I am back from Hawaii after traveling to the big island for the first time and I have to say the most surprising thing about it was how sparsely populated it was in comparison to Maui even. Oddly enough I would put it last on my list of the islands to visit and enjoy compared to Maui, Oahu, and Kauai.

Nonetheless, here are some of my favorite pictures:

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Having some temporary problems with Wordpress’s newest version 2.5 with managing posts, trying to figure out why, but my Hawaii return post is currently unavailable for publishing as an fyi.

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I will be on vacation starting today until next Saturday without a computer, so postings will be light or not at all until then.

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Baidu is quite well known in China as being the place to get free mp3s by just searching for songs at mp3.baidu.com and then downloading the song from the respective website. Now, this can be done still in Google with some advanced search commands (eg: filetype:mp3 aerosmith), but what could be done for Baidu specifically?

A search for “Linkin Park” (without quotes) elicits the following (click to expand):

However, if you know a few Chinese phrases–such as the word for song (歌), then the search suddenly changes. Change the phrase to “Linkin Park歌” (once again without quotes) and now you get the following (click to expand):

Click on “试听” and now you have the website showing up along with the ability to hear the song as well.

So much for trying to hide those songs to English speakers.

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Technological improvements are really amazing where we can start to mimic four-legged animals:

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The concept of intellectual property rights (IPR) did not develop at the same time nor happen overnight in the rest of world; on the contrary, it took decades for the culture to develop and be accepted worldwide.

The ideas of copyrights, patents, and trademarks first arrived in China in the late 1800s, yet wars, rebellions, and revolutions all squashed the ability for China to develop the protection for IPR. In fact, the stealing of a book was seen as an ‘elegant’ offense within China, a forgivable offense as the person is trying to acquire knowledge—something valued by society.

With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the removal of private property this reversed and prevented any trends towards the development of an IPR culture. Only until the 1980s with the PRC’s acceptance of a market-based economic system did the PRC begin to establish rules around IPR.

Even with a rapidly growing software industry over the past decade in China, China’s software industry is definitively smaller and far less profitable than it should be. With pirated software accounting for over ninety percent of installed computer software, the loss in profits has been overwhelming to the domestic software industry. As such, the some firms within the industry have formed the China Software Alliance modeled on the US Business Software Alliance in an effort to promote awareness over copyright issues and push to change existing laws and policies for the software industry.

Yet, the software industry’s power is relatively small as the CSA took a very conciliatory approach and refrained from openly criticizing various government agencies responsible for cracking down on piracy and drafting the new copyright law, with much of the pressure from China came not through the domestic software industry, but by the US government through China’s joining of the World Trade Organization.

So what would be some business incentives from a pro-IPR perspective? Having copyrights on software allows companies to protect their code and the way they made the software in order to protect profits as without it other companies could directly copy the software and sell the software for cheap—like generic drugs. Other companies may make a worse software if not protected, making it seem like the original product was poor to begin with, reducing the company’s brand image. Without copyrights, companies would have few incentives to produce or charge cheaper prices if the risk of copying was extremely high.

I created a powerpoint presentation on this topic back in 2004 for a telecom class specifically on the China piracy debate.

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China’s prominence is rising in the high-tech world on a variety of fronts as China’s Alibaba.com has enjoyed a massive 340 percent gain in net profit tied to China’s fast-growing economy. The number of unique visitors (as of October 2007) is second only to the US (yes, China’s large population has helped), however, their presence is being felt all around the world from World of Warcraft users having to sell their characters at a cheaper rate to compete with the Chinese ones to within China as homegrown sites such as TenCent, Baidu and Sina all reach more native Web surfers than Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo.

Nonetheless, one should be careful to equate fast growth, large numbers, and impressive actions with that of how China will overtake other first world nations in the near future. Strong growth now, does not mean it will continue to do so in the future.

