Company Name

Daily Grommet

20-Word Description

Daily Grommet tells the story of one product discovery a day with video, original content, live comments, blogs and emails.

CEO’s Pitch

Many people are delighted to support independent or innovative companies with stylish, inventive, useful products. But who has the time to find them? That’s what we do.

Daily Grommet discovers one fresh product a day, and tells its true story. One blogger called us the anti-Amazon because “rather than having everything for everyone with the consumer being responsible to find it, Daily Grommet has only one thing for you, as long as you dig what the Grommettes dig.” Even bigger, we’re taking all those conversations that happen among friends about the products they use and like, and we’re organizing them into a powerful, social media-based word of mouth campaign.

Mashable’s Take

Partially an ode to the Home Shopping Network or QVC, albeit styled in new media-esque proportions, and partially a play on the Woot philosophy of “one day, one deal,” Daily Grommet is a showcase of items shown individually, complete with video presentations, and a descriptive storyline of how the site’s reviewers came upon each product. Naturally, visitors are encouraged to post comments.

Looking into Daily Grommet’s history, the venture is certainly very young. Only a handful of items are listed at present in the menu of ‘Past Grommets.’ But the idea put forth by its creators is as quaint and homely as it is enjoyable to observe. For the job undertaken, the site’s dimensions are perfectly crafted, really. Others perhaps try to professionalize too much. This project, meanwhile, seems to connote that time honored phrase of “keeping it real.” Take a look for yourself. You’ll see what I mean.

Of course, there’s only one way Daily Grommet can really succeed in its pursuit. And that is to remain steadfast with its rollout. In the early days of the podcasting boom, the term daily was loosely used, and understandably so. Things were very rough cut and almost entirely unrehearsed and laden with defined schedules and the like. Now, the option to keep things casual doesn’t serve creators’ interests. No reason to jump to conclusions yet, though. All things being said, Daily Grommet is young, so we’ll just have to see where things go.

As far as its basis for existence is concerned, I think Daily Grommet holds considerable promise. While the product lineup to start the week isn’t my cup of tea, it is diverse enough to target a broad audience that doesn’t take to things like clearance priced flash drives and super cheap computer monitors. Today, for instance, the site features a Microplane Zester/Grater. Rejoice, all you kitchen hounds!

We’ll see what comes of Daily Grommet as the days go by. Suffice it to say that initial signs point to interesting times ahead for this one. Nothing’s guaranteed, but more often than not, sheer perseverance is what gets participants in the new media market to higher places with more potent exposure.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

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Source:Mashable!

The Guardian, one of the UK’s biggest newspapers, is breaking ranks with its dead tree counterparts and offering up its content in full-text RSS feeds. As the Google Reader team notes in its blog post about the move, The Guardian in turn becomes the first major newspaper in the world to do so.

To-date, newspapers have only offered partial feeds primarily because there isn’t nearly as much money to be made in RSS advertising as there is in selling more conventional banner, text, and overlay ads on websites. With a partial feed that only offers a headline and brief summary, the thinking is that people will click thru to the website to read the article, and in turn, load those ads.

The problem with this model is that very few people subscribe to partial feeds, because they offer little value. The Guardian is trying to turn this model upside down, and I think it could be successful, both as a user that wants to consume content in an RSS reader, and from a business perspective for the newspaper.

First and foremost, The Guardian instantly gains an advantage on every other newspaper in the world, because their feeds are now way more useful than those of its competitors. And while RSS may still be fairly niche, The Guardian also positions itself to take advantage of the viralness that is now built into many RSS readers. For example, in Google Reader, when you “share” an item, it is broadcast to your Google contacts, on Friendfeed, and on dozens of other Web aggregators.

Most RSS readers also include the more mainstream concept of simply emailing a story to a friend – something one isn’t likely to do from within the reader when there is only a headline and short summary. While all of that sharing might not translate into immediate revenue for The Guardian, it does give their stories and brand greater exposure in a market that is currently being completely dominated by alternative sources like blogs, most of which offer full-text feeds.

There are a couple caveats about The Guardians implementation of full-text feeds. As the company notes in a blog post, images and cartoons won’t always be included, and content where publishing rights are uncertain (such as a story from one of the wire services) will be limited to excerpts in the feed. Fair enough. Nonetheless, The Guardian is taking a very progressive (and long overdue) step for old media. It will be interesting to see who follows suit.

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Are you ready to have your mind blown?  I hope so.  I never thought I would live to see the day when an Old Media institution defended piracy. One has, and I intend to make a big stink about it because it’s something we should all put on our calendars and remember.

