Veoh Networks is a great company, though I haven’t worked out yet whether it is sailing too close to the wind or not. The company is funded by media conglomerate Time-Warner and Michael Eisner (the former ruler of planet Disney). The website looks like YouTube, but with some important differences:
Veoh can do 2 GB files distributed via a P2P-client available for Mac and that other platform
I’ve been enjoying a selection of ‘so-bad-they’re-good’ 1970s martial arts movies off there.The Mac client is really easy to use. My main concern is how will the company make money in the longer term. I can see someone like TimeWarner using Veoh as a guinea pig to further is experiment with AOL and online TV. On second thoughts just enjoy it while you can! More media related posts here.
I’m with StupidApple has apparently moved away from using a PortalPlayer media processor in all its iPods and instead moved to Samsung for the next-generation of MP3 players. PortalPlayer is very exposed to the Apple business, with iPods counting for about 70 per cent of its sales according to a Reuters report that I’ve read. Its not healthy for PortalPlayer, hopefully the company will diversify its client base to become more independent.
However Samsung as a supplier was also a dumb move for Apple. This is not a commodity product like flash memory where Apple can use multiplie suppliers and change at will, the media chip is central to the iPod functionality and experience.
Does it sound like a smart move to work closely with (and educate in the art of engineering a killer MP3 player) a large ambitious, hyper-aggressive company that wants to eat Apple for lunch? It has been alleged that Samsung had meetings with creative agencies in London where the central theme was Kill iPod.
You can chart the fall of the iPod empire from this moment on…
From romantic Korean drams to hard boiled films like Old Boy and Silmido are making waves amongst arthouse cinema fans and movie industry talent-spotters throughout the western world. It now seems that its not only Hollywood that is turning its eyes eastwards to follow the latest cultural carrying-ons in Korea, but Chinese eyes are too.
The country’s cultural exports are cutting-edge tempered with the Confucian-based culture familiar to Chinese audiences. American culture is too ‘post-modern’ to be absorbed directly. At least some of the time, China sees Japan in a way reminiscent of Basil Fawlty and is still beyond the pale because of the War. Although the Chinese consistent appetite for Japanese AV content is well documented elsewhere. Taste making goes beyond pop singers and movies to hip brands such the must-have mobile phone from Samsung and Hyundai cars.
Rather like Eric Clapton adapting the blues for white audiences in the UK; so Korea is adapting western idioms from hip-hop culture and sit-coms like Sex in the City. It is then making them palatable for East Asian audiences. Free trade and intellectual property protection is likely to not be as beneficial to Hollywood in tapping the Chinese market as the media moguls had hoped. More Korea related posts here.
Bez won Celebrity Big Brother, ten years after the peak of the Happy Mondays. London creative team Lee and Dan made an Al Qeada inspired calling card for Volkswagen that managed to leak out on to the web. Analysts at Credit Suisse First Boston won the monthly award for stating the bleeding obvious. We did a bit of homegrown analysis with the help of information from Popbitch to work out just how much News International made from the Prince Harry Nazi pictures. We also found that the Watchman character that the rc personality most resembled was The Comedian, more details on testing your Watchman Personality Inventory here.
February 2005
Words of the month were Mum Truck and KAGOY (kids get older, younger). Hunter S Thompson killed himself and half the media world pretended that they were avid readers of his work. The books of the month were Michael Collins by Tim Pat Coogan and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (another pioneer of the gonzo school of journalism). The US Army released details around its successful word-of-mouth marketing campaign to attract recruits. America’s Army a realistic 3D game garnered interest in soldiering as a career and was far more fruitful than their television advertising campaigns. Bob Cringely highlighted how 25 billion USD needed to be invested by VC funds in the next 18 months or else they would lose their management fees. This of course wouldn’t have anything to do with the bubbling up of Web 2.0 would it? Carly Fiorina was finally ousted from H-P much to the relief of its employees. Sci-Fi London hosted a fantastic all-nighter of Shaw Brothers classics including Super Infra Man and Monkey Goes West.
March 2005
renaissance chambara turned 1 years-old. Forrester mapped out trends in consumer electronics for 2005. March’s word was Search Arbitrage. Seymour Hersh highlighted the Pentagon’s plans for axis-of-evil club member Iran. Hersh’s pioneering journalistic approach contrasted with general media malaise. The Sony PSP picked up a lot of interest on the web with some hailing it as the new iPod, I don’t think so…. And most importantly the rc towers local pub got recognised as Pub of the Year by the Evening Standard.
