Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Live Video on the Web - A crazy world that needs to be watched
(Annette Moser-Wellman) If you are The Jonas Brothers, how do you keep in contact with your fan base in a fast, efficient way without the risk of losing your life? How about a live video web broadcast? The band came on
Justin.tv soon after the site launched and they got over 80,000 views in an hour. The site crashed. When The Jonas Brothers came back six months later, they got a little over a million views in an hour and the site stayed up. So goes the popularity of live video.
Evan Solomon from Justin.tv talked to me about the popularity of live video and how it's changing the marketplace on the web.
You may remember a guy called Justin Kan. His idea was to broadcast his life by posting live videos about himself. The phenomena became known as life casting and it created a viral tidal wave in 2006. Since that time, streaming live video has taken on a bigger and - not surprisingly - more commercial role. The big players in addition to Justin.tv include
Ustream and
LiveStream. Justin.tv now has something like 35 to 40 million unique viewers in the last 30 days and has scaled so quickly that they have 250 of their own servers and can handle over a million concurrent views.
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Wednesday, December 30, 2009
rrripple: 100% Signal, 0% Noise
(Annette Moser-Wellman)
Information noise is everywhere. From comments about what's for dinner on
Facebook to
Twitter expletives about lost luggage, irrelevant messages are beginning to make advertisements seem interesting again. And as your network grows and shares, the noise becomes even louder. My sixteen- year-old who has been addicted to Facebook for two years is now complaining, "Facebook is filled with stuff I don't care about!"
Look forward to new tools that will help to solve the noise problem and keep the genuine connectivity we originally loved about the Web 2.0 movement. In
my last blog, I told you about
Scoopler, which uses algorithms to screen out Twitter noise and can divine news trends. Social networks are now cropping up that take a different tack on promoting and preserving the best of our peer-to-peer communication.
I spoke with one of the founders of
rrripple, Heather Hiles. rrripple is a media sharing site that says it is committed to 100% signal, 0% noise. What they mean is that, as a social network, you'll be able to share and get what you want with none of what you don't - not even any advertising.
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Monday, November 30, 2009
Separating news from fiction - Technologies that are blocking noise and even predicting the future
(Annette Moser-Wellman) There are a myriad of search engines trying to unseat Google. At the same time, there are a handful of search engines that are trying to grab the white space that Google is missing. One of these complementary players is
Scoopler.com. Scoopler is focusing on organizing all the real-time content on the web and making it searchable. What do they mean by real-time? I talked with their Founder Dilan Jayawardane to figure it out.
How are you different from your everyday search engine?
We are indexing content from
Twitter,
Flickr and
Digg, and making it discoverable. We look for trending topics. We are creating a system that is able to detect any newsworthy event that happens out there and build a custom portal so that people can find all the relevant information in one place.
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Monday, November 30, 2009
Reclaiming the Cash - A way toward monetizing publishing content?
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Many believe the demise of the newspaper business model began with the decision to give content away on the Internet. Why buy the paper, the magazine, the newsletter when you can get the same thing online for free? Increasingly, innovators are trying to reverse consumer expectation that content should be free and find fresh ways to create revenue through micro-payment, subscription and more. Is it possible to reclaim at least some of the cash?
The industry is closely watching the efforts of the start-up
Journalism Online. Still in prelaunch phase, Journalism Online is a reader revenue platform that allows publishers the ability to experiment with different ways to charge for online content. Targeted toward anyone who publishes original content online through any electronic devise, the Journalism Online platform is designed to collect revenue from multiple forms of online content.
In my conversation with Steven Brill, one of the Founders of Journalism Online, I asked him about the inception of the idea and their vision for the future."
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Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Vocalo.org - More than just a radio station
(Annette Moser-Wellman) The advent of social media promised exposure to more people and diverse ideas. We'd learn from each other's differences and might even grow smarter in the process. But one could argue that social networks have had exactly the opposite effect. It appears that narrower and narrower groups of people talk to each other about similar topics and that the hope for rich dialogue and cross-pollination is more elusive than ever in the digital space.
Chicago Public Radio has made a bold effort to address this trend by creating a form of hybrid media to spawn rich dialogue with wide audiences. Research showed WBEZ's territory covered a large non-white, underserved population. How could new media serve as a lever to encourage participation and involve African-American and Latino communities?
Vocalo.org is a Chicago Public Radio enterprise - a radio broadcast channel in Northwest Indiana designed to target a different demographic mix and expand dialogue at the same time.
