Anime-ting Music Business Models

Here's a characteristically generous post from Andrew Leonard about new business models for music, as practised in Japan:

Once upon a time, a rock band played local clubs, got a record deal, released a single, made an album. Today's up-and-comers license their tunes to video games, movies, cartoons and, of course, commercials.

And, more specifically:

According to Wikipedia, Asian Kung-Fu Generation songs are featured in Nintendo and Konami musical games, as movie themes, and grace the credit sequences for half a dozen anime shows, including "the second opening" for "Naruto" and "the fourth opening" for "Fullmetal Alchemist."

(Via Boing Boing.)

Mobile Linux Goes East

There's an interesting graphic in this story, which shows how very different the smartphone market is around the world - and how big Linux is in China and Japan.

The Birth of Blognation

I was a big fan of the Vecosys blog - I even got used to its horrible name. And then it went away, only to emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes, as something bigger and bolder: Blognation.

Blognation is certainly an ambitious”“Go Big or Go Home”” project, the aim being to report on the Web 2.0 startup ecosystem around the globe including, United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Denmark Portugal, Italy, Iceland, Netherlands, Japan, China / Taiwan / Hong Kong, Australia, Brazil, South America, all with the help of 16+ blognation editors who are getting ready to start writing.

Today sees the launch of blognation UK and over the coming weeks and months all of the other aforementioned blogs will be launched. And proving that I certainly don’t lack ambition, I am currently speaking with a further 10 more prospective editors to cover Canada, Russia, India, South Africa, South Korea, South-East Asia, Poland, Czech Republic, Turkey and Greece.

Makes sense, but it depends critically on the quality of the blogger team that Sam Sethi has assembled. We shall see. At least the name is better than the previous one.

Paying the True Cost

I and many others have written about the need for economic goods to include all the real costs of production - including environmental costs. Here's a great demonstration of what goes wrong if you don't:

"The West moved its manufacturing base to China knowing it was vastly more polluting than Japan, Europe or the US," he added.

"No environmental conditions were attached to this move; in fact the only thing manufacturers were interested in was the price of labour.

"This trend kept the price of our products down but at the cost of soaring greenhouse gas emissions. Long term, this policy has been a climate disaster.

Nominal price goes down, environmental cost goes up. If the latter were factored in, China would not be so eager to employ production techniques that poison its own land and people.

Please, Antigua, Please

Go for it:

Repeated violation of WTO commitments in the face of contrary WTO rulings allows a victimized member country ultimately to suspend its own WTO obligations to the offending nation - a form of restitution much more punitive than tariffs alone. America runs a steady and hefty trade deficit in virtually every category of international trade other than intellectual property.

Were the WTO - with possible European, Japanese, and Chinese support - to allow the Antiguans to suspend all intellectual property obligations to the United States, the American IP industry could face a tiny adversary with an unlimited right to reproduce for its own benefit American IP goods of any kind.

(Not So) Mysterious Asia

Simon Phipps has some interesting numbers relating to open source in Asia:

It seems that a few years ago, more than 95% of the software market in China was foreign-sourced. Last year, however, 70% of the software their government was using was open source. That means a market over which western software companies were rubbing their hands with glee in 2003 (presumably awaiting the payout from the first hit that was free) now see the market potentially evaporating.

The Biter Bit - by Bits

Now that the flow of highly-personal "security" information between the US and other countries is a two-way thing, I predict people in the former are going to become as unenthusiastic about it as those in the latter:

Welcome to the new world of border security. Unsuspecting Americans are turning up at the Canadian border expecting clear sailing, only to find that their past -- sometimes their distant past -- is suddenly an issue.

While Canada officially has barred travelers convicted of criminal offenses for years, attorneys say post-9/11 information-gathering, combined with a sweeping agreement between Canada and the United States to share data, has resulted in a spike in phone calls from concerned travelers.

...

Oh, and by the way, if you don't need to travel to Canada, don't think you won't need to clear your record. Lesperance says it is just a matter of time before agreements are signed with governments in destinations like Japan, Indonesia and Europe.

"This," Lesperance says, "is just the edge of the wedge."

Oh, yes, indeedy.... (Via Slashdot.)

The Future Belongs to Chindia

It's not just mobile phones:

Productivity growth will help India sustain over 8% growth until 2020 and become the second largest economy in the world, ahead of the US, by 2050, Goldman Sachs has said, scaling up estimates of the country's prospects in its October 2003 research paper widely known as the BRICs report.

The original report had projected that India's GDP would outstrip Japan's by 2032 and that in 30 years, it would be the world's third largest economy after China and the US. The new report goes one step further by moving India up from No. 3 and No. 2 in the global sweepstakes of tomorrow.

Ni hao - namaste: I, for one, salute our Chindian overlords. (Via Technocrat.)

