A possible inconvenience

by Andy Wilson, editor

Several years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a talk presented by Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail (www.thelongtail.com). If you have read this book, you will be aware of its simple yet powerful message.

In essence, Anderson points out that the economy is shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of mainstream products and markets at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. Thus, the total demand for products not available in traditional stores such as obscure 1930s jazz recordings by Fletcher Henderson and Cab Calloway is potentially as big as for CDs produced by groups such as The Beatles.

Although the demand may be as large, the number and variety of products needed for Anderson’s equation to be accurate points to a model of multiple niche online stores that do not incur the overhead of traditional retail and broadcast distribution.

After I attended his presentation, I was given the opportunity to quiz Anderson on his theory. I pointed out that I was the US representative of Steve Hatfield’s UK-based Country and Western band Spongefinger, which, unfortunately, only recorded one good CD. I told him that despite all my valiant efforts to promote the product via online services such as CDBaby, iTunes, Last.fm, and numerous other web sites, I had sold the grand total of five CDs in the same number of years!

I quizzed Anderson on what I could do to increase sales. After he informed me of more long-tail ideas such as taking the band on the road, printing T-shirts, and offering free music samples online, I informed him that Spongefinger had been disbanded. Although this drew a few laughs from members of the audience, Anderson looked at me as if I were an idiot. Would it not have been better, I thought, if I had struck a deal with Walmart to put thousands of copies of my band’s CDs in their stores across the world?

This long-tail phenomenon has started to encroach on the machine-vision business. Relatively small software vendors are already leveraging their algorithms into smart cameras and large, well-known machine-vision software packages. Lighting distributors are using web sites to reduce the cost of their inventories from overseas suppliers. What is even more interesting is that camera companies are using relatively obscure ICs and intellectual property into reengineered high-speed camera interfaces, blurring the bandwidth distinction between established standards such as FireWire and GigE and proposed standards such as CoaXPress and HSLINK.

In the past, advances were often made by large semiconductor companies and software vendors that were relatively easy to find. However, to keep abreast of changing technology, engineers and system developers now must be aware of more narrowly focused companies often located in far-flung corners of the world. This has been made increasingly difficult, since such companies are relatively small and may not have the money to market and promote their products across a wide audience.

To effectively promote these niche products, smaller companies are leveraging long-tail ideas that include directly approaching related companies about licensing and embedding their hardware and software products into cameras and frame grabbers, for example. In this way, vendors of niche products can leverage the more powerful sales and marketing efforts of larger companies.

Many small companies are taking their products “on the road,” individually approaching potential third-party vendors about licensing, purchasing, or listing their products in widely distributed catalogs. Some even post news of their technologies and products on niche-based LinkedIn groups where news is aggregated on specific topics. In doing so, these companies gain access to a smaller number of people really interested in their products.

Of course, all this long-tailed effort takes a long time. One is left wondering whether the time spent in pursuing all of these long-tailed ideas is as potentially worthwhile as using the now so-called “old-fashioned methods” of advertising, sales, and marketing.