Somewhere in the world today a printing press operation is preparing to go dark. Mind you, it's not a universal phenomenon; in markets such as India, where a burgeoning middle class is hungry for news and not yet equipped with an abundance of electronic media sources, print media is actually growing. Scholarly publishers are still doing well their premium journals and custom print for B2B and consumer markets is thriving. But in many developed media markets print operations are struggling to stay alive, with 2010 expected to be a year in which newsstands begin to display significantly fewer titles. Barnes and Noble, with its Nook ebook reader, offers free wireless in their stores as a bundled part of the service, trying to encourage both browsers and coffee-drinkers to make more use of their "big box" stores real estate. It's a Web-eat-paper world, and the publishing industry is wearing newsprint shorts.
Yet the broader picture of print is that print publishing technology has never been more sophisticated, cost-effective and capable. Many of the same technologies that enable the Web also enable printing presses to deliver mass-customized printing runs, allowing wholesale book distributors such as Ingram to deliver profitable print runs for titles with as few as two ordered units. Mass print customization also allows ever more effective tailored marketing materials, allowing highly customized color post cards, brochures and other high-value communications tools at very competitive prices. In short, print rocks, if you do the right things with it.
The wrong thing to do with print is to expect to do the same thing again and again and expect different results. That is, as many will tell you, the definition of insanity. Unfortunately, this is the insanity that grips much of the B2B and consumer publishing industry. I paid a short visit to the recent Professional Scholarly Publishing 2010 conference in Washington, DC, though far less time than the event deserved. I was encouraged by the American Institute of Physics winning a PROSE award for their work to advance scholarly publishing through its Web-enabled services. Yet at the same time I was confronted by a surprisingly young attendee who had a hard time getting his head around the definition of publishing that I had used in my book Content Nation, which embraces social media as a key form of publishing. He saw this concept as "too broad" a definition of publishing. In spite of many advances in electronic publishing, many people at the heart of the publishing industry still see the traditional business model and functions of publishing as the "real" publishing industry. You can see this attitude in many of the efforts to adopt electronic publishing platforms that enable content to look more like print publications, as if waiting for the Web to give up its "defects" in failing to adapt to their ways of doing business.
Well, certainly the Web is still a relatively young form of publishing technology, in spite of its rapid advances. But it is not the Web that has failed publishing: it is publishing that has failed publishing. It's only as red ink has flowed liberally in the past couple of years that many publishers have made the hard decisions to adjust their staffing levels to the revenues that they can expect in a Web-first world. There are simply far too may substitute information sources available to the average person that can be discovered via search and social media tools to justify the dedicated brand approach to publishing that most publishers use as their fundamental business premise. If "a brand is what a brand does," then most publishing brands just don't do what Web publishing outlets such as Google and Bing do. If that "doing" doesn't align with the classic "dos" of publishing but still satisfies markets, that doesn't mean that it's not publishing.
This brings us back to print, where, in spite of the capabilities of mass print customization, most publishers insist on creating print artifacts on a mass scale that are in essence the same. Yes, you get some zip code-level tailoring of ads, sometimes, and perhaps some regional content, but it still isn't dawning on most publishers that the real opportunities in print are in creating highly customized artifacts on a massive scale. These are still seen by most publishers as "ancillary revenues," much as they saw Web operations as a little bit of gravy on top of the meat of their print revenues. But now that Web revenues have to sustain them more as their meat in many instances, most publishers have failed to position their print operations as highly targeted and highly profitable value-add operations, Instead, they continue to seek out ever-slimmer markets for mass-produced print content, either resigning themselves to smaller audiences or seeking out larger audiences with ever-slimmer slices of least-common-denominator content that offers little long-term brand value either as a product or as a service.
The answer to this problem can be seen in a now-familiar model: Google. Instead of trying to assemble a portal of perfectly curated content for specific audiences to consume over an indefinite period of time, Google decided to focus on search as a tool to curate content tailored to specific people's needs at specific moments. Each search result is a publication, with its own editorial rules, tailored ads and features. It happens to be a publication assembled from any number of sources, selected based on the editorial recommendations of people using content on the Web, via Google's ever-changing PageRank algorithms.
The question is, why haven't publishers awoken to the opportunities to take a Google-like approach to print? Just as the advantages of search technologies are largely wasted on relatively small collections of content, so are the advantages of today's mass-customizable printing technologies wasted on relatively small collections of content collected by a particular publishing house. The Web exists, and will, in all likelihood, never cease to exist as a medium that reduces distribution costs and speeds to near-zero levels.
This means that print as a platform must adapt to Web economics to deliver optimal results. To do this, print media must adopt a Google-like model of source-agnostic content aggregation tuned to the needs of tiny and/or individual audiences. In other words, just as search engines have enabled people to aggregate content from anywhere that meets their needs, so must print media operations if they are to return high value. Some service, somewhere, will enable people to print any collection of content from whatever source in whatever form suits them best in whatever quantity suits them best.
Some might say that copyright concerns stand in the way of such an approach, that this would be the equivalent of enabling anyone to print up content willy-nilly. Not so. What really stands in the way of this happening is an antiquated sense of "this is what publishing does." If publishing in the classic sense is getting value from copyrighted content, then simply tune that classic model more effectively to the available channels. In this instance, that tuning would require a more flexible approach to content licensing. Today, content licensing is still largely a person-to-person effort, requiring business development specialists or marketing managers, legal departments, and days, weeks or months of process time required to enable one publisher to use another publisher's content, be it in print or electronic form. But if today's printing technologies have the ability to assemble content with Google-like agnosticism and speed in a way that's tailored to very specific needs, then it is content licensing, not copyright, that stands in the way of more effective print revenues.
Thinking of both existing licensing technologies from organizations such as Copyright Clearance Center and iCopyright as well as emerging technologies from organizations such as Journalism Online, we are likely on the verge of a new convergence of licensing and printing technologies that can revolutionize what appears in print. This does not mean that print as a whole will surge back as a primary profit center, though. In the long run, the time that it takes to spool out pages of print will never be a match for the Web's ability to spin out tailored text and multimedia content sets instantly and effortlessly. But it does mean that the wide availability of custom printing technologies and the wide availability of people with professional printing skills figuring out what to do next in the aftermath of the current print apocalypse is likely to fuel the Google-like print revolution of mass-customized print content delivery no matter what. The main question is whether it will be Google taking on that challenge on a large scale or someone else.
The other key question, though, is whether publishers are going to balk at the notion of massively automated content licensing for tailored publications. Given history and publishers' attachment to the notion of their brands being what they want them to be rather than what their audiences want them to be, it's likely that many will balk at the idea. In that period of balking, it's likely that widely available substitute sources of printable content will work their way into these opportunities - leaving established publishers as also-rans yet again, though this time in their native medium.
Publishers failed to optimize their operations for Google-like content searching in time to take advantage of the in-the-moment opportunities available to them, in part because they were afraid that it was a technology that was in conflict with their publications' Web sites. The same sort of tensions seem to exist with customized printing and typical print editorial operations - and the same opportunities await publishers that tackle them proactively with aggressive automated content licensing strategies.
High-value purchasing and advertising opportunities await those publishers that begin to take highly customized printing opportunities more aggressively. Just as Web revenues looked like a puny investment early on, so does custom publishing look more like a sideline than a main line of revenue to many publishers. But in a world in which Google has become the center stage of most of the world's content access, it is imperative that publishers look more seriously at how their print publishing models are affected directly by the same potential for agnostic content aggregation - and leverage them as rapidly as possible for high-margin revenues.
My wife was bugging me before Christmas for a nice toy that I would like as a gift, so I thought that it couldn't hurt to get Barnes & Noble's new Nook ebook reader, which, at the time, was due for delivery before the holidays. With a hybrid eInk display for text and Android-driven touch interface for navigation combined with ePub-formatted documents, at least it would be a "walking the talk" gizmo that reflected how I saw what publishers should be doing with ebook distribution.
Unfortunately on Christmas day I got a nice new traveling case and screen protector, but only a placekeeper for the unit itself, which finally arrived the day that the Apple iPad was launched. Hmm, interesting timing. There's really no comparison, though, between the "whats" and the "whys" of an ebook reader like the Nook and a device like the iPad. The nook is all about simplifying and in some ways enhancing the process of relating to printed material, where the iPad is about the multi-sense world of Web media, with books a nice part of its capabilities but one not necessarily likely to appeal to many of its core Web-raised customers.
The Nook definitely has a leg-up overall on its Amazon Kindle rival, in the sense that it combines both the sophistication of a touch interface with a very simple and enjoyable page-turning experience via its eInk interface. I had my doubts about this combination, but, while not perfect, it works out pretty nicely overall. You can swipe your finger across a row of book, newspaper and magazine titles like you would on a touch-screen phone interface, tap once and start digging in. A second or two after your text is displayed, the color touch interface powers down and you're enjoying crisp eInk text, which only improves its readability in bright daylight. That's a boon when on a beach or in a sunny train or plane seat where moving to a better spot is not an option.
The physical controls of the Nook are bone simple. An "on" button on the top of the unit, a bar between the eInk display and the color touch display that activates the touch screen, and page-turning buttons on either side of the screen. The page-turning buttons are just about perfect and a joy to use. Each page-turning button has a pinhole-sized protrusion in its middle, which makes it a no-eyes procedure to get your fingers in the right place, and no edges. It's a seamless case, so there's no place for dirt, dust or sand to get into the controls or to spoil the smooth look of the unit. Best of all, the buttons are repeated on either side - a huge plus for righty-lefty usability and for when you get in those wierd positions that feel great put that put your hands at odd angles.
Downloads of new and updated materials are smooth and effortless, with simple and well-designed procedures. It's a no-brainer to use for all of its basic functions. Searching the Barnes and Noble store is simple and easy via a touch keyboard, which overall is no worse than Kindle's weird Chiclet-style physical keyboard but has rather slow typing response and an early-release Android look and feel that leaves something to be desired compared to the Android-based Nexus One phone that hangs next to me most of the time. Barnes and Noble also provides its own content via "The Daily," a daily newsletter that includes a listing of your latest content downloads. You can accelerate download performance by powering up your Nook on your local wireless network, but it will drain your batteries fairly rapidly. Without a wireless LAN connection or a lot of use of the color display, your batteries can last for days, typically, since the eInk display is not powered once a page is displayed.
While I am certainly open to reading book content on powered displays, I really like this "off" nature of eInk. After a day of staring into backlit computer and phone displays, there's an "unplugged" aspect to the Nook that fits the nature of book reading nicely. Reading books is about sharing some "quality time" with the thoughts of another person. The simplicity of the Nook encourages me to tune out many of my typical daily electronic distractions and to focus on one relationship. Want Web browsing? Go to your PC or phone, please. The only other significant function of the Nook is its ability to play downloaded music, which is a nice complement to reading, if I am willing to tax the batteries a bit. Downloading tunes from a PC is easy via the Nook's standard USB cable, which doubles as the charging cord when plugged into a special AC converter. Economy of design and purpose is the theme with Nook, and overall it delivers on that theme well.
However, the Nook is far from perfect. The delay in getting this unit to market was doubtless getting some of the product development kinks out, some of which still shine through. The most glaring problem with the Nook is its overall performance. Loading large books for reading can take several seconds in many instances, and some large ebooks did not load at all (possibly due to being formatted an older proprietary format not compatible with Nook). Page-turning is quick and smooth enough and bookmarking functions simple enough, but the bookmarks themselves cannot be given easy-to-use human names; you're stuck with a geekish, URL-like name based on chapter numbers that is hard to understand. At times it seems that bookmarks were not being saved. The note-taking capability on the Nook is decent but nominal at best, not something that's likely to satisfy a real student or scribbler often. You can bump up font sizes in the eInk display, but there's only three settings overall for font sizes. An extra-large font setting would be nice for those days when your eyes have had far too much work. Combine these rough spots with the touch keyboard issues, and it's a fair bet that the Nook needs a newer version of Android ASAP to improve performance and a few interface tweaks to boot.
And while the online store interface is smooth and features millions of books from Google Books, Barnes and Noble's own ebook title offerings are still a little bit thin; you'll get most major titles, but don't expect too much peripheral content beyond Google's offerings. Some of the ecommerce for newspapers and magazines is still a little rough also. The online store, for example, lists The New York Times as a $13.99 subscription. For, what, a month? A year? It doesn't say. The subscription provides only a subset of NYT information, which is a bit annoying, but you get at least the highlighted stories that you're likely to want to spend time with in an "unplugged" mode on the Nook.
Finally there's the color touch display, which feels comfortable to use if you're used to touch-screen phones and is generally a pleasure to use, with easy-to-use menus and features that are well-designed overall. The main annoyance here, though, is that after a day of touching the screen of my Nexus One, it feels kind of awkward to look at content in the eInk display that's controlled in the touch display below it. A full-touch display such as in Plastic Logic's new Que document reader would be ideal, but I am not interested in hauling that much hardware around. A Nook slips comfortably into my parka pocket and is not hogging up any significant space on the coffee table next to my favorite reading chair. And again, since book-reading is about getting into the words more than fiddling with features, I am willing to live with the compromise.
I am not really sure that you can call the Nook clearly superior to the Amazon Kindle as a machine, but it's definitely a sleeker and more flexible unit overall with better design and more potential for improvement via its Android underpinnings, as well as more potential to get your content to play nicely in other ebook readers via its use of the ePub formatting standard. I was unable to test out the book-sharing feature yet with another Nook user, but this is certainly an important first that deserves at least a nod of appreciation for the many efforts that Barnes and Noble has put in to replicating some of the most important parts of the book-reading experience. Nook's titles are a little pricier than those found in the Kindle store, but that's a small price to pay for the ability to use content on other ePub-compatible readers. Lock-in to the Kindle system is the price to pay for it's cheaper titles, a price that I am not willing to pay.
And I suppose that's the point of the Nook at the end of the day. It's a great little reader that will allow one to prepare for any number of great new ebook-displaying products that will be coming out in the years ahead. With the Kindle, or, for that matter, materials on the iPad purchased via Apple's online store, you're likely to have a more restricted range of technology options moving forward. It's not clear that standalone ebook readers will be with us much longer, but for those wanting simple functionality in a rugged unit with great battery life that will be highly usable in any number of conditions that would be daunting to many advanced display units, the Nook offers a good reading experience and the ability to escape without hauling around a pound of books - or Jeff Bezos' business model hangups, either. That's good enough for me today, at least.
With the media industry salivating over Apple CEO Steve Jobs' announcement of the new iPad as if it were awaiting an injection of Viagra, you'd think that the machine would do everything except change a flat tire. Well, the hoopla is over, and the iPad is...a large iPhone, essentially. Nice, sexy, though functionally not really a breakthrough device compared to the impact that the original iPhone had on mobile markets. However, then the other shoes started to drop after the klieg lights on the announcement stage began to cool off a bit. The two key factors: price and e-book packaging.
First, the price. At $499, the iPad is coming out at a blow-away price point that will make its purchase an attractive and simple alternative for many people who would otherwise be considering a PC or Mac as their next step-up from a mobile phone - or a slightly more pricey unlocked Google Nexus One superphone. This matters in a big way to global markets, where billions of people who are experiencing Web content for the first time on mobile phones will be looking for their next step-up device for content consumption.
Keep your eyes open also for possible subsidies on this price point as mobile network-enabled versions of the iPad hit the market. Just as King Gillette figured out how to give away razor handles to sell disposable razor blades, Apple will find many ways to lower the cost of hardware acquisition to lock people into their software and ecommerce services. Since the iPad technology and apps are largely warmed-over iPhone components, one assumes that not much R&D was required to launch this model, so there must be a good amount of "wiggle room" in the iPad's pricing for such deals.
Its aggressive price point also pegs the iPad as a highly attractive alternative for educational markets, the original market that launched Apple's growth years ago as a scrappy alternative to then-crude PCs. Given the average college student's expenditures on textbooks, an iPad equipped with ebook versions of those texts that they can use for most other schoolwork along with their favorite entertainment will be a very appealing option. It's also a price point that pretty much resigns most existing ebook readers to also-ran status as cost-effective platforms for people on the go. What do you want at your train or airline seat as a light PC alternative, an ebook reader or something that can also play movies and help you get some emails done? Problem solved.
The other factor that is very appealing on the face of it is Apple's decision to deploy an iTunes-like eBook store with content formatted in the ePub open-standards ebook and emagazine format championed by the International Digital Publishing Forum for several years. Having an ebook reading software package that will, in theory, be compatible with content purchased from any ecommerce service using ePub-formatted content will be a great boost to ebook, enewspaper and emagazine sales. However, the caveat with Apple's use of ePub standards is that ePub leaves the door open for the optional use of proprietary DRM tools, such as those used in Apple's iTunes store and Barnes and Noble's online ebook outlet.
If you're happy using iTunes on whatever platform you're using, then chances are Jeff Bezos over at Amazon just bought himself a huge headache after having alienated publishers with onerous revenue share agreements to get content in Amazon's proprietary Kindle format. I've said it often that the proprietary Kindle format was a dead end, but no more so than today. In a sense I wonder if the publishing industry went along with the proprietary Kindle early on as a ruff of sorts to keep the combination of Amazon, Google and open standards from running away with the entire premium content ballgame while they developed a more palatable alternative. That may be giving the people involved too much credit, but it's curious. Perhaps it's not too late to dust off some of those "GoogleZon" memes, after all.
Now that the book industry and other media producers have an alternative to Amazon's stranglehold on them, it will be interesting to see whether they will find themselves in a new Catch-22 situation. Have they run from Amazon's dominance only to discover that the grip of Apple's DRM on ePub-enabled content winds up being an even worse stranglehold in the long run? Time will tell, as will the details that unfold over the next few weeks regarding the iPad's compatibility with premium content purchased from non-Apple outlets. If it's easy-peasy to pull up content purchased elsewhere in ePub format on the iPad, then publishers will have done themselves a great favor. If they drank too much of Steve Jobs' Kool-Aid and allowed it to be hard to use other DRMed or non-DRMed content via Apple's ePub reader, then it will be a more-of-the same dilemma for publishers overall.
While the media industry seems ready to declare Steve Jobs the next David Sarnoff, their "homeboy" genius of content, technology and human insight, the overall reaction to the iPad by consumers so far seems to be warm but not necessarily hot. If you love Apple products already, then you're probably going to plunk down your five Franklins as soon as you can. If you're a person who's already equipped with a decent PC, an iPhone or Android-enabled mobile device, then you're probably saying, "Oh, a big iPhone, neat" - and then going back to surfing the Web. iPad as a gizmo is nifty, but it's not grown new capabilities that people haven't seen before in one form or another. If you're an enterprise I.T. manager, you're probably saying, "Oh, brother, another device to deal with, thank goodness it's basically just an iPhone" - which may simplify adoption at schools and universities especially.
And if you're a book or magazine publisher, then you're probably feeling pretty good at the moment - but then, perhaps, realizing that Jobs spent most of his demo showing how great it was that the iPad rendered Web pages and YouTube movies so well. Sorry, dear publishers, the Web is not going to disappear just because there's a handy new netbook that does DRM the way that you want it to. The iPad will definitely be a boost for print-formatted electronic content, but this is highly unlikely to address key revenue and cost issues that are ultimately the enemies of many publishers. By the time that iPads start coming out in March (and in April in mobile network-enabled configurations) , competitors will be that much further down the road towards their own cost-effective tablet and touchpad interfaces that are likely to be committed to open standards more aggressively.
Yes, this means that Google is still very much in the mix for premium content. Google's Chrome OS will be available in the next year, and rest assured that this next-generation computer operating system will have some deployments that will be remarkably iPad-like. Already its Android operating system is the basis for Barnes and Noble's Nook ebook reader being shipped in a few days, equipped with ePub-formatted content. Could this alliance form the basis for another end-run around Amazon for book and magazine publishers? It seems that not too long from now we will start thinking of Google and Apple the way that we used to think of television and radio networks, with Microsoft striving to get its own new-generation devices into the mix as well.
In the meantime, there are TiVos, Playstations, mobile phones, ereaders and a galaxy of other gizmos that will keep both the iPad and any other particular device from being a "magic bullet" that will solve the distribution problems of media companies definitively. All hail Jobs, today's knight in shining armor for a content industry still struggling with the realities of the Web some fifteen-plus years after the launch of HTML-based graphic browsing on the Internet. Then let's look at how many gray hairs some of us have gained since that time - and accept that the iPad is just another beautiful, functional tool from Apple that cannot stave off the effects of the Web indefinitely. Even with Viagra, you have to come down to life size eventually, after all.
I don't jump often at first-generation technology for most things, so it's no surprise that I waited a while to get a smart phone. But in a sense I have waited for the first generation of what was termed a "superphone" in today's announcement of the Google Nexus One, a Google Android-based mobile device built by HTC and sold directly by Google from its own online store. The Nexus One goes toe-to-toe with Apple's iPhone in many ways but it also begins to challenge the content industry to consider what today's proliferation of mobile devices means for their marketing strategies.
Unlike the Apple iPhone, you can choose to order a Nexus One "unlocked" from Google's online store, meaning that you can get it without having to be locked into any telephone company's contract or service plan. You can then, if you choose, get the voice and data plan of your choice with a technology-compatible vendor (T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon in the US, and most non-U.S. carriers) or, if you choose, just use WiFi and to get connectivity to data and Voice over IP services on the Web.
I ordered the "unlocked" version of the phone within a few minutes of the online store going live, a bone-simple process. I noted on the order page that Verizon will offer "locked" access for this phone soon, marketed under the "Droid" moniker it uses currently for Motorola's Android phone offering on Verizon. For the time being I have decided to use the Nexus One as a "data only" phone, using VoIP when I am in WiFi hotspots. This may allow me to use it as a replacement for my desk phone, since it's always in range of my local WiFi (let's see what happens when Google announces its integration of Gizmo5 VoIP services for Google Voice). I think of it like having Skype in "walkabout" mode with a trendy earpiece that has Web access. Once the service plans for data-only access to phone company networks have improved a bit and I can suss out what to do with my last remaining copper phone line, I'll think about which U.S. telco vendor will be best to choose to fill in the gaps for WiFi service.
