Tag Archives: digital

The Un-united States of Amazon

Gabe Habash -- July 12th, 2011
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The Street's map of Amazon's ongoing legal battles.

The Amazon/California spat is not going away.

On July 1st, we posted an article detailing the satisfaction on the part of California bookstore owners and Barnes & Noble in the wake of California’s decision to require online retailers to collect sales tax, just like retailers physically located in the state.

Now, Amazon is declaring it would support a referendum to end California’s new online tax law.

The problem? They need 505,000 signatures to qualify it for the ballot.

Amazon is facing an uphill battle. They cut ties with their California affiliates in an effort to skirt tax collection, but officials are saying this doesn’t get them off the hook and that they still owe an estimated $83 million in tax obligation.

Amazon has been protected against collecting taxes since 1992, when Quill Corporation v. North Dakota ruled that unless a retailer has physical stores in a state, they are not required to collect taxes.

But in recent years, more and more states are noticing the e-tailer’s deepening pockets. The Street has posted a great article breaking down Amazon’s battles, state-by-state.

A quick overview: 8 states’ affiliates have been cut off, with 9 more states at risk, and in 5 states Amazon is currently collecting taxes. Texas and Tennessee are the only two states working with Amazon, the latter because Amazon has expressed interest in building three new facilities in the state, and the former because Amazon has offered to create 5,000 jobs and invest $300 million in the state.

Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, summed up his company’s stance on California: “At a time when businesses are leaving California, it is important to enact policies that attract and encourage business, not drive it away.”

In response, Evan Westrup, a spokesman for Gov. Jerry Brown, said: “Amazon should be spending less time punishing its affiliates, threatening lawsuits and collecting signatures and more time doing what every other retailer does in California every day.”

But for all the back and forth–Amazon’s attempts at avoiding tax collection and all the stern resistance they are getting from lawmakers–and for all the difficulties it looks like Amazon will have to face, the public had a very definitive opinion, at least in one poll: The Street’s poll asking “Should Amazon be required to collect sales tax in every state in which it does business?” resulted in a 68% majority stating “No–I want my Amazon purchases to be as cheap as possible” as compared to 32% voting “Yes–it’s unfair to locally owned stores if Amazon is exempt from charging sales tax.”

Maybe those signatures won’t be as difficult to get as some think.

SXSWi Is So Cool, Even the Ice Cream is Free

Calvin Reid -- March 12th, 2011
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At the risk of sounding pompous, once you actually arrive on the scene at SXSW Interactive, it’s difficult not to feel really special in a town that seems to have been taken over by computer programmers, digital entrepreneurs and a hipster cartel of awesomely creative T-shirt designers. From picking up press credentials to finding a place to eat, our first day at SXSW was more about getting the lay of the festival’s digital landscape and plotting a way to cover even a small part of SXSW’s dense maze of panels, programming and, well, parties.

Arriving a day before the show began turned out to be huge boon, especially when we saw the lines snaking into the press credentials and badge pickup room on Friday morning. We were in and out wandering through the Austin Convention Center in no time. SXSW seems to have left no good idea untouched; I was incredibly impressed by the badges, which not only have your photo, but repeat your name, organization and picture on both sides of the badge. If you’ve ever been at a convention and desperate to remember someone’s name only to find that their badge has flipped backwards, you’ll know exactly why this is step forward in the evolution of convention IDs.

T-Shirts, Shuttle Buses and Software

Of course the immediate reaction to both Austin, a liberal, youth oriented laid-back city full of more bars and music dives than even the Lower East Side, and to SXSW, the epitome of Young Technology Nation, is that of uber college town with the convention center as the epicenter of the campus. Everybody’s really friendly, everybody seems really cool, yes, the t-shirts (I bought a t-shirt before I attended a panel) are lively and cool and the shuttle bus system—we’re stuck at a very nice but sort of far-out hotel down I-35–seems to work fabulously well, running frequently from early morning to 2:00 am—yes, the late night schedule is going to come in handy.

But we’re here at the premier venue for emerging technology and the entreprenuers looking to exploit it for the next big tech thing. First, my colleague Rachel Deahl is right—be on time, the panels are packed and you might not get in. I wasn’t on time, but managed to finagle my way into a jam-packed panel, No Child Left Inside: Mobile Tech Meets Education, a look at the movement to use mobile devices, from iPhones to iPads, with young and older students. A panel of activist educators and academics discussed “Citizen Science,” essentially arming students with devices and collecting data, using crowd sourcing techniques to create teaching environments outside of the classroom, and outside of the typically published educational content. More on that panel to come in future reports.

