In 1900, an American civil engineer called John Elfreth Watkins made a
number of predictions about what the world would be like in 2000.... read more via the BBC. I just ran across this image of Watkins' predictions from 1900, and thought they would make a very good 2013 kick-off / happy new year post.
BRILLIANT video by comic author Rob Reid, showing how ridiculous the calculation of economic losses due to content 'piracy' is. Absolutely amazing how he strings the facts and hypotheses together - must watch for anyone in the content industry.
Read more here: Comic author and Rhapsody C-Founder Rob Reid unveils Copyright Math (TM), a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists. Rob Reid is a humor author and the founder of the company that created the music subscription service Rhapsody.
Snippets from the transcript:
"The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACTA agreement in Europe has been very emotional. And I think some dispassionate, quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate. I'd therefore like to propose that we employ, we enlist, the cutting edge field of copyright math whenever we approach this subject. For instance, just recently the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year to copyright theft. Now rather than just argue about this number, a copyright mathematician will analyze it and he'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across Ocean Boulevard to the Westin, and then to Mars ... (Laughter) ... if we use pennies.
Now this is obviously a powerful, some might say dangerously powerful, insight. But it's also a morally important one. Because this isn't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we're talking about, but this is actual economic losses. This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops, as well as wheat, tobacco, rice, sorghum -- whatever sorghum is -- losing sorghum. But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math. Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a yearsince Napster first came on the scene. So that's a chunk of what we're looking for. But total movie revenues across theaters, home video and pay-per-view are up. And TV, satellite and cable revenues are way up. Other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up. So this small missing chunk here is puzzling..."
Many of you may have heard about the ticket troubles for this year's Burning Man: their new lottery system means that many veteran fans can no longer attend - what a mess. The Guardian has a good post on this; personally I think it's quite unfair towards those that have gone to Burning Man for a long time - after all, it is these people that created most of the 'content' there. Punish your most loyal followers for the sake of a lofty principle?
In any case, maybe this still fictitious lego set could offer some temporary reprieve :)
As the “single most powerful tool for population control,” the CIA’s “Facebook program” has dramatically reduced the agency’s costs — at least according to the latest “report” from the satirical mag The Onion. Perhaps inspired by a recent interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who …
This is a really interesting and often hilarious video of Google's Marissa Mayer interviewing Lady Gaga, found just now via FastCompany. Now, I don't care a whole lot about Lady Gaga's music (or did you really expect me to?) but this is indeed a very interesting and unique setting: über-celebrity-pop-cult meets micro-celeb-business-tech-super-girl. Note the slightly different outfits, to start with :). Nice, Google.
This is a must-watch; and yes, I am not the first one to mention it, missed this until just now - but what a great fit: the guy, the topic, the connection, the logic, the fun - great example of marketing nirvana.
The Blendtec people nailed this - and you've got to love the tag-line: "We've heard that the iPad will change your life, but will it
change the way you blend?"
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