Blockbuster Video is launching an API called “Blockbuster Everywhere.” The new cross-channel API is designed to deliver films, reviews and real-time inventory to devices that include phones, set top boxes, gaming consoles and other point of sale locations such as gas stations.

The Blockbuster story is another example of how companies are re-architecting through open API’s to reconfigure their businesses. A point of sale can be in any number of places. It may be a store, the Web or through a platform like Tivo.

Sponsor

Open API’s are lightweight, flexible and relatively affordable. And that’s just what Blockbuster needs. Blockbuster has been close to bankruptcy. The company plans to close 20% of its stores by 2011.

An API strategy gives Blockbuster the leverage to give the customer a unified experience across multiple channels. It also opens new ways to sell products as the API can present the right information at the right time on the platform of the customer’s choice. For instance, that may mean doing a check on the availability of a film at local stores. It may also mean accessing Blockbuster through a smartphone or other devices. Blockbuser is limiting the API to its partners but may open it up in the future. Partners include Tivo, Samsung and HTC.

The new API strategy comes after two years of work to consolidate Blockbuster’s multiple channels to represent its new philosophy: “One Customer, One Blockbuster.”

The time was right to make the transition. API’s were on the rise. But for a while it looked like it would be a massively expensive, heavyweight integration.

In 2008, open API’s began to appear in enterprise environments. But for the most part, customers received pitches like Blockbuster did from the big technology companies to “blow up the databases,” said Mike Debnar, Blockbuster Vice President of Retail Systems.

And the cost? Some bids came in at $1 million.

In 2009, a convergence came. CEO James Keyes became a strong partner in a customer focused strategy. The company started aggregating its legacy data to integrate into an API that it built with Sonoa Systems.

Sonoa worked with Blockbuster to develop API that is built on RESTful web services. It can be easily managed by a small team. The API is integrated with back office systems.

Blockbuster is also updating its iPhone app to reflect the new cross-channel efforts.

Sam Ramji of Sonoa puts it this way. The API gives Blockbuster greater possibilities to reach across a number of varied channels.

It mat seem far away but retailers are preparing for the holiday season. And where may customers be doing shopping?

Perhaps in the store or from their desktop. But it’s also likely they will be on the couch using their iPad to buy their holiday gifts.

Discuss

The Web is huge. And growing. Faster everyday. It’s almost like an ocean where there’s no evaporation (the data on the Web stays there virtually forever), but yet, it’s always raining in it. The rain is the new content that’s added into the ocean.

Every tweet is a drop, every blog post is a drop, every check-in is a drop that falls into the ocean. This ocean is almost constantly under a tropical storm in some places, like Twitter or Facebook.

Sponsor

Guest author Julien Genestoux is the founder and CEO of Superfeedr, a company dedicated at making RSS and Atom feeds realtime. It has implemented PubSubHubbub from day one and now host several hubs, including ReadWriteWeb, Tumblr, Posterous and Gawker. Follow Julien on Twitter.

When you’re a search engine, you obviously have an exhaustivity requirement. You can’t really skip on indexing the Indian Ocean. Google sends its bo(a)ts all over the ocean where it’s raining to update its index. However, the ocean is growing so fast that it will eventually become harder and harder to stay exhaustive.

Unfortunately, not only the ocean is growing, but it’s also raining more, which means that if a bo(a)t is away from a zone for too long, when it will be back it will have changed tremendously. That’s what happens when you see results in a search engine that are 1- or 2-years old, or even older. They’re not wrong, they’re just often inaccurate, but rank well.

It’s a real technical problem for search engines to know where to send their bo(a)ts, and at the right time! And when Google says they’re going to feed their search index with PubSubHubbub data, that’s what they’re trying to do: save a little bit on the boats.

I strongly disagree with John Battelle when he says this is not a huge deal. My take is that he sees this only as a great technical and infrastructure opportunity for Google, not so much as an immediate benefit for the end user. I strongly disagree – and so do you. You disagreed when you typed “earthquake” into Twitter Search, or even “hudson crash”, or “Mickael Jackson”. At that point, you knew that Google wasn’t able to provide you with the information you were looking for, and this is a massive loss for Google.

Google will have a hard time getting this brain share back. The first thing it needs to do is to actually have results that date back from the minute when people look for these things.

You may argue that if you search 10 times a day on Google, you go maybe once a week to Twitter search. I’m the same, no worries. Yet, I know that Twitter is much better than Google at contextualization. When I do a search on Google, I expect to find the absolute truth. If I look for earthquake, I’m looking at facts about earthquakes: pictures or maybe historical data. If I look for earthquake on Twitter, I’m looking for context; I want what is being said about earthquakes now (and here!).

As a matter of facts, Google always had a lot of issues about context because they know so little about the people who search there (or maybe they know a lot, but don’t want to scare us). Adding PubSubHubbub is a way for them to be able to take the “time dimension” back. They many never have the conversations that Twitter has, but they will have a much bigger ocean of data than Twitter’s sea of Tweets

Photo by Pam Roth.

Discuss

Later today, Google plans to unveil its own smartphone, the Nexus One. According to new data from research firm Forrerster’s new U.S. Omnibus Survey, Google is launching this phone at just the right time. Today, 17% of U.S. adult who subscribe to a cell phone plan use smartphones. This number is up from 11% in 2008 and 7% in 2007. Thanks to the growing importance of Android, Forrester thinks that 2010 will be “the year of the smartphone.”