If you look at most coverage maps for mobile data access and the ability of emerging networks to support both voice and high-speed data more reliably on a single network connection, why would I do otherwise for an advanced phone? If voice is moving towards being a service on consumer data networks, as it is already in most major enterprises, and voice services such as Skype and Gizmo5 are providing increasingly reliable VoIP phone-like connectivity almost anywhere, then I wonder whether it makes sense to lock into any traditional voice services for a superphone. I'd rather use a simple mobile phone as a voice backup service for those hard-to-reach spots that Google Voice can ring as needed and go superphone for voice on a good data-only network for the rest.
As voice becomes more integrated with Web applications and content services, the need for their integration is going to become more obvious fairly rapidly. One of the demos at the Nexus One press briefing was of dictating text messages and emails. It wasn't a particularly spectacular demo, and I am sure that less carefully tested examples may fare worse, but going to and from voice and text as a standard interface is more likely to make the combination of voice and data an essential factor in information services in the next few years. Since the Nexus One is pretty well positioned for the most advanced high-speed data networks rolling out over the next couple of years, I think that I am covered on that front for now.
As for the phone itself, I hate to say it, but technology changes so quickly these days that it's almost unimportant beyond a certain point whether it's a perfectly awesome phone or not. You can look at the Engadget review and judge for yourself, but overall it's as good as an iPhone but without two-finger touch software (which will come soon enough, since the hardware handles it, apparently) though trumping the current iPhone with a screaming 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Most importantly, though, it's built on an open platform developed by a company that believes in the Web as the real unifier of content services, not proprietary networks or platforms. With all of the tablets, readers and other gizmos coming out this year that will try to pretend that the Web isn't very important, it will be nice to have a mobile device that puts the Web experience for content first, with some neat-o applications in a spiffy, sleek package to boot. That'll do. For now.
iPhones rocked, Google shocked and social media was no longer mocked as publishers and technology companies flocked to online content business models;
Bing had a fling and even Windows 7 would sing as Kindle took wing, but proprietary platforms are no longer king;
Those in the cloud were quite proud of profits that wowed enterprise and media markets and vowed that all content would thrive in its shroud;
Enterprise vendors clung to tight margins and hung on to hopes of new profits among rescaled businesses flung across a changing world;
Twitter got the Web a-flitter about real-time chitter-chat, making news publishers bitter about the new heavy hitter;
Murdoch howled about profits fouled by search engines that prowled for news, while AP scowled at content reuses that tempted its members to throw in the towel;
Smart phones got fast and netbooks now cast a shadow over the last bits of old-school computing;
Save the best for last! It's Wave, the rave of brave trend-setters, promising an enclave that will repave the road to the Web's future;
Feel like you need a suture or two? Don't worry. The couture of content will change soon enough. The future is bright - for those who are tough.
Everyone at Shore Communications wishes you a great holiday season and a fantastic 2010. Enjoy what is important, and let's build the future of content together next year! I hope that you enjoy the following year-end video.
In a typical game of chess, there are three distinct phases of play: the opening, in which a handful of chess pieces stake out strategic territory on the chessboard, the middle game, in which the positions of many pieces are used to jockey for control of the chessboard, and the endgame, in which the pieces are traded and moved rapidly into a reduced and final push for ultimate control of the board and the strategic goal of the game - capturing the king. It takes both logic and passion to excel at chess, but at the end of the day it's a well-executed plan that wins the day.
You might say that Google has been in the process of introducing its own endgame for online publishing, quietly moving dozens of initiatives into strategic positions which in and of themselves may seem inconsequential to the game as a whole - until its ultimate position begins to evolve rapidly. As in a chess endgame, Google's recent moves are swift, monumental in their impact and, potentially, decisive in determining the outcome of how content becomes valuable on the Web. Media critics like Ken Auletta have quipped that Google needs more "Kirks" and fewer "Spocks" to succeed, mistaking the crowded middle game of media posturing against Google for an ongoing battle, when in fact Google has been keeping its well-reasoned eye on the pieces that will be most important for the outcome of the game.
What's the king that needs to be captured in this endgame? The Moment. Media companies continue to churn out outdated moves such as media players serving up magazine-like renditions of their own content, thinking that quality that reflects the last game that they won is what will win the day. In the meantime, Google's intense concentration on processing power in cloud computing, Web-standardized applications and search dominance have revealed a strategy that is quickly eliminating viable moves for many B2B and consumer content and technology companies. After the September introduction of The Second Web via its Google Wave preview platform for real-time collaboration, Google has in recent days extended its dominance of The Moment via three new initiatives: expanded personalization of search results, real-time search results and voice, location and sight-activated mobile searches, including Google Goggles, a point-and-click camera-activated search feature.
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has an excellent analysis of how Google's debut of personalized searching that doesn't require a Google login is introducing a "new normal" for its search environment, in which the content presented in search results will by default be different for different people based on their last 180 searches on Google. What is The Moment for these people? Where their interests have been most recently. Instead of waiting for editorial boards to decide what The Moment should be, Google is yet again trumping traditional editorial functions and allowing people's own behavior to have a seat at the editorial table automatically.
The introduction of content from real-time Web sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other status-oriented messaging services in Google search results extends The Moment into content sources that have split-second relevancy to online content seekers. Klipp Bodnar points out that this stream of tweets and postings means that B2B companies can no longer ignore real-time in favor of traditional SEO strategies if they're going to get people's attention. It's a broader scope than that, of course: nobody can afford to ignore real-time social media content generation now any more than a securities trader can ignore real-time stock tickers. All brands must enter the real-time conversation of The Moment to keep in touch with their markets and to define their markets.
Google's mobile search initiatives, introduced last week at the Computer History Museum, are perhaps the most profound in their potential impact, even if their ultimate powers are years away from being felt. Voice-activated and GPS-activated Web search is being perfected rapidly at Google and through other outlets, but the Google Goggles initiative, previewed in its development phases on MSNBC recently, brings a point-and-click element to The Moment that promises to give Google a real leg-up in mobile search markets. Using the camera in mobile phones, Goggles enables searches for information on things such as landmarks, stores, products and text simply by filling the camera's viewfinder with the item and clicking. Remember all of those fussy infra-red applications that were supposed to get us "beaming" business cards to one another? Now, just take a photo of someone's card and it will be uploaded into a contacts record. In just those few capabilities already targeted, whole content markets are about to develop as people capture content in The Moment.
And who will have all of the search data and metadata regarding all of these Moments? Yep. Yet again, Google is positioning itself to be the cloud-empowered master of what people are interested in right now, giving them the ability to bring people closer to their interests and passions simply by asking for them. And, yet again, by including as much content as possible in serving their customers, Google doesn't second-guess what people consider to be valuable in The Moment. If the stock and news tickers of the 20th century distributing content from central markets and publishers were the gold mines of Moments in that era, Google's absorption and distribution of content from anywhere to anywhere in The Moment has enabled it to enlarge its unique databases far more broadly and rapidly than any other publisher on earth. And, like a chess endgame, the speed with which other players are losing effective counter-moves against Google's strategic position in The Moment is only quickening.
No small wonder, then, that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is scrutinizing Google's acquisition of AdMob, a leading mobile ad network. Markets thrive when there are still a good number of pieces on the board to keep competition high. But perhaps it's time for the FTC and companies in the content industry to look beyond this rapidly emptying game board and to consider what the next round of content industry chess is going to look like. If The Moment is the new center of the publishing industry, how does content become most valuable in this context? The answer to this question is, in part, to acknowledge that the companies who collect the most input about the world most rapidly become the most knowledgeable about what is happening in The Moment.
It's a phenomenon that I call "the Sensor Society," a world in which our corporate awareness and memory becomes a valuable through common access in a way that reverses the "information is power" equation. Certainly having private information will continue to empower people and organizations in select circumstances, but for the average person or business having access to all information in the right context is becoming a more powerful resource for decision-making. To borrow a concept from my book Content Nation, some portion of the DNA of society is migrating into the Google-dominated cloud, with each of us feeding that part of our collective consciousness through our voices, our camera "eyes" and our fingers touching screens and keyboards. That may be a good thing for society as a whole, but it will be an enormous challenge for institutions who are not ready to accept that migration as a beneficial development.
What does this mean for publishers? It means good things for those that can manage to get their content into these personally defined Moments more effectively. But it also takes an acceptance that "the first draft of history" that many in the media business cherish as their mission is taking on a radically new form. Like the "playback" feature in Google Wave, everyone will have access to who did what where and when soon enough. The question is, who edited it the best? Google has staked its claim as the world's dominant editorial resource for displaying billions of histories a day, sweeping away front pages across the Web into a stream that assembles Moments that matter most to audiences.
We will spend time with content in any number of spaces thanks to this editorial resource, as we have on the Web for many years. But Google has accelerated the endgame radically in the past few months for those not tuned into The Moment. 2010 is going to be a year of momentous change in the content industry. Publishers that are tuned into The Moment will be in good shape to take on all of the inputs of The Sensor Society and to trigger astounding growth in cloud-based content markets. For those that aren't tuned in, well, you better get used to the idea that you're playing a two-dimensional game of chess against a 3-D chess master. Set up the chess pieces again, Spock. It's a whole new game.
When Google Scholar launched five years ago on the Web, its aggregation of freely available scientific literature and citations launched some sizable seismic activity in publishing circles. All of a sudden, content that had been aggregated only via expensive subscription database services was available for free and accessible as easily as any Web page. Five years later, Google Scholar has expanded to include most freely available academic research sources, as well as abstracts from subscription sources and public patent records and is an increasingly popular resource for researchers and students. However, major aggregators of scientific publications still remain successful, in large part because they continue to develop more sophisticated search and display applications and, well, because time has been on their side. Pressures from Open Access advocates who press for free access to scientific research and an increasing array of applications built using Google Scholar as a source have begun to open major cracks in the barriers to entry into scientific publishing markets, but the people in charge of enterprise purse strings did not use Google Scholar in their university days. So, in spite of budget cuts. the status quo remains largely intact for many scholarly publishers.
With this in mind, some reasonable skepticism is probably in order as Google announces the launch of a new Google Scholar service that makes full text legal opinions and legal citations available for case documents from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts. Public records are becoming more commonly available in general thanks to both Google and other publishers that see opportunities in generating value from public content, so this move should come as no major surprise to anyone. Yet this first major foray by Google into legal content is surprisingly strong - and may be the beneficiary of better timing than earlier Google Scholar product improvements. While legal publishers will rest soundly knowing that the search capabilities for legal documents in Google Scholar are limited to simple "white box" queries, they may not be so tranquil when they look at the results themselves. Documents are rich in links to legal references in the cited documents, a capability that has been for many years one of the key calling cards for legal databases.
Things get even more interesting when you look at the citations tab that is available for each located legal document. Google Scholar offers you brief, in-context snippets of how a case was cited in key documents, as well as comprehensive listings of citations in court documents and documents related contextually to the selected document. While that's far from the full capabilities that a LexisNexis or Thomson West offer to their professional clients, it's pretty much pointed at the core of their database offerings, nevertheless.
The Above the Law blog has a good summary of analysis and reactions from both legal experts and publishers, but I think that the most salient point comes from Social Media Law Student, which points out that this freely available information is likely to become a "go-to" content source for students who may not have ready access to subscription-based content sources. Looking at the offerings coming to market from Lexis.com, though, which I walked through recently as a part of my SIIA CODiE judging for Best Aggregation Service, it's not as if LexisNexis isn't aware of this "digital native" culture gap, as they try to index both public documents and freely available Web content to make it more accessible to legal students and professionals.
The threat that Google Scholar's new legal content represents to established publishers, though, is the exposure of a huge body of public documents to applications builders and content services. Much as Google Books' scanned out-of-print library holdings have created a resource for ebook platforms from the likes of Sony and Barnes and Noble, this new initiative from Google opens up more cost-effective competition for legal services publishers who may want to attack legal markets from new and innovative angles using Google Scholar as a resource. Some of the innovators may be startup companies in the mold of Collexis, which leveraged publicly available scientific content to showcase their innovative content discovery tools. Others may be business information competitors in adjacent markets, who may see a way to pick off some of the "low-lying fruit" using core legal content maintained by Google.
None of these really add up to a significant challenge to either LexisNexis or Thomson West in the short run, but they will tend to hold down their margins as they lose some market share and lose leverage at the negotiating table at contract renewal time. What this does add up to, though, is a strong case to have professional-grade legal information services more integrated into a far wider array of business information sources to support enterprise decision-making on many levels. If digital natives will have increased access to well-integrated legal content, the high end of legal information markets will need more unique content and integration across a fuller range of business information sources to justify premium prices.
As I mentioned earlier on ContentBlogger, I do think that Reed Elsevier would be smart to consider selling LexisNexis at this time in anticipation of this likely consolidation - or, alternatively, expand its business information holdings to build a broader base of services for LexisNexis. I think that the former is more feasible than the latter given current market conditions, and would enable Reed Elsevier to cash in on the still-formidable value of LexisNexis before it begins to lose significant market growth potential. Thomson was able to spin off its print assets near the peak of their value before print publishing markets ran aground, a trick that Reed Elsevier was not as fortunate in managing in the sale of its Reed Business Information publishing assets. Google's new legal offerings are not a death knell for premium legal information services, but they are a canary in the coal mine for database services based on public legal records. We'll be watching this space carefully in the months ahead.
It seems as if there's hardly a week that goes by lately without some major announcement from Google, Microsoft and other technology providers that has major repercussions for the content industry. In the past week, we've had not just a major announcement but a major rumor surfacing anew that has me thinking about how Google's strength as a marketing organization is in defining new markets that others are often unwilling to develop. In other words, where many publishers and technology companies focus on gaining slices of the same old market share pie, Google seems to be becoming the leader in defining whole new kinds of content markets to bake.
On the product announcement front, Google used the unveiling of its Chrome OS operating system as an open source platform to give a quick demo of its still-developing features (video). As I highlighted in ContentBlogger in July, Chrome OS, targeted for release next year, will be a computer operating system expressly for devices such as netbooks that use mostly Web-oriented content and applications. The result is a machine that can operate with minimal local data storage and that can boot up to a login prompt in seven seconds and get on the Web in just a few seconds more. So in less time than it takes the typical mobile phone to get ready you can access Web content and applications easily.
The Chrome OS interface is no real surprise to those already using Google's Chrome browser to look at the Web - it is, in essence, the same. There is a permanent "tab" open to allow one to start applications, which operate in tabs much the same as Web pages do currently in the Chrome browser, or you can have the applications pop up from the bottom of the display as "panels." Web links can activate apps as well, such as in the above display, which shows a music clip on MySpace playing after clicking a link on a Google search results page. The demo also showed how data in the Chrome OS "cloud" from any tabbed window can be pulled into Google Docs for more sophisticated manipulation and how games and ebooks from Google Books can be viewed easily and stay as persistent content in a given tab or as full-screen applications.
People expecting the "wow" factor that Microsoft or Apple has tried to engineer into its most current operating systems are likely to be underwhelmed by Chrome OS, a non "wow" factor that was echoed in a recent poll that I conducted in Google Wave. In the poll, only a plurality of people felt that Chrome OS would have a major impact on computing in two to three years. After all, who is going to get excited about an operating system that looks and acts just like today's browsers? I think, though, that this is where the pies come in. With only about a fifth of the world's population having access to the Web, Chrome OS as an open operating system is perfectly positioned to help the other five billion people who do not have Web access to build content in the clouds very cost-effectively. Most of these people will never see a PC in their lives and will find a Chrome OS device to be perfectly adequate. Of the 1.4 billion people who have access to the Web already, most of their time is spent on the Web anyway. That leaves Apple Macs and devices using Microsoft Windows 7 to go after the relatively affluent and sophisticated markets that have a lot of sophisticated gizmos in their homes and enterprises, a significant market, to be sure, but one in which the need for content outside of the cloud will be a diminishing factor. All of a sudden Chrome OS has the ability to make the entire PC-based marketplace look like a niche market.
Underscoring this positioning of an expanded global cloud as an expanded marketplace pie is the recent repackaging of the "Google Phone" rumor by TechCrunch. If Michael Arrington's latest "confirmed, super-high confidence information" is to be believed, Google is going to start advertising a Google-branded mobile phone device in January that will be built by an OEM hardware partner to Google's own specifications. In the short run, one assumes that this will be an "apples-to-apples" competitor for Apple's iPhone, supporting applications and Voice over IP telephony in a way that is less compromised than Google Android implementations found on smart phones released so far. But with heavy investments in Google's Android operating system by handset manufacturers such as Samsung, HTC and Motorola and a still-fragmented U.S. mobile market to navigate, it's doubtful that such a "Google Phone" is going to make enormous headway in developed markets any time soon based on just these features.
Instead, the more likely play for Google's potential phone device is a new market altogether: ad-supported mobile VoIP telephone and Web access. In other words, in the middle of a global recession and with a huge number of people who have yet to touch either a mobile phone or the Web, what better price point for a mobile phone service could you have than "free?" The features of Google Voice already await people needing voicemail and phone call redirection, so people falling off of telephone calling plans as the economy continues to tighten may see access to phone calls through ad-supported broadband and Web "hot spots" to be a "good enough" telephony and Web combination while they await funds to get more high-powered services from major telephone carriers. For those who could never afford or deal with mobile Web access, the Google Phone may offer a simple and affordable way into mobile communications that would be a stepping stone to a Chrome OS-powered netbook device.
All of this in the short term is likely to be fairly underwhelming stuff for people looking for the "what's in it for me for better results this quarter" solution to all of their content market problems. But in a sense that's the exact point. Google is one of the few companies in the content and technology industry that has been investing very patiently in long-term market development goals that will broaden their potential revenue base by huge magnitudes. Others have been innovators, to be sure, and profitable in their own right. But by plodding away at technologies and content services such as Chrome OS, Android, Google Apps, Google Wave and Google Voice, and by continuing to refine existing services such as its search engine, ad networks and YouTube videos, Google learns how to build a larger market in which they can satisfy at least 80 percent of its daily needs.
As Google expands into developing nations and "digital natives" markets more rapidly than many of its competitors, the slice of the "old" 20 percent that can be satisfied by more specialized technologies will continue to look smaller and less powerful as a content market play. With everything to gain and little to lose, Google's greatest barrier to competitive forces is the unwillingness of its competitors to risk everything to play on the same ground. The sophisticates who follow the content industry will continue to be underwhelmed by many Google products and services - until they recognize that in large part it is becoming the content industry as we will know it.
I have to chuckle a bit at the recent Poynter Online email interview with Wikimedia Foundation's Jimmy Wales, in which he discusses an internal memo gleaned from Associated Press (PDF) by Nieman Journalism Lab. The AP memo, entitled "Protect, Point, Pay - An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News Content Online," covers a lot of ground already familiar to those following AP's efforts to put in premium packaging for news content. However, in addition to conjuring up long-standing concerns about Google and other major search engines as competitive forces, the memo also highlights AP's concern about the millions of topic-oriented pages in Wikipedia that are capturing traffic when people search for breaking news. At last the light bulb begins to go off in some minds that perhaps the issue is not so much search engines but that search engines are directing people towards the most popular destinations for specific topics. Hmm, perhaps this might have something to do with...the quality of the content that they find there?
The AP memo points out that Wikipedia articles are rich with links and structured content that drive people to other trusted information sources, a concept that the memo suggests could be adopted by the AP for its own content. As Wales points out wryly, though, "Creating authoritative canonical pages based on the latest from the AP sounds like a good idea they should have implemented years ago." In other words, after more than five years of Wikipedia building both its content and its brand as a "go-to" source for freshly updated topic-oriented content that dominates search engine results, it dawns on some folks in the news business that perhaps there's a business model in there somewhere. Layer in the growth of online portals that are aggregating links to top topics content more effectively, and one wonders just what people are going to be willing to pay for those carefully designed hNews objects that AP is hoping to use to "reclaim" the news business.
The answer to that wondering seems to come in part from a recent study on consumer attitudes towards premium news content by the Boston Group highlighted in The New York Times. The study indicates that fewer than half in the U.S. are willing to pay for news content online and that of those who would be willing to pay the preferred tariff weighs in at about $3 a month. This seems to line up with long-time assertions by Journalism Online's Gordon Crovitz, who claims that premium news sites can expect to be able to charge for about ten percent of their online content. I've noted oftentimes that a system for managing access to paid content is long overdue, but news organizations should take a hint from the payments being extracted from iPhone apps and recognize that online markets reward functionality and community input that meets personal needs more than it does deathless prose and a good network of inside contacts.
A topic-oriented Web site for news content sponsored by AP would be a good idea, but one wonders whether AP or any other news organization is up to the task of building both the content and the brand necessary to contend in search engine wars for their audience's attention. At the same time, AP's emphasis on "protective" content packaging as a means to establish fair licensing of AP content seems to miss the real revenue opportunity available to AP and other news organizations. When a publishing-enabled global audience is your most effective distribution mechanism, a strategy of "joint supplier negotiation" suggested by the AP memo is not likely to succeed.
What is needed for AP and other professional news organizations to succeed in online content licensing is a system that encourages the distribution of their content through the most efficient and popular channels available at any given moment. Instead of fighting your audience, empower and encourage your audiences to be distributors of your content - and help them to profit from it as well. Highly automated content licensing with a billing mechanism akin to mobile phone usage units - and that can help individuals to profit from AP content when it's appropriate - is the key to this concept, and should be the cornerstone of AP's premium content strategy.
With such a scheme in place, AP's members can focus on beating the competition at their own game by becoming the most effective agnostic aggregators of news content in any given market. Yes, news organizations will continue to staff up with their own editorial resources, but the news of today - and tomorrow - needs to collect the best content from whatever source that it comes from more effectively than the competition. You can have some exclusive content, to be sure, but exclusivity alone cannot power success.
