Spotify Premium Now HALF-PRICE!

Only a couple of weeks ago I posed the question on Twitter “would Spotify double uptake if they halved the price?” To which, of course the answer was no, and it was pointed out quite clearly.

Last week we had confirmation from 3UK that they would be releasing the HTC Hero with Spotify Premium baked in next month and hey guess what I’ve just had in my inbox…

Now I am really really tempted.  Having bought 5 or 6 albums in the last month alone at £4.99 a month with offline cache the Spotify model is starting to look attractive.

UPDATE (17:50):  Having just dry run the offer it looks like it is a one-time-use discount code so it is entirely possible the offer is only being made to i) existing Spotify users and ii) even that group may be in some way limited.  Let me know if you had the offer.

eBay’s Nutty UK Pricing Premium

In the US from June 16th one has been able to list 5 items free a month.  Well not entirely free as the offer only extends to the insertion fee itself – a saving of $0.75 is still a saving.  Without further analysis is does look a lot like the offer is actually not that special as there is a flat rate 8.75% success fee on those 5 items and I seem to recall it was previously tiered.

If anyone has a copy of the pre-June 16th fees I’d love to know what they were.

But that’s the US.  I have 2 eBay accounts; one in the UK (where I live) and one in the US which serviced our New Zealand address more effectively.  Neither are highly used but just occasionally I want to buy something or in the case of now need to sell something.

In the UK that free listings offer is no where to be found on eBay’s site, and to make it worse eBay actually charge:

• tiered insertion fees ranging from zero for < £0.99 items to £1.90 for items over £100 and multi-list items,
• success fees are a flat rate 10% with a maximum of £40.

If I sold a bike for say £200 (c. $300) here’s how the regional pricing works out…

It costs 21% more to sell the same item through eBay in the UK than in US.  Is the US offering less of a service, well you could easily argue a bigger audience should mean more potential bidders so should really command a premium.

But the reality is there is NO difference in the offering from eBay that I can discern other than a 21% premium for living in the UK.

And who said the internet was breaking down international trading borders?

I have 2 eBay accounts; one in the UK (where I live) and one in the US which serviced our New Zealand address more effectively.  Neither are highly used but just occasionally I want to buy something or in the case of now need to sell something, but…

I’ve talked about eBay’s listing and success fees before on Twitter but having received an email today offering up free listing insertions I thought it best to write down just what eBay are doing with pricing and where I think they are going horribly wrong.

Twitter – Is Charging for Commercial Accounts THE Right Model?

So everyone has seen the news Marketing (in an interview with Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter) broke about Twitter possibly having decided upon a route to revenues.

This is what Stone reportedly said:

“We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.”

There has been a lot of talk recently on where Twitter’s revenues could/should come from, everything from the lacklustre advertising models done to death to premium accounts offering SMS notifications (please please bring SMS back for the UK).

Conversations I was having with Robert O’Brien, a friend of mine, back at the end of 2007 early 2008 revolved around our thinking that Twitter had really missed an opportunity in monetising their namespace (not a revolutionary idea as we are in the digital identity space).  After all it’s a well understood model and one with which most digital life-stylers are quite comfortable to a level.  Even if Twitter had offered up leases for names say for US$5 a year with the first 2-3 years free just think how many of the 5 million plus active users today with more than a few months of interaction would be more than happy to pay up to maintain their account.

So it really comes as no surprise that Twitter are now considering paid for accounts, in this case for commercial use.  But there are a couple of obvious speedbumps:

• The proverbial gate of free accounts has been left open so long that perhaps the monetising namespace horse has already bolted.  Will commercial entities even now be able to realise and evaluate value in maintaining a presence on Twitter?  When Marketing contacted Bob Pearson, VP of communities and conversations at Dell, with that exact question and got a telling response: “If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere.”  Sadly I suspect that Dell and a raft of other commercial entities will be quicker to jump ship than they were to board in the first place.
• Personal accounts will be exempt (at the moment) from this charge.  Obvious really but for businesses to be enticed into using Twitter as a marketplace it is vital that Twitter continues to grow it’s user numbers.   But when does a personal account become a commercial account?

Is Barack Obama a personal account or (now) a government account?  What about Stephen Fry – sure it’s a “personal” account but the business of Stephen Fry is, well selling Stephen Fry.  How about one man bands, the Whatleydude’s and Jonathan MacDonald’s of the world just when (and who decides) do these personal accounts become something more?

