Talking to Idiots
One of the traits of a great innovation is how obvious it appears once you’ve seen it. Unfortunately a lot of frustration can occur trying to explain the innovation to people who haven’t yet grasped the concept. Often it feels like you are trying to explain the innovation to an idiot. While this might be the case, if your innovation depends on explaining it to idiots you have a serious problem. Chances are that your idea will not become an innovation very soon if you can’t explain it to investors and it definitely won’t if you can’t explain it to customers.
How can you tell if the problem is with the way you are explaining it or if you really are just talking to an idiot? If the person you are talking to is an idiot, move on. But if they aren’t an idiot you are left with two other possibilities. The first is you aren’t explaining it very well. That can be easily fixed. The second is a warning sign that your idea won’t catch on. If your idea is too far ahead of a customer’s demand they won’t understand it. If that is the case you will waste a lot of time and money trying to bring it to market.
In communication sciences we have a term for this, its called rupture. Two people might be using similar or even the exact same words but using different definitions or making assumptions that are radically different. The meaning of the message gets lost in transmission. The context is as important as the code of any communication.
Infinite Supply, the Problem with Copyrights & Patents
In a comment to Economics Of Abundance Getting Some Well Deserved Attention a reader complained that there isn’t an infinite supply of good books, good music, and movies. This is flatly false, there’s an infinite supply of any intellectual property and it can be mathematically proven. How is that for being emphatic?
Don’t fear I’m going to back up that statement and do the following:
- Prove there is an infinite supply of information.
- Show some reasons why Copyrights & Patents are logically flawed.
- List one form of intellectual property that is real and very valuable.
Digital media makes my point very clear. When you digitize a song, book or movie you convert it into numbers. And how many numbers are there? Infinite, you can keep counting forever. Computers store everything as a series of electrical impulses. We think of those as 1′s and 0′s. So inside a computer the music, videos, books and everything else is just a big number.
If you converted the phrase “infinite supply” into a stream of ones and zeros the way the computer sees it this is what it looks like:
01101001 01101110 01100110 01101001 01101110 01101001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110101 01110000 01110000 01101100 01111001
As you look at that I’m sure it looks like a meaningless number. And that is the point. That phrase, “infinite supply” is just a meaningless number to a computer. Now look at this article. Up to this point it is 1,462 letters. When I save it on my computer it’s converted to a stream of 1′s and 0′s, it’s just a number. And like every number you could start at 1 and count up to the number equivalent of this article.
To count to the number that represents “infinite supply” you would pass “infinite supplx” and “infinite supplw”. You would also pass “supply”, “infinite”, “finite”, “in” and “a” and every possible combination of letters up to the 15 letter combination that make “infinite supply”. That is 2,954,312,706,550,833,698,643 combinations if we only include the letters “a” through “z” and blank space.
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BBC moves to file-sharing sites
Hundreds of episodes of BBC programmes will be made available (legally) on a file-sharing network for the first time, the corporation has announced.
The move follows a deal between the commercial arm of the organisation, BBC Worldwide, and technology BitTorrent firm Azureus through their Zudeo service.
This is really great news. People all over the world have enjoyed BBC programming but its sometimes hard to get it. In the US BBC television is mostly available through public television. And more recently through file sharing. Its great to see the BBC recognize the value of global distribution made possible using BitTorrent.
I’ve been involved with BitTorrent since 1999, my business partner The Shad0w created BitTornado, a BitTorrent client, to enhance the protocol. Many of BitTornado’s enhancements have been accepted as standards to the protocol.
The original reason we got involved in BitTorrent was to create alternative business models to allow artists to get paid for their work. We realized that file sharing was the natural state and trying to stop it was impossible. So how can artists get paid if making copies is free? We tried to help performers get concert gigs and built a web site that allowed you to audition performers online and then book them for performances. We found paying for bandwidth was too expensive at the time; this led Shad0w to work on the BitTorrent open source project and became one of the major contributors to the technology.
I continued working on business models, and discovered there are four basic types of business models for information. The key factors are:
| Paid Before Creation | Paid After Creation | |
| Paid By Consumer |
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| Paid By Another Person |
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Copyrights focus on paying after creation or publication. By focusing on business models the pay the artist before creation or publication sharing isn’t a problem, and in general is helpful.
Advertising benefits from file sharing. I spent a lot of time promoting integrated advertising also known as branded entertainment. The Apprentice was one of the biggest successes of branded entertainment. I was unable to get the idea to widely catch on. Oddly enough it wasn’t people rejecting the idea, it was because companies didn’t know how to purchase it. The advertising world is based around the idea of empty space. You buy empty space and place your ad in the empty space. Since branded entertainment is the content there isn’t an empty space to fill with a 30 second spot. The big companies didn’t know which department should handle it. And is the case with most innovations, if its disruptive they ignore it.
We have seen an interim solution with such companies as Revver.com. They tack an ad on the end of videos. So far this is missing the important content targeting to make the ad beneficial to the viewer. Viewers HATE commercials. The post roll approach used by Revver is better than others because the ad is at the end so there is no interruption but advertisers don’t want to pay for something that isn’t seen. There isn’t a strong win-win-win feedback loop.
Patronage and charity are very similar but patronage is more interesting. A patron gains benefit from having the work created. And now that copying and sharing is free groups of people can be patrons of an artist and everyone get a copy of the work. A method of doing this is The Street Performer Protocol. I believe this is the next big innovation, its already being used and I’ll discuss it more in future posts. I’m currently working on a service to make patronage easy and reliable. This will allow consumers to directly fund new movies, books, music, and software that can then be released with a Creative Commons license. No ads, total artistic freedom and consumers choose what is made.
After seeing Zudeo and the ability deliver HD content with an easy to use interface it is one of the outlets we will use for distribution.
Action Items
- Visit Zudeo and try the Azureus client to download high quality video.
- Visit Inagada.com, read about the project and sign up for the newsletter to stay informed of the progress.
