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Enterprise Publishing and the "New Normal" in I.T. - Are You Missing the Trend?

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:47:00 +0000

I've been mini-blogging quite a bit lately on Google Buzz - you can pick up my feed here if you'd like until I brain out a way to integrate it into my newsletter - so I have been a little quieter than usual on ContentBlogger. One of the more interesting items I've come across in buzzing is a great article from CIO Magazine that outlines the enormous value gap that's been arising in enterprise information technologies. With the latest economic downturn many major organizations began to look much more carefully at what kind of value that they were getting from their I.T. operations. In a nutshell, many organizations didn't like what they saw. Some of the key items revealed by CIO Magazine included:

Fewer than half of people in enterprises are using installed software effectively
60 percent of enterprise staffs blame their I.T. departments for a "lack of success"
In 2009, I.T.'s top priority is modernizing legacy applications
Walt Shill, head of the North American management consulting practice for Accenture, declared that "strategy, as we knew it, is dead." It's now all about operational flexibility and how fast businesses can seize opportunity. If strategies and forecasts have to change daily or weekly, then so be it.

Although this may cause enterprise information services companies jump for joy at first reading, I have to suggest that it should be a strong cause for alarm for them to consider. While this may mean that enterprises are going to rely upon external and information service providers more frequently to get the jobs done that their I.T. departments cannot get done, it also means that the trend towards agnosticism in finding solutions to information problems is only going to get stronger. Whatever platform, tool or information service can solve the job today will get used, as long as it's affordable and helps major organizations adapt to their needs. If you thought that your information products and services had branding problems already, hold on to your hat.

Perhaps more to the point the CIO Magazine article is also pointing towards a broader and more troubling trend for major enterprise information providers; will there in fact be a market for them once the economy recovers? Of course law firms, banks, manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and other major consumers of information services are not going to disappear overnight. But what seems to be happening is that many of the business processes through which these enterprises survived and thrived over the past several decades are shooting blanks. We already know that central budgets for buying enterprise information services are more challenged than ever; but as the economy recovers, it's not only doubtful that enterprises will be willing to stoke up on huge subscriptions, but also doubtful that they will be stoking up on big I.T. initiatives to integrate internal and external content sources.

The "agile enterprise" meme sold these days by Gartner - the same analyst firm that sold enterprises on the "everything in one big database" concept that they've spent so much money on the past twenty years - is in essence a reskinning of the problem to find ways to keep enterprise I.T. departments in the strategic loop in their organizations by telling them how to create "people-centric workplaces." Well, these managers have been working with people all of these years already, so I am not sure exactly what wand will be waved over their heads to make them able to respond to their needs better just because their managers demand it. Moreover, as the CIO magazine article points out, while their bosses may be deploying their workforce in office-less environments increasingly, their information assets are mostly oriented towards fixed locations and technology platforms and will have to remain that way until their organizations go completely mobile. In other words, they will have to spend both on "agile" I.T. initiatives and traditional initiatives just to keep everything I.T. afloat.

In other words, many of the fundamental concepts of IT that have been promoted for the past few decades no longer give businesses operational advantages but they have to keep spending on them anyway. The Web has accelerated the flow of information and services that can lead to effective decision-making far more rapidly than enterprise IT managers have been able to accommodate.

This is likely to leave less of the information pie available for spending on any specific set of external information resources. Information needs will shift more rapidly than ever, placing a premium on content services that can aggregate content from any source, be it content that a vendor has licensed or the latest information from key Web sites and feeds. Worse yet, what spending will be increasing is less likely than ever to be on large-scale information subscriptions. With search engines and social media tools enabling people to find the content that professionals need in more contexts than ever, there will be more pressure for both on-demand content purchases and content subscriptions more oriented towards specific people in specific work roles. Yes, workflow will be a key factor in servicing these clients, but the assumption that major enterprises will pay major monies for across-the-board access to workflow tools provided by a central vendor assumes that these organizations' tools and goals are constant enough to respond to such long-term investments.

Instead, enterprise information services are facing an era in which, like their customers, they will have to enable their content to show up on more platforms through more channels than ever before. Moreover, as with the growth of Salesforce.com, many solutions oriented at first towards small to medium enterprises are likely to scale up cost-effectively as platforms from which more targeted information services can be launched to meet the needs of larger enterprises. If agility favors smaller companies that lack the legacy of failed I.T. investments that larger organizations must still bear, then there will be increasing pressure on large organizations to adopt similar methods. We can see the beginnings of this trend as major organizations begin to embrace cloud computing resources, but that's just the start of a broader trend towards in-house enterprise I.T. resources dwindling rapidly over the next decade.