I’m not suggesting for a second that there needs to be a process for deciding, just that this is an area dotted with mines.

And of course there has as yet been no mention of cost.

An alternative approach

In October 2008 I had about an hours chat with Jon Bishop at a meeting of the Tuttle Club in London where we talked about where Twitter could derive income.  An idea forming in my head at the time (and it probably was based on those prior conversations with Robert) was around the usefulness of Twitter as a B2B & B2C platform, a messaging platform if you will for applications using the simple form of source based routing we all know and love on Twitter.  The ideas weren’t fully formed at the time (an old school mate Nick Halstead recently discussed the API route to revenue over on his blog) until just before Christmas when during one particularly busy afternoon I stopped receiving updates periodically.

For any serious Twitterer the bane of one’s tweeting existence is the current API limit.  I’m not a developer and will not claim to fully understand REST of any of the other goodness that has gone into the creation of the Twitter API, but I do get API’s what they do and why.   The volume of messages going across the Twitter API daily must be huge (anyone got stats?) and growing weekly.

Of course scaling this is easy is the system was designed to do so from the ground up, but I suspect that like most organically created systems the  Twitter API groans and strains like a 14 year old boy.  Remember 2008 – the year of the fail whale?

Twitter’s current limit of 20,000 calls per hour for whitelisted apps and 100 calls (?) for individual accounts places some control on this growth but seriously hampers active users.

For commercial operations this restriction needs to be either lifted or better still paid for by volume.

Rather than having say Dell pay for an account username, have them pay for messages.  A bit like how we all used to pay for SMS before all-you-can-eat packages were available.  In fact why not have an all-you-can-eat service level for the seriously verbose users?

As long as the cost is proportional to traffic and the business provided can easily access, buy, maintain and analyse their costs/benefits and that the money is driven back into helping to create the infrastructure needed then everyone wins.

To my thinking this user-pays approach if applied makes the system fairer, placing cost on those who i) place the most strain on the system and ii) derive the most direct/indirect monetary benefit from their Twitter presence.  Not at all dissimilar to web hosting, it’s easy enough to get a free account but if you generate a lot of traffic you’ll have to pay at some point.

Of course I may have assumed too much.  Maybe the smarts at Twitter have realised some of this and are already heading down the API  route – until they announce more I guess we must but speculate.  I welcome thoughts and feedback.

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Differential pricing for video calling – is this a disability issue?

A few days back a conversation on Jaiku in which a comment was made regarding the use by the deaf as a potential driver for video calling.

My thoughts on this are yet to be fully formed but it raised a couple of immediate questions;

1) Does 2-way video calling potential level the telecoms playing field for those with a hearing impairment in that now that can use the service to lip-read (assuming they can)?

2) Has anyone done any research into this?

3) Does the differential pricing for video calls, whereby the operator’s charge more for a video call than a voice call, represent discrimination against those unable to utilise the voice service?

Rather obviously for the deaf SMS, IM and microblogging services are a level playing field already.

Hmmm. This needs more thinking.

Mobile Data Enough to Force a Man into Bankruptcy?

Full of Christmas cheer Vodafone UK landed a whopping £27,322 bill on British customer Ian Simpson’s lap.

As part of Simpson’s £41.50 per month contract was a £7.50 data plan maxing out at 120Mb per month.

It appears that Simpson may have forgotten to switch on his ‘Dumbdar’ when he hooked up his mobile as a broadband modem at home as it was faster than his existing connection! After downloading what was thought to be “20-30 TV shows and four albums” Vodafone UK pulled the plug.

Now I’m not sure whether this speaks worse of the state of broadband in the UK or Vodafone UK for helping to perpetuate the widely held belief that mobile network operators are determined not to offer up sensibly priced mobile data. These downloads equate to something like £18 per minute!

Only last month we had the case of the Canadian running up an $85,000 with Bell Canada, for exactly the same thing, using his mobile as a modem.

Vodafone UK have stated they will “try to come to some sympathetic arrangement” with Simpson but is this enough? With Vodafone’s mobile data revenues up 49% to £1bn for the six months to Sep’06 surely they would be in a position to i) wipe this silly bill and ii) leverage their size to open up mobile data when and where the customer wants it for a sensible price?