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Last October this blog noted that Google was preparing to circumnavigate the normal IPO process by going straight to market. The announcement of an auction today is the next step in that story. Should be fascinating to see how Wall Street reacts.
By shirking the institutions (partly) and going straight to the people, Google are showing they understand the concept of the new powerful digital consumer. And that in this new era it's actions that count , not words.
Donna Karan has opened up her own film company and started making web films showing heroic females in heroic situations wearing glamourous, DK styling.
Modern marketing genius.
http://www.dkny.com/control/story
Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Sun's Scott McNealy have become the best of friends recently. Which is strange because until recently Scott referred to Steve and his co-director Bill, as "Ballmer and Butt-Head" and their company as the, "evil empire".
However, Scott now seems to have been left with no choice but to join the Dark Side in the face of their common enemy : Linux. Gathering around the fact that they both believe in "intellectual property" or "massive licensing deals" the new golf buddies are directing their monolithic armies against those "communistic" open-sourcers.
This is even stranger as it wasn't that long ago that McNealy, presumably seeking to prove how communistic he was, arrived on a stage dressed as a penguin, the Linux logo.
The Digital Consumer strikes again!
'Something really serious is afoot: the net has once again demonstrated its capacity to unleash disruptive innovation on a complacent establishment.'John Naughton, The Observer
The federal Court of Canada last week ruled that music fans who download music via peer-ro-peer networks are not breaking local copyright law and the Harvard Business School released research contradicting the claim's of the record industry about the effects of downloading on sales.
However, the industry refuses to acknowledge the powerful digital consumers who continue to reshape the market for recorded music and the fact that their market industry has changed for good.
The International Federation of Photonographic Industries and the (IFPI) and its UK sister the BPI continue to alienate its customers by launching law suits against offenders.
But what is amazing is the numbers involved. The IFPI is suing 247 fans in Canada, Denmark, Germany and Italy. Is this really any deterrent to a community that probably numbers 8million in the UK alone ?
The modern marketeers are preveiling in the shape of OD2, iTunes and P2P United but it is still amazing to see such a blinkered approach.
Jay Rosen, the chairman of the journalism department at New York University and a blogger himself (pressthink.org), said
"The fragmentation of news online is part of a larger trend of moving editorial power into the hands of the audience. The old system was, 'Here's our news; take it or leave it'. Now, sovereignty over the story is shifting.""Services that allow readers to have more control over their information diet can actually give them a greater understanding of topics they choose to follow in depth - sports teams, for example. Sure, they're covered extensively, but compared to what some people want to know, it's a trifle," he said.
Mr. Denton said Kinja users would be able to decide whether to make their customized digests public and that the best digests would be promoted at the site, making the users "part of the editorial team."
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