Triggered by the title? Well, basically that’s what is happening here in the Netherlands on the web. All bloggers (amateur and professional) that embed video or music need to pay a fee based upon the amount of viewers. The fee is depending upon the amount of visitors. But first let’s start with a small explanation for what Buma/Stemra is. From their website:

There are people who make music although you’ll never hear them make a sound: they are called music authors. Their efforts precede the successes of the artists who perform their works. The music that we enjoy is their intellectual property. Just like other authors, they have the right to remuneration when their works are played, sung or recorded. Buma/Stemra takes care of these matters.

So. Buma/Stemra takes care of all interests of music authors in the work they create. Not necessary a bad thing, wouldn’t it be the case that they’ve launched this ridiculous idea(dutch) for charging bloggers for embedding the music of authors.

What’s crazy about this is that YouTube or any other site providing access to copyrighted content should (and in a lot of cases already is) pay for it. In other words, they’re the broadcasters. They deliver the content to my browser. For me to see. A blogger or any other website is just a channel which I’m in which leads me to the content on the network of (for example) YouTube.

In the old world this would mean a manufacturer of TV’s is paying a fee for the amount of viewers that watches content via the screen. Where in fact (and completely logical to me) the broadcasting networks are paying fees for the series, movies and other contents that are being broadcasted.

Can we solve this? Yes we can. It’s not that hard, only it involves more effort from Buma/Stemra. I believe they should be more cooperative and look at how the world is changing. They’re focusing on the downside of the Internet (pirated content) and fighting against it. However they should see this as a big opportunity. You can now promote your artists and drive sales through all kinds of content networks. Artists are more and more using the web to connect and promote their own music. We now see more artist producing music on their own without a label. They own their channel and show what we’ve always known. They love to create music and connect to people that appreciate them for it. How? By listening, buying and maybe even more important: promoting it.

If Buma/Stemra won’t start making more deals with content networks, they face to be replaced. I love to see more self managing artists. Buma/Stemra is in it for the money, that’s why one day they’ll be gone.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Talking to your customers about your product is very important. We’ve experienced that while starting Tweetburner and see it actively happen around us. It’s a big drive for your success. For example, let’s take a look at two big video websites: YouTube and Vimeo. YouTube is the real big guy, while Vimeo is just, well, big. However I’ve never heard people say: ‘YouTube is a great product and becomes more and more relevant for me’. Other people have kept repeating to me how great Vimeo is.

I believe this has to do with the staff of Vimeo being active in their community. Involving your users during development makes them loyal and likely to stick when a YouTube in your market arises.

In the valley, building the next YouTube’s is what they try everyday. I would lie if that doesn’t appeal to my imagination, but think about it. Because VC’s have funds they need to keep alive, cashing out is their goal. If building a bad product allows them to cash out, they will. And if that affects you and your users, too bad. Needs to happen. Your customers know that. It’s like the banking world, it’s all about he money!

When a new YouTube enters your market, you want to be able and say: ‘Our users love us, let’s improve our product even more and show that new competitor who we are‘. You want to be credited for creating a product loved by users, not raising another $20 million dollar of funding.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Put the priority on ideas, not on data
Create and grow your own creative imagination. Build a personal balance sheet of intellectual capital. Understand patents, copyright, trademarks and other intellectual property laws. Entrepreneurs are more worried to lose their ability to think than if their company loses money.

I believe the quote contains a contradiction. As an entrepreneur I surely value the ability to think above earning every penny I can get. When you make sure you keep the thinking process on the go, you’ll be able to make money with your intellectual property quite easily. The contradiction lies within companies being worried to lose money. Here’s why.

I love to share my ideas and knowledge. With everyone interested but also with companies in the same industry or maybe even direct competition. This is related to an active thinking process. If done right, you’re always ahead of the competition or at least be able to use you thinking power to change your idea, concept or strategy.

People asked me if I’m not scared people ’steal’ an idea. I’ve always told that idea’s can’t be stolen because they’re just a bunch of thoughts. I focus on the difference between ideas and concepts. Developing an idea to a strong and valuable concept takes time, thinking power and skill. Now the concept has a small market worth, but more important  Depending on the level of completion of the concept you need to be careful about what to tell and what not to tell.