Vocalo.org is more than just a radio station. It's also a social media, content-sharing website that takes the best user-generated content and curates it as the broadcast. "We have on-air hosts just like traditional public radio," says
Wendy Turner, General Manager of Vocalo.org. "But the content is all talk-based speech ranging from stories of personal experience to parodies, commentaries and opinion. We curate the content and expand exposure. We take conversations already happening on the ground and transfer them to mass media."
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Wednesday, October 21, 2009
An Uncommon Partnership: How an investigative journalism site garners a wider audience
(Annette Moser-Wellman) In this blog, we've introduced some new models for on-line news. Perhaps one of the most visible advancements has been the plethora of investigative journalism sites growing on the Web. Since this expensive news function has been eviscerated from traditional news media budgets, Internet news sites have flourished. Largely funded by philanthropy, investigative reporting has been enjoying a comeback.
Some sites, such as
voiceofsandiego.org and San Francisco's
public-press.org, seek to bring hard core news stories to their local communities. Largely funded by individual and institutional philanthropy, their mission is to illuminate issues of local importance. These sites are fighting it out on the battlefield of the Web, casting for eyeballs wherever they can find them.
Another model is being created by an organization called
ProPublica. Rather than an individual city focus, ProPublica produces investigative journalism in the public interest that is national in scope. They create in-depth stories that highlight concerns such as the Treasury Department bailout. They produce data-rich analyses of the Obama administrations' stimulus package. But what makes the site unique is that these stories don't just live on their site, they are also shared and distributed by popular media.
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Thurday, October 1, 2009
The Future of Our Many Screens - Ideas from the edge of mobile and TV technology
(Annette Moser-Wellman) How long have we lived with the futuristic scene of a homemaker in front of her refrigerator ordering milk on the built-in computer screen? Images abound that have not transpired, but it doesn't stop us from wondering about the future of these rapidly changing computer devices and their application for everyday uses. From smart phones to dumb netbooks, from game boxes to cable boxes, we wonder how this panoply of screens will work together, or not, in the future.
One point of view on this future comes from Ephraim Cohen, a consultant in the digital media space at
The Fortex Group. We asked Cohen about technology trends he notices in TV, mobile and more. Instead of the PC dominating the computer interface, he predicts "The cell phone is on its way to becoming the entertainment hub of the home and potentially the information hub of the workplace."
How did this transition happen and what can we expect the changes to be? Cohen explains that with the iPhone,
Apple popularized the app store, and made it easy and fun to use the full potential of computing technology off of the mobile device. Previously wireless carriers controlled how people used their phones by selecting functionality like video or texting. Now carriers are giving control to the user, who can download applications as they want or need them. Cell phones already had much of this capability, but it was the one-touch apps and the choices the App Store offered that demonstrated the phones' potential to consumers.
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Friday, September 25, 2009
The Future of Media from a Venture Capitalist
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Our mission at TechScout is to provide a window to the things to come in the media marketplace. From interviewing academics about their cutting-edge research to checking in with CEO's in the tech industry, we try to give you a peek under the hood of a rapidly changing - and some say wholly unpredictable - industry.
An interesting glimpse of the future is also found in the venture capital community. These VC investments shape new media players and give us a hint on some potential winners in the media marketplace. I recently spoke with Paul Holland of
Foundation Capital about the trends he sees and some bets his firm has made in the changing media world. Their strategy: "We simply look and say what we think are the next major trends that are going to occur, what the technology needs around those trends are, and can we service them with startups?"
Clearly, business models for traditional forms of media are imploding and Holland admits "I have no dog in that fight," meaning no investments in old media. But he is keenly aware of the tremendous push of traditional firms to recapture some lost revenue through online outlets. Holland points out that the disintegration of traditional media revenue and the attendant interest in online is happening at a lightning pace few anticipated. While some traditional media outlets are making the transition better than others - he cites
Forbes and
The Economist - Holland believes the crossover to online has and will continue to be a struggle.
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Thursday, September 17, 2009
Scrambling to Change - Strategies for Innovating in the Media Industry
(Annette Moser-Wellman) When an industry goes through a radical disruption, everyone knows change has to happen and it's often those companies who change early that survive. I spoke with Professor Georges Haour, an expert in technology and innovation management from the global business school
IMD. Haour believes organic growth for media companies is difficult because of the shrinking advertising dollars. Still, he claims there are ways to innovate and find ways through the dark night of the industry.
One of the first lines of defense is looking for small entrepreneurial candidates to acquire. Mergers and acquisitions hedge against risk when the future for growth seems unclear. Certainly we've seen this at work in traditional media.
Hearst is a case in point with their investments in companies from
Kaboodle and
UGO Entertainment to
eInk and
Pandora. When you have the money to spend, acquisitions can be a viable option for growth. But what if you don't have a lot of free cash? How then do you innovate?
