Hidden Frequency

Skip the Checkout, Should Google Create its Own Currency?

While it’s too early to call the game on Google Checkout because Google is committed to making it work, even if it means forcing Android users and developers to use it, it’s not exactly a huge success. For those of us clamoring for a PayPal competitor to make the market more consumer friendly, Checkout hasn’t delivered yet.

Rather than just being a PayPal clone tied to Google services, Google should think about creating the impossible dream that so many others have failed at: a web-wide virtual currency. Hundreds of millions of VC capital has been wasted trying to create a universal online currency. Outside of in-game purchasing, none have taken off. Most have crashed and burned. Google could be the one that makes it work.

The advantage of an online or “e” currency is that it makes micro-transactions possible. Right now there’s no effective way to spend a few cents or a fraction of a cent outside of a particular platform. Credit card transaction fees make it impossible to sell services and content for a few cents. Facebook has its own plans, but I’m skeptical of how well that will work outside of Facebook’s eco-system.

A successful virtual currency creates value in two important ways:

It creates an economy for micro-transactions.
It reduces the overhead from credit-card transactions (which eat up 2 to 5% of every online purchase).

To make an online currency work you need to solve five problems:

1. Trust

We need to trust the company handling the currency and making the exchange. Google has trust issues like any other company, but I think they’re best positioned to make an online e-currency work. We trust their algorithm with billions of dollars of commercial transactions everyday (AdWords and AdSense).

2. Security

Besides trust, we need to feel that the company involved has the resources to make these transactions secure. Fraud killed several PayPal clones and made it nye impossible for anybody else without some serious capitalization to even get started. Google has a state-of-the-art technology for preventing fraud.

3. Liquidity

An effective e-currency should be able to be moved from person to person and cashed out with minimal transaction costs. A friction-free currency is also capable of very tiny transactions like a thousandth of cent that can be useful in certain financial transactions like moving away from a CPM model in online advertising.

4. Utility

A virtual currency that’s only useful in one place is not very helpful. Other virtual currencies failed to take off because potential users were concerned by the first three problems. Would you ship a physical good to someone in exchange for a virtual currency from a third-party you didn’t trust? Google can encourage a wide variety of third-parties to adopt the currency.

5. Solvency

In-game and other virtual currencies have no external value. An online currency needs to be pegged to real currency to have real value. A company can’t just generate currency like an African dictator. It has to based upon money on hand. Google is large enough and trustworthy enough to back an online currency we’d feel has real world value.

How to implement a virtual currency

All five problems can be solved by a company with the resources of Google. To implement their currency they should first think about making it a universal currency within games and then extend it outward to virtual goods, digital downloads and then physical goods. By working step by step from content with little intrinsic value to goods with real worth they can grow the currency and learn how to solve minor problems before they become major ones.

The benefits for Google and the economy in general would be great. The more you can reduce the cost of transactions, the greater the surpluses and efficiencies you can generate.

Andrew Mayne is publisher of WeirdThings.com and founder of Blurbtastic.com. His personal website can be found at AndrewMayne.com.

How HTML5 Will Save Podcasting and Make it a Billion-Dollar Market

For all its promise, podcasting is still a niche form of content on the web. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into trying to make this a more profitable medium, but the end result is that in 2010 just a handful of players are just getting by. Its popularity is growing for sure, but not in the dramatic way we’re used to seeing with the web.

This is despite the fact that podcasts are one of the most engaging forms of online content.

The Problem

The difference between text content, videos and other online content and podcasts is this: There’s no way to immediately interact with the content.

If you hear an ad, there’s no way to act on a call to action. If you can’t immediately click on something like a link or or a pop-up (like you can in a YouTube video), there’s not as much value for online advertisers. Marketing has value, but advertisers still pay for clicks. Text links, and click through banners are what drive the online economy.

Currently advertising for podcasts is driven by large marketing budgets that want to “get the word out” and by sponsors with affiliate offers (where they have individual podcasters direct listeners to use a special link or enter a special code). This is a hugely inefficient system. It expects the users to take future actions which never works very well. It greatly limits the potential advertisers. As a marketing tool it’s hard for advertisers to track down how effective a spot was and impossible for podcasters to measure their influence (did you buy a Ford Fiesta because Leo told you to or because Adam did?).

