George Lucas buys into the Long Tail

Chewbacca and Jabba will no longer be banking on blockbusters.

"Lucas said he believes Americans are abandoning the moviegoing habit for good."

From the Long Tail Blog:
    From the current issue of Variety:

"George Lucas has a message for studios that are cutting their slates and shifting toward big-budget tentpoles and franchises: You've got it all wrong. The creator of "Star Wars," which stamped the template for the franchise-tentpole film, says many small films and Web distribution are the future.

And in case anyone doubts he means it, Lucasfilm is getting out of the [theatrical-release] movie biz."We don't want to make movies. We're about to get into television. As far as Lucasfilm is concerned, we've moved away from the feature film thing because it's too expensive and it's too risky.

Spending $100 million on production costs and another $100 million on P&A makes no sense, he said. "For that same $200 million, I can make 50-60 two-hour movies. That's 120 hours as opposed to two hours. In the future market, that's where it's going to land, because it's going to be all pay-per-view and downloadable."

 With more than 13000 movies submitted to just the Tribecca Film Festival and only 150 getting real distribution, that's good news for young filmmakers. Distribution will get easier.

But it's terrible news for advertisers. How will you target and deliver a consistant message if you don't have a big channel? It's the same problem that network televison is facing. See Judd Bagleys Connect article and graphs here. 

So where is the paradigm shift? Technology allows more efficient markets and cheap and easy distribution. It is just a better system.

If it's so great, why hasn't it already been built?

j0311536.gifMatt Asay has a post on 'Self indulgence and Silicon Valley' that gave voice to a question that I've been asking myself about Nimble which is, 'if this idea's so damn good, why 'hasn't' anybody done it already. It's a common question that every entrepreneurs faced with all the time. (10 seconds into the elevator pitch is when the eyebrows start to arch.)  Why? Because there are insulators that prevent people, even really smart people, from having the information they need to make sense of the world. How else could you explain George Bush.

Kiva: Microloans for third world entrepreneurs.

Kiva is an organization that makes microloans to tiny businesses in the third world. The repayment rate is 97% according to the site. I'm using Kiva for our extended family project this year, something you might wish to think about.


If you're a blogger and you'd like to post a banner like the one above on your blog, here's the code: <SCRIPT type='text/javascript' src='http://www.kiva.org/banners/bannerBlock.php'></SCRIPT>

If you would like to loan to Maria or any other entrepreneurs please head to Kiva.org. 100% of your loan goes directly to the borrower and you can loan as little as $25. Why not get started as an international financier today? With repayment rates around 96% you don’t have much to lose but you do have many lives to change.

Click fraud is increasing for everyone except Google and Yahoo.

 NY Times article >

Instead of actual prospects, the clicks were coming from fraudulent sources. The fraud, which cost DiamondHarmony $17,000 over seven months, was uncovered through analytical software the company installed from ClickTracks of Santa Cruz, Calif.

Click fraud most commonly happens when renegade partners, who get a portion of the fees earned by a search engine each time a paid link is clicked, deliberately generate excessive clicks with no chance that any of the clicks will result in a sale for the business that is paying for them.

The spurious clicks can be generated through automated programs or by paying people to spend time clicking over and over on a link.

Name this blog.

I need a better name for this blog. Something catchy. Something Quirky.

If anyone has any ideas about what I should call this site, comment on this post and leave the name.

If I choose a name from among the comments, I'll give the lucky namer a $1000 dollar gift certicate good at my other business, Surface Medical Spas. That's no joke. Your wife will love you for at least a year. (some restrictions apply.) < you always have to put that in. 

The Billy Barty Memorial Knock-out Hernia Belt...

Judd Bagley loves Fight Club. Funny, he didn't look like a boxer.

His comment on the Fight Club blog:

 Sweet Sassy Mollassie! That was one of the best times I've had with a bunch of dudes. Seriously, dinner lasted like four hours but could have gone on for ten, as good as the conversation was. I'm hooked on Fight Club. Thank you Jeff for organizing it. I intend to challnge Ryan Coombs for control of the Billy Barty Memorial Knock-out Hernia Belt. What an honor.
See you in three and a half short weeks.
Judd

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Barriers to imitation

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Excellent post on 'Barriers to Imitation' from Early Stage VC.

google-trademark.gifFrom the post: So what do we really mean when we say what’s your barrier to entry?  I think what we mean is really the reciprocal. What’s everyone else’s obstacle to imitation?  Competitive imitation erodes your uniqueness as in Unique Sales Proposition. It raises the cost of differentiation and it gives the customer more perceived choices.   You have to spend more to stand out and get less market share for it.