I recently re-discovered the Dallas Morning News Tech Blog a few weeks ago.  It had somehow become a buried feed in my reader, relegated to relative obscurity of my “fallback bin.” It’s mostly geo-centric tech news to Dallas, but yesterday they proffered comment on a New York Times news item about the rise of piracy of school textbooks. In the piece, amazingly, they actually condone piracy:

But what if someone really does write an incredible organic chemistry book, one that will let students learn twice as much in half the time?

That’s why I say that professors — rather than textbook publishers or authors — are the villains. They should be the gatekeepers, the ones who distinguish between expensive me-toos and truly innovative works.

But they don’t. So the whole system is a fraud. Good for the kids who are subverting it.

I’d expect to see this attitude (though a bit more toned down) in TechDirt, or possibly this verbatim in TorrentFreak, but the Dallas Morning News?  Simply astounding. 

Not that I’m complaining.  I’ve always been sympathetic towards pirates of all stripe for a number of reasons, and this is one of the better explained defenses of piracy. As they quoted from the New York Times:

More students are choosing used books over new; sales of a new edition plunge as soon as used copies are available, in the semester following introduction; and publishers raise prices and shorten intervals between revisions to try to recoup the loss of revenue.

Andrew Smith at the DMN Tech Blog expounds:

The Times focuses on a basic Organic Chemistry textbook that runs 1,300 pages and costs $210 new. The publisher sells a $110 e-book version that cuts book retailers out of the loop and eliminates the possibility of used books hurting new-copy sales.

Rather than focusing on actual innovation, these publishers are making minor changes to the texts, and pricing the books even higher than they were the previous year.  Certainly the books are a necessary part of the learning process, but the media type is quite obviously all wrong.  Rather than printing a whole new run of books, simply amending a line or paragraph that reflects the latest research on the topic and recompiling the PDF, or amending updating the database from which the hypertext is pulled from.

Clearly the printing costs (which aren’t going down, by the way) are a part of the justification for the high price. If they can offer the same text book in electronic form for half the price, then there’s clearly some wiggle room there.

Piracy in the music business forced new business models to arise. Piracy in the entertainment business is forcing the film industry to adapt by making better movies (for unique formats you can’t see in your living room).

Perhaps piracy will act as a market force here and end the cycle of racketeering by the school systems and publishers.

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Yahoo Music sent out a notice yesterday to all the users of the Yahoo Music Store letting them know, amongst other things, that they’d be shutting down their DRM servers in September.  As Dave over at Evil Genius Chronicles so emphatically put it today, it is yet another reason why you should never purchase music that includes digital rights management.

The only way after September you’ll be able to move your music around or play it is if you decide to burn your music to compact disk and re-import it to your machine (or alternatively bust the DRM with an underground tool). This is because every time you use your purchased music, your player will go attempt to go out and ping the Yahoo DRM server to verify proper ownership. When it is no longer there, your player will simply assume you’re a pirate and not play the music.

Interestingly enough, this circumvention by CD method was the course of action suggested by Yahoo in the service’s fairwell email to its users. The PDF embedded via Scribd below.

yahoo music drm email - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: yahoo music drm email

RealTechNews is reporting that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a set of demands from Yahoo (as they did when Microsoft pulled this same stunt) including an apology to their customers as well as a full refund for the cost of all the music purchased.

We’d be inclined to agree, but we’d settle for a simple executable designed to undo the DRM to turn our Yahoo music into universally playable music.

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Source:Mashable!

Redlasso, the web service we occasionally used here at Mashable to illustrate a point using footage from mainstream television, has shuttered their service for the time being in the face of a lawsuit being brought against them by NBC Universal and Fox.

According to a press release issued by the company today, in light of the litigation, they’re cutting off all access to the video side of the service to bloggers, but retaining the audio clipping functions as well as their business services.

On their site, they offer a final note to the disgruntled bloggers like myself:

We would like to thank you for your continued support of Redlasso. You have been essential to making Redlasso a household name online. Unfortunately, due to the legal actions taken against Redlasso by two networks, we are left with no alternative but to suspend access to our video search and clipping Beta site FOR THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE. The networks have provided a big blow to the blogger community’s right to exercise the first amendment and comment on newsworthy events. It is anti-Web. During this service suspension, we will continue our conversations with content providers, with the goal of establishing formal partnerships that will quickly help us restore access to the Beta site.

It’s a highly unfortunate end to a very valuable service.  Being able to include clips from newsworthy events was a nice luxury to have while it lasted (we used it in a few cases, including a local news broadcast concerning Loren Feldman, and a CNN clip detailing an investigation on child pornography controls on Craigslist).