Without a way for users to have interactivity with podcasts it’s very difficult to calculate the value of a podcast. This price uncertainty is the underlying problem with podcasts today.

The Solution
The most direct solution is to give podcasts a similar level of interactivity as web pages and web video. By enabling users the ability to follow up on call to actions in a podcast you can measure their level of engagement and put a price tag on their actions.

This interactivity has to work in a way suitable to the medium. Podcasts are mainly an auditory medium, so this interactivity has to work in auditory way. You can’t expect someone listening to a podcast on their iPod or in their car to go to the device to look at a screen to interact. It has to work along the same lines they already do.

Podcast content needs to accept voice input from listeners.

This voice input could be used to let listeners choose which commercial to listen to, give permission for their email address to be used for a special offer or it could even be used to activate a purchase from with the podcast for additional content.

The capability for this is in the HTML5 specification for a “device”. Although not currently implemented, in the near future HTML5 will allow browsers to use your microphone or webcam to send audio or video back to a server. This will allow for a open, cross-platform way to add interactivity without third-party plugins. iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs, Linux machines and any other system running an HTML5 browser with this implemented would be able to interact. Being a part of the HTML5 spec it would make it very easy for developers to add this into applications.

The hard part is done on the back end where a system has to interpret those voice commands. Fortunately, Google and other companies with voice recognition technologies are working on API’s to make this easier. The end result would be a small piece of code you’d embed that would send your voice input to a server that would then return text input (“Tell me more”, “Send me more information”, “Sign me up”, etc.).

Making it work

A few years ago this would have been technically feasible but much more difficult to implement because of how people consumed content on mobile devices. In an environment driven more and more by apps and mobile browsing, it’s easier to get people to a web page or an application that hosts your podcast.

Currently there’s no support for this kind of interactivity in iTunes and other media players, but that’s likely to change. In the mean time, once browsers ship with HTML5 support for audio, it’s not difficult to get a large portion of your audience to listen to it from a web page or app with the right incentive (use iTunes for discovery, but push people to a web page or free app for more content).

For content producers, creating interactive podcasts could be done in a very simple way using HTML5.

Content would be broken into segments and the commercial spots could be dragged and dropped where needed. A drag and drop interface for creation would handle inserting all of the API calls needed to make it work.

Will Google make this happen?

Once you have the ability to drop commercial spots with interactivity into a podcast you’ve created a way to monetize podcasts with as few as one listeners. With millions of hours of podcast content and hundreds of millions of listeners, that’s a huge potential market.

The company best poised to make this work is Google. Their entire business model is based on scalability. They make money at both ends of the spectrum. A podcast with 20 listeners has value to them if they can treat audio like they do text links.

Their voice transcription technology, while sometimes amusingly awkward, is getting better everyday from a learning algorithms and more than adequate for interpreting simple user instructions. An API to support this already exists.

Because they own Chrome, they can implement the device function whenever they want. Being the first to do this would give them an advantage over Firefox, IE and Safari.

When?

This could happen tomorrow or five years from now. The moment people with the ability to make it happen realize this is where the money is, we’ll see start to see these technologies. They’ll realize it when people start talking about it. If you’re a podcaster, start talking about the potential of interactivity. If you’re a developer, start talking about tools for implementing it. If you’re and advertiser, start asking about it. If you’re a regular person, start asking questions. If you’re an angel or a venture capitalist, give me a call.

Andrew Mayne is publisher of WeirdThings.com and founder of Blurbtastic.com. His personal website can be found at AndrewMayne.com.

My Apple Predictions (updated)

1. Yes to the iPod Touch with FaceTime rumor. I’d expect a $299 price for the Touch with the cameras and the retina display. $199 iPod Touch gets faster processor, more memory and retina display. Maybe an iPod with 3G. That would be revolutionary too. You can own and Android and an iPhone.