Haour uses the pharmaceutical industry as a metaphor for media industry innovation. Having leaned on mergers and acquisitions to fund their growth, pharmaceutical firms are looking forward to new ways to innovate. The mass market is less lucrative due to patent restrictions, so companies are moving toward finding new ways to create specialized medicines for specific ailments. And with the promise of genome discoveries, there will be ways to further personalize medications.
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Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Hyperlocal News - A Perspective from Outside.in
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Let's say you represent a local newspaper in a mid-size town. You've heard about the trends toward hyperlocal news and reporting and are intrigued by the possibility of offering your readers neighborhood coverage. But the budget certainly doesn't warrant more reporters. And scouring the Internet for stories online? Inefficient and probably not very effective. However, technology tools have emerged promising to solve these very problems. In our recent Media Management Center report,
The Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization, we heard industry leaders like Adrian Holovaty at
EveryBlock portend the day when hyperlocal news would be available at the fingertips. In fact, by the beginning of 2009 EveryBlock was operational for search in eleven cities.
We interviewed Mark Josephson, CEO at
Outside.in to check out the current state of the hyperlocal news industry. Outside.in is a news aggregator a la
Google News, but they focus on scouring news and organizing local news. They track blogs, newspapers, municipal data and even
Twitter feeds. They push it through eight different algorithmic filters and categorize for over 35,000 neighborhoods in the US.
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Thursday, July 16, 2009
A Newspaper Experiment - The Public Press
(Kevin Stark)
Michael Stoll believes that newspapers should provide a public service. Stoll moved to San Francisco in 2000 to work as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and, after being promoted three times, was fired after accusing the publisher of tailoring coverage to favor certain advertisers and politicians. Stoll was then hired to scrutinize the content of local news organizations by Grade the News, a media watchdog group based at Stanford University.
Through his work, Stoll often found that the intentions of many journalists - to tell the truth and uncover social injustice - were being compromised by the business practices of their publications. Specifically, newspapers needed ad revenue to fund their journalism and this was influencing the reporting. In 2005, Stoll began circulating ideas for his own publication, a nonprofit noncommercial news organization that published hard-hitting reporting.
The Public Press was born out of these initial plans and published its first content last fall. It has joined the ranks of organizations like the Voice of San Diego, Consumer Reports and others that have attempted to create a nonprofit, noncommercial business model. "What it comes down to is we have created a platform of journalism that cannot be bought," said Stoll.
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Monday, July 6, 2009
The Next Generation News Organization - A Conversation with Andrew Donohue
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Many believe the disruption in the newspaper business model will lead to innovation. But what will that innovation look like? To be sure, one of the creative concepts to emerge is that of the small, local, online newspapers sprouting up all over the country. What makes these not-for-profit news organizations unique is not just the way they generate revenue, but their editorial perspective. In this interview,
Andrew Donohue, editor of
voiceofsandiego.org, shares how the publication started and his vision for the future of news.
What was the impetus for creating voiceofsandiego?
There was a general atrophy in the San Diego media world. The Union and the Tribune merged in the early '90s. Then the LA Times, which had a full San Diego Bureau and San Diego edition, left town. So we went from having three daily newspapers competing for stories to one newspaper very quickly.
Our main founder, Buzz Woolley, was the son of a reporter. He saw the atrophy of media as a weakness in a civil society. As a retired venture capitalist and philanthropist, he partnered with Neil Morgan, a grandfather in San Diego journalism. Together they decided to create a new business model for news. This would be an online newspaper supporting a vision of public service with investigative reporting at the core of the institution.
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Monday, June 29, 2009
The Mobile Advertising Challenge - How One Company May Portend Things to Come
(Annette Moser-Wellman) How DOES Twitter make money? I hear that refrain constantly so I'm sure you wonder about it too. When I interviewed one of the founders a few years ago for the Media Management Center, Twitter was a fledging service popular with only early adopters in the Valley. When I asked Biz Stone how they would monetize the service, he told me they had a few models in mind. Now, when Twitter has fully bloomed - even Larry King is twittering! - we still see no advertising. We continue to wonder. One thing is sure: Making money on mobile advertising is tricky.
In a recent blog, I wrote about Tony Fish, one of the leading industry consultants on mobile. I asked Fish what companies were ushering in the era of mobile as the 7th mass media. Who was making money and how? He mentioned
Blyk. Blyk is a company that optimizes a user's digital footprint - its interests, attitudes and behaviors - in exchange for the right to share advertising.