April 2005
PR gossip blog Spin Bunny was shut down for the first time as an unnamed PR agency called in the lawyers. Red Bull’s Art of Can exhibition brought a bit of culture to the Truman brewery. Word of the month is Kronenbourg. H-P manages to launch survey results that make them look foolish. There was less content overall as we were burning the midnight candle at work.
May 2005
Flying Records, one of the UK’s foremost dance record shops finally closed its shutters after ten years at the forefront of the scene, however its spirit lives on as Andrew Baker now champions new tracks online working for distributor Goya Music. Palm launched the LifeDrive and it didn’t look that impressive compared to an iPod, retail therapy was thus avoided. Michelle Delio was found to have made up some of her stories that she contributed to Wired News. The word of the month was Sachet Marketing.
June 2005
Country Music Television appoints a vice president of Dukes of Hazzard in a brilliantly executed PR campaign to promotes its re-runs of the original series. Omega releases its Planet Ocean watch – the watch that the Seamaster should be. WTF Apple goes Intel! Web 2.0 starts looking bubblicious. It was a few months since the Miami Winter Music festival and the Ibiza season was just starting to kick-off so a bumper month was had in the vinyl stakes. Michael Jackson is found not guilty, but the court of public opinion isn’t so sure. The word of the month is Mommy Consultant, Burson-Marsteller’s phrase e-fluential missed out because it was too close to effluent and we wouldn’t want you to be under the opinion that we thought all bloggers were full of sh!t now would we?
July 2005
Cracks start to show in the eBay edifice. Fatigue for consumerism starts to set in. Coke rolls out their Love poster campaign, arguably the best piece of creative this year. The ongoing rising price of oil gives Hubbert’s Peak a mainstream audience as consumers wake up to the fact that oil isn’t going to get any cheaper or more plentiful. The New York Times celebrated the tenth birthday of e-commerce.
August 2005
Wired issues its ten-year netrospective ‘celebrating’ the original of the bubble with the Netscape IPO. Citizen journalism sees its first cynical cash in with the launch of Scoopt, a picture agency for the general public and their camera phone. Paparazzi sleep easy though. Music industry bodies blame everybody but themselves for the continued under-performance of their industry. Bob Cringely launches his NerdTV series of interviews and Stussy’s 25th (XXV) anniversary collection is full swing. Towards the end of the month I managed to survive Silicon Valley. In Utah, the heavy mob is used to deal with kids listening to repetitive beats in an incident rather like the infamous police raid in Nelson near Blackburn back in the day. I am sure American’s everywhere feel safer already. The harvest of quality dance music on an acid house tip.
September 2005
Chigger is the word. Nick Love’s film The Business reminds us why the 1980s were so good and so crap at the same time. Palm previews a Windows device, Dell stumbles and I try hard not to snigger, its especially hard when some bright spark calls Dell’s answer to the iPod Shuffle the Dell Ditty and styles it like a Ronson lighter. Apple launches the iPod Nano and gadgeteers recoil in horror from the Motorola ROKR. Nestle re-releases the Texan bar. Geek-in-chief at Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, appeals to the troops to stop leaking confidential news via their blogs; via a blog!
October 2005
Designers Burro shut up shop, while Criminal opens a Covent Garden boutique and Matmos see sense and re-release the Telstar lamp. Disgraced analyst Harry Blodgett starts his own blog. Super Southerner is the phrase of the moment. Spin Bunny gets shut down for the second time, this time it looks like its permanent as the entire site is removed from Typepad, speculation is that a South Bank based agency was responsible for letting loose the dogs of law. The tune of the moment is Tiger Stripes – Spirited Away. In a pre-Halloween push Burger King’s clumsy viral marketing efforts get unmasked by Slate.
November 2005
Lynx launches a bespoke perfume in conjunction with Oki-Ni, research shows that music downloads have plateaued proving the proving the point that you can only buy so much crap. Talking of crap, Hypercolour looks like it may be making a come back. AOL makes its first interesting move in years by taking TV to the web and my even have a good business model. The word is Shorty (at least according to DJ Tim Westwood).
December 2005
Christmas comes in with a whimper and Sony messes up a street marketing campaign for the PSP. rc floats the concept of a media bond and futures market to capitalise on the digitisation of content, the long tail and too much sloshing around waiting to be invested. Bootlegs mixes of Aretha Franklin and Pink Floyd move the feet so that the mind will follow. The word of the month is Uncanny Valley. Designers Terratag have some awesome gear in their latest fashion collection. Amazon take a Hermann Goring approach to email marketing in the final run-up to Christmas. A brief trip to Ireland left me with a number of contradictory observations about the state of the Celtic Tiger.
