Alec Saunders SquawkBox

In Making Money in the Mashup Economy, GigaOm writer Anne Zelenka enumerates the ways that ome of the participants at the latest Mashup Camp have been making money.  She includes:

• Elastic Computing (on demand services from the cloud)
• Aggregated Data Access
• Mashup Development Tools
• and…. mashup’s themselves.

I’m surprised at the failure of companies to monetize access to websites. I would think that the services provided by an Amazon, or a Google should be monetizable in other ways, other than simply through related sales of advertising or product.

 

 

Next Monday night will be Ottawa DemoCamp 3.  The format is pretty simple.  Each presenter has 2 minutes to introduce the topic, 8 minutes to show product, and 5 to discuss with the audience afterward.  We’ll be in the lineup, which includes:

• Nelson Ko - Citadel Rock Online Communities.  He’ll be showing a WYSIWYG Wiki with Google maps. 
• Scott Annan - Mercury Grove - an enterprise collaboration tool.
• Alec Saunders - Iotum - Talknow - a new presence application for Blackberry users.
• Peter Childs / Ian Graham - Distributed Calendars

Luca Fillighedu has spotted an interesting series of videos on Brightcove, from Kohler.  They’re all commercials, and Luca asks why you couldn’t just embed a link into the video (say a Sitofono link) to allow the viewer to get more information.  Exactly!  This is one of the flaws of video blogging, in my opinion.  The day is coming, however, where you will have live links embedded into video.

And after seeing the shower tile video, can you honestly say you don’t want one of these?  Wowsers!

The battle over the iPhone trademark promises to be messy, to say the least.  Flat Planet Phone Company CEO Moshe Maeir dropped me a quick note this morning to tell me to have a look at his blog, where he has posted a scan of a 1996 magazine advertisement showing an internet phone named iPhone.  Sure enough, you can see the name iPhone quite clearly on something which looks a lot like one of today’s USB handsets for Skype.

Now, I am not a lawyer, but there are two elements of trademark law that I know of in conflict here.  First is the notion that first use allows you to claim a trademark. If you use it first, then it’s yours.  The second is the idea that to preserve a trademark, you must use it.  I believe that continuous use is the standard, but perhaps a lawyer can chime in and clarify.  So there you have it.  Others used iPhone first.  Cisco even bought an iPhone trademark in the late 1990’s.  But Apple argues that they abandoned their claim by not using it.

It’s like watching a couple of dogs take turns marking a hydrant.

In what has got to be one of the more interesting experiments in social media, Microsoft has hired journalist David Spark to edit a “whitepaper” on hosted messaging services.  The twist?  Microsoft’s whitepaper has taken the form of a wiki, with Spark as the administrator.  The text, as it stands now, is opinionated and biased.  What form will it take when the IT community has had an opportunity to edit it?

It’s a fascinating idea.  Rather than develop a top-down messaging architecture, focus group it to death, and write a final document, why not just ask the eventual readers of the document to write it themselves?  Is this the future of marcomms?