Today, only big companies get a tax deduction for health insurance.

Get laid off, no tax deduction for you.  You pay taxes on your health insurance bill.

Work for yourself.   You pay taxes on your health insurance bill.

To me, this is one of the biggest problems with our health care system.

It makes people captive to working for big companies and captive to the health care plans the company decides on.

It means the unemployed and the entrepreneurs pay much more for health insurance.

The current system is bad policy, bad for business, bad for personal choice and totally BS.

The American Medical Association is asking people to tell their representatives to change this bad policy.

I’ve read their proposal and it seems good.

Tell the bozos in Washington to fix it.  I did and I hope you will too.

Here’s a short cut http://ta.gg/2v9

Alex

If you want health care fixed, pass it on.

Jason Calacanis, CEO and founder of Mahalo, has managed to turn layoffs into link bait for himself and Mahalo.  Mahalo is a self described next generation search engine (more realistically an about.com business model with freelance/contract editors and writers).  

Some months ago Mr. Calacanis decided to stop blogging and communicate with his readers through an email newsletter.  The newsletter has grown to many thousands of followers.He has written about the impact of the financial crisis on startups and done a good job telling it like it is.His most recent email went into deep detail about the cuts he has made at his own company, the logic behind it and how he dealt with the situation.

I think he was right to make the cuts he did, as painful as they have been.  It is his responsibility to make those decisions and I know from first hand experience how hard those decisions and actions can be, but given the economic conditions every company should be taking similar actions.

While the content of his email is strategically correct, his style comes across as finding humor in the darkness of the situation which makes the email tough to swallow for anyone who has been hit by the swift turn in the market.  This makes it naturally link bait for the technology bloggers.
Mr. Calacanis has made it a point to make his entire life a marketing tool for his companies and rarely misses an opportunity to market himself or his company. In this case, he managed to turn layoffs into a personal and maybe a company marketing tool.

While he clearly stated his wishes that his email not be republished, it was ok to forward it on to others.  Mr. Calacanis is clearly a sophisticated blogger who knows that republishing his words would be irresistible to the blogger community. The result would be a huge kerfuffle not only over the content of his email, but his rights to protect his content in this way.  And so, it has been republished here, here and here along with others with an explosion of comment and links.

He has managed to turn the layoffs in his company into a big discussion on the web, and that means more links to Mahalo and more marketing for Mr. Calacanis. It means he has exchanged the layoffs in his business for the currency of the web, links. More links equals more page rank and that means better search engine optimization. I never thought that someone could turn this downturn into link juice, but Mr. Calacanis seems to have made that work, either though Machiavellian insight or through some less devious intentions.

I don’t know Mr. Calacanis, but have heard him speak his mind many times.  He is not a shy man and he is very, very good at promotion. I have agreed with his points much more often than I have disagreed. I think he is a smart, aggressive make money kind of guy who is good at building $50 to $100 million companies.

Sending out the email reflects his very nature. It’s the problem or perhaps the insight of his email. He found a way to turn the bad stuff into a marketing opportunity.

So what do you say?  Did Mr. Calacanis do a good job of making lemonade out of lemons, or did he overstep the bounds of decency?

BTW.  I can’t but find the irony in the company’s tagline “We’re here to help”

Podcasting 1.0 has been the age of iTunes and iPods. The original software clients that were built in late 2004 and early 2005 were designed to automatically download media files and put them into your iTunes music folder. By labeling the files as podcasts, they automatically went into a folder on iTunes for podcasts and from there the files were automatically synchronized with your iPod.

Clever and simple it was. Using the RSS feed, you could set your software to record your favorite shows directly to your iPod for listening or viewing whenever you wanted. The iPod became a portable Tivo for audio and later video with the release of the video iPod.

Media could be published by anyone, anyone could subscribe and new stuff showed up on your iPod by simply connecting it to your computer. The term Podcast for this subscription based media distribution mechanism was a natural.

This simple innovation became even bigger when Apple saw the opportunity that podcasts presented. Massive amounts of new and free content that could be provided by iTunes. The fact that it was free meant that everyone could start filling up their 40 or 80 GB iPods with all kinds of subscribable media.

In 2005, we saw lots of growth in podcasting and by 2006 it had been picked up by mainstream media as well. NPR, NBC, ABC and many other media companies started to provide podcast content and these mainstream media publisher quickly rose to the tops of the iTunes charts along with a number of new players.

While the growth that came from Apple’s integration of podcasts into iTunes has been great, I believe the tight association and integration with iTunes and iPod is holding back podcasting from realizing its true potential.

