Life is tough for anyone who has to earn a living right now, and it’s double tough for retailers. Even though Barnes and Noble is the de facto 2000 pound gorilla in the brick and mortar book biz, it’s not enough. With no profit on best sellers thanks to Wal Mart, and online competition from the likes of Amazon, just holding market share in the declining print business is impossible. BN was late to the game in eBooks with yet another proprietary reader, and new competition in that space is popping up almost daily. All of these factors could make the massive amount of retail space BN holds a huge liability. So, management thinks it’s time to sell? Since they mis-timed everything else, why not?

Barnes & Noble has said this week, somewhat surprisingly, that it plans to put itself up for sale after suffering large losses in the battle for leader in the digital books market.

After the news, shares of the company jumped as high as 27 percent, finishing the day up 19 percent.

Founder and largest shareholder Leonard Riggio said he would consider being part of an investment group that could purchase the company. (After Dawn)

With the #1 eabook reader, Kindle, likely to shatter the $100 price barrier soon, and a wave of cheap tablets on the way to market, pushing an also ran proprietary reader is a terrible strategy. Operating so many large square footage outlets devoted to selling ink on dead trees with the market rushing to the electronic does not make sense. There are plenty of opportunities remaining, but the BN management, and most other book retailers continue to not get it. The wave is cresting. It’s time to ride it or drown.

In business there are several ways you can win. You can be head and shoulders above everyone else. Your competition can be total screw ups. You can gain a defacto monopoly by political legerdemain. Or some mix of all of them. Case in point –

In just over two weeks, Emmy-winning AMC drama Mad Men is slated to begin its fourth season on the basic cable channel. But with negotiations between its parent company and AT&T U-Verse over carriage fees, the cable and internet provider might force subscribers to relocate their premiere parties to the apartment of someone with Comcast.

It’s not just AMC that faces being dropped by U-Verse. Female-oriented channel WE tv and the Independent Film Channel could also face the firing squad if AT&T can’t reach an agreement with parent company Rainbow Media before July 25.

This is similar to the situation faced by Cablevision last March when its pricing squabble with ABC resulted in customers missing a bit of the live Oscars telecast.

Source

It is crazy that a channel customer should be losing any access to the entertainment over some internal provider-carrier squabble. That is fighting over who washes the dishes kind of silliness. And the customer be damned thank you very much.

The better model is the carrier is paid by the subscription of the consumer not by the channel provider. No squabbles occur. In fact under that scheme the two parties work in concert to maximize subscription rates. The whole effort become customer focused rather than channel focused as it is now on cable.

And that is why the likes of Netflix and Hulu will be winners in the space.

It’s no secret that anti-business policies can wreck an economy. The persistent recession is proof of that. The problem is, when you kill growth, you also kill tax revenues. When the revenue slides, government tends to look for new any new way to tax.

Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) has teamed with four Democratic co-sponsors to introduce the Main Street Fairness Act, legislation that aims to put online retailers on a par with their brick-and-mortar counterparts regarding the collection of sales taxes.

Internet retailers typically only collect sales taxes in states where they have a physical presence, such as a corporate office, call center or distribution center, though some states have enacted laws to impose collection requirements on ecommerce companies that generate sales through referrals from affiliates.

Delahunt’s bill would authorize states that participate in a voluntary consortium that aims to harmonize the byzantine web of state and local tax rules across the country to require online retailers to collect and remit taxes on residents’ purchases. (Ecommerce Guide)

The current system of not requiring merchants with no presence in your state to collect tax from buyers in your state has been with us since the time your great grandfather mailed money orders to Sears. In that era there may have been some lack of parity, since mail order companies tended to be located in large population centers. States and localities were free to require payment of sales tax on residents out of state purchases, but needed to collect directly from the buyer in their state. Over time, most states have enacted laws requiring locals to pay sales tax on out of state purchases, but have only been able to force retailers with a local presence to be their unpaid tax collector. For all practical purposes, no sales tax collected on purchases from smaller concerns out of state.

With the advent of online commerce, the advantage enjoyed by the mega corporations has been diminished. A new level paying field benefits all states from online businesses who hire local people and pay local taxes.  The lure of not having tax added to purchases has helped small sellers woo buyers, but more as an offset to the disadvantage of added shipping charges.  The lack of accounting woes that playing bag man for 50+ taxing entities would create also allows the little guys to run an online shop with a smaller investment. With so many Americans starting businesses to support themselves when there are few jobs to be had, that’s important.

The dirty little secret Rep Delhunt and his cronies don’t want you to know is that the current sales tax system is working well. Even if tax is not collected from local buyers,  sales are also made to out of state buyers by local business, increasing the local tax base.  Every state benefits from small business selling online. If there is any advantage, it goes to the states who are friendly to small business over those who only offer special treatment to corporate giants.

