up to the house, it's green. I was just blown away to see how well everything worked.
The idea of protecting houses instead of relying on evacuation plans is part of a controversial disaster-response plan called "shelter in place." The idea: make entire neighborhoods impervious to fire, so that even if surrounding land is engulfed, people don't have to venture out into dangerous conditions just to evacuate. Because fire's behavior is so erratic, evacuations are often unpredictable and unnecessary. So how do you make a neighborhood in bone-dry San Diego fire-proof?
Common requirements for homes built in the shelter-in-place communities include indoor fire sprinklers, noncombustible roofs, wide roads and driveways for firefighting equipment and 100 feet of defensible space around homes with irrigated, fire-resistant plants.
Earlier this year, county supervisors expanded the concept by adopting shelter-in-place guidelines for developers wishing to build in backcountry areas where access is limited. They include tough building and landscaping standards with the requirement that property owners pay for monitoring and enforcement.
In the next few decades, it's likely that this technology for monitoring and prevention will become ubiquitous in fire-prone areas of the Golden State, as it has in Australia, where it was pioneered after a devastating blaze in 1994. It's great that citizens are finding so much aid and comfort in technologies like Twitter and Google Maps -- but here's to hoping that someday, they won't have to.
Related Links:
FEATURE: The Next Email By Robert Scoble
Why Twitter will change the way business communicates (again).
VIDEO: Business by Twitter
Mansueto Digital President Ed Sussman chats with expert tech blogger and videocaster Robert Scoble about Twitter, the fastest growing application in Internet history. Scoble sees services like Twitter, where users can update snippets from their lives -- through text, images, and video -- as the next great marketing tool. It's just that marketers haven't quite caught on yet.
FC EXPERT BLOG: Twitter Has "Ruined" My Life By Bill Cammack
For those of you that don't know what twitter is... Basically, it's a DIY (do it yourself) chat room. You choose people that you want to "follow", and you can see when they type something to the twitter site. People can choose to follow YOU, and they'll see what you type to twitter.
FC EXPERT BLOG: What Are you Doing? By Peter Fasano
What are you doing? This is the opening dialogue box I am greeted with when logging into the Twitter. The question is precisely the best way to describe the service. It is a messaging tool and community that connects you to your networks via short messages.
In the last few days, the world has seen a morass of chocolate-related news. The New Yorker has a story on the hippie-go-lucky founders of Dagoba Chocolate, the popularity of which has surged on a reemergence of interest in natural cacao. Artist Cosimo Cavallaro has just opened a gallery show in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York featuring life-size statues of nine religious figures -- in chocolate (witness "My Sweet Lord," a massive chocolate Jesus.) Some teenager in Britain has made news by creating a booming chocolate company out of his house in Shropshire, just by thinking up peculiar flavor combinations.
And yet, the New York Times reports this week that Hershey's profits have plummeted by almost two-thirds, and Cadbury Schweppes has moved its chocolate production from England to Poland, and plans to cut over 7,500 jobs in the process.
What's going on with chocolate? And what does it mean for entrepreneurs like the British teenager?
Most successful entrepreneurs are adept at finding a niche unfilled, and filling it with a great product or service. However, there's another brand of entrepreneurship that requires a little less originality and a little more knowledge of zeitgeist: re-doing a corporate product, and making it trendy. As the New Yorker says in its piece about Dagoba, consumers are becoming increasingly interested in "artisanal" foods, and chocolate is one of the hottest.
Interestingly, plenty of large-scale food and beverage producers have yet to realize that they are serving increasingly health-conscious customers. Yes, we live in times of epidemic obesity, but let's not underestimate humanity. When human beings see a negative trend, we slowly work to reverse it. It's happening with global warming now. More quietly, it's happening with food.
The remarkable success of chains like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's indicate a paradigm shift on a macro level, but consumers are becoming increasingly picky on a food-by-food basis, too. I firmly believe that one of the reasons Red Bull consistently outsells its cheaper copycat beverages is that it doesn't use high fructose corn syrup, the sweetener found in regular soda. People increasingly read the labels on the foods they ingest, especially with the Chinese-ingredient poison scares in pet food and toothpaste.
Hence the troubles at Cadbury and Hershey's. Their chocolate (while often delicious) is of poor quality -- far less than the 70% cacao content of boutique chocolates like Dagoba, and lacking in antioxidants. Their candy is also subject to that mysterious chemical processing that prevents M&Ms from melting in your hand, or spoiling on a shelf after 9 months. Chocolate with high cacao content actually doesn't spoil easily, but cheaper milk chocolate should. People know that a year-old package of Reese's Pieces shouldn't taste okay, but it does. And it's starting to make them uneasy.
Until the big companies really get wise to consumers' changing tastes, there is an increasing opportunity for small-scale, health-oriented companies to make a killing selling foods with comprehensible ingredients. It's happening with soda, potato chips, and yes, chocolate. It's only a matter of time before it happens with other junk food staples.