So, I interviewed
Leif Fagelstedt, the COO of Blyk, and learned about their theory of mobile advertising and how the service works. The Finnish company provides a mobile service for young people in the UK. Blyk provides free texts and cell phone minutes in exchange for receiving relevant communications (offers, information and entertainment) from brands on their mobile phones. They also become part of an invitation-only community.
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Monday, June 22, 2009
History Lessons - Can the Past Help Us Create a New Business Model for News?
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Some say history can be thought of as a spiral. As the spiral climbs ever higher, we deal with the same problems, but in a slightly different context. Can that experience be true with the news industry? If so, what can we learn from that history?
Andrew Odlyzko is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota and the founding director of the Digital Technology Center. He researches electronic publishing, electronic commerce and the economics of data networks. In our interview, he started out by talking about his latest research comparing the Internet bubble to the British Railway Mania of the 1840's. My first thought was, "What could the 19th century possibly have in common with post-modern technology?" But when Odlyzko started explaining how information flowed both then and now, I caught a glimpse of the lesson he was trying to share:
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Monday, June 15, 2009
Mobile Ahead - How Your Digital Footprint Will Change the Media Landscape
(Annette Moser-Wellman) From the moment you wake up to when you go to sleep at night, who is your most intimate companion? Well, I'll give you a hint. It's not your partner or spouse. It's not your Chihuahua either. It's probably your mobile phone. Not only does your device bring you immediate access to your social circle whenever you want it, but when its GPS is enabled, it reveals intimate secrets about you and your behaviors.
Tony Fish is author and founder of
AMF Ventures. He uses the term "digital footprint" to describe the data that you create and collect on your mobile phone. Fish was recently recognized as one of
The Observer's most influential thinkers in technology and business. In our interview Fish talked about this
Digital Footprint, the title of his new book - how it is created, sustained and how it brings values to individuals, companies and the media industry.
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Thursday, May 07, 2009
What If News Searched for You?
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Imagine for a moment that you didn't search for news, but news searched for you. The news knew your mood. What you wanted and needed to know showed up on your television, your netbook, your computer and, especially, your mobile device. If you had trouble getting out of bed, you might get an inspirational story on the radio. If you were interested in local politics, you would be served a story on your handheld about the debate on affordable housing. About 4 in the afternoon, your computer would suggest a dinner idea and, when you came home from a hard day, the television would provide three options for a movie on-demand. The news delivery would match your behavior and your attitude.
In our latest blogs, we've been interviewing academics researching the frontiers of science and technology: men and women who have projections about the future of media. Sensors are one of the most intriguing areas of development that promise application within the news media. Sensor data is available through a plethora of electronic devices including cell phones and a variety of other mobile devices. Scientists are asking "What attitudes and behaviors could we predict from the analysis of sounds, movements, and location over time?
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Monday, April 20, 2009
Using Technology to Enhance Journalism's Future
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Less investigative reporting? Less high-quality news available? These are frequently heard concerns as news organizations struggle for survival. But what if the disruption in the market for news and information could lead to fresh, new media products that have yet to be imagined?
This is the view of
Dr. Irfan Essa, Professor in the
College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Essa works in the areas of human computer interaction and artificial intelligence and coined the term "computational journalism."
"Imagine an article written by your favorite news organization about your neighborhood that offers background data you can personally customize or visualize in a myriad of ways and provides access to experts in your area to for perspective," Essa said, describing the future of news as an intersection between breakthroughs in computation and the highest-order journalism.
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Monday, March 23, 2009
Answers on Monetizing Mobile from Tomi Ahonen
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Tomi Ahonen is a best-selling author and media consultant based in Hong Kong. His expertise in third generation (3G) technologies and global wireless trends gives him an authoritative voice in new ways to monetize the mobile channel. His "Seven New Capabilities for Mobile" have been popularized across the media community. These "seven firsts" include: the first personal mass media, the first permanently carried and 'always on' mass media, the first built-in payment mechanism, the first content-capture at point of creative impulse, the most accurate audience measurement and the first capture of social context of media consumption. We interviewed Ahonen via e-mail about the future of mobile and news.
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Friday, February 27, 2009
Building a Kingdom for Media Brands with Podcasts
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Finding new ways to spread a media organization's content as far and wide as possible is the name of the game these days. Think of it as building a media brand's kingdom - in a crusade against the tyranny of declining advertising revenues.
So it's interesting to look at what some news organizations are doing to spread their audio and video content via podcast 'feeds' or RSS content - and at emerging services that intensify the consumer experience . Check out
CNN's series of audio and video content that repurposes cable broadcasts for other forms of distribution. Each 'product' offered is a regular segment. Some are updated hourly, others daily. Magazines and other newspaper publishers are following suit, yet not with the same frequency. See and listen to the
Wall Street Journal entries in this market.
