iPhone New Zealand

The team at www.iphonenewzealand.co.nz have written an article about the Zenbu iPhone app and given it a glowing recommendation. Thank’s guys!

It’s a new site but they’re rapidly putting up some great content so if you have an iPhone then I recommend checking it out.

Mature or Suggestive Themes

Apple has recently added a rating system to the iTunes appStore based on a variety of themes

• Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
• Realistic Violence
• Sexual Content or Nudity
• Profanity or Crude Humor
• Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
• Mature/Suggestive Themes
• Simulated Gambling
• Horror/Fear Themes
• Prolonged graphic or sadistic realistic violence
• Graphic sexual content and nudity

I rated the Zenbu app None for all the above, getting a 4+ rating, but our most recent update was rejected (after 3 long weeks in review) because it

allows unfiltered access to contents of the Zenbu website, where content with mature or suggestive themes can be accessed

There is the occasional adult shop, gentlemen’s club, brothel (80% of them in Napier, that’s wierd…) or massage parlour on Zenbu but if it’s OK in the eyes of the law, it’s OK with us.  (Zenbu is not a classifieds service so we don’t have that kind of information)

I hadn’t thought of the possibility of a 5 year old doing a local search for such objectionable material and getting hold of the local strippies phone number and then… what Apple?

Now we get a 9+ rating for infrequent Mature / Suggestive Themes. Those 10 year olds are so mature.

TechCrunch says the rating system is broken, I tend to agree.

Echronomy 101

Echronomy (noun) : the production, distribution and consumption of time. [a neologism from economy and chronos – the Greek word for time)

I’ve watched the Free debate between Internet poster-boys Malcolm Gladwell versus Chris Anderson with interest, it’s a fascinating discussion in a period of such monumental change. The topic is worthy of the many books about it so this 1000 word summary simply relates the concepts back to Zenbu.

Anderson, who wrote the book and coined the term “The Long Tail” and is currently promoting his new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”, pushes the idea that information industries will tend towards providing a free product based on age old Adam Smith economics that the price will be the marginal cost of production, which is close enough to zero for anything which can be consumed as zeros and ones.

Gladwell, author of Tipping Point and Blink and a journalist at The New Yorker, seems to take umbrage that his newspaper industry is a key target in Anderson’s writing.

Gladwell writes

There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money)

Answering each point in turn:

1. digital infrastructure is effectively Free
The inherent nature of the internet is a distributed infrastructure which spreads the cost of use out between users – not free but close enough. BitTorrent is such a succesful distribution system because it utilises that very distributed nature.

2. consumers love Free
Beyond that, free is the black hole of rational consumer thought.

3. Free means never having to make a judgment
Free does NOT mean never having to make a judgement, it means we have to judge things without price based on our most precious, divisible and scarce resource – time (or attention). In fact if time was a transferrable asset, it would be the perfect monetary system; I call this the Echronomy but I digress into Sci Fi territory.

4. the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money
The market created by these claims can and will make a lot of money! Freemium, not free, is the actual model promoted by Anderson (he screams for the thousandth time in his blog comments); Google brought in 5.7 billion in revenue in the last quarter of 2008 based on this freemium model, unarguably a lot of money. Best guesses are over 90% of this is from advertising so this isn’t ‘new money’ (yet), its simply a transfer of wealth from the old (and in terminal decline) media industries. The pie is shrinking because the internet enables extremes of efficiency impossible in old media, so businesses are spending less and getting more, but at some stage they will realise that if they spent the same (or more) than they did previously in old media they will get orders of magnitude more value; the pie will grow again.

The most galling part of Gladwell’s argument is that he picks out Anderson’s use of YouTube as an example and admission that YouTube “has so far failed to make any money for Google.” Who cares? It’s an investment! I’m sure there’s a very simple graph of YouTube revenues. Revenue trends upwards relentlessly from advertising (and other) income streams. (YouTubes media advertising techniques might be experimental but there is a century of proof that this market is sound. ) Meanwhile the costs, mainly bandwidth and storage, shrink exponentially each year. The two lines will, sooner or later, cross and never go back.

Perhaps these golden years of the internet are parallel to the land grab of the wild west, only now the land up for grabs is the far more transient concept of attention – and Google is staking out some serious ground. Every day information becomes more abundant and attention more scarce; we enter the Attention Economy.
Of course Gladwell is right that not everything will be free, we will always be willing to pay for convenience, quality and exclusiveness. Anderson is also right that information resources will inevitably tend towards free. It’s economics 101: cost of entry to the information market and the marginal cost of distribution are both close to zero.

(What does this all have to do with Zenbu?!) The Yellow Pages in New Zealand was a $300 million a year business in 2008 and I believe this is one pie in serious need of shrinking. Yellow has a strong aura of authority and authenticity. We can rely on Yellow to have a listing for every business – primarily due to the strong historical relationships from when Telecom had a monopoly on telephone lines. Yellow did a great job of compiling and distributing information about every business in NZ. In the days before the internet this was a mammoth task, deserving of the massive infrastructure that Yellow has built.

Today it is a different story. We can build and share a comparable superior directory using the infrastructure of the net and the distributed labour force of the end users. We don’t need 200 staff or $10K full page ads in a printed paperweight pushed out to every household when we can create a better information resource with 2000 contributors and a few servers. I don’t begrudge those 200 people their jobs but New Zealand would be far more productive if they were doing something else of value. (Actually a lot of those jobs are outsourced to the Philippines now but that’s a completely different issue)

The Yellow pie will naturally shrink from old-media-attrition but let’s hurry it up, let’s build Zenbu up so you can Find Everything. The pie needs to be shrunk, it’s dinnertime.

June 2009 on Zenbu

2496 edits from 115 users on Zenbu in June. The biggest editors were

zenbu 1537
Gremlin 336
Spiker 183
SteveA 95
brownees172 44
jonzee 43
MauriceWinn 32
Linzi 12
rodo 12
jimboeri 11
burgla 10
allsecure 8
paulcar2006 7
EveMH 7
ronk 6
Falk 6
toddenergy 6
rentrite 5
FantomFan 5
giftsofnz 5

SteveA went to town adding Railway Stations up and down the country which is awesome and Spiker added almost every gun club in the country along with a tonne of edits around Whakatane, Edgecumbe.

Gremlin finished off a 6 month project to make sure that every 24hr petrol station in the country had that entered in the Hours  field; this is extremely valuable information to know when you’re on the go! Gremlin is a prominent supporter of the NZ Open GPS Garmin maps project, which all the Zenbu POIs are regularly exported to (free under the Zenbu CC license), and now all the 24hr petrol stations have 24HR in the POI label thanks to him. Nice work!

Zenbu loaded every Pharmacy in the country from data supplied by the Ministry of Health, over 900 pharmacies nationwide. Rad. One step closer to Finding Everything on Zenbu.

Jumping the gun a little as this isn’t live yet, but we’ve supplied a massive list of nationwide car dealers by someone in the industry. There’s still some work to do on tidying it up for consumption but that will be another exciting boost to the database in July.

Thanks for all the support from editors and users alike. Cheers!