Brendon J. Wilson

 by Brendon J. Wilson

Money For Somethin’?

I’m a huge fan of the Amazon Associates program, notwithstanding my previous concerns that it seems unfair that someone can make more money in referral fees by linking to Amazon books than their authors make in royalties. That concern aside, it’s still a marvelous system that, when combined with Amazon’s Web Services APIs, has yielded some very interesting applications. I’ve recently seen two excellent applications that appear to effectively leverage Amazon’s programs to create value-added functionality that benefits both the application users (in terms of functionality) and the application authors (in terms of referral fees).

The first example is Toru Yano’s iTunes Radio Lover. It’s a simple little application that “displays the iTunes’ current streaming title along with the cover art”. Oh, and you can of course click on the album cover image and go to Amazon to buy the CD. Naturally. It’s simple, but it works.

A much more sophisticated example is provided by MusicPlasma. MusicPlasma is a Flash application that allows a user to view a map of the relationships between bands. Enter a band name and the application shows a map of different bands that might interest you – presumably based off of Amazon’s own recommendations data. See something you’d like to buy? The current artist’s discography shows that album cover for the application and links to Amazon, embedding an Amazon Associates ID along the way to make sure the MusicPlasma creators make something out of the transaction.

From my own experience, I found the Amazon Associates program to be invaluable even without using the Web Services APIs. When I launched my book, I used Google Adwords to guide people to the book and an Amazon Associates ID to capture extra revenue. The Amazon referral fee more than covered the costs of the Google AdWord campaign. Though it may seem like the developers of these applications are making money for nothing, I’d argue these applications are finding unique and interesting niches to fill in order to drive viewership and capture referral revenues.

Though I originally couldn’t figure out why Jeff Bezos was hailed as a visionary – now it’s abundantly clear: he’s created a system that permits free innovation that supports Amazon’s ability to generate revenue. Like the developers who create applications built on top of the Amazon APIs and Associates program, all he has to do is sit back and let the system make money for itself. The only way this could be improved would be if developers building on top of Amazon’s programs could in turn enable others to re-use their applications and continue the process ad-infinitum. I’m not such if that would technically count as a digital pyramid-scheme, but with useful applications like this, who cares?

in Entertainment / Technology 1 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Doing Things Once

A number of years ago, I had the pleasure of working with Roy Philips at BC Tel Advanced Communications. At the time, BC Tel was heavily investing in fiber optic installations, and the Advanced Communications arm was pushing hard to sell “Ubiquity” – a high-end videoconferencing service – to leverage the fiber investment. At $15K a month, plus installation costs, Ubiquity was a hard sell in 1994. Roy, however, saw an interesting future for the technology, one which sadly has yet to come to fruition.

On numerous occasions, Roy and I discussed the process of university education. I was, as usual, quite disappointed with the methods used by professors to communicate with students. In many cases, university professors just weren’t very good teachers – nor, to be fair, was that their purpose. They were there to do research. Every so often, you’d have a brilliant professor, someone who not only really knew their stuff, but also knew how to make it stick to the inside of the skull of an undergraduate at 8:30 in the morning, despite the student’s half-inebriated state. Those star professors were few and far between – I often wish we could capture those professors, and make them available to everyone.

One-to-many broadcasting was a perfect solution. As Roy saw it, universities should collaborate to find the best professor for a subject, capture his lecture series on video, and make it generally available. Instead of attending lectures, students would watch the video and then attend a videoconference tutorial session with that professor. Thus, the “best” teacher could be made available to the masses, improving the overall quality of education.

Unfortunately, the form of education has changed very little, despite the widespread availability of high-bandwidth networks. In one shining example of thought leadership, MIT’s OpenCourseWare has made the notes from its courses available. In other areas, two MIT professors have released their thermal physics textbook online, completely free. These efforts, though worthy of praise, signal only the beginning of a movement to make education freely and easily available.

To be truly successful, such a movement requires educational content that is both freely available and freely subject to revision to encourage constant and rapid improvement (perhaps the lessons learned by the Wikipedia). It seems that it would in the best interest of everyone to produce and maintain such a repository to not only improve education, but reduce the cost of education as well. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t exactly think it appropriate for publishers to charge me over $100 for the new edition of a Calculus textbook, especially when the concepts hadn’t changed since their creation by Newton. Were these publishers really adding any value?

If free education content were created and unleashed, it could even provide some interesting opportunities for education tailored to the student. In an ideal world, content would consist of not only static text, but also interactive questions to test the student’s comprehension. How the student fared on the informal quizzing could be used to fine tune how information is presented to the student, adapting to the particular learning styles of the individual. As I’ve lamented before, there has got to be a better way to approach education than the rote learning we currently use.

All of these ideas are far in the future – for now, why don’t we try to eliminate the empires being built on public domain knowledge? Seriously, how much has first-year physics changed in the past hundred years? Very little – so why should a student pay $100 for that knowledge? It will be interesting to see MIT lead the way by demonstrating that we can be more productive as a society by doing things once by doing them right the first time.

in Technology 0 comments