Image courtesy of Sanrio. More related content here.
The New York Times has an interesting article about how Sean Coombes is trying quite successfully to walk his urban fashion label out of the cliche it had become. Though his business is worth some 400 million USD annually, Coombs has seen the writing on the wall of the scene and rather than cater for the limited market of Ali G impressionists is trying to move more upmarket. The urban fashion scene has become as tired as the sound of R&B and rap music, in the way that 80’s rock got into treading the same groove over and over again to make money.
In the US, labels like Ecko, Sean John and Phat Farm have been co-opted by preppie clientele. There is a certain irony in this as Phat Farm often aped preppie and collegiate looks for the hip-hop community. Now Phat Farm has been co-opted by desperate brands such as Motorola looking for a hook-up, Russell Simmons sold out leaving the company to an international conglomerate. Brands like Gap and Abercrombie and Finch have stolen much of the look. While in Europe, genuine workwear brands like Carhartt and Dickies that were part of the real prison yard baggy look have combated the new pretenders by acknowledging their fashion customer base and participating in associated activities like music and extreme sports.
Coombs is using his womenswear range as a Trojan horse to get into the department stores that otherwise would not have carried his usual clothing range. More on fashion here –
In the 1970’s through to the present day the English Disease referred to the reputation of a small minority of football supporters from England with a penchant for violent behaviour, the likes of which has not been seen in the US since the Rodney King riots.Within the technology sector there is another English Disease, this has been touched upon by Mike King, managing director of Johnson King in this op-ed which ran in Tuesday’s FT Creative Business. I would argue that it merits as much if not more attention as the organised violence of English football hooligans as is gnaws away at the future prosperity of the UK.
This disease is a chronic lack of ambition and vision and manifests itself in different ways:
Mike complains that British start-ups are reluctant to invest in marketing and PR to enhance their reputation and grow their business. They often do not recognise the value of it and even where they do, the pathetically low budget put into marketing is below the critical mass required to deliver results. There is a similar attitude whether the management team are novices or drawing down a serious package as an ‘experienced entrepreneur’. Yet the most respected businessman for these people would be Richard Branson; a modern-day Barnum who built his empire with large doses of shameless self-promotion. Mike owning a PR agency was particularly interested in this aspect of the equation! However this is only a small part of the picture.
Funding is not forthcoming; venture capital in the technology sector is based on trying to achieve a ten-fold return on the money. UK start-ups have lower expectations of themselves, they do not share their American colleagues dreams of being the next Oracle, Apple, Microsoft or IBM. Consequently the technology business is trapped in a self reinforcing prophetic circle, a black hole with an expanding event horizon sucking away the vision and dreams. This in turn encourages the fund managers to husband their limited cash as much as they can by cutting back on ‘unnecessary expenditure’ on things like marketing and looking for an early exit strategy through acquisition or technology licencing agreements. It is not because the UK does not have the expertise and the smarts:
US chip pioneer LSI Logic was founded by Wilf Corrigan, a Liverpool docker’s son made good
Apple Computer’s sizzle is in large part to a product design team headed by Geordie designer Jonathan Ives who has designed every successful product from the original bondi blue iMac to the latest iPods
Cambridge boffin Alan Turing was arguably the inventor of first programmable computer and laid down the defining test for true artificial intelligence
LCDs: liquid crystals were invented in the UK, but made Japanese companies rich
The problem is that the English disease is pervasive, it affects the value of houses, how much your future pension is going to be worth and what jobs the UK citizens of tomorrow are likely to have. The FTSE has underperformed US rivals for the past decade because it does not have its share of high-growth technology companies. Vodafone and mmO2 is just a seller of wireless services, just as much a merchant as supermarket chain Tesco, Lastminute.com is an e-tailer echoing the Napoleonic-era cliche of Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. ARM Holdings, the UK’s leading chip company, is a chip designer that can barely be described as a medium-sized enterprise. Software company Autonomy is noticable only for its lack of peers. Cambridge’s Silicon Fen is actually a laughable Silicon Sahara with precious few oasises.
With such a poor technology sector, money for investment sloshes around in management buyouts (with the intention of trying to squeeze more value out of mature businesses), a cash bloated property market and overseas where entrepreneurs generally have more vision. Thus setting the UK up for economic underachievement ad infinitum. Instead the UK will be an economy based on the export of a small amount of golf sweaters, rainwear, antiques and pre-prepared curry cooking sauces. It would be side splittingly funny if it wasn’t so tragic. More related posts here.
