A few months ago my buddy got married. As favors, he gave away t-shirts with his image in the Obamaesque Shepard Fairey design. Awesome.

Last week I bought an Obama T-shirt. It cost way too much. I wore it to a Superbowl party yesterday and three people said they were going to buy one (get yours here).

Today I read that the “Obama Brand Stimulates Big Sales” and that, according to the New York Times, Obama merchandise did over $200 million in sales. In the one month of November!

All this got me thinking about how to use this global celebrity to lift up the economy. (more…)

The first real instance of the ubiquitous, mobile web on a consumer-friendly handset is the Apple iPhone 3G. It’s a game-changer and a technology market-mover. We all know that. But as we also know, what drives technology development and adoption more than anything else is porn. Just as users will always find ways to get their porn, smart technology companies will find ways to provide and monetize it.

But how does one find free porn video content on the new iPhone? You can’t find it on Youtube, which comes native as a featured applicaiton, and some of the better-known adult streaming sites like Youporn, Redtube, Eskimotube all serve their content for free, but in Flash video, which isn’t supported on the iPhone.

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Pricing is one of the most interesting and yet misunderstood components of digital distribution.

I don’t mean pricing in terms of end-user costs, although that’s a fascinating discussion in its own right. I mean pricing in terms of the value of content interactions that an intellectual property owner should look to extract when selling their content.

In other words, if I’m a content owner, I want to license my show at a variable price which will maximize the value of each interaction that said show will generate. How do I do that in the current state of the digital world? (more…)

If today’s announcement that Google will launch Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane’s original web series across its network of AdSense sites sounds familiar that’s because the same parties made the exact same announcement last year. Someone, however, forgot to tell the New York Times, who managed to dust off the story, give it a fresh veneer and up the ante by quoting AdSense representative Kim Malone Scott as saying “We feel that we have recreated the mass media.”

Kim, you will never live that down.

No matter. I love what this deal represents, although I’m somewhat skeptical that users will adopt the model of clicking what has been defined as an advertisement in order to watch an advertisement in order to then watch a short blast of something MacFarlanely funny. (more…)