What is Madrona.com up to?

Mining the site log to see who’s been here lately. I’m getting a few international visits. I keep seeing a site come up that I’m not familiar with, madrona.com.

Curiosity killed the cat, so I went over to their site.

It turns out that they are a local venture capital group that specializes in high tech.

I’m familiar with a few of the companies they are involved with. Farecast.com was featured in this PI

article recently. What a great concept. Airlines have made ticket pricing so crazy, it was just a matter of time before someone tried to turn it into a futures market.

BagBorrowOrSteal.com has a clever business model and a few people I know work there. Bags was featured in BusinessWeek here a while back, but I have not heard anything about them recently.

Mercent.com is my favorite of the companies I recognized. Too much IT stuff going on internally to support optimizing your marketing efforts? Who you gonna call? These guys are taking advantage of overloaded IT departments by taking over some of the back office stuff. I met the founder of this company at a DMA meeting. Companies like this are going to proliferate as marketers find new ways to avoid their internal IT quagmires.

So why would a technical VC site be visiting little old me so frequently? Does someone I know work there? Are they trying to implementing some new technology related to blogs, and regularly visit them to evaluate content for some new product they are creating?

If it’s the later, I hope they are working on a blog rating service so I can target my brand advertising based on site content, popularity, and maturity level. Something like this needs to be invented to help marketers know where they can safely advertise at some of the 15 million blogs out there.

Whatever the reason, thanks for caring guys. See you in the log files.

Internet Radio: Live Free Or Die (save pandora)

A few months back, I heard through the friend about a fantastic new online radio station called Pandora.com. You get started by selecting one of your favorite artists, and then the station selects songs for you to listen to based on music that has similar attributes to the seed artist that you selected. You can give a thumbs up, or thumbs down to each selection. Future songs are selected based on this feedback.

I gave it a try, and the technology works really well. You can see which other users out there like the artists you’ve enjoyed, and see who their favorite artists are. I ended up purchasing a couple of CDs from bands I’d never heard of based on the selections I discovered at Pandora. Score one for the Internet: Technology delivers innovative business model that allows users to drive the content they consume vs. pre-defined programming.

All was well for a couple of months, then the i.p. address got blocked by the company I work for… apparently music is not an appropriate use of corporate band width. I contacted Pandora to see they had another i.p. address I could go to, but they did not. Fair enough, but I’m a little resourceful when something I care a lot about is involved. I reverted back to a local online radio station run by students for my music fix.

A short time later, I came across this article at wsj.com:

Last week the Copyright Royalty Board released a ruling proposing new performance royalty rates for online radio stations. An online radio station would pay .08 cent per song per listener for 2006 (the rates are retroactive), .11 cent in 2007, .14 in 2008, .18 cents in 2009 and .19 cents in 2010. Seems like little enough, but it adds up -- and this small change is a big change for small Webcasters. Under a deal brokered in 2002, small Webcasters had met their royalty obligations by paying artists and record labels 12% of revenue, but the new rules would do away with that exemption.

The article went on to say that this new royalty fee would effectively wipe out most online internet radio stations. Land based radio stations pay a composer royalty, but not a performance royalty. Internet stations must pay both. This fee structure is designed to wipe out competition for traditional radio stations, and force you to be a good consumer and listen to what you are programmed to listen to.

I’ve been watching the music industry for a while. A family member of mine left the industry due to the upheavals it has gone through over the decade. The Internet has made music a much more fluid commodity, and existing music titans are kicking and screaming to retain control of their niche. Recently one or two of the major labels out there have capitulated and made deals that start to make more sense for me as a consumer.

Yesterday I got a letter from Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora.com. Here is the text:

Hi, it's Tim from Pandora,I'm writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn't pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.

Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio:

http://dbm.pandora.com/t?r=927&c=896850&l=37172&ctl=168C8CE:4A993843ECE4582ABBDCFB52E706CF58050542759970026E

Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends - the more petitioners we can get, the better.
Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I'm no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians.

The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster's business potential.

I hope you'll take just a few minutes to sign our petition - it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you
for your support.
-Tim Westergren(Pandora founder)

I’m not one to write my congressional representative about anything. Never done it…until today. This fee scheme is some bureaucratic attack to make and end run around a changing market place, and it will only work if you ignore it.

I found a few like minded bloggers on this subject. Check them out in your spare time:

Read/WriteWeb
Discourse.net
Gizmodo.com
Change Is Good
Zatz Not Funny!
Out Of The Woods
Geek Zone
BigSnit.com
Where Is My Mind
Paige Burns
One Thing I Know
The View From Here
My.bicycle
Cool Librarian
In Heavy Rotation
Beadweaver
The Dauntless Muse
America’s Victory ‘08
Repliqa
Pipeline
Gribbit’s Word
See One, Do One, Teach One
21st Century Paladin

Google Banking Please

I recently got an over draft notice from one of the banking institution I do business with. They graciously charged me $30 for the overdraft, and covered my check.

