I want to give some props to the brilliant folk over at jaded Pixel who continue to do incredible things with their baby, Shopify. Shopify makes selling anything on the web dead simple, and incredibly beautiful. Good design, easy implementation and simplicity are corner stones to building a successful web app, but few teams hit that sweet spot. In the case of jaded Pixel and their Shopify system, they’ve not only hit the mark, they’ve hit it out of the park. Not satisfied with having one of the best ecommerce applications on the web, they have now set their sites on building a large and diverse ecommerce community and marketplace – enter Shopify Marketplace. Now you can search the whole network of Shopify stores through their Marketplace search engine. This adds even more value for their shop-owners and further cements their position as an innovative leader in this space. Way to go Scott, Tobi and the whole JP team. You guys rock.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Shopify co-founder Scott Lake about a year ago.DATE ARCHIVES : August 2007
Digital pirate or entrepreneur?
I’ll preface this by mentioning that I have a very limited experience with downloading torrents, although I do have a pretty firm grasp of the technology and the process involved to do so. I came across an interesting article about Canadian entrepreneur Gary Fung who is a co-founder of one of the leading torrent sites called ‘IsoHunt.com’ (12 million monthly visitors) which was started while he was attending the University of British Columbia and currently indexes the locations for approx. 500 terabytes worth of digital content – primarily movies, plenty of illegal copies of such. Not surprisingly, the lawsuit-happy Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is suing Gary for breach of copyright. Gary’s position is that IsoHunt is basically just a tour guide. You can’t download the movies from his site, but you can download a digital map (torrent) from his site that will tell your computer where to go to get the movie, legal or otherwise. Maybe the downloading of the torrent file is his biggest legal hurdle, but it sure seems that he has a winning case provided he can put food on the table while the MPAA lawyers try to starve him out to the tune of $22,000 a month in legal bills – it’s a good thing he lives rent-free with his parents. While the whole P2P debate has a long history and received no shortage of press, it does bring up an interesting issue. At what point does a P2P or discovery service become a plain-old, perfectly legal search engine? For example, on Calacanis’ Mahalo.com, the #1 most-trafficked page on his site today is “How To Download Free Music“. Sure, he has all of the legal-friendly platitudes on there, but plenty of information on that guide page ‘could’ be used as a road map to download illegal music. Is Mahalo breaking the law? Of course not. What about MP3 aggregators? Again, totally legal, because no files are being hosted or downloaded. Copyright is in flux, and this is just another example of someone who is getting caught in the undercurrent of change. Last word on this goes to Gary…
“The natural progression, as we’ve seen with YouTube and MySpace, is a lot more media distribution is going to be done online, and that’s going to converge with the client and P2P technologies….I think copyright holders will have to accept the internet as a new way of distributing content and not just look at it as a liability”
Stop the presses?
BusinessWeek has an article that focuses on the plight of newspapers, and specifically suggests that a wave of newspapers could/should consider quitting the paper business altogether and publish exclusively on the web. It’s an interesting perspective, but one I would argue is flawed.
Shutting down a diminishing or losing print business will save a media company plenty of dough on the expense side, but the paper business also represents (currently anyways) a much larger piece of the revenue pie than the internet side of the mainstream publishing business – and therein lies the rub. It’s not so simple to say, ‘stop the presses’, because doing so to a large degree also equates to ‘stop the cash flow’. In author Jon Fine’s point of view – it’s the San Francisco Chronicle that should be first in line to ditch paper, a notion that seems credible on the surface given that the Chronicle is currently losing approx. $1 million per week. Ouch, yes you read that correctly.
Vin Crosbie over at Corante has a good rebuttal to Jon’s ‘web-only’ newspaper fix. If newspapers ever do seriously consider making a web-only leap, they had better have a major strategy in place for brand extension on the web. As the web market continues to mature and saturate, you are going to want to have more than one brand-ball in play.
Historically speaking, broadcast mediums don’t die. Newspapers will be around for a long time yet, but the evolution process won’t come without its bumps, bruises, and inevitably, some casualties.
Russia’s arctic ambitions should serve as a warning to Canada
Stephen Harper deserves some credit for putting Canada’s arctic sovereignty on the policy and federal funding radar screen. However, I still question whether we’re being aggressive enough on this issue, especially in lieu of those land-grabbing Russians.
We’re probably less than 10-15 years away from the Northwest Passage being ice-free for part of the year making it a legit shipping channel and shorter alternative than the route via the Panama Canal. The ramifications both politically and financially of a viable northern passage shouldn’t be underestimated. Not to mention the vast unknown natural resources that will inevitably be discovered once the ice recedes.
I totally respect the Russians for their foresight and ambition, but Canada had better be ready to defend her territory. In disputes like this it often boils down to ‘use it or lose it’, and we have done little to strengthen and legitimize our arctic borders to date.
Canadians are replacing TV, radio with the web
CRTC released a new study, and it shows Canadians are spending less time with traditional media (radio and tv) and are replacing it with the web.
“It’s not as if TV is disappearing, it’s just that the Internet is really consuming it,”
Adam Finkelstein of Montreal’s McGill University
What is particularly interesting is how advertising dollars are still flowing (rising) for TV and radio despite dwindling usage. Having said that, while TV and radio are seeing a slight rise in annual revenues, Canadian online ad dollars hit $1 billion for 2006 which is almost double the $562 million spent on the web in 2005. Considering the online ad market in Canada is growing at approx. 35% per quarter, there can be no denying that the internet is ‘the’ growth medium in the media foodchain right now.