Vook dead yet? Doesn’t matter. If you want to sell blades, first you have to find stubble that people are willing to pay to have shaved.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This was in my email this morning, spam from LinkedIn.com:

Joel Burslem is no longer Director of Product Development at Vook

Means what, I don’t know. Deck chairs on the Titanic. There is no huge surging mass of sub-literates demanding even easier-reading access to the half-shouted profundities of Gary Vaynerchuk. Love him or hate him, the guys lives and dies in video. He cannot be caged by a page, no matter how stylish or expensive or electronic that page might be. The book is a dead letter, so how could the Vook not be an even-deader letter? You cannot even pretend to believe otherwise unless you are in the pay of Brad Inman.

But: None of that matters. The Vook is instructive because it teaches us a host of interesting lessons about how to fail in business. Big names. Big funding. Design budget. Attractive product that works. Fancy offices filled with bigfoot corporate types. Even Aeron chairs, I’ll bet. What could go wrong?

Only this: There is no market for the product.

Remember that “find a need and fulfill it” bit from Business 101?

Can you name even one person who has confided to you, “You know, I’d probably read more if books were more like television?”

“I’d sure like to read more books, but the books I want to read are interrupted at intervals by bad actors enacting bad scripts.”

“What I want from books requires a sub-woofer!”

That’s a disaster from day one, and I have been ridiculing the Vook since first I heard about it. But even now, I can see an actual use for this technology: How-To books: How to build a rocking chair in 24 easy steps or The Kama Sutra for Klutzes. Those could sell, because they answer a need that can be served by both text and video. Even then, though, they’d be better as web sites — easier to control, easier to revise, etc.

But let’s go back to the Vook’s original marketing problem and try to solve it in a better way.

Brad Inman is a choke-point dinosaur. His goal was to come up with a “blade” dispenser — a relatively cheap razor that could be used to sell higher-profit “blades” over and over again. Gillette’s razors, Kodak’s cameras and Amazon’s Kindle device are all examples of this very-common business model. Because he has worked his whole life in publishing — selling vast quantities of a publication no one reads — he naturally gravitated to publishing for his new venture. He has a background in video, also, and video — unlike paper — is not easy to produce, reproduce, exhibit or copy. If anything could make a book into a “blade,” it would be video.

Except that books themselves are dying as an information transmission medium, dedicated devices you have to schlep around are an anathema and no one is crying out in desperate need for badly-animated comic books starring Gary Vaynerchuk.

I had two words for this idiot product when it was announced: Market research.

The Vook is just a dumb idea, but the base idea — a dedicated device that people are willing to pay added-value fees to gain access to — that may not be completely off the wall. Or maybe the place for an idea like that is on the wall.

Look at this:

That’s a beautiful photograph. So it this one:

Those are just two news photos I found today on-line. There are hundreds more, just as striking, taken every day. And there are millions of other very striking photos that have been taken over the decades. And thousands of drawings, illustrations and paintings.

High definition video monitors are the perfect picture frames, and we are soon headed for the day of video fabrics that will work like wall-paper — and eventually like garments.

We are on the cusp of an age when the quantity of available video screens will be massively increased — and every one of them is going to need programming.

For now, a dedicated device could connect a big Aquous-like monitor to a net-based service that fed images to that huge screen.

This is programmable art as decor.

You already have big picture frames all over the place.

You already have a small USB-fed picture frame on your disk, filled with eight gigs of family photos.

A device like this combines the two: Huge, striking graphic images that change at intervals — an evanescent art far better than you can afford to purchase in atoms, but yours for pennies a day when sold to you as electrons.

You’re already paying for decor. All we’re doing is turning decor into “blades” — something you purchase continuously, rather than only when you change homes.

That’s a business.

Your mood is programmable — on the fly. The intervals, the arcs of the color wheel, the tone and tenor of the images themselves — all controllable by you.

This is something people would pay for. This is something I would pay for, and I hate everything.

And remember, the quantity of available video surfaces in our lives is about to explode. There are a lot of business opportunities in here, but there are a lot of Web 2.0-like options, too. What a DeeJay does is more than just records, and what an Image- or Video-Jockey does can be far more than mere images.

This could be huge…