Services like these are "not your father's" podcasts. In the old-style podcast, you had to download each MP3 file to your device, be it a PC, MP3 player or a mobile phone. These more accessible audio RSS feeds are podcasts streamed over the Internet. Importantly, the 'podstreams' allow consumers to easily customize their news and information menus.
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Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Realizing the Power of Mobile for News
(Annette Moser-Wellman) If there is one safe prediction to make about innovation, it's that it's impossible to predict. Particularly in rapidly changing marketplaces like mobile technology, who can say what will happen two years or even two months into the future? Who would have predicted the wildfire adoption of the initial Blackberry or the amazing demand for the iPhone?
Even so, I got a glimpse of the future in a recent interview with Benjamin Mosse, Director of Mobile Products at the Associated Press, when we discussed some trends for the future of mobile news.
The
AP Mobile News Network (APMNN) is an industry-led digital cooperative that takes news feeds from its members and distributes it through carriers and handset manufacturers. Member organizations benefit because APMNN provides the negotiated agreements and technology platforms to distribute publishers' content. Carriers like AT&T, looking to distribute local news, benefit because the APMNN is poised to provide one-stop shopping for the content of more than 1,000 local newspapers domestically and, soon, internationally as well.
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Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Virtual Beers for the News Business
(Annette Moser-Wellman) In our recent report,
The Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization, we mentioned the need for media organizations to think like a marketer. In this shifting, if not shrinking, economy, it's necessary to build a strong and viable brand with your target audience. It's also vital to connect with them wherever they are. Increasingly, you'll find they're on a social network.
You may be familiar with a trend on social networks called virtual gift giving. If someone wants to say congratulations, they can send you a virtual 'beer' - an icon which is prominently displayed on your social network profile page. But what you may not be familiar with is the growing interest in buying 'high end' virtual gifts online. From small purchases of an animated icon for $1.00 to real estate in
Second Life, the virtual goods market is expected to top $9 billion by the year 2011. It's estimated that the social network,
Facebook, took in $35 million in virtual goods sales direct to the consumer.
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
"The Future Is Mobile!"
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Some news organizations have told me that it's nearly impossible to figure out how the mobile market will shake out. How can you monetize the mobile experience? With all the complexity around handsets, networks, carriers and formats, who will rise and fall? With all the chores of running a media company in a changing world, how can you figure out the advertising business model on mobile? Why not just wait and see, they ask?
Well, as we've said before at TechScout and will be saying again: The Future Is Mobile! It's critical to jump in and test the waters - now.
One place publishers are beginning to make some money is in the mobile video market. There are an estimated 100 million video-viable cell phones in the United States alone and that's no small market. Further, technology platforms are rising that allow any company to easily monetize their video.
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Monday, December 15, 2008
Semantics and the Coming Revolution in Internet Advertising
((Annette Moser-Wellman) We each have our own tricks for searching the Internet for the information we need. I've found that if I drop the "s" off of plural words in Google, I get what I'm looking for faster. But the day is coming, and maybe just around the corner, when search will rapidly improve and trump our current basket of tricks. Further, the same technologies that will streamline search will have big implications for online advertising.
The promise of better search is being driven by smart, or semantic technologies, that extract meaning from information. At the forefront of the artificial intelligence movement, semantic technologies are revolutionizing the way in which we access data on the Internet. I interviewed Matt Colledge, Chief Executive Officer of
Idilia, a software firm that researches and develops applications for semantic processing. For the last eight years, Matt's firm has been pioneering at the edge of artificial intelligence.
Idilia's breakthroughs are in the area of "word sense disambiguation" - the capability to automatically resolve the meaning of words in context. It sounds scary but bear with me and you'll catch of glimpse of the radical changes coming.
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Monday, November 10, 2008
The Useful Local News Organization
(Annette Moser-Wellman) It's easy to get tied up in our underwear debating what should be the mission of the news organization - delivering news or providing information? Jack Lail, News Director of Innovation for the Knoxville News Sentinel, knows his answer. "I'm a big believer that we have to be useful to our audience. That is really what we do. If being useful is making it easy for you to find out stuff or acquire social currency at the water cooler, that's great. But it's also how to plan your life or what you're going to do this weekend. If you focus on being of use to your audience, then the news is very important, but it doesn't have to be the only thing that you try to accomplish."
And the Knoxville News Sentinel is finding a lot of fresh ways to be of use. Facing the challenges of any local news service, the paper and its Web site,
knoxnews.com, are focusing on serving audiences in a multi-platform way. From text alerts to
Twitter feeds, their goal is a deeply useful engagement level with consumers.
