Written on January 25, 2008 – 12:06 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Are you a writer and looking for more readers? Follow the example of the author of the ultimate birthday-gift book The Alchemist: Paul Coelho. He’s using filesharing networks as a way to promote his books.
Coelho thinks that giving people the possibility to swap his books for free, actually has a positive effect on sales. In a keynote speech (see below) at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he gave some strikingly good examples. When he uploaded the Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more. The author said:
In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. […]
I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. […]
So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.
He thinks that this tactic will pay-off in other countries as well. I guess he’s right. Just imagine that you download his book and start reading it. After two chapters you’re captured by the book and obsessed to know how it ends. Trust me, Coelho is the kind of writer who can make you do that. Do you really want to print the whole book? No, you surf to Amazon.
Not sure if it works the same for business books since they’re generally not so captivating as thrillers.
Coelho however is preaching his new sales evangelism on the Pirate Coelho blog, where he also offers links to illegal copies of his books: “Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site…”. See the rest of his interesting speech:
I hope you like that post!
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Written on January 24, 2008 – 11:48 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Two weeks ago we ran a story about the main problem of Facebook: monetization. Dave McClure, an internet expert from the Valley, wrote an extensive post about this matter. Now Lightspeed Ventures discovered a good flow of Facebook cash: those corny digital gifts.
Lightspeed tracked the number of available gifts for a seven week period to better understand the sales rate of digital gifts. They excluded the free gifts, and found out that the average number of sales per week for a gift was 846. Since there were 322 different gifts available this means that 272.412 people are making other people happy with a 60 by 60 pixels birthday cake, hugging teddy bears or a freaky clown.
It’s easy to make fun of the concept, yet the numbers are pretty good. The price of a gift is 1 dollar, that implies an annual run rate of just under 15 million dollars.
My advice for European social networks, introduce this concept right-a-way. We have the euro, so you guys would even make more money per gift. Find a slightly different locally-adapted format and start monetizing. What about an (extended) cupid service on Hyves? For a few euros, the social network sends a iTunes love song to your secret love. I’m sure some users would be interested in such services.
Giving presents is an important aspect of the social discourse, so why wouldn’t the social networks make some money out of it?
[WebTipr: Yaniv Solnik, Israel]
Written on January 23, 2008 – 4:41 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Here is a brilliant video about the VPAD. It is a Smart device for Deaf people which allows them to communicate with sign language and video through the internet. The gadget is made by Viable and currently in beta. The deaf and HOH (Hard of Hearing) community is relatively small but very interested. Apparently a normal Skype or iChat video connection isn’t enough to let them communicate with sign language. As they explain in the video the speed of communication via sign language is 3 times as fast as normal speech. This means that they need at least a 30 frames per second video feed unless they want to miss half the words.
So think about that for a minute. I never believed that the future of data input would be voice recognition. Unless the circumstances are perfect, and they never are, speech recognition is too slow and error prone. I’m in a noisy office surrounded by talking people and music all day. No way that voice recognition will ever work for me. But sign language would be a lot easier to recognize for a computer than sound. And sign language is probably (I hope!) easier to learn than typing with 10 fingers, which I can’t do either. And that would mean that just by gesturing at my computer I would be able to input text 3 times faster than talking to it. Now THAT would work!
Look at this video not just for the gadget or deaf people but see it as a demo for how one day you, or your kids, will be inputting text into the computer:
Video by Vincent Everts, made during CES 2008.
Written on January 15, 2008 – 12:56 pm
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This article is written by affiliate- and search marketeer Eduard Blacquière.
A few days ago I noticed one of the most creative Google AdWords Ads I’ve ever seen:
But…it’s not allowed!
Just a couple of hours before I saw this remarkable AdWords ad, I went to a Google training about Google AdWords. They had used the exact same ad to illustrate that overuse of punctuation isn’t allowed.
Is Your AdWords Ad Remarkable?
This example illustrates the importance of the fact that you have to be remarkable. Your ad has to diverse itself from your competitors. Of course you run into restrictions of the Google AdWords policy, yet that’s where creativity comes in. (more…)
Written on January 8, 2008 – 5:58 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
I remember downloading the first VRML browser in 1999. It promised to show me the web in 3D fashion. Unfortunately it never went anywhere. Until now, maybe.
Check this video of a 3D browser built by SpaceTime and demonstrated during CES yesterday. It shows an Apple CoverFlow like interface to many popular websites. In this example eBay is used. The first 10 seconds are boring but don’t look away:
Can you imagine browsing the web like this? What would your site or this blog look like in 3D? What would be the advantage of browsing like this? One thing is for sure; don’t try this on dial-up.
