The press and various tech blogs have had something of a field day with the news of Vivendi's CEO, Jean-Bernard Levy, calling Apple's iTunes' contract "indecent." Vivendi, of course, owns Universal Music, a company that has been rather aggressive in trying to squeeze money out of just about everyone while searching for new business models. However, reader Cannen writes in to point out that, while the "indecent" quote is getting all the headlines, there's a much more interesting quote buried further down in the article. Levy then is talking about Universal Music's plans to make money, and there are a few very interesting quotes:

Fleshing out UMG's strategy, Levy said it planned to focus on better exploiting the "monetization of an artist's image" which included branded clothes and TV shows. "This is what we hope will revive our business," Levy said. "People indulge in piracy but spend a lot of money on many other things that are linked to an artist." Levy forecast that "in the not so distant future", traditional music products such as DVDs and CDs would make up less than 50 percent of music publishing revenues.

That sounds shockingly similar to what some of us have been advocating for about a decade -- which had record industry insiders telling us we didn't understand their business at all. Of course, it's not all the way there. What's missing is the realization that if you stop thinking of it as "piracy" and start thinking of it as "promotion" then you want people to share the content, recognizing that it will spread further, creating more fans with more interest in buying all those other things linked to the artist. Of course, if any of the record labels want to get a better idea of how to do this, they should contact us. We could have helped them avoid much of the mess of the past ten years. There's still time to make sure that the next ten aren't even worse.

Filed under: Digital Cameras, Misc. Gadgets

We've seen ways in which quite a few marketers earned their bonus, but the bright lad (or dame) who dreamed this one up deserves a serious promotion. In what's likely to be confirmed as the "world's smallest questionnaire," Olympus sent out slides with questions to valued high-end microscope customers in order to boost awareness and hopefully drum up more business. The survey was shipped just like any other specimen slide, and it reportedly drove up traffic to the firm's website by around 24-percent. Click on for a closeup of the actual questions.

[Via OhGizmo]

Continue reading Olympus creates 'world's smallest questionnaire' on specimen slide

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Gaming

Diamond is no stranger to packin' an awful lot of RAM onto graphics cards, and apparently, the forthcoming VFX 2000 Series Professional Workstation GPU will keep the legacy alive. According to Hot Hardware, Diamond is readying a 2GB (of GDDR4 memory, no less) professional card based on the R600 (now known as the HD 2900 XT), and reportedly, "the card's PCB has been modified from the standard HD 2900 XT reference design to support the workstation-class features inherent to the FireGL line of professional graphics cards." Still, there's no word yet on what frequencies the GPU and RAM will hum along at, but word on the street has this beast launching "in the coming weeks." Click on for another glimpse.

Continue reading Diamond planning HD 2900 XT-based 2GB VFX 2000 pro GPU?

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Sunday, September 2 is the deadline for ISO member countries to vote on Microsoft's Office OpenXML -- the result will determine if it's approved as an international standard. Name calling, finger pointing and muckraking have sparked a debate over current standards-approval procedures and how they're affected by corporate influence. All this excitement over office docs?