Radius of Rainbow : Thoughts

To get them reading

Ashutosh Galande — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:04:22 GMT

Read a short essay by Adrian Hon about decline in reading. It talks about how people are reading less these days and what would get them to read more. I don’t know if people are reading less overall but I tend to agree that in this age of microblogs, twits and SMS, reading a long winding novel or even an essay is rare.

He posits that with the increase in popularity of kindle and other ebook readers, we will see increase in ebook piracy and that would lead to people reading more books. I think anything that transforms from atoms to bits will eventually get pirated. So no doubt that ebooks will get pirated more often but I don’t know if an easy access to books will make people read more. Aren’t libraries already offering good literature for free? That still doesn’t seem to encourage people to read.

As for getting people to read, I think the answer is YouTube. Yes the same video medium that Adrian despises as inferior to books. Let me explain. In Microsoft we frequently have authors visit and talk to us about their latest books. These hour long talks are then archived and are available online for viewing later. Almost all of the books that I have read in the past year or so have been by the authors whose talks I listened to online. Imagine if Amazon put on its pages a 5-10 minute video of the author outlining key ideas of the book. I’d definitely view that as opposed to reading through the first chapter or looking at the table of contents. A video might be inferior but it is great at grabbing attention. It also solves the problem of barrier of entry that Adrian is referring to. One can quickly decide after watching a 5 minute video whether he/she wants to read more about the topic or not. So I think something like that is more likely to get people reading that piracy or Kindle.

Lala: Yet another business model around selling Music

Ashutosh Galande — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:06:17 GMT

Selling music online is an interesting business. So many people have tried their hands at it with so many different approaches… iTunes and Zune were revolutionary. They freed good music tracks from the otherwise mediocre albums. iTunes pioneered this model. Zune went a step further and made it easy for people to access millions of tracks via subscriptions.

There are more such models in the wild. Just heard about Lala which has yet another business model around selling music. Two novel approaches here. 1. Lala let’s you listen to your offline music collection from any browser and 2. Lala allows you to purchase a track for listening online for 10 cents. This is one interesting approach to deregulating copy that Lessig suggested.

There’s one approach that I want someone to try out. It’s music rental. My theory is that a music track has shelf life. You’d hardly hear current chart toppers a few months down the line. Artists and trends come and go. J Lo and Shakira were popular a few years ago so why do people have sunk cost in their songs today? Particularly if they hardly ever listen to them these days.

There are very few tracks that you’d perpetually own and would listen to over and over again. For all other tracks, it makes sense to rent them for a friction of the purchase price and let the DRM expire the track after some time say a year. If I want to own the track for long haul, I can always own it DRM free. This will let me explore a lot of music without having to commit to 15$ per month or spending a dollar a track. This will also let me play all the music that is currently hot without having to pay a lot of money for it.

Restrictive measures against piracy should not prohibit people from exploring music and developing their taste.

Pirates to Profits – Deregulating the copy

Ashutosh Galande — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:31:36 GMT

Lawrence Lessig had an interesting essay yesterday at the WSJ. Based on his upcoming book remix, the essay is subtitled “Digital technology has made it easy to create new works from existing art, but copyright law has yet to catch up”.

Among the solutions he proposes, the most interesting one is about deregulating the copy, focusing on the ultimate use of the copyrighted material rather than the actual act of copying. It essentially says that the use of a song by a political campaign in a public meeting and by an amateur YouTube mom in a home video has to be treated differently.

Although amateur, the content on sites like YouTube does generate revenue implicitly. It would be unfair to let a company like Google eat that up given that it did not contribute to the content at all, only provided the infrastructure to broadcast it. Sites like Break.com do offer uploaders some share of the revenue but the most popular video site in the world still doesn’t.

An ideal scenario would be something like this: You upload your remixed video on YouTube. YouTube parses it to realize that you have used some copyright material. It automatically sets aside a revenue share from that video for the copyright owner and publishes the video.

The current model and the usage of DMCA by sites like YouTube is a mockery of the concept of copyright. It’s inefficient, scales poorly and also inhibits creativity of the remixers. Using the remixers’ creativity by letting the original copyright owner collect part of the profit would not only encourage such remixes but would also give credit where it is due. Now only if YouTube could be less greedy and bold enough to take such step…

Naive Joel on Mesh

Ashutosh Galande — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:06:41 GMT

Joel's blog is one of the best resources on the net for software development. I find myself agreeing with him most of the times but his latest post on Live Mesh didn't come out to be as insightful as some of his others.

If you take out his histrionics, Joel’s premise is that MS is wasting too many resources in solving the problem of synchronization which doesn’t even exist to begin with. His logic is that synchronization must not be an issue as you don't see people flooding numerous other services that provide similar functionality.

So what's Microsoft doing different with Mesh?

One thing I love about Microsoft is that it never stops at writing an app. It always tries to make a platform out of it. Microsoft's past successes have come from generating a critical mass of ISVs around its technologies to create a whole ecosystem of software and solutions. And that's what I see is being done differently in case of Mesh. Sure there are a zillion other applications out there that sync your files across but none of them was written with a vision to make every desktop and device out there a first class citizen of the Net.

Our desktops and other devices (e.g. phone) are like big silos of applications, data and information. They exist as isolated entities that connect to the net primarily through browser. That's the reason we see a crop of these web based applications (even a so called OS) that hardly integrate closely with the rest of my desktop. I think Mesh is trying to break that model and open up those silos so that all my devices and their content is always accessible to me wherever I am.

