Techdirt. Stories filed under "ecosystem"

Techdirt. Stories filed under "ecosystem" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "ecosystem"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:00:00 PST DailyDirt: Life, Life Everywhere Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101110/19051611808/dailydirt-life-life-everywhere.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101110/19051611808/dailydirt-life-life-everywhere.shtml

Astronauts have actually discovered a new species of life... while training in an underground cave. The astronauts were taking a week-long ESA CAVES underground training course to prepare for duties on the international space station and to acclimate to working under extreme conditions, and they found a new kind of crustacean. [url]

An ecosystem exists in the deepest layer of the Earth's ocean crust, in the gabbroic layer, living off hydrocarbons such as methane and benzene. This discovery could mean there may be life even deeper, possibly in the Earth's mantle. [url]

Microbes isolated beneath 65 feet of Antarctic ice might define a new limit for life to survive. These little organisms live in Lake Vida without much sunlight, without oxygen, at -13°C, in acidic salt water. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20101110/19051611808 Tue, 26 Apr 2011 09:11:00 PDT Analyst: Motorola's Best Play Is To Become A Patent Troll & Destroy Android Ecosystem With Patent Lawsuits Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20110425/15344314029/analyst-motorolas-best-play-is-to-become-patent-troll-destroy-android-ecosystem-with-patent-lawsuits.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20110425/15344314029/analyst-motorolas-best-play-is-to-become-patent-troll-destroy-android-ecosystem-with-patent-lawsuits.shtml the company go full on patent troll and sue everyone else making Android tablets. Because that will help the market. Think of it as Chowdhry's scorched earth policy: if Motorola can't succeed in Android tablets, no one should succeed in Android tablets. Apparently, Chowdhry thinks this is a good thing, because Android sucks in his opinion (though, not in the opinions of plenty of folks who are happily snapping up Android devices at an increasingly rapid rate...):

The successful launch of the iPhone on Verizon, he writes, has "taken the wind" out of Android's sails. The Google app store is "a disaster." Honeycomb, the operating system on which Motorola has hitched its wagon, is "incomplete," "unstable," has a "poor UI" and is basically "dead on arrival."

All in all, Motorola's "competitive fixation" on Apple (AAPL) and Research in Motion (RIMM) is misplaced. Rather than trying to innovate on software, Chowdry suggests, "selectively attacking with patents other Android phone OEM's is a better strategy."

Or, you know, the company could take that effort and focus on making a better product and improving the overall market. But, suing everyone else and burning down the whole Android market is apparently more fun... at least for those with a ridiculously short-term focus on quarterly results, rather than a long-term focus on innovation and actually building out profitable business lines.

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]]> great http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110425/15344314029 Mon, 14 Mar 2011 02:41:01 PDT Twitter Decides To Kill Its Ecosystem: How Not To Run A Modern Company Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110313/17021713476/twitter-decides-to-kill-its-ecosystem-how-not-to-run-modern-company.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110313/17021713476/twitter-decides-to-kill-its-ecosystem-how-not-to-run-modern-company.shtml praising Twitter for how it dealt with the issue of third parties building on its ecosystem. The company took a very permissive approach, letting other providers do all sorts of things that really helped to make Twitter much more valuable in the long run, including create a whole variety of client apps that really pushed Twitter. I know that my own recognition of why Twitter was valuable didn't really come about until I started using some third party apps, that let me do much, much more and get much more value out of Twitter. However, on Friday, Twitter appeared to want to cut off all that goodwill and value adding by telling third parties (effectively) to stop making Twitter apps. It appears the company will allow a few legacy apps to be grandfathered in, but new apps-makers are forewarned to stay away. This comes a little while after Twitter shut down some third party apps it claimed were "misbehaving."

The reasoning behind this new prohibition are, frankly, ridiculous and totally unbelievable. Specifically, it claims that "people are confused" by these third party apps. Of course, in my case, and in the case of almost everyone I know who uses a third party app (and I don't know anyone who actually uses Twitter's official app), we weren't confused, we were enlightened by those third party apps providing much more context and value to Twitter. The new rules basically remove a large amount of the flexibility that the existing third party providers can use to add more value to Twitter. This is Twitter both trying to control the developer market and to take it back over itself. This is a dangerous move that could seriously hurt the developer ecosystem around Twitter, and push people to alternatives. Even if developers think they can live within the rules, these recent changes might get them to think twice about building on Twitter since it could change the rules further. As per usual, Mathew Ingram summarizes nicely why this is a bad business move, even if it's designed to benefit Twitter's business:

Without the help of third-party apps like Tweetie and Tweetdeck, the company likely would not have been nearly as successful at building the network (and a ready-made client like Tweetie certainly wouldn’t have been sitting there waiting to be acquired). But the ecosystem didn’t just build demand for the network -- it also helped build and distribute the behavior that now makes Twitter so valuable: the @ mentions, the direct messages, re-Tweets and so on, none of which were Twitter’s idea originally. That created a huge amount of goodwill, and led to the (apparently mistaken) idea of an ecosystem.