Want to try it yourself? Download SpaceTime 1.0 (Windows only, for now) and let us know how it worked for you.
By the way, have you checked out this 3D post as well? It allows you to search through the web cover flow style.
Written on January 4, 2008 – 4:25 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Matt Mechtley felt like publicly commenting (Operation Mindfuck) on all the billboards and advertisements and their audacious claims. He is also a big WikiPedia fan and decided that these ads need some of the little [citation needed] tags as can be found in Wikipedia articles. He had some stickers made and distributed them to his friends and some of his blog readers with the request to put them on billboards, take a photo and then upload the photo to Flickr with the tag “citationneeded“.
So far there are only 12 photos tagged with “citationneeded” on Flickr but that might change fast as popular magazines (Make Magazine & Bright magazine) and blogs (BoingBoing) pick this up.
Want to join the movement? Download the PSD or PDF file, print some stickers and start Wikiffiti-ing.
Written on January 3, 2008 – 10:37 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
In 1998 I got my first always-on Internet connection via my cable provider. The move from dial-up to cable was huge. Speed was an important factor but the fact that I could access the internet at any time had an even bigger impact.
After the shift from dial-up to always-on came mobile. Mobile hasn’t caught on as we hoped it would. And it turns out it might look different than we thought. No ordering pizza on a black & white WML generated iMode site. The future of mobile internet looks different. It looks like the iPhone and more important: the Amazon Kindle.
The interesting thing about the Kindle isn’t so much the fact that it has a Wireless Connection built it. It is the fact that this Wireless Connection is free and comes bundled with the device. The seperation between gadget and mobile connection is gone. The Kindle comes with Ubiquitous Internet.
2008 will see more evidence of the Ubiquitous Internet. SanDisk launched a new USB stick today called the SanDisk Cruzer Titanium Plus. This storage device, which SanDisk believes is the first of its kind, will automatically save all data stored on it to Amazon’s S3 storage service via a synchronization service called BeInSync. The device is cheap but comes with a $29.99 a year subscription to the BeInSync online back-up service.
The interesting thing about the Cruzer and Kindle is that they simply provide you with a service and you don’t have to think about this data being on of offline. It is simply there for you and available everywhere.
There have been indications that Google is working on an offline client for their Google Docs Application suite. The interesting thing about an offline client would not just be to work offline instead of online but again to remove the distinction between the two. With a client installed at your computer your documents would simply be everywhere, and always available, forever.
The question is if Ubiquitous Internet will dramatically change business models and enable new companies. Obviously BeInSync will do well and so will Amazon. But what start-ups can we envision taking advantage of an always-on economy?
Written on December 27, 2007 – 3:11 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Web2.0, the new web, the next web, or whatever you want to call it got a lot of attention over the last 2 to 3 years. Some very cool new services and companies sprung out of the new breed of technology entrepreneurs. However, only few of these new companies manages to reach a broad audience and have a hard time to cross the chasm. The technology scene seems mainly ‘a guy thing’.
The innovators, the people who love technology and love to test new stuff are fairly easy to reach, weblogs like Techcrunch and ReadWriteWeb write extensively about new companies, but their audience is, although large, limited to web-savvies and… men.
Where are the women?
“Women use the web to streamline their lives NOT as a replacement to having a life. To make a date, not to have the date”
Martha Orloci
To reach the masses you need women as well. Look at it as if you go to a party. A small party with your 20 best friends is a lot of fun and no women are needed to have a good time. If you’re throwing a party for 40.000 people (Sensation for instance) it will be a hard sell if men are the only ones interested. It is the same with web services, if you want to be BIG (mainstream) you need men and women.
I was talking to Martha Orloci, a Canadian women who just caught ‘the web2.0 virus’. She explained me the difference between what men and women are doing on the web.
“To understand why there are so few women writing, strategizing, creating, or participating in designing 2.0 projects, looking at my friends and acquaintances (30-55 year old, strong, smart, well educated women who are technically sophisticated). Their time is very valuable, spare time is scarce. They use the Internet as a tool to gain some efficiency in their day. They pay their bills, do their research, check their mail. They use it to streamline their lives NOT as a replacement to having a life. As they’ve told me, they use the Internet to make a date, not to have the date”
She answered some questions about women on the web extensively on her blog (thanks Martha)
So, how do we get women on the web2.0 train?
One thing that could help is a female role model, a female Steve Jobs would probably do the trick. Web2.0 needs a successful and charismatic female technology icon to have a chance to get the attention of women. Someone who inspires other women to fall in love with technology, someone who can spread the word.
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