Sobre expectativas

Do Lee Clow:

If you’re always exceeding clients’ expectations, you may just be working for some fairly mediocre clients

Gregory Brothers

Post foda do Brainstorm9 assinado pelo Rapha Vasconcello, da Click:

Há alguns dias atrás me peguei empolgado com uma ideia, como há tempos não sentia. É uma dessas coisas simples e geniais que a gente esbarra por aí, de tempos em tempos: conheci os Gregory Brothers, e fiquei chapado. Há tempos que eu não via algo tão original e tão inspirador.

Simplificando ao máximo, eles pegam um vídeo na web, geralmente um que esteja começando a ganhar fama, um vídeo com potencial criativo, e o transformam em música. Pode ser qualquer vídeo. Como a música fica aceitável, a vendem na iTunes Store. Isso mesmo: ganham dinheiro com música, de um jeito totalmente novo.

Esse é talvez o melhor exemplo. Veja o vídeo original:

E a música criada em cima:

As músicas do Gregory Brothers são vendidas no iTunes:

Semana passada estava na posição 63 do ranking, uma abaixo da Rihanna, e HOJE está na posição 38.

Outros números: Cerca de 30.000 músicas vendidas na iTunes Store, teve dia que chegou a TOP 3 (imagem abaixo). Número 89 na Billboard Hot 100, matéria no Today Show de hoje nos EUA e uma série de vídeos-respostas (1 e 2) que não param de aparecer.

E o mais bacana:

Quer outro elemento novo? Os Gregory Brothers dividem o lucro da venda da música com a família Dodson, e Antoine, o “figura” que deu a entrevista, hoje aparece em shows, concede entrevistas e já juntou dinheiro suficiente pra mudar do bairro pobre onde o incidente aconteceu.

Puta estratégia!!!

Falácias sobre privacidade

Contraponto interessante à muita coisa que tenho lido por aí sobre privacidade. No texto original do WSJ são 10 falácias, abaixo vão só alguns:

Privacy is free. Many privacy advocates believe it is a free lunch—that is, consumers can obtain more privacy without giving up anything. Not so. There is a strong trade-off between privacy and information: The more privacy consumers have, the less information is available for use in the economy. Since information helps markets work better, the cost of privacy is less efficient markets.

If there are costs of privacy, they are borne by companies. Many who do admit that privacy regulations restricting the use of information about consumers have costs believe they are born entirely by firms. Yet consumers get tremendous benefits from the use of information.

Think of all the free stuff on the Web: newspapers, search engines, stock prices, sports scores, maps and much more. Google alone lists more than 50 free services—all ultimately funded by targeted advertising based on the use of information. If revenues from advertising are reduced or if costs increase, then fewer such services will be provided.

If consumers knew how information about them was being used, they would be irate. When something (such as tainted food) actually harms consumers, they learn about the sources of the harm. But in spite of warnings by privacy advocates, consumers don’t bother to learn about information use on the Web precisely because there is no harm from the way it is used.

Restricting the use of information (such as by mandating consumer “opt-in”) will benefit consumers. In fact, since the use of information is generally benign and valuable, policies that lead to less information being used are generally harmful.

Sobre dados e satélites

Aperitivo de um PDF fresquinho da The Economist sobre dados e o tal dilúvio informacional.

Nic Marks: The Happy Planet Index

Statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation’s success by its productivity — instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people. He introduces the Happy Planet Index, which tracks national well-being against resource use (because a happy life doesn’t have to cost the earth). Which countries rank highest in the HPI? You might be surprised.

Durante a palestra ele fala uma frase que sempre ecoou em minha mente:

We are focus on the worst case cenarium, we are focus on the problems,  and we´re not thought enough about the solutions

É para se tornar um mantra

“Behavioral Finance: The Role of Psychology”

Tô viciado nessa porra!

Behavioral Finance is a relatively recent revolution in finance that applies insights from all of the social sciences to finance. New decision-making models incorporate psychology and sociology, among other disciplines, to explain economic and financial phenomenon, such as erratic stock price variations. Psychological patterns such as overconfidence and perceived kinks in the value function seem to impact financial decision-making, but are not included in classical theories such as the Expected Utility Theory. Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory addresses such issues and sheds light on irrational deviations from traditional decision-making models.

Obrigado, Yale, por gravar tão bem as aulas (algumas têm transcrição, o conteúdo que o aluno recebe e até o que o professor que escreve no quadro!). Essa aula aí de cima tem legenda em inglês no próprio vídeo!

E obrigado, Tim Berners-Lee, pela internet. Tu é foda!

What physics taught me about marketing

Palestra curta e foda com o diretor de marketing do google.

