Some articles spelled the end of email as early as 2004 (in Korea of course, where else). Now Slate comes back on this matter claiming that “email is looking obsolete“.

The main argument behind this reasoning? Stats show that teens are giving up on email in favor of instant messaging and social networks. As these kids will get older, email won’t be in their toolbox so they won’t use it right?

Isn’t there a problem here? Does this separation by age really make sense? It is because you are a teen you don’t use email, or is it because you don’t yet play in the corporate arena? I think it is the latter. Somehow usage is correlated to age (facts are here, teens don’t use email), but this does not mean this whole generation won’t start using email once it gets older and, well, needs a job, needs to climb a corporate ladder, has to sell products to clients.

It is not because the young generation does not use Viagra that Viagra won’t be used in the the future ;) If you listen to ethnographers like Stefana Broadbent, they tell you that email is the “admin channel“. And admin is one of the “pleasures” of stepping in the adult age, something that you don’t have to worry as a kid. As admin catches up with the new generation, it won’t be able to escape email.

If there is a real threat to email it is not SMS, IM and Facebook. It is JotSpot and the other wiki-based collaboration platforms who make the asynchronous and invasive email obsolete.

But good ol electronic mail has very strong allies in a few things like corporate politics (who wasn’t involved in a “cc war” with an escalating number of bosses copied on the messages), ego (how many people “didn’t notice” they hit reply to all instead of reply when making a “brilliant” joke in a chain mail), bosses processing power (I don’t see a CEO with 50 chat sessions open, taking a large number of decisions at the same time) to only name a few.

Consumers are pushing the creative industries towards a free model, forcing a reinvention of monetization, a crucial element of the chain that “professional” artists obviously need. As more and more creators experiment free models, mixed reviews come in. This fascinating interview of Jean-Louis Murat, a French musician who is known for being very opinionated, gives a harsh perspective:

You have been one of the first French artists to open a web site in 1998 and to offer songs, exchanges, links, images on it. Is you current anti-internet stance in contradiction with that?

[…] At the beginning, I was putting an exclusive song on my site every week, downloadable for free. Then I stopped. These songs were downloaded without a “thank you”, without a “hello” , and eventually sold as paying compilations in conventions. I belonged to the idiots who believed in the mirages of the internet, and therefore to the inner goodness of people, to communautary exchanges.

Link (in french)

And now Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert:

I’ve been watching with great interest as the band “Radiohead” pursues its experiment with pay-what-you-want downloads on the Internet. In the near term, the goodwill has inspired lots of people to pay. But I suspect many of them are placing a bet that paying a few bucks now will inspire all of their favorite bands to offer similar deals. That’s when the market value of music will approach zero.

That’s my guess. Free is more complicated than you’d think.

Link

Free is not an option as it will be forced by consumers, so the question is not about wheter is can happen or not.The lesson here is that free is not something that can happen by simply taking money out of the equation. Both artists and listeners need to adapt and re-negotiate how they will interact. Artists having the longest way to go in their quest for new monetization channels, but consumers should also adapt their behaviors and change their outlook on artists who are more and more enhancing our lives and less and less pieces of a puzzle trying to screw us as much as possible.

Wonderful news to start your day: “according to Brad Taylor, a staff software engineer at Google: The number of spam attempts — that is, the number of junk messages sent out by spammers — is flat, and may even be declining for the first time in years“.

Gmail’s spam filter is really effective, and as more users move to that platform, sending spam becomes less and less effective. Great news. Google making Bill Gates predictions come true, how ironic is that ;) ?

At least that is what the BBC is writing in an article about peer to peer networks undermined by users downloading files without redistributing anything. The solution: an imaginary “currency” that would enforce good manners, and a whole of bean counting to go with it of course!

Peer-to-peer networks can become sluggish if too many users download content without sharing with others.
Using bandwidth as a kind of currency helps to encourage better habits said Dr Johan Pouwelse [who] has been working with associate professor David Parkes to add an accounting system to Tribler to encourage users to upload as often as they download.