This frustrates me in a lot of ways. I had the money to cover the check I’d written, but I don’t look at my bank account often enough to know when I’m low on funds.

As banking services become more of a commodity, I’m going to have to re-think who I’m doing business with. I’m not sure I’m getting much value for the services I pay for, and I think the limited services that are offered to me are structured so that I’ll end up paying an extra $50 to $100 per year towards unexpected fees.

I’m looking for a bank that is going to bend over backwards to help me manage my money better. Why do I need to get Quicken or MS Money when the bank already has all that transactional data anyway? I’d like to get mobile alerts on my phone when my bank account falls below some threshold I’ve set, or if certain transactions are over some specific dollar amount that might indicate fraud.

Is this crazy talk? Maybe this will be Google’s next free beta offer. Just a thought.

Retail Adventures In 2nd Life

I read a few articles recently like this one in Adweek about 2nd Life and in Fallon’s Planning blog here. I thought I’d better check it out and see for myself.

The printed word does not do this place justice. The amount of detail in this virtual world is truly stunning, although content is still a little sparse. The main attraction is exploring new worlds, and chatting with other like minded explorers on your journey. You get $275 Linden dollars (virtual money) to start with, and there are plenty of ways to spend it.

My 1st decision in 2nd Life was what type of avatar to have. An avatar is a virtual representation of yourself in the lands that you wander. Basic avatar choices range from male or female, Caucasian or African American, and hip or gigolo. From there you can customize your basic model’s facial appearance and body style, or go hire someone to give you a complete custom body job.

My avatar isn’t very smart. All he can do is walk, fly, or teleport around to different parts of second life. Five years from now, I’m sure he’ll be sending me an email when my virtual friends hop online, purchase my wife's anniversary present for me, fetch me news articles that he thinks I’ll find appealing, and balance my check book.

You start off on 2nd Life with some pretty basic clothes: jeans and a t-shirt. I felt kind of like I was running around town with a sticker on my back that said “freshman”, so I went hunting for some better duds. I didn’t find a lot of big brands to choose from. American Apparel was about the only place I recognized.

Once inside, I realized their men’s selection was pretty limited, and I couldn’t figure out how to pay for the damn clothing, so I left empty handed.

My next stop was to American Eagle Outfitters…er, well, ALMOST American Eagle Outfitters. The company came up as AEO in search, but when I got there, things were a little different.

Are there any laws against this in cyberland if the person hosting the store isn’t on American soil?

After a little more exploring, I finally found a nice little shop in my own virtual back yard.

I opted for the Smashing Pumpkins ZERO shirt:

Only $100 bucks! I can’t copy it or transfer it to anyone, so if you dig it, you’ll have to go get your own.

I stumbled around a few more stores and picked up some more clothes. Now I’m down to just $47 Linden Dollars in my account. I’m a little worried, because $47 USD only gets me a tank of gas in the real world.

How do you earn virtual dollars in 2nd Life? There are lots of ways. You can purchase Linden dollars with real dollars, you can build things and sell them to other people, and you can earn them. The most popular way to earn Linden dollars seems to be dancing. This struck me as weird at first, but as I wandered around 2nd life, I realized I was looking for places with people hanging out there as much as I was looking for places to explore.

Gambling also seems to be pretty popular. If you like to, or as a means to get more Linden dollars, there are slot machines everywhere. The real life FBI is not too happy about this, as noted in this Reuters article. I’ve even read that some 2nd life casinos have banned US based avatars from entering their establishments.

I scurried around a little bit more and ran into a Nissan dealership. Nissan was handing out free Altimas, and they had a test track where I could take mine for a test drive.

Virtual cars are much easier to maintain then the real thing. I crashed mine a bajillion times and the thing never got a scratch on it.
Nissan also had a bunch of other really cool free stuff on their lot, but as I wandered around, I noticed some of the stuff wasn’t created by Nissan. I wasn’t sure if I was picking up some sort of Trojan Horse virtual voodoo items that might cause me to morph into some three eyed alien at some point in the near future, so I wasn’t too greedy. I picked up a ‘script’ that supposedly would give my avatar a more fluid motion, but I haven’t noticed any difference so far.

