Back on June 12th, 2005 Steve Jobs, creator and master of the Reality Distortion Field, gave the commencement speech at Stanford University. While the transcript has been floating around for awhile now, the video has been somewhat elusive; that was, of course, until YouTube came along.
The era of the blockbuster is so over. The niche is now king, and the entertainment industry – from music to movies to TV – will never be the same.
By Chris Anderson
On March 21, 2000, Jive Records released No Strings Attached, the much-anticipated second album from NSync. The album debuted strong. It sold 1.1 million copies its first day and 2.4 million in the first week, making it the fastest-selling album ever. It went on to top the charts for eight weeks, moving 10 million copies by the end of the year. The music industry had cracked the commercial code. With NSync, a pop-idol boy band fronted by the charismatic Justin Timberlake, Jive had perfected the elusive formula for making a hit. In retrospect it was so obvious: What worked for the Monkees could now be replicated on an industrial scale. It was all about looks and scripted personalities. The music itself, which was outsourced to a small army of professionals (there are 60 people credited with creating No Strings Attached), hardly mattered.
As Google and others race to move the ever-so-popular word processing and spreadsheet programs to the web, the person that ultimately benefits (at least in the near term) is you; but while these programs may be free, what are the real hidden costs?
Google has already opened up its Google Spreadsheets application to beta testing, and is working to make the recently acquired Writely word processing application available soon. The obvious upside to using Google’s solutions over, for example, Microsoft’s is the immediate cost savings — a legitimate copy of Microsoft Office standard edition will run you a cool $400.
That $400, though, allows you to pretty much use Office out of the box. In order to use these new online applications you not only need decent connection to the internet, you must also be comfortable with the idea that your addresses, your correspondence and your documents don’t reside on your hard drive in your computer in your home. They are stored at sites controlled by a giant company. In addition, these solutions can’t quite do everything that Word and Excel can do, at least not yet. We must also look at it from the companies’ viewpoint — they will want to eventually make money off of these ventures, and the most obvious way would be through advertising. Are people ready for ads popping up while they edit their documents?
Of course, for those already using web-based email, those hurdles aren’t a far departure from the current line of thinking. The only thing that’s left is to conquer the gap between these new applications and the “industry standard”.
)
Yes, I admit it, I watch the damn show. But at least I’m not alone — drawing an impressive 2.9 million viewers during its debut episode, The Hills has sprinted out of MTV’s starting blocks. The show follows Lauren Conrad, who now prefers “Lauren” to “LC”, as she struggles to adjust from her charmed life in Laguna to her only-somewhat-charmed life in LA — she did, after all, land a coveted internship at Teen Vogue, but we quickly see that it’s not all glamorous. The question remains, is it real? Lauren maintains that like Laguna Beach the show isn’t scripted — Scripts are corny and predictable. Real life is always better.
The music industry has just filed another in a long line of stupid lawsuits. This time it’s against Pioneer’s Inno XM radio. The RIAA claims the Inno, which gives users the ability to record XM radio broadcasts in a similar fashion to TiVo, violates (drumroll please) copyright.
The music industry wants to stop your ability to choose when and where you can listen. Their lawyers have filed a meritless lawsuit to try and stop you from enjoying these radios.
They don’t get it. These devices are clearly legal. Consumers have enjoyed the right to tape off the air for their personal use for decades, from reel-to-reel and the cassette to the VCR and TiVo.
…
Satellite radio subscribers like you are law-abiding music consumers; a portion of your subscriber fee pays royalties directly to artists. Instead of going after pirates who don’t pay a cent, the record labels are attacking the radios used for the enjoyment of music by consumers like you. It’s misguided and wrong.
Unless the RIAA does something, and quickly, they will eventually be made extinct by the very thing they should be working in conjunction with — technology. They need to change, and the change needs to be at the core of their business model. Filing lawsuits against people, companies, technologies, and ideas, and hiding behind copyright just isn’t going to cut it, at least not any more.
