What’s interesting is that Pandora will start trading under the ticker symbol “P”, joining a select club of companies with a single letter ticker.

Pandora’s IPO is probably quite anticipated in investment circles, but people in the know are doubting the future profitability of the company. Kevin Simms’ comment on the Techcrunch article concerning Pandora quite easily summarizes the doubt:

If $2.6 billion for a company that loses money and is in the *music* business doesn’t scream bubble, I’m going to have to log on to Pandora to have them recommend a synonym for me.

The music industry in my opinion is still failing to adequately adapt to the changes in the market and I agree with the critics that this will not be a solid investment in the long run.

“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.

- To start gaming, someone only needs a computer in his house, something that’s seen as a requirement to function in this society
- The availability of games is only growing (iPhone, wireless internet, etc.)
- A greater variety of games is released every year
-  Game interface is ever changing; who could’ve imagined the Wii a few years back? or the Natal?
- Integration of gaming in our daily lives; friends meeting on WoW or for a game of FIFA is not strange or uncommon anymore

Sure, you’ll say, gaming will be big. But what will this mean;
1. Gaming will be basic.
2. The question will not be whether you play or not, it will be what you play and when.
3. The top gaming titles, IP’s, will have turnovers much larger than any other form of entertainment.

It is hard to say where professional gaming (e-sports) will be, what a game will look like or even how a game will be operated in 10 years time. But what I do know is that gaming will be growing for all the years to come. Which is why I personally want to be involved. Do you?

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.

Read the entire Craigslist article on Wired.com!

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.

Basically, place would translate for us to some piece of real estate we would rent in order to start Revol7 there. But in our search for maximum distinguishing capacity we have failed to think of anything that would add to it when it comes to the place of business. Perhaps we are looking at it the wrong way.

The current strategy is to determine what our needs are in terms of:

- Quality of object; is it a AAA or a B location, ofcourse this is most often directly connected to the price
- Transportation; how easily can visitors access the public transport network and is there parking available
- Neighborhood; how well-maintained is the property, how well is it patrolled by police etc.
- Facility; in terms of construction, heat management, visibility; will it support our project

Based on these principles we are able to start looking for the right piece of property. Because these variables are not uncommon, property that does well on these questions will unquestionably be expensive. Everything that appeals to us next to these factors will determine remarkability and wether or not we will use it.

So basically what I’m saying is that we can only use the location as a feature in our distinguishing capacity when we have finally selected it. And because we will be trying to have the financing done before or while we are looking for the location we cannot incorporate it in the business plan.

This just seems odd to me because it is a big part of the feasability of the project itself. Writing this down made me realize the position we are in! Your thoughts on the matter are more than welcome!