Animated Economics

Found via House of Naked, the website Animoto creates slide show animations out of your images [which it can pull from the usual places]. Since you have very little control over how it turns out this will probably have limited presentational use except as a moving mood board, but once it lets you download the videos it'll be handy for that.

There seem to be a bunch of online animation tools launching at the moment - Iain pointed to a flash style [think singing kittens] animation tool called Fuzzwich a while back. All part of the ongoing move towards thin client wysiwyg programming that should further accelerate the democratisation of creation that we've been harping on about for ages.

The business model for software creation has been turned on its head. It no longer really makes sense to sell software to consumers - piracy is too easy in a connected broadband world.

In fact, the foundations of economics change in an information economy. Economics is based on the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity - a model that doesn't work when you can endlessly replicate product at zero cost - see software, music, information - anything digital. [You can still force corporations to buy software licenses - Microsoft send auditors round - but increasingly that model is shifting towards service contracts with the software as the bait.]

In a previous life, I used to preach this as software as a service - take the product and turn it into an on-demand service over the web, charging only for what people use, thereby lowering barriers to uptake and increasing potential customer base.

In the post Google economy, different monetisation models are springing up to compensate the creators of intellectual property without charging the end user. Currently most of them rely on a media model - use tool to build audience, sell audience to advertiers - a model which, you guessed it, is also being forced to evolve rapidly.

In our era of accelerated innovation, it makes sense for cycles of creative destruction to accelerate in step. Some old things [companies, business models] will die and from their ashes new economic powers will be born, faster than we have ever seen before.