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01-02-2006, 8:09 PM Simplicio Joined on 12-28-2005 Posts 4 But new instruments don't sell! It hardly matters how cool the Jammer-brand thummer is -- new instruments don't sell.  It's that simple.    Report

01-02-2006, 8:16 PM Sagredo Joined on 01-02-2006 Posts 3 Re: But new instruments don't sell!  Simplicio wrote: It hardly matters how cool the Jammer-brand thummer is -- new instruments don't sell.  It's that simple. Hmmm...all musical instruments were new once.  If Simplicio's claim were correct, then no musical instruments would exist today. Clearly, new musical instruments can and do sell. Sagredo    Report

01-06-2006, 11:35 PM J. Plamondon Joined on 01-06-2006 Posts 17 Re: But new instruments don't sell!  Simplicio wrote: It hardly matters how cool the Jammer-brand thummer is -- new instruments don't sell.  It's that simple. It is absolutely true that most new instruments don't sell well.  Indeed, most new PRODUCTS don't sell well, no matter what market they're in.  This is well-known. To sell well, a new product has to be significantly better than existing alternatives in THREE different areas -- not just one.  Most new products are only slightly better in only one area. For example, the jammer is not the first musical instrument to offer the benefits of an isomorphic keyboard.  These have been offered up, over and over, at least since Paul von Janko's "Janko Keyboard" in the 1880's.  The jammer's note-layout was first patented during this period, too.  But such alternative keyboards have always failed to enter the mainstream.  Why? Simple: they offered an improvement in only one area: ease of learning.  That's just not enough. One of their other problems is that most of of them were designd to be "replacements" for the piano-style keyboard, and therefore assumed piano-centric design goals, such as size, shape, and use of the thumbs to play notes.  The jammer had concertina-centric design goals, emphasizing small size, low weight, and portability. Our concertina-centric design goals led to the selection of the Wicki/Hayden layout, which places the most octaves and notes-per-octave under a single hand's finger-span.  Keeping the hand fixed in one location was never a design goal of piano-centric designs, so the resulting opportunity to use the thumb to control expressive effects -- for which it would have to remain in one place relative to the keyboard -- never came up with those designs. This greater expressive power also allows the jammer to offer real-time control over tuning, while still controlling other more traditional expressive effects. So the jammer has three core benefits -- expressive, easier to learn, and expanding musical horizons -- and a host of other ancillary benefits, such as being smaller/lighter/portable, flexible & extendable through its open-source Thummer(tm) Setup software, and NEW. Other instruments that have sold well in the past have also had similar relative advantages, but that's a different post.  :-) Thanks for your comment!  Please let me know if I didn't answer it to your satisfaction. Jim Plamondon CEO, Thumtronics Ltd The New Shape of Music(tm)    Report

01-20-2006, 12:16 AM GWHLevy Joined on 01-19-2006 Posts 10 Re: But new instruments don't sell! Well, I plan on buying one as soon as I can here in the U.S.A.  So, there'll be at least one U.S. sale.  Will there be any U.S. distributors?  ( I wish I had the money to become a distributor.)    Report

01-29-2006, 4:27 AM J. Plamondon Joined on 01-06-2006 Posts 17 Re: But new instruments don't sell!  GWHLevy wrote: Well, I plan on buying one as soon as I can here in the U.S.A.  So, there'll be at least one U.S. sale.  Will there be any U.S. distributors?  ( I wish I had the money to become a distributor.) We expect to sell direct-to-consumer worldwide from our website, without local distributors, to keep our prices as low as possible. However, we expect to support an affiliate sales program, kinda like Amazon's.  If someone buys one of our products by clicking through a link on your Thumtronics-affiliated website, you get a piece of the sales price.  So, for example, a French-speaking person could put up a website extolling the virtues of our products in French, which would funnel its viewers to the ordering pages of Thumtronics' website.  Likewise, an affiliate site could target the church market, or goth musicians, or Chinese-speaking electronica musicians, or the elderly Hindustani-speaking musical novice, or whatever. None of these sites' owners would buy jammers to re-sell; they would just attract potential customers to their own websites, and feed them through to Thumtronics' ordering pages.  That way, the only pages that we have to provide in multiple languages are the purchasing pages; we get all of the customer's data directly; we avoid most of the complex legal issues that can arise when selling through intermediaries; etc. We expect that this approach will allow us to penetrate the world's markets rapidly and at low up-front cost, since we would only pay our affiliates AFTER the sale. This model would certainly cause us to miss out on sales that we could have made through traditional distribution deals.  Deciding to forego these sales in favor of a simple, internationally-scalable business model is a close call -- kinda like deciding to use USB and not MIDI -- and one which we'll revisit regularly.      Report

09-10-2006, 12:44 AM mark Joined on 09-09-2006 Posts 3 Re: But new instruments don't sell! I'm sure your way will work but I hope you expand to traditional markets when you can. Musicians especially want to see and try what they're buying I'm no marketing expert (gasp) i'm just saying... you go to the shop and try it out. and only then you see whether the keyboard action is good, if you like the velocity response, if it feels solidly built, if the controls are too fiddly, etc. Tech heads will buy, real musicians and performers need to try it first. (as for me I'm just a tech head starting out but I'd want to try it out in person anyway because it's just better that way). Some musicians believe that they can hear sounds above 22kHz, that's how fussy they are. but if the internet is more economical for you to start with, as a business model, then... sure, sounds reasonable, as long as you shift to traditional distribution when the time is right. Sure why not. As you say it's a close call but I think you're doing the right thing at the moment. I'd probably do the same if I started a business. <br />    Report

09-10-2006, 8:13 PM A12Learn Joined on 09-05-2006 Posts 15 Re: But new instruments don't sell!  mark wrote: Musicians especially want to see and try what they're buying I'm no marketing expert (gasp) i'm just saying... you go to the shop and try it out. I know of a wonderful PC keyboard called the Boswell, which blew even the Dvorak keyboard away - about 3 times faster for text entry than a Dvorak design - using intelligent design  (left fingers for begining consonants, thumbs for vowels, and right fingers for ending consonants, plus two-key chording to reduce finger movement), one could enter whole phonemes at a time - e.g. 'marketing would be entered as 'm-a-r' {one triplex keystroke set}, then 'k-e-t' {ditto} and 'i-ng' {one duplex keystroke set}; three hand movements to type one word. One of the cool things about the thing is that it is omnilingual - works for most languages, and is great for learning a language - type in what you hear and the computer tells you if you were close to the right guess. It was also fast to learn, as the "hear sound, move finger" connection is easier to develop than the eye-to-keyboard one of a regular keyboard. When I saw this keyboard, I was impressed, and suggested that they market it to the geek market as an additional keyboard, provided they could get it under $300 - I said some geeks out there would kill for 3-times faster entry and that while they would pay thousands for a proven product, 300 was the threshold for an unproven, worth-trying-out possibility. They said they had considered that, but instead decided to go for the fairly extensive English-as-a-second language market, and sell it to schools etc. at $1100 a pop. This was circa 1995, when internet marketing was pretty iffy, and it was hard to create cheap exotic keyboards. They tried hard, but did not reach take-off - I don't know how close they came - but they did say to me "you were right - we wish we had done it that way". Probably the only time my advice has ever been right, sigh. Fast-forward to now. The lesson to draw here is that entry into schools or shops is a slow one. The geek market should be much faster entry, provided (1) marketing is done properly, and (2) the price is right. The entry price of $500 sounds right, but the website could show much more. (side note: The discrete buttons on the unit shown seem clumsy compared to the Boswell’s sleak finger-ergonomic design.)    Report

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