ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Apple announced its second-quarter results this week, reporting earnings of US$6.40 per share on revenues of US$24.67 billion. That’s an 83 percent increase over the same period last year. During the quarter, Apple sold 3.76 million Macs, representing a 28 percent increase in units sold compared to the same period last year. The company sold 18.65 million iPhones; an increase of 113 percent over the same period last year. Relatively few iPads were sold—4.69 million—probably due to production shortages.

Cryptography

I depend on Dropbox for all manner of things, including storing and syncing my work directory across multiple laptops and servers. Dropbox has always been transparent about security, assuring its users that data was transmitted over an encrypted channel, files were stored in encrypted format, and Dropbox employees have access only to file metadata, not the contents of files. But Dropbox recently announced that it would provide the US government with your decrypted files if requested to do so. How is this possible if Dropbox cannot access user files. Is Dropbox lying now or was it lying then when it told us it couldn’t access our files? Dropbox needs to honestly and completely describe the cryptography protections—including algorithms—it offers its users. Dropbox attempted to clarify its policy later in the week, making it clear that it will comply with government investigations. It also updated the Dropbox features page, removing the statement about employees not being able to access files. The clarification makes it clear that private keys to encrypted files on the service are held by the service, not the user. So, if you want security, encrypt your files with your own keys and cryptography tools before putting the files in Dropbox.

Media

The New York Times has sold more than 100,000 digital subscriptions in the three weeks since it erected its paywall. The number doesn’t include free subscriptions like the one I received courtesy of Lincoln but does include promotional priced subscriptions including a four-week trial for US$0.99. Overall, the publication’s revenues are down 3.6 percent (advertising revenue is down 4.4 percent; circulation is down 3.7 percent). Meanwhile digital advertising revenue is up 14.9 percent. Because the Times has no digital subscription conversion or retention rate numbers, there’s not a lot of value in that 100,000 number.

KQED, the National Public Radio affiliate in San Francisco just may have found a solution to the problem of sustainably monetizing a pure public good. If a listener donates US$45, he or she can receive a members-only internet stream of the programming without the interminable pledge drive. Each donating listener receives a code tied to their email address that can be used to unlock the stream on up to four devices. Adam Ragusea, a reporter at WBUR in Boston, told Andrew Phelps, writing for the Neiman Journalism Lab, that he’s worried that it will work. “‘The incentive for the stations will be to gradually make the exclusive service more and more desirable than the free service, and the pledge periods longer and longer in order to get more people to buy in. Then little by little, year by year, we will become a de facto subscription service, which is not what we’re supposed to be.’ He [Ragusea] takes issue with the concept of offering “premium” content only to paying members, saying it departs from public radio’s core mission of public service.” Don Derheim, KQED’s chief operating officer and executive vice president gets extra points for acknowledging that this needs to be thought about but that KQED can’t wait for the conversation.

Publishing

Ebooks overtook all other formats for book publishing in February 2011, surpassing both hardcover and paperback sales. While most analysts seem to believe this is driven solely by Christmas sales of tablet devices and ereaders, I’m not so sure. I’m pretty sure my days of buying paper books are over save for the rare artifact I want to add to my collection. That doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped reading—far from it; I read more now than ever, it’s just that almost all of it has migrated to various screens.

Sustainability

The financial crisis of 2008 brought what many thought was a temporary end to hyperconsumption in the US. The common thought was that hyperconsumption would resume when the economy turned around. But more and more individuals are opting-out of destructive over-consumption, removing those things that fail to add value (the vast majority of that which we consume) from their lives. Danielle Sacks, writing for Fast Company, has a profile of this new approach, calling it the “sharing economy.” Sacks begins her piece with a profile of Neal Gorenflo and his migration from DHL strategist to founder of Shareable, a non-profit web magazine and community providing information on building shareable systems. “Business has spent centuries making buying really easy,” Gorenflo tells Sacks. “We’re just at the beginning of making sharing easy.” The culture—driven by the millennials—is readjusting how it thinks about ownership. Rachel Botsman—a recovering corporate innovation consultant and coauthor of What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption—tells Sacks that collaborative consumption—sharing—“could be as big as the Industrial Revolution in the way we think about ownership.” The basis of collaborative consumption is simple, Sacks writes. “Access to goods and skills is more important than ownership of them. Botsman divides this world into three neat buckets: first, product-service systems that facilitate the sharing or renting of a product (i.e., car sharing); second, redistribution markets, which enable the re-ownership of a product (i.e., Craigslist); and third, collaborative lifestyles in which assets and skills can be shared (i.e., coworking spaces). The benefits are hard to argue—lower costs, less waste, and the creation of global communities with neighborly values.” And Botsman tells Sacks sharing is a US$110 billion-plus market.

User experience

Orbital content is content that is no longer constrained by or rooted in websites, “but floats in orbits around users.” That’s Cameron Koczon’s take for A List Apart. Koczon says that orbital content transforms our relationship with content and “will force us to rethink existing reputation, distribution, and monetization models….” Orbital content reverses the gravitational center—where before websites were the center around which users orbited, now users are the gravitational center around which content must orbit. “Applications will no longer ask for our credentials to other services; instead, they will ask you directly to lend them the content they want to make useful,” writes Koczon. With regard to copyright and ownership issues, Koczon unfortunately punts, writing that the problem isn’t copying but rather compensation, pointing to orbital content as an opportunity to address the compensation problem. The sole solution offered is the pitifully weak proposal to have advertising follow content into other contexts.

I stopped going to technology conferences some time ago. Partly because I no longer had something to sell, but mostly because I discovered that most of the interesting bits were happening on the backchannel and I didn’t have to be physically present to participate in the backchannel. Christopher Fahey and Timothy Meaney, writing for A List Apart, propose to bring the backchannel to the forefront of presentations. By aiming to start a conversation rather than impart wisdom, most presentations can be rescued from the rocks. Fahey and Meaney built Donahue around Twitter to bring the backchannel forward. Speakers tweet their ideas as they present, encouraging audiences—both the physically present audience and remote audiences—to respond and propagate.