At the end of the day, this means one very important thing for enterprise information providers: if you thought that your business could be segregated from the Web as a whole, increasingly you'll be dead wrong. In an era in which business advantages go to those who can connect with people more efficiently rather than those who can segregate their information resources more effectively, the ability to have your information anywhere on any platform will become a mission-critical requirement for enterprise publishers. Yes, your customers are thinking workflow, but look carefully at where they're headed with those workflows. Few will have the luxury of it staying on the same platforms that they're on today over the next few years. It will be more important for you to be a part of those workflows wherever they're headed than to own them all. Feeds, APIs, on-the-fly aggregation and rapid service development tools will be more important than ever this year. It's the "new normal" for enterprise information services - one which means that business will be far from normal as the economy recovers.

My Notes from an Interview on Ebooks

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:37:00 +0000

I just sent off some responses for an email-based interview as background for an upcoming article on ebooks in a magazine. I thought that I would share them with you in the raw here to open a discussion on ebooks that we can continue on Buzz or via the comments section of this blog. What are your thoughts about how publishers should approach ebooks?

Questions and my responses:

—It seems like the specifications for e-readers vary widely from device to device, and this year’s offerings look just as varied. Are there particular capabilities or specifications that publishers are really looking for from e-readers right now? What would an e-reader “silver bullet” device need to be capable of?

Some publishers are beginning to consider new content and features for ebooks, such as video interviews with authors and "hooks" into Web content such as social media services. In some instances publishers are hoping that such value-add content may allow them to command higher prices for ebooks than the prices that have dominated for ebooks from major publishers since the introduction of ebooks on Amazon's Kindle platform. To this end a platform such as Apple's new iPad is attractive to publishers, as it offers a device that can work well as a general computer and as a display mechanism for rights-protected content. But there will be relatively few titles that will be targeted for such enriched content. So what is the "magic bullet" platform for ebooks? The one that's been out there for more than fifteen years, I would argue: the Web. Ebooks will do best when they can be linked into Web content effectively, not necessarily on the device on which we like reading book content the best. With dozens of new kinds of mobile devices being introduced every year, now, it would be counterproductive for book publishers to try to target only a handful of devices for commercial success. It's best for ebook publishers to enable their content to "play well" on as many devices as possible and to ensure that what a reader does on one device can lead to a valuable experience for the same person on other devices that they use. For example, if I have just finished reading a chapter in a book about the state of business and economics in China, that's a great opportunity for book publishers to be able to apply metadata and keywords relevant to that chapter to other services that I as a reader may use. Some of those may be integrated into the ebook reader directly, but I'd probably appreciate them in a private email or messaging service delivered on a platform where I can consume or purchase other forms of content easily. Publishers should think of the ebook itself as just one item in a systematic approach to engaging audiences interested in specific authors and topics. Some of that approach may be delivered best via a publisher or a bookseller on their own portal, but their metadata may lead to rich experiences on partner platforms as well, triggered by contextual advertising network technologies or other technologies.

—On a related topic, are there specific capabilities that consumers are now looking for?

One of the key items that consumers ask for consistently is the ability to call ebook content their own and to be able to manipulate it the way that they would other forms of electronic content. Being able to cut, paste, share and annotate book content is key to enhancing its value in the eyes of book-reading audiences. These types of features, though, are the ones that publishers are least likely to offer to consumers without some form of rights management technology controls. While publishers have a right to defend their copyrights effectively, they have to consider carefully how content reuse and sharing can enhance the value of their products. O'Reily Media, for example, is pushing to have DRM controls removed from ebook content that they distribute, so that it can be used more effectively in collaborative environments. Eliminating DRM can also accelerate the ability of ebook content to be used by its purchaser on any number of technology platforms. This will accelerate also the likelihood that someone will actually read a book that they've purchased. In doing so, that reader is more likely to follow up with more purchases of similar content or value-add content associated with that title.

