Books, Music etc.

Digital books, Digital Music - I wonder if the traditional model of going to library or Barnes and Nobles is still going to be there in 5 years from now. With Sony Reader, and Kindle making waves, and the hardware cost is bound to come down in couple of years - everyone will just own one of these devices and access books from home. The libraries are going to get involved, so will be the publishers, and everyone will have to migrate to one platform. Open source for making content available on any hardware will be of great benefit to the consumers.

Sony seems to have an open software policy, where the content can be in any XML format - thus they are betting to make money on hardware.
Amazon's kindle - Both hardware and software.

Well, I think of iTune, Apple, Spotify and Apple contained ecosystem.

Interesting, ain't it?

Virtual currency

Very recently, I came across two very interesting posts/revenue models that intrigued me. First is Mahalo's model and the second is myYearbook's profitability.

Well, Mahalo 2.0 of revenue sharing with people who are going to answer the questions, and to build How-To pages is nothing less than brilliant? Andy why do I say this? - Jason C. now does not have to worry about updating the pages. The owner of the page is motivated(both monetarily and recognition) to keep the relevant information up to date. You can earn Mahalo dollars and spend on the site. I think the latest I heard was that you get 75c on a dollar. More information on this model is here:

Mahalo 2.0 is kicking ass, Mahalo: CNET: Wikipedia plus Money

The second site's profitability is a bit more intriguing. According to Patricio Robles of econsultancy, myYearBook a second-tier social networking site is making money by subscription and by virtual goods business. We have already seen the celebrities, who have started whoring themselves on the facebook as virtual gifts. This also reminds me of the baseball fantasy cards we used to trade when we were kids and paid for them. Even in the gaming industry people are spending money on virtual goods/characters. Perhaps, the buy/sell of virtual products with the help of virtual currency will be bigger than what we imagine right now.

May be someone can come up with one virtual currency that can be used to buy books/softwares/virtual goods from all over the net.

Nichepapers

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. recently announced that they will be charging for online content. Much has been said about how the monetization of news content is not possible as there are plenty of websites which will provide users the same information. One of the blogs at HBR had an excellent strategy on how to monetize the traditional newspaper. I will try to find a link to that blog. If News Corp. is the only site that will go ahead and charge users for accessing their online content, it is going to be a big failure - considering Myspace isn't doing well, and if Newscorp takes further hit in their profits, I am not sure where Rupert Murdoch is going to stand in future.

It is going to be interesting to see how newspapers evolve in the next couple of years. Newspaper is a batch processing job whereas www is full of real time news. With twitter and facebook, people don't have to wait till the next day to read the news. So, if there is a monetization model present, it shouldn't be of delivering of news but perhaps a some sort of discussion/topic that relates to the news and presents alternative viewpoints. A news in itself isn't going to add much value anymore. This is where Nichepapers are going to come in place. Sites like Techcrunch, Techmeme, Huffington Posts have done exceedingly well, and will continue to do so. They provide a domain specific news and have captured their niche audience who want to learn about their specific content.

NewsCorp: NWSA, Market Cap: 29.9B.