Andrew Lark

Cuddle Class….

I love this idea from Air New Zealand… really clever… they are easily the best airline out there…

The national carrier yesterday unveiled the interiors for its new Boeing 777-300 aircraft, which includes the Skycouch, the first economy seating that allows the traveller to lie flat, or a couple to curl up… The arm rests between the three seats of the Skycouch fully retract and flaps come up to meet the seats in front to create a platform … The new economy seats come with small added comforts, such as a pillow that fits over the winged head rest, a port for your iPod, and a larger entertainment monitor.

Erick Is Right…

Erick’s points on communications are right on… if you are a communicator, ignore them at your peril. Having been one for many years, the hardest thing is knowing you rarely have all the information – and the easiest thing is acting like you never do.

PR is not supposed to be fiction and spin. At least not all the time. Occasionally the communications professionals at companies, particularly publicly traded companies, are supposed to actually tell the truth. And perhaps help journalists and bloggers with a story instead of sending them off on a fake trail.

The trick here is a “no comment” actually helps both the communicator and the journalist.

Dell On Board

Cool story on the preferred computer of any good sailor – A Dell Latitude XT2 XFR..

The Meter is Ticking

Nick Carr gets at much of the flawed thinking on the New York Times metering content. In essence, The Times are introducing a new product, at a new price point. Another way of thinking about it is they have attracted a monumentally large number of beta users and are now looking to convert those to paying customers. More from Nick…

Jarvis might want to spend some time reading about the fundamentals of pricing, particularly Hal Varian's classic work on the "versioning" of digital goods. Varian is a distinguished economist who teaches at Berkeley and is also now Google's chief economist. Here's a little of what he says about "versioning information goods," which is extremely pertinent to the Times's strategy as well as the news and media business in general:

One prominent feature of information goods is that they have large fixed costs of production, and small variable costs of reproduction. Cost-based pricing makes little sense in this context; value-based pricing is much more appropriate. Different consumers may have radically different values for a particular information good, so techniques for differential pricing become very important ... [One] particular aspect of differential pricing [is] known as quality discrimination or versioning ... The point of versioning is to get the consumers to sort themselves into different groups according to their willingness to pay. Consumers with high willingness to pay choose one version, while consumers with lower willingnesses to pay choose a different version. The producer chooses the versions so as to induce the consumers to “self select” into appropriate categories ...

[Consider the case] in which the seller knows something about the distribution of willingness to pay [WTP] in the population, but cannot identify the willingness to pay of a given consumer. In this case the seller cannot base its price on an exogenous observable characteristic such as membership in some group, but can base its price on an endogenous characteristic such as the quality of the choice the consumer purchases. The appropriate strategy for the seller in this situation is to choose two qualities and associated prices and offer them to the consumers. Each of the different consumer types will [select] one of the two quality/price pairs. The seller wants to choose the qualities and prices of the packages offered so as to maximize profit.

The intention is to get the consumers to self-select into the high- and low-WTP groups by setting price and quality appropriately. That is, the seller wants to choose price/quality packages so that the consumers with high WTP choose the high-price/high-quality package, and the consumers with low WTP choose the low-price/low-quality package.

Go Oracle

Jonathan posts a great note as Sun merges with Oracle. I was lucky enough to be a part of Sun for a number of years. He’s right, there are many remarkable people there. Oracle is going to be even more remarkable as a result.

The Inefficient Game...

For those of you that watch Football of the American kind, here's an interesting stat from the WSJ -- some have called the NFL "triumph of project management over sport", I call it "the triumph of marketing over sport". Here's why:

According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.

In other words, if you tally up everything that happens between the time the ball is snapped and the play is whistled dead by the officials, there's barely enough time to prepare a hard-boiled egg. In fact, the average telecast devotes 56% more time to showing replays.... the ratio of inaction to action is approximately 10 to 1.

The Participatory Era

Stowe flags a nice quote from John Hagel and Thomas Friedman that highlights the shift into the Participatory Era – a characteristic of which will be a move from “store” to “stream”.

John Hagel, the noted business writer and management consultant argues in his recently released “Shift Index” that we’re in the midst of “The Big Shift.” We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks — the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace — into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledge flows, which are constantly being renewed.

“Finding ways to connect with people and institutions possessing new knowledge becomes increasingly important,” says Hagel. “Since there are far more smart people outside any one organization than inside.” And in today’s flat world, you can now access them all. Therefore, the more your company or country can connect with relevant and diverse sources to create new knowledge, the more it will thrive. And if you don’t, others will.

And I agree with Stowe – a key determinant of business success will be the power of it’s network. I don’t think this will be defined in terms of, say, number of followers, but rather, degree of participation and contribution.

And So They Charge…

The much hyped decision to charge non-subscribers to the NYTimes for content is likely to set off a firestorm. I’m a subscriber so not impacted. But if you are used to surfing the times in any volume, you are going to hit a pay-to-go forward barrier.

While metering content is generally viewed as a negative, I don’t see it that way. Publishing is a business. If the economics of the current model don’t add-up, move to a different model.

I also don’t buy that it targets their “most loyal users”. Loyalty is earned on the basis of the business you are in – these folks are in the business of monetizing great content – the value equation must cut both ways for loyalty to be established. Their loyal users are by definition aren’t just those who visit, but also pay to visit. Paying for content isn’t a “burden” it is a requirement to supporting those who craft it for you. The thesis also assumes the most loyal users aren’t also paying subscribers – like me.

I would argue that it in fact targets those too lazy, cheap or disinterested in paying for content, but enjoying it enough to visit frequently. It also underscores the value of that content online relative to print. It is also a precursor to attaching value to content in a new world of tablets, eReaders and mobile devices. Something the FT has already done on the iPhone.

Food Rules

Love this… so right, and nicely put together… Thanks to Johnny for the pointer…

Dell Largest Server Provider to the Cloud

You can read more here…

Dell's Data Center Solutions unit, has only 20 customers, but would be the third largest supplier of x86 servers in the U.S. if it were split out from Dell, said Forrest Norrod, the unit's VP and general manager, in an interview. The only companies ahead it in shipping Intel or AMD servers would be HP and Dell itself.