This was the obvious one. I was surprised that Apple was able to release it at $229. The lack of the 5MP camera explains it.

2. Yes to the iPod Nano going touch screen. I think it’ll be easier to navigate than some people think.

Yep.

3. Apple TV gets apps (like games and Netflix). Think about an AppleTV that runs apps - many of them free games supported by iAds. Game changer. I think casual gaming is a much bigger market than X-Box and PS3 and Wii games.

Well, we got a Netflix app… In retrospect it makes more sense that we’ll see an app enabled AppleTV in a January event when Apple can tell developers how many of them are out there. I think…

4. I don’t see a $99 Apple TV if it has that cool magic trackpad. Maybe a $149 Apple TV that’s ram based and comes with a magic remote. Maybe a $99 Apple TV that you control with your iPod or iPhone.

No trackpad. I think we’ll see that with an AppleTV that does apps. It’ll need an input device like that. Maybe a remote that flips over to a trackpad on the other side.

Although the iPod app for the AppleTV does have this function…

5. The biggest news regardless of price will be Apple TV with apps. This is what the public will focus on. Forget the tech pundits. This is the device that makes it the last mile. The iMac is the desktop. The iPhone and iPod are in your pocket outside. The iPad is in your bedroom and around the house. Apple TV is your living. The only thing left is implants.

The app-focused Apple TV is Apple’s new approach to their “hobby” and the reason they don’t take Google TV seriously.

Technically, this is what people were talking about…the lack of apps. I underestimated how big of a deal this would be. I think Apple wants to just sell a streaming AppleTV for now and then move up to apps like they did the iPhone.

The really big deal is AirPlay. That’s the killer feature that didn’t get enough attention. Forgetting everything else, a $99 box that lets you show what’s on your iPhone or iPad on the big screen. This is huge.

This Christmas will be about 3 things: iPod, iPad and Apple TV.

Duh.

Andrew Mayne is founder of Blurbtastic.com and publisher of WeirdThings.com. His personal website can be found at AndrewMayne.com.

Chatroulette: contextualize or die

Beyond Chatroulette’s well deserved, deviant reputation as an online Mos Eisley Cantina (now with more male nudity!), there is an undeniable value to randomly interacting with people, one on one from around the world. The instantly intimate connections matter and if the service is alive five years from now it will be because they are known for the tech that make those possible.

On the eve of their first major overhaul, I believe Chatroulette v2.0 will fail unless their biggest upgrade is context to conversation. Thankfully, the solution is already right in front of us: high traffic blogs.

Chatroulette Prime showed us The Internet. Not how we imagine it, not how we partition it and not what we wish it would be. The truth, warts and all. Users quickly learned a tumescent lesson, The Internet at large is gross. It’s why we retreat to be amongst those who share our basic interests, which in most cases includes an agreed ban on random dong shots.

Instead of showing us the entire scope of humanity, what if it offered you a connection to naturally formed groupings that are already of interest to you? Beyond general rooms, what if you were able to connect to people currently reading a specific website. Drilling down further, what if you were able to discuss a specific post with an informed stranger.

For example, if you read The Onion’s AV Club review of Arcade Fire’s new album The Suburbs instead of leaving a comment, you could have the option of clicking through to a pool filled with people who have clicked through to the same page. You are paired with a random person who is also primed to chat about that specific topic. Automatically, you have a very rare pleasure presented on demand, an informed discussion about exactly what you want to talk about.

This would not be a replacement for those who use blog comments to get the attention of the post’s author or as their own broadcast platform. Those will always be the domain of the indelible text. It’s also not the same experience as a instant video chat tool like TinyChat. There you are again part of a scrum, the loudest will get heard, the intimate conversation is over before it begins.

For high traffic blogs with specialized audiences and a rabid readership a Chatroulette comments section could be the perfect context to start a conversation you’re ready to have at that very second.

Imagine discussing Ebert’s stodgy review of Kick-Ass throughout opening weekend with those who also saw the film or have an opinion on his thesis. Or Matt Ridley’s latest post on why health panics are often wrong. Or the Pittsburgh Penguins ‘09 Stanley Cup victory minutes after they won on a niche site the ThePensBlog.