"In our local market, we need to be the largest player in monthly visitors to our Web site," he says. "We are using different strategies to get people to come more frequently, particularly if they are not print newspaper readers."
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Thursday, November 06, 2008
Making the most of what you have
(Annette Moser-Wellman) The road to Internet revenue is littered with pay-for-premium-content failures. The most visible was the New York Times'
TimesSelect, which charged for access to special content online. Two years after it was launched, it was abandoned in September 2007 because, of course, there was more money to be had in advertising revenue than online subscriptions.
And remember when
Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal that same year? The ubiquitous buzz on the street was that he was going to abandon subscriptions and make content free online - because of course, there was more money to be had in advertising revenue than in online subscriptions.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Internet. The WSJ online still prices its online subscription at $99 per year (and with print on promotion). What the heck happened? Either News Corp management figured it was too hard to make money through online advertising OR subscription revenue was so lucrative it was hard to walk away from it.
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Monday, November 03, 2008
On Becoming A Next Generation News Organization at NPR
(Annette Moser-Wellman) As readers of TechScout know, I've been spending the last year scouting out technological trends that will affect the news business and mulling over what capabilities news organizations need to cultivate as a result. In just a few days, you'll learn what I've concluded, when Media Management Center publishes my new book, "Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization."
So let me whet your appetite for my findings by sharing with you parts of my interview with Carlos Barrionuevo, who is Senior Director of Business Development at National Public Radio (
NPR). Carlos shared with me recently how his organization is transforming for the digital age. Imagine my delight when I realized that some of NPR's initiatives nicely illustrate the very competencies outlined in my MMC work.
(To learn more about the study’s findings,
sign up here for a free Webinar November 11.)
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Thursday, September 25, 2008
Relationships of trust and the future of on-line advertising
(Annette Moser-Wellman) A college student recently told me something shocking. "My friends aren't using
Facebook anymore. We don't want information about our lives open to anyone - especially marketers. Feels like Big Brother." Well, you can't mark a trend from one data point, but you may have noticed Microsoft's recent version of Internet Explorer has a feature called "
InPrivate Browsing". It automatically deletes cookies so advertisers and the like can't have access to your Internet activity. Could it be that just when the dream of highly targeted advertising seemed near, it's disappearing in a puff of smoke?
There is a new mandate evolving for the Internet advertiser: develop a deeper relationship with your audiences.
"I think what's really going to happen is that marketers will have to effectively woo people into signing into services and let them know what's in it for them, rather than surreptitiously taking the information from behind the scenes," says Doug Winfield, Vice President, Digital Strategies at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide.
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Monday, September 8, 2008
Fighting to Win on the Web
(Annette Moser-Wellman) In the war for the time and attention of consumers, news organizations face some pretty fierce competitors. And in the wild and wooly world of the Web, the competitors to beat arguably are social networking sites.
In terms of spent per visit, we can crown Facebook as the winner in the battle. Last year
hitwise.com estimated the average length of a Facebook visit at 21 minutes, three times longer than the average news and information site. Twenty-one minutes! It begs the question: should news sites just admit defeat in the war for time and attention? Or is another strategy called for?
Increasingly, news organizations are finding it more productive and profitable to work in a symbiotic relationship with others - with aggregators and with social networking and bookmarking sites. Fully two-thirds of the traffic to NYtimes.com now comes, not through the home page, but through aggregators, blogs and outside links. Many more readers come to the site from search engines and links on other sites, instead of coming directly to NYtimes.com.
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Thursday, August 28, 2008
Why news organizations should care about the iPhone
(Annette Moser-Wellman) You’ve heard me complain about my smartphone, or what should be called a "lack-of" smartphone. Disgusted with hardware that overpromises and undelivers, I headed to the mall to check out the new
3G iPhone. As I weaved my way passed Victoria’s Secret, I noticed a crowd of really energetic, enthusiastic people. At first, I thought they were waiting for a lingerie fashion show or something. Then I realized they weren’t waiting for lingerie at all. They were standing in a line about a block long to get into the Apple Store. And they seemed happy about it.
I trudged to the front and asked what the wait was about. A super-friendly Apple employee who looked like he drank Steve Jobs’ Kool-aid smiled and said, "People are waiting in line to buy the new iPhone."
" Well, how long does it take?" I asked him.
"Approximate wait from here is 45 minutes," he answered.
"Is there a better time to come back?"
"Oh, no. It’s been about this long every day since we introduced the iPhone. I’d encourage you to get in line now. And by the way, the only version left today is the white 16 gig. Many line up before we open to see if we’ve gotten a new shipment. It'’s really exciting, isn’t it?"
