Verizon VCast Music Service to Launch in January

While getting a new phone at the local Verizon Wireless store yesterday, I saw on the back of the counter a piece of paper with sales and customer service information for a Verizon VCast Music Service, showing a launch date of January, 2006. Details are sketchy in my mind (I'm willing to look at something sitting in plain sight; snatching it up would have been a bit tacky), and there was no information on pricing or content sources, but I do recall that four phones would be supported - two LGs, "The V" and the VX8100, and a Samsung, all of which would require an "upgrade package", and one yet-to-be-released phone the maker of which I can't recall.

Google Betas and Stock Price

Mark Evans compares Google's stock price with its launch of new Betas and official products, and Om Malik notes it.

Now, I suspect that Mark was half kidding, but his "analysis" also "inspired" me to look a little deeper.

Of the ten days that Mark notes new product or Beta introductions, Google went up 6 and down 4. On the six up days it gained $17.57; on the four down days, it lost $15.24.

So in other words, on the 10 days Google introduced new products or betas, it had a net gain of $2.33, or $0.23/day. On the 307 days Google didn't introduce new products or betas, it had a net gain of $300.21, or $0.97/day.

Which just goes to show that given five minutes with a spreadsheet and daily stock prices, you can prove just about anything you want.

Towerstream

This hardly merits a post, but Andy Abramson doesn't have comments turned on in VoIPWatch.

He writes, "I keep hearing that Comcast has an interest in acquiring (Towerstream) to compliment their existing wireless spectrum portfolio."

Towerstream uses unlicensed spectrum for their standard offering; they use licensed spectrum strictly for point-to-point backhaul and 100Mb/s+ enterprise service, and that's 18 GHz and 23 GHz licenses.

So if Comcast bought Towerstream, it could be for their networks, could be for their enterprise customers, but is unlikely to be for their spectrum.

How Mainstream Can Blogs Get, Anyway?

Nick Carr writes that "...the blogosphere is going to end up looking a lot like the old 'mainstream media'... A relatively small number of high-traffic blogs will dominate the market, and then there'll be a whole lot of more specialized blogs with fewer readers."

I agree that a relatively small number of blogs could dominate blog traffic, and there could be a whole lot of specialized blogs with fewer readers. But I think the orders of magnitude of "relatively small", "whole lot", and "fewer" are radically different than they are for, say, magazines, because of the radically different cost of entry for a blog as opposed to a magazine.

The Magazine Publishers of America represents more than 240 publishers with approximately 1400 titles. Five titles account for 20% of the magazines sold. I'm guessing (hard to find statistics) that (a) a lot more than 5 blogs are needed to account for 20% of the total blog page hits; (b) there are a lot more than 1400 blogs published by bloggers in the US; and (c) the minimum readership for a blog to continue to be published is a whole lot lower - i.e., 0 - than the minimum readership for a magazine to continue to be published. (Like this one, for example...)

I believe in The Long Tail.