As we approach April, my heart can't help but flutter in anticipation of hree shows that will finally start airing after such a long break without any ground breaking shows.

Macross Frontier
The first show is Macross Frontier, a brand new anime series that picks up the on story of Macross. For those of you need a reminder Macross, also called Robotech when it aired in Singapore over 2 decades ago, is the story of the first Human-Zentraedi war that was eventually stopped by the love triangle trio of Rick Hunter, Lisa Hayes and the singing of Lynn Minmei. Macross Frontier carries the story forward several centuries, to an age where the surviving Humans and Zentraedi work together to colonize the galaxy via huge colony ships.

To whet your appetite, here's a promo music video for Macross Frontier:

By the way if you have not heard the rumor, Toby Maguire of Spiderman fame has purchased the rights to create a live action Robotech movie. So who knows? In a few years there might actually be a Hollywood version of Robotech.

House
That's right, one of my current favorite characters on television, Gregory House is back from the Writer's Strike with 6 new episodes starting at the end of April.

I know many people who watch the show has a love-hate relation with Gregory House. For me, I just feel that he is like me in quite a few ways that watching the show, watcing House is almost like watching a filtered mirror of myself. I understand how House thinks, and unlike most people I do not see him as an egotistical, selfish person. Instead behind the facade most people cannot see past, I see a deeply caring, loving soul who has been cut too many times but still continues to care and love.

Battlestar Galactica
The show that I have really truly been aching for is the fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica. After the long one year haitus, the uncertainty of the Writer's Guild strike, tele-movie Razor that only raised more questions than it answered, it is good to finally have the show back on television.

I once again reiterate my prediction that Ellen Tigh is the final cylon!

I had a dream this morning. I can't remember the details now, but I do remember who I dreamed of. I guess I could call her my childhood love. She was someone I saw on television when I was just a small boy. Somehow, I simply fell in love with the first time I saw those big round eyes of hears. I didn't even know her name, neither could I remember her character's name. All I know is that I have this infatuation over her.

During my days in the Polytechnic, I met a girl who looked remarkably similar to her. It was that infatuation that spurred me to approach this girl, and got to know her if only casually. Her name is Chelsea, at least thats what I think it is. Time has blurred my memory. Anyway, I never saw her again after her graduation. Since them, I have never thought about Laurie nor the young actress again until I had this dream today.

The only clue I have is the show's name, "The Wonder Years". Thanks to the miracle of the today's Internet, I now know she played the character of Gwendolyn Cooper. Her real name, is Danica Mae McKellar, born in January 1975 just a shy three months after my own birthday, and yes she is as lovely as the first time I saw her on television nearly 2 decades ago. She is still an actress today, but unfortunately I have never seen any of them since these shows aren't available in Singapore. However I truly am surprised that she was in one of my favorite shows, The West Wing. How could I have missed that, I have no idea.

What is more surreal for me, is that Miss McKellar has a degree in Mathematics, have published scientific papers as an undergraduate student and recently wrote a book encouraging women to take up Mathematics. Beauty, brains and most of all a Heart. That is the perfect combination and it makes me feel as if I could fall in love with her all over again like I did so many years ago. Alas she is all the way on the other side of the globe and busy with her Hollywood career! Oh well, I guess I just have to look for someone closer to home. :)

Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about digital information, the music and movie industry and their tussles with digital music/movies and P2P networks.

What I have been trying to think of is a win-win solution for all parties involved. That is, to come up with a digital information distribution business model that enable the music and movie industry to earn a good profit, to ensure producers such as musicians, actors, directors, writers all get a fair share of their cut and of course, that we as consumers still continue to get what we want (high quality music) at what we believe is a fair price. The result, is this series of articles examining what's wrong with the current model and what needs to change to create a robust entertainment market.

Today, we focus specifically on why the Internet marketplace is so different from a normal brick and mortar market place that the entertainment industry is used to.

One Cent Storage, Reproduction and Distribution

As I have mentioned in the first article, the main difference between a typical brick and mortar Economics and Internet Economics is that digital storage, digital reproduction (or copying) and digital distribution are so cheap that its total cost is still less 1 cent per product sold. This is very different from real world storage and distribution where materials, manpower, warehouses, ships, trucks and store space all costs a significant amount money.

In fact when producing a digital product, there are only three substantial financial costs involved:

1. The one time cost of creating the first copy of the digital product.
2. The cost of marketing and advertising.
3. The cost of per-unit-sold royalties, licenses and residuals.
   

The first two costs are largely fixed and from a basic economic perspective, would mainly influence when a product breaks even. The third cost is going to be the bane of companies trying to enter the Internet with digital products as all other per-unit costs such as manufacturing, distribution costs drop to zero, these per-unit royalties to third parties become major factors in the final cost of these digital products. I believe the television and movie industries and to a lesser extent the music industry suffers from cumbersome per-unit costs that prevent them from selling their digital products at low prices.

