Daft Punk’s return has generated acres of coverage, reviews ranging from rave to merely fawning, and even saw several thousand people flock to a rural town in Australia for the launch party for the new album, where the French duo failed to show.

But possibly the best thing to have come out of the release of their incredibly retro new direction is this video, which sees the song Get Lucky put to a video compilation of people dancing on the classic American show Soul Train. The moves, outfits and general attitude are all so amazing it just makes me smile.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When you watch these kids dancing back in the 70s you can totally see how funk begat disco, begat hip-hop. After all, who were the band sampled by  early hip-hop legends Sugarhill Gang on the classic Rapper’s Delight? Disco kings Chic, whose guitarist Nile Rogers supplies the ravishing guitar licks on Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, which brings us nicely back to where we started.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Once again I’m sticking to the two biggest stories in tech over the last week, as they both cover off so much.

Buying Into Youth

As if it wasn’t enough spending millions of dollars on an app built by a 17 year old, it seems that Yahoo! now wants to spend $1 billion on a company which is hugely popular with 17 year olds. Following widespread reports, Yahoo! dropped the mythical amount (“You know what’s cool?“) on the social blogging platform, though it’s yet to be seen whether this will be Yahoo’s MySpace or its YouTube.

Whilst there are some good arguments being made for why this might be a bad deal (including porn & rebellious users) there are some equally compelling ones as to why it makes sense, including one suggesting that Facebook should gazump the deal. What’s not in doubt is that this is a massive roll of the dice for Yahoo and its (relatively) new CEO, Marissa Mayer.

Many thought that she would focus massively on product, but with both Tumblr and Summly, she seems to have chosen youth and content over real engineering brilliance. Whilst it’s too soon to say how that will likely play out it seems a stretch to think that advertisers will rush to associate themselves with Tumblr’s tricky audience and content (though that doesn’t necessarily mean its not worth $1 billion) whereas concentrating on doing a deal for Hulu would have made more sense (though only with the right licensing deals in place).

After all, some reports suggest that Tumblr is losing traffic and was about to run out of money whilst others hint that the deal will also, potentially, leave Yahoo a little short of cash (though others disagree). Despite all that others are suggesting that these sort of platforms are still undervalued, though the main person saying that runs… a blogging platform.

As of 3/31 Yahoo had just under $1.2b of actual cash on hand. And deal is $1.1b cash? Time to liquify that $1.8b of “short-term investments”

— danprimack (@danprimack) May 19, 2013

Searching For The Competition

Although it didn’t make any massive purchases in the last week, in many ways Google came out on top of most of its competitors. During the 3 hour keynote of its annual I/O conference it presented a series of product updates and innovations that left many commentators gasping for breath. It included major updates to Maps & Google+, tweaks to Search & Google Now, and lots of news about the fact that Chrome and Android will soon be, if they’re not already, the biggest browser and mobile operating systems on the market. Oh, and cash is now an email attachment.

As if this wasn’t all enough to take in, Google also decided to take on the likes of Spotify and launch its own subscription based music streaming service. Without a freemium option, or the ability to use Facebook as a launch pad, in some ways the (rather clunkily named) service  Google Play Music All Access seems like less of an obvious hit than last year’s Google Glass. Whatever the case, Google seems to be shooting for the stars, whilst its main competitors are more concerned with just squeezing out the next product update.

Of course even astronauts have to come back down to earth eventually, and with continuing political and legal issues in a variety of different markets, Google could still end up on the wrong side of one of these decisions, though that is only likely to happen if legislators tighten up the rules which Google says it is playing by. In that respect at least, Google is firmly in line with its peers.

Avengers image from a Tumblr post (what else) about memes

No Place Like Home

When Facebook launched Home, its super-app, many people (me included) suggested that thay had done so to get the benefit of having their own phone and operating system, but without the hassle or cost of building one. Based on the success to date of Home, it’s probably lucky that they didn’t.

According to reports, the app has only been downloaded 1 million times in the month or so since it launched, with many of those who have downloaded it unhappy. To put that in context, when Instagram launched its Android app, it added 1 million users in a day, and they didn’t have an existing user-base of over 1 billion. At the same time, the phone on which Facebook Home was initially installed, the HTC First, has seen its price slashed to $0.99 in order to clear stock.

