Geek Biz Report, week ending 23 May 2010
Lead Story: Japan Recovers. W00T!
[a new spring, after a near-20-year-long winter. Image Credit, non-commercial CC license]
Deflation is still an issue, as consumer prices fall in Japan and the effects of global commerce continue to give headaches to those who must traffic on such wild waters, but growth is growth — and if the sum creative output of Japan from 1990 on is what they as a nation managed in a slump, well, maybe suffering is good for art but one also hopes that good times for Japan means good times for Japanese Consumers and good times for Japanese Manga and Anime; and as one of the bottom-feeders who only get to dine of the mere scraps of Japanese Content that manage to filter down through mulitple layers of muck before it is available to my (American) market, I look forward to more and tastier tidbits.
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I’ll skip my first response to the news (though it’s still up, two posts below this one) and instead link to my more reasoned analysis
► Navarre (NASDAQ:NAVR) owns Funimation, anime localizer of repute and the reason NAVR garnered a place on the RBGSX, but Navarre is quite a bit more than just a content company; it’s one of those ‘consumer & lifestyle brand’ companies (like Conglom-O in Rocko’s Modern Life) so occasionally there’s an announcement like this:
Navarre Corporation Announces Encore’s Acquisition of Punch! Software
…which has nothing to do with anime or Funimation, but thank several gods that at least one anime DVD house has a successful corporate parent that isn’t betting it all on otaku.
► Disney [pre-Marvel] tries a type of comics; fails. (in related news, [as linked] Disney as a corporation has it’s own shudder-inducing fan sites.)
► Best Buy expands to UK. Hey, you know who else tried that? Borders.
While on the topic: Best Buy also making forays into streaming video
Good Luck. …but nothing says desperation (or perhaps, “oo, oo, me too!” -ism) like showing up late to the party in last years trendy kit.
► Three Hundred Sixty Five. – submitted without further comment.
► Wired.com has a roundup of available tablets, kinda like the iPad though all are lacking, one way or another similar to their previous roundup of e-readers
► You know all that licensed crap? No, not the cool lunchboxes or Japanese Figma (or manga and anime, which are also ‘licensed’ but in a different sense) but the crap: trinkets, tchotchkes, t-shirts, jigsaw puzzles, bad board games, pens, journals, vibrators, bondage wear, and other apparel — you know, the crap? Crap has it’s own expo
► Throw Down: Apple says search is dead, Apps the future – so
[Geek Biz Editorial]
Yes, Apple is right. Apps are the future, in that tailored, curated experiences seem to be all the general public wants, so long as all the ‘general public’ wants is a set of predefined experiences anticipated for them in advance by Big Brother Apple or whichever gate-keeper we choose for ourselves.
Weather, Scores, Headlines, Funny?
Sure, queue it up.
But every now and then we need something we don’t even know the name of yet. Or we want it all, without filters. Or we just want to double-check your ass. We want to drink from the firehose, even if initially we don’t know what to make of all that info (right away) and our underwear gets wet.
Apps are Apps, the Internet is the Internet, and it’s best not to confuse the two.
And the Internet is literally [literally and without irony literally everything] so:
There are four sliding scales: User Experience, Information, Accessibility, and Veracity.
The best information means nothing if we can’t find it. The most accessible information means nothing if it’s not true. A slick UI is criminal if it only points to incorrect info, and even when it’s easy to find verifiable, comprehensive, and close to exhaustive data on just about any topic — the system is still broken
My point would be that the internet, and the iPad, are still human systems and subject to human error, whether that be an open honest system that is vulnerable to concerted attacks, or the hubris of a Steve Jobs who will claim to know every last thing we really want to do with a computer, and so closes out options of what we might or could do with the hardware.
Neither side of this debate is right. But, given an option, I’ll take a Mad Max Thunderdome of competing ideas, some of which try to kill me but all of which are available, over a Zardoz artificially-created walled garden, which seems perfect but piggybacks (and is parasitic upon) the wild internets just beyond the protective bubble.
[Do I have to provide links? One hopes you get the pop-culture references, or can wiki them.]