Sure there are issue like security and access control that would be paramount in such scenarios and I'm sure folks over in Mesh team are thinking hard about it. Frankly, I haven't yet wrapped my head around all the concepts of Mesh but from whatever I have seen it looks a bit too sophisticated to be dismissed as just a file sync app.

How to beat Guy Kawasaki to a startup

Ashutosh Galande — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:35:00 GMT

I admire Guy Kawasaki and love The art of start. I'd recommend his book to anybody who has ever dreamt of starting anything. So when he announced his latest venture today, I was all ears. It's called alltop. A concept so simple that it'd make you think how come nobody thought of this before... well some people sure did. Ever heard of live.com, my yahoo, igoogle or....? Well there are hundreds of them out there.

Though not original, I would certainly not undermine the idea of an rss aggregator with links culled for the mass market. I am one of those people who use Live.com as their default homepage and rss reader and since switching to live.com I have hardly ever spent time looking for interesting stuff to read in my spare time. Having all your favorite sites at your fingertips the moment you open your browser can be very addictive. I spent a few weeks gathering the feeds that I liked and Alltop saves you the effort by gathering most interesting sites for you. The disappointing part is that I did not see any smart algorithm or customization around the blog selection.

Though it looks quite obvious and simple, I'm sure Guy has plans for the site but in the mean time if you want to beat him to a startup, head to live.com and start customizing your home page. In terms of look and feel, live.com home page is at least as good as alltop, if not better. Here's a comparative screen capture of live (on left) and alltop (on right).

Office Live Test Drive

Ashutosh Galande — Tue, 02 May 2006 04:14:00 GMT

The "live" wave has brought some pretty cool products to the web. I was more intrigued by Office live. I thought it was going to be a web based version of Office products but they came out with something totally different. Free domain sounded too good to be true and I jumped for it when I got an invitation to take it on a beta test drive.

Since Office live basics is something that will continue to be free, (and hence likely to be more popular) I decided to try it out. I dawned hat of a small charity NGO which sells handmade greeting cards and donates its proceeds for a social cause. Check it out at AnandwanGreetings.com

Initial setup was surprisingly quick and so was designing the web site. I got it all done in just a couple of hours. The page designer lacks some flexibility but I think the goal was to make it simple enough for a non-techie. My only major gripe was the choice of designs. Simple doesn't have to be unattractive. Hope they get some cool design templates up there before RTM. I'm looking forward to it. In the mean time check out my greetings site.

Pirates to profits

Ashutosh Galande — Sun, 23 May 2004 09:08:00 GMT

There's unrest in the music industry since last couple of years. Napster and its cousins have created agitation in their camp. The industry has fought back with measures ranging from suing creators and users of p2p services to educating users about the misuse and swamping these networks with fake copies of media. Artists like Metallica and Madonna have personally picked up the gauntlet and reached out to the users asking them to stop sharing files online.

But sometimes I wonder is the hubbub they are making really worth it? Do the Goliaths of the music industry really need to lose their sleep over these p2p Davids? Isn't there a better way of dealing with this?

Size of the music industry worldwide is estimated to be about 40 billion USD and its loss due to piracy overall is 4.5 billion. Though the exact amount of losses due to p2p file sharing are difficult to calculate, I'd think that its still less than the 2% of the total sales at about a 800 million.

Consider on the other hand the internet porn industry, one of the largest businesses online. Estimated at the size of about 3 billion, this industry, though small as compared to the music industry, is loosing a big chunk of its revenue due to these p2p networks. It's a fact that most of the files traded over p2p network are porn. But then why aren't they making any noise? Shouldn't they be blocking porn downloads or flooding the networks with bogus files? Is it because they are too small? Is it because they are into this "unethical" business and hence can't come out in public and denounce this? No. It's because they have an alternate way of doing business.

Internet porn is one of the few profitable businesses online. This industry supposedly has given rise to many internet advertising and user profiling techniques including pop-ups, site referrals, user tracking etc. And they are handling this issue in a different way - Porn Strategy: Share and Snare

Rather than preventing users from accessing porn through p2p networks, they are looking at it as a way to reach targeted audience. A potential buyer looking for a specific thing is a dream of any salesman and that�s what Kazaa and Gnutella are bringing to the doorsteps of these guys.

It beats me why the music industry can't think of the p2p users this way. Recently Apple was forced to remove p2p capabilities from iTunes because it did not please the big music labels. I feel rather than spending money in suing their own customers, the music industry should rethink its view point and spend that money in developing technology which will help users to preview, buy download and share music online. It will not only help boost sagging music sales but will also go long way in making online music experience enjoyable.

Good virus/Bad Virus

Ashutosh Galande — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:57:00 GMT

Microsoft has always been blamed for being a monopoly. But Dan Geer went further ahead to term it the cause of a monoculture. Here's the famous paper where he comapred the Internet to Microsoft Monoculture! According to him the network could be sharing a single flaw and can be brought down by a virus exploiting that flaw! Pretty interesting concept... though a bit far fetched I'd say.

Most of the latest viruses have spread more due to gullible users and poorly maintained systems. The OS is just a part of the whole ecosystem that could turn into a monoculture. A careless system administrator who poorly manages his network or a naive user who believes that its perfectly fine to open attachments from unknown people make the network more vulnerable than just the machines.

Thinking about viruses and patches, I wonder why doesn't Microsoft or any other software vendor deploy a viruslike patch management system. I system which tries to find vulnerable computers by attacking and just patches whenever it comes across one. This would be so easy to manage and deploy for an organization. Particularly where not all of the machines are connected to the internet and hence cannot benefit from the automatic patches provided by Microsoft.