This doesn’t mean the end of Facebook Home; when the social network launched its early advertising system Beacon it was widely panned,  and was eventually withdrawn after a costly law-suit. Fast forward 6 years and many of the elements of Beacon are now to be found in many of Facebook’s, and many other platforms’, products. It may well turn out that the same thing happens with Home.

Hire And Hire

At times over the last week the tech giants of Silicon Valley have resembled desperate bargain hunters, still throwing things into the shopping trolley as their other half drags them towards the check-out. Yahoo alone has bought or aquihired 4 start-ups, primarily in the mobile space, Twitter bought an analytics  company as well as a big data start-up, and enterprise outfits Salesforce and Box also got in on the act. Many of these deals were around mobile, as are a couple that haven’t come off yet.

Apparently Facebook is planning to doubledown on the $1 billion it (sort of) spent on Instagram and offer a similar amount for Waze, a company that crowd-sources the data to power sat-navs. In the words of Waze founder Noam Bardin:

What search is for the Web, maps are for mobile

Although a rather trite statement, it’s also kind of true. Ironically, the deal is supposedly stalled over an argument about location.

At the same time there were rumours that Microsoft was considering whether to buy Nook, the e-book business launched by Barnes & Noble. Whilst there have since been counter rumours saying that no deal is imminent, it was an interesting suggestion and one that got investors excited.

Maybe they could have done the deal with Bitcoin, the virtual ‘currency’, which received a shot of respectability when UVC, one of the first investors in Twitter, pumped $5 million into a Bitcoin related start-up. Whilst Fred Wilson, the man behind the investment has had an incredible run of investments, it’s hard not to think that he’s backed the wrong horse here.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s start by looking at how pictures can be worth a billion dollars…

Picture Of Health?

This week saw Facebook release an important update to Instagram, the photo app that it paid close to $1 billion dollars for shortly before its IPO last year (70% of the deal was in stock, so there’s no knowing what the deal will end up costing Facebook). The update allows people to tag themselves, friends and even brands in the pictures they take.

Whilst Mark Zuckerberg has said that they have no immediate plans to start monetising Instagram, it’s not hard to see how tagging could be the first step on the road to making back some of the hundreds of millions of dollars that they paid for it. Tags in photos were what really turbo-charged Facebook’s growth, and, as I said a year ago, could do the same for Instagram, whilst the fact that it will also be possible to tags brands opens up obvious monetisation options.

That said, it’s worth noting that it only took a couple of days for articles to pop up telling people how to remove tags which may make things a little harder.

Mobile Money

In other Facebook news, the social network had its latest earnings call. Depending on whose PR you read, the results were either OK, great or terrible. In reality, they were probably a little of each.

Revenue was up, though possibly not by as much as some people would have liked. Revenue from games was the highest its ever been, though Zynga appears to be losing its attraction, with its contribution towards Facebook’s revenue down (something Facebook is probably glad about as it used to be dangerously reliant on Zynga.)

In terms of advertising, mobile now accounts for about 30% of ad revenue; this is growing, which is good, but may not be growing fast enough to replace revenue from desktop traffic as it isn’t currently as valuable to Facebook.

Seeds Of Growth?

Last week I highlighted the change in Apple’s recent fortunes that noted that it might well still turn out a major new product, and so it has turned out. To fund its major dividend it is selling its own debt (the iBond?) rather than repatriating the cash it has sitting outside the US, as this would cost it a lot of money in tax.

Having quietened down its major critics, the tech world is hoping that Apple will get back to releasing market defining products, though it seems more likely that Apple will instead bring out the iPod Mini to the iPhone’s iPod, by releasing a lower priced, mass market model. It seems that those waiting for Apple’s Smart TV or internet enabled watch will have to keep waiting.

A relatively quiet week in tech, but nonetheless one with a few interesting stories pointing  at the direction that the industry, and the world, is going in.