This can be seen clearly in how information providers in the financial industry are required to aggregate content from as many different sources as possible to help information-hungry decision makers. Over time you may develop unique assets, but the fundamental game is giving people what they want, where they want it, when they want it. If you yell at your markets for wanting to play a different game, don't be surprised by the blank stares that you get before they go to pay attention to people who listen more effectively.
I do hope for the sake of professional news producers that AP does come up with an effective content distribution strategy, and there are some hopeful outlines in the AP memo to that effect. But the largest thing that needs to change in the AP strategy is their attitude, which still treats the Web as an object of fear and scorn. More than 1.4 billion people around the world seem to feel otherwise about electronic content, people who both consume and contribute value to the news gathering and distribution process. It's time for the AP to recognize that their mission needs to embrace those 1.4 billion people more effectively if they are to value their brand and their content enough to consider seriously the prospect of regular payments for it.
As exciting as Amazon's Kindle has been for many early adopters of content technologies, its screaming limitations and awkward business model have been threats all along to its long-term success. But as long as really viable alternatives were not available, few people seemed to focus on the potential for Amazon to be painted into an uncomfortable box. With the nearing launch of the Nook device from book retailer Barnes & Noble, that time of unchallenged supremacy for the Kindle seems to be drawing to a close.
As much as Kindle has been hailed as a breakthrough for eBooks, I do think that Nook will be a far greater breakthrough for the average book reader and for book publishers and retailers. The Kindle was a nifty piece of breakthrough technology, but it did little to improve the lot of publishers looking at dwindling margins and nothing to help book retailers who are able to shoot cannons through their stores oftentimes without hitting a customer. Nook is well thought-out through and through from a technology standpoint, a customer standpoint and a retailing standpoint.
First, the gizmo itself, which will be available for sale in a few weeks. It uses eInk display technology for the book content, as does Kindle, and it can download books via wireless connections like its Amazon brethren. It has access to millions of books, a convenient online store, and tons of storage and battery life. But this is where the stories of these two devices begin to diverge. Where the Kindle is a completely proprietary platform, the Nook is based on Google's up-and-coming Android operating system for mobile devices, which ties it in immediately with dozens of other Android-enabled devices hitting the marketplace this fall and next year. Barnes and Noble sees clearly that proprietary devices are not going to be a viable barrier to entry when devices based on open source software and Web standards are setting the pace for electronic content access. Using Android enables the Nook to have a slick touch-sensitive color display in addition to the eInk text display that allows for book covers and other attractive graphics to be displayed. Instead of waiting for eInk to solve the color display problem, this is a simple and useful solution that opens up the Nook to other Web functionality and slicker feature navigation more effectively.
Behind the hardware and software is wireless connectivity both for wifi hot spots and for broadband wireless Web networks, a two-fer combination that bests Amazon broadband-only access but also opens up interesting possibilities for retailers. Nook owners who are visiting Barnes & Noble stores will be able to read books via Nook in their stores for free. What a great way to attract people to their retail outlets - and, eventually, what a great way to transition to site-licensing free content access on a subscription basis via affiliates such as high-end coffee shops, university and community libraries and so on once print-on-demand services can be packaged by Barnes and Noble more effectively. Having the right physical context for content remains a winning strategy for content packaging, and Nook's marketing strategy promises to get the 'where" of content right.
Nook also gets many of the "hows" of book content right. Purchasers of eBooks can use Nook to share a book with other people for up to fourteen days and will be able to mark them up with personal notes. Lending can be enabled across both the Nook itself and other portable devices enabled for ePub-formatted eBooks. This also opens up Nooks for library books using the ePub format, in addition to PDF-formatted eBooks that are popular on the Web - and not supported at this time by Kindles. The combination of these features finally offers readers the kind of usability for eBooks that they have been used to having as print readers in an electronic format. Instead of making the hardware and software artificial barriers to a full experience, Barnes and Noble has embraced the experience - and, in the process, has enabled the Nook to be a much more "must-have" place to consume and share content.
Finally, the Nook comes in at a comfy $259 price, twenty dollars less than the current price for the original-size Kindle while offering a display as large as the Kindle2 model. For a fully wireless-enabled device, this will give the Nook a strong advantage going into the holiday season in a lean year - and strong traffic in both their online outlets and retail stores. And while I can't vouch for the hands-on experience, the look of the unit promises to be at least as rewarding as the Kindle. Lacking a physical keyboard, one assumes that the Nook will make use of the Android software-managed touch keyboard capabilities, which, while not an ideal interface, cannot be worse than the amazingly awkward keyboard on Kindles.
So let's see. Great interface, great physical package, great rights management, standardized electronic format, use and share content the way book readers like to, good reasons to visit their retail outlets, go-anywhere networking, Android compatibility - yep, I'd say that Barnes and Noble has just leaped into the center of the new-hotness race for electronic content consumption. I think that it's safe to say that Barnes and Noble is poised to become a major player in electronic book retailing with a device and a marketing strategy that is likely to heat up the book services race to a raging boil. But don't count out Amazon yet - especially with their recent efforts to re-invent the business of local retail delivery. Local contexts is where the money is in content delivery, and both Amazon and Barnes and Noble will have a shot at new approaches to local markets in the years ahead. As for me, well, if a Nook showed up in my holiday stocking, I won't be thinking that it resembles a lump of coal.
You are reading a blog post that started as a comment. That in and of itself is hardly unusual for people who decide to leave detailed comments on one blog and then expand on them in their own blog, but the way that I did it was through Google Sidewiki, a new feature of the Google Toolbar that is used commonly in the Firefox Web browser. Once installed, an icon on the Toolbar enables you to enter a comment-like bit of information relating to a blog entry or other Web page that you're viewing, either about the whole page or a section of text. Once you've had your say, your text (and it's only text, no links, images or other enhanced items are allowed) can be saved in Sidewiki and at the same time get pushed to an entry in one of your Blogger weblogs (finally, a small side-benefit for using Blogger). You can also easily share a comment with someone via email, Twitter or Facebook.
Tools like Sidebar have been in use for many years, but none of them have found that much of an audience. One of the reasons seems to be that comment editing systems that float on the side of a page tend not to draw your attention as you scroll down it. Sidebar may suffer this same fate in the short run, though its ability to be relevant throughout a page and contexutal to very specific parts of the page makes it an interesting companion tool that may escape similar disinterest given to other annotation tools. Its presence only in Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers also seems to limit the potential community of users, though versions for Chrome and other browsers such as Safari are likely soon. What is likely to save Sidebar from lack of interest is the fact that it's well, a Google tool, of course. Google has lacked a reasonable entry point into social media communities for some time outside of lackluster experiments such as Orkut. The voting, abuse control and integrated features that make it easy to share Sidebar content in lifestreaming services are ways for Google to play its strongest emphasis - putting all of the Web in context - alongside the strengths of other social media services. So, while it's still kind of an iffy play, it does offer some solid thinking
that may accelerate Google as a destination for valuable comment content extended out to all of the Web alongside its own Blogger blogs.
One angle where you can see how this can take on a new angle for building Google's destination content is in a feature that doesn't get much attention at first. After a bit of use I noticed a link in Sidewiki that says "view my Google profile." When you click on this link , you discover that your Google Profile page now has a tab that displays your Sidewiki comments along with links to the content that you were commenting on. This is an interesting feature, enabling Sidewiki content to act as a seeding mechanism for a Facebook-like stream of links and information. In typical Google fashion this is a subtle tool that builds content in places that you may not expect, integrating it both into the experience of visiting a Web site and visiting a friend's Google profile. This cries out for a widget-oriented implementation that can enable Sidewiki to integrate more closely with destination content as Facebook Connect enables through sites like the Huffington Post.
All of this points to the elephant not yet in the room but waiting in the hallway: Google Wave. It's clear that Sidewiki and its integration with Google Profiles is custom-tucked for Wave technology, which would enable highly sophisticated real-time content sharing with trusted peers. That's a relatively long-term strategy, though, leaving lots of room for other comment sharing tools to gain market momentum. Sidewiki is yet another interesting piece of the Google puzzle, a puzzle that encompasses so may individual little pieces popping out of the Googleplex one at a time that it's hard to appreciate at times what it is that Google is trying to do. Perhaps that's the way that they want it - a charging elephant might be a little more alarming to people. But in the meantime, a lot of people have a hard time seeing even pieces of Google's social media strategy making sense.
I found Michael Arrington's comments on the new Google Sidewiki feature to be an oddly neutral and superficial analysis, albeit with a bit of inside scoop. While this, like many other Google projects, may not seem like much at first, it has the potential for major impact. First, it comes at a time when comment spam is becoming a major problem. Technologies such as "captcha" character graphics that weed out automated comment spam are failing, as spammers are hiring people who work cheap enough to defeat these mechanisms cost-effectively with manual entry of spam. The Digg-like voting and ranking will help to push such garbage to the bottom of the comment pile.
Secondly, comments are becoming a major source of content unto themselves, as seen in platforms such as Facebook and Friendfeed. Sidewiki is an ingenious play to get that kind of community content embedded almost anywhere, while at the same time enabling the community to develop a personality of its own. This is a unique kind of platform play that defines a "between the raindrops" approach to these competitors.
This all points to one key factor - most technology platforms have done very little to improve the value of comments or to address long-standing technical issues. They're not a sexy tech feature by most techie standards, so the glory goes elsewhere. Google sees them as a major opportunity, and may have a major play as a result. I feel somewhat uncomfortable about the disintermediation factors, but the ability to post a comment as a blog entry on your Blogger weblog (finally a reward for having stuck with it!) enables you to shift the conversation to focus on your own content fairly handily. Key weakness in this feature: you can't post links or graphics in your Sidewiki content, so your entries won't be very rich. I am sure that this will be addressed in time, perhaps as a part of Wave technology being introduced.
At the end of the day, if it makes your core content more valuable and it's better technology than what you can get yourself, it's probably a good thing. I welcome better comment solutions that can compete with this, but right now we all need a little relief from comment fatigue - especially if you're trying to keep the spammers away.
On-demand book publishing has been a quiet reality behind the scenes for several years, now, with outlets such as Amazon and a handful of major universities and bookstores generating some books on an on-demand basis rather than shelving inventory. On the retail side of the equation, however, on-demand publishing is almost a total cypher, in spite of technologies such as the Espresso Book Machine from from On-Demand Books. The EBM carries a still-hefty price tag and has kind of funky marketing (does anyone really name products with acronyms any more?), but nevertheless represents a great opportunity for many new business models to surface around print media. Yet most publishers have failed to commit any significant resources to delivering their titles to consumer-demanded printing.
A new alliance between Google and On-Demand Books, though, may help to prime the on-demand business model with an abundance of content. Google has agreed grant On-Demand Books access to 2 million public-domain book titles available via its Google Books service. According to eWeek, Google is suggesting an $8 price tag for these on-demand books, with $1 of the proceeds going to On-Demand Books and $1 to Google, which intends to donate its proceeds to charities. While there are already about 1.6 million titles available via Espresso machines, the highly affordable price tag for public-domain books and the online cachet of Google Books (not to mention millions more waiting in the wings for a settlement of Google's rights to out-of-print copyrighted works) may be a priming of the pipeline for wider distribution of on-demand books.
When computerized laser printers first came to the marketplace, they were huge, hunkering machines found in major computer centers that had to handle high-volume printing. Today, of course, anyone can park a high-quality, high-speed color laser printer in their home for a few hundred dollars. The Espresso Book Machine seems to be caught between these two extremes, affordable enough that some larger retail outlets are willing to give it a try but not built in enough volume that your average neighborhood coffee shop, print shop or book store could afford to pop one in the corner somewhere for on-demand books. With the Google Books deal, highly affordable printed books from a wealth of titles may help to push the volume of on-demand printing at the consumer outlet level to the point that more affordable versions of EBM technology could be deployed.
This may be just what Google has in mind, as it yet again takes content that most publishers considered unmonetizable and seeks ways to make money with it. A buck a book for high-quality free content that costs almost nothing to store online is not a bad deal. Add in Google's expanding footprint in eBooks via deals with retailers and ePub-compatible reading device makers and the unmonetizable starts to look like a pretty good deal. In this era in which many publishers are still focused largely on incremental gains for their cash cows, it's nice to see Google and On-Demand Books turning cow flops into blue sky markets that may transform on-demand books into a lush pasture for new profits.
With a webinar for MIT coming up at the end of September, I finally accepted that my aging laptop was overdue for an upgrade to keep up with the increasing need to be video-literate online. In the process of ordering up my new unit, I had an opportunity to order a nearly-free netbook along with my new Dell Latitude. Looked interesting for a moment, but I decided to pass and to wait it out a while longer for something with a little more power and battery life. That something is not just an idle dream: smartbooks are coming to town in a few months, and they promise to do for mobile computing what PCs did for desktop computing in the 1990s.
A smartbook is in essence a small laptop optimized to use a new generation of CPU chips such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Nvidia's Tegra that offer days of battery life and high-quality performance for video, Web browsing and online office applications. Combined with operating systems such as Windows CE and Google's forthcoming Chrome OS, smartbooks - and smart phones based on the same chips - are poised to eclipse inexpensive (and not very powerful) netbooks as do-everything mobile devices for people who are content to do most everything computer-oriented via the Web. Given the billions of people who have yet to use PCs on a regular basis and the increased demand for on-the-go lifestyles that rarely settle down to a desktop unit anymore, inexpensive smartbooks are likely to take off in a big way over the next few years.
That's not all bad news for some of the incumbent interests. Microsoft is well positioned with both its CE operating system and a wealth of improving online Web-based office productivity tools to take full advantage of the capabilities of smartbooks. While this means that some of its legacy desktop software may go by the wayside in the process, it's likely that the online versions of these favorites will be powerful enough to satisfy the lion's share of people who use them. This spells sorely needed growth for Microsoft, even as it comes to terms with the positioning of Google as a more direct competitor in this space via its Chrome OS operating system being launched next year. Smartbooks are also good news for most books publishers and video producers, as they are big enough and powerful enough to support their needs for better on-the-go display systems.
Will smartbooks be the spark that catches fire in many unwired parts of the world to open up the Web to billions of people who have yet to experience it? Many mobile phones equipped with these improved chips are more likely to be key in the Web's further expansion, but smartbooks are definitely a very important step forward in making Web access an instant-on service that will make browsing a more universal tool in more venues than ever before. Yes, mobile apps will still be important, but will face far stiffer competition from cloud-based content services that work perfectly fine in smartbooks and a new generation of smart phones that will service people more effectively overall. So I'll wait a few months before picking up a smartbook, but by then, with 4G networks starting to roll out, I am sure that it will be well worth the wait.
In my Wall Street days, one of the first uses for real-time information feeds into PCs devised by investment banks was to pump them into spreadsheets, which would in turn calculate information that could be republished out to the investment community. It was a very cost-effective way to accomplish a key publishing function without having to rely on armies of programmers to set up these relatively simple functions that a spreadsheet could handle fairly easily.
Fast-forward to today, an era in which cloud computing is beginning to absorb both spreadsheet software and much of the content that can be consumed by software. It should come as no surprise then, that Google's recently launched Google Apps Script capabilities are providing publishing abilities that connect Google Apps spreadsheets to the Web in much the same way that investment banks were using them for business processes many years ago. You can now use script programming in Google's spreadsheets to trigger well-formatted emails to contacts, or to feed Web services - say, Salesforce.com, to pick one possible example. More to the point, though, some of the pre-defined scripts include formulas for converting local currencies into foreign currencies and business logic. Hmm, this is not just for casual marketing campaigns, is it.
It would be a far, far jump to say that Google Apps Script is in any sort of position to take on the sophisticated trading environments of investment banks, and, to be truthful, that's probably just as well. But it does point out how easy it has become to use the Web to be a self-programming publishing environment that can support many core business functions with event-driven automated information feeds. As more and more business logic works its way into cloud-driven programming environments, we can expect that both enterprises and enterprise publishers will be adopting these environments as cost-effective ways to deliver more valuable workflow services. Foreign currency trading via Google? Well, those early spreadsheets looked pretty crude at first, also. Watch this space carefully, enterprise publishers, there's more to come.
I had an interesting exchange on Twitter today with Rafat Ali, founder of paidContent.org and a person who I respect and admire greatly for his insights into the content industry (not to mention for having blown the socks off of many a trade pub over the past several years). Rafat had pointed out in a post on paidContent that The New York Times had started to use barrier ads on their iPhone applications, something that he found to be very intrusive. I couldn't agree more on this point; most media companies view mobile applications as little more than Compuserve-like kiosks from which they can serve slightly jazzed-up versions of their Web page content. With that in mind, it shouldn't surprise us that the NYT or any other media company will be intent on carrying over its ad strategies to these walled gardens.
As a follow-up, though, Rafat pointed me towards a good post on pC's mocoNews site that outlined the case for Apple's approach to mobile apps versus Google's more Web-centric approach. Tricia Duryee points out in this article that Apple had considered emphasizing the browser as the focus of delivering content on the iPhone, but then shifted to its App Store as a preferred method for getting people excited about the potential of mobile devices for delivering useful content and services. As she notes:
[T]he biggest problem facing Google will not be convincing developers, but consumers. Apple’s steroid-enhanced marketing machine has drilled into the public thinking that “there’s an app for that,” not that there’s a URL. Clearly after logging 1.5 billion downloads within a year, Apple is on to something and vigorously training the mobile users of tomorrow.
Sorry, Tricia, but I have to smile at that one. While Apple rolled out a very savvy strategy for the iPhone given its market position as a high-end product oriented towards proprietary intellectual property, I think that it's worth noting that a lot more than 1.5 billion Web pages, many of them with embedded applications, are downloaded every day on the Web. The iPhone's app strategy has certainly made mobile technology platforms far more usable and understandable for its early adopters, much as early premium online information services such as Compuserve and the original AOL made the still-crude world of networked information delivery more palatable. Similarly, early PCs benefited from a galaxy of packaged software that used to line the shelves at local stores, providing "user-friendly interfaces" that made still-crude PC technology more palatable.
But today the walled-garden services of Compuserve and AOL are distant memories, and packaged software for PCs is almost non-existent in most local stores, except for a few have-to-buy items like Microsoft Office software (about the most expensive items to be found on any of the shelves at our local Staples office supply store), accounting systems and tax preparation tools. Why? Because for the most part these products and services were attached to more mature technologies that no longer required packaged IP to help people get to the good stuff. In the instance of software, many of the functions that used to require packaged software are now available via cloud computing services, including tax preparation, bookkeeping, spreadsheets and word processing. In the instance of services like Compuserve, it also became a matter of scale: 65,000 or so iPhone apps sounds like a lot of services, but good luck finding any of them once you begin to scale up to more broad markets. Walled gardens are great when you have a cozy crowd, but most people's interests won't be content to stay in them very long when a good search engine can help them to find the next movable feast easily.
This isn't to say that there is not a valuable place for mobile applications in the mix of marketing strategies for publishers and technology companies. Good functionality with good content being fed into it is a winning combination on any platform. But if we were to speed up the clock and have this discussion a year from now, I don't think that people will be waxing as sanguine about the App Store as they are today - and not just because of Google's Android mobile platform hitting the scene. Real applications, as opposed to the lightly gussied-up browser substitutes that most publishers toss up as mobile applications, take time and thoughtfulness to develop and to roll out carefully.
Yes, a Safari browser is a somewhat different platform than a Chrome browser, and so on, but it's not very realistic to compare the relatively minor differences in how these packages handle largely open Web standards such as HTML compared to the larger, glaring differences between iPhones, Palms, Blackberries and Android phones. Mobile applications will be useful, but there is no practical way to expect publishers to deal cost-effectively with this broad array of approaches simply to get their content to and fro. No amount of seductive ads by Apple or any other platform manufacturer is going to be able to conceal this basic fact, it would seem.
The truth is, of course, that many Web pages are in fact driven by very sophisticated applications already, a fact that will be only accelerated by the emergence of HTML 5, which does more to merge programming functionality into the Web environment than previous versions of the basic code for Web pages. The architecture of today's Google Chrome browser hints at where this is really taking us. When you have more than one page open in a Chrome browser, each tabbed page is its own separate program process on your computer. If one tabbed page has a problem, it can stop functioning without affecting the other opened pages. In other words, Chrome as a browser is actually a multi-process program execution environment.
To put it another way, it really doesn't matter whether you're running a Web page or an application, as long as you can get to it easily in a standardized access environment. Why bother with a page of apps and a separate set of Web page bookmarks when you can have one unified environment where you can access whatever is important to you? Once you have that kind of environment, people will want to have billions of choices filtered by a good search engine or recommendation service rather than a few thousand apps that have to be "mother-may-I"ed through Apple before they can be accessed.
The iPhone App Store has been a very clever and useful marketing mechanism that has allowed Apple to make its platform more palatable and useful in a highly controlled way that's appropriate for any emerging technology. Let's face it, the mobile Web is still a work in progress, making the more sophisticated displays of some mobile apps far more appealing than dealing with the almost-good mobile Web functionality that's available on most platforms today. But given the already mature nature of the Web that's awaiting better browsing via Chrome and other platforms that will not intentionally cripple Web functionality to make more proprietary approaches more palatable to consumers, it's not likely that this artificial Compuserve-like era of iPhone applications can be expected to dominate the mobile content landscape very long.
iPhone apps will endure and even prosper for quite some time, to be sure, just as those early online services such as Compuserve managed to endure for several years after the emergence of the Web. But it won't take long for most content consumers to realize the difference between a transitional technology designed to bolster the margins of publishers and a more satisfying technology that connects them more effectively with the world at large. As long as companies like Apple can create new frontiers of technology that entertain and delight high-end mobile content users, we'll be hearing, "Yeah, there's an app for that" for quite some time. But if history is any guide to the future, it's not likely that any one company will be able to keep that phrase rolling off of their clients' lips when more powerful substitutes are available that intrigue more people more easily. Yeah, there's a Web for that, all right.