[/editorial]
► So, my notes on this next link (past “Dear Matt: re-read and comment on this when you are sober.”) were “First Impression: Someone Needs to Synthesize This with McCloud and Start Preaching the Effin’ WORD.”
Since there wasn’t time for sober reflection this week, I’ll let my first impression stand.
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Retailer News:
► Borders gets $25 mil, new chairman. I’ll also note the current [interim] CEO of Borders, Mike Edwards, really wants the job. Since he was the VP of Merchandise prior to the temp-stint at the top — and as such, is a bookseller — I hope they give the opportunity to him. It takes a brave person to stand on top of a huge steaming pile that was someone else’s fault and say, “No, I really like it here; please, give me the job, give me a chance to make this better” [that was a paraphrase and putting words I’m not sure he ever said into Edwards’s mouth. That, and He Must Be Nuts but more power to ‘im]
► Bamm reports Q1 earnings – highlights: sales down but company still makes money. (and really, that’s all we need to know)
And almost not-news but everyone is going to make a fuss about it:
► Barnes & Noble to offer digital self publishing
[yeah, and I suppose this is editorial too, but it feels more like common sense]
That is to say, if you have a book, and since the actual costs to bring most books into an ‘e-book’ format are minimal, if not semantic, and since B&N has this huge honking website anyway (to say nothing of the new e-book appliance they’re shoving down the throat of an almost-ready market) – Your hopes and tears and e-book-ready manuscript can be swept up by a major company with nothing but the promise of a database listing & a contractual agreement to give you ‘some’ of your profits.
Sure: Now folks can buy your e-book on nook or bn.com; but: you still have to sell it yourself. B&N is providing access, not support. This isn’t even a Faustian bargain, this is more like the book deal we’d offer to Sisyphus.
[once again, I’ll ask you to wiki any reference you didn’t get — classical, not sci-fi, but really: those are interchangeable (if not overlapping) fandoms]
this is actually B&Ns second foray into self publishing, though B&N only took a 49% stake in that company. B&N sold the entirety of the self-pub. business to their largest competitor and washed their hands of this mess years ago, until the new technology made it stupid-easy:
“Say, I’m looking for a broadcast platform but instead of facing the internet, which is bold, brash reality, I instead insist that I’m an Author and the message I intended to relate is Most Definitely A Book. No, not a blog, a book. I find it hard to believe my doc file is only 60 pages, you’re formatting it wrong; did you try a larger font size? Or a different font?”
more on self-pub — Cory Doctorow @ Publishers Weekly – first column (of five, so far) & the latest
[/editorial]
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Aggregate prices on the Rocket Bomber Geek Stock Index fell 31.37 points (3.22%) to 943.07. Again, this has nothing to do with the actual companies traded, it’s just the markets are fragile (between the euro-crisis and BP attempting to sell us the gulf shrimp & seafood plate , blackened, and dressed in oil.)
Charted: 21-week RBGSX Aggregate Price
[Went back for historical prices to 12/31/09; we’re slowly working up to first, a 26-week graph, and eventually a full year. After a year, presuming my attention span holds out, I’ll graph-and-post a rolling 52 week window of the RBGSX]
& the 25 stocks: CBS Corporation (NYSE:CBS), The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS), News Corporation (NASDAQ:NWSA), Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE), Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX), Viacom, Inc. (NYSE:VIA), Wiley John & Sons Inc. (NYSE:JW.A), The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (NYSE:MHP), Lagardere SCA (EPA:MMB), Pearson PLC (NYSE:PSO), Scholastic Corporation (NASDAQ:SCHL), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Books-A-Million, Inc. (NASDAQ:BAMM), Borders Group, Inc. (NYSE:BGP), Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS), Hastings Entertainment, Inc (NASDAQ:HAST), Indigo Books & Music Inc. (TSE:IDG), Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY), Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX), Navarre Corporation (NASDAQ:NAVR), Activision Blizzard, Inc. (NASDAQ:ATVI), Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS), GameStop Corp. (NYSE:GME), Nintendo Co., Ltd (OTC:NTDOY), and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)
Please note: nothing here is investment advice. full disclaimer
