Archive for the “economics” Category

No, I don’t mean the trouble all those college kids are getting into, I mean Charity Muggers, or “chuggers” as the limeys call them.  I was at lunch with @tangyslice in Davis square today and observed him live-blogging the local charity panhandlers.  Being who I am, I couldn’t help but geolocate Tangy’s observed data.

Perhaps you can use this to plot a nag-free course through the square.  Good luck, and watch where you step.  If you really want to make a difference, perhaps you’ll make a donation to Jane Doe Inc., the Massachusetts Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, which is the featured charity of Social Media for Social Change.

It happened again, some punk stole $2 from me in the subway.

Well, not exactly.  What happened was, somebody squeezed through the fare gate behind me without paying.  I hate it when that happens because it makes me feel somehow complicit in the fare-beating, or even that the fare beater has somehow stolen the fare directly from me.

This is generally silly, as there have been fare-beaters - such as turnstile jumpers and token suckers - for as long as there’s been public transportation.  In fact, token suckers were punished by a fine of four shekels in ancient Mesopotamia per the Code of Hammurabi.  But recent changes in the T’s system have made it feel more like a personal robbery because fare beaters can’t just jump the gate, they have to wait for you to pay and then scoot in behind you.  Either that or hack the Charlie card system with some help from MIT.

Any economist will tell you that the cost of fare evasion ultimately falls to the commuters, so I’m going to have to be more alert going through the gate, and I hope you will be too.

PS you might want to take the T to the grand opening of the Hudson Street Gallery this Saturday.

Right on the heels of the terrible cheese/chocolate choice, I find that somebody has made an important cheese choice for me. I went to Diesel Cafe for lunch as I often do and ordered the Branch Trio as I often do - in fact, it was the winner of the Davis Square cheese-off back in May - but found that they had dropped it from the menu as part of a general refresh done this month. The nice lady offered to cobble together a “Branch Duo” since they had only two kinds of cheese - cheddar and jack.

Only two kinds of cheese? There are a dozen sandwiches on the menu and only two kinds of cheese in the whole shop? This is starting to sound dangerously like that Monty Python sketch. To be fair, there is also fresh mozzarella and cream cheese, but those never really belonged on the Branch Trio.

Interestingly, the improvised Branch Duo, while lacking one cheese and some sprouts, featured toasted bread and for some reason cost $2 less than any of the official sandwiches on the menu.

I understand the need for a business to control food costs, and how this can lead to the elimination of a favorite item or ingredient.  (If you don’t, you might need to hire a restaurant consultant.) We’ve all seen sandwich prices rise on account of the price of tomatoes, for example. I guess this is how its going to be. Unless the next president can muster the guts to open the national cheese reserves, it might be a good idea to begin hoarding cheese and maybe also buying cheese futures as a hedge against future cheese inflation.

Coit Tower in the fog

Saba sashimi at Ozuma

Ti Couz Creperie

Lemon cake with blueberries at the Slanted Door (brought in apology for a misplaced entree)

The Contemporary Jewish Museum

The Bay Bridge at dusk

One time, at podcamp, somebody stood up and talked about how her business - an art gallery - had invited local art bloggers over one night for a gallery tour and general chat, and about how this had been a wildly successful PR and community-building exercise. If any gallerists are reading, I suggest you take note. And if any expensive restaurants or clothing stores would like to try this, please do get in touch with me right away.

Yesterday, I got just such an invitation from one of my favorite institutions, WBUR-FM, an NPR station that is more or less permanently tuned on my home and car radios. The good people of WBUR have had the foresight to invest in new media initiatives, including the excellent blog, The ConverStation, ably helmed by Ken George, to which I referred earlier.

Ken invited local bloggers and social media types through facebook, twitter, and maybe even personal invitations, and despite biblical weather, about 15-20 people showed up for a tour of the station, networking, chatting and eventually, eating and drinking. See the WBUR socials flickr group for some not very incriminating photos.

What the heck is that, you ask? It’s a beautiful wooden sound baffle, on the wall of the engineering room next to one of the air studios at BUR. Reminds me of old type-sorting cases. I totally want one. You can see it with more context in the background of some of the flickr pics. Each box is few inches across and has a different depth, turning it into an acoustic black hole, especially at the lower frequencies. Bass checks in, but it doesn’t check out.

Unfortunately, this might be a metaphor for the future of public radio in a digital, on-demand world. Here are some thoughts from the free-wheeling discussion after the tour. I’m sure a lot more was batted around at the bar after, but I had to cut out early for dinner.

Everybody agreed that we all love NPR programming, and eveybody agreed that we all hate pledge time. Some even hate underwriting announcements, and they’re about as painless as ads can be. I learned that NPR underwriting messages cannot include any call to action or any mention of competition or offers. Sadly, this helps confirm why as a marketer, I consider underwriting to be a donation that makes the executives feel good, not a marketing program that drives business.