Even more so, one should always be careful about making predictions of country growth with innovation and new tech centers. A new book called Silicon Dragon by Rebecca Fannin notes:

It’s going to be years before it becomes very pronounced, but China is slowly emerging as the next Silicon Valley.

If you look at venture capital money flowing in, it’s a phenomenal rate. China has been the fastest-growing target for venture capital in the last four years: far faster than anywhere else in Asia or the U.S. or Europe.

Venture capitalists used to say they’d never invest outside a 30-mile radius of their offices. Now VC firms like Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Accel Partners are all focused on China. Virtually all of the major venture capital firms in the U.S. have teams and funds there. It’s been a huge shift. And for every startup that’s funded in China, there’s a startup that’s not funded somewhere else.

Yes, the growth and money put into China has been tremendous, but if its going to be years in the future, we can only imagine how long China’s growth and strength can last. The Asian Tigers were seen as phenomenal and Japan itself was seen as going to overtake the US back in the 1980s, but as we all saw, some fundamental economic instabilities became too pronounced to avoid leading to stagnation within.

Keep in mind one important point from all this:

We have to ask: what innovation has the new China produced already? [B]eing a manufacturing powerhouse is quite different from actually [originating] the products, let alone inventing novel ones.

In other words: Look beyond how fast the growth is, beyond how much money is being invested, but dive into how stable is this system? Is this growth based on sound principles? Is the country able to adapt to economic downturns? Are there any intrinsic problems that will prevent future growth during the hard times? Lastly, what is actually being created and not just mimicked?

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Sometimes the brightest people can come off as completely clueless and say the strangest things. This week’s winner goes to Aaron Wall at SEOBook about how a company could try to make money by limiting the number of people who can freely see buzz-worthy items, and then later charge people for it.

I predict that if that limited syndication model is available to the masses, a future media pricing system will allow publishers to offer free video for the first X views and then the videos are turned to private / members only / payment required after they get a certain number of views. All the free views build the perceived social value, while being easy to market since the content is originally free.

Now, I have to admit I already have a bias in that the Internet will be free and always open as people can create content for prestige or attention that in turn can lead to a job or money elsewhere.

So, what’s the problem then with the idea of a limited syndication model? Simple: you are already giving out something for free–which means anyone can pick it up and freely distribute it elsewhere. Therefore, the minute you remove it into a private/paid area, every new person then goes to another website that is still displaying it, thereby driving down the price of what you can make with something behind a wall (hence why the New York Times finally opened itself up–the money to be made through traffic was far greater than the subscription revenue it generated behind a wall that was leaked elsewhere around the web).

In the same way, I feel that online subscriptions are a joke unless it offers information that is extremely unique and cannot be distributed elsewhere. Sure, it may take me a couple days to find what I need, but once I have done so, I no longer need to continue to continually pay for information I now have for free. Yes, it cost me some time, but with the right researching abilities, then the initial cost of my time is not nearly as high as a continual payment of cash.

So, how does this then affect the word of mouth strategy? Quite poorly really, people hear about a great product or video, try to see it and get frustrated when they have to sign up they will just quickly go elsewhere in their busy lives. Then, the minute another word of mouth campaign comes up about a site that does not hide their content and takes the content hidden from elsewhere leaving it open, they will just permanently go there instead. Sure the site will only last as long as the other sites keep hiding their content as it is not generating unique content, but this is the same way as paid links work–as long as Google continues to erroneously think that linking popularity is relevance for SERPs, the free market will be there to exploit a niche.

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How many years do you expect until this industry dies out (if at all)?

My personal belief is that although the newspaper industry is in a major decline, print will still play a major part in the daily lives of people around 30 and older, and yet, for those who have grown up with the net always there and with the increasing prominence of blogs, it could be another fifty years before newspaper really succumb in the end to the digital revolution.

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Meet the dog’s best friend:

That’s right, man is no longer a dog’s best friend. When you can have a machine that consistently throws balls, why care about a man who is going to get bored and stop playing after a few minutes?

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