In this issue

Internet Radio

You may not have thought of listening to the radio on your PC, but there are thousands of radio stations out there from all over the world. All you need is some software - Windows media player, Real player, or just a web browser and you are all set to tune in.

As you probably don't want to carry your PC into the bathroom, you can buy an internet radio receiver which talks over a wireless link to your broadband. It looks and behaves like a regular radio, but you have many more stations to choose from.

What stations

For a directory of stations try www.live365.com. There are 240+ country music stations alone - ya-hoooo!!... This includes my favourite - Gospel Twang Radio; "Christian Country Radio playing a heavenly blend of pure, santified (sic) Country and Bluegrass Music. Over 2500 songs in our playlist. iTunes friendly."  Under the 'talk radio' heading, my favourite is UFO Paranormal Radio: this is a support group for the study of alien contactees. Another is Inner Light Radio ('the healing frequency').

www.windowsmedia.com has a radio tuner, fewer stations - maybe 100-150 country music. You need windows media player to play them of course. Fewer looney stations.

If you don't find your favourite station that way, just search for it on the web. The odds are it will have a 'listen now' button.

Some of these stations are the Internet version of a regular radio station, but a lot of them are 'Internet only'.  They are financed by:

• Advertising
• Subscription: generally getting better access in some way, maybe priority access to streams or fewer station breaks.
• Ecommerce - selling the CD for the music being played.

Quality

With a reasonable broadband connection, reception should be fine. Is it 'CD Qualty'? I don't know about that.

There is a transmision delay - so the time signal on the BBC is going to be a few seconds out. Each station is going to take a few seconds to fire up, so channel hopping is not really an option. 

Royalty isues 

There is an active issue with royalties. Because many internet-only stations operate on low budgets a special deal was cut to allow worldwide broadcasting at very low rates per track. The new arrangement calls for a fixed fee per station plus a fee per listener, the per-listener fee escalating year on year. For the latest situation on the US situation check out http://www.soundexchange.com/. The news section has the latest developments. 

This is of course the situation in the US. In the UK royalties are administered by Phonographic Performance Ltd  and the Performing Rights Society. One covers the performance itself the other the recording. Don't ask - I am as confused as everyone.

Last.fm

Last.fm is like radio - only different. This is not a broadcast, but each listener gets their own station with selections according to their preferences. So if you like (say) country music, you will get random tracks from that genre.

You need a special player program to run it and it works on the basis of members tagging tracks with keywords. Ask for country music and you will get tracks tagged as country music by other members.

Business intelligence

Software as a Service

Software as a Service has been getting a lot of press in the Technology area. The idea is that instead of installing your software on your own computers you run it over the internet on someone else's computers. I must tell you that this concept is much older than the Internet, in fact it dates back to the 1970s when it was called a computer bureau service.

The reducing cost of hardware killed the bureau business but now it is back. The key here is 'cost of ownership' which is different from 'what it costs to buy'.  'What it costs to buy' is your up-front cost.  Cost of ownership is your long-term cost including your operational costs, the cost of support and so on. 

We are working with a web site that uses a product called Netsuite. This combines e-commerce, stock management, accounting, customer relationship management (CRM) and management reporting on a single system run at Netsuite. There are big advantages:

• No capacity worries if the load fluctuates 
• Monthly billing rather than a big up-front cost 
• 24x7 support 
• your ecommerce site truly integrated with your other systems

Now giant software company SAP is getting into the act. 

I think that this updating of the bureau service is here to stay with big advantages for a net-based ecommerce business. If you think this may be of interest to your customers please give me a call.

From my blog

Biba - a lesson for us all

Last night I went to an evening hosted by those lovely people at Rackspace at the Kensington Roof Gardens. It all came back to me.

This was BIBA.

You can tell how old you are when you are the only person in a group to remember BIBA. In the 60's it was the epitomy of cool. A department store like no other. High fashion sold in the exotic art deco surroundings of the old Derry and Tom's store. A massive place, set like a stage with mood lighting and notoriously snooty sloan-ranger assistants. And at the top of it all the 30's roof garden where you could have a coffee and watch the other beautiful people.

Why did it fail? A combination of things:

• The mood lighting made it rather too easy for shoplifters and 'shrinkage' was crippling.
• It was a great tourist attraction and people came to look not to shop
• A property company took over the parent company, looting this fabulous brand until it died.

Ask your mother about BIBA - she will remember.  They are trying to resurrect the brand at http://www.bibaexperience.com/ but once a brand is dead can it be recreated?     

News

Security is important. Monster had over a million names and addresses stolen from criminals who downloaded their CVs. They are spending millions of dollars to improve its security.

Are you a member of Linkedin? You should be. It has been going for as long as I can remember but is now hailed as the "next big thing in web 2.0". Which shows that web 2.0 is getting pretty vague. Linkedin is basically facebook for professionals at work.

Wikepedia publishes its 2 millionth article last month. Something of a milestone, but the article was about "El Hormiguero," a popular Spanish TV show.

I am trying to get my head around floobs (www.floobs.com) which apparently will offer a free TV channel to anyone with content - even if all you have is a mobile phone. Sounds almost as boring as 99.99% of YouTube.

On a more edifying level www.kiva.org lets you offer micro-finance to small businesses in the third world.

A new satellite will be making Google earth even better. This is the satellite company's third satellite and they will be photographing more than 1 million square kilometers per day.

First we had free content paid for by advertising. Then that was no good at all - everyone knew that paid content was the answer. Well everybody was wrong - in the case of the New York Times at least. They are removing their subscription model and their web site will all be free again. Mind you I could never see the point of it because the paid content was pretty marginal. 

The city with the most Facebook users is London. It has over a million.

Microsoft have given their search engine another workover. Previous versions were disapointing and I personally always ended up goping back to google to get the best results. We shall see if this one is a big improvement. I will say one thing - it is now fast.