Sick in the Genome

From the nation that brought you whaleburgers:

The breeder told Mr. Sasaki that he had bred a dog with three generations of offspring — in human terms, first with its daughter, then a granddaughter and then a great-granddaughter — until Keika was born. The other four puppies in the litter were so hideously deformed that they were killed right after birth.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Whaley, Whaley

Whales may share our kind of intelligence, researchers say after discovering brain cells previously found only in humans and other primates.

They were touted as the brain cells that set humans and the other great apes apart from all other mammals. Now it has been discovered that some whales also have spindle neurons – specialised brain cells that are involved in processing emotions and helping us interact socially.

Now there's a surprise.

"This is consistent with a growing body of evidence for parallels between cetaceans and primates in cognitive abilities, behaviour and social ecology."

How about if we stop eating them, then?

Turbo Wizpy

A long time ago, TurboLinux was a cool company with a turbo-charged CEO, Cliff Miller. As I wrote in Rebel Code:

Born in San Francisco, he had lived in Australia for a year as a child, and then went to Japan for two years, where he stayed with a Japanese family and attended a public school. After he moved back to the United States, Miller attended college, and spent a year in Macedonia, then a part of Yugoslavia, to further his studies of the Macedonian language. "I finished my BA when I was nineteen," he explains, "and then a year later got my MA in linguistics as well," and adds with what amounts to something of an understatement, "I tend to be pretty intense, and just get through things as fast as I can."

But that was in another land; Miller moved out, TurboLinux moved on.

And now here it is, with a dinky little object that sounds, well, cool:

It's an MP3 player. It's an FM radio. It's video and photo display device. It's an e-book reader. It's a sound recorder. It's a Linux-based personal computer ready for web, email and office usage. Yes, it's Wizpy, the Swiss Army Knife of handheld gadgets announced by Japan's Turbolinux this week.

I particularly liked this feature:

Just plug it into a PC's USB port, restart the host machine and it'll boot up into the open source operating system so you can surf and work and be sure nothing's being recorded on the hard disk.

Skulduggery at WIPO

An interesting leaked document shows how the intellectual monopoly bullies (the EU, US and Japan with a few hangers-on) are trying to undermine any good work that WIPO might be minded to do under the influence of developing countries. Clearly still a long way to go on the WIPO front. (Via Boing Boing.)

UK PubMed Central: Good News, Bad News?

The US PubMed Central service has become one of the cornerstones of biomedical research, and a major milestone on the way towards full open access to all scientific knowledge.

Just as the world's central genomic database GenBank exists in three global zones - the US, Europe and Japan - so the natural step would be to roll out PubMed Central as an international service. The first move towards that has now been made with the announcement that a consortium of UK institutions has been chosen to set up UK PubMed Central (UKPMC). That's the good news. The bad news - maybe - is that one of them is the British Library.

Why is that bad news, since the British Library is one of the pre-eminent libraries in the world? Well, that may be so, but it is also deeply involved with Microsoft's Open XML, the rival to OpenDocument Format; Microsoft is trying to push Open XML through a standardisation process to match ODF's full ISO status. It is particularly regrettable that the British Library is bolstering this pseudo-standard with its support, rather than wholeheartedly backing ODF, a totally open, vendor-independent standard, and this could be real problem because of the British Library's role in the UKPMC consortium:

In the initial stages of the UKPMC programme, the British Library will lead on setting up the service, developing the process for handling author submissions and marketing the resource to the research community.

It's the "handling authors submissions" that could be bad news: if, for example, the British Library gave any preference for submissions be made in Microsoft's XML format formats, it would be a huge step back for openness. The US PubMed Central does the Right Thing, and takes submissions in either XML or SGML. Let's hope the UK PubMed Central follows suit and goes for a neutral submissions policy. (Via Open Access News.)

The Other WWW: World-Wide Wikipedia

Wikipedia is deservedly famous, but there is a tendency to conflate Wikipedia with the english version of it. One of Wikipedia's many great achievements - alongside its huge size and the innovative partipation of large numbers of people - is that it is energising communities all around the world to create local versions in languages other than English. There is a list of the main languages at the foot of the main English Wikipedia page.

As Wikipedia explains:

Language editions operate independently of one another. Editions are not bound to the content of other language editions, nor are articles on the same subject required to be translations of each other. Automated translation of articles is explicitly disallowed, though multilingual editors of sufficient fluency are encouraged to manually translate articles. The various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view", though they may diverge on subtler points of policy and practice. Articles and images are shared between Wikipedia editions, the former through "InterWiki" links and pages to request translations, and the latter through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions.

Given this global diversity, and the lack of appreciation of efforts outside the Anglophone world, it's good to see that this three-way interview with leading Wikipedians includes voices from Germany and Japan as well as the obvious English one.