 TECHNOLOGY | ||
| With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking By MIGUEL HELFT Published: July 27, 2007 | ||
 A map created to show the spread of graffiti in Federal Way, Wash. | ||
| SAN FRANCISCO, With the help of simple tools introduced by Internet companies recently, millions of people are trying their hand at cartography, drawing on digital maps and annotating them with text, images, sound and videos. In the process, they are reshaping the world of mapmaking and collectively creating a new kind of atlas that is likely to be both richer and messier than any other. They are also turning the Web into a medium where maps will play a more central role in how information is organized and found. Already there are maps of biodiesel fueling stations in New England, yarn stores in Illinois and hydrofoils around the world. Many maps depict current events, including the detours around a collapsed Bay Area freeway and the path of two whales that swam up the Sacramento River delta in May. James Lamb of Federal Way, Wash., created an online map to illustrate the spread of graffiti in his town and asked other residents to contribute to it. "Any time you can take data and represent it visually, you can start to recognize patterns and see where you need to put resources," said Mr. Lamb, whose map now pinpoints, often with photographs, nearly 100 sites that have been vandalized. Increasingly, people will be able to point their favorite mapping service to a specific location and discover many layers of information about it: its hotels and watering holes, its crime statistics and school rankings, its weather and environmental conditions, the recent news events and the history that have shaped it. A good portion of this information is being contributed by ordinary Web users. In aggregate, these maps are similar to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, in that they reflect the collective knowledge of millions of contributors. "What is happening is the creation of this extremely detailed map of the world that is being created by all the people in the world," said John V. Hanke, director of Google Maps and Google Earth. "The end result is that there will be a much richer description of the earth." This fast-growing GeoWeb, as industry insiders call it, is in part a byproduct of the Internet search wars involving Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others. In the race to popularize their map services — and dominate the potentially lucrative market for local advertising on maps — these companies have created the tools that are allowing people with minimal technical skills to do what only professional mapmakers were able to do before. "It is a revolution," said Matthew H. Edney, director of the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. "Now with all sorts of really very accessible, very straightforward tools, anybody can make maps. They can select data, they can add data, they can communicate it with others. It truly has moved the power of map production into a completely new arena." Online maps have provided driving directions and helped Web users find businesses for years. But the Web mapping revolution began in earnest two years ago, when leading Internet companies first allowed programmers to merge their maps with data from outside sources to make "mash-ups." Since then, for example, more than 50,000 programmers have used Google Maps to create mash-ups for things like apartment rentals in San Francisco and the paths of airplanes in flight. | ||
| | ||
Online maps have provided driving directions and helped Web users find businesses for years. But the Web mapping revolution began in earnest two years ago, when leading Internet companies first allowed programmers to merge their maps with data from outside sources to make "mash-ups." Since then, for example, more than 50,000 programmers have used Google Maps to create mash-ups for things like apartment rentals in San Francisco and the paths of airplanes in flight. Yet that is nothing compared with the boom that is now under way. In April, Google unveiled a service called My Maps that makes it easy for users to create customized maps. Since then, users of the service have created more than four million maps of everything from where to find good cheap food in New York to summer festivals in Europe. More than a million maps have been created with a service from Microsoft called Collections, and 40,000 with tools from Platial, a technology start-up. MotionBased, a Web site owned by Garmin, the navigation device maker, lets users upload data they record on the move with a Global Positioning System receiver. It has amassed more than 1.3 million maps of hikes, runs, mountain bike rides and other adventures. On the Flickr photo-sharing service owned by Yahoo, users have "geotagged" more than 25 million pictures, providing location data that allows them to be viewed on a map or through 3-D visualization software like Google Earth. The maps sketched by this new generation of cartographers range from the useful to the fanciful and from the simple to the elaborate. Their accuracy, as with much that is on the Web, cannot be taken for granted. "Some people are potentially going to do really stupid things with these tools," said Donald Cooke, chief scientist at Tele Atlas North America, a leading supplier of digital street maps. "But you can also go hiking with your G.P.S. unit, and you can create a more accurate depiction of a trail than on a U.S.G.S. map," Mr. Cooke said, referring to the United States Geological Survey. | ||