Google’s New Reader

Not that long ago Google announced its plans to close (or sunset, to use the horrible Valley term for shutting things down) its RSS product, Reader, causing much gnashing of teeth in the tech-blog bubble. One of the reasons given was declining usage but now, in a sign of how the world has changed since the halcyon web 2.0 days of Reader’s creation, Google has bought a different kind of reader.

Wavii, which Google has bought for something in the region of $30 million, is one of a new breed of services, which aims to aggregate and concentrate the content that people are consuming.  It follows hot on the heels of Yahoo’s purchase of British start-up Summly, which really highlighted the interest that Silicon Valley is taking in such products.

Whilst these moves show that tech and media companies are now trying to adapt to a world where 140 characters is often the limit of people’s attention spans, they also highlight the increasingly short attention spans of the companies doing the buying: Wavii was shut down on the day of its acquisition whilst this week also saw Google shutting down Meebo, a company it bought less than a year ago.

Whose Results Are They Anyway?

Google has often pitched itself as the anti-Microsoft, right down to its unofficial motto of “do no evil”; former Google CEO, and current Chairman Eric Schmidt said in 2009 that the company hoped that:

we won’t repeat the mistakes that Microsoft made, you know, ten years ago that ultimately led to all these things that happened with them

Which is ironic, seeing as how Google is now being taken to task by the EU, largely because of complaints led by Microsoft. They allege that Google unfairly favours its own products in its search results and have chased the US & EU to act to stop Google’s (alleged) anti-competitive behaviour.

The US threw the case out when the FTC found that the law protects competition and not competitors. The EU, which is often tougher on this sort of thing (and also never suffers politically from taking a pop at large US corporations), has not followed the same course. And whilst Google has now offered to label its own products when they appear in its search results, its competitors have said that this doesn’t go far enough, meaning the case won’t end here.

What this will mean in terms of a final result is hard to say (the nuclear option is for the EU to impose fines of up to 10% of Google’s global revenues), but what is certain is that Google is likely to face this sort of government oversight a lot more frequently going forward.

Rotten Apple?

In another case of a company which once prided itself on being exactly the opposite of Microsoft now being compared to them, Apple is suffering the same fate. Having briefly become the most valuable company in the world, its stock has now been in free-fall for quite some time. This week saw the company’s profits drop for the first time in a decade and now the wolves are really coming out.

The company’s move to keep investors happy by releasing a huge chunk of its cash hoard as dividends has caused some to wonder whether Apple is experiencing what Microsoft experienced back at the start of the millennium - a change in the shape and momentum of its business. What is for certain is that Samsung is now soundly beating Apple in almost all areas of the smarpthone business, though its latest phone is still far from perfect.

It’s more than possible that Apple will still turn things around with another industry changing device but even if it doesn’t, Samsung still has a long way to go till it can lay claim to a service product as strong as iTunes (10 years old this week). Amazon on the other hand…

Microsoft image by Robert Scoble on flickr

Today, April 25th, is ANZAC Day here in Australia and in New Zealand. The date commemorates the first day that the combined forces of the two countries (hence ANZAC) went into battle at Gallipoli in the First World War.

As well as acting as something that highlighted the entry of both countries as honest to goodness nations in their own right, rather than just colonies, it’s also interesting to note, for those of us who work in media, that it was one of the first cases of media standing up to government censors. The hero of the hour? A certain Keith Murdoch (you might be familiar with his son).

It is truly heartening to see, nearly 100 years since that fateful day, how seriously these two countries take the commemoration of those who died in the two world wars, as well as the various battlefields that their troops have found themselves on since then. Whilst the first world war was a huge global folly, whose victims should be mourned, those who fought in the Second World War sacrificed so much in what was, as much as anything ever is, a true battle between good & evil.

We should never forget that, and should always honour those who gave so much, even if what they fought for was, one could argue, squandered in so many ways.

Photo courtesy of Gnangarra on Wikipedia

Back after a well earned break, I’m going to have another bash at providing a weekly round-up of tech, media & marketing.

Tweet As…

Twitter had a busy week, launching a new product and two updates to its ad systems.