While there's been enormous buzz about Kindle eBook readers from Amazon and, now, the new eBook platform offering from Barnes & Noble and an updated eBook reader from Sony, the broader truth is that eBooks represent just a sliver of the book industry as a whole and an even smaller portion of online attention. With USD 118 million in U.S. eBook sales last year versus USD 24.3 billion in overall book sales, electronic books have barely scratched the economic surface of publishing, in spite of all of the Silicon Valley bluster about their potential. Yet this isn't stopping major retailers and publishers from experimenting with eBook technologies again and again - and continuing to pull their punches when it comes to realizing the possibilities for books in electronic forms.
This doesn't mean that there aren't good efforts being applied to these improved stabs at eBooks. The new Barnes & Noble eBook store includes lots of state-of-the-art best practices, including easily downloaded reading software for PCs, Macs, Blackberries and iPhones, a decent offering of current commercial titles and access to free eBooks from the Google Books online archive, as well as a smattering of classics pre-loaded into their eBook reader. A forthcoming eBook reading unit from Plastic Logic will enable Barnes & Noble to have its own little toy for eBook enthusiasts, but wisely they didn't bother to wait for this hardware to show up before launching its attractive and easy-to-use store for existing electronic platforms. As they go to pains to point out in their online orientation materials, they want it make it as easy as possible for people to buy and download eBooks using whatever device people want to use to absorb their attention.
While it's good that Barnes & Noble is offering alternatives to eBooks and a very consumer-friendly approach to their promotion, the broader truth is that the book industry has gained very little from eBooks thus far in taking on their biggest competitive challenge: the Web. If, after more than a decade of Web access to books, the entire book industry can only garner USD 323 million worldwide from a medium that reaches more than 1.4 billion people around the world, one wonders how projections predicting USD 9 billion in eBook sales by 2013 can represent real growth and new markets as opposed to a more probable contraction of overall book revenues as book sales to dwindling audiences transfer to online destinations.
There are many signs that the book industry is becoming more savvy about rethinking their role in publishing and beginning to think of themselves as being able to promote talented authors as assets in many media, but these are baby steps in the face of a Web that has already completely rethought how people can profit from expressing themselves to audiences. As nice as the Barnes and Noble eBook store may be, its level of education and assurance seems to be aimed at people who have very little confidence with using online content. One would think that book publishers would become far more aggressive in thinking about how to engage the most aggressive online content producers and users, capturing their energy and interests - and disposable income - more effectively. Certainly ensuring compatibility with iPhones and Blackberries are a step towards that audience, but the relatively inflexible eBook reader software that packages most eBook offerings on these platforms seems doomed to make books an afterthought rather than a primary focus of aggressive content users.
What publishers should do is to focus far more aggressively on packaging that will integrate book content into personal publishing lifestyles far more aggressively. APIs that facilitate applications development to extend eBook capabilities, collaborative reading, bookmarking, linking, user-generated content and other extensions into the real-time generation of content consumers and producers are essential developments to bring eBooks into the stream of attention that they really deserve. Serving audiences is the real objective of publishing - not generating units of production that may or may not deliver full value to a given audience. Creating services that keep people who are today's greatest content purchase influencers - digitally literate readers - in a position to recommend and amplify the value of a wide variety of book-oriented content and services will take far more than locked-down reading software that operates in a vacuum. These types of services are surfacing in the hands of innovative online companies, but as to where that leaves mainstream book publishers and retailers remains to be seen.
If I had a dollar for every opportunity over the past few years to blog about the ins and outs of Yahoo's present and future, I could take you out for a pretty good dinner. The soap-operatic saga of how the leading but beleaguered Web portal lost many opportunities for greater industry dominance are well-chronicled, but now a completing deal for Yahoo to use Microsoft's new Bing search engine in exchange for Microsoft using Yahoo's ad network appears to set the stage for a new assessment of Yahoo's place in the online content industry that rises above the the usual cult of obsession with Silicon Valley personalities. More importantly, this deal is not the only step that Yahoo is taking to strengthen its position as an online destination that solves problems for people with engaging content.
On at least one level the deal appears to be a no-brainer. Yahoo's search capabilities are quite good for consumer search, but they lack Microsoft's investments in the engineering mojo of its Powerset-enhanced Bing search engine to accelerate the maturing of search results into rich, contextual content. Yahoo has good ad technology and brand marketing, but needs both more inventory and more overall market share to get a more serious share of advertisers' budgets. Each organization will be able to take capital out of competing for their common but smaller pieces of the online search and ad pies and concentrate more on drawing market share away from Google and other sites using Google services. In doing so they will be able to build online and mobile revenues more effectively through their combined audiences.
This is all good, and probably well-needed competition for Google to strengthen the online breed. It also puts Yahoo's efforts to re-engineer its future as a direct competitor to Google comfortably in the past: Yahoo's greatest growth came during its earlier technology partnership with Google, which allowed Yahoo to concentrate on user experiences and content partnerships more effectively. Different partners, now, but similar opportunities await. So in spite of the "Yahoo has thrown in the towel" rhetoric floating around - or worse - there's reason to believe that this alliance is a good step towards Yahoo using its more limited assets to do what most successful Web companies do anyway: use alliances to do what you do best and to leave the rest to others. Bing will kill the Yahoo brand no more than Google's search and ad alliance killed the AOL brand; there's plenty of room for Yahoo to be a strong aggregator and services provider through and around Bing's capabilities. It may also, of course, be a way for Microsoft to absorb the benefits of a Yahoo one step at a time while avoiding regulatory issues that an acquisition might raise, but given the iffy online future for both companies individually it's probable that a trial marriage through this deal that strengthens the assets of both companies is a more realistic step at this time than risking capital on a merger.
Yahoo is also not relying simply on Microsoft to reposition its strengths in the Web marketplace. In today's world of virtual aggregation, Yahoo's recent home page redesign beta, which includes links to major online Web sites such as Facebook and eBay is an indication that they have finally accepted that Yahoo's strength as a brand can't grow exclusively on traditional content licensing deals. If Yahoo is to be the "starting point" of using the Web, as suggested by Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder and former chief executive, then it has to do as the Web itself does and become more adept at using links as a form of powerful brand endorsement. A media cynic may look at this and say, "Well, it's nothing more than a big Huffington Post with some extra ecommerce features," but if it does what people want it to do and they come back for more, then, well, who's going to laugh last? A successful product is first and foremost about meeting the needs of your markets cost-effectively, after all.
There are still many hurdles for Yahoo to overcome before it can be labeled a truly "hot property" again, but the new Microsoft alliance and the home page redesign are both key indicators that Yahoo is focusing increasingly on the things that will keep people coming back for more. The days of walled gardens filled with licensed content built one deal at a time are a waning phenomenon, but that leaves many hopeful days ahead for those who help people make the most of their online experience in whatever garden suits them best. Hopefully Yahoo will remain a key player in those efforts through their latest moves.
I have been using Google Chrome as my Web browser for several months, now, after giving up on Microsoft Internet Explorer years ago and then suffering from Firefox's add-ons and crashes bogging down what little memory was left on my PC. The Chrome browser fires off separate processes for each window or tab that you open, making it easier to keep it humming along as a stable Web appliance. If one window or tab fouls up, you get a polite "aw, snap" message from Chrome and the rest of your browsing stays intact. That's the kind of simplicity and reliability that's sadly lacking from most other Web browsing software that tries to address too many technology agendas.
Google is now expanding its Chrome brand to include an emerging computer operating system that has been announced today on its official blog. ChromeOS will be an open-source operating sytem based on a Linux kernel that will be released on netbooks and other devices sometime in the next year or so. The goal of ChromeOS is fairly straightforward: turn netbooks into the "instant-on" Web appliances that phones, PCs and even Apple's Mac computers were never designed to be. Conceived of originally in the era of minicomputers and early microprocessors, PCs and Macs were always modeled on machines that were ultimately never meant to be consumer appliances. My PC today, overburdened with software that I rarely use, takes at least as long with a 1.7 gigahertz processor to start up as my original 66 megahertz home PC did more than sixteen years ago. That was fine when I used my PC for a lot of my work: today most of my work takes place on the Web.
Google's assets, by contrast, are almost exclusively Web-based - as are the content assets of most individuals and an increasing number of institutions. Just as the Chrome browser strips out most non-essential functions to get people into Web standards-based functionality as cleanly as possible, so will ChromeOS support appliances that have Web access as their primary goal. The Google blog makes clear that desktop functionality in ChromeOS will be kept to a minimum with this in mind: just cut to the browser, thank you very much, you know where I'm going. ChromeOS may overlap somewhat with its Android operating system targeted at mobile phones with this goal in mind, but as the takeup on Android in the netbook world has only begun - and as mobile voice communications are migrating increasingly into the Web itself - any conflict between choosing ChromeOS and Android in the netbook market is likely to be minimal. What's more likely is that Android will be to ChromeOS as Windows Mobile is to PC-based versions of Windows, except that ChromeOS will not target enterprise-strength desktops and servers. Why bother, when Google specializes in platform-neutral access to all of the content on those platforms?
With that in mind, some of the hysteria in today's split-second reactions in the media to this announcement are a little hyperbolic. I doubt that there will be a "nuclear winter for Microsoft" as a result of the ChromeOS announcement. Enterprises will continue to need heavy-duty information appliances to address a wide variety of publishing needs, while at-home gamers and entertainment buffs will continue to want the maximum hardware and software available to maximize their experiences. It's unlikely that ChromeOS will beat any significant paths into these markets any time soon, though its promises of virus-free operation may inspire some crossovers. Instead, Google will more likely use ChromeOS-based appliances to expand the global footprint of people able to access the Web cost-effectively and reliably in as many ways as possible. In other words, the five billion or so people who have yet to access the Web can help Google to redefine the pie from which it draws market share for its content and technology services, just as it redefined the advertising pie with its AdWords contextual search ads and the aggregation pie with its many content services.
With most content being maintained already in the cloud of Web storage and services, Google ChromeOS is a reminder that after all these years the fundamental story about what is changing human communications remains the Web itself. The appliances that make Web access possible will be made more efficient via ChromeOS but it's the content and communications which they access which will continue to drive the changes in the world prompted by more universal electronic publishing and content consumption. With emerging tools such as Google's Wave messaging environment beginning to redefine how people communicate collaboratively via voice, text and images, it's likely that ChromeOS will be a middle-of-the-road technology strategy that will, in the long run, create an environment in which PCs and mobile phones as we have known them are pushed to the sidelines to cater to increasingly legacy-bound markets while ChromeOS defines the new "just-right" level of technology for most on-the-go and in-lap-at-home content use. Others such as Microsoft and Apple are starting to aim for that "just-right" Web niche as well, of course, so the pie will have more than one slice out of it. So yes, let's pay attention to ChromeOS, recognize its significance to the long-term future of content platforms - and then let's get back to being as serious about the Web as possible.
There has been a virtual tsunami of new product announcements coming out of Google lately, a wave of innovation that makes you wonder at times why private investors were so intent on putting money into in media companies with inflated multiples recently while content companies like Google were sinking significant funds into core product improvements. With consultants left and right making money telling companies how to be more innovative, the simple answer seems to be to invest in it. One key investment from Google is a new project revealed by TechCrunch named "Flipper" that offers a very different look to its online news search services through thumbnail images of news articles.
Google has been making extensive use of its thumbnail graphic generation technologies in many of its services, including up-to-the-moment screen grabs of pages recently visited in its Chrome Web browser. In the Flipper project, however, Google is showcasing not random pages selected by a browser user but articles selected by its news search engine. The thumbnails in the Flipper demo show a good chunk of the layout of selected news pages, grouped in various categories such as recent articles, hot topics, specific publications, most viewed and so on. The effect of this technique leave a strong impression that one is looking at a customized newsstand - except that instead of looking at the covers of magazines and newspapers one is looking at the images of specific articles tailored to a person's interests.
In an era in which search engines have made any page a potential first-visited front page for Web sites, this concept is particularly important to publishers. The graphics, multimedia and value-add content are supposed to be key differentiators for mainstream publishers' content, but in today's search engines these valuable assets are not well exposed in comparison to other sources when typical search results expose little other than a headline and a snippet of text. Thumbnail images can give a news browser a quick sense of which articles have deep and engaging content and which ones are a little bit thinner on content. That could turn out to be a key plus for publishers trying to differentiate their wares amidst a sea of potentially acceptable substitute content sources.
Of course, this will also put more pressure on publishers to focus more on ensuring that the layout of their content will turn out to be appealing in a newsstand such as the Flipper project is showcasing. But its likely to be beneficial pressure that may enable publishers to rise above competitors based on virtues other than search engine optimization. It also may enable advertisers to get a better sense that premium publishers offer qualities that run deeper than mere page view statistics - and to realize that providing content on publishers' sites that adds to the visual and editorial value of a publisher's content is an increasingly important virtue for promoting their advertising goals. While it's still unclear as to whether Flipper will see the light of day in its current form, it's a technology that is well adapted to mobile markets as well as PC browsers - and as such is likely to work its way into many Google offerings in the foreseeable future.
In the beginning, there was the CPM - that enduring measurement of how many thousands of people were exposed to an advertisement as a benchmark for gauging its value. But with the rise of online advertising, CPM impression measurements began to compete with metrics such as Cost Per Click, the number of people who actually used a link on an ad to visit an advertiser's Web site. Here at last was a metric that proved that online advertising really worked - even though relatively few people actually clicked on these ads.
CPMs were great for advertisers, in that they could be assured that their money spent on ads had a measurable result that they could use to negotiate ad rates that corresponded with revenues in some meaningful way. CPMs still figured in to ad budgets, but it was hard to gauge the real effect of online ad impressions compared to leadgen-like CPC results (cut to frowns on faces of ad agency teams everywhere).
Enter the Online Publishers Association, which has released a new research study conducted by comScore of how consumers respond to online display advertising from 80 major brand campaigns running on 200 major media sites. The study measured the behavior of consumers after having been exposed to online display ads when searching for a brand trademark, traffic improvements on their Web sites and the amount of ecommerce. An OPA slide deck available at Silicon Valley Insider depcits some of the key stats from this study.
The results of the study are quite rosy: about 18 percent of the surveyed consumers searched on the advertised brand within a month period, 29 percent visited the Web sites for those brands, they spent 55 percent more time on pages at that site, clicked on 51 percent more pages and spent more on ecommerce options when available. The overall ecommerce increase was about 7 percent, spanning sectors such as autos and finance as well as others, but when looking at consumer packaged goods the uptick in ecommerce attributed to display ads was 14 percent, with consumer electronics increasing 22 percent (Cue broad smiles at ad agencies everywhere).
Clearly this is good news for media companies looking to transition from print revenues gained from impression-based brand advertising to online markets, as well as for advertisers (and, of course, for comScore, which can sell more research of this kind). Advertising benefits from "hang time" with eyeballs, not always correlating to those nifty eye-movement-scanning human factors tests which imply that nobody's paying attention to ads. The peripheral vision of humans picks up and processes far more than we may imagine, it would seem. The problem, though, is that it's not only ads in major media outlets that are claiming a benefit from this effect - and the comScore research is not the only game in town.
It turns out that Google has also been looking at the value of ad impressions relating to its own content and advertising. As related in B-to-B Online by Sam Sebastian, director of local and B2B markets at Google, a study for General Electric conducted by Enquiro, a B2B search engine marketing firm, revealed that contextual text-based ads appearing in search results also had a positive effect on brand recall. In other words, there is more than one way to skin the brand cat - and many outlets for advertisers to consider.
Moreover, as Google's own research indicated, 64 percent of C-level executives from Forbes 500 companies surveyed in their own research were using search at least six times a day themselves to locate business information. So not only is the potential for commerce to be gained from ad impressions not the exclusive domain of traditional media outlets, but it appears that many of the prime decision-makers with budgets are turning to search engines first oftentimes to get the impressions of products and services that they need. The presumption that print is a medium for the elites that many brands seek out as opinion-makers is still valid, but breaking down rapidly.
While the Google and Enquiro research doesn't refute the comScore study, it's a reminder that there are many contexts that advertisers need to think about how to convey brand value - including social media outlets and other venues beyond search engines and publishers' portals. All of this research seems to point out that advertising for brand value still matters in online outlets, even though its payback is challenged by new methodologies. Social media in particular offers a very high ratio on payback in brand investment, even though it does not provide in many instances the mass-scale impact that traditional advertising campaigns deliver.
One interesting example of the power of social media for brand marketers told by David Binkowski, Director of Word of Mouth Marketing at MS&L Worldwide, at a recent meeting of the Social Media Club in New York City, underscored the point that return on investment can still be very different in online venues even when brand impressions count. Binkowski relayed how the manufacturers of the heartburn medication Prilosec had spent big on an advertising campaign to give away tickets for a Super Bowl game one year, but then tried using social media and other Web outlets the next year for their ticket giveaway, spending about one tenth as much in the process. Interestingly, the net results from these two campaigns were about the same. So while everyone can feel good about impression-based advertising working in both traditional and new online outlets, advertising alone is no longer the only game in town for contextualizing brands online.
The good news in all of this, though, is that brands can survive and thrive online when they are using the right tools and putting down their chips appropriately. Traditional media is certainly a big part of that mix, but it's not the only game in town any more. A good page of search results that solves a very focused problem for someone can be a valuable opportunity for a brand to claim some space as a part of that solution. This has to temper enthusiasm for the OPA study somewhat as a tool to increase CPMs based on the value of impressions, but the ability of services such as comScore to quantify ROI on impression-based online advertising may help to give ad agencies a boost in their efforts to benefit more broadly from the switch to digital outlets for marketing.
The ROI value of social media as a tool for brand building is powerful in theory, but the metrics on its performance are still a work in progress and not yet accepted widely in marketing circles. This can be expected to change fairly rapidly, as underscored by a presentation by Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer for comScore, at that same Social Media Club meeting. With services such as comScore beginning to put the finger on the pulse of cross-platform consumer behavior, marketers are entering a period in which the mysteries of unlocking ROI from online promotions and advertising are unfolding rapidly. Any way you look at it, there's a lot more "stickiness" for brands online than we may have thought previously - and a lot more reasons for marketers to push the limits of what can be done with brand marketing in online environments that much harder.
A few years ago I blogged about Microsoft's then-CEO Bill Gates' appearance at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, in which his brand was sharing a good deal of the CES limelight with Google and Yahoo. No longer did the Microsoft brand alone command the attention of tech mavens: it was content and content-oriented features that were carrying the day. While Microsoft still enjoys an enviable position in the marketplace, there is no doubt that its ability to project presumed dominance in consumer and enterprise markets faces many challenges.
Ticking the clock ahead to today's world, it would appear that Apple may have had a similar passing of the market mojo moment at this year's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Steve Jobs failed to deliver the event's keynote address, presumably due to health issues, but it may also have been because Apple's usual razzamataz had few blockbuster announcements off of which to leverage. The news from WWDC was about incremental changes, all good, but mostly about trying to deal with the challenges of positioning Apple as a premium brand in a world that is pushing pricing down on many bright, shiny objects.
By contrast, bright, shiny objects were found everywhere at very reasonable prices at the recent Computex Taipei event across the Pacific from WWDC. Computex featured an abundance of netbooks and thin client desktops and tablet panels running many different kinds of operating systems software, including Google's new Android O/S that was seen running alongside smart phone and netbook versions of Microsoft Windows. Windows was the first cross-platform operating system to start driving down the cost of content delivery electronics, and Android is following in its footsteps with an open-source operating system that helps to drive down the price of a smaller, cheaper and more portable generation of electronics significantly.
Apple has always managed to create a unique niche for its products by focusing on highly appealing designs and features. For example, at WWDC announcements included a slot for SD memory cards in some of its lighter new Macbook laptops - perfect for the photo and graphics afficionados who form a strong core of Apple's support. Great stuff, but ultimately still the stuff of niche brands. Call it the BMW approach to content delivery: ultimately, a Macbook or even an iPhone doesn't do much that a Windows or Android-equipped device won't do similarly, but dang, it just makes some folks feel so, well, you know..."in." Some people will always pay a premium price to be a part of that club, whatever is on the inside of it, so Apple-branded devices are not going away any time soon.
From a content industry perspective, though, the Apple wave queued up by the soaring success of the iPhone is about to gain a new sense of perspective over the next several months as netbooks and tougher competition from newer smart phone models begin to elbow into the limelight. The real star of the show is the Web, with cloud computing resources the co-star. Yes, mobile applications are helping to fuel up excitement about smart phones and other devices, but when a device with 1GB of memory can handle virtually any multimedia content display requirements, it's not realistic to think that proprietary hardware or operating systems are going to enable publishers to have technology partners that can help to buffer them against the competitive forces of Web publishing. You can increase storage for downloads to enjoy when you're not Web-enabled, but for most people the content that they want resides in the cloud and appears on whatever standards-compliant device makes it useful. Toss in the increasing availability of wireless broadband Internet connectivity and the "why" of platform-captive content makes less and less sense.
More and more inexpensive appealing devices to deliver content are pouring out of Taipei, China, South Korea and other low-cost producing markets every day, many of them aimed at global markets that have participated only marginally in the Web experience so far. While many premium content producers continue to focus on the upscale content platforms as their salvation, already more than a billion YouTube videos are viewed daily around the world. A premium strategy will work if you can attract people's attention well, but at this point in time there are really not enough fundamental technology differentiators in Apple or any other existing technology platform producer's products to justify a strong reliance on premium platforms as a buffer for intellectual property licensing. In short, the battle between the Web and platforms is over, for now, and you can put the crown securely on the virtual noggin of the Web.
If content producers want premium platform barriers to entry for their products they will have to have technology partners that are investing much, much more heavily in breakthrough innovations that deliver real differentiating value. The iPhone was merely the first in a wave of devices that are providing incremental improvements in performance in what was already a marketplace headed towards commoditization of mobile technology platforms. In the meantime, a floundering world economy is pushing more people towards cost-effective content technology solutions. Dear publishers, say goodbye to your love affair with the iPhone - before it's too late. Learn to love netbooks, a galaxy of smart phones and any other device that can get you people who whant your content on the line, and then prove your value from there.