Link

Good to see accounting finally do a bit of good for humanity ;)

Here’s a suggestion to every Internet executive: take a Post-It note, write “EBay wasted $3 billion on Skype” and stick it to your monitor. Stare at it the next time some hot social whatever-2.0 company comes by and talks about growing fast and finding a revenue model later.
Link

The NYT is hitting Ebay with a tough headline now that the Skype deal officially resulted in a $1.43B loss. This deal - who made me and many others quite skeptic - seems to have created value for only one industry: Swedish private banking.

What was the last time you saw something that dropped your jaw on the Internet? I’m not talking about the evolution of dance or laughing baby youtube video, I am talking about new apps, new ideas, new business models. What’s exciting these days? As we are putting the finishing touch to the LIFT08 program, that’s the question I am asking around here at Picnic.

Amazingly this question puzzles most of my interlocutors, triggers a long silence, and usually ends with a unenthusiastic “Facebook” answer. It seems Techcrunch is filled with clones of clones announcements these days (that’s not a knock on Techcrunch but on all of us, the entrepreneurs and innovators).

Where is the excitement? Where are the digg, twitter, facebook and second life of tomorrow? Nova (LIFT’s editorial manager) and me have some ideas, but I’d like to know what the readers of these blogs think.

The IHT published a report on the increase in the number of suicides in South Korea, a consequence of the stresses of a (too) rapid evolution worsenen by new technologies. Modernization has brought many uncertainties and weakened the traditional family references while the Internet provides an easy way for suicide candidates to get together or get lethal drugs.

The increase in suicides in South Korea has been especially steep in recent years, almost doubling from 6,440 in 2000 to 12,047 in 2005, according to the National Statistical Office. […]

The government does not compile figures on how many suicides may have been inspired or aided by the Internet. But in an analysis of 191 group suicides reported in the news media from June 1998 to May 2006, Kim Jung Jin, a sociologist at Korea Nazarene University, found that nearly a third of the cases involved people who had formed suicide pacts through Internet chat sites.

Link

Asian societies seem to be particularly vulnerable to this phenomena. Are these countries paying the price of their fast-paced transition from third world traditional societies to modern superpowers? Or is it a wired society problem happening in Asia first, which means our European countries will soon have it too?

Despite a good penetration of mobile phones, Africa is on pace to miss the benefits of the Internet age. The number of internet subscribers is incredibly low.

Africa remains the least connected region in the world, and the digital gap between it and the developed world is widening rapidly.

“Unless you can offer Internet access that is the same as the rest of the world, Africa can’t be part of the global economy or academic environment. […] The benefits of the Internet age will bypass the continent.”

Link

We really need to find some speakers from this continent for LIFT08.

The Swiss Internet Professionals Index – the first project I launched when I started this company – is going strong. More than a hundred companies and professionals are now listed, the site gets around 60’000+ hits a month (sorry I don’t have the more relevant page views figure), and at lunch the other day a friend working for the United Nations told me their procurement department was using it as a resource to find companies to send their request for proposal to.

So if you are active in the Internet industry in Switzerland, feel free to add yourself to the wiki listings at liftlab.com/sipi

Whisher is out! It is a project I have been following for quite a while, as it is coming out of Swisscom in a similar way than coComment. Deemed a FON competitor, it is an interesting piece of software that allows users to engage in social activities around one main thing: Wifi access points.

Whisher has a different approach than FON, and differs on one crucial aspect: you do not have to flash your router or do anything that requires deep technological expertise to use it at home. Download the software, let it work its magic, and you’re good to go.

I will test Whisher in the coming days, and actually the FON router I got for free at Leweb just arrived in the mail today, so I have all I need to make my mind. I’ll test both, and let you know.

UPDATE: GigaOM has mixed feelings, CNET is quite impressed. The discussion goes on.

Disclaimer: Whisher is sponsoring my conference and will offer free Wifi to all attendees.