Trolls would either behave themselves or get “next’d” and flame bait would be tempered by ones desire to spit their screed to a strange face instead of cluster bombing a conversation and waiting for a reaction.

As for the dongs? If we multiply the targets by infinity, you are bound to cut down the odds of seeing one. And hey, maybe the junk bearers will find a qualified post where they can have conversations that focus exclusively from chest to upper thigh.

Justin Robert Young is the co-host of the NSFW Show on the TWiT Network. He is also a founding partner of Blurbtastic.com. His personal blog can be found at JustinRobertYoung.com.

Is Google’s Book project just another content scraper?

Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Geoffrey Nunberg points out some serious flaws in the Google Book project.

I think it can be summed up by this:

“The ad placement on Google’s book search right now is often comical, as when a search for Leaves of Grass brings up ads for plant and sod retailers…”

Google’s intent for the project seems to be two-fold: Have an immense amount of data to develop natural language processing and have something else to plug text links into.

Making an actual usable database that’s something scholars can rely upon seems a little bit too advanced for their algorithm at this time:

“To take Google’s word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis,which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler’s Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux’s La Condition Humaine, Stephen King’s Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society 1780-1950, and Robert Shelton’s biography of Bob Dylan, to name just a few.”

As it is, the project can feel as useful as a link farm filled with scraped content. If Google Books was a site about web content and not print, they probably would have blacklisted it by now.

Andrew Mayne is founder of Blurbtastic.com and publisher of WeirdThings.com. His personal website can be found at AndrewMayne.com.

Why do we refuse to believe Mark Zuckerberg can grow up?

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t live in his Harvard dorm. He isn’t 20. His creation, Facebook, is a modern institution. It has changed. He, like anyone else, has probably changed. After all Bill Gates today isn’t the introverted, arrogant guy he was seen as in the 90’s and Steve Jobs is clearly a different man then the one who left Apple in the 80’s.

With Gates and Jobs it took the media longer than the public to realize the difference and we’re making the same mistake with the new kid on the block.

If you were to sum up our collective judgement, Zuckerberg is at best a social retard who sees his fellow men and women as 1s and 0s and at worst a cheat-to-win savant who will bleed his crop for all it’s worth, no matter the moral cost.

All, some or none of that might be true. All, some or none of that might have once been true. No matter that years have past since that meteoric rise. His life has no doubt shifted. Priorities reset. Maybe his mood has mellowed. Like anyone after a seismic shift in their lives, it is safe to guess he’s probably adjusted on some level.

Yet we stick to our caricature.

Most of these concepts are chronicled best in Ben Mezrich’s fantastic tome The Accidental Billionaires. As good as the book is it cleverly writes around a glaring hole: his main character didn’t give his side of the story. Considering all the primary sources, it is no disrespect to the talent of Mezrich or the honesty of those interviewed to say the recollections of those with axes to grind should be taken with a grain of salt.

Even if we assume the worst from Billionaires, we are admittedly looking at a year and a half window in the life of a young man in his early twenties trying to make sense of a greased-wheels joy ride paved with sick money, sleepless nights of coding, ego-ballooning success and dizzying expectation.

And lo, that’s Zuckerberg. We point to the chat transcripts of a 20-year-old to indict Facebook privacy policies made in 2010. Are they relevant? Maybe. Does coming to that conclusion automatically hinder the search for more relevant data? Absolutely.

It’s not fair, which it’s why it’s helpful to believe Zuckerberg is selfish, greedy putz. This way, he deserves our prepackaged scorn.

But maybe it’s not so cut and dry. Maybe, it’s complicated.

Justin Robert Young is the co-host of the NSFW Show on the TWiT Network. He is also a founding partner of Blurbtastic.com. His personal blog can be found at JustinRobertYoung.com.

Beware of anti-social social media

Are you a social media spammer? Do you let applications like foursquare and Farmville take over your Twitter and Facebook account and send updates that are really just marketing messages? Are your friends calling you the Mayor of Doucheville behind your back?