 Christopher Berkey for The New York Times April Johnson used a G.P.S. device to help create a map used for the Trace Tribute endurance horse ride near Nashville. | ||
 Google Maps April Johnson's Trace Tribute endurance horse ride map. | ||
| April Johnson, a Web developer from Nashville, has used a G.P.S. device to create dozens of maps, including many of endurance horse races — typically 25-to-50-mile treks through rural trails or parks. "You can't buy these maps, because no one has made them," Ms. Johnson said. Angie Fura used one of Ms. Johnson's maps to help organize the Trace Tribute, an endurance ride on trails near Nashville, and distributed the map to dozens of other riders. "It gives riders an opportunity to understand what the race is like, and it allows them to condition their horses in accordance," Ms. Fura said. Until recently, most Web maps were separate islands that could be viewed only one at a time and were sometimes hard to find. But Google and Microsoft have developed tools that make it possible for multiple layers of data to be viewed on a single map. And Google is working to make it easier to search through all online maps. Now, a tourist heading to, say, Maui can find the hotels and restaurants on the island and display them on a map that also superimposes photos from Flickr and users' reviews of various beaches. The same information is quickly moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional renderings. Microsoft, for example, has created 3-D models of 100 cities worldwide and aims to have 500 models in the next year. "You will have a digital replica of the world in true 3-D," said Erik Jorgensen, general manager of Live Search at Microsoft. | ||
| ||
For the Internet search companies, these efforts are part of a race to capture the expected advertising bonanza that will come as users browse through these maps in search of businesses and services. In the process, they are creating technologies whose impact could be similar to those of desktop publishing software, which turned millions of computer users into publishers. "The possibilities for doing amazing kinds of things, to tell stories or to help tell stories with maps, are just endless," said Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project affiliated with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the journalism school at the University of California in Berkeley. Some of Mr. Gillmor's journalism students are working with a researcher at Dartmouth to add photographs, videos and interviews to a map-based project documenting the house-by-house reconstruction of a section of New Orleans. Mr. Gillmor wants local residents to contribute to the project, which uses Platial's map service. "The hope is that the community will tell the story of its own recovery with the map as the dashboard," he said. "We have just seen the beginning of what people are going to do with this stuff." | ||
viernes, julio 27, 2007
Con TIC´s para Sistemas de Información Geográfica cualquier principiante puede crear mapas digitales para SIG´s.
jueves, julio 26, 2007
Almacene y comparta su información utilizando servicios web.
 | |
| Friday, June 02, 2006 11:00 AM PDT Store It on the Web These 17 free and low-cost services make it easier than ever to back up and share your files online. Jon L. Jacobi, Erik Larkin, and Steve Bass | |
All your important files--text documents, spreadsheets, music and videos, you name it--may start out sitting safe and snug on your PC's hard drive. But what if the drive goes belly up, or runs out of room? And what if you'd like an easy way to share those files with coworkers or friends? Web-based storage services let you back up your data, store your files on a Web server, or share them quickly and simply with anyone, often at no cost. Of the 17 services we tried, our favorite backup service is IBackup, while the GoDaddy Online File Folder is our pick of the storage sites. And for sharing files, we like the free 4shared.com service. In This Article:
Also, before you select a service, see our safety tip below.
| |
|
Back Up to the Web | |
|
Though IBackup is the best all-around backup service I tested, the beta version of Mozy has much to recommend it, despite some rough edges, so it's a service to keep an eye on. Of course, not the least of its virtues is that it's free. | |
|
IBackup
| |
| Both IBackup and XDrive cost the same, and their features are almost identical: multimedia streaming, browser-based file management, and file sharing. However, unlike XDrive, IBackup doesn't require that your friends open an IBackup account to view the files you want to share with them. The service's client software isn't as easy to use as the XDrive Desktop client. IBackup, though, didn't misfire as XDrive did in my tests. IBackup's IDrive feature, like XDrive Desktop, maps your IBackup files to a network drive to let you drag and drop files between the two. | |
|
XDrive
| |
| This service supports file sharing and streaming of media files to cell phones. You can manage your files via the XDrive Desktop client, or in a browser via the service's Web interface. Unfortunately, despite its features, the XDrive Desktop client stumbled too many times: I encountered C++ runtime errors and several failed backups. None of the other client programs I tried even hiccupped.