The word itself leads one to believe you need an iPod if you want to get a podcast. Those of us in podcasting constantly try to communicate that you don’t need an iPod to enjoy podcasts, but it’s a small voice compared to the perceptions of consumers. The issue is further compounded by the fact that the easiest way to subscribe to podcasts is to use iTunes.

The Limitations of the Pod Market

The problem is that the installed base of between 100 and 200 million iPod devices is actually quite limited, particularly when you take into account the number of iPods people own and how many actually get used.

In my own home, my kids and I have six or seven iPods, and only one of them gets used for playing podcasts. I also have many friends who have been given the device for Christmas or a birthday, but don’t actually use it.

If we reduce the installed based by 50% for duplicate iPod owners and a further 50% for those who don’t use the device or listen to podcasts we end up with a potential market size of 25 to 50 million users. If we take the old 80-20 rule, it says that the hard core market for podcasts on iPods is probably between 5 and 10 million users at the current time.

If we move beyond iPods and say the market is iTunes users then things look a little brighter. iTunes is said to have an active user base of 500 million. If we apply the same math that we used above we could probably get the market up to 125 million people who have tried podcasts, with a hard core market of 25 million people who are heavy users.

Moving Beyond the iPod

The market starts to look more interesting if we move beyond iPods and iTunes to the broader internet. Some recent survey data from Universal McCann shows that of 475 million active internet users in the world 45 percent have downloaded a podcast and that 7 percent download daily. These numbers suggest a market of 213 million who have tried podcasts and a hard core market of 33 million users who download daily.

Beyond the PC, lies the huge potential of the mobile phone market. Phones that support subscribing to podcasts like the iPhone (received through iTunes) and Nokia’s N95 (received through an on-phone podcast application) show the potential of mobile phones as the next generation of portable Tivos.

There are billions of mobile phones in active use every day. While most of these phones don’t yet have the capability needed to be portable Tivos, the installed base continues to be upgraded at a rapid pace.

500 million cell phones equipped with mp3 players were shipped in 2007 and estimates call for over 900 million to be shipped each year by 2011. On the video front, 3G phones with video capabilities is one of the fastest growing segments.

Within the next 5 to 10 years, it is quite likely that most new mobile phones being sold will be video capable, and if good fortune/open markets prevail they will be WiFi enabled. This will expand the market for subscribable media to billions of mobile devices worldwide with potential audience sizes as big or bigger then television.

Connected digital TVs represent yet another big opportunity, but one that will take longer to evolve due to the slower turn over of the installed base of devices. HDTV’s are basically very large monitors that can be connected to the internet via set top boxes, PCs, Mac Minis, Apple TV and the like. Tivo is already providing some support for podcasting. The publish and subscribe model that is the foundation of podcasting can turn every one of these devices into Tivos for internet video and audio.

The PC, mobile and HDTV are the markets that will allow subscribable media/podcasting (or whatever new name it takes on) to realize its true potential. These markets will give podcasting the reach and scale required to turn subscribable media into a sizable industry. These are the markets that matter and the markets that every serious publisher should be working towards. Now is the time to establish your position.

Getting from here to there

Getting from here to there requires a change in mindset. In many cases, today’s traditional publishers treat subscribable media as a sideline with little strategic thought and poor execution.

In contrast, new media players like Revision3 and TWiT.TV are thinking strategically about building audiences and brands that form the basis of a real business. Winners will take the business seriously.

Publishers who see the opportunity on the horizon will begin to shift their focus from iPods/iTunes to the PC, mobile and connected TV segments. Too many publishers rely too heavily on iTunes. This dependence manifests itself in many ways such as the use of one click iTunes buttons as the only way to subscribe and the use of iTunes as the way to present the content archive.

This shift in focus requires a multi-device content strategy. This is particularly important for video, because what plays on an iPod, won’t necessarily play on a cell phone. In a recent survey I did of 25,000 video podcast episodes, I found only 6 episodes encoded with 3gp (the video standard for 3G phones). If publishers want to tap the mobile market, then they need to make sure that the content they produce can be played on these alternative devices.

Building real businesses in this sector will take investment and sound execution. Revision3 has taken in $9 million in investment and Mevio (formerly PodShow) has taken in $24 million in funding. This is the kind of investment that traditional publishers will need to make if they are serious about building new media businesses.

On the execution front, there are profound differences between those who are focused on building new media businesses and those that treat it as a sideline. Companies like Revision3 and TWiT.TV show a commitment to the business and best practices that is just not found in many traditional media companies.

These new media companies are successfully building brand franchises and growing audiences that are attractive to advertisers. They are positioning themselves ahead of the huge demand wave that’s building.

If you want to ride that wave, now is the time to get serious about building a new media business.

As always, comments and feedback are appreciated.

[tags]podcasting, podcast market size, podcasting 2.0, subscribable media, mobile media[/tags]