April 23, 2001
Business Week: A Penny-Ante Business Worth Billions.
The major roadblock for micropayments is that people don't like them. Simply put, they're a pain. If something costs so little, such as a song that goes for 50 cents, is it really worth your time and effort to pay for it? Clay Shirky argues that micropayments send conflicting signals to consumers.
NY Times: Record Labels Struggle With Napster Alternatives.
The announcements are about as far as the record companies have gone. The follow-up remarks betray the labels' lack of clarity about how to master new technology in a way that balances their business needs with the expectations of music consumers...
Business Week: Turning Surfers into Subscribers.
But most of these subscription initiatives are doomed to failure. "Ultimately, people are willing to pay for content only if it makes them money, saves them money, or it ties into their career or some other passionate, personal interest," says Rich Gordon, a professor at Northwestern University...
ZDNN: Start-up adds locks to media files.
In SigningStation's copy-protection method, which it calls Cryptocast, a music company would encode each digital-music file for a given user with his or her public key. The user's private key would be permanently stored in a "dongle..."
Industry Standard: CNBC.com to Merge With MSN MoneyCentral.
Its new approach stems from a hard lesson that NBC execs learned in the NBCi debacle: Stick with what you know. For NBC, that means providing content and doing the marketing. From now on, NBC officials say, they will partner with technology firms when it comes to the Web.
The Register: SDMI cracks revealed.
Felten declined to go through with the SDMI challenge because the terms of the click-through agreement participants were forced to accept would have prevented his team from publishing their results. So he withdrew, but continued the research independently, much to SDMI's embarrassment.
News.Com: Perlman's Rearden Steel raises $67 million.
But sources close to the company said it was devising a television set-top box that will receive and record a wide array of digital programming, allowing consumers to pause live programs and interact with televised content.
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