Imitation comes in many forms. It can be a current claim, as is “we do the same thing.”  It can be a future promise, as in “we will have that feature, too.” Worst of all, it can be a rapid replica of your actual product.  It is the latter that most investors care about when they fear competitive “entry” or imitation.

Re-casting the question as obstacle rather than barrier also points to how to address the issue.  There is rarely a single obstacle that is so insurmountable as actually to be a barrier.  However, you can often outline a series of speed bumps that will slow down even the fastest fast follower.

 

Free alternative to Basecamp. Is there a flaw in 37 Signals business model?

logo-bc.gifHere's an alternative to 37 Signals popular Basecamp project managing software: ActiveCollab (Absolutly terrible name.) TechCrunch article link.

 A flaw in the newfound "simple" business model? Seems when somethings so simple it's easy enough to knock off. And since there are any number of programmers ready to provide a free service, where are the barriers to imitation?

Post directly to your blog using the ultimate speech recognition.

I have recently put to a new form of blogging using a pay service called Copytalk.

_mouth.jpgCopytalk uses a transcription model for which I pay around $50 a month. I am able to call up a phone number and just talk. The transcription is sent, I think to India, although I'm not sure, and typed by a real person who then deposits it in my e-mail box.

Since I'm using Squarespace for my blogs, I don't have the option of posting directly from email. However, there are a number of blogging options that allow you to e-mail a post directly which means that it can be set it up so that instead of coming to my inbox, it just appears on the blog. Now to post a blog, all I typically do is type 8 on my speed dial and start talking. That is how this post is generated. I'm curious to see after I have posted for a while using this method whether my blog post become more or less coherent.

Somebody stole my domain name.

Somebody stole my domain name, that dirty son of a bitch. I've had the domain www.ren-man.com for the last eight years from a former stint as an artist, it was my art site. Since I've been so busy lately, somebody came along and as soon as that domain expired, they snapped it up.

I can't really say I blame anybody except myself. I'm sure a bot snaped up a domain that's been registered for a long time immediately, as soon as it goes offline. I do have something of an ethical problem with the people that do this, since really, they're adding no value to anything the damn parasites. So now I'm going to have to register another domain and switch over my site. It could be worse, of course, but I still think it's kind of screwed up that these guys are allowed to register a domain, make a dead end with a bunch of paid advertising links on it, so that when you get there you have no option except to click a paid link. I hate that.

Do Young Entrepreneurs Still Want To Change The World?

w887097-001.jpgWhen I decided to become an entrepreneur, a streak that always lay dormant in me, one of the criteria I had when Ilooking at a business is, is it changing the world in some small way? That's always been my goal is to create something that is better than what has existed in the past. Most notably, my first real, true start up, not including my previous failed businesses, is Surface Medical Spas, which, from the beginning, was designed to change the way cosmetic medicine is practiced and delivered. The current medical system is totally antiquated and inefficient, and Surface brings efficiency to the marketplace based upon technology, not individual physicians' skills.

My current start up, Nimble, is designed to replace advertising and marketing for local small businesses. It is designed to bring hyper-competition into the marketplace and allow any business to manage its own inventory in real time by selling its unused inventory at a discount directly to the public or some other small business; that is a cool deal.

It surprises me personally when I meet entrepreneurs whose only goal in life is to make money by what I see as less than purely ethical or idealistic reasons.

I recently ran across an entrepreneur at a gathering who was truly excited about his new business. He had come out of UVSC Entrepreneurial Program and one of his assignments had been to start a new business. The business he had started was an online ppc business, and he was very proud that he was making about $1,000 a month doing it. His business consisted of purchasing a domain, running up the rankings using SEO, providing a bunch of ppc text links at a dead end, and, from my opinion, tricking browsing consumers into clicking one of these ad-links. That was his business model.

Businesses like this irritate me to some degree because they add nothing. They just skim a little bit of money by unsuspecting businesses and people (I routinely categorize realtors in this category as well).

My own feeling is that if you are going to run a business and expect people to pay you money that you should be actually adding value. Just providing dead links so that somebody is tricked into clicking on them, adds zero value and to be honest I think is at least cloudy on the ethical front. I know many business owners that will do anything for a buck. Potentially, if I had one of these sites, I might think about that as well. I do have sites that run adwords and I do make a little bit of money off of them, at least enough to pay my bills, to keep the sites up and going. But to provide no content, I think is just scummy.

Where are the young radicals out to change the world and stick it to the man?