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Thursday, August 07, 2008
Power in the Palm of Your Hand
(Annette Moser-Wellman) My smartphone isn't very smart. It's supposed to do fancy things but has trouble just delivering e-mail. While it was expensive two years ago, it now gets frequent brain cramps and the screen freezes. It comforts me to imagine it's possessed by an evil demon. In fact, the $279 data charge I got last month confirms it.
But some smartphones are getting smarter and new technologies are making me envy my friends and neighbors. The iPhone has ushered in a new enthusiasm for what is possible from the palm of your hand. The higher end Nokia phones also have unprecedented computing power. And if you look overseas, you'll see how the intersection of quality phones and amazing technology is changing the landscape of news.
Bhaskar Roy, Cofounder of
Qik tells me, "What you see in Europe and Asia is the power of these high capability phones at work. In countries where public transportation is important, people get their news off of their cell phones. So while they're sitting on the train, breaking news comes from SMS, video or audio transcript and is pushed directly to their phone. In the U.S., mobile content will soon become highly customized and will be designed to match a person's personality."
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Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Hey Web. Browse msnbc.com. Read headlines.
(Annette Moser-Wellman) For years, we've been waiting for the one device that will combine the "lean back" experience of TV, the computing power of your laptop and mobility of your cell phone. From
Sling Box to the
iPhone, manufacturers have been searching for the "killer application" that will solve all our needs for news, information and entertainment in one device and bridge the gap between our home and office.
In a recent conversation with Robbie Bach, President of the Entertainment & Devices Division at Microsoft, we talked about this holy grail of devices.
"I don't believe in massive convergence of devices. I don't think there's one device. There will be two or three devices. I tend to think about it less in terms of devices and more in terms of screens. There are screens in the home, screens in your car and screens that you take with you. I think of screens instead of devices, because ultimately that's the way the consumer is going to experience whatever content they are getting," he said.
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Watching, chatting about, clipping, annotating and sharing the news
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Here's my latest guilty pleasure: lying on the family room couch watching mildly entertaining TV while working on my laptop. Somehow when I combine the two experiences, it seems to redeem them both. I just have to be careful not to get popcorn butter on my keyboard.
I suppose this multi-tasking activity is an awkward precursor to the convergence of devices that we hear so much about in the tech community. Device convergence is at the stage of development where it has created more questions than answers for people in the news business. Will access to the Internet on a TV screen alter the way we view news and information? Will mobile devices usher in the intersection of the Web and entertainment? When we can communicate seamlessly across mobile, TV and portable computing, will the nature of news change?
Venu Vasudevan's job to think about questions like these. A senior director in applications software platforms research within
Motorola Labs, Venu is exploring the implications of convergence on media experiences.
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Monday, June 09, 2008
Bouncing back to the editorial core
(Annette Moser-Wellman) "The Internet changes everything! The Web operates on new values! Old rules just don't work on-line!" We've all heard the refrain and maybe even said it ourselves.
But in a surprising interview with
Albert Cheng, Executive Vice President, Digital Media, of
Disney-ABC Television Group, I was reminded how rapid change also creates a bounce-back effect. We realize some important things stay the same.
"We've tried a lot of things [in news]. Some have succeeded and some didn't work. We thought, for example, user generated video would be core to our success and giving consumers the opportunity to upload what they wanted would be important. But that really hasn't come to fruition. A very small percent of people actually want to upload content. The greater majority, actually the vast majority, still want to read professionally produced, editorialized content," he said.
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Monday, June 09, 2008
Moving Eyeballs and Curating Communities
(Annette Moser-Wellman) If you want to see into the crystal ball of the future of media, talk with someone who heads the business development function of a media company. These leaders get the 30,000-foot view of how the Internet is changing the landscape of news.
One of them is
Kenneth A. Bronfin, president of
Hearst Interactive Media. You'll recognize the household names of ESPN, Cosmopolitan and the Houston Chronicle in the Hearst portfolio, but have you heard of
E Ink and
Idilia? These are media ventures hand-picked by Ken, who's charged with blending a traditional print and television company with strategic new and emerging technology. It's a role not without risk, and coupled with Ken's aerial view of new media, it's given him a unique perspective about the future of news and media technology.
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Friday, June 06, 2008
Getting the Kind of Online Metrics That Advertisers Need
(Annette Moser-Wellman) We've all seen the stats. Online news is growing in popularity. But what do commonly-available usage statistics really tell us about the attitudes and behaviors of consumers on a news site? Wouldn't you love to have a deeper understanding of your online users? Better data to share with your advertisers? The future of online measurement is changing and Susan Hickey, Chief Marketing Officer of
Nielsen Online explained to me some of the opportunities and barriers in the world of online measurement.