In my opinion, every time you let those services use your social media platforms to communicate something with absolutely no content to your friends, you’re the equivalent of a web newbie passing around a chain email letter of jokes that died in 1996 or a promise that Bill Gates will send money for helping him test out some email thingy.

I have nothing against foursquare. I just have no use for it. I care about the most mundane and ridiculous things in my friend’s lives. I don’t care about what some application like foursquare or Farmville has decided to tweet out automatically. That’s not you. That’s those platforms using your account to spam your friends.

If you’re having a great experience using those services, by all means tweet about it or update your Facebook status to tell me so. But let me hear it from you.

I want to know what you thought about the movie you just saw. Tell me what song you’re listening too. Send me a funny link. I want to hear from you and not the marketing department of who you let hijack your account.

Andrew Mayne is founder of Blurbtastic.com and publisher of WeirdThings.com. His personal website can be found at AndrewMayne.com.

Twitter isn’t your audience. It’s your community.

So Leo Laporte woke up yesterday and realized that his Google Buzz account was broken and nobody noticed. That’s the end of social media for Leo. Paul Carr over at TechCrunch noticed this and opined that all of his twittering has come at the expense of his soulful blogging. Paul too has decided social media has run its course.

With all due respect. I think I perceive social media a little differently from them. It’s about your community, and I don’t mean the community as in “fan club”. I mean community as in the people you have one-on-one interactions with. People whom you have a mutual interest in. The operative phrase being “mutual”.

Leo is an absolute pioneer in online broadcasting and a hero to me. But it’s important to see that Twitter isn’t another form of online broadcasting.

Hint: If you have to use TweetDeck or some tool that lets you follow 1,000’s of people on Twitter then you’re having a different experience than those of us who follow a hundred or fewer people. I read every tweet from every person I follow. That’s why I only follow a few people. I don’t need Twitter to be truncated RSS.

If you treat Twitter as another broadcast outlet, that’s exactly what it becomes. It’s just talk radio with words. Twitter for me at least is like a huge conference call with all my friends.

A tweet from a celebrity with 200,000 followers doesn’t get top billing over a tweet from a friend with 2 followers. And that’s the way Twitter is supposed to work. That’s a very hard concept to understand for people used to a feudal web where one person is the gatekeeper of an audience.

And there’s the difference. Twitter isn’t your audience. It’s your community. It’s easy to tell the difference: The guy on stage at the concert is in front of his audience. The people in the stands are in their community. When the concert is over the audience vanishes but the community continues; with or without the man on stage.

Andrew Mayne is founder of Blurbtastic.com and publisher of WeirdThings.com. His personal website can be found at AndrewMayne.com.

Marshall McLuhan’s head would probably have exploded over this.

Why we forgive Facebook

Facebook often acts like a bad friend. We’re never quite sure we stand with them. One day they’re making life awesome, the next day they’re telling our secrets to people we don’t want to know. Telling us to pay attention to our privacy settings is like a friend that tells everyone who you made out with last night because you didn’t expressly tell them not to tell anyone. They win on a technicality.

But that’s not why we forgive Facebook or why we think of it as a friend. Or why Mark Zuckerberg can probably get as much action as that vampire dude from Twilight.

We forgive Facebook because of our biology. Specifically because of a hormone called oxytocin. You can read my buddy Dr. Paul Zak’s site for more information about that. In Marvel comics terms, it’s a chemical our brain releases that makes us trust and like each other. Getting a back massage will release it. Having sex will release it. Thinking about people you love can trigger it. Looking at photos of your friends can trigger it. And there you have it: Every time you go to Facebook your body is flooded with this love hormone. By proxy, we love Facebook.

Don’t blame Facebook, blame your biology. If we weren’t addicted to this hormone we’d be able to face up to Facebook like a clearheaded reptile and tell it to stop, or eat it’s young, or whatever animals that don’t have oxytocin receptors do when they’re upset. Instead, we do what every other primate does, screech a bit, bare our teeth and then hug and make-up.

Andrew Mayne is founder of Blurbtastic.com and publisher of WeirdThings.com. His personal website can be found at AndrewMayne.com.