Every now and then you get an opportunity to go to an industry event that's doing something really unique and fun. This year's SIIA NetGain event in San Francisco is going to be just that. In addition to a great day of speakers and experts from B2B and consumer media laying out today's best practices in content services, the second day will take participants on a tour down Highway 101 to some of Silicon Valley's leading companies for "up close and personal" interaction with the leaders in content technologies. And when we say leaders, we do mean leaders - try Google, Apple and Adobe, for starters. If you want to rub shoulders with the greats of the content industry from both the East Coast and the West Coast and do some real business while having a great time, get hopping and register soon. Frankly, for the price they're charging it's an absolute steal. Early bird registration ends Monday!

Labels: 2010, adobe, apple, conference, events, Google, NetGain, San Francisco, SIIA, silicon valley

Apps fever is sweeping across the content industry, spurring hopes amid content providers that software applications development toolkits available for mobile devices like Apple's iPad and iPhone and Google's Android phones will allow them to define new channels for revenues. Certainly "apps" that can be downloaded from online storefronts provided by these and other platform providers are taking off in a big way.

Labels: Android, apple, apps, cloud computing, consumer, enterprise, fm publishing, Google, ipad, iPhone, ipod, mobile, search, services, software

Unless you were under a rock in a far-flung desert it was hard to miss the launch of Apple's iPad tablet computer over the weekend, an event which, while generating impressive coverage and good first-wave sales, seems to have raised as many concerns among publishers as it has raised lavish praise and attention. Clearly the era of touchpad tablets is now officially upon us, with Apple using its now-customary combination of brilliant engineering and proprietary gatekeeping to tip the playing field in its favor in another neglected market segment. The iPad is well-timed from Apple's perspective in that it managed to swoop on to the scene ahead of other rival touchpad devices from Hewlett Packard and other providers, albeit with a stripped-down feature set and relatively few options for software and premium content.

Labels: apple, computers, ipad, Publishing, tablet

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.

Labels: Android, apple, barnes and noble, eBooks, eInk, epub, Google, ipad, nook, readers, wireless

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.

Labels: amazon, apple, eBooks, epub, Google, ipad, iPhone, standards, Web

Amazon Kindle has always been an odd duck of a platform, a proprietary e-book reader that bundled wireless access with a device that offered a very limited range of functionality. But as the first major e-book platform with an integrated ecommerce function, it gained early followers and a lot of media hoopla. Enter Apple, which is trying to become the default delivery mechanism for a galaxy of mainstream media content sources via its soon-to-be-released whiz-bang iSlate platform, including book content from Harper Collins. All of a sudden last year's bright, shiny thing from Amazon seems not so bright and shiny after all, prompting a late move by Amazon to open up its Kindle platform more aggressively to software developers.

Labels: Amazon Kindle, apple, E-book, islate, marketing, readers, SDK, strategy

This year's International Consumer Electronics Show was awash in more tablets than a local pharmacy, with both actual models being shown and overarching buzz from Apple's anticipated iSlate tablet offering expected later this year. While many of the new tablet models were largely warmed-over versions of netbooks or smartbooks, some were oriented towards executives and (presumably) wealthy students who would be willing to pay close to a thousand dollars for a tablet that "acted" like a paper document. Two key models making their debut at CES in this column were the Hearst-sponsored Skiff newspaper and magazine reader and the Que document and e-book reader from Plastic Logic.

Labels: 3-d, apple, avatar, cinerama, eBooks, ereader, facebook, hearst, islate, magazines, mobile, newspapers, pc, plastic logic, que, skiff, tablet, television, Twitter

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.

Labels: apple, Chrome OS, Google, HTC, iPhone, Mac, Microsoft, mobile, Motorola, operating system, samsung, smart phones, techcrunch, Windows 7

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.

Labels: Android, apple, bill gates, computers, electronics, Google, markets, Microsoft, mobile, smart phones, Steve Jobs, taipei

The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberger and other prominent lights are weighing in on the launch of an application on Apple's iPhone that enables reading e-books compatible with Amazon's Kindle mobile device, with many analysts cooing about this as a huge event. There's no doubt that Kindle e-books have everthing to gain from leapfrogging out of a pond of half a million Kindle devices into a lake of thirteen million-plus iPhone owners (just in time for "Content Nation," which is now available on Kindle). Better yet, since the Kindle application does not tie down Amazon to any exclusive marketing deal with Apple, the doorway is open for Amazon to march onto Nokias, Blackberries and phones equipped with Google's Andriod application. As people owning Kindle-compatible book titles move from one mobile device to another, the Kindle Store on the Web will make it possible for them to use their e-book on any equipped device, "closing" their book on one gizmo and being able to "open" it on another one at the same spot. Think of it as an iTunes for books that's not tied down to any particular player. Not much to complain about here at first glance: it's the creation of the first true mass market platform for electronic books from major publishers. Kudos to Amazon and to the publishers that are playing with them to advance Kindle sales.