Sponsor

Forrester’s Charles S. Golvin also notes that quick messaging devices with closed operating systems like the LG Xenon are still growing at a rapid pace as well. Currently, about 15% of adult subscribers own one of these devices. While the growth of this category slowed down somewhat over 2009, it still eclipsed that of the smartphone segment. As prices for smartphones continue to come down and as developers manage to overcome some of the usability issues of current devices, more and more users will opt for full-blown smartphones instead of quick messaging devices in the coming years.

While Android and Apple’s iPhone are clearly driving the adoption of smartphones – and the Nexus One will surely play its part in this in 2010 – it’s important to note that BlackBerry still maintains its two-to-one advantage of the iPhone.

The Google Phone

It’ll be interesting to see how Google will market the Nexus One. Thanks to numerous early reviews, there is very little that we don’t know about the phone itself at this point. Chances are that Google has a few surprises up its sleeve for today’s announcement. After all, the company must have known that today’s press briefing would come long after all the details about the actual hardware of the phone had leaked already.

Discuss

For decades the cost of publishing on dead trees gave the publishing industry significant leverage over hopeful writers. But the Internet, specifically sites like Lulu and Scribd, are about to change all that.

Here is the classic scenario: A writer pours his heart and soul into a manuscript, polishes it up, and sends it, along with the lump in his throat, to a publisher in the hopes of validation of his art. After all, an unpublished writer may as well be no writer at all. Sometimes he even pays a reading fee, a small tax to weed out more impoverished competition while supporting publishers. He waits, he collects rejection slips, and if he hits the right publisher at the right time, he gets published.

If the publisher has a good relationship with booksellers, a hefty marketing budget, friends in high book review places, both the writer and the publisher succeed. The vast majority end up at smaller publishers dedicated to publishing fine works for minimal return as a sort of commitment to the arts. Regardless of who takes the risk (risk=cost of dead trees, marketing) on an author, the author’s standard reimbursement: a dollar per copy sold.

Yes, the reader pays upwards of $25 for a book, and the person who created it gets a lousy buck. The rest of the money goes to cover the cost of printing and marketing, and the rest is pocketed by publishers and booksellers. That lousy buck is fine if you sell millions, or even hundreds of thousands, but a book just needs to have a good week of 5,000 copies sold to qualify as a “best seller.” And the vast majority of authors would be lucky to sell that many ever.

If an author spends a year, two years, five years on a book, that’s not great return on investment.

The Internet offers good news, though, for modern authors. “Self-publishing” used to mean an author couldn’t convince a publisher to take a risk on him (or her, apologies to women writers everywhere—gender-specific pronoun is a convenience thing, not a statement), and the author footed the cost of publishing himself. Once labeled “vanity publishing,” self-publishing instantly took on the stigma of the second tier.

That meant if the author wanted to be remembered for anything, he had to play the upside-down game publishers wanted him to play, and accept the terms the publisher was willing to give him, often in the form of losing the rights to a work, dwindling advances, or puny percentages.
 
This 20th Century system worked basically the same way for music and movies as well. The advent of YouTube, MySpace, and other online promotional/publishing venues has set this model on its end by taking out the gatekeepers, the barriers between artist and public.

As for book publishing, there have been various outlets for vanity publishing on the Web for years; Lulu.com is one of them, which allows authors to upload their manuscripts and copies are printed as ordered.

But what about e-books? Aren’t we getting beyond the hardback and paperback? While some of us still love the smell of binding and the crack of a hardcover spine, no doubt times are changing and eventually bookshelves will exist only in nostalgic abodes. Amazon has nice self-publishing offerings for authors, especially with the advent of Kindle. However, Kindle carries the same issue iTunes does. E-books purchased for the Kindle can only be viewed on the Kindle.

That’s a bit restrictive, limiting the audience in such a way that, like in the past, only those with the hype Big Publishing can provide have any real chance at success. 

Enter Scribd, which touts itself as the YouTube of the publishing world. Scribd allows users to upload pretty much any document format, PDF, Word, PowerPoint, etc., and share as they like. Readers unattached to glossy covers can download the documents and print, read, embed, or share. Authors can charge for downloads, keep 80 percent of sales (as compared to a meager two percent), and control how the e-book is distributed.

Today, Scribd announced a deal with publishing giants Random House and Simon & Schuster, among many others to make books available and offer sneak preview chapters and excerpts.

While Lulu has held steady at 800,000 unique monthly viewers, Scribd in the past few months has rocketed past seven million. Already that’s a significant opportunity for authors looking to bypass the wait-and-hope approach and to take publishing matters into their own hands. It could even be a bridge between authors and powerhouse publishers, displacing agents and giving those risk-averse publishers a good indication of a book’s potential.
 

It’s well known that big corporations employee brilliant accountants in an effort to save money at every turn.  Google seems to have been caught doing some less than up-front things, however, as the search giant’s been accused of routing revenue through Ireland in order to avoid a big UK tax bill. 

The Sunday Times hired an accountant to investigate Google, and Robert Watts reported this weekend, "More than 90% of Google’s UK revenues are channelled through Ireland, where corporation tax is levied at 12.5%, compared with 28% in Britain."  This supposedly saved the company £110 million (or about $160 million at the current exchange rate) in 2007.

Also, "Google avoided a further €135m [or $173 million] in tax from Ireland during 2007.  The search engine’s Irish subsidiary is owned by one of two companies Google has set up in the tax haven of Bermuda."

And as you might expect, a great many people are now rather unhappy.  Vince Cable, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, and Austin Mitchell, a Labour MP, both pointed out that tax dodges effectively put more of a burden on honest organizations and individuals.

Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (a department of the British government "here to ensure the correct tax is paid at the right time") may take action.  In the meantime, Google has at least raised some serious questions about right, wrong, and high tax rates.