Month: February 2005

A good friend, Vijay Rana (formerly with the BBC Hindi Service, and based in London) of History Talking sent me this about what he has been working on:

UKs leading NRI website launches Radio for All – Free Internet broadcasting opportunity

After a successful launch in June 2003, as one of the premier community websites for Britains South Asian communities, History Talking.com is now taking a big leap forward in the arena of mainstream webcasting.

History Talking.com is now launching a new section called Radio for All. It will be a unique platform for all creative people to showcase and broadcast their creative work on the Internet. The aim is to explore the constructive power of the Internet to promote creativity in a culturally diverse environment.

Radio for All programme will have two sections.

Radio for All: Schools Programme: The programme invites schools, students and teachers to participate and broadcast on the Radio for All. The programme will provide broadcasting opportunities to students and teachers through their schools on educational topics and course works. It could really be a very stimulating experience for young students to listen back to their own broadcasts. The programme sets no editorial constraints. It will be for schools and project leaders to determine the broadcasting content. The programme is absolutely free and without obligation. History Talking.com team could also provide training in programme recordings and basic broadcast techniques.

Radio for All: Public and Community Programme: We also invite charities, community groups and individuals to spread their message to the global audience. The Public and Community Programme is an innovative experiment in broadcasting where people decide the content. They can broadcast their own film and music review, cricket or football match report, their own short story, poetry or even a drama or simply a political commentary criticising Bush, Blair, Musharraf or Sonia, as long as they remain within the limits of public decency.

Internet is a wonderful medium of public _expression. We have just begun to realise its true potential. In most broadcasting organistions its mostly commissioning editors who have a very tight grip over the content, but History Talking.coms Radio for All programme is designed to reverse this process. This is real public broadcasting. From now on its the listeners who will decide the content, says Vijay Rana, the editor of History Talking.com

Participants can send their recordings in MP3 format as an email attachment to: editor@historytalking.com. Recordings should not be more than five minutes long. For longer recordings participants will have to write to the editor. In some cases History Talking will be able to ring and record your interviews as well.

Vijay also sent me an email yesterday: “In my time I could not imagine any 13 yrs-old speaking English in Bulandshahr. The students from BSR have lapped up at this opportunity, shairing ideas on a subject like Tsunami. [Check this.] If you could forward this opportunity to some schools it will be a great help. I will also need your ideas on how to take it furhter in India.”

This is a terrific initiative. Any suggestions for Vijay? Can we get more Indian schools involved?

SiliconBeat writes:

Most new classified ads sites face a daunting chicken-and-egg challenge. Sellers are reluctant to post ads on a new site that hasn’t built a base of users yet, and users won’t go to a Web site where no one is selling anything.

Even after building a strong base of users, the owners of free classified ads sites have to figure out to make money. (Craigslist makes virtually all its money off jobs listings.)

For ZiXXo’s Chief Executive Mike Hogan, the answer is coupons.

For less than $300 a year, local merchants can create online coupons that will appear in a special section above or below the free ads on ZiXXo. Users print out the coupons and redeem them. Hogan and his staff have devised a coupon-wizard system that he says makes it easy for merchants to create online coupons in minutes. Merchants can change the coupons whenever they want.

“Seventy-nine percent of the U.S. population uses coupons,” says Hogan. “”But on the Internet, it’s much better than clipping and saving. If we can use classified ads to build local communities, then we can capitalize on the coupons.”

That leads us to Hogan’s next challenge: luring local merchants to buy into the online coupon program.

Experts view local businesses as a huge, untapped market for online advertising, potentially worth billions of dollars.

But many local businesses do not have Web sites, and still pour their advertising dollars into printed phone books and newspapers. Online companies from Google and Yahoo on down have been grappling with how to educate merchants about online advertising opportunities.

Hogan is banking on building a cadre of commission sales people to beat the streets and sell the ZiXXo program to merchants door-to-door.

Jonathan Schwartz writes:

You may recall one of my first blog entries assessed the fitness of the word “commodity” for the computing marketplace. Distilled to a single sentence, my conclusion was that despite the self-interested rhetoric of some vendors (and gullibility of a few pundits), computers weren’t the commodity – computing (and bandwidth) was. Just as power generators built by my friends at GE aren’t the commodity, electricity is. It’s not even close to a subtle distinction.

In looking at the evolution of the commodity called computing, history provides an extraordinary parallel to the evolution of electricity. In fact, if you haven’t read it, I’d highly recommend “Empires of Light,” by Jill Jonnes. It’s a very entertaining historical examination of how electricity was first discovered (rubbing amber produced mysterious sparks), reliably generated, and ultimately distributed across the world.

It took about a decade for those deploying electricity to settle on a few standards that ultimately accelerated consolidation. From voltage to cycle to plug configuration. (The processes used to get there, although they involved far more violence and loss of animal life, bear a remarkable resemblance to standard setting in the computing industry.) Spooling forward, once the standards existed, businesses could plug into a grid – labor markets went through a fairly sizable dislocation (all those engineers and “CEO’s” had to find other work), but electricity was firmly established as a ubiquitous service. Scale efficiencies and the resulting massive decrease in price allowed the government to bridge the power divide through rural electrification. Electricity that started out 20 times the price of gas lighting – obviously got a lot cheaper.

What’s most interesting to me is that once the standards were set, and the grid powered up, electricity finally established a transparent price – the hallmark of a true commodity. If pricing isn’t transparent, products can’t be deemed a commodity – by transparent, I mean equivalently defined for a standard unit of measurement. Here are a few examples, “5 cents per kilowatt hour,” “2 dollars per gallon.” It’s either a standardized physical delivery (gallon, barrel, ton), or unit of consumption (typically time based, 100 megabit hours, megawatt hours, etc.) – but it’s the same across the industry.

In my view, the great thing about commodities, whether financial services, telecommunications, oil and gas, and now computing – is that the companies whose business it is to monetize those commodities, along with the businesses that supply the technologies necessary to compete in a commodity market, are among the largest on earth.