BookExpo America is one of the premier U.S. trade events, encompassing more than a few Wal-Marts of display space wherever it sets down. This year's event in New York was no exception, but more than ever there was a pall in the air of its exhibit halls as much of the paper-based world of books began to come grinding to a halt in recessionary times. The other key factor, of course, was the meteoric rise of premium ebooks on Amazon's Kindle device, a blessing for publishers needing quick revenues without inventory commitments but a curse with its draconian revenue cuts and control over unit pricing. Who would have thought, then, that the name of Google would come along to offer the book industry...some hope?
As counterintuitive as it may seem to some, the light is finally going off in more than a few minds in the book publishing industry that Google's neutral stance on delivery platforms and its popularity as a destination for book readers courtesy of its library book scanning project may combine to offer publishers a more sane "plan B" for online publishing than they had originally thought. A recent New York Times article outlines some apparently positive responses from publishing executives to Google's strategic partnerships director Tom Turvey saying "We really mean it" to going live by the end of 2009 with Web-based premium ebook sales on all major PC and mobile devices. One key incentive to teaming up with Google: the promise to give publishers complete say over unit pricing.
The technology making this possible, though, is still a bit shaky. Turvey mentioned that books would be available offline only through Web browser caching capabilities; otherwise, your ebooks will be ready and waiting online for you. This is less optimal than the reader-centric features of Amazon's Kindle reader, but given the increasingly universal presence of Web connectivity, it's probably not a major hindrance for many readers more used to online access. It also underscores yet again the re-emphasis by Google of the importance of the Web browser as the most powerful platform for cross-platform electronic content delivery. "Lock-down" of content is easy enough for ebooks in whatever container a publisher would like in a browser, but more importantly it gets to live in a medium that doesn't require them to negotiate distribution deals with an expanding universe of platform providers with each new twist in their technologies. This is also bound to make more of their cash-strapped book consumers happy.
While Turvey made it sound after a fashion that Google had slipped on ebooks as a product priority, clearly there were a few other product priorities that needed to fall into place. With Google's Android operating system taking off now on both smart phones and netbooks, there is a growing Web counterforce to proprietary technologies that were hemming book publishers in to platforms that would ultimately hinder ebook growth. Google's new Wave messaging and collaboration technologies are likely in time to accelerate Google's ability to build real-time conversations around books, enabling publishers to create richer content to engage readers without having to invest in technologies that would take them away from their core editorial talents.
Although these seem to be positive trends for Google, no doubt publishers are still feeling their way through a relationship with Google that is only beginning to move past the tension and mistrust that lead up to the recent book scanning settlement covering orphaned works. It's also likely that Google will not find itself the only "plan B" that publishers investigate as they decide to expand their partnership options beyond Amazon. But when one thinks back a few short years ago when the book industry was trying to partner with Yahoo and Microsoft as alternatives to Google's book scanning efforts, it appears that book publishers, willingly or not, are ready to pursue more aggressive marketing strategies that embrace the Web on the Web's own terms.
It's been a busy week for attention-getting events in content technologies, with the Google I/O developer's conference in San Francisco vying for mindshare with the All Things D conference in San Diego. Both were important events in their own right, with Steve Ballmer's announcement of a preview launch for Microsoft's new Bing search engine facing off against Google's announcement of Google Wave, a new technology that promises to deliver a new standard for common messaging and collaboration infrastructure for both the Web and enterprises. Hmm, yet another stab at launching a Live.com successor versus a reworking of email, wikis, real-time messaging and file sharing in one swoop. Which event should Walt and Kara have been covering in more detail? I think that I'll take door two, though Bing is worth taking a gander at in its own right. Mind you, Google giving away free Android phones with a month's free call and data time to developers at I/O certainly upped the attention-getting factor a little bit, as well.
Google Wave is important for any number of reasons, but it's important first and foremost because many major technology companies could have done this, and probably should have, but chose to stick with incremental improvements to older software technologies. Back in the 1970s, for example, when it was a big deal to get messages from one person to another person on a remote computer, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was an important tool to facilitate widely different computing platforms to pass messages to one another. Good stuff in its time, to be sure, but today the fundamental concept of email is entirely out of step with today's communications methods, where message content tends to be shared and stored in Web cloud infrastructure rather than being scooted around to storage devices at the edge of the Web. Add in mashups, instant messaging and the real-time broadcast capabilities of services such as Twitter and it's clear that email is a completely inadequate messaging infrastructure for building content services that really satisfy today's sophsticated consumer and enterprise audiences. Yet for decades interoperable standards for a successor to email sponsored by major technology companies have been no-starters.
Enter Google Wave, a new communications technology that made its debut at Google's recent I/O conference for developers. Built to leverage the emerging HTML 5 standards for content and software services delivered via Web browsers, Wave is an open-source set of protocols, platforms and products that enable anyone to put together services that allow people to create and share content and display applications with one another using non-proprietary Web programming standards. Given that the Web has been overshadowed recently by proprietary products such as Apple's iPhone and Amazon's Kindle and applications environments such as Adobe Air, Google Wave is a very strong statement from Google that the common and open standards of the Web are the key to unlocking the full potential of the most valuable communications medium ever invented.
Wave is also an extremely strong challenge to Microsoft and just about every major software and services provider hoping to take some piece of the emerging world of real-time collaborative communications that spans consumers, enterprises and an expanding multitude of mobile and desktop computing platforms. While other companies are still trying to leverage their ownership of technology intellectual property, Google learned long ago that it's far more important to own the moments that people interact with technology. Some people try to call those moments "media," but Google was one of the first companies to realize that these transitory moments were far more valuable and complex than both traditional media companies and technology companies had imagined.
If you can find the time it's really worth it to go through the full video of the demo video that shows all of the potential of Wave as a messaging medium. For those that don't have the time, here's a brief tick list of things that will leave you oohing, aahing and - hopefully - thinking:
A "wave" can be any number of digital objects - messages, documents, images, embedded applications - that can be exposed to people just by dragging and dropping a profile icon into the Wave object.
Wave enables concurrent real-time information transfer to and from collaborators. So although you can view completed messages in Wave as you would an email, instant message or other completed communication, you can also experience it as a real-time conversation or collaboration. As you type, the characters of your message appear in the other person's browser as they are being typed. People can type together in multiple languages (with real-time translation as needed). The real-time semantic spell-checker is pretty amazing in the demo. The open-source Wave protocol makes this all happen.
Wave objects can start out as a simple message, have replies and participants added, enables people to share private messages from within the wave, can allow people to edit an object concurrently and to view those edits as they are happening concurrently, can use rich text with drag and drop hyperlinks, allows the dragging and dropping of videos, images, texts, hyperlinks, enables rich tagging - and can do this all in real-time on any platform that uses the Wave protocols, including enterprise platforms.
Anyone can develop Wave-compatible applications, including those who want them "inside the firewall" of an enterprise. Demos were given on Wave working in Google's own Chrome browser but also Firefox and on iPhones as well as Google's own Android mobile smart phones. Examples in the I/O demo of an "Acme" third party implementation of Wave and an embedded "Twave" application for including Twitter messages in Wave underscored that any developer can use Wave protocols and standards to develop compatible applications that leverage Wave capabilities.
In other words, this is a complete rethink of how we use Internet-based messaging to communicate and to collaborate, enabling content to be assembled in Web cloud infrastructure as real-time conversations. It's young technology also, to be sure, but it rides on the back of the enormous cloud infrastructure resources that Google and others have assembled over the past several years. Whatever scalability and reliability issues need to be worked out for Wave are small compared to the decades of effort it has taken to get infrastrcuture in place already to keep up with Wave's potential. If you think of how the relatively simple Twitter infrastructure has been tweaked and kept alive with fairly few "fail whale" outages during its exponential growth of the past year, then it's probably safe to say that the potential for Wave to grow rapidly as a market force in real-time and collaborative messaging is not likely to be gated by basic issues such as networking and servers.
Given the slow adoption rate amongst software developers for Google's Open Social programming interface, though, it was far from certain that developers were going to get jazzed up about Wave as something that deserved their attention - hence the high-energy introduction for Wave at the I/O event. The giveaway of Android phones to I/O attendees was no accident, of course, in this regard. What other real-time messaging medium has the potential to be changed by I/O's potential? Why telephony, of course. With millions of phone calls being made already on services such as Skype and even Second Life, the telephone networks' days as the universal real-time messaging medium are numbered. Google's open-source Android software is about to empower dozens of new and more affordable smart phone models around the world, making Wave a perfect tool to help accelerate the demise of telephony as we have known it. It's likely that Wave will be a key component in accelerating the acceptance of Android, and vice versa.
As traditional content and software publishers continue to try to wrestle the Web into one proprietary box after another to suit their established business models, it's important to remember that the world is aching to have cost-effective productivity improvements that will help to boost the global economy. Wave is a good example of a content technology that has the potential to sweep aside many drags on Web and enterprise productivity in ways that can help to create and to contextualize content in more valuable ways than ever before. In the long run, that can only be good for publishing. My suspicion is that you'll see Wave in a Gmail inbox near you pretty soon. For those who were hoping that there would be a breather from the pace of change being fomented by the Web with the introduction of platforms like iPhone and Amazon's Kindle, I am sorry to say that you had best get down to the gym and start getting used to more fast breathing ahead in the emerging Web cloud economy.
I've had the privilege to have moderated many great SIIA panels over the years, but the 24 June Brown Bag Lunch mid-day event at the McGraw Hill building in New York City (online video available) certainly ranks among the most important topics that I've had the opportunity to moderate with some excellent panelists who will stimulate your thinking on how best to monetize content on today's hot distribution platforms. Please register soon, the last Brown Bag Lunch event was a sellout both in-person and online. If you have suggestions for questions that the panel should address, please add them as comments to this post. A panel summary and a list of our truly distinguished panelists follows. See you there!
Google, Kindle, iPhone: How to Leverage Hot Content Delivery Platforms for Profits
Today's publishers are finding both great opportunities and great challenges in using leading-edge technology platforms to deliver revenues for their premium content sources. iPhones, Kindle e-book readers and Google Books and search services are being adopted by both consumers and enterprises to access premium content at a pace that challenges publishers to come up with effective pricing and marketing strategies. Key questions that arise include:
• What are going to be the most successful business models on these platforms for news and information, books and magazines - and what are the up-and-coming platforms that will challenge publishers to keep those business models working? • In locking down deals and settlements for content distribution on these platforms, who are the winners and losers? • How does the availability of premium content on these platforms change how publishers manage the value of their brands? • What will be the emerging role of the open Web in an environment that is seeing more proprietary content distribution technologies emerging?
A panel of leaders from the worlds of media, enterprise and academic publishing and intellectual property management will explore how news, books and other intellectual property from publishers can best take advantage of emerging technologies to generate revenues from premium content in mobile and online markets and on the open Web - and how these platforms are likely to affect how content creators view the role of publishers in delivering them value for their efforts.
Panelists: Alisa Bowen, Senior Vice President, Head of Consumer Publishing, Thomson Reuters Gordon Crovitz, Co-Founder, Journalism Online Chris Kenneally, Director of Author Relations, Copyright Clearance Center
While the tsunami of buzz surrounding the Wolfram|Alpha reference service (by their own claim not a search engine) seems to indicate a desire for novelty at least as much as interest in its actual merits, the service is one of a few major announcements this week which indicate a shifting attitude towards online publishing that is catching up with the realities of today's publishing technologies. Wolfram|Alpha offers a simple "white box" query interface with semantic parsing of requests that access a fairly limited, curated set of reference data feeding through display functions such as tables, charts and graphs. The W|A team is careful to note that these images and data displays are not search results but useful publications unto themselves - hence a bit of static about their terms and conditions, which emphasize that query results are W|A's intellectual property.
Wolfram Alpha is an interesting reference tool for people wanting to chart and graph contrasting points of data, but it's hardly alone in the movement towards more robust on-demand content. Recently Google announced at its Searchology event a range of enhancements to its emerging Universal Search capabilities, including search options that enable one to embed relationship trees, videos, reviews and other displays that relate to a query - in addition to already embedded rich content such as maps. For example, the image to the right shows a relationship tree for people relevant to Apple CEO Steve Jobs as well as relevant video clips. Included on this menu of options is a feature called "rich snippets," which enables publishers to encode content that's related to a particular item from their Web sites that appears in a search result using a microformat specification provided by Google. Examples of this feature in use are fairly thin so far, but it holds out the promise for a wide range of content sources to be placed in context with content returned from Google searches. Google's open approach to helping publishers to develop search-embedded display applications for their content returned from queries, as opposed to Wolfram|Alpha's "it's our content" approach, is far more likely to accelerate the development of rich content applications cued by queries into a wider array of databases.
The team at Yahoo has been looking at this emerging landscape for enriched queries and is trying to steer somewhat of a middle course between the Wolfram|Alpha approach of tight curation of sources and applications and the content available on the open Web. As noted in SearchEngineLand recently. Yahoo is ceding the "all the world's information" indexing battle to Google and is instead focusing on doing a better job of curating specific types of Web sources more effectively and serving them up through a variety of display objects. Yahoo's Search Monkey display capabilities, similar to the "rich snippets" microformats announced by Google at Searchology, already help to power rich content in Yahoo search results, and will be folded into broader use of digital objects that get served up via Yahoo queries.
This is all a way of saying that search was never really about "just search" to begin with. Search results are and always have been content in and of themselves, a collection of content sources that are arranged to enable people to determine what's the most relevant information on a given topic. In other words, search is an editorial function, albeit one that's highly automated, but it performs much the same function as an editor working on a news article or an encyclopedia entry - except that it is done on an on-demand basis. We've seen many efforts through recent years to enrich search results with more robust graphics and related content, making a given search result more like a reference compendium rather than just a listing of links. But what we seem to be moving towards at a faster pace as of late is the realization that the digital objects served up by search engines are increasingly likely to be the objects where people get their answers and insights in full, rather than trudging off to various links to get more in-detail answers.
Now, this is usually where some of my good friends in publishing start to howl about the evils of search engines, but realistically this kind of aggregation is happening whether publishers want it to happen or not. The only question is how they want their own content to participate in this automated just-in-time editorial environment. I believe that the most constructive answer for publishers is to embrace the increasingly object-oriented environment of search warmly and to recognize that there are opportunities abounding in getting more of the right content in front of the right audience at the right time through enhanced search services. For example, instead of having to compel someone to click on a link to read a news story on your own Web site, you could have either a lede paragraph or an entire article come up in the search results page. That article could have your own embedded ads, or links to a subscription or micropayment monitoring service that would enable the publisher to expose premium content in a search context.
However it's done, query results on a search engine represent the point of highest demand for much of today's content. Getting the right content into those results with the right monetization scheme gives a publisher a potential jump on the competition that hopes that someone will click on their link into their Web site. Destination Web sites serve an important purpose, but in the world of distributed online content aggregation, but relying on them solely is a little bit like saying that one should only buy newspapers at a publisher's printing plant. Search engines and other content technologies that allow on-demand contextualization of content for an audience are the newsstands of today, leaving publishers with but one choice: do you want to hide your content behind the counter or do you want it where people can see it? The serving up of rich content through digital objects asks the question more loudly and with more and better answers to the "how" of meeting this challenge, but it's the same challenge that's been with us for many years.
The most important innovation that publishers can embrace over the next several years are the technologies that enable them to have cross-platform digital objects that are easily monetized and licensed for monetization through a broad array of partners adept at on-demand contextualization of content. While the Wolfram|Alpha platform offers an interesting view of how a limited range of sources could be curated into a useful reference service, ultimately it's a model that is far too limiting to allow most publishers to succeed. A handful of content-serving graphs and charts is useful for only a few types of information sources. Publishers need a robust array of content-serving objects, ones that enhance their own content and that allow it to trigger the integration of other content sources more easily for enhanced value.
Search engines and social media tools have empowered a new generation of editors and curators who have the power to put a publisher's content in its most valuable context more quickly and more effectively than traditional distribution media. Hopefully the efforts by Wolfram|Alpha, Google and Yahoo begin to make publishers think more actively how their content can be served up more automatically in more contexts through their object-oriented publishing technologies.
When Gordon Crovitz left Dow Jones several months ago, I knew that his experiences in helping to build the most successful premium online news brand would be likely to result in good things somewhere. Gordon’s insights into the value of traditional journalism and his online savvy are an unusual combination in the world of today’s content industry. So it was with some interest that I have been learning about Journalism Online, a new initiative captained by Crovitz, content industry veteran Steven Brill and former cable industry CEO Leo Hindery. In a detailed press release – more of a mini-business plan, actually – the Journalism Online (JOI) team has outlined a multi-pronged strategy to enable traditional journalism to reap new revenue streams from online sources.
As many of the elements of the JOI plan are in sync with what Shore has been advocating for many years to promote the health of premium content sales (I briefed Crovitz on the concepts of The New Aggregation about five years ago), I would be contradicting myself to say that his team’s plan doesn’t hold water. In fact, much of what Journalism Online advocates is sorely needed in the news industry and will be likely to offer professional journalists a chance to benefit from more sensible online business models in tune with how content is actually distributed and consumed online. However, there are some troubling aspects in both the details and the broad brush of this plan that should be considered carefully by publishers as they weigh its merits.
The first concept in the Journalism Online plan is really a no-brainer and long, long overdue. JOI would set up an online system that would enable anyone to sign up once for access to premium news content across the Web. Payment models via this system would vary, and would include subscriptions for individual premium publications, pay-per-view access and royalty-driven payments in a cross-source subscription model. This would enable any publisher participating in Journalism Online to share in common payment and billing infrastructure that would make a wide variety of premium business models possible. While JOI does not target mobile and television markets explicitly, clearly this is a system whose basic cross-source payment model based on open Web access can be easily extended to other content delivery networks.
So far, so good, most especially on the cross-source royalty model. In essence the Web is a broadcast medium that enables people to tune into multiple streams very easily, so tuning premium content delivery into a payment model more like radio’s royalty payment system for music producers is a strong plus. When specific content becomes very popular online, the spike in views of that content can result in direct revenues to its producers. In theory this helps to resolve the ongoing dilemma of having to expose content to search engines that’s monetized with ads that just don’t seem to take advantage of oftentimes brief spurts of interest in news items to the point of paying the bills for many publishers. If the QPass cross-platform payment system of ten years ago had not flopped by trying to control content distribution via their service we’d have had this type of payment management service in place years ago.
The next leg of Journalism Online’s plan is a little more shaky. JOI has put under its wings two of the most prominent legal talents in the U.S. – former Microsoft anti-trust attorney David Boies and former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson – to lead some strong-arm negotiations with search engines and online aggregators to pony up licensing and royalty fees for the right to link to JOI member content. While one has to respect the considerable judicial, political and corporate gravitas of these two legal heavies, I am concerned that their efforts seem to be misplaced. There is now a substantial body of law which makes it clear that indexing a link to a headline is not a crime and falls comfortably into the concept of fair use of copyrighted content. By the logic outlined in Journalism Online's stated focus they should be suing newsstands in cities across the world for exposing the headlines of newspapers to people walking by, or charging millions of dollars for copies of the venerable Periodicals Index on library reference shelves. I believe that this tactic is in large part a sop to news publishers who have been relying thus far on the Associated Press’ failing negotiations with Google and other search engines based on similar issues.
Strong-arm legal tactics for search engine licensing are also largely unnecessary, in large part, if the JOI system works as it ought to. Access policies could be enforced on all participating publisher sites, and terms of bulk access licensing could be managed for search engines and other corporate entities from the same system that services consumers. It’s more likely that the JOI legal team is a stick for the carrot of negotiating some meaningful price points for bulk indexing access – price points that are likely to disappoint many publishers, since the search engines know that news ad revenues would die without search engine links. What’s more promising is having legal and technology infrastructure in place that could facilitate bulk relicensing of content for reuse in new content aggregation schemes such as online mashups and in enterprise software applications.
The most concerning aspect of Journalism Online, though, is the sense that their team harbors a dogged determination to preserve the status quo at traditional news media outlets in the face of more than a decade of change fostered by online access to news. The following quote from Brill seems to set the tone for much of what JOI is trying to accomplish:
“We’re also convinced,” Brill added, “that readers, who have been paying billions of dollars a year for print journalism, will continue to support journalists by paying a modest, fair price for original, independent, professional work distributed online. They realize—as we do—that quality journalism is a vital component of a functioning democracy and free market.”
While I would agree that many people are willing to pay a premium for high-quality products and services, the implication in Brill’s statement is that they are out to support the journalists creating the news in a way that will sustain the traditions of print journalism. Given that many journalists caught up in newspaper cutbacks now have to accept wages that are getting closer to those offered for low-level services jobs while many media executives continue to do rather well by themselves, I think that it’s fair to say that the merits of the print journalism model's ability to support journalists are largely at question. This sales pitch for Journalism Online is not so much about preserving journalists as it is about preserving some portion of the lavish profits once enjoyed by a news publishing industry that no longer has near-exclusive access to publishing technologies. A “modest, fair price” doesn’t sound like the type of monies that will support glitzy skyscrapers that were paid for by those technologies. Promises and realiteis seem to be out of sync in this instance by a broad stretch.
In sum the Journalism Online initiative holds out a great deal of promise for the news media to revise its thinking on how to acquire revenues more realistically in an online environment, albeit with some sentimental froth around the edges of that promise for those not quite ready to accept the true value of news in today’s online publishing environment. In a world that has empowered over 1.6 billion people as publishers, it’s no longer realistic to think that only a handful of people who carry the official title of “journalist” are defining the supply of quality information and insights in the world. The key factor that Journalism Online really doesn’t address at all is that the news industry is surrounded by valuable sources of information that leave them struggling to define a fundamental value proposition, regardless of how it may be financed. News organizations are also surrounded by technology platforms that make it possible for consumers and enterprises to aggregate, filter and analyze news far more efficiently than via their own publishing platforms. The “let’s tame Google” approach to trying to control content linking and access belies the reality that the contexts in which news is most valuable are increasingly far away from publishers’ own Web sites. There's some tacit acknowledgment of this concept in the JOI positioning, but only time will tell if they can emphasize licensing of content for reuse efficiently enough to make a real difference for news producers who must compete with and complement new sources of engaging news and information.