When you think of it, a paper edition of a book has nothing more than the copyright symbol to protect the legal rights associated with its content. Why would publishers want to frustrate consumers who have already demonstrated via music download purchases that they need the ability to transport content that they've purchased to new types of devices easily without the frustration of dealing with incompatible DRM systems? Ebook services need to enforce copyright but also enable the value of ebooks in as many contexts as possible. DRM services as designed today make that relatively hard to do. What is really needed for ebooks is a built-in ecommerce service that enables both the purchase of ebooks on a person-to-person distribution basis and that enables other types of ecommerce for related content and experiences. For example, if someone forwarded me a link to an ebook for possible purchasing or sharing, I should be able to be presented information about attending upcoming book talks by the author near me automatically on an opt-in basis or related titles or videos that are available. In other words, we can use the offering of content sharing as a revenue-generating experience from many angles.

—Are there any particular e-reader devices coming out in the near future (or that came out recently) that really stick out to you as being potentially influential devices?

Apple's iPad is bound to be an influential ebook reading device, if but because it introduces color formatting to ebooks in a user-friendly design, but I think that the most influential ebook technology will not be any one specific device but the ePub ebook publishing standard. This standard is gaining wide acceptance as a common format for ebooks, although rights management services may differ from publisher to publisher for ebooks published using that standard. Cross-platform standards will help to make ebooks accessible on more devices more rapidly than any one "magic bullet" device can afford publishers. The Nook ebook reader released by Barnes and Noble features ebook content published in ePub format and has been a very popular unit so far. Other devices such as Plastic Logic's Que device are promising advanced touch-screen devices for displaying ebooks and other types of electronic documents, but they are very expensive compared to consumer devices. Probably the most important devices are mobile phones, which are the most plentiful media-displaying devices in the world today. If you can reach book-reading audiences on mobile phones, then you don't have a very effective ebook strategy.

—Are there any specific markets where ebooks have the potential to make a big impact, yet still remain more or less unexplored?

Ebooks open up the possibility of both new ecommerce models and the re-introduction of older commmercial models for books in new ways. For example, in the 19th century it was fairly common for books to appear bit by bit in periodicals. I think that it's worth considering how popular authors may prove to be a source of subscription revenues for book publishers via Web portals for periodicals sponsoring such bit-by-bit access to a book, or even via email or direct downloads onto mobile devices. Ebooks are also just beginning to touch on some of the potential for creating new opportunities in packaging content for educational markets.

—Is Apple’s agency model of ebook selling the new standard? Does Amazon have any hope of holding onto its retail/wholesale model, and maintaining control of the pricing of ebooks on its website?

I think that we will continue to see a mix of retail/wholesale and agency models for ebook distribution, but publishers have a lot to gain from the agency model if they choose their partners wisely. Amazon in a sense has an agency model built in to its model in the sense that it enables people to embed "kiosks" for selling books in Web pages. Whether its an agency model or a retail/wholesale model, the important thing for publishers to do is to make people aware of books in as many contexts as possible where people are likely to have interest in purchasing them. Helping Web site developers and individuals with their own social media presences to "dress up" Web pages with information about and from ebooks will get them in front of people at the times at which buyers are going to be most likely to have their attention.

—Related question: If the agency model were to become the new standard, what effect would this have on ebook pricing in general? Are ebooks going to become more expensive all around? And would higher prices benefit the industry in the long run, or potentially harm it?

Publishers are looking for better margins and retail prices from ebooks in general. While the agency model has been held up as a tool to enable better prices and margins, it's not clear that enabling publishers to set their own prices via the agency model is going to support prices and margins in the long run that much better than the retail/wholesale model. The agency model also opens the door to price competition between publishers, as they seek the right balance between unit sales and margins. So it's possible that what we'll see in the agency model is a handful of books at higher price points and a majority of books at lower price points. The main problem that book publishers face is not competition from Amazon or ever other book publishers but rather content that's been born on the Web - including ebooks that have been developed through online services. By managing information about what Web-native ebook content is most popular, this new breed of publisher may develop to become "good enough" alternatives to major publishers that many ebook consumers will be glad to consume their ebooks at price points that will be much lower - and, often enough, better integrated into online content. I think that higher prices via the agency model are fine for established book publishers in the short term, but if they don't use those improved margins to invest heavily in digital-first marketing strategies then they are going to squander the real opportunities to develop profitable ebook publishing strategies for the long run.