University of Colorado marketing professor Paul Herr is planning on releasing a study where 200 students were polled to determine the succes of sex in advertising. His conclusion? Sex doesn’t sell.
If customers want quality - when buying a new computer laptop, for example - an attractive model can hurt a product’s credibility, said Herr, who also is an associate professor at Binghamton University in New York. “If the customer has time to process the ad, and the attractive model doesn’t fit, it’s almost like this bias detector goes off,” he said.
…
The results of their marketing study, “Beauty and the Beholder: Why Pretty Faces Don’t Always Help Sales,” will be published in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.
Well now, that’s just nonsense…
[via Denver Post]
Magazines with men in mind — be it health, cars, lifestyle, or “girlie mags” — will be seeing dark days ahead of them. According to recent numbers, ad spending in men’s magazines are down an overall 4%, with most advertisers switching their focus from print to the Internet.
“It was a pretty lousy first quarter,” summed up Chris Mitchell, vp, publisher of Condé Nast’s Details, who rejoined the title in February. “Auto is soft, liquor is always threatening to do more on broadcast television, and consumer electronics is hot and cold.”
Among the titles struggling: Rodale’s Men’s Health, where ad pages through June declined 14.3 percent to 437, according to publisher’s estimates; Dennis Publishing’s Maxim fell 15 percent to 395; Emap’s FHM slid 17 percent to 348 (though it has published one less issue in 2006); Details slipped 6 percent to 492, and CN’s GQ dipped 1 percent to 673.
Who wants to wait for a magazine when you can get it online?
[via MediaWeek]
A list posted by Johnny Wadd, a former strip club DJ/MC who used to love his blow, booze & babes (NSFW).
#10 Brandi’s, Vancouver, Canada
#9 Colibri, Hamburg, Germany
#8 Chez Pare, Montreal, Canada
#7 Dolls, Moscow, Russia
#6 Goldfingers, Melbourne, Australia
#5 Scores, New York, New York
#4 Blue Rose, Ibiza, Spain
#3 Crazy Horse, Paris, France
#2 Seventh Heaven, Tokyo, Japan
#1 Crazy Horse Too, Las Vegas, Nevada
If you want to also read the commentary for each of the clubs listed, head on over to the full review at Beyond the Neon (NSFW).
Move over Bugatti Veyron, here comes something meatier — well, maybe. The Caparo T1 is the latest super car planned to be unveiled in Monaco. Built by a company founded by ex-McLaren engineers, this street legal car claims a 0-60mph time of under 2.5 seconds (to recap the Veyron has a 0-60mph time of 2.5 seconds), a 0-100mph time of less than 5 seconds, and a top speed of 200mph. However, with 500bhp, a curb weight of only 1000lbs, and what looks to be a cockpit instead of a real “cabin”, the T1 resembles a 4-wheel motorcycle more than a car. My vote is still for the Veyron.
Read: Jalopnik: Caparo T1 to Be Unveiled in Monaco
Visit: Caparo T1
It happened before, it will happen again.
Everyone seems fascinated that on Wednesday, 123 seconds past 1:00a, the date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. Some have even gone so far as to say this will be the only time in human history it will ever happen.
Ummm, think again — how quickly we forgot what caused the Y2K bug…
Where New York Times columnist David Pogue latched onto this fascinating factoid, there’s no telling. But as randomly useless bits of trivia go, this is definitely worth noting.
Pogue writes: Late tonight — specifically, 123 seconds after 1:00 a.m. — the time and date, for the first time in all of humanity, will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.
And, Pogue points out, this moment will never come again.
Forget the fact that Wired pointed out that Europe transposes their day and month, they still made the mistake of saying that this will never happen again. WRONG.
It will happen every 100 years, as long as we only use the last 2 digits of the year. C’mon people!!
2206, 2106, 2006, 1906, 1806, 1706 … get it now?!
