Super-hero metaphors is how Techcrunch (the mother of tech blogs) presents the European Commission’s “Entrepreneur 2020” framework. But even if the Com were Batman, can Europe really become Silicon Valley? Best intentions aside, the Northern California has a venture capital community that Europe can only dream of. That would explain why client services rather than consumer services is the focus for the Euro-IT-sector: without VC, work-for-hire is the answer. And even with the Single Market, the US has a home-audience of 300 million who speak the same language (most of them at least), plus another few hundred million speakers overseas. That will never be the case for Europe (except we too can speak English, obviously).

But is it true that Europe has no successful online services besides Skype? You have only to look to the entertainment sector to prove that wrong. With more than half a billion downloads, Candy Crush Saga is the biggest digital game ever and has a user base on its way to rival Facebook (1 billion+ active users). Music streaming service Spotify has 25 million users, which is nothing compared to Itunes 500+ million, but Spotify grows rapidly as new territories are added and odds are the streaming model will beat download, at least that has been the case so far. Yes, both of those are Swedish companies. Finland’s Facebook game phenomenon Supercell’s stock value is greater than its US rival Zynga. And Germany’s Bigpoint counts over 330 million registered players. The list goes on, but the pattern is that these are entertainment services with sophisticated business models that go beyond the ad-based economy that dominate Silicon Valley. Advertising spend will always be limited, with channels competing for a bigger piece of the pie. Real consumers spending their own money on stuff like virtual goods: endless.

Sure, there are problems: many of these companies are owned by investors outside Europe. Many of them use Silicon Valley platforms to deliver their content. But it is probably a good idea not to try to copy the US success factor, but rather build on European fortés: diversity, quality, content, SME’s and monetisation of content rather than users. In the global online market, the winner takes all and niche monopolies are everywhere. The way forward is not to try to beat the monopolists at their own game, but to make something completely different.

Oh, and Batman on the silver screen – Christian Bale – is Welsh.

So, we all had some time off and what happens? It seems all that glühwein and family time put some sense into the conversation about the online society. One example, obviously, is whistle-blower-come-superstar Edward Snowden who gave the UK Channel Four “Alternative Christmas Speech” describing a bleak future where no child will know what it means having a private and unrecorded moment. Maybe it was the slow news season, but his words was repeated by news media across the Western Hemisphere and whoever was still in their Kantian dogmatic slumber surely woke-up and smelled the belated coffee (or was that glühwein?).

Netopia has always followed and admired American musician David Lowery’s Trichordist blog for its no-nonsense approach to the battles of music online. In this holiday season, it seems mr Lowery enjoyed generous cups of the Netopia eggnog as he expanded his scope to the online society in a greater sense. Do these words not sound like something straight out of the Netopia manifesto?

It’s time that the average Internet user understands that the web is something we collectively created.  And when it doesn’t work the way we want it to?  We can change it. We can make it better.  We can upgrade it.  The web doesn’t belong to these multibillion dollar internet behemoths. It belongs to all of us.  And these companies need to play by the same set of rules that the rest of us play by.

No, Netopia does not believe David Lowery gets his views from this humble blog, it’s just a happy coincidence. Nevertheless promising for the new year. I hope you, dear Netopia-reader, will be joining us for the ride!

We’ll be back in 2014. Feel free to browse older stories and columns in case you can’t wait!

Chris Anderson’s Long Tail (Random House, 2006) made a greater impact than most airport-business books with cool taglines. It suggested that the internet turned the rules of supply and demand upside down; with digital, there is no cost for storage, and stock kept can be unlimited. Anderson’s hypothesis is that this would create “unlimited demand,” that each item will be purchased (or downloaded, accessed, clicked-on, whatever) at least once. To some extent, the theory was a case of “faith economics,” as only long-tail phenomena had been observed to a limited extent around the time Anderson’s book was published. Now, seven years later, we have the evidence, however. It turns out the long tail theory does not hold. It may have looked like the tail end of the long curve was infinite, but given enough supply, it actually does end. Let’s take a look at a few examples of this.

Earlier this autumn, music streaming service Spotify celebrated its fifth birthday and released some data. One fact was particularly interesting in this context: out of the 20 million (or so) songs available on the service, 20% have never been played. Not a single time. Sure, Chris Anderson might argue that five years is not enough, but that would lead to the conclusion that his theory only works with an infinite time span—hardly the case in real life and surely not to base economic assessments on. Spotify, by the way, is working to speed things up by introducing a function that lets users listen to random unplayed songs. The jury is still out on whether that is long-tail dogmatism or an honest attempt to find hidden gems in the catalogue.

Another example is Amazon’s literature self-publishing service, Kindle Direct Publishing, which lets you “publish once and reach readers worldwide.”. “Potentially” is the missing word in that sentence: while no data has been made available, you only have to look to the user forums to find self-publishers scratching their heads wondering why their books get zero downloads, in spite of the fact that they are free.

The third case in point is the iPhone Appstore, where hundreds of apps are added daily. In the early days, an app typically cost one US dollar (in some cases more), but these days, with more than one million apps available and almost a thousand added every day, free is the normal price (which coincidentally was the title of Anderson’s subsequent book). Some sources suggest that two-thirds of apps have never been downloaded.

It seems the long tail grew too long in the end. Even online, the old laws of supply and demand still apply. With endless choice came not unlimited demand but zero value. The new game is making money from free, but that’s a different topic altogether.

