Back from today’s seminars. I’m really quite tired, but try to give you a short wrap up here of today’s events. It will be brief, but I believe that if you’re one of the fairly dedicated people reading this blog, you’ll find more ground breaking stuff in your regular Twitter- and RSS-feeds than in these seminars. Consider this the short short version. Here we go.

Today’s Golden Egg seminars were all about stating the obvious. The talks following the RAB-talk I mentioned earlier were eloquent, though not very surprising. The talk by Alan Rosenfeld was better, though perhaps a bit soft when you’re used to seeing Steve Jobs in front of basically the same slides.

The talk by Weber Shandwick’s Leo Rayman was correct but not exactly earth shattering.  I liked this slide for some reason.

The last talk of the day was by David Orlic. It was a very well written talk on the things that he and I have both been talking about for some time now. No more, no less. The difference today was that it was received with a curious interest. It’s as if our constant nagging about honesty and utility is finally starting to catch on. Perhaps we have the financial crisis to thank for this change in attitude, or perhaps it has finally just become inevitable. Either way it was a joy to see it happen.

(Was this a not so  secret message to us? ‘stop lying dammit’)

Anyone who has ever been to one of my talks will recognize this graph.

All in all, the state of the union is perhaps finally one of awakening. Neither me, nor David are trying to change the world, we’re just saying what should be obvious to anyone: Be honest. Don’t spend 90% of your marketing budget on distribution. Deserve attention.

A few days after the fact I read this article on Realtid.se. The contents of the article are nothing jaw dropping. The comments on the article however, reflect the fact that so much of this discussion is taking place well outside the realm of relevance. People are talking about whether or not artists should be able to be artists, something that would require them to get paid for their work. Fair enough. But it is utterly irrelevant. Art will not dissappear. Neither will the internet. I will not waste energy on this discussion. Like most things, it will evolve Darwinistically.

To be productive we have to discuss value. The business model of charging for copies is obsolete. Some copies, such as physical books, have a certain value and will prevail. CDs are just a hassle. So are digital self hosted files really. So where can we add value? Here are some examples:

1. Hosting. Hosting music and syncing it between players is a hassle for the consumer. Especially if you have to authorize the player (In which case the stolen product is actually superior to the purchased one. Go figure).

2. Shareability. An effect of sharing a central database of music is that sharing music only requires sharing a tiny link. The evolution of sharing services is still somewhere around the stone age.

3. Upping the S/N-Ratio. There is just so much music! Finding the stuff you love could easily be a full time job. In my engineering days we talked about upping the signal to noice ratio. Last FM and Genious has scraped the surface of this field, but here you can create real value. And again, a centralized music database makes this much more effective.

4. Augmented Intelligence. Yes, Jan Guillou, I know you’re upset about your audiobooks and that I’ve been focusing on music. But here is an idea for audiobooks as well: If a centralized service keeps track of what I’ve “read” of what audiobook it can help me mine this data (since audiobooks are also available in text form) and help me draw conclusions that I would perhaps not otherwise have seen. I’ve personally co-developed a service doing knowledge clustering for the television industry. We could just as well do it with this data. Suddenly the person using this service is smarter than the person downloading on Pirate Bay. Again – this is real value. If anyone out there would like to develop this service, give me a call. I’ve made quite a bit of progress here already.

The current discussion about Pirate Bay is a joke. We will laugh at it ten years from now. If that.