But there's not much time. Dagoba Chocolate was recently acquired by Hershey's, indicating that the behemoths aren't as out of touch as they seem. Are natural foods startups doomed, as the big boys muscle in? In 20 years, will we be back to the same big companies -- Coca-Cola, Hershey's, Frito-Lay -- just under smaller, nichey brand names?
In college, I took an anthropology class. One of the first things we learned was that most people don't know our species' correct Latin name. We think we're homo sapiens, but we actually haven't been homo sapiens for some time. Present-day man has an upgraded moniker: our correct scientific name is homo sapien sapien, which, translated, means "the clever, clever human." So what does this have to do with cell phones?
I don't remember what earned us the second "clever" in our title, whether it the wheel, or fire, or wiki technology. Whatever it was, allow me to make a reaching metaphor. If most modern-day camera phones are homo sapiens, the new Samsung SGH-G800 would be the first to earn that second "clever."
The SGH-G800, as Unwiredview.com reports, isn't a massive step forward in cell phone technology, but it is indeed more clever than its competition. It share the slider form factor of other Samsung phones, but -- get this -- it has a 5.0 megapixel camera witha xenon flash and optical zoom. That's right, optical; when you zoom, the lens extends out of the phone body, like a real, live camera. Does this make it a new species of phone? No. But it might mean the difference between the caveman that can grunt, and the caveman that can grunt out a tune.
For as long as the world has known camera phones, the world has known crappy digital cameras. Even my prized iPhone, which I swear was designed and built by very advanced aliens, has a really awful camera. But what Samsung has done with the SGH-G800 is to turn a novelty gizmo into a practical device. Just as my iPhone allows me to combine phone and iPod into one device, the Samsung allows me to combine camera and phone, making it the perfect party camera. Not only does it take legitimate-quality pictures with lossless zooming, it's one less expensive gadget I can leave on the table when I walk out of the restaurant. Clever indeed.
According to The Hollywood Reporter (and who doesn't love a post that begins like that?), the creator of the viral-video site BarelyPolitical.com has accepted an offer for the purchase of his site by a bigger video startup. BarelyPolitical is best known for its music video "I Have a Crush On Obama," in which a salacious young lady sings an R&B ballad to the Illinois Junior Senator, whilst wearing enough lip gloss to waterproof a pair of gym shorts. If you haven't seen it, please, avail yourself. Then we'll talk.
On its face, this video is, of course, absurd. As with many viral YouTube phenomena (this video got millions of hits), it combines 1) prurience, 2) a silly premise, and 3) amateur production value. Yes, it's funny. Yes, it will pleasurably waste two minutes of your day. But even after the immense success of other YouTube favorites, this is the first news of a real money-making opportunity growing out of viral popularity. So the big question is: who would pay money for this site that made this? And why?
The buyer, Next New Media, will thrill any Long Tail-loving readers out there -- its mission is to create 101 miniature entertainment channels with content like that of BarelyPolitical. In their own words:
"Next New Networks is a new kind of media company, creating micro-television networks over the internet for targeted communities, bringing together elements of tv programming and internet philosophy to allow viewers to contribute, share and distribute content."
In other words, they'll have more variety with less depth of content, to appeal to the sporadic tastes of internet viewers. Their methodology: troll the web for video entrepreneurs whose work has a spark, and incorporate them into the network. In essence, Next New Networks is the company so many YouTube posters have been dreaming of. As it continues to buy channels for its network, it creates a market for fun, if silly, destination sites. So all you have to do to get a piece of the pie is put together a handful of funny, if stupid, videos, then ride the wave of cash. Right?
Wrong. As it turns out, BarelyPolitical founder Ben Relles, who is staying on board after the acquisition, thinks his site is destined to serve a higher purpose with a bigger company behind it. As the Reporter... reports:
Relles said he has a larger goal of getting people involved in politics in the run-up to next year's elections. He said the mainstream reaction to Obama Girl made him realize that his videos can have a life in the offline world, and he said Scannell and the team at Next New Networks, which includes board member and former AOL chairman and CEO Jonathan Miller, would be able to help him execute this.
If you look a the BarelyPolitical site, it's hard to call what Relles does "satire" with a straight face -- it's more like farce. Many people, such as this blogger, would argue that the sitcom is a dying form, and that this kind of web video will replace it. But can these sorts of videos really become do-it-all replacements for the brain-dead sitcoms of yore by featuring both levity and conscience? And as such, are they actually worth buying (or creating for sale)? Can the future of television be both lovably amateurish as well as subversive and provocative -- even as the companies behind the scenes grow increasingly conglomerated?
This morning the web is abuzz with some news out of Beijing. Apparently the Chinese index of entrepreneurial confidence (which I think needs an acronym) is still soaring in the third quarter of 2007. It registered no statistically significant change since last quarter, when it was at a high of 143 points (100 points is conventionally thought to be the boundary between a bullish or bearish trend).