The Long Tail: https://www.longtail.com/

David Lynch’s Dune is an epic Eighties sci-fi flick, featuring Kyle MacLachlan in a humidity-recycling leather desert suit as the good guy and Sting as bad guy in leather… well, swim trunks. The space travel tech is based on giant floating worms eating spice to bend space, so it ranks well on the flower-power vs hi-tech scale. The book series about Dune that Lynch based his movie on were written by the American Frank Herbert in the Sixties. The books represented a new take on science fiction writing, focusing more on characters and story than technology and are also often regarded as an inspiration for environmentalism.

Frank Herbert has said in interviews that he was often approached by fans attending book signings or readings who had the same generous offer: “I have a great idea for a new book about Dune, how about I tell it to you, you write the story and we share the money?” Mr Herbert gently turned down these business proposals.

What is the point of this example? you ask. I say it is an illustration of idea vs execution. We are often impressed by big ideas (open source, open government, open this, open that, for example), but in many cases, such as literature, it is not the idea but the end result that matters. It is the effort that takes the idea to fruition that is worth something. An unfulfilled idea is just an idea. Ideas can be great, they can be inspiring, they can lead to new insights, they can be the theme for a blog post. But they don’t have economic value. They can’t be traded. They can’t be sold. They can’t pay the rent. Ideas are no substitute for hard work, as mr Herbert gently would have his counter-part understand. So by all means, let the ideas flow but make sure the hard work that goes into realizing them is properly compensated. And watch the movie again.

Frank Herbert on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert

Google is often accused of abusing its dominant position in search and other online services, so today’s news that the same is the case for the augmented-reality of Google Glass should come as no surprise. A survey commissioned by ICOMP (a Brussels-based institute/think-tank on digital competition) found that a majority of clicks by Google Glass users favour Google’s own sponsored links. Surely there will be lots of debate about the methodology of this report and Netopia is not convinced it is exhaustive by any means. The interesting point, however, is that there is a pattern repeating. It used to be tech companies, pirates and telcos knocking Hollywood for locking movies into the “window”-model (theatres first, then dvd, then tv, you know the pattern) and not embracing the value of “accessibility”. Turns out maybe accessibility isn’t the key to the future after all, windowing and lock-in turns up in all sorts of ways. Try extracting your Facebook friend list in some useful format. Or moving your photos from one cloud-storage to another. If you want to change phone carrier, you will have to go through the “anti-churn” department (churn is what telcos call subscribers leaving). The list is endless, making “accessibility” look more like a nice phrase – lock-in is where you get the big bucks from.

ICOMP report: http://www.i-comp.org/blog/2013/icomp-announces-results-of-new-eye-tracking-study/

Five hundred (and counting) of the world’s finest authors have signed a call to the United Nations for a digital bill of rights, following Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing on how the US government (and others) use big data technologies to monitor people’s activities on the internet and other networks. The demand is for human rights to be respected in the digital domain, and Netopia can only agree and support this initiative. In fact, it could just as well have been inspired by Netopia’s manifesto!

One point that the authors make is that personal information belongs to each person and not to anyone else. That could seem obvious, but most online services regard user data as their property: it was created on their service after all. It seems, however, that the European Commission will agree more with the authors, as the Data Protection-reform takes the view of the individual users’ rights, including “the right to be forgotten”. This may prove some of the free online services business models difficult to maintain in the longer term. A completely different view was suggested by Cukier & Mayer-Schönberger in the book Big Data earlier this year, that it’s the use and not the collection of data that should be regulated and that companies should be made accountable for any abuse in how they use personal data. Interesting point, but that was before Edward Snowden demonstrated that all databases can leak, one way or other. Your data is never safe, once it has been collected. The only way forward is for governments and internet services to regain the public’s confidence by introducing strong rules on how data can be used. EU’s data protection regulation is a start.

A new Snowden-document reveals that the NSA and GCHQ infiltrated online games like World of Warcraft to look for terrorist activity – not in the game, but with the game as a communication platform. Sounds like an April Fool’s joke, but the date is wrong. To make sure agents did not spy on one another a “deconfliction group” was put in place. Good thing, anyone who read Ghosts (the second part of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy) knows how easily spies end up accidentally targeting each other. Paul Auster is by the way one of the authors that signed the petition, so the governments of the world better listen.

The petition against mass surveillance: http://www.change.org/petitions/a-stand-for-democracy-in-the-digital-age-3

NSA & GCHQ in WoW: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/9/5191338/nsa-gchq-videogame-spying-leaked-documents

EU data protection regulation: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/data-protection/news/120125_en.htm

Impossible to resist sharing with Netopia’s readers: Chinese television covered our 3d-printing event on the news! It is the independent TV station NTDTV, which airs from the United States and independent of the Chinese Government with a potential audience of over 100 million viewers in mainland China and ex-pats (via satellite and broadband). It seems Netopia peaked in terms of reach on November 14^th! Watch the video, perfect opportunity to brush up on your Mandarin.

In other news, BBC takes a closer look on the topic of object-piracy based on personal 3d-printing technology. It doesn’t say whether the BBC read it first in Netopia’s report.

NTDTV video: http://www.ntdtv.com/xtr/gb/2013/11/14/atext1004048.html

BBC story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25230078