Who really benefits from this proposed tax law? Mega retailers like Wal Mart. In fact, Wal Mart has lobbied long and hard for this type of legislation.  I have no doubt there are plenty of local government Luddites who do not understand the advantage of freeing small enterprise from the burden of playing tax collector for 50 different states. While they may back it  this legislation, if passed, I believe the new law will actually decrease revenues in most states as millions of marginal micro businesses will call it quits.   This is a full assault on small business and technology as a great equalizer for the little guy. That’s a bad idea in good times, and sheer stupidity in times like these.

Sorta, as in right now its register, then get an invite. Its not a bad strategy either. Run a test case with a small body of users to get the kinks out. A method I would heartily support.

But the question I have is it it worth $10? For the money you get –

• Access to more shows from the major networks.
• Access to the past seasons archives.
• It will be viewable on more devices (iPod, iPhone, Samsung devices, Sony PS3, Xbox, your PC)
• All of it available in HD.
• Oh, and you still have to watch all the ads. The price of entry does not spare one from this.

Now ole Fuddy-Duddy here says maybe its worth $10. Fact if they would ditch the ads I would give a serious thumbs up. I would also suggest they consider bringing in other partners like USA Network as well. Finally I could really care less that HuluPlus runs on an Xbox or PS3. I don’t game.

But with a little jiggering of the content. Dropping of the ads. Then getting some of the channel partners like HBO on board in an ala carte fashion this could fly. There is only one problem. HD already exists over the air and that ole trusty Tivo is still there with the FF button. So questions boils down to does access to the archive of shows worth the $10.

My last Ah-Ha. Does HuluPlus set the new price model for broadband content? Personally I think it does. Not because I think the content is competitive as what $40/mo cable provides. No, its a market perception thing. Once the public gets it in their mind that $10 is the value proposition the cable Cos won’t be able to shake it. Serious downward pressure waits in the wings.

Now, do the networks have the guts to pull content off the cable providers?

Linky

Oh its not about their security or selling YOUR data, though that it is the cause. Their problem is they have spawned a new generation of Facebook wannabees –

Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network

The vid above is for the upstart Diaspora. Another that is starting up is Appleseed. Both are running forward as Open Source projects. Interestingly, Diaspora has already raised nearly a $100k of Angel financing thru individual contributions to the effort.

What sets these two fledglings from Facebook? One is philosophy. They believe the user should be in control of their data. That is a FOSS core concept of its existence. The second is approach. Whereas Facebook used the central server farm approach, these two firms are going to take a distributed approach. My understanding being your data stays on your machines and the option to share is local. The protocol having many of the attributes of torrents but much more sophisticated.

If they can get these tools off the ground and accepted (and hopefully a merged api) I see a much broader use for the tool. How? Maybe financial transactions. Companies passing annual reports to the SEC for example in the accepted BRXML format. Or how about micropayments? The coke machine taking your dollar transfer to it from your cellphone using the api and a validation code from PayPal where the dollar came from.

But we have to walk first. So lets see now much impact one or both of these platforms have on Facebook. Its a shame really. Facebook had an excellent business model that could have been monetized differently without the privacy issues. A bad business decision is going to lay them low. Better competition will put them under.

Aaaah yes, case you have not heard the word, the Fox Avatar Blu-Ray release may not work in your Blu-Ray player! Even though you paid for the privilige. This ladies and gentlemen is why DRM is broke. Forget the technical details, et. al. For the most part this is fraud on the part of Fox —

Bought Avatar Blu-ray today along with ten gazillian other people. Only problem is that the digital rights mgmt or copy protection seems to be causing errors on a large number of players (even with updated firmware). Comments are pilling up on the web (see amazon link below). Nice job Fox, keep law abiding cash paying customers from viewing their DVDs so you can keep a few people from ripping copies to their iPods for road trips….

From Consumerist.

There is also a lively discussion up on Amazon on this whole issue, here.

The primary reason DRM will not work is this simple fact. So long as the last interface — our eyes and ears. Then the next to last interface can be cracked. Yes I can pump the output of the speakers to an audio file. It may not be the most high fidelity but it can be copied. Same for video. The Suits seem to forget that fact.

The best way for the Suits to prevent piracy is to lower their prices. When a DVD is under $5, and a Blu-Ray under $10 then there is less compunction to steal the content. The lower price also sells more copies. But hey, what do I know?

For the benefit of those that might not have been watching. Amazon and Macmillan got into a pricing dispute over eBook sales. Part of the trigger being that Macmillan cut an agency deal with Apple for the iPad platform that has a variable rate that is higher than Amazon’s pricing. It got so heated that at one point Amazon disabled purchasing of the entire suite of that publishers books.

Why do we care?

Well primarily because it might change the landscape for eBooks. But my gut says this will not play out like either party thinks.

Whose right?

Well neither. Remember this is at its core a contract dispute. So you have two parties haggling over price and terms. But one author did have an interest viewpoint –

If Amazon were a smaller retailer, this probably wouldn’t be a big deal. But Amazon pretty much, right now, has a monopoly on online bookselling. They’re huge. As a result, this becomes nearly a form of de facto price fixing.

source.

Which if not in word, at least in deed is probably the case at this point and time.

Is one price for a book wrong?