At the moment, our embeds still work, but we’re unable to use our account to make any clippings of current TV broadcasts. Michael Massnick made a salient observation on the matter today over at TechDirt:

This is especially odd since TV stations are in the business of attracting viewers, and giving people an easy way to promote your content to others (at absolutely no cost to you) would seem like a good plan for attracting more viewers. However, it would appear that the execs suing believe that companies should have to pay TV studios to promote their TV shows.

It was a gutsy move by RedLasso, and I had no doubt that it was all going to end badly for them when they opened the service, but Mike has a very good point.  All the usage of these clips could have possibly lead to were increased viewership of those networks’ content, and possible increased brand affinity.

Given the fact that newspapers continue to be upset when more than a few words are quoted on a blog (and for that matter some bloggers even have a hard time seeing themselves promoted elsewhere), I’m not particularly surprised to see TV networks blowing a gasket when we use their content to supplement our own.

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According to the latest government data, China now has 253 million internet users, due to recent sharp growth - 56 percent from last year. The inevitable has happened: China now has more internet users than the USA, which is at 223.1 million with 71% online penetration. The fact that the Chinese government is exercising very strict control and censorship over internet use has immensely slowed down the growth of internet use in this country, but when you’ve got a population of over 1.3 billion, even a relatively small fraction of it is enough to become a global leader.

Yes, the really amazing thing is the fact that the online penetration is China is mere 19.1 percent, way, way lower than the USA and most European countries. Financial facts are even more revealing: total revenues for all of China’s internet companies was $5.9 billion in 2007 while in the U.S. online advertising revenues alone in that same year were $21.2 billion. For companies such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other giants, this means two words: untapped potential.

Research firm BDA China Ltd. estimates that China’s online population will keep growing by 18 percent annually - a modest estimation, considering that this growth was 56% this year - and reach 490 million by 2012. The US online market suddenly seems small in comparison. Due to strict Chinese government regulation of the internet, financially the Chinese market will not catch up as fast as it could, but with a little (inevitable) westernization and a little globalization it’ll get there, and every online firm will want a slice of the pie. This one growing market might be more important than most other world’s markets put together.

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Source:Mashable!

I know there’s a good portion of you that are going to instantly groan at the headline, either because it’s a territory that’s been hashed out a number of times from a number of different angles or because you’re one of those folks who simply doesn’t believe there are such thing as “killer” technology (I’ve had that conversation with a few folks recently).

But Duncan Riley put out an interesting, if not provocative, editorial this evening entitled “Television will be the first traditional media medium to fall.”  Personally, I have always felt that radio would be the first to falter, though in a neck-and-neck race with newsprint, but Duncan Riley puts some new stats to work in support the prediction today:

The television switch off is real. In the United States, 2.5 million viewers switched off in the spring on 2008 compared to the same time in 2006. Statistically this is only a small percentage of the overall viewing audience, but among those still watching television, the amount of television they watch each day is declining.

The decline in television viewing is stronger among younger statistical groups. In Europe, a 2005 study from the European Interactive Advertising Association found almost half of 15- to 24-year-olds are watching less TV in favor of browsing the web. A study reported in The Guardian in 2007 headlined with “Young networkers turn off TV and log on to the web.” The television switch off in the United States among younger people has seen the average age of a TV viewer increase to 50.

The stats are compelling, and certainly point to an uncertain future for Old Media television, particularly in the face of the ever increasing volume of studies showing that pretty soon we’ll be watching video online more than we’ll be sleeping. Duncan goes on to say that while newsprint and radio have some harrowing times ahead of them, they’ll survive. At least, for now.

I’m not sure that I agree that TV is the first to go, though. Certainly Duncan makes a compelling case, and I’m not one of those folks who thinks new technology incapable of killing old technology (you certainly don’t see a lot of eight-tracks for sale these days, and photograph developing is quickly becoming a thing of the past). But we’re seeing a lot more rapid detioration taking place in the music and radio business than we’re seeing even in newspaper and television. It’s an interesting deathrace between the industries, and it’s difficult to call a ‘winner’ to the finish line.

Newspaper death watch.

For instance, newspaper decline is largely financial in nature.  Certainly, when you’re talking about business, that’s the most important factor to measure a media type’s life span. Is that what we’re really talking about here, though? The death of the media type or the changing of the guard in terms of the dominant companies behind them. In either event, newsprint and text delivery of news is increasingly being dominated by online blogs and news portals. Circulation may be technically up, but revenues for the companies that resist the transition to online delivery are most decidedly down.

Wise newspaper publications are managing some sort of a transition to an online revenue, but most companies that have their base in serialized news in the printed form still have problems adjusting to the new formats that we in the blogging business take for granted.

Duncan is very positive that newspapers will always go the distance because of the need for quality journalism.  Unfortunately (at least for the newspaper industry) I don’t see this as a particularly convincing argument.  Quality journalism can and does take place outside of newsprint, and for a much greater profit. Some traditional text journalism outfits may realize this and make the transition.  Most won’t.