But let's look past the first glance and get to what this really means for book publishing. The good news is that Kindle books can now reach the relatively affluent and educated audience that has enough money to buy iPhones - many of whom may have the money for both an iPhone and a Kindle reader but not necessarily the desire to lug around two book-reading gizmos all of the time. Now e-books get to take a major step towards the "nearly everywhere" profile that Web content has on both Internet and mobile-based devices. The bad news, though, is that the book industry, already beholden to Amazon almost as much as music companies are beholden to iTunes for electronic sales, appears to be repeating the mistakes that are likely to prevent their revenues from growing quickly enough to sustain their business models. Put simply, book publishers have turned over the keys to their electronic printing presses to Jeff Bezos and said, "Knock yourself out, you know what to do more than we do." E-books will progress only as quickly as it suits Amazon - and on only those platforms that suit them.

A benevolent monopoly of this kind for electronic book distribution might be beneficial for publishers if it had global reach, but those 13 million iPhones represent only about half of the greater New York City metropolitan market. A good chunk, to be sure, but a far step away from, say, the 1.6 billion people using the Web or the billions of mobile phone users around the world. And even within that universe of 13 million iPhone users, a fair amount of those people fall into the category of folks who Steve Jobs believed would never really read much of anything. In the meantime the audience for books continues to get grayer and grayer. To put it another way, I don't see all that many people in book stores toting around iPhones. The Kindle packaging for iPhone solves a key licensing and distribution problem for book publishers that's likely to improve their profits in the short term, but it does not come even close to building marketable exposure for books on a scale that is likely to draw attention away from other forms of electronic content.

This brings us back to those music publishing companies which had such high hopes for the DRM-enabled iPhone agreements that they signed only a few years ago. This "magic bullet" seemed great at the time - and it certainly has been great for Apple's profits. But it did little to slow the rapid erosion of profits from music sales at most of the major music publishers. Put simply, the insistence on having packaging that seemed to protect their existing business models only delayed the point at which music publishers had to face that their models were going to miss the lion's share of revenues that could be generated online from music. What they saw in the Web was the world's largest music store. What they should have seen was the world's largest theatre and radio station rolled into one.

Book publishers in general don't suffer from the electronic piracy problems that plagued the music industry, so no doubt it seemed like a logical step to move into rights-protected distribution that enabled book publishers to manage industry metrics in much the same way that they have managed metics on print book sales. But in focusing on protecting their existing business model, like the music industry the book industry is largely delaying the more troubling question of how they can make the most money possible from the global audience of billions who engage the Web and mobile devices daily.

Kindle book packaging is useful for traditional reading, but how, for example, can it facilitate even the most basic collaborative use of books? Basic uses of books such as discusions via book clubs, classroom discussion, fair-use excerpting, note-sharing and other value-add services are nowhere near the surface of the stack of potential Kindle developments. Beyond replicating basic uses of print books there is little if any thought given as to how multimedia can be integrated into Kindle books effectively. For example, the online version of the "Content Nation" book has about a dozen video clips embedded in the text. Even still photos of most of these clips did not make their way into the print edition because of traditional print publishing standards. Yet these same clips would be great to have in an electronic, Web-enabled version of the book.

While it's possible that an aggressive roll-out of Kindle readers on most major mobile devices could help to stave off some of the worst problems that are looming for book publishers, the truth is that they are years behind in developing the real opportunities for books in electronic format. Book publishers are facing the same revenue gaps that confront music, newspaper and magazine publishers that waited far too long to build robust online revenue models that could sustain them as their traditional revenue sources moved into legacy status. In the meantime the Google e-books initiative that builds on their book-scanning initiative promises to put millions of book titles on electronic devices that are no longer controlled by book publishers. In other words, Kindle may just turn out to be the "eight track tape" solution for books - a technology that seemed to be extremely popular at first with the public for listening to tape-recorded music but that turned out to be a dead end for early adapters when more flexible and higher-quality technologies came along.

Every time publishers resist the fundamental dynamics of the Web, they usually come to regret it. Traditional book publishers still have an opportunity to redefine their future independent of the Kindle, but it's more likely that the explosion of alternative online book publishing services will begin to overtake Kindle-based books over the next few years as sources of content that are more flexible, more shareable and more attuned to the needs of new generations of readers to whom the term "cracking the books" is largely a metaphor. Traditional books and book publishers will live on, and Kindle will help them to live on for many years to come. But in the meantime a new book industry is being defined that will be the true future of books - with or without Kindles.