Twitter #Music is an app, built off the back of acqhired Australian start-up We Are Hunted, which is designed to help people find and connect with new and upcoming music. It’s a lovely use of Twitter’s platform which understands, and makes use of, how people are using that to connect to music. Importantly, it builds off of existing music services, in the form of iTunes, Spotify & Rdio: this means it’s in the interest of the latter two for this to succeed, and helps ease the pain of Apple after closing Ping.

At the same time Twitter announced that it is to allow ads to be targeted at Twitter users based on words in their tweets or tweets they have interacted with, and it was rumoured that Twitter is trying to tie-up deals with TV networks so that it can monetise video content within tweets.

Whilst the #Music announcement is a smart effort to drive deeper audience usage of the product, whilst creating lots more lovely user data in the process, the keyword launch, and TV rumour, show that Twitter also wants to get much better at making money off of the audience it already has. Tie the two together and you can imagine a scenario where TV stations target their video content based on what other TV shows people have tweeted about, and then Twitter gets to monetise it. Meta.

Home And Dry?

Last week also saw Facebook Home hit the streets. It’s since seen 500,000 downloads which is impressive, but not a patch on Instagram which saw ten times as many downloads in the same amount of time after launching on Android.

It’s early days yet, and, to be honest, in some ways it’s hard to understand exactly what Facebook Home does for people. Perhaps the fact that one of the main features of Home, Chat Heads, is now part of the iPhone app, will help to really kickstart Facebook’s mobile landgrab. At least that would mean they wouldn’t have to rely on this ad doing the job.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Race To The Bottom

Finally, and a lot more seriously, the web showed its darker side in the aftermath of a tragedy in Boston. reddit, which likes to call itself the front page of the internet, decided to try and capture the bombers. And failed.

Which would be fine, if it’s misguided attempts to play Sherlock didn’t result in plenty of innocent people being named as terrorists. It was, to repeat one memorable turn of phrase, like a racist Where’s Wally. To be sure plenty of people have pointed out that ‘traditional media’ is hardly blame free, and they’re right. But reddit has history, and it’s not as pretty as its cheer-leaders would like to claim.  

Last week I wrote about how I’m increasingly finding that the word community is being used in ways that I find annoying, if not downright offensive. As if to prove this point, over the weekend a number of ‘community spokespeople’ managed to work themselves into a frenzy because Google chose to honour Cesar Chavez, who spent his life trying to help the poor. Whereas, obviously, they should have commemorated the death of Christ by putting up pictures of mass-produced chocolate eggs.

Anyway.

Obviously though, community isn’t the most offensive word out there. No. That distinction belongs to another word entirely.

Yep, you guessed it.

Consumer.

As someone who works in marketing, I probably hear this word at least ten times a day. And I probably say it or type it almost as many times again. But it’s actually a horrible word, and one that we should all try to stop using, at least in its current usage where it’s used to describe the people who brands want to buy their products.

Firstly, consumer has incredibly passive overtones. It brings to mind a motionless slob, sat on a sofa being spoon-fed junk food & junk TV. A burger-inhaling drone gorging on Biggest Loser, immune to the irony inherent in the situation. Is this really who we want buying our products? Is this the sort of people we, as advertisers, agencies and publishers aspire to talk to?

Secondly, if there’s one thing that most of us should be able to agree on, its that one of the biggest problems facing the planet at the moment is that we are burning through the earth’s resources quicker than we can ever hope to replace them.We are, quite simply, consuming the planet that we rely on to survive. Which is why, I feel, that in a world where we need to move away from green-washing to actual effective action, we shouldn’t be spending so much of our time trying to get people to consume things.

So what, considering the fact that I work in advertising, which depends on people buying things, are the alternatives?

One is to treat people with respect and we can do this by changing the nature of our relationships with them, simply by changing the language. By thinking of them as consumers, it’s almost impossible not to dive to the lowest common denominator in order to find something that people will want to consume; this is particularly true for the media. But if we think of people as audiences, we change the dynamic and therefore the entire relationship.

You can see this in the attempts by news companies to move from free website to pay-walls and metred models, and their need to differentiate themselves from social news aggregators.