Unfortunately, this is something the entertainment industry will have to solve through legal re-negotiations. However, once it is done the entertainment industry will be able to leverage the tremendous economies of scale advantages that the Internet brings.

The Long Tail
One of the well documented effects of having near-zero cost storage, reproduction and distribution is popularly called the Long Tail effect. The idea is that an "Internet Store" is able to stock up several orders of magnitude more songs/videos/movies than any brick and mortar stores can ever imagine stocking up. For example, if the operating cost of a HMV superstore allows it to stock 10,000 unique titles, then an Internet Store with the same operating cost can probably stock several million unique titles. The impact of having such a huge stockpile of music and video is that only half their revenue comes from Blockbuster Movies and Billboard Music. From another perspective, they effectively doubled their revenue by selling non-Blockbuster/Billboard products.

If you are really interested in how businesses can leverage the Internet or just how the world works, I seriously recommend reading the book "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More" by Chris Anderson, current Wired magazine's editor-in-chief. The book is written for the layperson and reiterates its main points through different viewpoints that you get a pretty good understanding of why the long tail effect is so critical to Internet businesses.

The entertainment industry in particular, needs to get away from thinking solely about Blockbuster Movies and Billboard Songs and focus on serving up on the Internet everything they have produced in the past century. The entertainment industry should aos start promoting themselves with themes such as "The Place for Music" or "Where Movies Live". The movie industry, for example, can adopt genre specific promos such as Romantic Comedy/Sci-fi Month. In fact, this is exactly what Amazon.com has been doing for the past decade.

Most importantly, the entertainment industry must realize that they have always been a long tailed business. There is still a significant audience who still watch "Gone With The Wind" even though it was produced nearly 70 years ago. Even today, I frequently see posts made by teenagers who have just discovered Star Trek for the first time and are hungry for more. There are many more "long burning" products that continue to sell years and even decades after their initial release. The entertainment industry has largely neglected these "long burn" products over "flash burn" products. For the first time ever, the Internet Store offers an opportunity to stock both types of products without worrying about the cost of retail space.

In the next article, I will cover the entertainment industry's misteps with digital rights management and detail a digital copyright management scheme that both consumers and the industry can accept.

Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about digital information, the music and movie industry and their tussles with digital music/movies and P2P networks.

What I have been trying to think of is a win-win solution for all parties involved. That is, to come up with a digital information distribution business model that enable the music and movie industry to earn a good profit, to ensure producers such as musicians, actors, directors, writers all get a fair share of their cut and of course, that we as consumers still continue to get what we want (high quality music) at what we believe is a fair price. The result, is this series of articles examining what's wrong with the current model and what needs to change to create a robust entertainment market.

The Entertainment Industry As It Is Today, Is Flawed
I do not need to repeat what just about every blog and news article is saying, that the entertainment industry's current view of their own industry is seriously flawed. For example, the four major music distribution companies, Sony BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner, think they are selling music but actually they are only selling a specific type of music that I call "Billboard Music". Likewise the movie industry is currently mostly only interested in selling "Blockbuster Movies".

The entertainment industry cannot be blamed for selling Billboard Music and Blockbuster Movies because they are only following the brick and mortar Economics: Sell as many of the most popular products. It is a good model that has worked for decades, so why change to something new? One reason is that the assumptions made by Economics about brick and mortar businesses changed when a company moves to the Internet.

This change in Economics is somewhat similar to the situation in the early 1910s when Einstein discovered the Theory of Relativity. Relativity did not prove that Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is wrong. Newtonian gravity continues to be accurate on Earth even today. In fact, the only difference is that Newton assumed the force of gravity is constant throughout the universe whereas Einstein showed that the force of gravity is different at different locations in the universe. The result is that as long as we stay on Earth, both Newton as well as Einstein's formulas work equally well. When we move into space, Einstein's relativity formulas are much more accurate than Newton's.

The entertainment industry faces the same issue today. The laws of brick and mortar Economics would continue to work so long as the entertainment industry stays in the brick and mortar world. If the entertainment industry decides to move (and has to move) into the much larger universe of cyberspace, then it better be using the laws of Internet Economics and not the laws of brick and mortar Economics.

Like Newton's Laws, the brick and mortar laws of Economics makes the assumption that every resource, every step, every process used to bring a product to market costs money. It takes money to buy raw materials, hire people, store stuff, transport stuff, buy machinery. Yet strangely in the laws of Internet Economics, there are certain resources and certain processes that are so cheap that they are essentially do not even cost a cent per product sold. This might seem like a small difference between brick and mortar Economics and Internet Economics, but as we will see in the next article, the implications are huge.