Physics and marketing don’t seem to have much in common, but Dan Cobley is passionate about both. He brings these unlikely bedfellows together using Newton’s second law, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the scientific method and the second law of thermodynamics to explain the fundamental theories of branding.

“Entropy always will increase”, motherfucker!! Run for your fucking life!!!

“Social media, I gave you the best years of my life, but never again. You broke my heart.”

Um dos posts mais corajosos e reflexivos que eu já li. Do Leo Laporte.

Something happened tonight that made me question everything I’ve done with social media since I first joined Twitter in late 2006.

You know me – I’m a complete web whore. I sign up for every site, try every web app, use every service I can find. It’s my job, but I also love doing it. I believe in the Internet as a communication tool. I love trying the myriad new ways people are using it to connect and I believed that social media specifically had some magic new potential to bring us together.

When Google announced Buzz last year I was one of the first to jump on the bandwagon. I welcomed a competitor to Twitter that had the community features I loved in Friendfeed and Jaiku, and I thought Google had the best chance to create a second generation social network. I defended Google for its initial privacy stumbles and I began to use Buzz exclusively, replacing Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook. I built a following of over 17,000 people. I was happy.

Then last night I noticed that my Buzzes were no longer showing up on Twitter (I use a service called Buzz Can Tweet that has been pretty reliably rebroadcasting my Buzz posts to Twitter.) I looked more closely at my Buzz feed and noticed that there had been considerably less engagement over the past few weeks. Then I noticed that I wasn’t seeing my posts in my Buzz timeline at all. A little deeper investigation showed that nothing I had posted on Buzz had gone public since August 6. Nothing. Fifteen posts buried, including show notes from a week’s worth of TWiT podcasts.

Maybe I did something wrong to my Google settings. Maybe I flipped some obscure switch. I am completely willing to take the blame here. But I am also taking away a hugely important lesson.

No one noticed.

Not even me.

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.

Thank God the content I deem most important, my Internet and broadcast radio shows, still stand. I believe in what I’m doing there, and have been very fortunate to have found an audience. I’m pretty sure I would have heard from people if there had been 16 days of dead silence there. Hell, if we miss one show I get hundreds of emails. But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place.

I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more. I’m sorry for having neglected you Leoville. From now on when I post a picture of a particularly delicious sandwich I’m posting it here. When I complain that Sookie is back with Bill, you’ll hear it here first. And the show notes for my shows will go here, too.

Social media, I gave you the best years of my life, but never again. I know where I am wanted. Screw you Google Buzz. You broke my heart.

De quebra ainda tem esse link, que começa com uma citação mais que apropriada:

A poor life this if, full of care / We have no time to stand and stare

Jogos sociais no Brasil

A Mentez é a empresa mais bem sucedida em jogos online na AL, em especial no Brasil, e o Orkut é a principal plataforma. Em uma entrevista, o CEO da Mentez falou coisas interessantes sobre o mercado brasileiro. Comecemos com uma provocação. Ao falar das características dos jogos brasileiros, o cara diz que é muito importante injetar a cultura nacional no jogo:

“Another example is that in farming games in Brazil, users could steal from other users. That wouldn’t work in the US or Europe, but for Brazilian users it was a key functionality, and it’s a reason our farming game is number one in Brazil.”

A Mentez tem uma espécie de paypal bem peculiar:

[At Mentez] we have a strong monetization platform that’s a combination of online and offline. In Brazil, about 40 percent of people don’t have a credit card, so there’s a payment gateway to process cards, and 120,000 points of sale on the street, so users can go and buy the credits. Also, 35 percent of the population accesses the internet through cafes.

Orkut ou facebook?

Right now Orkut is huge, I believe the number one site in Brazil. My estimation is that it has over 50 million users. So for Orkut to keep growing is difficult. I don’t believe they’re growing because they have 80 percent penetration of internet users, and from what I’ve seen Google is investing in Orkut and they want to keep their leadership.

But Facebook is investing as well. The way that Facebook is growing in Brazil is with high-income users, people that speak English or have friends in the US. They’re very strong with the high-income users. However, the Brazilian market is a massive market, so if you want to be a player in Brazil, you need the rest, where Orkut has its leadership.

Para fechar, mais monetização:

The good news is that the Brazilian user’s monetization behavior is similar to the United States. Four to six percent of the user base does transactions, versus what I hear is about six to eight percent in the US.

For our only game that has been on the market for more than a year, we’ve seen users spend $10 per year. The life-cycle of our games, from what we’ve seen, is 8-12 months, but like in any other market they eventually get flat and start to decline.

“When there are incentives to cheat, a small percent of people always will”

O livro Freakonomics virou filme!