FirstBackup The client software that this service uses is well designed. My only complaint is that FirstBackup lacks an automatic backup capability during a PC's idle time. FirstBackup provides just one simple pricing plan: $4 per month (three months minimum) for up to 50MB, $8 per month for up to 300MB, $12 per month for up to 1GB, and $2.75 for each additional gigabyte. Those costs are affordable as long as you're backing up only limited amounts of data, but by the time you reach 5GB, the charges come to a total of $23 per month, more than twice what you would pay for the same amount of storage on either IBackup or XDrive. | |
|
This is one of the priciest services I tested, although its penny-per-megabyte-per-month plan has no minimum charge: Store nothing, pay nothing, or store only a few megabytes and pay only a few pennies per month--a boon for anyone who backs up only relatively small amounts of data. Though the service's desktop client software is reliable and easy to use, it lacks a "do backup now" option. Data Deposit Box does offer several nice bonus features such as the ability to share folders by e-mail, and a file-management interface that is exceptionally clean and practical. ElephantDrive Currently in beta, this site offers 500MB of free Web storage space. The pay plan is more expensive than that of the other free service I looked at, Mozy, but at $10 per month or $100 per year for up to 10GB of storage, Elephant Drive's per-gigabyte rate is half that of either IBackup or XDrive. If your system doesn't have a fast upstream broadband connection, however, it could take days to upload multigigabytes of data to this or any other online storage service. Like the other services I tested, ElephantDrive supplies client software only for Windows. ElephantDrive says it will switch from Microsoft's .Net Framework to the open Java platform to add support for Mac and Linux users. In my tests, transfers were stable and reliable, but the client dropped some connections. Still, any service whose marketing uses elephant puns bears watching. Mozy Mozy's client software for uploading and restoring files was in beta when I tested it, but the service performed well despite the lack of visual feedback while a backup restore is in progress (this should be fixed by launch time). Mozy's for-pay service is cheap compared with the norm: $20 for up to 5GB, $30 for 10GB, and $40 for 20GB--per annum. You get only five free restore operations per month, but that should be more than enough for most users. | |
| Online Backup: Keep Your Data at a Safe Distance (chart) These services ensure that your important files are secure on their Web servers no matter what calamity may befall the PC situated in your home or office. | |
| Find Ample Storage Online Anyone who owns a digital camera or an MP3 music collection knows it doesn't take very long at all to fill up a hard drive. If you have a broadband Internet connection, you could save some of the cost of a new hard drive by using one of the many services offering free or dirt-cheap online storage My favorite for music and video playback is Streamload, while Online File Folder is the choice for integrating online storage with day-to-day work. Online File Folder Godaddy's online storage service is decidedly businesslike. Online File Folder's clean, Explorer-style Web interface makes file management a breeze. But you don't even have to fire up your browser if you map the service as a network place in Windows, which then permits you to transfer files and folders by dragging and dropping them from within Explorer. This is the only one of the storage-focused services I looked at that lets you zip and encrypt your files and folders via the Web interface. Oddly enough, there's no search feature, although you can use Windows' search function to find files on the mapped network place. A small downloadable program allows you to sync an online folder with a folder on your desktop, so updating one automatically updates the other. You have no free option, and you must pay by the year rather than monthly. Still, $10 a year per gigabyte (up to 10GB) isn't bad, considering all the extras you get. Streamload Mediamax How does up to 25GB of free storage space sound? The gratis storage alone makes Mediamax worth a look. As befitting the name, Mediamax emphasizes storing your music, video, and photos. When you upload files, the service automatically sorts them under such tabs as "Photoshare" and "Music Locker." With Streamload's easy streaming options, the service acts as a ready-access library for all your media files. You just select a few songs or whole folders, choose Play, and listen via your favorite media player. | |