—It seems like the multiple competing mp3 marketplaces quickly collapsed into just two or three players as the digital music market matured. Are we going to see the same thing happen with ebooks?

Just as the commonly accepted MP3 file format flattened out the music player marketplace, so will the ePub format make it harder for devices to develop proprietary appeal based on file formats alone. In the long run that's a good thing for publishers, since it means that ebooks will be useful on billions of devices rather than millions. Book publishers need to be ready to accept that this is beneficial and to prepare revenue models that are designed to maximize the benefits of rapid and broad dissemination of ebooks, taking into the account the potential power of viral marketing. What could be better than to have someone chatting about a book that they loved at a social gathering and to enable people who hear their praise to experience that book in part immediately via a tap of two mobile phones, as used in the Bump mobile application? Book publishers need to trigger sales based on social interactions far more aggressively - search alone cannot help them to build online revenues effectively.

—E-Ink, color LCD, and other display techs like Pixel Qi: what are the pros and cons of the various display technologies? What seems like the most likely way forward for the e-reader industry?*

While eInk has definite advantages under specific circumstances, such as bright sunlight and limited battery recharging opportunities, the increasing life of mobile device batteries and increasing efficiencies of backlit touch mobile displays are making eInk increasingly a niche device play. The real problem with eInk and similar technologies is not the technologies themselves but the demographics of the audiences that they serve. eInk-like technologies are oriented towards people used to print materials. The younger generation of readers has grown up rarely using paper for reading in general, so being able to duplicate a paper-based reading experience, be it in book, magazine or newspaper format, is far less important to them. Paper-analogous technologies tend to be more important to publishing executives stocked with employees who have skillsets most readily adapted to print-formatted materials. Touch-sensitive displays are particularly appealing to publishing executives for similar reasons, but these technologies will benefit Web-native materials as much as they will traditional media materials, so there's no strong reason to believe that they can develop unique market advantages through touch interfaces either.

—How do you feel about hybrid devices like the enTourage eDGe and iPad, which position themselves as being somewhere between an e-reader and a netbook? Are one-purpose e-readers like the Kindle becoming a thing of the past, or is there still potential there?

I think that there's still definitely a place for limited-function ebook readers. Books are a very personal experience for a reader. Book readers tend to use books as an opportunity to spend one-on-one "quality time" with a particular author, tuning out other stimuli to concentrate on what is usually a very carefully prepared manuscript. With that said, though, people find themselves shifting from a book-reading frame of mind to their online frame of mind fairly rapidly and fluidly. For these situations, having an ebook on a multi-function platform can be very beneficial to publishers, as it may allow them to take those moments of transition to put their book content into more contexts at a time when a reader is most motivated to do so. Publishers have been drawn to simple ebook readers initially because they feel that this replicates their existing relationship with readers more effectively - and they do, by and large. But in limiting their vision of their relationship with readers to their existing models, in part to prevent duplication or sharing of book content, they have shut out books from the billions of people who interact with content and with one another every day on the Web. Standalone ebook readers will continue to have appeal, but these devices must enable readers to interact with the Web through other Web-enabled devices more effectively. For example, though I may not want to do social media sharing of a passage from an e-book via a Kindle or a Nook ebook reader directly, I should be able to build a queue of excerpted passages that I can then manipulate via a mobile phone application to share with others.

ContentBuzz: Sirius XM Posts Profit, Its First Since Merger

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:59:00 +0000

Yes, recovered from near bankruptcy, but still dealing with a bankrupt business model. Subscription satellite radio is dead in the face of subscription Web radio services such as Pandora and Last.fm. You have to literally go 22,000 miles into outer space to try to find technology rare enough to think if a "walled garden" that can compete with mobile Web delivery. That's not to say that there aren't good uses for satellite broadcast services. I'd suggest that Sirius - or whoever gets access to its frequencies - consider real-time broadcast services that complement the Web content that more and more people can get in their mobile devices, perhaps providing data, video and music downloads that would otherwise be too data-intensive for mobile networks. Or, who's to say, perhaps, print-on-demand subscription newspapers.