Friday offered a mix of Meet the Entrepreneur—Rachel and I got to talk tech with Pawan Deshpande and Richard Turcott of HiveFire, an online marketing and content curation venture. I think I may have heard the first relatively clear definition of “curation’’, a relentless buzzword these days that seems on the surface to have replaced the word “publishing.” HiveFire offers its clients a software platform called Curata, which seems to function like a meta-publishing platform within a company—HiveFire seems to specialize in niche industries like health information—serving up a automated platter of content that, we’re told, is much quicker to collect, much easier to find and much better at showing off what your business does.

A packed house at PubCamp

Panels, PubCamp and Parties

We managed to get a glimpse of other cool stuff at other cool panels (yes, I use cool to much) thanks to help of the help of photographer/intrepid panel reporter Jody Culkin. Programmer Jon Dahl’s presentation, “Programming and Minimalism,” surveyed the importance of style and simplicity in writing code, comparing programming to both rock music and principals of writing set forth in George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.”  A panel on, “The Potential of Augmented Reality For Education,” looked at AR—the ability to overlay or embed visual info over the real world images seen through a cameras or mobile device—and how it can be used for both teaching as well as “putting people at the center of their data.” And at a panel called, “Interactive Comics: Techniques to Enhance Math Education,” educator John Baird outlined his Create a Comic Project, an educational project where he uses templates with comics with blank balloons, and has the students write the dialog.

Friday’s programming ended with an appearance by me and Rachel at PubCamp, a mini-conference organized by an impressive group of long-time SXSW attendees (BookSquare blogger Kassia Krozser and BookTour.com’s Kevin Smoker among them).  Romance book blogger Sarah Wendell (Smart Bitches Trashy Books) opened the event with a typically wry survey of recent book events, including the HarperCollins new library e-book lending policy that forces librarians to repurchase e-book licenses after 26 loans. “library budgets are this big,” said Wendell, scrunching her two fingers close together and invoking the romance genre she loves so much in defense of libraries,  “and nothing that small can be any good.” And joined by Ed Nawotka, former PW colleague and now editor-in-chief of Publishing Perspectives, on the small stage, Rachel and I fielded questions from a room packed with new media and old media veterans, published and hoping to be published authors and, of course, readers.

So our first days in Austin/SXSW were a combination of—excuse the college metaphor—student orientation and class in session. And yes, the parties are good too. In fact, leaving the last party event of the night—a wild and rocking multimedia rooftop affair at a place called Mohawk—and heading back to the hotel, our group passed the Ice Cream Man truck (we also passed Taco Trucks, BBQ Trucks and so on), a group or business or social movement (whatever) whose mission is to giveaway ice cream—for free. Apparently they’ve given away over “300,000 frozen treats,” so we lined up and got ours, happily licking and scooping free ice cream as we headed to the shuttle bus. Cool digital programming and free ice cream? How cool is that?

“Success” Story: Lessons from the Music Business

Andrew Richard Albanese -- July 16th, 2010
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A little over a week ago, a colleague shared with me this interesting New York Times Article by Devin Leonard about Fred Goodman’s new book: Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis (Simon & Schuster). First off, I can’t wait to read this book—Goodman is the author of the excellent The Mansion on the Hill, and is a top-notch music writer. But something Leonard wrote in the Times really caught my attention: Goodman, Leonard writes, concedes that the major labels “made their share of mistakes, like suing college students to stamp out illegal downloading.”

The thing is, the RIAA (the music industry trade association), doesn’t seem to see it that way. While the major labels themselves have since questioned their scorched earth strategy, which led to more than 30,000 lawsuits filed against alleged downloaders, (including dead people and children), the RIAA still insists the lawsuits were “successful.”

As it happens, this week over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick posted about attorney Ray Beckerman’s look at the RIAA’s “success.” According to Beckerman, who examined the RIAA ‘s financial statements, the RIAA paid $64 million in legal fees from 2006-2008, to bring in $1.4 million in settlement money. Hey, I agree with the RIAA, the lawsuits were very successful—for the lawyers! As for RIAA claims that the suits served to stem the tide of illegal downloading? Masnick notes that file-sharing is still on the increase, so, not so much with the lawsuits being a $64 million PR campaign/education effort. If anything, critics note, the suits have turned public opinion solidly against the labels.

In the Times, Leonard writes that the “the recording industry has indeed been decimated by the Internet,” and goes on to question how that will affect the future of music.  But does it not defy logic to suggest that technology that enables the creation and distribution of music actually harms music? I think it is more accurate to say that the music industry’s response to the Internet is what “decimated” the music industry, and that’s important, because if there is a lesson for publishing in all this, it’s about how to respond to technological change. “It’s been a dozen years since the RIAA had a very real opportunity to lead the recording industry into the digital era by adapting and embracing what technology allowed,” Masnick observes. “Instead, they’ve fought it the whole way.” Does that sound like a successful business strategy to you?