|
| |
| Unfortunately, you can quickly use up the free service's monthly 500MB download maximum. The limit leaps to 25GB (and a whopping 250GB of storage) for the cheapest paid plan ($15 a month). Streamload Mediamax is a new service, and it has rough edges aplenty. The file-upload features are clunky, particularly if you upload many files at once, since you can't choose the destination folder. And while a new Web interface affords good options for organizing your music, it sometimes balks with strange errors. A stand-alone software program is expected to arrive soon. | |
More Online Storage Services Box.net You get 1GB of free space and a clean, lean Web 2.0 interface with this service. File management, including the ability to tag your files and folders, is also simple. | |
|
| |
| Yet Box.net offers little in the way of extras. A stand-alone program that will synchronize with your desktop folders is still in the works. And while you can stream music, you can play just one song at a time, and only through Box.net's own little desktop player applet. The free version has some limits: You can't upload files larger than 10MB, and you can download only one file at a time. The paid options--$5 a month for 5GB, and $10 a month for 15GB--do away with these limits and offer both mobile access and support for additional users. Simdesk This service provides a number of nice features, especially for business collaboration. For example, you can map the service as a network drive, and you can sync online files with those in a desktop folder. It also lets you send online files to a shared printer via its browser-based interface. You can even get to that interface using a Web-enabled mobile device. | |
|
| |
| However, the Simdesk Web interface is inelegant, and file navigation is slow: To move a file, you have to use the program's buttons to cut and paste it rather than simply dragging and dropping it. Simdesk's pricing isn't so hot, either: It costs $3.50 a month for up to 1GB of storage and $6.50 per month for 2GB, which doesn't compare to GoDaddy's low-cost offerings. In addition, Simdesk imposes a 5GB-per-month transfer limit. FlipDrive Compared with the other online storage services I looked at, FlipDrive feels somewhat spartan. The site's free service provides only 25MB of storage, so it's basically a teaser. The FlipDrive Web interface is serviceable but plain, and there's no client program to use instead. The service's Web download feature stands out: Choose several folders and files, and FlipDrive automatically zips them to speed your downloads and preserve file names and directory structures. Still, dragging and dropping files to and from a mapped drive is probably faster. You can make as many sharable photo albums as you like and order prints of pictures in the album from FlipDrive. However, you can't download full-size, full-resolution images. FlipDrive costs about the same as Box.net--$5 a month for 5GB, $10 a month for 15GB--but its top level costs $20 a month for 30GB. Online Storage Solutions This service slaps a bare-bones interface around a large FTP (File Transport Protocol) account. It lacks online file management, media streaming, file synchronizing, and other extras. However, as with any FTP account, you can use Novell's free Netdrive utility to map a network drive. The upside is that you get more space for your money: up to 10GB for only $5 per month, and up to 100GB for $35 per month. For FTP users who are looking for a lot of storage space with few restrictions, and who don't require such niceties as a functional Web interface, Online Storage Solutions might be a good choice. Otherwise, one of the other storage services in this roundup will serve you much better. Extend Your Hard Disk to the Web Jump to our comparison chart here of the online storage services discussed in this section. Erik Larkin | |
|
Share the Web Way | |
| Sure, you can attach umpteen files to an e-mail and blast it to three or four dozen of your nearest and dearest, but, oh, the hassle--adding each address, selecting and attaching the files one by one, and then choking the pipes of your ISP and those of each recipient. A better way is to post the files on the Web and send everybody a single URL so they can retrieve and open the files on their own, at their convenience. For me, the icing on the Web-sharing cake is that many of the services are completely free of charge (and we all love a bargain). Of the five sharing services I looked at, my favorites are YouSendIt for its simplicity, and 4shared.com for its winning interface. Now let me share with you my opinion of these Web-sharing sites.
