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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The things I like:
- New dashboard looks good, new ways of customizing the look and feel
- New menu system is more dynamic, it looks more flexible and will save you some clicks
- Lot of drag and drop features in there, which will make it more feel like a web app

Possible downside, it looks more bloated with features. I hope it remains as conveniant like WP 2.6.

Possible downsides

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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!

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Now I remembered a great presentation by Tara ‘Missrogue’ Hunt. Don’t be scared about the 197 slides in there. It’s worth it. Take a sit and watch. Both a great presentation and a very good vision.

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So what are we dealing with right now?

Microsoft is granted the patent for the keys on your keyboard for a function that we already know for 25 years. So the invention is 25 years old, known by almost all computer users. Besides the function on the keyboard the patent is licensed for several usages. The example given:

“In one implementation, pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key/button allows a user to begin at any starting vertical location within a page, and navigate to that same location on the next or previous page,”

So besides the keys they also patented the functions related to them.

Patent offices exist to register ownership for intellectual property. It is there to regulate and prove ownership for inventions and property in the public domain. The patent offices should look after their customers and their patents, but it needs to be in favor of protecting the public domain.

At the moment patenting offices aren’t looking after the public domain anymore. They’re merely satisfying their customers that are paying the excessive fees for the patents. For example Microsoft owned 5.000 patents in 2006 already, and they’re rapidly approaching number 10.000. In the example we see today with Microsoft there is not only an invention patented, also a lot of the related functions are registered with that patent.

By patenting all these ‘inventions’ and processes the patent office is not helping the public domain. By granting patents of this kind the public domain is excluded from accessing something they already know. As in this case the keys and functions already exist in the public domain, therefore I think it should not be patented.

I’m really eager for discussion on these subjects. Drop a comment to let me know what you think.

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About a minute ago I was browsing my feeds and I stopped at Techcrunch. As always a lot of startup and technews there. For me this is always relevant, but today something else caught my attention. When visiting the frontpage there wasn’t much news on start-ups, but there was news on the of the biggest software firms: Microsoft and Apple. And the news wasn’t good. Microsoft’s launched the long awaited Photosynth but couldn’t take the loads of traffic to their servers. Apple already launched MobileMe a few weeks ago, but it’s being chased by problems. At the moment they finally think everything is over, a major flaw in their service is unveiled. Their users are angry and unhappy with their products. Sounds logical, a titan should launch a reliable and working product.

As a start-up there is one thing you really want to happen, getting picked up by the media. After all the hard nights of work, receiving attention is what matters. But you never know when it happens. It is something where it’s hard to prepare for. Which causes a lot of start-ups to go off-line as soon as the media jump onto them. In other words, big trouble!

But going off-line is a good thing for a startup. When it’s happening to your bad ass startup, your users understand. In the first stage of your start-up, your users are loyal. They report bugs and accept the fact something isn’t functioning properly. Most of the successfull startups have the same experience.

Microsoft and Apple both had problems, major problems. Microsoft couldn’t manage their own servers (so in a sense, couldn’t work with their own product) and Apple lost email of 1% of their users. These are all big mistakes and people don’t like it. They expect a service from a titan to function properly and they certainly don’t expect a beta product with bugs.Titans, finish and test your products before launching. Simulate heavy traffic or make it beta, Google does it all the time.

Start-ups, run for that off-line moment. It’s one of the best things that can happen. Make sure to get back online soon. Keep the people informed with a blog and somekind of microblogging account. Going off-line is going to give you some negative feedback from some users, of course. But most of them will understand.

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