It’s all very well for Twitter to claim ownership of all those things now, since it is their platform. And obviously there are businesses that can get away with being arbitrary or dictatorial -- Apple is well known for such behavior, after all, and it is one of the most valuable companies on the planet. But this only works over the longer term if your product is so unique and compelling that people will put up with it. Is Twitter in that category?

The company may get away with this in the short-term, but this is a hugely risky long term move that seems to have a high likelihood of backfiring. Going against those who helped get you where you are is a very dangerous move. For a company that used to seem so welcoming, it's a pretty rapid about face.

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]]> big-mistake http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110313/17021713476 Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:40:00 PST Spotify May Not Spur Music Sales; But What If It Makes Music Consumers More Valuable? Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100226/0320388320.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100226/0320388320.shtml people who use Spotify do not. Of course, if you understand these two services, this should be completely obvious. After all, Pandora is like radio -- with a bit of randomness, and no real way to just play what you want. Spotify, on the other hand, is designed to replicate your music collection -- a cloud-based iTunes. Unfortunately, those who focus too narrowly on the idea that music sales is the music business may find this news as further support for moving away from services like Spotify. On top of that, I've heard from people who were at the conference where this "research" was announced, and it turns out that the guy presenting it never mentioned Spotify at all. It's just that the press is assuming he meant Spotify.

However, either way, just looking narrowly at music sales is a mistake. As we've discussed, selling music is not a very good business any more, but that doesn't mean that there aren't good music business models -- it's just that selling music probably isn't one of them.

With that in mind, it's worth taking a look at a recent report put out by Will Page, an economist for PRS in the UK -- and the guy who put out that report last year showing that the music industry was actually growing, not shrinking, when you looked at all the component parts. In his latest report, Page takes on the question of "average revenue per user" (ARPU) when it comes to the music consumer out there -- with a specific look at Spotify (and, unlike the NPD report that's getting all this press, Page actually has real info about Spotify).

Around here, we're used to hearing about ARPU in the context of telcos. It's a stat that telco execs and Wall Street money folks obsess over. Five years back, we warned why the telcos obsessive focus on ARPU was dangerous, and could lead to bad long-term strategic decisions. Page's report effectively suggests the same thing is true in the case of the music business. With the move to various music services, such as Spotify and Pandora, there is a sudden push to look at "ARPU" of music consumers as well -- and if the average music buyer in the UK spends £63 on music, and Spotify can get them to sign up for a £120 plan, that seems like a pretty good thing. Right?

But, as Page notes, the real story is a hell of a lot more complicated than that. What if Spotify is picking off just the "top users" who were actually spending £150 per year? Or, what if it's getting people who didn't buy music at all to pay for subscriptions? Then, any direct revenue is incremental, and the pricing could really matter -- since lower prices could bring in a lot more total revenue by bringing new "buyers" into the market. Furthermore, just focusing on the ARPU from direct payments for music (sales or subscriptions) misses a big part of the story. Live shows are a large and growing part of the market, but don't make it into such calculations. Merchandise and other direct-to-fan offerings also probably aren't included in many of those calculations. And, in fact, we've heard that Spotify is looking to enable those other business models as well -- and isn't just focused on the obsolete metric of "music sales."

As such, services like Pandora and Spotify shouldn't necessarily be judged on how much they contribute to plain old music sales, or even direct ARPU -- but how much they drive people to spend money within the music ecosystem -- and then figure out where that money goes, and whether or not it's allocated in a way that benefits or harms the various players in the space. If Spotify helps make every other aspect of the music industry more valuable, but depresses the market for direct music sales, that shouldn't be seen as a bad thing at all.

Once again, it reminds us of the necessity to not get too narrowly focused on a subsegment of the market when trying to figure out what's happening -- but to explore the larger ecosystem of how much money is being generated around music -- and then we can look at where it goes and what it funds. That is, we shouldn't be worried about how much people spend on horse carriages, but on transportation. So remember that whenever you hear numbers being thrown around about how much money is being made or "lost" in various industries. If you don't look at the overall ecosystem, you often miss what's happening.

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]]> lifetime-value? http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100226/0320388320 Mon, 5 May 2008 14:35:00 PDT Competitors Using Software To Mark Each Other's Craigslist Postings As Spam Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080502/1518221012.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080502/1518221012.shtml trick Craigslist into deleting a post as spam. As you may know, Craigslist has a little link on each post that allows any reader to "flag as spam." There's an automated system that takes note of these clicks, and if enough such clicks come from enough unique users, the post is automatically pulled off the site. For the most part, this system is both effective and efficient. But, according to the linked article above, there's software out there that will let you "flag as spam" any post you want, sending multiple clicks pretending to come from unique users. It's being used by some companies to maliciously pull down perfectly legitimate posts from competitors. Craigslist says it's constantly tweaking its systems to avoid this kind of thing, but why not have a Wikipedia-style setup, where "deleted" spam posts can be reviewed by folks who can "undelete" the not-spam ones? It can use the same basic system, where if enough people vote that a "spam" post is legit, it goes back online. Or if it's really an issue, then certain posts that get jerked back and forth could finally be "locked" by an admin based on their discretion.

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]]> now-that's-impressive http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20080502/1518221012