According to this Channel NewsAsia report, SingTel has "more or less sealed the deal" with Apple to be the sole distributor if the hotly desired phone in Singapore. Given that SingTel has always been the leader in business oriented mobile phones and its leadership position in telecommunications in Singapore, it is not much of a surprise that Apple would choose to tie up with the company.

The report also hints that the rumored September 2008 launch date might also coincide with the launch of a 3G version of the iPhone. It certainly coincide well with many analyst predictions for a mid-2008 3G iPhone debut.

Meanwhile, I noticed today that M1 has started an aggressive new campaign to grab more subscribers before iPhone fever hits our tiny island. I anticipate StarHub to begin their campaign soon.

During January's MacWorld 2008 Keynote speech, Steve Jobs introduced the Time Capsule product that allow Leopard users to backup their data wirelessly to a Time Capsule. I pointed out at that time that the Time Capsule:

1. Was nothing more than an Airport Extreme Base Station with a built in server-grade Hard Disk.


2. Was way too expensive as a product.


3. That Apple should have just enabled wireless backup on the Airport Extreme instead of introducing the Time Capsule

Well lo and behold with this week's Airport Extreme update, Apple has done exactly what I said in point 3. The Airport Extreme can now wirelessly backup to any attached USB drive via Time Machine. This update exactly duplicates what the Time Capsule is doing at a much, much cheaper price point.

Way to go Apple, I pity all the early adopters who went to buy the expensive Time Capsule when they could have waited two months and buy an Airport Extreme and USB drive for the exact same functionality at half the Time Capsule price.

Today I stumbled upon a video that presents a very interesting viewpoint on piracy. It basically says, if you're a corporation who is suffering from piracy issues, then there is something wrong with your business and your business model. I know, it sounds wierd when I present it like that, but if you watch the video it actually makes sense. So without further ado, here is the video of The Medici Summit on March 3, 2008 on the topic "The Pirate's Dilemma".

If you're interested in knowing more, read Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism.

Until today, I never realized that for the past 2 years, I have been dilligently reading daily news updates from 22 different sites. These sites include major news networks such as BBC, Reuters, Channel News Asia for local news and for technology news, I follow Slashdot and Digg. I also follow news related to Apple, just because it is usually interesting and fun to read. For that, I read from MacRumors, AppleInsider as well as news released by Apple itself. Besides all of these, I also follow a few blogs, these are usually related to machine learning or natural language processing.

So how have I been able to read from so many disparate sites on a daily basis? To be honest, it is not an easy process. Just about every news website as well as blogs have an RSS news feed these days. I used Yahoo Pipes! to combine and sort all of these news feeds into a smaller number of news feeds, each focusing on a specific topic such as "Tech News", "Singapore News" and "Apple News". Finally, I use a FireFox extension called Sage that presents the piped news in a nice format on my web browser. So yes this is how I have been reading news everyday for the past 2+ years, and yes I know I am geeky.

Well this is no longer the case! Today, I stumbled upon a new Google product called Google Reader that handles everything for me so I don't have to jump through all the hoops ever again.


All I need to do is read the news. :)

This piece of news spread like lightning across the internet. Gary Gygax, father of the role playing game, died today at the age of 69.

While I did dabble in Dungeons and Dragons as well as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons when I was in Secondary School, it never became a great love because it required huge investments in time and money. However, the name Gary Gygax was already legendary in the 1980s. I have a few friends who were heavily into table-top RPGs and Gygax's name was always whispered with a tone of reverence. And most certainly, what I got out of those few role playing sessions was a serious love affair with the fantasy medieval genre.

Since the retro 80s, I have devoured dozens of fantasy literature, including the many books of David and Leigh Eddings, the Wheel of Time books by Robert Jordan and the entire Midkemia and Tsuranni storyline by Raymond E. Feist. Even my interest in MMOs came about because it was a role playing game. Marlyene saw how EverQuest held my attention when she was playing it and gave me a copy for my birthday so many years ago. For sure, that love of the MMORPG genre that continues to this day.

So it is with great sadness as I see all these legendary people die of old age one after another in the past few years. So here is a quick tribute to a few other great people who have recently left us.

Keith Parkinson (October 22, 1958 - October 26, 2005), fantasy artist and illustrator for so many TSR products, DragonLance and Forgotten Realms books, Magic: The Gathering cards and MMO cover illustrations for EverQuest and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. By the way, if you are really interested in his works, Kingsgate: The Art of Keith Parkinson is the book to get.

Leigh Eddings (?? - Feburary 28, 2007), silent co-author with her husband David Eddings, has her words woven in parts of The Belgariad and The Malloreon series. She is officially recognized as co-author with Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress, both of which are still my favorite books.

Robert Jordan (October 17, 1948 – September 16, 2007), probably best known as the author of the epic 12 books long Wheel of Time series and a series of Conan The Barbarian books. I hope the final book, A Memory of Light, would be a fitting tribute to the man.