A Nice Automated Letter from Netflix

It is so infrequent that automated communications are nice that I enjoy celebrating every instance. I had put my Netflix account on hold last month, but mailed back what turned out to be an empty envelope. I assumed they had already charged me the $14 for the missing DVD -- how many companies would've done just that? -- but instead I get this reminder from a friendly robot.

Y Combinator Ad Innovation Conference: What Stuck

As part of Hill's Beacon initiative, I traveled to the Y Combinator's Ad Innovation Conference earlier this week to watch some 20 YC-funded start-ups present their technologies to a roomful of ad people. AdExchanger already has a nice write-up that explains what each company does, so that's not what I am going to do here. Instead, I will go through my notes trying to answer the question Paul Graham, the YC co-founder (pictured above with the glass), asked after the event: "So, what stuck?"

Here's what stuck.

Journalism's Primary Duty Is To Its Readers, Not Advertisers

"Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula "morally abhorrent" and also "economically self-defeating." That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication's primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue."

Time, "How To Save Your Newspaper", 2009 

I keep thinking about this quote but forgetting where I first saw it, so I'm parking it here. It's a good thought; probably applies to a lot of web and mobile apps, too.

Will Daily Deals Turn Newspapers Around?

"Groupon is Hastening the Demise of the Newspaper Industry," wrote a daily deals trade pub in April.

It could be the other way around.

The technological barriers to the deals space are pretty low;  Shoutback and Nimble Commerce  and many other companies are offering consulting and white-label systems to power deal mechanisms. And newspapers have other things many other Groupon clones don't -- large local audiences that are still used to turning to newspapers for coupons,  and a sales force with established local relationships.

The Boston Globe is offering its own Boston Deals (promoted on the home page, no less) after trying a partnership with BuyWithMe last year (and SCVNGR, also last year) as it moves to separate its online content from a potentially more lucrative e-commerce business.  Boston Phoenix offers deals,  Star Tribune in the Twin Cities offers STeals.

It's interesting how newspapers today struggle to make money on content -- putting up paywalls, repackaging it into single-device apps -- instead of going for an easier buck.   It seems like the newspapers should be able do a lot with the two things they already have -- local audiences and local sales relationships.  They could  do daily deals, for example, like The Globe, Phoenix and Star Tribune. Or they could aggregate local deals from Groupon and its numerous clones, Yipit-style. (Maybe they could also print some of these deals in Sunday circulars, for fun.)  Or maybe they could try getting some of the classifieds back from Craigslist -- has any newspaper really tried?

But even content -- what if they took their massive and rich content they have accumulated and repackaged it for a different, non-news market?  For almost everything a large newspaper touches there's a start-up that is likely doing for more money.  School ratings in the Globe? There's School Digger and Great Schools. "Hyper-local news"?  Neighborhood Scout.

A lot of tech start-ups are going to great lengths to produce content to attract people to sell their services to. With newspapers, it almost feels like they half-heartedly bolt on random third-party services (job search by Monster, auto listings by cars.com)  to attract people to read content off which the newspapers then struggle to make money.

It's easy to be an armchair strategist so I'll shut up, but I like newspapers and hope that maybe the Globe's and other publications' experiments with daily deals will mark the beginning of things turning around for them.

Movie Spectrograms

Every frame of Kill Bill vol.1 compressed into a spectrogram-like "barcode".  This and a lot of other movies on MovieBarcode Tumblr.

Kinect To Power TV Ads, Billboards

A Microsoft guy explains how Kinect and Nuads will add gestural and voice goodness to TV ads served through Xbox.

Would one have to be standing up for this? Are people's living spaces spacious enough to accomodate Kinect?   And would anyone care?

Kinect, though, would be a nice cheap addition for digital signage in public spaces, illustrated by this hack and this. Some ad shops are already experimenting. Wouldn't be fun to customize a billboard's message based on the onlooker's body type and gender?

One other thing Kinect would be awesome for is monitoring people's general usage of TV and other media in the device's vicinity by combining sound detection and recognition with body position identification, answering the "what's on?" and "is anyone watching it?" questions. It's such an awesome idea that I'm actually keeping my Kinect behind the TV and facing the wall when it's not in use, in case the idea has already occurred to someone else.

Looks like Microsoft has tested a Nuads-like execution with Chevy Volt last fall with the car placed into the Kinect-enabled Joy Ride.

SoftKinetic has developed and been using its own hardware to power up signage way before Kinect.

AdShip Adds Ads to eBay Purchases

Here's a way for eBay sellers to earn an extra buck by adding ads to their shipment paperwork and email confirmations: AdShip "dynamically inserts complementary advertisements on shippers' post-sale, customer-facing print and digital order fulfillment touch points."  Like this.

Did you know that eBay has its own app store?

YouTube Identifies Soundtracks, Creates Auto Playlists?

I was watching this mega-awesome video and noticed that YouTube identified the artist on the soundtrack (Hybrid) and linked the artist's name to a separate page containing more artist details including other tracks, a playlist button, upcoming events, and an info blurb.There's also an affiliate "Buy" link placeholder under the artist's name, but it was left empty. This seems to be a part of YouTube's Content ID program, but I haven't it in this type of action before.

Bonus track: one hacker explores how Content ID works.

CreditLoan.com Cashes In On Rapture

Love how CreditLoan.com jumped on the Twitter rapture train by paying to for the sponsored tweet in the #endoftheworldconfessions top trending topic. 150 retweets as of this post.

Casual Mobile Advergames - For Cats!

Puss In Boots, boot up your tablet - Friskies has released not one but three Games for Cats advergames playable in any tablet browser thanks to the magic of HTML5/CSS3. The games don't scale down to the phone screen size, though, so smaller cats are out of luck. The games are Cat Fishing,   Tasty Treasures Hunt, and Party Mix-Up. Cats like.

Now waiting for a study on the advergames's effect on feline brand recognition.