So what does a roomful of smart social media types say about this? Some suggested that they’d be happy to pay for an ad-free (no underwriting, no pledge driving) audio stream or podcast on a subscription basis. I’ll leave the logistics of pay per podcast - and what to put in the stream gaps left by excluding the pledge drives - to the techies. This hints at the basic problem the old commercial (or pledge) system has: you can’t fast-forward TV or radio, but you sure can fast-forward a podcast. Actually, with TiVo and the like, you can fast-forward TV, and I think there’s something similar for radio.

The next idea that circulated was wondering if people would pay for individual programs by subscription, or individual episodes on demand. This led to discussion of whether public radio looks at how much pledge money comes in from different shows (they do) and whether the pledge-per-show model might let some shows float themselves and others that can’t pay their bills just dry up and die.

I opined that the very premise of public radio was that some kinds of programming could not support themselves in the market, but had such redeeming qualities that it was in the national interest to subsidize them. The elitist and paternalistic nature of public radio is at odds with the both tough-love capitalism and the populism (Diggocracy?) of the internets. Ouch. I guess we really are all batch of quiche-eating prius drivers.

I bet that lots of public radio shows could be commercially viable: Car Talk, Prairie Home Companion, and even This American Life come to mind. (Not all examples are WBUR shows, and NPR syndication is a bit piece of the puzzle here that I’m going to skip for brevity) But what about the stuff that they are essentially subsidizing, Con Salsa, RadioLab, and most of the news? On the one hand, the low, low price of internet distribution could put some of those shows back in the black if they could avoid sharing the big fixed costs of terrestrial radio production and distribution. But on the other hand, dropping those shows from the air would likely make them even even less able to raise money, especially if the station cut them off from a share of the pledge pie.

I’m usually all about free marketeering, but for the small slice of my taxes that goes to support cultural stuff, I’m pretty happy to subsidize and then to pay again on top of that. I hope Ken and the WBUR crew can find their way in this brave new world.

Speaking of free and not so free markets, if you have any disposable income left after tithing to public radio, you might look into the latest in expensive wooden radios, the Tivoli Audio NetWorks internet radio, available in cherry, walnut and wenge, pictured below. (Wikipedia says its endangered, Tivoli says sustainably harvested, go figure)

You may recall that I have a thing for wooden radios, and I periodically check in on what’s new in tree-based audio products. I’ve been critical of Tivoli for getting things painfully almost right in the past, and I think this is another one of those. But the release to market of a $600 internet-only (FM radio costs you an additional $50) audio device has got to mean something to the discussion above. Tivoli is pitching hard on the angle that you don’t need a computer to use this thing to listen to hundreds of radio stations from all around the world, you just need an internet connection. If there’s a place where lots of people have high-speed internet but no computer, I must have missed it. Maybe they just mean you could put this radio in a room where you don’t have a computer, like your bathroom. If you need a $600 internet radio in your bathroom, you need more fiber in your diet.

I haven’t seen or heard or touched this device, but I’m going to tell you what I think anyway since I’ve seen and heard and touched many other Tivoli products.

It’s gorgeous - from the waist down. The geometry of the box and the speaker and their colors and materials look great. I love the wenge especially. I recognize that it probably needs a digital display, but couldn’t they come up with something less ugly? I would think that a color screen wouldn’t be hard to pull off at this price point. And maybe you don’t need those two rivets on the display frame? Ick. The credit-card remote looks like it has those awful blister buttons, too. There’s a button or knob on the top of the unit that might - just might - approach the joy of the geared-down knob on the Model One, but sadly, I doubt it.

It’s expensive - I’ve mentioned this a few times and I’m still a bit in shock. For $600 you get a mono internet radio. Other internet radios cost half that. If you already have a computer, you can get speakers for even less. And you have to add $50 more for FM and another $100 for a second speaker for stereo sound. I can’t tell if the second speaker is connected by cable or wireless. Conspicuously absent, an ipod dock. Clearly, this is a premium product, so I say, just take the whole kaboodle up to $800 or $1000 and don’t nickel and dime your premium customers.

It probably sounds great - I really don’t know, but the reviewers seem to like it, and it has some spiffy buffering technology that might reduce the chop of a lousy internet stream. The wooden case bodes well, too.

It’ll be interesting to see how this product goes for Tivoli. If they’re right, there are some people willing to pony up big bucks to get good looks and good sound with internet radio. If they’re wrong, the XM-Sirius monster might eat their lunch, or the internet radio generation will just pass them by. That would be a shame, I think the world needs more and better wooden cases for its electronics.