TechCrunch’s new contributing author after Marshall Kirkpatrick’s exit, Natali Del Conte says: “When customers buy “Superman Returns” at Wal-Mart, they can choose to pay $1.97 more to play it on portable devices, $2.97 more to play it on PCs or laptops, or $3.97 more to play it on either portable devices or PCs/laptops.”

While this offer may interest the casual customers of WallMart (who seem to account for 40 percent of all DVD sales in the United States according to the CNN release), I do wonder if it addresses the actual target shopper for the online digital movie download.

Thord Hedengren at BlogHerald was irked enough to post about what he feels would be ideal in the online shopping scenario for DVD movies, instead of them joining the PlaysForSure brigade.

Thord says: “Wal-Mart folks, how about this: Sell the DVD, offer an additional downloads package with every bloody format known to man for $2 extra, and don’t be asshats about the licensing. Let me play my movie where I want, with easily accessible downloads if I want it for my new media player, and you’ll have one happy and returning customer. It’s boring to re-encode movies in new formats, better if I can throw you some change and save the time.”

I think some of these ideas are quite profound. It’s time that digital movie download vendors wake up, smell the coffee and realize that their first target audience really is…

…the Geek.

The Geek with little or no time, or even the patience to find the right DVD cloning/copying clone and use it.

I posit that the geeks among us would be quite willing to let go of miniscule amounts of cash to forego the pain associated with acquiring that movie that they want to collect, archive it and keep transcoding it repeatedly to watch it on their owned devices. These devices usually require video to be in a specific format that is native to them to be able to play it.

YouTube has emphatically proven that transcoding video on-the-server is a better idea than leaving it up to the end-consumer. Let’s take this theme forward and try to reach the devices, directly instead of the current Web2.0 wave of only converting it to the (now universally playable) Flash video format (FLV). Like Thord ideates, offering a point blank whatever-format-you-want-it-in option seems much more ideal than the gradiented repeated value-increase model that WallMart is currently pitching.

At least to a geek like me.

I own and regularly drain the battery of my PSP by normal usage. I do play games on it (Racing away in Burnout Legends is my idea of a healthy break) but primarily I use it for, listening to podcasts, reading RSS through my specially formatted RSS aggregator, and yes watching video. I’d love to see some online support for this device’s video capabilities which IMnsHO leaves the other players in the dust with it’s hardware capabilities.

I read Brian Clark’s Copy Blogger blog quite often and when he wrote up this gem, I just had to talk about his blog.

For all of you who yearned to learn all the techniques that separate a good, successful blogger from the regular Joe-Shmoe, this is one Blog that you can’t afford to miss reading regularly.

Brian regularly writes excellent pieces of advice, tips and the exact things that no one would ever tell you about capturing an audience and captivating their attention, specifically on the Attention Deficient Internet.

Excellent stuff; I only wish that CopyBlogger had been around all those years ago when I started of putting down my own scattered thoughts.

Recommended reading for all bloggers, copywriters and yes, marketing people, everywhere.

ZDNet’s Phil Wainewright talks about how the success of a customer’s adoption is imperative to the success of an online service that operates in the SaaS business model.

Compared to standard permanent-license, on-premise implementations of enterprise software, SaaS definitely seems to be the correct solution to common woes.

Apart from all the inherent benefits of online delivery, one of the key differentiators is that in an on-premise software license model, the customer has typically paid for the software (The License) before it enters his premises. The software must then be customized to his business application, maintained, his users must be trained on it, and finally his entire Enterprise supposedly “shifts” to using it live.

In all my years in the software technology industry (I’ve been around) I’ve never really seen an implementation really “succeed” this way. At least from the point of view of the end customer, they never really got what they expected - a solution to their problems. What they got were endless delays and, if they were lucky enough to have paid for it, they got technical support.

The SaaS model is pretty much diametrically opposite to all this. In the online delivery model, the customer “checks out” the application (typically himself/herself), decides to try it out, brings in a few key users, and tests the system, directly.

SaaS providers should realize this (just as the Service-now team has) and welcome these early customers. It is in the interest of the provider to ease the entry of the customer into the platform and facilitate the adoption of their service.

As customers begin to use the service, the more benefit they realize from it, the more they will encourage adoption from their organization.

It really is this simple - a SaaS service can only succeed if it’s customers do. And as the service-now VP of sales says, each and every customer of theirs is referenceable.

What your customers (existing and otherwise) say about your service is always going to influence your presence in a market much, much, more than what any PR, advertising or promotional activity can get you.

A customer’s success is vital.

Rob Luddy should be proud. And justly so.

I’ve been following Ray Deck’s 52 Bicycles blog and recently he posted on a topic too close to my heart for me to ignore - selling online services.

Selling a service online with repeat revenue, even if it is of much lower  per-sale value than say a perpertual license single sale of an online or offline product, is much more appealing to any solution provider.

For one, you have a guaranteed revenue based cashflow (instead of a single-sale customer) assuming that your service is one that your customers would begin to depend upon and worthy enough to capture interest in the first place, of course.

Support, updates and value adds are much more justified and easier to deploy on an online service as well.

Customer interaction is again one-on-one and an excellent way to gather feedback and improve your offering.

Copy-protection / piracy issues are also eliminated from start - since your offering is online and so are your customers, pirates cannot rob you of the revenue that you work so hard for.

All-in-all, an online service model has more potential than other models. What remains to be seen is of course how today’s startup Web 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, etc. ventures figure out a business model that goes beyond the boring “Get advertisement revenue while we wait for Google / Yahoo / Microsoft / eBay to acquire us”

I’ve been watching a lot of TV episodes lately. Quite often I found myself going to this nice site called TV Tome, where it had a comprehensive review and fun facts about shows, like goof ups and other trivia. It was sometimes quite useful to see the story of an episode if I missed any in between or to find out the finer points about a particular episode.

Recently, a CNet text links bar started appearing on all TVTome pages. Since the site continued to work as before, I didn’t bother checking it out, surmising that there had been another website bought over by the CNet network.

Imagine my surprise, today, when I tried to go to TVTome, it redirected me to TV.com - the new home of TVTome. CNet had also acquired the TV.com, two letter domain and moved the site there. There’s something about two letter domains that simply ……. gives me a feeling of absolute awe.

Anyways, the new site, while keeping with the old content, is a lot more…. CNetish now, there’s a whole different, heavy, feel to it. On the other hand, it not only brings the well known CNet look and feel to the site, the CNet common account also works, so you can use your CNet account to put in your own reviews, select your favourite shows, etc.

Try it out, if you’re a TV buff. Good show.

Ever wanted to have a set of goals that you wanted to accomplish in your life? I’ve always had a few, but never really got down to putting in the time and effort to list them all down.

Until now, that is.

I found this really awesome site, 43things.com. It let’s you set up your goals, see what others are doing. You can cheer people on, comment on others goals, write about your own, the works!

Really, really well done. Highly recommended for everyone. Do try it out, you’ll like it.

Bonus: You can set up the goals to appear on your own site. Like I have. After some arm twisting with my blog, I managed to set it up as a links panel on the right bar. You can see my goals and click on them to see more detail. Neat, what say?

My home page on 43things is here.