4shared.com | |
|
| |
| This free service provides 500MB of storage and lets you upload an unlimited number of files (though no single file can exceed 25MB in size). All of the folders you place on 4shared.com's servers are permission-based, so you can easily make some folders available to anybody while restricting access to others. You can also password-protect your folders, which adds another layer of security. Visitors access the folders through an e-mail link. In less than 10 minutes, I created a dozen folders and subfolders, each with specific rights. You can track how many files are downloaded, but unfortunately you can't find out who did the downloading. One quibble with the free account: You have to upload and download the files one at a time. You get more storage, multiple file transfers, and the ability to store files larger than 25MB for fees ranging from $48 to $84 per year. Groove Virtual Office Acquired last year by Microsoft, this collaboration service--and WebEx WebOffice Workgroup (see below)--differ from the other sharing sites I tested in their business-ready robustness, which makes them ideal for sharing data with work associates. However, Groove is also great for sharing with friends and family. The service provides you with a private, shared workspace and offers all the critical collaborative functions: file sharing, instant communications, and shared calendars. You can use Groove's desktop application to collaborate on projects and documents by storing and sharing files in various folders; edit and sync Word documents and other text files; view PowerPoint presentations; and enter meeting and other dates on a shared calendar. Besides sending e-mail within Groove, you can also conduct real-time, online meetings using the service's built-in instant messaging tool. If you have a microphone connected to your PC, you can use Groove's cool audio-chatting feature. The service even lets you do multiple tasks simultaneously--say, participate in an online meeting while uploading files and collaborating on a document. The 60-day trial version has document review and other features disabled; you can continue using the app after 60 days (the service is free for personal use), but the meetings tool and other functions won't work, and the connection speed is a poky 56 kbps, which makes the free version impractical for most PC users . | |
| Webex's collaboration tool, which it acquired along with Intranets.com last year, provides a variety of ways to share files. You can allow authorized users to access, download, and modify the folders you create. Unlike Groove, however, WebOffice doesn't let people work together on the online files. The basic plan limits storage to 250MB combined for up to five users. You can allow non-WebOffice users to view and download files. The WebOffice calendar features a group scheduling capability similar to the scheduler in Microsoft Outlook. You can attach documents and agendas, manage projects, and sync calendars and other data with your Palm (but not Windows Mobile or BlackBerry) PDA. Unlike Groove, in WebOffice all of your group's activity is done through a browser. WebOffice costs $60 a month for up to five users and $100 a month for ten users. WebEx Meetings costs an extra $50 per user per month. The fully-functional, 30-day trial includes WebEx Meetings. RapidShare This simple, no-frills, free site lets you upload as many files as you want, each as large as 100MB, and send the link to any number of recipients. The files can be downloaded an unlimited number of times, and they remain on the server as long as they're downloaded at least once every 30 days. To avoid the annoying 23-second wait before you can download a file, sign up for a premium account, which costs 10 euros--about $12--per month. YouSendIt This free service lets you upload files to its Web servers for temporary storage. You can include a personal note along with the upload; YouSendIt then sends an e-mail to the person with whom you're sharing that explains how to pick up the file. You're notified when the file is sent and when it's picked up. The recipient's name is automatically added to your YouSendIt Contacts, too. While you can send your file to several people at once, the "Send To" field won't hold more than 128 characters; the service says it imposed this limit to prevent spammers from using it. | |
|
| |
| The free version limits the file size to 100MB. The files you upload are stored for seven days or for a total of 25 downloads per file. That is probably more downloads than most people will need (it's plenty for me). But $5 per month raises the size limit to 1GB, the per-file storage period to 14 days, and the downloads to 100. | |
|
Collaboration: Online Storage (chart) | |
| Rather than wrestle with e-mail attachments, let these services distribute your digital images, documents, and other files to family, friends, and coworkers. | |
|
| |
Jon L. Jacobi is a contributing editor, and Erik Larkin is an associate editor for PC World. | |
| Become a PCW Member Join the community and start enjoying the benefits:
| |
 All rights reserved |
Illustration: Headcase Design
lunes, julio 23, 2007
Barbie entra a la era de la Web2.0. (TIC´s)
TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS | |||||
| Barbie Gets Another Accessory: An MP3 Player and More Stuff on Her Web Site By LOUISE STORY Published: July 23, 2007 | |||||
|
| |||||
| First, Barbie had Ken. Now, Barbie has a docking station. A new doll hitting retail shelves this week is familiar in many ways — she's got outfits galore — but she also has some unusual features: this Barbie, who is smaller and less shapely than her standard namesake, functions as an MP3 music player. And when her feet are plugged into the iPodesque docking station that she comes with, she unlocks pages and pages of games, virtual shops and online chatting functions on the BarbieGirls.com Web site. The new doll is a roundabout way of charging for online content. Instead of asking young Web surfers to punch in their parents' credit card numbers, BarbieGirls.com and other sites are sending customers to a real-world toy store first. Some of these sites (like the Barbie one) can be used in a limited way without purchasing merchandise — the better to whet young appetites — but others, like the popular Webkinz site, are of little or no use without a store-bought product or two (or three, or a dozen). The trends that have brought about BarbieGirls, Webkinz and their ilk are clear: While sales of dolls, action figures and outdoor toys are down, electronics sales to children were up 16.6 percent over the last two years as