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WSJ: Free, Legal and Ignored. The subhead says it all: Colleges Offer Music Downloads, But Their Students Just Say No; Too Many Strings Attached. The article is about the unsurprising-to-anyone-except-Napster miserable failure of subscription based music services to take hold in universities. Compared to the complicated barrage of restrictions on the music offered by Napster, the students come across as models of common sense:

• While Cornell's online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. "After I read that, I decided I didn't want to even try it," says Mr. Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall...
• Purdue University officials say that lower-than-expected demand among its students stems in part from all the frustrating restrictions that accompany legal downloading. Students at the West Lafayette, Ind., school can play songs free on their laptops but have to pay to burn songs onto CDs or load them onto a digital music device.
• "People still want to have a music collection. Music listeners like owning their music, not renting," says Bill Goodwin, 21, who graduated in May from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. USC decided last year that it was finished with Napster after fewer than 500 students signed up...

There’s also a telling quotation from the director of the Campus Computing Project, who says, “The RIAA’s push to buy into these services strikes me as protection money. Buy in and we’ll protect you from our lawsuits,” which is one of the kinder descriptions of the unfriendliness of the industry that I’ve read lately.

I’m still waiting for someone in the industry to wake up and understand that their path to profitability lies in supporting good music and making their rich back catalogs available, not in fighting the fans of music tooth and nail. Today, three years after the birth of the iTunes Music Store, there are still many albums and tracks that can’t be found anywhere online—some by major artists (just try tracking down any non-album Sting tracks from before the late 90s), some by minor artists on major labels (Annabouboula, anyone?), and some by great cultural figures (I’d gladly pay through the nose for access to e.e. cummings’s Six Nonlectures as digital files, or even on CD). Instead we get American Idol and Rock Star. What, no one ever told these guys that a steady diet of candy can kill you?

BTW, for a good counterexample, check out Verve’s deep catalog—including a bunch of rare Impulse! recordings—though they don’t quite get it right; they support both iTunes and Windows Media, but no DRM-free offerings. But at least they’re opening up their catalog.

Okay, so I was a little inaccurate in my last post about LibraryThing; it’s not an overnight sensation, having been launched back in August of last year. In fact, Alex Barnett (who was in my home aggregator but not my Bloglines subscriptions; rectified) wrote about them back in January, as he was gentle enough to remind us this week.

Alex’s point bears thinking about. LibraryThing is an online service that makes it possible to get your data back out, in a variety of ways—RSS and blog badges and mobile access, of course, but also plain ol’ tab-delimited or CSV export. And that’s pretty cool.

In the meantime, the rest of my books have finished importing (guess they were pretty backed up!), so I’m off to play with it a little.

At a speech in New Orleans on Monday I said we were just five percent of the way into the Internet -- that of all the things that could simplify our lives and save us time, only five percent of them are here so far. New companies such as Pandora are pressing the envelope to do great things but unfortunately many existing companies have not kept pace with expectations.

This morning I checked on the status of a medical prescription at Express Scripts, my "online" pharmacy. The web site had an order number but did not show the name of the medication. Clicking on "check status" gave a line that said "In pharmacy" -- since May 6. No information available. Sending an email to them is hopeless -- I have done it before -- they respond to the email by telling you to call if you need information. I called and was told they had received the prescription on May 3 and it then takes them three days to enter it into the system. Four days later they determined that it needs "prior authorization" and so they faxed a form to the doctor requesting that he fax a form to the insurance company who would then need to fax a form to customer service who would then notify the pharmacy it is ok to ship the medication. The pharmacy and customer service are the same company. There is no feedback to the customer at any point. Meanwhile everyone is calling everyone and the doctor's office is so overloaded with calls about prescriptions that you can't get through to them. This is the status of online pharmacy. Five percent would be an overstatement.

Then I made a reservation at Marriott.com. At the end of the form was a "comments" box and I entered some things that I thought would be helpful. Upon hitting the submit button I got an error message saying "Comments too long". The form only accepts 45 characters -- a ridiculous limitation in these days of inexpensive storage. Well designed online forms that limit the text input tell you how many characters you have remaining. Not this one -- there is no indication given of how many characters have actually been entered and the text box actually has four lines of 64 characters each. You just keep shortening and entering submit until it is satisfied. What could they be thinking? The confirming email arrived quickly but because they had embedded some javascript in the email to make it look pretty, it could not be printed. Travel sites generally are getting better but they still do a lot of dumb things.

The point that top management of these and many other companies are missing is that the perception of their company and their brand is no longer based on their past history or even the reputation of their products and services. The way we see them is the way we see their web sites. Unfortunately, a lot of things we see are not pretty. Increasingly our loyalties will shift to the companies who make our lives simpler and save us time instead of frustrating us. Many are trying hard but they have a long way to go.

