The Smooth DJ

Guest blogging today is Yomar Lopez, Marketing Guru, Business Growth Consultant, and Creative Geek. Yomar is President and Founder of Two Guys & A Pencil (TGAP), a New York City business/marketing consultancy aimed at protecting consumer rights and helping businesses do things in an ethical, effective, and profitable manner. He can be reached at yomar@tgapdesign.com or via his personal blog. - Gautam

Digital Rights Management. It's a buzz phrase you see everywhere these days, especially as more and more people download their music. For the entertainment industry, piracy and DRM are hot-button topics. Companies are losing money solely because of evil people downloading movies and music for free, people taking money away from the artists we all love so much, or so they'd like us to believe. To them, DRM is the solution for gaining back that supposedly fading market share. Unfortunately, these companies fail to see that Digital Rights Management is sound in concept but poorly-executed in most cases. DRM is actually hurting their business more than it actually helps them.

Continue reading "DRM: The Solution That Adds To The Problem" »

Just like their plan to give away free WiFi, Google has a new patent search engine that other vendors like Thomson currently charge for. Still in Beta, use it now while it doesn't even have Ads popping up. One way for Google to improve this ap is to include batch search (which Thomson offers). Anybody who's been near a patent lawyer knows that you call up batches of reference patents at a time when studying prior art. Still, kudos to Larry and Serge for bringing us yet another free service.

Via Andrew Sullivan - This is genius. A simple yet elegant solution that presents text in columns speeding up reading times.

This reinforces the notion that design is everything. And in most cases, it's more to do with application and not technology itself.

Take a look:

So proclaims Fast Company magazine in an article by Saabira Chaudhuri. Why?

1) Partnering with Cingular limits the customer base to 60 million, and according to survey data, the majority of people are happy with their existing carriers (not likely to switch)

2) Price. Is $500-$600 beyond the sweet spot for mass adoption?

3) The socio-technical and market landscape is completely different. The mobile phone market is relatively mature when compared to the 2001 MP3 player market where the iPod debuted. The iPod had major social influence - a key to its success. In contrast, just about everyone is comfortable with cell phones, that is, the demand to make a call on the go is not increased by the existence of the iPhone. The iPod on the other hand spurred social preferences and hence demand for portable digital music - a kind of self feeding momentum that the iPhone may not enjoy. An analogy (by no means perfect) I can think of: the iPod is closer to the model-T (groundbreaking) while the iPhone is closer to a stylish, 2008 hybrid that parks itself and gets 50 mpg.

The key to the iPhone's ability to revolutionalize mobile communications lies in its user-interface. Will it be compelling enough to make web-surfing-on-the-go as "normal" as making phone calls?