of May, the latest month available from the NPD Group, a research firm that tracks retail trends. The total toy industry's annual sales were up just 0.8 percent in May, compared with two years ago. With children's leisure-time habits shifting online, toy companies are responding with new products that can be construed as fun both online and offline. That Barbie in the docking station? Go to a physical store and buy her an extra outfit, and you get access to even more Web content. Products like these represent a change not only in the design and function of toys, but also in how toy makers use their Web properties. Mattel, for instance, like many consumer goods companies, has until now treated Barbie.com, HotWheels.com and its 22 or so other Web sites as advertising forums, places to showcase toys with the hope that children will nag their parents for them. But now Mattel and others are trying to turn their sites into money-makers in their own right. Although BarbieGirls toys are just now hitting the market, Mattel has paved the way for them: about 3 million people have registered since April 27 on the BarbieGirls Web site, a virtual world where playing games can earn a visitor play money — "B Bucks" — that can be spent on the likes of miniskirts, tiaras or home accessories. And, that's without Mattel advertising the BarbieGirls site, even on its Barbie.com home page. Mattel's new toy follows the success of Webkinz, a line of Web-savvy stuffed animals made by Ganz, which also sells various sigh-inducing (albeit unplugged) teddy bears. Each Webkinz comes with a number code that, once entered online, starts an "adoption" process and ushers the owner into a virtual world that amounts to a Second Life for the grade-school set. More such products are on the way. This month Zizzle, the company that makes Pirates of the Caribbean toys (not to mention Lucky the Incredible Wonder Pup, perhaps the first stuffed Labradoodle) is introducing an online/offline toy. SpotzGirl.com is a bubblegum-pink Web site with games (that people can play free) plus a collection of girly images (pussycats, hearts) that can be made into round physical tokens. How does one make them? With the help of the Spotz Maker, a new-age button-maker that will be available in stores for $24.99. Girls will be able to create jewelry, decorate picture frames and collect and trade their Spotz, which are sort of like charm bracelet tokens. "Over the next few years, you'll see a lot of companies finding ways to create products that are Web enabled," said, Marc Rosenberg, chief marketing officer at Zizzle. "The monetization for us comes from the product, and not from the Web." | |||||
|
| |||||
| The concept behind Web-connected toys is not new. In the late 1990s, a number of toy companies introduced physical goods that could be used to unlock online goodies. One noteworthy attempt came from The Learning Company, an educational software company that was owned for a short time by Mattel. But concepts like physical telescopes that could zoom to far-away islands when aimed at an Internet-connected computer failed to take off, in large part because Internet connections were too slow. But times have changed tremendously. "Kids look at video content or virtual content as their toys," said Jessi Dunne, executive vice president of global toys for Disney. "There isn't a distinction between — 'That's a toy' and 'That's an online game.' " These days stores routinely sell out of the $10 to $13 Webkinz — pandas, lions, hippos and other animals that unlock the online fun on "Webkinz World." There, on the site, customers can play with avatars of their pets, shop for them using "KinzCash," decorate their pets' rooms, enter online tournaments and chat with their real-world friends. "The Webkinz concept is still doing very well," said Robert A. Eckert, Mattel's chief executive, in the company's second-quarter earnings conference call. "That phenomenon is real, and will continue to do well." So real, indeed, that the starter set for the BarbieGirls site — sold for $59.99 — will be one of this holiday season's main Barbie products. Mattel plans to run some television ads for the product in the fall, but the site is expected to be the primarily driver of sales, said Chuck Scothon, general manager and senior vice president of girls, Mattel Brands. "For girls to understand the level of detail, the level of content, truly the experience of BarbieGirls," Mr. Scothon said, "we wanted to allow them to play on the site." Toy companies also may benefit from the Web by using it to provide add-ons to products. Toy makers could sell cheaper products with a base-level of features, then allow customers to log online to choose what custom functions they want to download, said John Rose, a senior partner and managing director at the Boston Consulting Group and leader of the firm's Global Convergence Initiative. Even as toy companies cash in, some media executives are wondering if they, too, might use physical products to generate new revenue for their Web sites.Neopets.com, for instance, a virtual world of whimsical creatures and games, draws more than 10 million visitors a month, according to Viacom, which owns it, and although T-shirts and other Neopet-related merchandise is for sale, it is not the main draw. MTV, a Viacom subsidiary, has started marketing toys that relate to its Web content. Earlier this month, the network introduced a music video game, "Rock Band," in partnership with Electronic Arts. The game allows up to four people to play along with various songs using physical instruments hooked into an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. "We're looking at it as more of an add-on. Can we do something a little bit extra or a little bit different?" said Mika Salmi, president of global digital media at MTV Networks, which includes MTV, Nickeolodeon, VH1 and other networks. "The idea of connecting experiences is very, very important to us, but the absolute model is not established." The Walt Disney Company, too, has gotten into the act. Last year, it introduced a digital camera that lets people download images of Disney characters from its Web site to their photos. Disney will introduce an analogous video camera this fall and has other online/offline toys in development, said Ms. Dunne of Disney. "I think Disney's a perfect example of where it will work," she said. "We have an advantage as a media company because we have all this, where toy companies have to create content. That's not necessarily their sweet spot." | |||||
| Related article
| |||||
domingo, julio 22, 2007
"Revolcón" en el negocio de la música. Prince.