The month of April had the normal slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. Being "tax" month, the company announced a new solution for optimizing tax auditing. IBM's Tax Audit and Compliance Solution uses advanced analytics to help revenue agencies zero in on questionable tax returns.

There was also a milestone in April. Ten years ago, IBM WebSphere Commerce -- then known as Net.Commerce -- made its debut at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. Thousands of customers later, WebSphere Commerce is one of the best-selling e-commerce applications on the market, running many of the world's top e-commerce sites. Most of the top 100 online retailers use the middleware to power their Web sites that generate billions of dollars of online revenues. I am sure some will say it was great planning, but those of us who were there at the time know that the "ticket server" for the Olympic Games was an experiment. At about $5m in ticket sales it turned out to be the largest e-commerce site on the web at the time. The first real customer was L.L. Bean, Inc. of Freeport, Maine. See the complete history of Websphere Commerce here.

Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

Following Nakamura-san at the Business Leadership Forum would not be easy but Sunil Bharti Mittal, CEO of Bharti TeleVentures Limited had quite an amazing story to tell. Bharti is India's leading mobile operator and one of the top five companies in India. Revenue per month per person has shrunk from $30 to $8 and he believes it will go to $3-$4. The good news is that the number of users has gone from 2 million to 90 million. India is a huge consumption economy because there are so  many young people -- 50% are under 25. He expects mobile phone users to grow from 90 million to 300+ million by 2009-2010 and his strategy to address the market has been to give away everything except the customer ; i.e. outsource everything except the customer relationship. IT was outsourced to IBM -- a $1 billion contract. Networking was outsourced to Nokia & Ericsson. Call centers were outsourced to an IBM joint venture in India. Mr. Mittal said their growth (1 million new customers per month) could not be achieved without having outsourced to top partners. Complete alignment is achieved and the business model becomes predictable. Innovation in many areas including "Lifetime Validity" where incoming calls are free to customers for life. The theory is simple, if people receive a lot of free inbound calls, they will eventually *make* calls, which are not free. His goal is for his many partners to be happy -- not to laugh but to smile. He hopes to grow from 7 billion minutes per month to 20 billion.  

Mr. Yang Mingsheng, President and CEO of the Agricultural Bank of China, was the only speaker who did use English but the simultaneous translation to Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, German, and English allowed all of us to hear what he had to say -- which was a lot. The bank has 500,000 employees and 28,000 branch offices. Although I could not understand a word of what he was saying without the headphones, I could tell that the speaker was very articulate, enthusiastic, and confident. 95% of all bank services are available online. The bank has 400 million depositors, 12.4 million outstanding loans, and 220 million credit cards issued. They have introduced many e-banking and mobile products to their customers. This is being done by centralizing IT infrastructure. Mr. Mingsheng is both a ceo and a member of government. For hobbies he writes poetry and plays the violin. His speech covered every aspect of consumer and business banking services. I don't think a similar presentation by Citigroup or JP Morgan Chase would much if anything that ABC isn't also doing. 

Pierluigi Bernasconi, CEO of an Italian electronics retailer called MediaMarket. The company is the No. 1 consumer electronics retailer in Europe with 66 stores in Italy, more than 500 stores in more than a dozen European countries, and a new web-based business in Germany. One of their stores is the largest in the world -- it has six floors of consumer electronics products. Steady growth over the past decade has taken them from $4 to $16 billion. They have taken an innovative business model approach whereby they have two different store brands (MediaMarket and Saturn) that compete with each other. They believe that "self competition" results in better service and price to the consumer. Fifty million people per month spend time in one of their stores.  Mr. Bernasconi described an intensely competitive environment in Italy from 4,000 photography shops, 6,000 telephone stores, e-retail sites, hyperStores, and in the future new channels such as Digital Terrestrial TV.  In spite of this the company continuously outperforms the competition and gains market share. They have been using the web for sales and communications since 1995. Utilizing advanced IT the company has integrated all their distribution channels. They believe that communication is key and will result in customers thinking of MediaMarket or Saturn as the first choice as a place to get information and subsequently purchase. Their strategy is to exploit multi-channel strategies -- tying together so a person can call from land line or mobile, surf via the web  connect via digital terrestrial set top box, or visit in person and all the experiences are recognized and tracked.  

Intro to Roman Rendezvous Stories
Index to Roman Rendezvous stories

Students not interested in school-sanctioned music downloads: In 2003, colleges began signing exclusive deals with online music services to great fanfare. Nearly three years later, the schools are realizing what we've known all along.(Via Ars Technica.)

