Posts Tagged ‘internationalisation’

Do CDs have a future in the developing world?

// June 23rd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Media, Mobile, Music

amaztype.jpgamaztype.jpg

‘Doomed’ in music album covers rendered by Amaztype – check it out

In Canada, PWC forecasts that music downloads will exceed physical music sales by 2011. That’s no longer amazing, though it would have seemed so to the music industry five years ago. Now it’s just further confirmation of what we already knew – the music industry is undergoing change at of such magnitude and pace as to be almost indistinguishable from extinction.

It’s not so much the fact that it’s happening but the rate at which its occurring. In 2007, the Canadian download market was less than a quarter of the size of the physical sales market, yet in only four more years the minnow will overtake the whale due to the rapid rate of change – the decline in Canadian CD sales, for instance, was 11.9 per cent in 2006 and 19.8 per cent in 2007.

So far, all shocking stuff that no longer shocks. The unanswered question is: where will the CD market bottom-out? How many CDs can the industry still expect to sell in, say, 2020? And where? (more…)

Facebook wants to know about your politics

// March 10th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Products, Social Media


Facebook adds political party affiliation
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

In place of the original vague "libera/conservative" affiliations we now get actual political parties, which is great if you vote for the same political party every election and agree with their entire platform, which is… rare. But make no mistake, this is a step forward.

In Australia, all Federal parties considered by Wikipedia to be "significant" are represented, so Pauline Hanson and Shooters Party members will be disappointed.

Here’s a fun thing: type a keyword like "Liberal", "Democratic", "Popular" or "People’s" into the field and see all the whackjobs from around the world lined up together. It’s almost like a political party name should be the opposite of who it actually represents.

I am certain there will soon be news stories showing whether, in the US, Democrats or Republicans are more likely to be active Facebook users, and Facebook Platform developers will bring us a variety of ways to surf the social graph according to political lines.

No doubt, many Facebook users consider their political affiliation a personal and private thing. So put “Pirate” or “Ninja” in there and leave us guessing.

Amazon’s international billing problem

// February 28th, 2008 // 0 Comments // strategy

Met Mike Culver, web services evangelist for Amazon’s S3 cloud services today on his first trip downunder. All this cool stuff about how we can base an entire startup on a pay-as-you-go storage and computing model with the same reliability and speed as Amazon itself.

Mainly technical discussion, so a lot of it way over my head but one of my questions hit home: 

If Amazon’s charging me in USD and only accepts credit card payment, the foreign currency exchange fee my bank is going to charge me is a big hit. My bank’s 3.3% for Mastercard and 3.4% for Visa foreign currency transactions is probably standardish.

Mike hadn’t come across that before but seemed serious about taking that issue back to the US to get solved.

Not as big an issue for me personally as having no amazon.com.au, but prolly enough to make such a variable cost unaffordable here.

US companies still aren’t great at the whole international product strategy.

(btw, no links or image with this post because iPhone STILL doesn’t support copy & paste grrr)

[Sent from my iPhone, still unable to copy and paste and it's 2008]