Whilst the digerati mock these efforts, they should, in fact, be lauded. Because people will consume crap if it’s free, they’re a little less likely to pay for it, which could have the effect of improving the quality of the content that surrounds us. Treating people as an audience, with the ability to decide to withhold their applause, is much more likely to result in truly great content than thinking of them as mindless consumers, content to lap up any old rehashed churnalism. Maybe it will even save us from a TL:DR world.

Secondly, we can start thinking of things to sell people other than actual products. This shift, from consumers to customers, means that companies will be forced to start to value what happens after a sale, as much as what goes before it. It means that it’s important that you spend as much time telling people what not to buy, as what to buy. Patagonioa did it with this ad.

Marks & Spencer and TK Maxx are doing it with these initaitives.

And whilst it’s not about the environment  Nike are writing the rule-book on this by moving from a company that ‘just’ sells trainers and track-suits to one that sells services and experiences. Not every brand can make a FUELBAND, but every brand should have something to offer its customers, other than the product that sits on the supermarket shelf.

Because, apart from the ethical connotations  if they don’t then they have nothing to differentiate themselves from own-brands and pile-them-high retailers and the only thing that will end up getting consumed is what’s left of their brands’ advantages.

A concerned individual just left this comment on one of my posts:

Should people would like to gain backlinks then they really should at the very least have the sense to write a themed and thorough reply. All comment spam will do is maybe negatively impact your backlinking efforts and creates worthless backlinks. The only way to be a success is to befriend other bloggers who have blogs of similar theme and hopefully generate genuine targeted traffic by leaving a well thought reply. Maybe others will read this prior to posting below me, Thank you.

I can’t decide whether or not to approve it.

But on a serious note, does this sort of thing occasionally get approved? I guess it must do, or people wouldn’t bother attempting it.

A fascinating insight into the ongoing proof that there truly is one born every minute (or at least that one sets up a blog every minute)

If you haven’t heard about the goings on at the dev conference Pycon, you’ve obviously been pretty divorced from the day to day buzz of the tech-goldfish bowl.

For those who have been spared the ins and outs of it, a relatively well known blogger posted a photo on Twitter of some men sitting behind her, who she felt were making sexist comments. One of them went on to lose their job, as did she, amongst a huge amount of abuse, excuses and recriminations.

But stepping back from the ugly details of the story, the thing that really got to me was the way that so many people were throwing around the ‘c’ word, a word that, increasingly, offends me.

Yep. Community.

In her initial post after uploading the photo Adria Richards said:

I publicly called out a group of guys at the PyCon conference who were not being respectful to the community.

What I would like to know is who is this community she speaks of, and who elected her its spokesperson? When did one person get to decide what is or isn’t respectful, without holding an election first?

Margaret Thatcher famously said:

…there is no such thing as society

I’m no fan of Maggie’s, and certainly don’t agree with her sentiment. But what I also don’t agree with is this seeming trend whereby the loudest and most opinionated amongst us decide that they speak for some ill-formed and hard to define ‘community’ and then start to make comments on its behalf.

Whether it’s the Muslim community, gay community or tech community, I generally find that the people making the pronouncements are exactly the sort of people I wouldn’t want speaking on my behalf if I fell into any of those loose groupings. And nor are they the sort of people we should be giving a mouthpiece to, in the form of newspapers or TV & radio stations desperate to find spokespeople.

Before anyone thinks this is some sort of racist or sexist rant against Ms Richards I should point out that the adverse reaction to her highlighted exactly the same issues.

The fact that an anonymous idiot with access to some coding skills was able to get her fired by bringing down her employer’s website, again under the banner of expressing the community’s displeasure, shows just why we shouldn’t allow our views to be expressed for us without our approval. That one of the co-founders of reddit, a place which is almost synonymous with unelected mobs abusing women, all in the name of the community’s right to free expression, got annoyed at how many people started abusing Richards, is almost painfully ironic.

Because it goes to show that if you start to allow people to claim that they represent a community that doesn’t really exist, and that you probably wouldn’t want to belong to if it did, then you can’t really be surprised if they start doing things that you don’t like.

Oh, and if nothing else, hopefully this post will go to show that it is possible to write about this without reprinting the photo that caused all the trouble in the first place. Every site or blog that republished it above a posts all but begging people to think of the children, should be ashamed of themselves.