"We have a lot of metrics about how consumers use the Web, but when you are thinking about brand impact or consumer involvement you want to be thinking about the quality, not just the quantity. We are spending a lot of time working with clients to define engagement metrics, which may differ by industry - for example, e-commerce, media, health and consumer packaged goods," she said.
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Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Democratizing the tools of TV
(Annette Moser-Wellman) I visited the
Newseum in Washington DC, a permanent new museum dedicated to the role of news in our culture. Beautiful building and some great exhibits. But one exhibit (for which you had to pay $8) was called "Be a TV Reporter." It involved standing behind a large television camera, talking into a microphone while reading a script from a teleprompter. My first thought was, "Couldn't we get a bit more up-to-date on the art of reporting?" Surely gathering and distributing the news has evolved since ancient times of one person behind one camera?
I recently interviewed Max Haot from
Mogulus. Talk about a new way to gather and distribute news. Mogulus is a company that enables you to produce your own 24/7 TV channel and broadcast it via the Web. Mogulus provides the tools so that you can broadcast live from a camera anywhere and then mix in live reporting with video from a play list of many online sources, develop a storyboard, customize your graphics and even invite others to collaborate live with you.
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Monday, April 14, 2008
Microsegmentation and the Opportunity Under Your Nose
(Annette Moser-Wellman) If you have a presence on the Web, your most pressing concern should be consumer engagement. How do you get people coming back again and again and remaining interested and involved? Wetpaint's
Ben Elowitz has some ideas.
Consumers come to
Wetpaint, a free wiki service, choose a template and build their own forums, from fan sites to hobby clubs. Since Wetpaint started in June of 2006, it has grown to host 700,000 user-generated sites. Elowitz credits the success of Wetpaint to one of the benefits of the Web 2.0 movement: microsegmentation.
Elowitz told me, "What we've found is there's a whole other category of media the Web enables which is more topic-focused. People are using technology to create a kind of replacement for the traditional magazine. They're looking at all sorts of new resources, opinion and information that they're able to share with others who care about the same topics."
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Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Finding That Photo, Targeting That Consumer With Image Recognition Technology
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Does your Web site allow users to upload their photos? Or do you have a large photo and video inventory? If you answered yes to either of these questions, read on. Recognition technology is rapidly evolving in ways that could create new opportunities for your media organization.
So, first off, when I hear 'recognition software,' I immediately think of Tom Cruise getting his retina scanned in
Minority Report. But the technology to recognize people is quickly moving beyond security screening and launching into applications that offer fresh ideas for managing video and photos and even extracting value from them.
Eyealike is one such recognition software company, which seeks to take recognition technology to a new level. President Greg Huess told me about his firm's histogram technology, developed in partnership with the
University of Washington. By grabbing four or five bits of information from a photo or video, Eyealike creates a "fingerprint" that allows a server to understand its content.
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Monday, March 03, 2008
Storytelling and Community
(Annette Moser-Wellman) When we peer into the crystal ball called "news," one thing we're sure to see more of is imagery. Audiences will expect more still pictures and video in news coverage and more people will want to share theirs. How can news organizations prepare for some of these changes ahead?
I decided to check-in with David Hobby, a 20-year veteran photojournalist and blogger of
Strobist.com. Less than two years ago, David started writing online about lighting techniques for photojournalism students and young pros. His following has grown to 200,000 regular readers and he is so busy tending his 'flock' that he is taking a leave from the Baltimore Sun.
"The one thing you can't deny is that we are in an increasingly visual society," Hobby claims. "You probably get more of your news in a visual form that you do in a print form on a daily basis, whether you realize it or not. There are more and more and more outlets for visual journalism and visual content than there ever were before."
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Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Standing Out with Mobile and Video
(Annette Moser-Wellman) Mobile and video were top of mind for most of the media executives we interviewed recently for
Media Management Center's recent report on
innovation and the news media.
But, of course, watching video on news sites can be a less than satisfying experience. You name the problems - takes forever to buffer, disappointing quality once you get it and no easy way to explore related content. And watching video on most mobile devices? Forget it.
Fortunately, both technologies are morphing quickly. So we thought we'd 'scout out' what's happening at the edge of the horizon and what changes might be in store for news media organizations. I caught up with Cameron Brain, CEO of a promising start-up called Open Box Technologies - a Web and mobile commercial video solutions provider - to talk about some of the opportunities and challenges media companies face when it comes to optimizing video - on mobile and off.
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