 MUSIC / BUSINESS |
| The Once and Future Prince By JON PARELES Published: July 22, 2007 |
 Afshin Shahidi Prince has caused a stir by distributing his new album free in a British newspaper, one of many ways he is showing that he thinks differently about the music business. |
I'VE got lots of money!" Prince exults in "The One U Wanna C," a come-on from his new album, "Planet Earth" (Columbia). There's no reason to disbelieve him. With a sponsorship deal here and an exclusive show there, worldwide television appearances and music given away, Prince has remade himself as a 21st-century pop star. As recording companies bemoan a crumbling market, Prince is demonstrating that charisma and the willingness to go out and perform are still bankable. He doesn't have to go multiplatinum — he's multiplatform. Although Prince declined to be interviewed about "Planet Earth," he has been highly visible lately. His career is heading into its third decade, and he could have long since become a nostalgia act. Instead he figured out early how to do what he wants in a 21st-century music business, and clearly what he wants is to make more music. Despite his flamboyant wardrobe and his fixation on the color purple, his career choices have been savvy ones, especially for someone so compulsively prolific. Like most pop stars, he goes on major tours to coincide with album releases, which for Prince are frequent. But he also gets out and performs whenever he chooses. Last year he took over a club in Las Vegas and renamed it 3121, after his 2006 album "3121," which briefly hit No. 1 and spawned multiple conflicting theories about the significance of the number. He started playing there twice a week for 900 people at $125 a ticket. In February he had an audience in the millions as the halftime entertainment for the Super Bowl. He has gone on to play well-publicized shows at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood for a few hundred people paying $3,121 per couple, and another elite show last weekend in East Hampton for about $3,000 per person. |
Meanwhile Verizon put Prince in commercials that use "Guitar," another song from "Planet Earth," as bait for its V Cast Song ID service, making the song a free download to certain cellphones. On July 7 Prince introduced a perfume, 3121, by performing at Macy's in Minneapolis. In Britain he infuriated retailers by agreeing to have a newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, include the complete "Planet Earth" CD in copies on July 15. (The album is due for American release this Tuesday.) Presumably The Mail paid him something in the range of what he could have earned, much more slowly, through album sales. British fans have remunerated him in other ways. On Aug. 1 he starts a string of no fewer than 21 sold-out arena concerts, 20,000 seats each, at the O2 (formerly the Millennium Dome) in London at the relatively low ticket price of £31.21, about $64. The O2 ticket price also includes a copy of the album; Prince did the same thing with his tour for "Musicology" in 2004. Those "Musicology" albums were counted toward the pop charts, which then changed their rules; the "Planet Earth" albums will not be. But fans will have the record. Prince's priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it's purchased or not. "Prince's only aim is to get music direct to those that want to hear it," his spokesman said when announcing that The Mail would include the CD. (After the newspaper giveaway was announced, Columbia Records' corporate parent, Sony Music, chose not to release "Planet Earth" for retail sale in Britain.) Other musicians may think that their best chance at a livelihood is locking away their music — impossible as that is in the digital era — and demanding that fans buy everything they want to hear. But Prince is confident that his listeners will support him, if not through CD sales then at shows or through other deals. |
 Johnny Nunez/WireImage Prince playing last weekend in East Hampton, N.Y. |
This is how most pop stars operate now: as brand-name corporations taking in revenue streams from publishing, touring, merchandising, advertising, ringtones, fashion, satellite radio gigs or whatever else their advisers can come up with. Rare indeed are holdouts like Bruce Springsteen who simply perform and record. The usual rationale is that hearing a U2 song in an iPod commercial or seeing Shakira's face on a cellphone billboard will get listeners interested in the albums that these artists release every few years after much painstaking effort. But Prince is different. His way of working has nothing to do with scarcity. In the studio — he has his own recording complex, Paisley Park near Minneapolis — he is a torrent of new songs, while older, unreleased