Well no. But if you think of a free market, single cost pricing may be efficient for the offerer but it forces a self selection from the buyer to only consider catalog items that have an intrinsic value more than the offer price. So ‘Gone with the Wind’ would sell well, but ‘Attack of the NanoAtomic Vampire’ from an unknown author would not.

So what’s the moral here?

Its all theatre. Here is why. There is no determined pricing for ePub books. Its all new. The book publishers want to set an expectation in the ~ $20 range, right below a mid-successful hard cover release. They want to protect their legacy infrastructure when for all purposes it is toast. To me that is as bad as Amazon trying to fix a one price strategy.

The reality is the following — ePub pricing will be determined on authorship, topic and audience. It will no longer have a printing component determining the floor price of the publication. That is what both parties are trying to avoid and they don’t want you to think that it might be possible to buy ‘Linear Algebra II’ from Knopf, Knuth and Rupert for $4.99. But that is entirely possible even with today’s technology.

ePub platforms are crude compared to what they will be like in say 5 years. Authors will be able to set their pricing, eliminate the Macmillan’s of the world, and sell pulp copies if need be through a supplier like Lulu.

That ladies and gentlemen is what the dust up is about. They don’t want you to know that very shortly there could be a door number 3 to choose from for all your reading.

Which in this case means that if Google wants to deliver it, and you want to use it, Google WILL find a way to do so. Even if the device mfr says NO! Well in this case its AT&T/Apple saying no to a Google Voice app on the iPhone.

Now I understand why AT&T did not want it, it hurts their voice traffic income. But do both of these partners realize the semi truck load of a mistake they just made? Had Google followed their original plan they would have locked the Google Voice into the app space of the iPhone architecture. Doing so would have meant Google duplicating that for any subsequent smart phone with the attendant hassles and costs of handling multiple variants of software. Now?

Now Google has turned the software and the iPhone into a VoIP TERMINAL. Unleashed from the underlying architecture Google Voice can now live on any device capable of handling HTML5. Any smart phone, MID, Nettop, Netbook, you name it. That single denial has unleashed a monster, at least for a Telco.

Very dumb AT&T.

Linky.

Yawn? Surely you jest. Oh I know that multihead conferencing has been around. Most of it corporate using dedicated circuits and equipment. Or public services like WebEx. But what makes VuRoom is that is does not require a lot of specific gear. If your PC can run the latest version of Skype it can run VuRoom.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–ViVu, Inc. (www.vivu.tv), an emerging leader in creating innovative and easy-to-use solutions for live video participation, today released VuRoom – a ViVu-powered plug-in for Skype, the popular software that enables the world’s conversations. VuRoom is built on the Skype platform to provide customers with instant multi-user video conferencing – an exciting new breakthrough previously unavailable to Skype users. Along with its presentation and desktop sharing functionalities, VuRoom is designed to help remote business users collaborate in real-time, while also saving valuable time and money.

“Having experienced the technology, I believe that ViVu is well positioned to deliver on the video collaboration needs of SMB and enterprise customers. In particular, I see strong potential for ViVu’s new Skype plug-in.”

“Our recent research studies predict a big year for global growth in the web conferencing market,” said Krithi Rao, an analyst in the Information & Communication Technologies Practice at Frost & Sullivan. “Now more than ever, enterprises are looking for cost-effective communication and collaboration solutions to help them succeed.”

Demo here.

Now why the tither Dog? The price. The problem with most of the other services is they run $30-40/month. That can run into some serious coin on a 10 person team every month. This is running $10/seat. A fourth the price. At that price point if using the software for the entire team replaced but one airline ticket a month it paid for itself and then some.

The fact that it is on Skype provides for a very ubiquitous platform. One could add external input sources as needed into the video conversations with little cost or set up charges. The real question is does it last in its current biz plan form. Skype with there latest release now provide P2P video on the three major OS platforms. That is probably 60% of all the Skype usage out there. Couple that with some geek will pull this off as a freebie somewhere as well. Time will tell.

But while it lasts VuRoom lowers the bar on multihead video.

Linky.

I have used Visio for years. First when it was and independent and afterwards when Microsoft bought them out. In the Corporate world it is THE graphics package. Visio is so dominate that there is little competition. You have to go to the Mac space to find viable alternatives.

Well that changes now —

Cacoo - Real-time Collaborative Diagramming & Design from Nulab Inc. on Vimeo.

Issues? I had only one. My base system runs 64bit Ubuntu and the flash player I am forced to use is an experimental v.11 code. Does not work. But a 32 bit Ubuntu with flash does.

But is it a Visio killer? Out of the box no. There are features that this Cacoo do not even touch. For example diagram packs for Cisco gear right down to the card that can go in the frames. Not there yet. But, from small beginnings competitors are made. This online tool is sufficient for most small businesses. It is perfect for any individual. That’s the rub for Visio too. Once someone buys into a base package the customer is more inclined to buy add-ons and upgrades. Now that might get short circuited.

Would highly recommend folks give them a try.
website: http://cacoo.com/