BCmoney – Board Meeting
Title: BCmoney – Board Meeting
Location: 110 Branch Street, Moncton NB
Description: This meeting, the first of its kind where stakeholders will have a chance to gather and voice their opinion, concerns or comments, and vote on the management of BC$, will essentially decide the future of BC$ and set the tone for its miraculous success or impending death.
The good news is that a party and BBQ will follow this event.
Start Time: 14:00
End Time: 16:00
Date: 2008-07-13 (Saturday, July 13th, 2008)
KEY Topics for the evening will include:
- Evaluation of Funding Options
- Use of current Budget
- Marketing Strategy
The Famous Deadly Question….
Image via FST
“How does it make money?”
As Joe Marchese reminds us in this week’s edition of Online Spin: Investors And Advertisers Playing A Dangerous Game — Again that’s a million dollar question right now. And its also the question on everybody’s mind these days, when considering a move from traditional to digital media. It’s a simple question, and yet there are many a complex and contrived answer when it gets posed to many of the current leading content providers, publishers, aggregators and portals. Almost each of them have a different vision of how their content services will be sustained over time, but the bottom line to all of them seems to be an Ad based model.
As was hinted at in this week’s Video Insider: http://blogs.mediapost.com/video_insider/?p=181, they’re trying to answer the question on someone else’s terms, and as a result they’re scrambling to come up with the right answer, or, the answer they think that Marketers, Retailers and Advertising Agencies alike want to hear. Trying to compare apples to oranges, coloring the apples orange and the oranges red or yellow, doesn’t really change the fact that their presumptions upon which they base their answers are flawed. People assume that digital will and should play out just the same as traditional media, but they are greatly mistaken.
Ballmer on the future and Microsoft
Image via CrunchBase
Earlier this month Bill Gates confirmed rumors and news headlines that he would be stepping down from his daily activities at Microsoft and handing over the bulk of the control and responsibility of Microsoft’s management to current CEO Steve Ballmer. (In fact, it was part of a multi-phase retirement plan already released on the company’s corporate press site)
Since the announcement, and indeed over the course of this transitionary year, Ballmer has already made himself comfortable as he prepares for the position of Microsoft top gun by redifining the Microsoft mission statement and privacy policies, shifting a significant focus towards the horizontal and vertical advertising markets, with particular emphasis on content and discovery (i.e. search). The company’s new policy and direction can already be clearly seen in the attempted acquisition of Yahoo!, the world’s #2 search provider (by market share and volume), and arguably one of the best at dealing with premium advertisers, and working them into its existing content portal & framework.
An interesting set of interview clips were posted this week over at the Washington Post’s Technology section.
Finally we see the executive-level beginning to echo what the BCmoney team has been talking about for quite some time. It seems that Mr. Ballmer has been debriefed extremely well, and assuming that his responses were not merely scripted, he seems to really have a handle on the emerging global content ecosystem. He even went so far to have admitted that perhaps Microsoft and competitors Google, Yahoo! and other Ad Networks are crossing some legal boundaries and thresholds, and will eventually need to pay users in exchange for monitoring their behavior and usage data. In the picture of the future of advertising painted by Ballmer, companies will compete on not just services and technology, but also on privacy policy. Finally, he warned that governments need to refine their laws for the digital world or put its people at risk to large corporations mining their date without limit or reprecutions.
In addition, Bill Gates has even made an ode to Bill Clinton and his popular “Final Days in the White House” viral video, with “Bill Gates’ Last Days at Microsoft”:
Related articles
- Should Microsoft acquire Netflix? And its CEO? (seattlepi.com)
- Transcript of David Einhorn’s Speech at the Ira Sohn Conference – Insider Monkey (stoweboyd.com)
- A Fool Looks Back (fool.com)
- Ballmer going down? (amanwithaphd.wordpress.com)
- Hedge Fund Honcho Wants Microsoft’s Ballmer Out (techdailydose.nationaljournal.com)
- How Much Authority Does Steve Ballmer Have? (conceivablytech.com)
- Report: Microsoft board supports Ballmer (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
BC$ = Behavior, Content, Money
The goal of the BC$ project is to raise awareness and make changes with respect to the three pillars of information freedom - Behavior (pursuit of interests and passions), Content (sharing/exchanging ideas in various formats), Money (fairness and accessibility) - bringing to light the fact that:
1. We regularly hand over our browser histories, search histories and daily online activities to companies that want our money, or, to benefit from our use of their services with lucrative ad deals or sales of personal information.
2. We create and/or consume interesting content on their services, but we aren't adequately rewarded for our creative efforts or loyalty.
3. We pay money to be connected online (and possibly also over mobile), yet we lose both time and money by allowing companies to market to us with unsolicited advertisements, irrelevant product offers and unfairly structured service pricing plans.