Posts filed under: Miscellany
Webkinz - Second Life for kids
I recently heard about a new children’s toy known as ‘Webkinz’. This has to be one of the best (and most lucrative) ideas I’ve seen in a long time.
The basic gist is that kids (or rather their parents) purchase a standard plush toy animal. Then kids, using a secret code that comes with their toy doll, ‘adopt’ the cuddly critter online at the webkinz website. Once the toy has been ‘adopted’, kids can create virtual rooms on the webkinz website, find friends online, interact with each other, chat, and go hang out in other kids virtual rooms. It’s like Second Life for kids.
So here’s the clever parts:
Kids can purchase additional virtual accouterments for their rooms and by using ‘kinzcash’. Everything is available for sale, from wallpaper to virtual food for your pet. From reading the website, it seems as if ‘kinzcash’ can be earned by taking quizzes and playing games, but I’m wondering if you can buy ‘kinzcash’ with real dollars. If not, you should be able to! This is like all those Barbie accessories of days gone by, minus the manufacturing and shipping costs to the toy maker. Pure profit.
The price point for webkinz is perfectly set at around $10 - 15 – just right for a birthday gift. The toy makers know that the real money is made from having a huge online community of kids. Rather then paying $15 for a toy that has some neat software attached to it, this is more like buying a yearly subscription to a social networking service, and receiving a gift of a free doll. And once a kid starts using this service, you can bet they will scream bloody murder if their yearly subscription isn’t paid up and renewed.
Word on the street is that these toys are flying off the shelves, and like any other truly popular technology, the value of the toy increases as more kids sign on to the website. This encourages other kids to actively market the product to each other. It’s a viral plush toy combined with social software! Yipes!
Update: I just found out that the average number dolls that a webkinz owner has is 1.6! Impressive, from a marketing standpoint…
Net, Blogs and Rock’n'Roll
Here is an interesting sounding book to keep your eyes out for.
Net, Blogs and Rock’n'Roll
From the Authors blog:
“People have access to vastly more music, video and other entertainment than ten years ago. In the case of music, record companies are releasing twice as many new albums per year. Not only that, but some are ‘rescuing’ old and deleted tracks for release in the digital marketplace.
So how do people find out about all this material? How do they judge what they might like? I’m writing a book that addresses these questions.”
Sounds like a good read, now I just have to wait for it…
Pearl Jam Video “Life Wasted”
From the Google Blog:
“Pearl Jam’s new music video “Life Wasted” is now on Google Video for free! Be sure to check it out now, as free streaming and download is available only until next Wednesday.
And in line with the band’s experimental personality, Pearl Jam released the “Life Wasted” video under a Creative Commons “some rights reserved” copyright license. What does all that legal gibberish mean to you? It means that you can download the video for free, share it with your friends, and even post it on your own site–provided you give the band credit and don’t use it for commercial purposes. It’s yet another example of Pearl Jam putting its fans first.”
Except since I’m in the hinterland of Canada, all I see when I go the link is a big “We’re sorry, but the provider of this video has not authorized Google to display this video in your location.” Which is strange, because I thought it was released under a CC license.
Can someone upload this to YouTube for me?
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Updated: This seems to works now… Yeah!
The death throes continue..
XM has launched the Inno, which allows XM customers to record up to 50 hours of music and automatically parses recordings by song and artist.
So of course, the recording industry is suing XM radio.
“The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in New York by the largest labels, seeks $150,000 in damages for every song copied by XM Satellite customers using the devices, which went on sale weeks ago.”
I’m actually neither a fan of XM Radio or the Recording Industry, so maybe they’ll take each other out.
What’s my issue with XM Radio? I certainly think it’s a step forward from the clear channel oligopoly, but I still feel that there are better ways for people to enjoy and discover new music. That long tail is pretty long though, and 70 channels of music seems unlikely to cater to an individual the way last.fm radio does, for example. If I could get last.fm streamed over satellite to a portable player, that would be much more interesting.
Google subscribed links
Of all the interesting things announced at Google press day, I’m particularly taken with their new “subscribed links” (thx Boris). The idea is that you can easily plug in extra services to Google’s search, and the results of these extra services are displayed at the top of other search results when presented to the user. Straight from the horses mouth:
With the Google Subscribed Links API, you can add your services directly into Google search. This can help make those services more accessible, giving your users another entry-point to them when they’re making a related search on Google. There are a number of special features built in to Google search, such as currency conversion and movie showtimes, and you can add your service to that list with subscribed links. The API was designed to be as easy to use as possible, and requires only basic XML skills.
I went through and made a couple of quick “hello world” type examples, and it all seemed to work great. Then I thought I would move on to something a bit harder and try and tie into the 43 Things API. I thought it would be neat to make it so when I would google for someone’s name, if they had an account in the 43 universe, I would see their 43x information shown along side the standard search results.
But then I realized that the XML DataObjects that Google uses as a data source can’t be created dynamically on the fly (which I guess makes sense for performance reasons). Google caches the xml data, and crawls it every 10 minutes or so. If you don’t change the timestamp on your XML data file, the new results don’t appear to be crawled again. But since creating an XML file of every user on 43things was out of scope for my lunchtime hackery, I called uncle.
Does anyone else have an easier way of tying in Google’s subscribed links to external API’s? I guess the only real way is to create a cached file of relevant data and have it updated hourly (or something).
Podcast hotel video (from Roland)
I had a great time at last weeks Podcast Hotel in Seattle with Roland Tanglao. Kudos to Alex Williams, Cathy Wang and everyone else who made it so fun! Roland was playing with his nice new phone and took this video in our hotel room of me strumming on the ol’ guitar in Seattle. Enjoy!
ID3 chapter tool
Courtesy of Boris, check out this cool idea of extending ID3 tags to support chapters. I love the idea of embedding this stuff right in ID3 tags. One gets all the benefits of mp3 portability, and the promise of Apple-like enhanced podcasts. From their website:
Chapters in this context could be any of the following:
- chapters within an audiobook
- articles within a podcast
- individual tracks within a multi-track audio file
Now all that’s needed is players!
Last 100 years of music on a subway map
Neat post over at the Guardian in which the last 100 years of music are plotted on a subway map. Perfect for you data visualisation freaks.
Band sells 120,000 copies of album thanks to online downloading.
The Arctic monkeys sell 120,000 copies of their first album. It is the fastest selling album in britain thanks to their internet downloading savyness. They promoted the sites that illegally played their music and they gave out demo copies which spread on the internet that gained interest.
Take that RIAA.