… RIM has repeatedly told carriers that, unlike Apple, it believes that they deserve a portion of revenues from its apps store and as well as future services. Although given the relative paucity of BlackBerry apps, the offer has relatively little financial value as of now.

That’s the same as me telling the carriers they deserve revenue from my app store.

These are the kinds of opportunities that emerge when you focus on developing unique content. Note to general news providers: This won’t work for you.

From Columbia Journalism Review:

In exchange for a weekly licensing fee, franchisees and partners can choose from three bundles of content to sell print and geo-locational web ads against: the national “news” stories, the national A.V. Club section (consisting of non-satirical profiles and interviews with filmmakers, comedians, and musicians), and local A.V. Club listings (local events chosen and summarized by Onion-supervised editors and freelancers living in each city). But franchisees take those packages in an all-or-nothing agreement. They can’t touch the content; that’s the deal.

Kudos to Paul Bond at The Hollywood Reporter for injecting some much-needed reality into this piracy story. Examples:

Indeed, at last year’s average ticket price of $7.18, the piracy could conceivably — though not likely — have cost Fox $28.7 million.

It’s taken a long time for this to sink in, but a pirated product is not necessarily a lost sale. There’s no way to know if someone who acquires a pirated piece of material would have ever bought that material. That’s why “lost” dollar figures must always be countered.

These closing sentences illustrate the discrepancy between executive overreaction and box office sales:

Nevertheless, “Wolverine” scored a better opening weekend than any other movie this year.

Said [Rupert] Murdoch on the call Wednesday: “At Fox, we couldn’t be happier with last weekend’s $85 million opening of ‘Wolverine.’ ”

This same issue popped up with the “Dark Knight.” Warner Bros. gnashed its teeth over piracy losses, yet the film grossed more than $500 million in the U.S. alone, making it the second most successful movie of all time.

This Boston.com article focuses is on vinyl reissues and Record Store Day, but it also aptly hits all the high points in the collector-souvenir-technology ecosystem:

• Small but passionate groups of collectors will pay a premium for special editions and compilations from their favorite artists.
• Businesses need to set appropriate pricing to make money from relatively few limited-edition sales (Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails knows a thing or two about this). This is the “anti-blockbuster” strategy.
• Long-tail technologies like print on demand and Disc on Demand can profitably connect collectors to lesser-known work by incurring production costs after a purchase is made. This is a beautiful way to serve niche markets with minimal risk.

I just saw this awesome blast-from-the-base tweet from @monkchips and @cherkoff. It’s like reading an early-’90s interview with Tim Berners-Lee that references his in-development “hyper linking system”:

The company has also instituted a pay-for-play scheme called Adwords that allows an advertiser to purchase a word and place a small text ad on the page whenever that word is mentioned in a query. But Google is making the most money from customized intrasite search functions, built for a dozen select clients, such as router giant Cisco Systems and Linux provider Red Hat.

All these rags-to-riches stories are nice, but the true genius of the App Store is the platform. Apple is taking a 30% fee for lightning in a bottle success. Unreal (in a good way).