Art, it’s an uncommon product, and normally, they’re one of a kind so they are quite expensive. But an artist has to make a living like any other so why not behave like this french artist and make the following setup:

You create art, with your own significant style, and you advertise yourself on your website. On this website you also showcase what you have made. What you also do is sell directly from the website for a good price.

I can imagine that the step from finding an artist to buying a piece of art is the biggest, this makes that step much smaller. Who would make a trip to Bordeaux where her gallery is based on a website alone? But I can spend some money on something I seem to like. And this allows anyone that finds you to get a good indication of price, even when they don’t want to buy right away. I would say that it would be most interesting if the artist also created a premium product line that would only be sold in select gallery’s. This way you can still get the more common work directly, but for the really exquisite pieces you would have to visit the gallery and pay a (much) higher price. This would also allow you to involve people even more with your painting, add them to the tribe to use Seth’s words.

I think this goes for more than just paintings, any type of product of which the value is determined mostly by taste would benefit from this approach. Think designer furniture, jewelery, photographs (which are like paintings) or even something intangible like a service.

Interestingly enough he calls the downfall of Nintendo sales I mentioned earlier a direct result from Nintendo not releasing its bigger titles in the first half of 2009. And the only influence the recession has on the video gaming sales is through the distributors.

Yoichi Wada is quoted to say the following:

Present game machines already have a lot of functions: they are a network terminal, a Blu-ray or DVD player, and a gaming machine. Compared to these three pillars, the [new motion] controllers are quite limited, so the impact may be small. They are an extension of the gaming function,

He does expect Nintendo to also move this way with its new console in 2011, contrary to the Activision Blizzard CEO’s statement who does not believe we will see new consoles within 2 years. I personally believe the new Xbox controller; Natal, will be the next step towards a full motion gaming environment, the last step was made by the Wii’s controller and it remains to be seen what the next step will be. We haven’t seen what the Natal will be able to do in a fully developed game!

Main problem is the fact that Microsoft fails to incorporate the apps into the proposal, while they are working on their Windows Mobile app store, they seem to be unable to use that same app store for the Zune, saying it has a different focus.

Apple was just saying the success of the Touch is based on games, what’s the truth? Well I believe that the Touch selling 20 million times and Apple having one app platform for all the devices is a better guess than Microsoft is going for with the Zune. Because only a select few developers are allowed to develop apps for the Zune and they believe games are not very important to bring to the Zune.

Unbelievable!

With a total amount sold of 227,400 during August, down 39 per cent year-on-year Nintendo has to make a move to be able to profit from the coming holiday season. Microsoft is looking to present the Natal project while Sony is presenting their new controller in 2010, nobody knows what Nintendo will do to keep up.

But since Sony and Microsoft have been playing catchup since the launch of the Wii, it’s to be expected for Nintendo to have some trick up its sleeve. But I’m still trying to imagine how do can out-do Natal.

“Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch,” Jobs told the New York Times. “Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine.

“We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to USD 199. We don’t need to add new stuff. We need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.”

There you have it, huge sales numbers; iPhone sold 30 million units, Touch sold 20 million; both in the past 2 years, combined with its enormous amount of games looks to be Apple’s ticket in the big league of gaming. The new technology; iPhone 3GS and new iPod Touch, allows for even more impressive graphics and gameplay allowing designers to push the envelope even furthur.

Next stage? More processing power, augmented reality, and fully integrated social networking features. I believe the future has no monthly play in terms of call time in it, we just lease the phone of our choice and pay a flat fee for data.

While it was to be expected for this to happen sooner or later, the stated reasons are laugable and are very quikly taken apart; Firstly it’s because it harms the music industry’s “ability to adapt to the changing marketplace” and furthermore “cheats songwriters out of fair compensation for their creative efforts”.

Lets talk about both seperately; the cheating of the songwriters seems clear, they write a songtext and get paid when its used. When someone puts it on a website they don’t get paid for the use, thus they are cheated. But are they? Because everyone that goes to a lyrics site wants to know “the lyrics to that great song I’ve just heared” or whatever makes them come there, we can all agree that the basis for visiting a lyrics website is hearing the song. I might be wrong but by having already heared the song, isn’t it strange to then not allow people to put this text on a website? Clearly the text goes with the music and the combined song is the product that is being sold by the music industry, by allowing people to reread the text are you not setting the stage for having them to listen to the song again? If the music industry is not able to sell songs to people so clearly interested in them they do not understand their business.

Funnily enough, this last sentence is confirmed by the first reason for sueing; “it harms the music industry’s ability to adapt to the changing marketplace”. It does not harm the music industry ability to adept in any way but one. Lets get the first, and only reason, out of the way first. People use Google to look for stuff on the internet; a page’s Google ranking determines how high a site ranks in the results and how many people would use it as their source. For the already released songs, it would be hard for the music industry to get a google ranking higher than the lyric sites because they were here first. Would this harm them in the future? No, because they always know what songs will be released and which’ll probably be a hit, they should be able to very easily top google rankings on their own songs.

I fail to see any other way in which the availability of a song’s lyrics harms the music industry’s ability to adept to the changing marketplace. I only see positive influences;

* The music industry gets a great suggestion towards what could be added value to selling a song online; the song’s lyrics integrated in the file when a song is bought online.
* The music industry gets additional places for distribution; people that look a lyric up would probably like to hear the song again, why not sell it at the site like they do at youtube
* The music industry gets valuable insight into the long tail of music; what kind of songs do people like from times past

The only harm that’s been done is what the music industry is doing to itself. It keeps saying it would like to evolve and adapt to the changing marketplace, but all that it’s been doing is focus on the same old thing; sell a song for as much as possible and keep out any innovation. Being conservative is not going to cut it in the long run, especially not in a moving marketplace with a product of which the core is so easy to reproduce once its out there. Adding value to legitimately bought songs should be their first focus and if that’s not working, stop sueing and start building another way to earn.

You are behaving responsible if the social profit of your business exceeds its cost.

You are behaving responsible if you minimize the footprint your business leaves behind.

Why is this something that people feel should be discussed? Because the laws and regulations were made before we had any awareness of the fact that pollution has a very long-term effect? It seems that way, and only when public opinion threatens to affect the bottom-line companies feel obliged to take action. The current green movement is just as much a marketing trend as the next thing but at least we are neutralizing our carbon footprint. It’s just too bad that there are all these other possible footprints that are not in the public eye.

For example, the electric company trying to sell me green power, but I still have a choice, when they’re convinced that is the best way, why leave us a choice at all? Or why doesn’t the government use the huge percentage of tax on our energy usage to make it ‘green’?

Same goes for social profitability; a business that can only thrive by exacting a cost on its social surroundings is not thriving at all; its costs are bigger than its  profits. The gambling industry comes to mind for example.

I do understand that it’s very hard to determine what the social profits and costs of doing business are, at least in some cases. The Salvation Army for example, probably has a bigger social profit than cost, while a gambling club does not gain anyone but the owners anything. For all the businesses in between things can be more grey, but it being grey is no excuse for exacting it anyway.