greenpoint design

Netflix Model for Shift to Digital

Netflix’s recent move to shift subscribers from DVDs by mail to streaming over the net holds some valuable lessons for the newspaper business, argues Ken Doctor, the author of Newsonomics. By making streaming roughly half the cost of DVDs by mail, Netflix is moving their customers to where the company needs them to be, Doctor writes in The Newsonomics of Netflix and the Digital Shift.

“Imagine 2020,”  Doctor writes,  ”and the always-out-there-question: Will we still have print newspapers? Well, maybe, but imagine how much they’ll cost — $3 for a local daily? — and consumers will compare that to the ‘cheap’ tablet pricing, and decide, just as they doing now are with Netflix, which product to take and which to let go.”

Of course, Netflix doesn’t have to contend with the huge revenue gap between print advertising and digital advertising as newspapers do. All that is still TBD, Doctor writes, but Netflix may point the way.

Where It’s @

During Internet History Month, we bring you a happy-talk Today Show segment from 1994 wherein Brian and Katie ask, “What is internet, anyway?”

Also, for your consideration, this vintage Prodigy ad.

Clean Up Your Bookmarks

For a long time I’ve wished for a utility that would help me clean up my bookmarks. In 15 or so years of web browsing, I’ve accumulated over 2000 of these links with no good method to identify and erase the bad links.

Most people wouldn’t give this a second thought — ‘bad data happens, so what?’ And really, with faster processors and cheap storage, there’s no real penalty for letting detritus accumulate in your data. Probably it’s a symptom of OCD to even worry about dead links in a favorites file. But I did.

So it was with relief and gratitude that I found Andy Halford’s CheckPlaces add-on for Firefox. According to the write-up on Mozilla’s Firefox site CheckPlaces, “Checks your bookmarks are valid and the pages still exist, checks for duplicates and for empty folders and can restore missing favicons”. It does all that simply and with a minimum of effort. You can download your copy of CheckPlaces here.

So what percentage of the 2000 links were bad? About 10 percent.

Data and the City, Part II

Steven Johnson has a fascinating article in the November issue of Wired titled, “Invisible City: What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York.” For those of you who don’t live in Gotham, or one of the 300 or so other American cities that have instituted similar programs, 311 is simply the call center for New York City. It takes about 50,000 calls a day and returns information in 180 different languages. New Yorkers call in with complaints about rats, potholes, sewers and noise (noise is by far the biggest complaint category from 9pm to 3 am) and questions about parking rules, school closures and recycling.

Besides offering a safe way for cranky New Yorkers to let off steam, the 311 service has become an important data-gathering tool for the city. As Johnson points out in his article, “A data-driven approach to urban life makes sense, because cities are in many respects problems of information management.” Read more about Steven Johnson on his blog.

By categorizing incoming calls and tagging them with time and location data, city administrators can identify patterns and pinpoint problems. For example, the first hot days of May or June will bring a spike in questions about the city’s chlorofluorocarbon recycling program as New Yorkers look to dump their old air conditioners and buy new units. Similarly, a cluster of sanitary complaints about a specific restaurant will prompt a visit from the city’s health department.

So far the Bloomberg administration hasn’t made too much of the 311 data-pile public, but the potential for reuse of this type of info is huge. Imagine the suffering that could be averted if 311 data were merged with a public service like The Bedbug Registry.

Groups like Open311 are looking to standardize the system and open all the data to the public: “Open311 refers to a standardized technology for location-based collaborative issue-tracking.” That’s a pretty cool idea — bug tracking software for your hometown.

Dumbphones and the Late Adopter

If you pay attention to the popular press, you might believe that anyone without the latest iPhone or Droid was a troglodyte so rare as to warrant a mention on the endangered species list.

While smartphone sales are growing fast, they still only account for about a third of all mobile phones sold in the US, according to a June Gartner study.  And, in the developing world, dumbphones are likely to be the primary mode of communication for years to come. That’s not so much because of the high cost of smartphones overseas, but the lack of reliable data networks.

Even in this country with the recent roll-out of 4G networks in major cities, consumers are staying away in droves. Why is that?

Cost is an obvious factor. Most unlimited data plans are about $30 per month. Add in voice, text and taxes, and you’re looking at about $100 a month.  That’s worth it for a salesperson who travels a lot, but for a student or stay-at-home mom? Maybe not.

Actual utility is another factor. Dropped calls, blank spots and the slow-drip of overtaxed data networks do a lot to reduce perceived value. Most mobile devices are also difficult to use. A study by Jacob Nielsen’s firm last year found that people using mobile devices only had a 59 percent success rate for simple info-finding tasks.

There’s also the wariness of consumers who’ve been through one too many product cycles. Guaranteed obsolescence is great for manufacturers, but kind of a drag for buyers. Or as Don Norman writes in “The Life Cycle of a Technology“, “The vast majority of customers are late adopters. They hold off until the technology has proved itself, and then they insist upon convenience, good user experience, and value.”

In a few years we will almost certainly have a pocket-sized computer-communication device that can take photos, play music, provide recommendations, directions and data while facilitating cheap phone calls and seamless voice-to-text translation. It will probably also be rugged, waterproof, simple to use, and take its power from the sun. Until that day comes, though, many of us cave dwellers will stick with our dumb phones.