The search for subscription and royalty payments fostered by Journalism Online also tends to gloss over the ad-driven culture of most of today’s news organizations that restricts fairly radically what topics and personalities gain their attention in their search for an increasingly limited “truth.” If JOI could help fund a broader approach to journalism that gave coverage to less ad-worthy topics, then truly it would be living up to its ideals. It’s far from clear, though, that the news organizations that Journalism Online intends to support are likely to maximize the funding of such “news for the sake of news” journalism any time soon, though. But as an alternative to AP’s trenchant response to online publishing, it at least offers some hope for the news industry as a whole as a means to overcome some of the challenges posed to it by online content distribution capabilities.
The concepts behind Journalism Online may yet succeed in helping the news industry to secure more revenues from online publishing, but it is already a far different industry than the one that used to be dominated by the organizations which JOI is approaching to use their services, an industry which needs to support independent journalism far more effectively and which benefits from content being aggregated in any number of venues. In the meantime, technology and services providers such as Sonoa Systems and Zuora offer their own broad approaches to content distribution and monetization that offer a broad array of publishers their own alternatives to the ads-only monetization game. It’s about time that industry veterans like Brill, Crovitz and Hindery got up the gumption to try an initiative like Journalism Online to shake the news industry out of its doldrums. Hopefully they will not run out of time to convert existing news organizations to the use of their proposed sevices before their potential revenue streams have drifted towards newer sources of journalism for good.
There's been a whirlwind of announcements, commentary and downright bad blood beginning to steam up around the Associated Press' moves to position news content from its own reporters and its member organizations more effectively in the online environment. The latest developments in the war for news organization survival were kicked off by the AP board's announcement that it would be moving aggressively to identify and to challenge Web site publishers that were using unlicensed AP content illegally. The "why" of this move, largely ignored by media reports, is contained in the rest of the announcement: AP is introducing a new schedule of lower fees for its member news organizations that will make it easier for them to participate in AP distribution and news use. Faced with having to respond to the revenue crunches experienced by most news organizations this year, AP has no choice but to ensure that their online revenue streams from organizations consuming AP content can be captured as effectively as possible.
From the perspective of public relations, any constructive aspects of the latest AP moves appear to have been lost in a sea of furor rising up from bloggers, Twitters and other online voices. TechCrunch viewed AP's moves as being akin to the RIAA's moves to prosecute consumers for downloading relatively meager quantitites of music on to their PCs - legal moves that have backfired in many ways both from a legal and public relations perspective for the music pubishing industry. TechCrunch also highlighted a cease-and-desist order sent by AP to a Web site using AP-posted video from YouTube in an embedded video player. Of course YouTube videos are made for embedding in other Web sites, and the site that happened to be using it was that of WTNQ-FM, already an AP affiliate member. Google CEO Eric Schmidtcommented in the wake of these PR fiascos by AP that it's a good idea not to "piss off your customers"- especially those who are doing their very best to abide by fair use policies for the reuse of copyrighted content. AP could certainly take some lessons from Google's efforts to get publishers to swallow some of their own bitter pills with much kinder and gentler approaches to public and professional-level communications.
The question is, though, what is really the most effective path towards revenue growth for AP at this time - and are they handling the rollout of new strategies in a way that will help those new revenue streams to materialize? From the looks of things, AP is still struggling to find answers to that question. Certainly pursuing legal enforcement against blatant content pirates is one possible route, and it's not without its merits. Data published by Attributor indicates that nearly half of the Web sites taking content from major publishers are copying more than 90 pecent of the original text of articles. Knocking out parasite Web sites that copy unattributed content strictly for the purpose of sucking up ad revenues that would go otherwise to the original publishers would do the bottom lines of all online publishers a great favor. It's a shame that AP's initial efforts along this vein have resulted in embarassing misfires - it's an important goal that should not be sidelined by a mishandling of the policies built on top of the underlying copy detection technologies.
But the larger concern is whether AP is really "getting" how to make money in the online publishing environment. The AP board announcement included a statement indicating AP's intent to build a search portal that would feature only content from "authoritative" news sources. While this is a constructive goal of sorts, we've had such search engines for years already. The Topix search engine focuses primarily on traditional media sources, and, for that matter, Yahoo! News and other major portal news services have focused on aggregating and searching mainstream news even longer. Both are good efforts in their own ways, but they're not floating the boat for most online news publishing revenues and they're not growing in any significant way. Why would yet another search portal wind up being the solution to news publishers' concerns?
The future that AP needs to embrace can be summed up in a fairly simple phrase: get news content that people really want to read to where it can make money. In broad concept that's pretty much what AP's mission has been all along, but in insisting that that mission cannot be expanded or altered significantly in light of how news is created today is holding back both AP and its member organizations from surviving and thriving in online news markets. Media organizations need to become better at aggregating sources of news more agnostically: if someone is streaming live video via Qik from their mobile phone at the site of a plane crash, then AP should be the natural source to which news organizations would turn to find such content as breaking news, not "i-reports." The idea of "authoritative" news need not always be synonymous with editorial and news-gathering methods that grew up in the era of printing presses. With today's publishing technologies editorial values can be implemented in many ways that can expedite the most compelling information getting to the right audiences at the right time.
This recognition that its own members need better agnostic aggregation of news sources is key to AP supporting the economic performance of those news organizations. Thomson Reuters CEO noted recently at a conference, "Why does The New York Times need to have 600-700 journalists? Why not 30 journalists with 30 apprentices?" In other words, if the economics of news have shifted permanently, why try to justify subsidizing jobs that need to move elsewhere in the news economy simply because you want only specific people in specific organizations producing news a specific way? With billions of people around the world equipped with real-time news publishing tools, including increasingly successful independent journalists, the world's attention span has permanently embraced this "Content Nation" as a source of information that they trust. That's a fact that will simply never go away. Trying to make it go away is about at pointless as anyone who tried to sift the tea thrown overboard in Boston Harbor back in 1775. Even if you could do it, who would want to drink it?
Instead of arguing with people who are both consumers and sources of news, AP needs to take a deep breath and think about how they can power the profits of today's news organizations using whatever content - news, metadata, links, video, anything - will help them to make money. In some instances this may mean new members and approaches to membership, in other instances it may mean playing a very different role with existing members and in how they participate in its editorial efforts. This can be a hard thing for any organization with a venerated history as rich as AP's to do, and I know that they are trying their best to move in that direction. But if they were able to leave the confines of Rockefeller Center behind to set up shop in dot-com West Side digs, one would hope that AP could help to carry both its traditions of excellence and of innovation to new levels of performance in the news industry that take it in directions that others have yet to dare to imagine. The time to dream a new dream at AP has come. I do hope that they start to envision and to realize that dream aggressively some time soon, both for its own sake and for the sake of its members.
While the concept of the content organization features found in the Powerset search application was always compelling, the original content in the demo application set up for the early version of Powerset was not the most powerful presentation of its strengths. Now in the hands of its acquirer Microsoft, the Powerset features appear to be ready to take on a much-improved content set and interface in the guise of an internal project at Microsoft labeled "Kumo." As revealed by Kara Swisher at All Things Digital, an internal Microsoft memo is encouraging staff to play with the prototype search engine to get some initial feedback.
In spite of some scathing negative reviews from the search engine intelligentia, the screen grabs provided by ATD of the Kumo interface look to be pretty competent. Gone is the over-busy Powerset interface, replaced by and interface that is at once Google-esque and yet unique. The top five web results are followed by results that match different facets of a search term. For example, results for the recording artist Taylor Swift return groupings of content available for her songs, her lyrics, her bio and her music downloads and her albums. On the left are possible searches by related artists and categories, as well as the ability to initiate new searches in video collections, bios and so on.
It's unclear at this point whether Kumo will be just a project name - it's apparently a word that means both "cloud" and "spider" in Japanese - or whether it's just an internal marker that may disappear at its features get absorbed into Microsoft's Live Search engine. For that matter, it's unclear that the features will make their way into production at all, though they are certainly useful enough. What is clear, though, is that Microsoft is going to continue to search for new ways to make alternatives to Google palatable in a way that might appeal to both enterprise and media audiences. I don't think that too many people harbor illusions about the ability to crack Google's dominant market share in search any time soon, but competition is good for the breed, they say.
I suppose the most intriguing aspect of Google's success that challenges the challengers such as Kumo is how Google has attained its success without explicit content categorization features. One can go to dozens of knowledge management and search conferences every year and hear about how important good content categorization features are for the success of search engines - and then look at the nearly naked search results on Google to contemplate just how true that may be. The assumption that categorization specialists have is that having categories makes it easier to browse content collections. Well, that may very well be true if you are in fact interested in browsing relatively finite and well-organized collections of content, but in general search engines have become less about browsing and more about delivering specific answers for most people. The average searcher seems to be trained now to refine their own searches via the "white box" rather than to traverse through browsing categories.
This isn't to say that content categorization isn't useful: it's more a matter of where it turns out to be most useful. Where it does seem to help most is in portal solutions where someone has come to a specific page of content and may want to explore that site or database from different facets. Where people understand that there's a finite, well-curated collection at their disposal, categorization seems to do quite well. Where it's a matter of sifting through billions of pages for the needle in the haystack, most folks are getting used to typing in the best search string that they can think of. With that said, the features in Kumo do provide an interesting and engaging alternative to Google search results, but they'd probably be better off either in specific content portals that need enrichment or in creating an on-demand portal from its results sets, so that it will be a more browsable set of content in its own right - and then, perhaps, attract a higher breed of advertising, if that's the goal. Instead of trying to out-Google Google, perhaps challengers such as Kumo need to think about how to out-aggregate the aggregators to build better revenue margins for smaller search operations. Something to wrestle with, perhaps.
Last week's Social Media Club meeting was great for any number of reasons that I covered in my Content Nation blog post, but it was capped by one of those moments of serendipity that come along only so often. As I settled in to my train seat on the way home, I noticed that my friend Jim Hirshfield was sitting in the seat behind me. Jim and I had last seen one another at last year's Cluetrain@10 celebration in New York City, just as he was looking to re-enter the startup space. Today Jim is VP of Business Development of Zemanta, a European startup with development offices in Slovenia that has developed a nifty platform that enables publishers to enrich their online content via their semantic language processing tools.
Zemanta technology operates via a plugin for popular blogging and Web CMS platforms and with popular brower-based email services such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. As with other semantic processing services that parse documents to suggest related links, tags and content, Zemanta semantic processing technology pumps text that's being typed in by a document author through its semantic filters to come up with relevant rich content that can be inserted into these documents. This in and of itself is not terribly revolutionary: publishing platforms have had similar tools for years to facilitate the development of rich content that can attract search engine traffic and keep audiences engaged in their content. What's highly interesting about Zemanta's approach is that it is a free download that can be integrated within seconds into platforms that are popular with both bloggers and professional publishers. A "pro" model is available that can be tailored for a publisher's own content on their own platforms.
Best of all, the stuff just plain works. As you type along, Zemanta's suggestions for images, links, tagging and related content pop up in convenient spots near a page's editing window. This real-time analysis is quite impressive and remarkably effective: it seems to take only a few sentences to get going and it gets only better as you type in more. A quick click or drag of the mouse and rich content is integrated into a blog post or article easily. It's giddily easy to enrich your articles: virtually every link, image and tag in this article was implemented with Zemanta. Zemanta's free download links into 10 million-plus items of content from free sources, including rights-cleared images from sources such as CrunchBase, Flickr and Google Maps, articles from key bloggers and Wikipedia as well as information posted on social networking services and content from Crunchbase, Amazon, YouTube and other popular sources. "Reblogging" content to other sites with trace linking to the original source is applied automatically to each post.
High-end services may provide more features, content and functionality for semantic content integration, but for publishers that don't have the time, money or project bandwidth for such solutions and that need to get more enriched content quickly Zemanta offers remarkable power in its free version - as well as the ability to upgrade to the premium version that enables publisher-specific sources to be integrated easily as well. This can be particularly important for a publisher that may have blogging or open-source CMS platforms that will not be so easily integrated into some of the high end semantic services. Zemanta allows these publishers to make rapid integration of content from their existing sources a very short project. In a world in which publishing platforms with 80 percent of what one would expect from a professional package now dominate the bulk of content being generated on the Web, Zemanta gives those platforms yet another "pretty-darn-good" asset that can help their content to compete effectively in online content markets. My thanks to Jim for being in the right place at the right time with a great tool for publishers of all sizes.
Talk about a bad hair day for WSJ tech journalists.
When The Wall Street Journal ran an article today on a Google plan to add "edge caching" servers at key internet service provider facilities, this fairly common practice to accelerate content delivery to audiences via the Web was mangled into a political imbrollio. To wit, their lede:
The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders.
Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.
Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday's Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.
Intellectual property guru and Net Neutrality proponent Lawrence Lessig noted that his take on Google and the political ramifications of this move were a bit off-key in the WSJ article as well:
The article is an indirect effort to gin up a drama about a drama about an alleged shift in Obama's policies about network neutrality. What's the evidence for the shift? That Google allegedly is negotiating for faster service on some network pipes. And that "prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject."
Who are these "Internet scholars"? Me. ...I've not seen anything during the Obama campaign or from the transition to indicate it has shifted its view about network neutrality at all.
With more moving pieces than a Swiss watch in Washington right now, the current political environment surrounding Net Neutrality and other Web access issues during a transition in Washington's power brokers is bound to be subject to as much jockeying and bullying as possible. Today the U.S. Federal Communications Commission canceled a vote on making radio frequencies available that would provide free Internet access as a public utility, bowing to pressures from both industry advocates and politicians. There's a big push for open Web access, but plenty of pressure from all points of view keeping things comfortably in neutral for now.
Net Neutrality and related issues such as public Web wireless frequencies seem to boil down to one basic concept: Don't make audiences pay for artificial scarcity. Carriers are still free to sell "bigger pipes" and better overall service levels, but artificial cartels based on reserving audience-facing Internet bandwidth for private use will only create more challenges for publishers in the long run. If you want to have proof that this is so, just take a look at the balkanized state of mobile service carriers that lassoed content providers for many years into deals for distribution on their private networks. What publishers now confront are scattered and overpriced deals for growing but underperforming mobile markets, even as the carriers now reach for ad revenue shares to sweeten their take.
Proprietary mobile breakthroughs such as the iPhone and the Amazon's Kindle are great for publishers in many ways, but they represent a relatively small share of the potential marketplace for mobile content and ultimately just continue the myth that artificial network scarcity can benefit the publishing industry as a whole. All these devices do is lock publishers in to proprietary networks that are bound to make it harder to reach their audiences cost-effectively.
The truth is that the fastest-evolving, most cost-effective technology changes are best for publishers, making it imperative to enable an environment in which mobile and Web technology providers are not resting on proprietary laurels that hinder the development of Web and mobile markets for publishers. Without these breakthroughs, the audience reach that content producers need to make mobile networks a highly profitable distribution medium is not likely to materialize. Let's keep the future of publishing out of the hands of companies that still can't tell us whether to dial "1", an area code or nothing extra to make a phone call to the next town. Net Neutrality will ensure that there is a cost-effective, rapidly evolving electronic distribution infrastructure that serves publishers best.
Well, of course it took a long time, but at the end of the day most of the several years between Google's introduction of its book scanning program for out-of-copyright and out-of-print books and the recently announced settlement with the book industry for USD 125 million has been a matter of the book publishing industry deciding to name a reasonable price that would sync up with the realities of book publishing in an electronic marketplace. Since the book industry was barely interested in e-books and print-on-demand a few years ago, it's understandable that the magic number was not readily at hand back then. But now that eBooks are beginning to take off via Kindle and mobile phones via Amazon and other outlets and print-on-demand publishing is beginning to look more attractive as a business model the book industry has some real revenue and traffic data and a marketing plan that will benefit from Google and other partners pushing their out-of-print wares.
In many ways this enables the book industry to monetize fringe content far more effectively via Google partners such as Amazon, in essence validating the value of Chris Anderson's "long tail" theory for content that was sometimes discounted by book industry executives resistant to Google's scanning efforts. The settlement is really just a bulk licensing fee to make it easier to administer long-tail revenues, not too different than the industry royalties paid by radio stations. This sets up people to buy books in print and in e-reading devices like Amazon's Kindle based on Google Books "broadcasts" just as premium downloads and CDs are fed by online and broadcast radio revenues. With finding an audience for one's content the greatest challenges for all publishers Google Books has become a powerful browsing engine that maximizes the value of any title, new or old, for an audience that is just right for it.
With the new agreement Google becomes a premium destination as well: you will be able to browse full pages of scanned books covered by the agreement instead of snippets and opt to pay for the full online rights to the book via Google Books - or purchase them for your private online "bookshelf." On the surface this may look like a bad thing for Amazon and it's proprietary Kindle strategy, and certainly Amazon would love for their gizmo to get as much momentum as possible. But as successful as Kindle has been with many core book enthusiasts it hasn't escaped Amazon's attention in all likelihood that the mobile market is exploding and that they are going to lose market share for books in general if they cannot get their inventory onto as many mobile devices as possible.
Enter Google's new Android operating system, which will be able to power any number of mobile and handheld devices - including perhaps, Kindles. As Amazon's portal specialty is shopping support and fulfillment, in the long run Amazon is better off partnering with Google and other platform providers to make their inventory relevant in as many venues as possible. Amazon may also turn up a winner with the Google out-of-print deal for print-on-demand support. Already a growing number of titles at Amazon are produced on a print-on-demand basis anyway, so Google and help to power that capability as well.
So all in all this deal is likely to turn into a content industry love-fest over the next few years, a peace treaty that finally enables book publishers to leverage the vast power of Google's book scanning initiative, thus avoiding expensive or less powerful alternatives and enabling book marketers to accelerate their increasingly aggressive exploitation of online channels for their marketing efforts. I can't say that I didn't say several years ago that this would happen eventually, but for now let's all just be glad that there are better times ahead for book publishers who are learning how to exploit electronic content markets far more effectively.
AP notes along with others the announcement that Google plans to extend its print archives scanning program to include the print archives of any newspaper that would like to participate in their program. This new effort builds upon Google's existing scanning efforts to capture books and other materials in the archives of major libraries. Early participants in the newspaper scanning program include Montreal, Quebec's Chronicle-Telegraph, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. Regional newspapers are struggling to find sources of revenue for their print assets what will offset plummeting print ad income, so the prospect of exposing their archives for revenues from Google's AdWords and to benefit from referral links to their subscription signup pages is found money for assets that are otherwise sound asleep in most library collections.
Unlike previous arrangements for newspaper archives, which were arranged based on access to subscription or pay-per-view databases or limited access to "snippets" of copyrighted content, the newspaper scanning program's direct parallels with the Google Books program means that people will be able to benefit both from the literal image of a newspaper as it existed at the time but also from text-based searching of those news sources. The differences in approaches are clear and somewhat startling when you compare the scan-based approach to other approaches. For example, a Google News search for "Man Walks on Moon" in the Google News 1969 archives, for example, yields dozens of pay-per-view articles on the topic, but eventually one can look at an ad-supported article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that captures not only the words but also the flavor of graphics, editorial cartoons and other features that were of importance in the era of the early space program, with key search terms highlighted in the scanned text image.
For larger media organizations this approach may not be as appealing as waiting for the "big fish" of pay-per-view and subscription database revenues, but for regional and local newspapers this is likely a very attractive alternative to microfiche collections which are expensive to create and will have relatively low-volume, one-time sales, versus the evergreen potential for revenues from online scanned archives. This alternative to microfiche and subscription databases also puts pressure on suppliers such as ProQuest and Cengage to justify the breadth of their archives as a key selling point. AdWords revenues will not be the answer for every publisher's need to monetize archives but it appears that Google has found another way to add value to hard-to-find content sources that challenges publishers to think more creatively about how they intend to add value to the delivery of their archived content.
The New York Stock Exchange has been careful through the years to keep feeds of trading data released to public media outlets hobbled with a fifteen-minute delay - in part to protect its revenues from financial institutions being charged for real-time data and in part to offer their member firms an information advantage that would help them have an upper hand with retail investors. But with most of NYSE's competitors being far more lax about releasing real-time trade reports and the definition of "real-time" having changed with powerful new low-latency trading systems for professional traders NYSE has re-evaluated its position on real-time trade reports for the public. Today NYSE Euronext launched its "Realtime Stock Prices" product for media, allowing unlimited distribution of real-time quotes to the public without tracking individual use. The product requires a distributor to pay an undisclosed bulk fee for the rights to public data distribution.
With NYSE's share of securities trading slipping and it's reputation as a market friendly to small investors slipping along with it real-time quotes from the public should have been a default position years ago, as we've argued oftentimes in ContentBlogger. Today's retail investors have more options than ever for making money in the markets, with NYSE's stumbling "blue chip" stocks being far from the most attractive alternatives for many. Forcing people to pay for real-time trade reports was only discouraging further participation in NYSE equities markets by retail investors - especially when other exchanges seeking market share were more than glad to use market data as a lure to new traders.
CNBC has long been a leader in public market data - I led the development and installation of their first delayed data system years ago for Quotron - so it's expected that they've opted to be on the edge of NYSE's release of this product. But the other announced client - Google - is one that was expected also but one that couldn't have come at a worse time for Yahoo. Real-time quotes from NYSE have been available from Yahoo at a premium for many years, so in a time when they have been trying to look plump to acquirers it's not surprising that they didn't opt to give up their NYSE quote revenues ("back door" real-time quotes from private electronic markets on Yahoo aren't strongly representative of the full market). So by default the go-ahead went to Google, whose Google Finance portal has become a very strong content offering. If nothing else the public knowledge that full NYSE real-time quotes are available at Google will provide some needed publicity for Google Finance at a time when Yahoo is slow to give up existing revenues.