When you search for places to go in 2nd life, there seems to be a common theme

Sex chat areas seem to be the most popular places. The history books talk about how explorers, then traders, then homesteaders tamed the wild west. I think 50 years from now when historians are writing about the evolution of the internet, they are going to talk about how the space was pioneered by horny people, then commerce, then politicians, and finally the soccer mom…maybe they’ll forget about horny people… no one seems to be talking about what made AOL so popular back in the day.


The natives I talked to were really nice. There seemed to be a lot more women then men around. In this place, if you have been around for 4 or 5 months, you are an old timer.

I met Elise standing on the roof of the demo house on Help Island. Help Island is a good place to go and hang out to meet new people and get tips on cool places to explore. We watched together as someone dropped a morphing sculpture into the main “teleporting” area of the island…This thing was HUGE, like 3 or 4 stories tall, and it kept changing shape. Everyone in the landing zone was blocked out by the thing. Some one called the Linden cops and the offending art was removed.

More people in a social setting is usually a good thing, but not in 2nd life. The more people that show up in one spot, the slower the graphic updates happen. Locals call this ‘LAG’, and it got so bad sometimes I had to shut down the 2nd life program to get out.

What does your avatar do when you leave 2nd life? It still persists there, in a comatose state. Every once in a while you’ll see an avatar slumped over with an ‘away’ sign over its head. I started going under water before I logged off because the thought of being in a public space with other people hanging around my lifeless body gave me the hee-bee-gee-bees. I think you can turn yourself into a small, inconspicuous ball, but I have not figured out how yet.
2nd Life isn’t limited to US citizens. I ran into a few French and German folks there too. I don’t speak those languages, but I’m sure in a couple of years there will be a Google Universal Translator mash up, so it will not matter where you are from. It isn’t too much of a leap of imagination to see myself commuting to a virtual office where I work with a team of people from around the globe to earn a living…



I’m getting ahead of myself, this is only 2007. So lets review; Gambling, Sex, and Shopping. If you can’t afford Las Vegas right now, consider a visit to 2nd life.
If you LOVE to read, consider Tad Williams ‘Otherland’ series to see what all this could lead to.

REI Misses Social Networking Opportunity On MySpace.com

I was kicking around MySpace today looking for companies out there trying new things in the social network arena.


The North Face



I've seen a few reports out there on who is spending for advertising on MySpace.com, and in general, I don't think many big retailers are included in this club.


The challenge with social networking sites is to convey your brand message without attracting unwanted negative attention.



TGR



Large apparel retailers appear to be a little phobic about the context in which their ads will appear at MySpace. If you have a nationally recognized brand, the odds are pretty high you are already represented there.




Notice a common theme in some of these profiles? There are a lot of "Great Outdoors" retailers on MySpace, and they all have thousands of friends.


BURTON

This one seems like a no-brainer to me. Lots of "great outdoor" people get to add their favorite "outdoor brand" to their list of friends, and the outdoor brand gets to post special offers to these folks, and talk about events they are sponsoring around the country.

So far, my favorite company out there is called Moosejaw.com. Their profile is full of zanny contests, funny pictures, and a daily free t-shirt giveaway (I have a t-shirt fetish) that convey a real sense of fun. They send my bulletins about special offers...all free marketing
Moosejaw


Is REI too dumb to understand they are missing an opportunity, or to scared too put their brand out there? Test your brand out on a social network, before someone else tests it for you.

REI

Evil Search Brand Keyword Bidders REVEALED

There it is again. The Google keyword rank report for yesterday says I ranked 1.8 on my brand name, which means someone else has been bidding on my company name, and forcing me to the number 2 spot in search results.

There are benefits to bidding on your brand name, and drawbacks. If you do, great, if you don't, should others?

You spent a long time and a lot of money to build your brand, and someone is trying to cash in on that and steal your customer when they are ready to shop with you.

Who done it? Was it an affiliate? A competitor? A shopping comparison site? There are an endless supply of suspects. You may have budget constraints that make it more cost effective to allow a partner to bid on your name. That may be the case with some of the examples here, but I suspect there are some sinister forces at work too.

Catching these guys can be hard. Brand name keyword bidders can geo-target their bids so that search results in your geographic location exclude their trespassing. Sometimes they strike in the dead of the night while you are asleep. Even if the culprit is dumb and lazy, Google doesn't always show all the bidders on a specific term for a given search... You need to be a little obsessive compulsive (I'm guilty) to catch these guys.

I think I've found a way to circumvent some of the filtering that goes on in Google. Their search results in places where they syndicate their search seems to include ALL the bidders for a given term. So you get different search results on places like MySpace (where I got these samples).

If you are bidding on someone else's brand name (without their consent), a pox on your family. If you are hanging out at MySpace, look me up and invite me over....imbarber

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