Monthly Archives: June 2008

Making no waves

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I’ve been hearing things on the radio about Speedo’s new swimsuit, but until this Economist piece really had no idea of what the fuss was about.

The suit has what Speedo calls an “internal core stabiliser”—like a corset that holds the swimmer’s form. As a swimmer tires, his hips hang lower in the water, creating drag. By compressing his torso, the LZR not only lets him go faster, because it maintains a tubular shape, but also allows him to swim longer with less effort. In tests, swimmers wearing the LZR consumed 5% less oxygen for a given level of performance than those wearing normal swimsuits did.

The third innovation, a further drag-reduction measure, is that polyurethane panels have been placed in spots on the suit. This reduces drag by another 24% compared with the previous Speedo model. Fourth, the LZR was designed using a three-dimensional pattern rather than a two-dimensional one. It thus hugs a swimmer’s body like a second skin; indeed, when it is not being worn, it does not lie flat but has a shape to it.

The results are a suit that costs $600 and takes 20 minutes to squeeze into, and a widespread belief among swimmers competing in the Beijing Olympics this summer that they will have to wear one or fail…

Apparently the Japanese are particularly worked up about this ‘unfair’ technological advantage. If so, why don’t they just buy some of the suits for their swimmers?

Later: Neil MacNeil emails a link which suggests that pragmatism has taken hold in Japan:

Japanese swim officials have granted their swimmers an option to choose swimsuits for Beijing.

Even though Japan’s swimmers are contracted by other companies in a domestic sponsorship agreement, they can choose to wear the tight-fitting polyurethane suit that suit that has been involved in 30 world record-setting swims since February.

Metallica: still stupid after all those years

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Well, well. Hear this.

Here’s the scenario: internationally known heavy metal band with long history in the business invites music critics in London to listen to six tracks off the band’s forthcoming album. Those critics then write reviews based on what they’ve heard. Despite the total lack of any non-disclosure agreements and the fact that the band must have known what it was doing, its management then contacted the blogs in question and asked them to take down the reviews.

Actually, “asked” may be a polite way of putting it. The music blog Blinded by the Hype contacted The Quietus, one of the blogs that had run a review, wondering what had happened to the piece. The answer, from editor Luke Turner, was clear. “The Quietus kept our article up the longest and, as no nondisclosure agreement had been signed,” he wrote, “[we were] not prepared to remove it merely due to the demands of Metallica’s management. We only removed the article earlier today to protect the professional interests of the writer concerned.”

I’ve never knowingly listened to anything by Metallica, but I remember well how aggressive they were in the Napster era. They’re old-style control freaks.

Quote of the day

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“Greatness is measured by the size of your manhood.”

Subject line of a junk email caught by my spam-filter. Sounds vaguely Churchillian, don’t you think?

Is Google making us stupid?

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Nice piece in The Atlantic by Nicholas Carr.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

While this is happening to Mr Carr’s brain, here’s what’s happened to the Net in the last ten years.

The two images are maps of Internet routers and the paths between them. The maps were made by Lumeta, a tech-security company. The one on the left was made 10 years ago, and shows about 88,000 routers. The one on the right was made a couple of months ago. It shows over 450,000 routers.

[Source.]

Where’s Plan C?

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You may have missed it, but my fellow-countrymen are voting on Thursday in a Referendum on The Lisbon Treaty (aka Plan B), which of course is the already-rejected European ‘Constitution’ (aka Plan A) without the go-faster stripes. The opinion polls currently suggest that the Noes might win. There’s blind panic in Brussels at the prospect, because if Ireland votes No then the treaty’s dead. Apparently, there’s no Plan C.

For what it’s worth, my guess is that people will be so scared by the looming recession in Ireland that they will not want to rock the boat even further. They have more pressing worries on their minds — like the problem that is quaintly known as ‘negative equity’, viz having mortgages that are bigger than the resale price of their homes.

eBooks: finally, the coming thing?

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Very interesting blog post by Evan Schnittman, an Oxford University Press executive, in which he does some calculations about the size of the eBook market based on sales of Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader. Excerpt:

Jeff Bezos said last week that ebook sales in the Kindle store had hit 6% of book unit sales. What this means is that of the 125,000 titles available in the Kindle store, the sales of ebooks represented 6% of the sales of those same 125,000 titles in print formats. Another interesting thing that Bezos said was that Kindle buyers purchase at a rate of 2.5 times more than print book buyers… food for thought when thinking through your ebook strategy.

One can draw some ebook sales conclusions from this information. For example, the number 2 seller at the Kindle store is The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. According to Bookscan, in 4 weeks this book has sold 784,158 units. For the sake of argument, lets ascribe 75,000 units (10% of total sales, a reasonable guess) to Amazon. If Kindle sales were 6%, then Amazon would have already sold 4,500 ebooks. That’s 4,500 people with Kindle’s buying a single title in 4 weeks!

While its clearly amazing that in one month an ebook can sell 4,500 units it is not the best way to calculate the ebook sales impact of Kindle and Reader. A better way to approach this is through good old-fashioned guess-timation. Taking stock of my own experience and the experiences of others I know, I found that ebook buying on either the Sony Reader or the Amazon Kindle ranges from 5 ebooks to over 100 ebooks. Assuming that anyone who buys an e-ink ebook reader is doing so to read ebooks, lets assume that 10 ebooks a year is a reasonable purchase estimate. Using this logic, we should see 10 million ebooks purchased for these two devices in 2008.

The IDPF estimates that in 2007 ebook sales income was $31,800,000 with the caveat that the actual retail income could be as much as double due to retailer discounts, so lets assume that the sales actually totaled $60,000,000. If we use an average retail price of $12 per ebook sold, and if consumers will buy 10 ebooks a year, then they will spend $120 on average, per device. That would lead us to $120,000,000 in ebook sales for the Kindle and the Reader in 2008, double all ebook sales in 2007. (For those of you who cannot swallow the idea of 10 books purchased per device – cut it in half. The result is $60,000,000 in ebook sales – as much as last year!)

Paul Krugman: we’ll all be Grateful Dead one day

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From his NYT column…

In 1994,… Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”

For example, she described how some software companies gave their product away but earned fees for installation and servicing. But her most compelling illustration of how you can make money by giving stuff away was that of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged people to tape live performances because “enough of the people who copy and listen to Grateful Dead tapes end up paying for hats, T-shirts and performance tickets. In the new era, the ancillary market is the market.”

Indeed, it turns out that the Dead were business pioneers. Rolling Stone recently published an article titled “Rock’s New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don’t Sell.” Downloads are steadily undermining record sales — but today’s rock bands, the magazine reports, are finding other sources of income. Even if record sales are modest, bands can convert airplay and YouTube views into financial success indirectly, making money through “publishing, touring, merchandising and licensing.”

What other creative activities will become mainly ways to promote side businesses? How about writing books?

He goes on to argue that — via Kindle-type devices — much the same will happen to book authoring. Hmmm…