I would hardly be alone in chastising NYSE for dragging their heels on releasing real-time quotes to the public, but it's sad that it has taken this long to get NYSE to make this move. It is, unfortunately, a familiar refrain in the content industry: major institution covets proprietary content revenues, squeezes them out for as long as possible while the markets move to find both acceptable substitutes and better ways of doing business. Publishing is in essence a very conservative business, so it's not surprising that NYSE would try to keep this formula going for so long. But in an era when the buyers of securities have and demand information at least as good as most selling institutions failing to serve the buy side in financial markets effectively is to ignore the fundamental shift in the content industry that empowers people with independent access to content from around the world. Your content may seem safe as a proprietary asset, but if it's not driving your clients' profits in its most valuable user-defined contexts it is far from a safe bet in today's content markets.
The mobile phone world was a-twitter with word that Nokia has purchased mobile software maker Symbian and will make the core of its software an open source resource some time later this year via a new Symbian Foundation, with other open-source assets to follow. Engadget notes that the Symbian foundation will include many of the mobile industry's biggest names and will include technology donated from both Nokia and many others, including Motorola, Sony Ericsson and NTT DoCoM. Other members will include Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and, interestingly, AT&T, which has had great success as of late with the proprietary Apple iPhone platform.
Clearly the impending launch of Google's open source Andriod mobile platform, delayed in launch until the fall but looming nevertheless, has forced the hand of mobile equipment providers and network operators to consider the potential impact of having their highly proprietary approaches to mobile technologies "googled" away to the demand for more common mobile standards for software to power more content services development. By creating a common core of technologies based on a company with which it's had a long-standing relationship Nokia gets to expand the value of their knowledge of the platform in a way that may transform their business model over time from one of manufacturing to one of enabling systems development. Given the demand for mobile services in developing nations this will enable companies like Nokia to have a hand in those markets without having to bear the full cost of either hardware or software development through the Foundation's partner network.
But more importantly for the content industry this puts at least as much pressure on providers Microsoft, Palm, Apple and Research in Motion to recognize that there is ever more pressure on proprietary operating system solutions to justify their ways. With speed wireless broadband network services opening up the Web to mobile devices the ability to deliver platform-specific content services will become icing on the cake for those who want new status toys but for the bread-and-butter corprorate worker or mobile entrepreneurs and family members it may take more than just a few proprietary services and a delightful interface to keep people locked into a proprietary platform. For content suppliers looking for new "choke points" via proprietary platforms the short-term news via suppliers like Microsoft, RIM and Apple looks good, but the picture over the horizon is likely to look vastly different in less than a year. Be it via the Symbian Foundation or Android platforms, publishers need to stop looking again and again for new ways to activate old business models via mobile platforms and look far more aggressively at how they will survive and thrive in a world enabled with open and universal access to Web-enabled content sources.
In what promises (for now) to be the end of the Silicon Valley soap opera known as the future of Yahoo, AP reports that Yahoo opted to seal a deal with Google for both the use of Google's ad network and enabling the interoperability of their instant messaging networks shortly after having announced the suspension of their attempt to revive talks with Microsoft on a potential acquisition deal. Yahoo shares tumbled immediately afterwards, leaving the long money on Yahoo holding a devalued stock but a deal that is likely to be one of the best ways forward for ensuring a reasonable future for Yahoo.
As noted two months ago in ContentBlogger, a deal with Google seemed to have been the best route for Yahoo all along, promising lots of new Yahoo page inventory for Google's more robust ad inventory and complementary media and technology profiles that were never as much at loggerheads as people made out some years ago. As for Icahn et al., while some may have been looking out for shareholders wanting short-term money out of what they had assumed was a cooked goose they never really seemed to have the goose's best interests in mind - or, for that matter, the best interests of Microsoft shareholders. After Yahoo would have been carved up it would be hard to believe that there would be a whole anything that would be greater than the sum of the parts.
As much as people tried to paint this as a Yahoo desperation deal clearly it was moreso a desperation deal by Microsoft to buy some time to build a broader position in online markets for its faltering ad network, with virtually no apparent upside for Yahoo properties. There was a lot of Ballmer bluster but underneath it all Microsoft was rolling the dice heavily for a very risky deal that had little solid strategy behind it beyond a temporary ad revenue boost from peeling away Yahoo ad accounts.
By contrast the deal consummated by Yahoo with Google is expected to pump in significant new ad revenues to Yahoo from Google's superior ad network, a total win-win any way you look at it. The deal is non-exclusive, so Yahoo can choose a plan "B" any time that it wants. In the meantime the other huge win-win is the promised interoperability of instant messaging networks. Google already has interoperability with AOL's still-popular messaging network, so the stage is set for the next major deal to whisper about - a Twitter acquisition that will provide a unified front end to the world of instant messaging.
With a generation of Web users coming of age focused on IM, Facebook and other platforms, email systems creaking with offensive and virus-laden spam have become a legacy messaging technology that wil die a slow and largely unprofitable death in much the same way that the telegraph lingered well past its prime. We use email because we have to - not because we want to. Focusing on accelerating the growth and usefulness of IM systems while leaving their email services to take their own paths is a smart move for both Google and Yahoo. A merger of Yahoo mail accounts to either Google or Microsoft's mail networks would have been a long, painful and largely unprofitable endeavor.
I felt all along that an independent Yahoo would be better for the content industry as a whole so I am glad that at least tonight we can go to sleep knowing that there will be a wider variety of good platforms through which to publish content than if the Yahoo deal with Microsoft had gone through. Jerry Yang's team still has a lot of challenges ahead of them but with an improving stable of user-friendly destination content properties and a progressive approach to supporting brand advertisers Yahoo promises to have a strong place alongside other major online portals for some time to come. At least I hope so - I really don't relish a deal war as ugly as this one any time soon.
The launch of the beta for Google Health caught a bit of media ripple last week, but with the never-ending machinations between Microsoft and Yahoo I suspect that it got lost in the shuffle by some. That's probably just as well, given the hyping of last year's big health launches, some of which have gone on to greater glory and others of which are back at the drawing board. Revolution Health has been an enormously successful media launch, for example, closing in rapidly on well-established leader WebMD's visitor count in little more than a year, while Microsoft's heavy-handed HealthVault did a great job of collecting and touting major health care partners but also did an equally good job of scaring away people who felt uncertain how improving corporate productivity was in their personal best interests.
Google Health plies a middle ground of sorts between these two major efforts, focusing on relating expert content and online media to someone's personal medical history. Like other services Google enables the import of health information from a select list of hospitals and medical testing companies and can find information that relates to known symptoms as well as search for doctors in a given specialty in a particular location. As you can see in the expandable screen grab to the right it's a typically low-key approach from Google. It doesn't present itself terribly differently from any other Google application, explains the user benefits simply right up front and encourages one to explore its capabilities gently and incrementally well within a user's control.
In some ways Google has benefited from the relatively slow start to online medical records gathering by Microsoft, even if it's been a little snookered by Revolution Health's aggressive grab of media attention. An MIT Technology Review article makes it clear that Google is working with its limited list of partners to understand what it will take to make people feel comfortable with entering and maintaining their health care information online. Terms and conditions make it clear to the user in the part that's appearing in the scrolling window that their information is theirs to control, so perhaps there's reason to hope. Starting with the approach that there's much to learn about what makes people comfortable with this particular kind of online personal data is probably a good approach, allowing Google to add features and content gradually.
In the meantime Google has also opened up its Google Apps APIs to developers, enabling anyone to use the highly scalable Google infrastructure to develop online applications that stand on their own or integrate with Google capabilities. WIth more that 150,000 developers already queued up to use the Google APIs we may be witnessing the beginning of the Google cloud beginning to subsume large portions of the online application development space. Combined with enhanced Andriod functionality for its mobile platform and the introduction of Google Gears, a desktop (and, presumably, mobile) client that will enable one to store data from the Web locally, it's clear that there's less and less space for Microsoft to lay claim to the personal content that's at the heart of its claim to personal computing. If the Web can lay claim as the primary repository for all of our content, with some items spun off to our local devices as needed, then Microsoft will continue to find itself positioned increasingly as a facilitator of appliance interfaces -a positioning underscored by Microsoft's announcement of a finger-friendly Windows 7 due to ship in...2010.
So on both the Google Health front and the Google Apps API front Google is continuing to position itself for prowess within the content cloud, building up relationships that will quietly unfold on a myriad of devices through a myriad of applications all developed on and stored in Google's powerful server and operating system infrastructure. It's not a media strategy by many people's estimates, much less an enterprise content strategy, but as these clouds begin to gather steam through the next few years prepare to be amazed yet again at the power of Google to keep focused on long-term objectives for delivering value through publishing that continue to amaze.
As a company that has as its tagline "Where Content, Technology and People Meet" Shore can only applaud the SIIA's decision to combine sessions for software and content professionals at its annual West Coast conference into one event this year, now dubbed NetGain. Seeing companies like Salesforce.com and Deloitte Consulting in one set of rooms and companies like LexisNexis and Wolters Kluwer in another room at this conference always seemed like a huge lost opportunity, only the moreso as Software as a Service begins to transform the face of enterprise I.T. services and content providers move more towards workflow applications and content integration technologies to build their market value. At the same time services like Google have long demonstrated that a technology that provides highly valuable context for content can be a publishing platform unto itself. So in many ways the software industry and the content industry are chasing the same high-value market opportunities and need to recognize that they have to speak in the same forums together for enterprise markets as much as for media markets.
On one level NetGain was such a perfectly natural blend of conference attendees from the SIIA Content and Software divisions that one wonders why this wasn't done earlier. This was underscored by the similar product themes brought out in the conference sessions. When software providers talked about "Software as a Service," what it really seems to say in many ways is that software companies are not succeeding as much as they used to simply by licensing their software as intellectual property and need to adopt licensing models more akin to those used for many years by enterprise subscription database services. When content providers talked about the importance of "workflow applications," What they seemed to be saying was that they cannot survive just on licensing intellectual property that gets commoditized unless it's put to work through really useful software services. Either way both software publishers and content publishers are chasing the same value proposition in the enterprise increasingly.
And for that matter, how different is "cloud computing" from the decades-old content services provided in the financial services industry by securities exchanges and companies like Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg? Certainly the Web has accelerated the development of client-server content services beyond any scale of earlier enterprise services but at the end of the day software and content services have been in a merging industry for a long time. Alacra, which won a CODiE award at NetGain for its ability to integrate content into enterprise workflows, has been working diligently for more than a decade on its powerful AlacraBook content integration services. Eventually trends catch up with long-established realities, I suppose.
The big difference today seems to be the influence of the one key ingredient that was somewhat under-represented at NetGain: social media services. Clay Shirky delivered his usual great speech about how social media services are revolutionizing publishing and ecommerce and there was a very good panel discussion lead by Dave McClure, but the increasing preponderance of social media publishing services both outside and inside major enterprises just didn't seem to register with most of the NetGain attendees. We're moving rapidly towards a predominant publishing environment in which the audience is seeking out and defining the value that it needs from content far more rapidly than traditional I.T. and publishing services are defining it.
This raises the question: what is the platform for today's and tomorrow's publishers? Certainly Salesforce.com and Google, along with other presenters, raised a compelling case for the applications programming interface, or API, being the platform of choice for the forseeable future. Being able to plug in content and functionality into one or more platforms via APIs enables people with both content and technology services to put their capabilities into the contexts that audiences value most very rapidly. Certainly the flourishing success of Facebook's APIs has helped to fuel its growth even as Google's OpenSocial API promises to bring content into social media contexts more universally. If a platform does not have the ability for content and functionality to grow through the efforts of third parties then it's going to be hard to fuel growth efficiently.
But the real platform of today and tomorrow is the community built around a platform. Bloomberg and Reuters proved this out years ago as their messaging and conversational dealing services enabled securities market traders to communicate with one another more efficiently and to contribute valuable content that resulted in the execution of securities trades. While much of the financial industry's technology and content services have shifted towards more automated functionality, the heart of what provides the firms using these services with a market advantage is the ability of people to collaborate in marketplaces through publishing. Today a new generation of business information services is emerging, highlighted at NetGain by Hoover's and ECNext, both of which are focusing on how to lock in content value through their audiences providing valuable content in the context of their platforms. A publishing community is a community that can become the heart of any platform's value. Looking at how Salesforce.com itself is moving towards integrating social media functionality this concept is hardly a secret.
There were also a lot of interesting exhibits by CODiE candidates at NetGain, which allowed people to get more "hands on" with their products before voting - sometimes literally. I especially enjoyed J.J. Keller's Safe.Sim truck driving simulator, which although it did not win in its CODiE category was both a very powerful training and evaluation tool as well as a "sleeper" software hit. With a little bit of repackaging and some consumer marketing know-how this could be a huge software hit. Truckers and truck fans around the nation and no doubt worldwide would jump at the opportunity to have a multi-player online version of this, complete with their own customizations. As for me, well, I guess I have a few things to learn about backing a semi into a loading dock.
In the paid exhibitors area I was especially impressed by a couple of offerings. Mzinga is an OEM social media community development service for both enterprise and consumer markets, enabling the collection and sharing of valuable content that builds value inside and outside the firewall. Well worth a look if you're considering stepping into social media more deeply. Vitrium Systems enables PDFs to be turned into intelligent content payloads that track audience behavior without requiring plug-ins or downloads and can also provide DRM for PDF content. For those still emphasizing print-formatted content this is an interesting play, especially for those interested in getting more play out if eBook content.
On the SIIA Previews agenda two later presentations stood out clearly. Watch Zuora, a company that promises to enable subscription models for practically everything, including content and technology to be sure but also just about any business model for any fungible product or service. Model-wise I think that they're on to something big and I plan to highlight them in future writings. It's a spinoff of ideas from Salesforce.com using telecommunications technology, Keep an eye on this one, it may take a while to take off but I think that it has the potential to hockey-stick.
Another strong Previews offering was SlideRocket, which combines powerful presentation tools, graphics development and community content to create a new way to develop and share presentations that can capture metrics on how people look at them. I think of it being to tools like PowerPoint and Photoshop and Flash what Salesforce.com and Facebook were to enterprise software and online publishing - services that defined their own categories as a new kind of publishing and in the process of doing so redefined several market segments at once by focusing on owning user content. I can't wait to get my hands on the beta.
So it was a great event, though I would hope that next year we get to see more participation both by more West Coast local firms and more major East Coast and overseas publishers. I would say that the only real disappointment that I had from the event was the rather quiet audience, which seemed in many instances to be of the opinion that while things were changing rapidly in the publishing and software industries the changes that many tout as revolutionary are not going to sweep away long-standing business models any time soon. There's more than a small grain of truth in that outlook, of course. Yet looking at the news industry, now reeling from the effects of having largely ignored the need to transform themselves radically in the face of a decade of online publishing, I think that it's safe to say that NetGain represented in many ways the admission that later is sooner than many may think.
At the SIIA NetGain conference in San Francisco George Hu, EVP of SalesForce.com Products and Marketing, gave both a great summary of their product philosophy and a demonstration of their Force.com integration with Google Apps. Nothing terribly new in all of this, but what struck me more strongly than ever was how both their philosophy and their product development parallels and integrates with Google. George mentioned conversations with Google CEO Eric Schmidt which indicate that they are aligned on far more than just the product level. It would be foolish of me to speculate on a potential acquisition of SFDC based on George's comments, but the more that SFDC develops as a market presence the more that it seems that it is repeating the Google business model for enterprise content services (also known as Software as a Service, or SaaS).
First and foremost, SFDC built a highly scalable architecture that would allow for multi-tenant hosting, a very geekish way of saying that they have a server farm that has common management of SFDC software for thousands of companies' protected data sets. This is not so different from Google's commitment to creating a highly scalable common search service for its online audience, instead of trying to use online search services as a way to sell software and hardware (does anyone remember AltaVista?). Making your services highly scalable as one of your primary proprietary advantages gives SFDC enormous power to become a defacto content services platform much in the same way that Google's power to crawl effectively gave it a key market advantage.
Instead of having to sell copies of this capability, like Google SFDC focuses on content services. Yes, we call them applications in many instances, but the net focus of these applications is to enable people to consume or publish content. Enterprise publishers talk about enabling workflows as a premium content service: there's no real difference between what SFDC is doing and what publishers are attempting, other than the desire of publishers to promote their own proprietary content. Add in SFDC's integration with Google Apps, including Gmail for email services, and you have an "80 percent solution" for enterprise workflows similar in scope and impact to Google's 80 percent solution for search. Yes, we still have many high-quality search engines for enterprises, just as there will continue to be many other high-value I.T. products in enterprises, but as a percentage of I.T. expenditures they are certain to dwindle as content services enabled via the Internet "cloud."
The similarity of Salesforce.com's marketing model was underscored by a presentation at NetGain from Google's Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director for Google Enterprise. Matthew highlighted in a simple graph how in enterprises the mediation of I.T. departments and other business functions in the purchasing of content and technology services from vendors is different from the consumer model, in which people can access and select services from any number of vendors without intermediation - creating more effective competition and, ultimately, coopetition between vendors. Security, data privacy are always touted as barriers to a transition to more consumer-like access to enterprise content but increasingly with the theft of laptop computers in airports, offices and just about anywhere it's not clear that a mobile-enabled workforce is going to be served well by anything but highly scaled cloud infrastructure.
Long story short, we are well on the way to the Google-ization of both enterprise content companies and enterprise I.T. companies by Salesforce.com in combination with Google, with Google Apps acting as the "glue" between the two parallel clouds. While there will always be other clouds out there for specialized purposes - you won't see low-latency securities trading networks on SFDC any time soon, for example - I think that what we're seeing is the content/applications cloud enabled by Salesforce.com as the emerging de facto environment for delivering content and technology services for much of today's corporate environment. In the process of becoming that de facto platform, the ability of small and medium sized businesses to scale themselves rapidly and effectively will change the competitive landscape in business quite rapidly on a global basis. About the only real difference between Google's dominance and SFDC's probable dominance is that one did it on ad revenues and the other on subscription revenues. I.T. vendors and content vendors looking at the SaaS space need to move far more rapidly to build effective cloud-based products and services - and to recognize that a winning strategy includes owning the cloud sometimes and sometimes playing in other people's clouds. I hope that's not too cloudy to you, if it is, give a holler.
The announcement of Adhere Solution's partnership with MuseGlobal to launch the "All Access Connector," a federated content integration solution for the Google Search Appliance, is one of those situations where an event is both obvious and profound in its potential impact on the marketplace. As enterprises today face an explosion of internal and external content sources that they need to integrate to create insightful content services there is a huge gap that has arisen between what most content platforms can do to unify that information and what enterprises really need. This is particularly true in enterprise search, where many search services fail to provide access to all of the sources that a person typically needs to access.
Federated search solutions have been one route to address this problem, querying interfaces to multiple searchable sources and assembling the results "on the fly" to yield a combined search result. Instead of trying to shoehorn all of the needed information into a single database or search index federated search enables content to live wherever it has to and to come together when needed via multiple queries into integrated search results. Some do this better than others, and some have been at it for longer than others. MuseGlobal falls into both camps pretty handily, having been providing federated content solutions for more than a decade which has allowed them to hammer out an infrastructure that will pull together thousands of different types of content sources together via federated queries.
All well and good, but the question is, how do you make this sing in the eyes of enterprise users? MuseGlobal's support of Adhere Solutions, a company that includes Googlephile Steven Arnold's son Erik Arnold as a Director, points towards a very powerful possible answer to that question: the Google Search Appliance. While the GSA is a popular search tool in many major enterprises it's not been deemed the "go-to" search interface when it somes to getting all the right content from the right places all in one place in many instances. Federated content capabilities from MuseGlobal united with the GSA seem to fill that gap very handily. Capable of searching any number of search engines, internal and subscription databases and feeds as well as harvesting content via its own site crawlers, the MuseGlobal platform turns GSA into a clearing house for all of the content sources than an enterprise user might want - all delivered on the highly popular Google interface that provides access to Web content as well.
Combine this with both Google's programming interfaces for applications development and MuseGlobal's own extensive library of content integration tools and all of a sudden the GSA looks like a lot more beefy competitor for expanded use within the enterprise. And since the MuseGlobal library of source connectors includes many interfaces to subscription content services as well it's a platform that can put subscription database providers on a new footing with their users as well. All of a suddent the GSA looks less like a user-friendly also-ran and a lot more like a growing hub for enterprise and online content resources.
We hear lots of talk about workflow as the key solution that's going to enable value-add enterprise content services to build new revenues, but the ability to pull together a comprehensive set of sources that their customers' users really need to do the job is a slow and laborious process oftentimes for many subscription database providers to accomplish. At the same time enterprise portal providers are stymied oftentimes by users who refuse to use their solutions to any great degree because they're used to getting the answers they want from the search engines they rely upon as ther real "go-to" workflow solutions. The All Access Connector solution offered by Access Solutions and MuseGlobal offer both camps a lot to think about as they ponder how best to ensure that they are delivering the content that their users want in the applications that drive their productivity the most. The era of The New Aggregation's ability to deliver more content value from more content sources more rapidly than ever is upon us in full, indeed.
Yahoo joined the list of online companies reporting rosy quarterly earnings, with earnings stronger than anticipated and profits nearly tripling based in part on earnings from new Chinese acquisitions. In the meantime Valleywag notes that Amazon's 1Q sales were up 37 percent over last year's 1Q results and earnings up 29 percent. Meanwhile Google reported revenues up 42 percent over last year's 1Q and net income was up 31 pcercent, powered in large part by continuing strength in U.S. markets and rising strength in overseas operations.
For those who invested in the future of publishing and ecommerce, the payoff has been handsome indeed. For some the growth of Web services in overseas markets in which they invested heavily is a key factor but in the instance of Amazon it's a combination of people who have time and money to shop online and less of a motive given high gasoline prices to sally forth to the mall. In both of these instances there's the continuing emergence of self-service for goods and content. the tendency for people to what what they want where they want it and to favor those who are best at doing this. "Find a need and fill it" was the succinct definition of marketing given to me years ago, one that online services have done well indeed.