Labels: amazon, Amazon Kindle, apple, books, business models, eBooks, iPhone, Jeff Bezos, Publishing, Steve Jobs

The world tripped over one another to ooh and aah at the latest version of Apple's iPhone, a somewhat sleeker model with 3G wireless Internet access and a software development toolkit that enables applications to be built for the iPhone that can take advantage of all of it's "new hotness" interface features. Prominent among the new applications at launch is Microsoft Exchange, a shot across the bow to enterprise users equipped with Blackberries and feeling that, well, they're just not as hip as the next sales and busdev guy. Toss in promised interfaces to home appliances and Microsoft's home strategy takes a bit of hit as well.

Also prominent is the new USD 200 domestic price tag, presumably subsidized by AT&T in much the same manner as other mobile phones to promote mass sales and mass usage of AT&T services. Now people wanting to keep up with the tech-leader Joneses down the street can pile on and join the fun. Put these factors all together and you have a highly competitive platform (albeit one that still lacks a keyboard) that makes consumer and enterprise content accessible in mobile markets as never before. That's the good rah-rah news, in any event.

The not-so-good news is that the exclusive deal with AT&T puts pressure on other mobile carriers to come up with their own deals that can compete with AT&T at a price point that's much closer to attainable luxury for most folks. Supporting a plethora of platforms has hindered the ability of applications developers to create software that scales to markets and has drageed down enabling full Web access on 3G networks, hobbling the ability of U.S. carriers to prepare for this inevitable moment of challenge by Apple and AT&T. Instead of focusing intently on content, most mobile carriers have focused too much on the tech of the platform, instead of viewing mobile devices as just another blank screen that can be painted with content from any application.

However, these aggressive moves by Apple and AT&T may be more a preparation for emerging competition. Microsoft or Google or both will benefit from other mobile carriers and device makers trying to create more cost-effective alternatives to the iPhone now that the USD 200 price barrier has been breached. Microsoft is the more likely beneficiary in the short term, but with profitability becoming an issue, especially with the cost of 3G Web services pushing margins down, Google's Android cross-platform operating system is likely to emerge as the platform that allows more profits at lower price points for both mobile device manufacturers and carrier networks. As noted in TheStreet.com recently a preview version of an iPhone-like phone equipped with Andriod offered touch-screen operation, 3G Web access, software development interfaces for applications and many other features which are likely to come in close to iPhone functionality without the content and software licensing baggage that comes along from Apple.

There's no doubt that the iPhone will continue to be the Lexus of Web-enabled phones for a while, but there's also no doubt that the world has been waiting for the Toyota version to show up for a while. Especially in burgeoning markets like China and India, where Apple's licensing strategy is likely to be less appealing, Android-equipped phones that enable integrated Web access and language-independent hardware are more likely to be the global winners in mobile communications. So while the hoopla around the iPhone 3G launch looks hot for today, remember that in the fall we're likely to be talking about a different perspective on its future.

Labels: apple, AT+T, broadband wireless, iPhone

It seems kind of silly beyond a certain point to call Amazon's launching of an MP3 store news, but with about 2 million audio tracks available for 99 cents or less and reduced-price album downloads it's at least significant that major content vendors are beginning to offer what consumers have been creating themselves for years. The delay in both music publishers and content distributors accepting that cross-platform, DRM-free music distribution via the common MP3 file format was already the de facto standard of the music industry from a consumer's perspective has to be one of the most monumental strategic blunders in publishing history. After years of struggling against MP3s with lawsuits, DRM schemes and other ineffective techniques to persuade the marketplace otherwise it took Apple's proprietary lock on music distribution via its own DRM scheme to awaken at least some music publishers to the need to let consumers be customers and not just licensees.

The real enemy of the music industry is not music copying but consumer attention. With social media, games, mobile devices and online video capturing more of the music industry market's attention span it no longer pays to limit the ability of consumers to move their basic content to where it's valued the most. MP3s enable music and other audio to move quickly and efficiently into to social contexts that are most likely to create consumer enthusiasm for a product quickly when it first gains attention and popularity and enables "long tail" content to get the exposure that it needs to allow consumers to get enthusiasm that will lead to purchases. Amazon's recommendation system is ideal for such purchasers, enabling content that would otherwise be obscure to become immediately relevant to a browser turned on to an artist that they had not known previously. From that point on out it's up to music producers to become more intelligent about how they merchandise the talents and following of an artist to maximize revenues, but singles sales are a great starting point.

With Microsoft and others investigating audio watermarking capabilities it won't be too long before the ability to distribute audio content without DRM and with appropriate audit trails for copyright abuse becomes the industry standard across the board - a factor which should enable music companies to begin to take full advantage of the Web's radio-like ability to broadcast enthusiasm for artists effectively. As to whether the leaders in music publishing will remain the ususal suspects remains to be seen, but by adopting MP3s as a default distribution medium for radio-quality audio they stand a chance on reinventing themselves in time for the next generation of music lovers.

Labels: amazon, apple, DRM, MP3, music