ones fill the archive he calls the Vault. Prince apparently has to hold himself back to release only one album a year. He's equally indefatigable in concert. On the road he regularly follows full-tilt shows — singing, playing, dancing, sweating — with jam sessions that stretch into the night. It doesn't hurt that at 49 he can still act like a sex symbol and that his stage shows are unpredictable. Through it all he still aims for hit singles. Although he has delved into all sorts of music, his favorite form is clearly the four-minute pop tune full of hooks. But his career choices don't revolve around squeezing the maximum return out of a few precious songs. They're about letting the music flow. Prince gravitated early to the Internet. Even in the days of dial-up he sought to make his music available online, first as a way of ordering albums and then through digital distribution. (He was also ahead of his time with another form of communication: text messaging abbreviations, having long ago traded "you" for "U.") Where the Internet truism is that information wants to be free, Prince's corollary is that music wants to be heard. How much he makes from his various efforts is a closely guarded secret. But he's not dependent on royalties trickling in from retail album sales after being filtered through major-label accounting procedures. Instead someone — a sponsor, a newspaper, a promoter — pays him upfront, making disc sales less important. Which is not to say that he's doing badly on that front: "3121" sold about 520,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and "Musicology," with its concert giveaways, was certified multiplatinum. |
 Retna Limited Prince on the "Purple Rain" tour in Detroit in 1984. |
| Prince ended a two-decade contract with Warner Brothers Records in 1996 after a very public falling out with the label. During the mid-1990s he appeared with the word "Slave" painted on his face and said the label was holding back material he wanted to release. For a while he dropped the name Prince — which was under contract to Warner Brothers and Warner/Chappell Music — for an unpronounceable glyph; when the contracts ran out, he was Prince again. And since leaving Warner Brothers he has been independent. He owns his recordings himself, beginning with a three-CD set called "Emancipation" from 1996. He has released albums on his own NPG label and Web site or has licensed them, one by one, for distribution by major labels, presumably letting them compete for each title. Over the past decade he has had albums released through EMI, Arista, Universal and Sony. The idea behind long-term recording contracts is that a label will invest in building a career. But Prince (in part because of Warner Brothers' promotion) has been a full-fledged star since the '80s. So now a label's main job for him is to get the CDs into stores. Prince also experimented with having fans subscribe directly to receive his music online, which turned out to be a better idea in theory than in execution. After five years he quietly shut down his NPG Music Club in 2006. Still, his Web site (which is now 3121.com) usually has a rare recording or two for streaming or downloading. Why not? There's plenty more. "Planet Earth" is a good but not great Prince album. Unlike "3121," which built many of its tracks around zinging, programmed electronic sounds, "Planet Earth" sounds largely handmade, even retro. "In this digital age you could just page me," Prince sings in "Somewhere Here on Earth," a slow-motion falsetto ballad. "I know it's the rage but it just don't engage me like a face-to-face." Prince, as usual, is a one-man studio band — drums, keyboards, guitars, vocals — joined here and there by a horn section or a cooing female voice. This time he leans toward rock rather than funk. Serious songs begin and end the album. It starts with "Planet Earth," an earnest environmental piano anthem with an orchestral buildup, and winds up with the devout "Lion of Judah" and with "Resolution," an antiwar song. In between, Prince flirts a lot, playing hard-to-get as he rocks through "Guitar" ("I love you baby, but not like I love my guitar") and promising sensual delights in the upbeat "One U Wanna C" and the slow-grinding "Mr. Goodnight." There's also a catchy, nutty song about a model, "Chelsea Rodgers," who's both hard-partying and erudite; Prince sings that she knows about how "Rome was chillin' in Carthage in 33 B.C.E." Although Columbia probably thinks otherwise, how the album fares commercially is almost incidental. With or without the CD business, Prince gets to keep making music: in arenas, in clubs, in the studio. Fans buy concert tickets, companies rent his panache, pleasure is shared. It's a party that can go on a long time. |