With the dollar at a humbling low point and our national debt soaring (much of it, by the way, owed to China), good news for our far-eastern industrial counterparts might make for an easy jab at the confidence of American entrepreneurs. But another press release came over the wires today that will hopefully remind Americans that they’re actually living in one of the best entrepreneurial economies in recent memory.
That press release comes from the Princeton Review, which announced today its list of the top 50 graduate and undergraduate entrepreneurship programs at colleges nationwide. While the University of Southern California and Babson College took top honors in the respective categories, that isn’t really the point.
What’s terrific about the rankings is that a whopping 30% more schools participated than did last year. That increase, The Princeton Review believes,
...Underscores the growing number of entrepreneurial courses nationwide and the established mainstream appeal of business ownership.
This isn’t totally surprising; just last year, the House of Representatives passed a resolution to encourage public universities to spend more funding on entrepreneurship programs, citing statistics that reported over 70% of high school seniors want to someday start their own business. As CNN reported in February, a hell of a lot of those high school seniors are actually making good on their goal:
We are in the midst of the largest entrepreneurial surge this country has ever seen. According to Small Business Administration projections, nearly 672,000 new companies with employees were created in 2005. That is the biggest business birthrate in U.S. history: 30,000 more startups than in 2004, and 12% more than at the height of dot-com hysteria in 1996.
Of course, the implicit attitude of these 70% of high schoolers can be perceived as quite negative. Either entrepreneurship is gaining some kind of cache because of billionaire successes like Google and Facebook, or these students are simply disillusioned with corporate work. If they know someone in their life who is unhappily marooned at a corporate job, showing little interest in the overarching success of the company, of course they’ll be reticent to join the big-company workforce.
In reality, it is likely a combination of the two factors that is driving students to be their own bosses. Nevertheless, it’s a good indicator that American ingenuity, which gave us light bulbs, peanut butter and “friending,” is still as vigorous as ever.
I'm currently reading economist Tyler Cowen's book, Discover Your Inner Economist, and the first chapter deals with the effectiveness of monetary incentives. Money, he argues, isn't always a useful tool in altering human behavior; anyone who's offered financial rewards to their children for doing chores can tell you that the results are mixed. In passing, he mentions another "bad" use of monetary incentives: paying people to lose weight.
But new research is suggesting that you can indeed use monetary incentives to get people to drop fat. As Fox News reports:
The research published in the September issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that cash incentives can be a success even when the payout is as little as $7 for dropping just a few pounds in three months.
Losing weight is a highly personal, sometimes embarrassing endeavor; to go on a diet is to admit implicitly to your peers that you're not happy with your body. That kind of vulnerability isn't easily allayed, but money can apparently help. So, the question is: does anyone dare make a buck off the obese?
In his book, Cowen discusses the possibility of an entrepreneur starting a Website for people who want to lose weight. Customers can pledge a certain amount of money -- say, $200 -- that they'll lose a target amount of weight. If they don't provide proof they've lost the weight by their self-imposed deadline, the site keeps the money. Cowen notes that this would never work; customers would develop a negative relationship to the whole schema of weight-loss if it involved punishment. But the recent study quoted above takes a reward approach, and opens the doors for a number of potentially profitable (and ethically questionable) mechanisms for altering human behavior.
In the study, which was conducted at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, participants were allowed to form "teams" to support each other in their weight-loss attempts, and were paid a pro-rated amount depending on how much weight they lost. So what if Cowen's model were modified; instead of a simple lose-or-win model, the customer's contribution becomes an investment. Weight loss aspirants could contribute the same $200 with the possibility of getting back $250 or $300, depending on their level of weight loss. Presumably, most customers would not meet their goals; weight loss is hard, and setting a realistic deadline is harder. Based on this assumption, a given company could promise higher returns to successful aspirants without the fear of running in the red.
This sort of self-based gambling could be useful with enforcing all kinds of behavior changes: quitting smoking, driving less, reading more. Granted, all the behavior changes have to be easily proven, but time-stamped photographs or short-answer questions could be enough to verify the veracity of customers' progress.
Of course, there's an ethical gray area when it comes to making a profit on people's negative self image. Doubtless, many customers would lose money by setting unattainable poundage goals or deadlines; in that case, the loss of their pledged amount just serves to add insult to the injury of their failure to change themselves, and might encourage future failure. To boot, it encourages aspirants to keep their quest between themselves and their savings account, instead of turning to friends and family for support and encouragement. I'm also uncomfortable with the suggestion (which is tacit in the study) that people's financial well-being is more important than their corporal well-being. According to the findings, people were willing to lose 5% of their body weight for only $14. That either makes weight loss seem surprisingly easy, or $14 seem surprisingly valuable.
So the question is, will any entrepreneurs be savvy (or sick) enough to give incentivized behavior modification a shot? Would it actually work, as the UNC study suggests, or achieve mediocrity (or failure), as Cowen predicts?
