Fresh Mown Hay

Jay-Z and the entrepreneurial spirit

With Jay-Z’s recent appointment as the president of Def Jam records, many have questioned his qualifications. The little I know about his business acumen I learned from the Black Album (and the illegal Grey Album, which I might have heard once, on a friend’s computer.)

For example, consider the second verse of "Public Service Announcement":

“…I get my by-any-means on whenever there’s a drought,
Get your umbrellas out because that’s when I brainstorm…”

“…You can blame Shawn but I ain’t invent the game,
I just rolled the dice trying to get some change,
And I’d do it twice, ain’t no sense in me lying as if I am a different man…”

(He also shows a deft understanding of his negotiating leverage in the first verse: “I be the music biz number one supplier…”)

Terrific advice for any entrepreneur.

Senior Citizen MVNO

In all the talk about the Sprint-Nextel (T-mobile? Verizon?) merger, very few of the articles have talked about what Sprint does well (Nextel’s strength – the NASCAR segment – is well documented.) It turns out that Sprint’s strength is a vaguely sad. Sprint is good at renting out spare capacity on its network to other companies.

Mobile virtual network operators (MVNO) are mobile carriers that don’t own a network. They use someone else’s network, usually Sprint’s, and just focus on marketing. It’s a brilliant idea since it enables niche marketing of cellular services. For example, Boost and Virgin Mobile, both of whom focus on getting teenagers hooked at an early age, are MVNOs that use Sprint’s network. 

So I’m in Vero Beach, Florida for the Holidays with my family at my grandparents’ place. In terms of telecommunications infrastructure, all I’ve seen is one of those land-line phones from Radio Shack with the HUGE buttons on them. I can see what number they are dialing from across the room. Without my glasses.

The rest of my family would love for the 90 year old grandparents to have a cell phone.  It would make all of us feel safer since none of us live in Florida, and since, well, they’re 90.

When is someone going to create an MVNO for seniors? It would need to do a few things differently for such a service to catch on with our elders:

Phones:
- completely stripped of fancy features (no Java apps, no games, no ringtones, no camera, maybe even no phone book…)
- HUGE buttons with that “HP calculator feel” so you know you press them (that patent must have expired by now…)
- maybe even an “on” button that gives you a dial tone (a fake one, like some VoIP providers)
- an analog dial on the side for volume adjustment (make the max volume LOUD)
- long battery life and a simple cradle for recharging

Service:
- prepaid (eliminates overage surprises)
- ultra simple plans and marketing (i.e. explain that there is no such thing as long distance charges anymore.)

On one hand, seniors have low monthly usage. But on the other hand, if you can get them a handset they like and a plan they understand, churn would be almost zero.

What does TiVo have in common with Kleenex and Xerox?

The marketing folks at TiVo have done too good of a job. Apparently they sent a nasty letter to the networks demanding that they stop using "TiVo" as a verb (i'll link to an article once i figure out how to insert links...) The worry is that the word "TiVo" has become so common, that it is at risk of enterting the public domain.

The same thing happened to Kleenex and Xerox: everyone started calling tissues Kleenex, and instead of saying "photocopying" everyone said Xerox (which must have sounded futuristic at the time. I wonder if Google is beginning to worry about this?)

The downside to having your trademark enter the public domain is that you lose exclusive rights to the name. Your competitors can use it. Customer confustion ensues.

Mobile Do Not Call Hoax

This is fascinating. Why did 9 million people sign up within a week?

1) to the average consumer, the telemarketers are parasitic ***holes and it just seems like a natural progression that they would move on to mobile phones (like a virus mutating – now it’s airborne!)

2) a lack of faith in the government regulatory bodies (in this case the FCC) to protect consumers from telemarketer harassment. This can be summarized as “well, the FCC has screwed this up so far, so I expect them to screw things up in the future.”

I wish I was more sanguine about the telemarketing industry. As contextual advertising continues to gain momentum (with web and video leading the charge) perhaps the telemarketers will follow by cutting back on their carpet bombing approach and begin to think more carefully about targeting.

Carpet bombing the telemarketers aside, what lessons can be taken from this? What ingredients do you need to mobilize 9 million people to take action?

My (rather pessimistic) guesses are:
1) plays on people’s lack of faith in government
2) plays on people’s lack of faith in the private sector
3) make it an issue people really care about (in this case, privacy)
4) make the “call to action” simple (just click and enter your number)

for reference see Om Malik's post Mobile Do Not Call Hoax

 

Google Print

My initial reaction to Google Print is that it is a brilliant and democratic move with a diverse set of benefits. My second reaction was to hum the tune to "m-i-c-k-e-y  m-o-u-s-e"

Copyright protection is a mess in the US. (The only bigger intellectual property mess being business process and software patents.) Congress has extended the length of time that a copyrighted work is protected 11 times! So how long does the creator of a particular expression of an idea get these days?

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#hlc
A work that is created (fixed in tangible form for the first time) on or after January 1, 1978, is automatically protected from the moment of its creation and is ordinarily given a term enduring for the author's life plus an additional 70 years after the author's death... For works made for hire, and for anonymous and pseudonymous works ... the duration of copyright will be 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.

So an author gets between 70 and 120 years of protection! That makes the 20 years of protection for patents look meager. Basically the story goes that everytime Mickey Mouse was about to lose copyright protection, Disney would unleash an arsenal of lobbyists to protect their crown jewel.

What will be the impact be on Google Print? It would be a shame if Google Print only had books older than 70 years old! Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms would be available (published in 1926) but we would have to wait another 18 years to read The Old Man and the Sea (1952).

I was excited to read in teh NYTimes article that "At least a dozen major publishing companies, including some of the country's biggest producers of nonfiction books - the primary target for the online text-search efforts - have already entered ventures with Google and Amazon that allow users to search the text of copyrighted books online and read excerpts."

But a few paragraphs later there is this little torpedo: "The Amazon and Google programs work by restricting the access of users to only a few pages of a copyrighted book during each search, offering enough to help them decide whether the book meets their requirements enough to justify ordering the print version. Those features restrict a user's ability to copy, cut or print the copyrighted material, while limiting on-screen reading to a few pages at a time. Books still under copyright at the libraries involved in Google's new project are likely to be protected by similar restrictions."

Time will tell how this will be resolved. With any luck it won't take 70 years.