In the meantime over at the Web 2.0 conference there are the usual nods of the head towards Tim O'Reilly and other gurus of social media, but at least according to one report the conference is as revealing for its emerging political correctness as it is for a meaningful exchange of ideas. As now-traditional online properties come up rosy in earnings, is Silicon Valley getting bored with social media's long-term promise but short-term question marks? Perhaps so, given a toughening economy and a lack of fully effective monetization tools: just as the dot-com crash came before contextual ads made monetizing search and non-mainstream media profitable, we're sure to see a short-term fall-off in new social media investments as quick exits begin to seem less likely and the over-saturation of the market with publishing tools fragments opportunities for both marketers and publishers alike to reach scale effectively. This, too, is reminiscent of earlier dot-com days, when many publishers adopted a "wait and see" attitude - and eventually lost major market share and brand value.
What's likely to light up the charts over the next few months for new investments is "social knowledge," a loose label that combines the ability of analytics software and aggregation services to divine patterns from social media and online expert services such as WikiAnswers that build repositories of how-tos from topic experts. Whatever the particular play, being able to get more definitive insights from social media seems to be where the money is being spent.
Missing in this mix so far is a huge push by traditional publishers to counter these trends. Most social media investments by major publishers are still largely incremental, moving at a pace that's not likely to lead to strong offsetting revenues any time soon. For enterprise-oriented publishers this is probably not a major concern right away, as traditional publishing methods for scientific papers, while under great scrutiny, are not likely to hit a breaking point this year due to social media. But we're starting to see more signs of services such as content federation and software as a service creating new competitors for enterprise publishers that are going to be worrisome as service renewals begin to come up against budgets in any long-term economic slowdown. Toss in a slow start to developing social media services and we could be in a relatively brief period in which traditional database services have an opportunity to catch a new uptick in their value proposition.
This all adds up to a pattern that is clear and unmistakable: good content will find good markets, but building good brands for good content requires more new contexts than ever before. The biggest mistake that dot-com naysayers made was disputing the value of those "eyeballs" in the long run. Those fettered to quarterly returns may have felt differently about that in the short run, but once effective monetization and contextualization tools took off, the revenues and the profits followed surely. Monetizing contexts will continue to be a hot spot, and those with the tools to monetize them - not necessarily synonymous with those who own the content being contextualized - are going to do just fine for years to come. More to the point, social media is drawing us to a time when microcontexualization will increase the value of these types of venues for monetization, enabling higher-value transactions to be monetized more effectively than ever before.
So yes, it's a gloomy time for the global economy as a whole, especially for those services that depend on people walking through a doorway that might cost a fiver or so just to get there. Great for the carriage trade, but not so good for mass market sales. This will put more pressure on social media services to provide not just interesting chats but interesting opportunities to survive and thrive - as I am outlining in Content Nation. It may turn out that the greatest motivating factor for social media will be not Silicon Valley greed but worldwide need to build a more effective economy. Anyhow, congratulations around to all those who enjoyed glowing earnings reports, let's not forget that it was less then a decade ago when your revenues were mere blips on the corporate charts.
In war it's said sometimes that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. If business deals are a form of warfare then we're seeing some interesting friendships in Silicon Valley these days. The Wall Street Journal covers an emerging wrinkle in the battle for Yahoo as they march closer to a deal to replace their ad network with ads from Google's more powerful stock of advertisers. WSJ speculates that this will make it harder for regulators to approve other acquisition offers from Microsoft and News Corporation to take over Yahoo - or at least slow down a potential re-upping of a bid from them. That may be the case, but it seems as if step by step Yahoo is navigating to a peaceful conclusion to its current woes - and forming a more healthy revenue picture that could help it to define a more comfortable independent future.
With the USD billion -plus boost it's likely to receive from Google's ad networks for ads displayed on its search pages and other page inventory and a potential pickup of already Google-friendly AOL, we're beginning to see the outlines of a duopoly to counterbalance the strong push of Microsoft and News Corp to dominate online media. In broad terms, think of Google as the search, video, database/API and ad backbone for the commercial Web and Yahoo as the media licensing, aggregation and community backbone. Each of these specific domains will overlap, of course, but in broad terms there's a symbiosis between them that offers each a path to revenue growth and the industry as a whole two distinct partners with two distinct strength sets.
This is probably the way that it should have been a while ago. I don't think that there was ever really a strong rivalry in many ways between Yahoo and Google on the product level. Each has always had their specific strengths, and probably both would have benefited greatly for earlier cooperation of this kind. Google was never going to "do media" as well as Yahoo and Yahoo was never going to "do technology" with quite the intensity and neutrality as Google. But between the two of them they both do online content very well indeed. And between the two of them they will have oodles of page inventory for ads to help them weather tougher economic times with fewer concerns - hopefully a key factor that can appeal to Yahoo shareholders being faced with choices.
More to the point, perhaps, such a duopoly would restore some natural balance to the Web that would enable marketers and publishers to understand who to deal with more effectively. There have been too many players with designs to be a "new number one," too much time wasted on kingmaking and not enough time spent on product development. It still leaves Microsoft plenty of room to focus on new and better platforms for content with mobile operators, auto manufacturers and appliance makers and to try to lock up entertainment deals for those platforms. News Corp may prove to be a stepchild in this situation for the moment, but with MySpace still chugging along healthily I doubt that it will be out of the game in any long-term sense.
The key loser in this deal would seem to be not so much Microsoft as Microsoft's strategy of domination by selling intellectual property. Be it software or content, Microsoft's continuing focus on proprietary consumer goods and services is distinct in many ways from the more open and collaborative assembly of value found in many Web-oriented environments. This may work to Microsoft's advantage where they can provide new and powerful platforms for content, such as in their Sync line of automobile communications technologies, but with ownership of content being more at the mercy of companies that own contexts it tends to be a strategy that conflicts with successful online media. It's that conflict that seems to be at the heart of their failure to convince Yahoo that a marriage would be good. At its heart, after more than a decade of online development, Microsoft still doesn't "get" the Web in some fundamental ways - nor does it seem to want to.
I'd be very happy if this path towards collaborative independence for Yahoo works out the way that it's headed currently. None of the acquisition paths for Yahoo were looking very positive for either Yahoo or the industry as a whole, even if they would have been good portfolio matches for potential stockholders. Here's hoping that we can let this deal fracas die off so that we can get back to focusing on the growth of the Web's greatest strengths - great content and powerful contexts.
One of the more interesting things about coming back to blogging after a short hiatus is that the Yahoo deal drama has only gotten worse. There's great coverage from many sources, including a good summary of recent analyst takes on paidContent.org, as well as a New York Times story now circulating that News Corp may combine with Microsoft to complete a deal for Yahoo, presumably to combine MySpace's social media strengths with MSN and Yahoo's strengths along with a combined ad network. The counterfoil to this is a possible deal to merge AOL into Yahoo.
Certainly an AOL/Yahoo merger would help Time Warner's plan to get out of the portal business and help Yahoo to grow market share significantly - and certainly working towards one set of user accounts, one messaging network and other combined infrastructure could become very valuable over time. But one wonders how much time and effort would be spent on merging plumbing on these two legacy platforms to get a unified portal business when they could have been focusing on the growth in traffic comes from social media products that operate largely via other platforms.
By contrast the Microsoft/NewsCorp/Yahoo combination may offer a lot more punch for a shareholder's money. Leveraging the power of MySpace, a still-powerful social media platform well-attuned to mass media markets with Yahoo's strength in content aggregation and user accounts and Microsoft's strength in software development, platform strength and ad network brokerage, all in one package, has a lot of interesting parts that could produce more value in the long run. AOL and Yahoo combined, for example, will do little to penetrate mobile markets more effectively. Yahoo, Microsoft and MySpace, by contrast, could make some interesting things happen in mobile between platforms, social media, user accounts and ecommerce.
This is all well and good, but why are we so fixated on this deal, anyway? It's not that it won't create some sea changes over time, but the strengths of a deal with Yahoo come largely from what the partners may offer in combination. Yahoo is big, still powerful - but for the most part in its lifecycle a cash cow with relatively low new product investment waiting to be turned into hamburger. The real issue is what this means in terms of exit plans for online content and technology companies, as pointed out by Fred Wilson over on A VC - that is, if a company with fairly obvious marketable attributes like Yahoo has a hard time cashing in, what does this mean to online plays in general? If there's no exit at the top, what does that say to other players?
Somehow a deal will be forged for Yahoo in the next few months if the company's staff doesn't implode before then from takeover stress. But in the meantime I honestly don't think that it's all that significant a deal to watch from the overall industry's standpoint. Big will get a bit bigger - and that combined entity will still look nothing like Google. I think that we're seeing that overall getting any bigger is not necessarily going to solve anything in online markets. Online publishing is still in its infancy, still requires an enormous amount of investor patience as new ideas face daunting risks and still will have periods of high uncertainty that don't lend themselves to quarterly reports, much less private shareholder reviews. In other words, while some people are still focusing on making larger dinosaurs the long money is still probably in making more and better mammals. Be patient, be foresightful - and don't get too caught up in the scuttlebutt.
TechCrunch notes along with others the possible bidding war brewing between Google and Microsoft to acquire social bookmarking service Digg, which sounds probable given the relentless march for each of these companies to build market share. I wonder whether the prices will really accelerate that much off of last year's earlier possible bids for Digg, though, given the soft ad economy and the stabilization of Digg's audience. Mind you I am sure that either Google or Microsoft would love to have 20 million monthly visitors but the real issue is how one of these majors can recover from the flattened prospects of a Facebook deal in a down economy.
With Facebook seeming more interested in improving their platform as of late than cashing in their chips perhaps to some degree both Google and Microsoft have been played off against one another by Facebook via their high asking price to keep either of them from getting stronger through another social media property acquisition. Certainly the stock buzz has been off of both of these properties since the Facebook deal went cold, so perhaps with quarterly earnings calls looming around the corner both Google and Microsoft are eager to have at least some social media story to tell.
Google's Orkut platform was always an also-ran in traffic and is suffering from declining traffic, in part perhaps due to losses to new local-market social media platforms in India and other regional markets, so it's about time for Google to pony up for a bona fide social media community. From the Microsoft side its ad deal with Digg would go away in all likelihood with a Google acquisition so a Microsoft deal would help to shore up momentum for its still-young ad network, but with only a tiny finger into social media via MSNBC.com's Newsvine property it has a lot of catching up to do as well
On balance, though, Google's needs would seem to make this deal a "must do" at this point to ensure that it can get some flesh-and-blood "wisdom of the crowds" that's been managed largely through their search algorithms to date. Search is still an important tool, but as the word "curate" begins to trip off more and more tongues this year Google needs to step up its ability to curate content with a human eye as well as through machine intelligence. While its audience doesnt' stretch down deeply into specialty topics Digg's ability to lend weight to what really interests people on the most popular topics for a younger audience that starts and ends their day with social media is an important factor for Google to address. Combine that with the potential to marry Google search algorithms with Digg's increasingly sophisticated curation of bookmarked articles a and there could be some very interesting news products in the offing.
The other factor that Google seems to need to address through such an acquisition is a cultural issue. Google's presence to the world is friendly oftentimes but not very conversational. A brand like Digg is by its very essence a conversational brand, one that creates most of its value through people interacting as a group. Google needs that more open approach to brand building in its DNA more deeply. It's good to at listening to geeks and getting a bit better at listening to real-world people, but folks in the Web 2.0 world like Kevin Rose who are just far more accessible can become effective bridges to that more open collaborative culture. Microsoft could certainly benefit in similar ways, but the cultural divide between most of the Web 2.0 world and the corporate culture of Microsoft would seem to be a pretty wide gap to fill in.
This could be just one more social media deal that goes sour after the earnings calls but somehow this one has a heft to it that may lead it to completion. The prices being bandied about are far less steep than Facebook's earlier numbers - USD 200 million or so - and as fine a job as Digg has done with refining its platform it's not clear that it can go much further as a standalone product. Social bookmarking is still an important social media capability, but the future probably belongs to those services which can blend generic platforms such as Digg with services that can use that technology to build enthusiast communities that may carry a publisher's brand or a product brand. We'll see where this goes but hopefully one of these players finally gets off the dime and starts embracing social media communities more fully in an open Web environment.
What does it mean when a company announces disappointing earnings and has no strategic plan to move forward? It means that you've been shopping your company like crazy and you're waiting to see what comes out of it. It should come as no major surprise that Microsoft finally made an offer for Yahoo that it will in all likelihood not refuse - USD 44.6 billion to be exact, more than double Yahoo's closing shares value. With an expected 23 percent drop in earnings over Q406, Yahoo's ability to fund a better position in the marketplace in the face of a looming recession was dimming rapidly. Microsoft wisely waited to buy low.
Six months ago I poured cold water on such a merger, seeing News Corp as a far better partner in the long run. I still believe that a News Corp acquisition would have been a great exit for Yahoo in many ways, as the negatives in a Microsoft deal that I pointed out in that earlier post still stand. But at the end of the day this is a merger of necessity, not of opportunity. Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo can compete with Google effectively at this point, a factor that's only going to be exacerbated as Google's mobile strategy begins to unfold this year.
While one can crow about "the merger of content and technology" or some such meme and marvel at the combined online audiences that these two megaportal providers can offer advertisers through the powerful combination of Microsoft's ad-brokeraging system and Yahoo's own ad marketing services there's one key and overarching problem for both companies: they've been slow to bring hit products to the marketplace. Old media and old technology product cycles are not Web product cycles, and neither company has done well in figuring out how to build online hits as effectively as they know how to buy them. Google may not pop out perfectly conceived products and has product issues of its own, but they're constantly letting new things hit the fan to see what new markets they can open up while others spent time trying to build perfect products for old markets.
The big plus of the deal - there is now going to be only one dominant portal for established content brands and marketers looking to position their own brand advertising - is certainly important, but for an upcoming generation of Twitterers who see their own Facebook homepages or newsreaders as the portals that matter most to them it's not clear that this will be a great solution for either company as the new generation of content consumers gains pruchasing power. If you want corporate content and corporate advertising on corporate technology, one certainly knows where to go now. But in three to five years corporations eager to eliminate the "middle man" of media to manage their own market conversations directly may not see as much value in this union as they might today.
The potential feather in the cap for this deal could be the opening of mobile broadband. With a strong position already in mobile devices and now armed with tons of content and a great ad network Microsoft could stake out an early advantage in broadband mobile frequencies now being opened to all devices based on their existing momentum alone. The struggling Vista platform will continue to be refined for enterprise purposes but Microsoft's mobile Windows CE operating system may become instead the default Windows platform for Microsoft's media efforts as home entertainment shifts between mobile gizmos and HDTVs. This is likely to bring strong profits over the next few years and is a very viable strategy overall.
But in the meantime one wonders whether there will be enough focus to make this happen. Having just survived a failed marriage between Hollywood media culture and Silicon Valley culture Yahoo must now adopt to Redmond ways. Microsoft has been redefining its own culture and focus rapidly in postitive directions as the Ballmer period fades away, but the scale of this merger is going to require some major dust settling. All this as a looming recession slows down both enterprise and media markets cannot be helpful.
It's a "Brangelina" marriage that's bound to eat up media cycles, but at the end of the day the fame of these brands is not necessarily going to yield substance out of thin air. This will benefit Microsoft in the short run, to be sure, if it can get to the short run issues in time, but in the long run onie wonders whether two overripe old brands can make a fresh and effective new brand. Time will tell, but at least we can read about this openly now and watch it play out.
In short, Knol will enable people to create encyclopedia-like articles on various topics which can be rated by their readers and have both in-article links to other sources on the Web and automatically generated links to related Knol content. Unlike Wikipedia, there's one author per article, but multiple authors can create articles on the same topic, creating a free-market effect as to who is the leading expert on the topic. Articles will be equipped with Google ads, revenues from which will be shared with the author.
This is quite different in many important aspects from Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia, which in addition to attributing authors only in the history trail on collaboratively edited articles also maintains an ad-free environment for their content. While there are more than passing similarities to Wikipedia in Knol's overall design, the system doesn't seem likely to yield similar results. Knol's emphasis on single authorship without editing means that any particular subject is going to gain popularity based on a particular person's outlook, which may be good one day and quite out of date the next.
So while Knol may help people to get a leg up on what leading experts think about a particular subject - and mind you, that might be great for consultants like us folks at Shore - it's at the mercy of the editing priorities of whomever is maintaining their articles. For fast-changing topics this means that it may take a little bit more work for a reader to figure out who's really at the top of their game on a particular topic - and who's off on holiday for a while. Wikipedia needs constant monitoring to keep powerful people and organizations from trying to add spin to their articles, but at least there's highly active editing of one reasonably definitive version of the facts on a given topic.
While the comparison to Wikipedia is inevitable I see this in many ways as much a play for a wider variety of reference portals. Certainly About.com's docent system has resulted in topic experts who have financial motivations to maintain reference topics well on a wide variety of subjects, and in many ways Knol seems to be aimed at providing more efficient ways for subject matter experts to compete with one another in ways that generate revenues more efficiently than About.com. Knol puts more of an onus on an individual author to keep their information up to date, as others could come up with fresher content first, providing a framework that will help them to focus on content while leaving usability, design and monetization concerns to other. As Google's OpenSocial initiative gains steam one can imagine a person's Knol pages as reference content that can travel with them throughout related social media sites.
This free-market approach to knowledge is intriguing but it highlights a major problem that Google faces. As more and more high-quality user-generated content comes online, many people are finding answers to their questions from leading experts in social media venues that are precluding the need to reference a search engine for answers. As it is, so many topic-oriented searches display Wikipedia articles as the definitive source that in some ways Google has become the default front end for Wikipedia lookups as much as an index of the Web in general, reducing overall ad engagement on Google search results pages - and, in time, fewer searches generated on Google. Fewer searches means less available inventory for Google ads - so keeping more people engaged in Google inventory of some kind becomes an increasingly important goal for Google. So as much as this is a very interesting and useful approach to knowledge development it's overshadowed by commercial considerations that may or may not result in knowledge that people really trust. Collaborative editing has its limits for generating quality reference content, but at some point one's own version of a topic needs to stand up to the challenge of other knowledgeable people.
There are many different ways that Knol could evolve out before it launches, but the key factor would seem to be to provide people with a way to aggregate knowledge effectively. As much as one individual's view of a topic can be useful collaborative editing offers the most certain way to gain insights that are going to provide people with the deepest insight into a given topic. There's still room in such a system to reward individuals - one can imagine a system like Wikinvest in which a collaborative neutral article could be supplemented by opinionated personal articles - but first and foremost one hopes that Google will see that the best system will be one that serves the truth before it serves the bottom line. Knol holds out great promise as a platform that can help individuals to create useful reference content, but it may wind up having to serve too many competing interests to gain much of an impact on the marketplace.
Google may not always be great at creating products, but they sure do know how to create markets. In introducing its new Android open-source mobile phone platform via the Open Handset Alliance, Google has opened the gates for any and all software developers to develop new applications that can take advantage of Android's capabilities - already impressive in demo form.
This could catapult Andriod into a competitive position with Microsoft and Apple in relatively short time frame for mobile platforms if ambitious developers take up Google's challenge - and Google is making it easier for them to consider that challenge with USD 10 million in prize money for them to consider. The question is, though, will mobile carriers intent on maintaining proprietary control over their platforms to control services be willing to take on such an open platform?
According to Engadget the likely candidate for early adoption of Android for mobile devices in the U.S. is Sprint, which is the American telecoms carrier most aggressive in building out high-bandwidth, long-distance WiMax mobile Intenet infrastructure that could bring the mobile Web to the masses. Engadget speculates that perhaps Google would acquire Sprint to help accelerate WiMax growth, services fueled by Google mobile advertising revenues that might make mobile more affordable or, perhaps, free. Nice thinking, but with so many different communications technologies in play, including the impending action of soon-to-be-former analog television frequencies in the U.S. it's far more likely that Google will be looking towards an alliance with Sprint that would still leave the door open for Android via other carriers.
In the meantime Sprint has much to gain in working aggressively with Google. Slow to the mobile services dance as it grew incompatible network scale via its Nextel acquisition, Sprint needs an edge to catch up with rivals well entrenched with iPhones, Blackberries and other intelligent handsets. In doing so Sprint may be able to catch the next wave of mobile communications focused on both full-screen Web services and advanced messaging capabilities that can leverage WiMax efficiently while other technologies fall into place for even more mobile Web access.
The Zune-sized touch-screen demo unit with a Blackberry-like keyboard that Google's Sergey Brin used to show off Android certainly underscores that Android has the potential to develop features that can run with the current mobile big dogs very quickly - and begin to create a price war between Android-equipped units and currently pricey iPhones and Blackberries that might be just the trick to unlock the chicken-egg equation that seems to have slowed the growth of mobile Web services.
This is a long way of saying that we should expect Android to open up highly affordable Web access via mobile units far more quickly than other platforms are likely to do via telecommunication partners seeking to maintain status quo services pricing. While high-end content services will certainly find a home on Android it's the prospect of reaching people for whom a mobile phone is a necessity and high-speed Internet access via a PC a luxury that content producers and advertisers should consider most important in this rollout of content technologies.
The Web is about to get that much more powerful and affordable via Android-enabled devices and networks - and that much more important to marketers seeking audiences with limited attention spans. Pop in Google's OpenSocial initiative for social media services on top of an Android-enabled device and you have a thoroughly compelling platform for content development that other platform providers are going to be hard-pressed to match soon. Google's definitely in catch-up mode in mobile services but it looks like through Android they might be catching a big break at last.
It's been a busy week for attention-getting events in content technologies, with the 
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At the SIIA NetGain conference in San Francisco George Hu, EVP of 
Yahoo joined the list of online companies 
