My Global Hustle
Fast Company Goes Social
Today, Fast Company relaunched its Website as a business social network, putting blog posts, comments, and questions from its readers front and center. Readers are now are encouraged to sign up, create a profile, and “join the business conversation.â€
Over the past few years, the print version of Fast Company has been brought back from near-death (thanks largely to the efforts of top editors Bob Safian and Will Bourne, both of whom were editors of mine years ago at Fortune). Now it is trying to shake things up on the digital side. You might have heard that guy Scoble is starting FastCompany.TV.
Next, it wants to tap into social media. A magazine’s readership is not a social network, but it is a community of interest. And Fast Company seems to understand the difference between the two. Edward Sussman, the president of Mansueto Digital, explains this in a post:
First off, here’s what it’s not: It’s not a pure social network. . . . You go to Facebook or MySpace and find the friends and co-workers you already know. The real world gets reproduced virtually. Maybe you meet a friend of a friend.
We’re not that.
We’re an entirely new community of people brought together because we want to share ideas about business. We like business. We think it’s important. Work gives more meaning to our lives. We believe business profoundly helps define our culture.
On FastCompany.com, you can now start your own blog, join a group, post a video, comment on articles, or suggest a “Fast Talk†question to start a debate. Articles from the print publication are interspersed with blog posts from readers, experts, and staffers, and are arranged in a blog-like chronology on the front page.
The idea is to make it easier for readers to interact with staff writers and contributors, and write their own thoughts, which might be featured prominently on the site. Every contribution a reader makes gets collected on his or her profile page, tagged, and placed into one of the eight sections on the site (innovation, technology, leadership, management, design, social responsibility, careers, and work/life balance). The site is built on top of the open-source content-management software Drupal. And it will support OpenID.
During the dying days of Business 2.0, I remember sitting in editor Josh Quittner’s office brainstorming about how we could do pretty much the exact same thing to save that magazine. We never got beyond the brainstorming. Whether or not this will work for Fast Company depends on how smart its readers are and how willing they are to contribute. But any media site that does not listen to its readers and, indeed, allow them to take over the conversation at times, is doomed for the dustbin.
We saw this with the recent relaunch of the Industry Standard, which tries to engage readers to predict future business events. And we will continue to see it moving forward. As a result, mainstream media and the blogosphere will become harder and harder to tell apart. It will just all become part of the bigger conversation.
Via TechCrunch
RapidShare a Wrap?
German owned yet globally popular file hosting site Rapidshare may be heading to the Deadpool after a German court found that it was liable for copyrighted files uploaded to the service.
The German equivalent of the RIAA, GEMA took Rapidshare to court over hosting copyright infringing files and at a court hearing January 23, won. The court found that Rapidshare must take responsibility for infringing files hosted on its service
Virgin Galactic Unveils Design For SpaceShipTwo
This morning, Richard Branson’s spaceship startup Virgin Galactic unveiled the second design of its suborbital vehicles, SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two. I am blogging this from the press conference at the Museum of Natural History in New York City.SpaceShipTwo is what the passengers will actually ride in, and White Knight Two is the launch vehicle that carries it to a high altitude before releasing the rocket. (It takes less energy to launch from 50,000 feet than from the ground). The design is a little bit different than the initial SpaceShipOne and White Knight One. Both are all carbon-composite vehicles, and are designed with an open architecture so that in the future other companies can use it as a foundation to create space vehicles for unmanned missions. White Knight Two is a double-hulled launch plane with four engines from Pratt & Whitney.
Branson suggests that if Virgin Galactic can prove the commercial viability of space flight, it will unlock a “wall of investment that could rival the amount invested in mobile or the Internet.†He also suggests that at some point in the future, in addition to suborbital thrill rides, the vehicle pair could serve as a superfast transport for point-to-point international travel here on Earth. (Forget about supersonic flight, this would be much faster). Looking much further out to a day when next-generation vehicles are flying commercially that can actually deliver small satellites and other payloads, he waxes about the possibilities:
One day we might be able to use space for energy production. While I believe aviation has to get more carbon efficient, seemingly benign industries like IT have outpaced aviation in carbon output. [One promise of a commercial space industry is] the ability to launch low-earth satellites that could literally take some of the heat out of the planet, by serving as a repository for information technology.
Although the flight rate will be low to start, the vehicle is designed to handle high flight rates several years from now. “The spaceship is being designed so that it can be flown twice a day and the launch plane can be flown three times a day,†says designer Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites. Virgin Galactic has ordered five spaceships from Scaled Composites, with an option of seven more. Rutan predicts that if Virgin Galactic is able to build 40 to 45 spaceships over first twelve years, with 15 launch planes, they could fly 100,000 people in the first twelve years of operation.
Virgin Galactic hopes to begin test flights this summer, but no mention of when commercial flights will actually start. With recession fears in the air, you’ve got to wonder what kind of impact that might have on demand for such premium-luxury travel.
And you thought Web 2.0 startups were risky.
On the initial $200,000 price per flight, Branson notes:
Within five years of launching, we hope that price will come down dramatically. We accept that $200,00, even though the dollar is not worth much anymore, is still too expensive for the majority of people.
By comparison, a trans-Atlantic flight in 1939 between New York and England cost the equivalent of $47,000 in today’s dollars. That was one-way and coach.
Via: CrunchBoardÂ