Disclosure: I may be particularly negative towards newspaper futures due to the fact that in a previous life I consulted for several newspapers in their New Media efforts. In my experience they’re generally not a very forward thinking bunch.

TV death and destruction.

As I said, Duncan makes a compelling point for the impending doom of television, and I’d go even further than he in my prognostications of doom for the media type. Again, like I said regarding the newspaper business, when you’re talking about the death of a media, you’re potentially talking about two things: either the media type itself or the industries behind that media production.

In this situation I think it’s silly to say we’ll stop watching video in our livingrooms on television sets.  Where the video that plays on those sets comes from is very likely to change very soon. Just yesterday I talked about a very clear path for Netflix and Roku to make a play for the livingroom very soon, but they’re obviously not the only ones competing for eyeballs.  TiVo, Apple, and a cadre of other set-top device manufacturers are working on taking real-estate in your entertainment center.

Traditional television has something that no set-top box solution has tackled or mastered yet (aside from coverage of live sporting events), and I’ve talked about it in the past here in my editorials on the subject: the “veg-factor.”

To illustrate the veg-factor, think about the type of media consumption you do in the morning, while you’re getting the kids ready for school, or fixing breakfast in the morning while you’re getting ready for work. Morning show format news-ish programs are designed for this low-engagement, veg-factor consumption. They’re, in large part, designed to be background noise that delivers some entertainment and utility to your morning.

Likewise, in the evening, you come home from work, you switch on the TV and catch the local news or a Seinfeld re-run, and leave the TV on through Wheel of Fortune or whatever reality program du jour is on this season. Most people won’t even touch the remote until prime-time starts. That’s the veg-factor in action.

Very simply, no one is doing this for the set-top box experience. Until there is a one-to-one equivalent for this, you won’t see a complete replacement for television.

Radio apocalypse.

The radio business has been even more dominated in recent years by mega-conglomorates and mergers. With this has come the ‘Clearchannel approach,’ that has driven almost all radio towards a formula for profit. Anecdotally, this was hashed out recently in the comments of an editorial I recently wrote about the impending doom for radio at the hands of the iPhone’s on demand music applications. Sean and I talked about this the other day, and the argument is compelling that radio is doing a decent job of killing itself, and requires no new technology to hasten its death.

But the fact remains that new technologies like smartphones and other pocket devices coupled with the impending ubiquity of wireless Internet access makes things look pretty bleak.

I say that, and I can almost hear Steven Hodson’s voice cracking as he crankily reminds me that impending ubiquity of access is anything but certain (most likely because he reminds me once a week on Elite Tech News). He makes a compelling case for it, but recent news like the coming embedded “Internet Chips” from Intel as VentureBeat reported on the other day makes me think otherwise.

Here’s the thing that really makes radio’s future look particularly bad compared to the rest - the record labels.  Talk radio is very ably making the transition to podcasting and other forms of online audio entertainment media types, but the record labels have very famously dug in their heels and made it next to impossible for broadcasters to adapt their business models for the online environment using popular music.

Given that, it isn’t surprising to see radio clinging the hardest to their dying business models. I predicted back in December that we’d see an end to at least one major record label this year, and I stick by that assessment. Given that the mainstream record labels are so integral to traditional radio’s survival (and their demise is key to online radio’s ascendence), I think it’s now more than ever we should be looking to traditional radio as the first to die off.

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As far as content management tools go, CushyCMS is rather new to the scene, having […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “CushyCMS Adds Pro Accounts, Upgrades Free Version”, url: “http://mashable.com/2008/05/19/cushycms-pro-accounts/” });

Source:Mashable!
A lot of folks would preface an “I told you so” with “I hate to say it.”  I love to say it, particularly in this case.  I’ve been beating silly the New Media pinata, and things are really starting to fall out of it.  I’ve been hearing a whole lot of positive news regarding payment […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “TV Viewers Go Online: See, I Told You So”, url: “http://mashable.com/2008/05/19/new-media-pwn-old-media/” });

In the fantasy world of the blogosphere, reporters for big national newspapers are slow-thinking, backdated rubes flummoxed by the Net, which they mistakenly call teh Intarwebs. In real life, 56-year-old New York Times reporter John Markoff is spending Sunday afternoon cranking through Facebook, installing apps like a champ and taking friend requests from slacker freelance writers i.e. me. This is the same John Markoff thanked in the credits for the original Mac OS two decades ago. Sure, we mocked his Times piece announcing Web 3.0. But at the rate Scoop-’em Markoff is flooding my news feed, he’s going to know more about Facebook than the entire Valleywag staff by Monday morning. Sigh, back to work.