When a competitor copies and launches on of your concepts, is your company losing money? I think not. I even think it’s good when it happens. When competition sees the same opportunity as you, this is evidence there is a market for your product. Besides that you can watch what they’re doing and learn from it. Use that information in your thinking process and it will enable you to take more balanced decisions.

Be open on abstract levels and get people to think with you. Do this face to face, or if you like on big scale via blogs and twitter. This opens the freeway of collective creative intelligence.

Here are some of my tips regarding this TCE rule.

1. Train your thinking power
   Read blogs, articles and books related to stuff your working on. Keeps you sharp. But also talk with other people about their ideas. Not only do most of them like to hear your feedback, it trains your thinking power because you get better at it and learn from them.
2. Don’t overprotect your ideas
   It is very important to protect your ideas, but over protection makes it harder to apply changes when needed.
3. Be open
   Closely related to my first tip. When working on your own ideas, share your thoughts with others. They maybe working in your industry, but maybe even more important in a different industrie. Learn from their thinking process when pitching your idea. Best example is related to on of the ideas we’re working within Firmhouse, Dealkeeper. At a conference I talked about it and somebody pointed me directly to a competitor still quite under the radar. I probably wouldn’t found that competitor myself.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

However Creative Commons is aimed to create freedom that creative people want to give to their work. The website of Creative Commons states that it also aims for scientists. I think this licensing model isn’t suitable for sharing research information. Therefore more specific tools are needed.

This short video is an introduction to Science Commons. Where Creative Commons focuses on sharing, Science Commons is meant to define a standard and licensing model that allows different resources to integrate their data.

By data we mean petabytes of research data that isn’t used to it’s full potential. It’s stuck in silo’s and only can be used by the few people that have access to it.

I think it’s great finally a workgroup is focusing on the research field. If they somehow are able to create the same effects as the Creative Commons did, this could have a big impact on the research field and how it operates.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

At the event a few dutch startups presented their great applications and how they use Amazon to run them. Afterwards there was time to ask questions to the starups and later on to Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. One of the most interesting questions was about the data that startups store at Amazon. Martijn de Kuijper of Qash asked:

How do we tell our users that we don’t know where their data is, except that it is “in the cloud?.

The answer to the question is that all data from Europe on AWS is stored in Ireland, guaranteed. Therefore the data will be under the jurisdiction of Ireland. So another question came to mind. In essence, AWS is ‘controlling’ the data of our clients. For example what will happen when a client decides to delete his account. What will happen to his data? We asked this to Simon Brunozzi (European Envangelist of AWS). He told me that they always have been executing audits on the data of Amazon.com and also AWS. Recently a security whitepaper is published about this.

I think cloud computing is providing great advantages when you’re building a web application or starting an online business.

No let me rephrase that.

Using the cloud for your applications will remove a lot of constraints and will break some traditional rules of business development and IT management. Starting your online business will be cheap and above all will provide infinite resources at a click of a button. You can build web applications very agile, but the business wasn’t that agile yet. AWS and other cloud services make running your infrastructure and business very agile.

Martijn de Kuijper mentions this in a recent blogpost:

Again, I personally believe that Amazon offers a great service and I do trust them in such a way that I wouldn’t mind “sending” them personal data, but I think for a customer it’s a big step to know that I if they took the first step of uploading their data to  for example our server, their data is then stored on external servers.

First of all, I believe that a customer always is putting his data external. For example we’re running Tweetburner on our own server. For us it feels as an internal server (we can drive to Haarlem and put our hands on it!!). But for the users it is as much an external server as if we would use AWS.

Probably they would even prefer AWS above us running our own servers. Not only has AWS more security, more experience and more resources. They run their own multi-billion dollar webshop on there. If AWS fully breaks down, their webshop is down too. That probably is the biggest devotion a single hosting company is doing to it’s own services.

Cloud computing won’t ‘fog’ our business, it will strengthen by allowing to use external infrastructure and resources with a click on the button. Something I couldn’t wish for more as a business developer.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I am fascinated about the way they share knowledge, I strongly believe this is a great way for small company’s to boost their potential. A must see.

Removed the embedded version of the video because of autoplay. Find it here!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.