Here's the money quote in the original WSJ article:

There is also little consensus among administrators about how successful the services have been in eliminating piracy. Although some say complaints from the recording industry have dropped sharply, no one can tell if that's because fewer students are engaging in illegal file-sharing or if the industry simply doesn't want to go after schools that are spending money to combat the problem. "The RIAA's push to buy into these services strikes me as protection money. Buy in and we'll protect you from our lawsuits," says Kenneth C. Green, the Campus Computing Project's director.

The RIAA denies the charge. "We do sue students and send takedown notices to universities that have legal services all the time," says Mr. Sherman. Universities have a particular responsibility to teach students the value of intellectual property, he adds, because they are "probably the No. 1 creator of intellectual property." And he disputes the idea that the subscription services have fallen out of favor. The number of campuses that subscribe will increase "pretty significantly" in the fall, he says.

The Alan Bush Music Trust are delighted to announce the Trust's latest project and to ask for your help in raising funds for the issue of a CD, to be released in the Summer of 2004, of Alan Bush's Symphony No. 1 in C (Op. 21) (1940) and Symphony No.2 ("The Nottingham Symphony") (Op. 33) (1949), performed by the Royal Northern College of Music Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra will be conducted by Douglas Bostock. The recording will take place in February 2004.

Douglas Bostock

The Royal Northern College of Music Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Douglas Bostock who is internationally renowned, will also perform Bush's Nottingham Symphony at a concert at the Royal Northern College in Manchester on Friday 6th February 2004. We hope that as many lovers of Bush's music as possible will attend this concert!

The CD will be issued on the Danish Classico label as part of their long-running "British Symphonic Collection". The recording company under the guidance of Douglas Bostock and their repertoire consultant, Lewis Foreman, have taken a particular interest in recording British music of the 20th century.

This will be a wonderful opportunity to further public awareness of Bush's symphonic works, following on from the great critical success enjoyed by the CDs of his music issued during 2002 - with more CDs to come this year and in 2004.

Those who send a donation of at least £15 will automatically receive a copy of the CD upon its release in 2004.

When a web site is online, someone, somewhere must have been responsible for its creation.

You may be thinking about setting up your own web site and have done much research to find your perfect or rather agreeable company base on price, features, their proven works etc., this article introduces you to the people behind a typical web development project.

For whatever reason, Amazon’s S3 has captured my attention since the day it launched.

I want to use S3 for an online backup of my most important files. (I already do nightly local backups of everything, but that’s not enough. I’m paranoid.)

I’m finally close to reaching this goal, but it’s not been terribly easy.

Here’s a brief recount of my trials with S3 so far:

1. s3DAV. It didn’t work so well on OS X. The developer was really helpful, so we traded a few emails while he attempted to get it working on OS X from across the Atlantic. No luck.

2. JungleDisk (via Steven Frank). Much, much better. Of course I jumped in head-first and ran my backup script immediately, which attempted to copy 10GB of data to my S3 account. That took all night and then some; I finally had to cancel the operation. But somehow I managed to bork (technically speaking, of course) my S3 bucket so JungleDisk beach-balled every time I tried to connect.

3. S3 Browser. I found this while looking for a way to get into my account and delete the screwed-up bucket. Too bad there was no way to delete more than one file at a time — I would’ve had to press “Delete” 15,000 times. Not fun.

4. jSh3ll. Like most things of this nature, I had to turn to the command-line to get anything done. In a rare moment of competency, I downloaded and built jSh3ll (using Ant, no less) on my Power Mac and connected to my S3 account. I deleted the troublesome bucket from the command-line and now I’m back to square one (mostly).

I’m running a much smaller backup to S3 right now. Wish me luck.

(Oh, and have a good weekend! Michelle and I are headed to Green Lake for the holiday. How about you?)

Today I finished building the bike I started just over a month ago (here’s a picture of me working on it). Tonight I rode it for the first time. What a blast!

It’s been a tremendous learning experience (thanks Chris) — before this project, I knew literally nothing about how bikes work. Which was part of the motivation for doing it this way, of course.

Even though I built it all myself, I didn’t dig around in boxes for the parts or anything (maybe next time). I ordered most of them from IRO. Here’s what I ended up with:

• IRO Angus frame and fork
• Velocity Aerohead rims with Conti Ultra Gatorskins
• IRO drive train (46 x 17 gearing)
• Nitto Dynamic stem and bullhorn bars
• Saddle of unknown make/model — I pulled it off the ill-fated Green Machine

In other news, Matt picked up a Soma frame this weekend. Fixed-gear fever!