Sirius Posts Profit Since Merger in 2009 - NYTimes.com

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About ContentBuzz: Integrating Google Buzz into ContentBlogger

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:50:00 +0000

As those who follow me on Twitter may know, most of my posts of news headlines these days come by way of Google's new Buzz social media service. When you click on my links in Twitter or, on ContentBlogger, via the headlines window, you'll visit my Buzz posts that have my more detailed headline commentary. Many of these commentaries aren't as detailed as my ContentBlogger posts, but they are timely insights, nevertheless. Moreover, you'll be able to take advantage of the Buzz commenting service to share your thoughts with others on both the news items and my commentary. You're not obliged to have a Google Accounts login to view these comments, so I consider this a more open alternative to Facebook commentary, and one that is free of some of the commercial and personal "noise" that one finds on the Facebook service.

From time to time on ContentBlogger you may now see items prefixed with the term "ContentBuzz." These will be items that I have cherry-picked from my Buzz stream for your consideration. I'll include a link to the original news item that prompted the post along with a link to the item in Buzz, where you may contribute your own comments - or, if you prefer, you can continue to leave comments on ContentBlogger. Hopefully I can get this merged in more effectively in the weeks ahead - any and all ideas appreciated - but for now, be aware that there's a lot more commentary coming your way.

Alternatively, to subscribe to a feed of links to my Buzz posts with headlines, click here.

ContentBuzz: iPad purchase plans sluggish, AdMob survey finds

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:00:00 +0000

Well, this may be an example of a poorly targeted survey returning data that creates its own reality. So one in six iPhone users intend to purchase an iPad. Well, is that so bad? It means that some people already heavily invested in mobile touch devices may actually go out and purchase a second one. That's not necessarily bad news. What the survey really doesn't tell us is how much the iPad will motivate purchasers who have yet to obtain an advanced mobile phone. In theory, that's supposed to be one of the key iPad appeal points, right? You know, get mom and dad who have never used a PC to cozy up to this magazine-sized gizmo? What the survey tells me is that leading technology adopters are having a hard time understanding why they'd buy an iPad - which may affect the breadth of the buzz that would push people who follow the leaders to consider a purchase. But that may not say anything about people who don't listen to those leaders. We'll see, but my guess is that by the time the iPad launches the buzz on competitive devices will be ramping up.

iPad purchase plans sluggish, AdMob survey finds | VentureBeat

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The Rebirth of Print: Time for the New Aggregation Plays to Take Off

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:40:00 +0000

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.

Noodling With the Nook: First Impressions of the Barnes & Noble Ebook Reader

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:01:00 +0000

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.

iPad Launches. Winner: ePub and Web Standards

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:05:00 +0000

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.

SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: The Future of the Content Industry

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:04:00 +0000

Yes, there is a future for the content industry in media and enterprise markets, and the Software and Information Industry Association Content Division has been charting it for several years now at its Information Industry Summit events in New York City. This year's IIS is drawing more than 300 executives from leading content and technology companies, a good crowd in the middle of a dismal economy. No surprise, given the star-studded line-up of speakers that was assembled by the Content Division this year. You might say that these people are documenting a future that people have been talking about for many years and that finally arrived - a future in which the Web dominates the dialog on profits and products on a daily basis, even as high-value premium products punch through to define new opportunities for value in enterprise and media publishing. Key to that trend is the rise of technology companies that are driving change in major publishing organizations, which enable publishers to define new relationships with their clients. Are all of these publishers ready for this ever-present "future?" Let's see what these experts have to say. I will be posting on our events blog throughout the day and linking the posts to this entry. You may also find my conference Twitter messages (and retweets) here.

AppFail: Amazon Opens Up Kindle, Only to Expose Its Flaws

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:10:00 +0000

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.

As noted by CNET, though, this is way too little at a time in which software developers are inundated with platforms begging for appplications to make them stand out from the crowd. To boot, premium applications will have to pay a healthy chunk of their revenues to Amazon, presumably to cover the cost of downloads, which is bundled into the Amazon service from a consumer perspective. Kindle readers on iPhones and other platforms may help to buoy Amazon's overall e-book strategy, but it is highly doubtful that the Kindle itself has much of a lifespan as a multi-functional content delivery platform. In turn, this puts pressure on Amazon's overall sales picture, as a generation attuned to iTunes downloads may be more willing to add books to that list of items to cram into their portable devices than to shift to downloads on the Kindle platform that's centered around yesterday's content formats.

The vision of the Kindle was myopic from day one, too bent on luring timid publishers into the e-book era before others became premium e-book download kings. While this did leverage Amazon into an early advantageous position for e-books, its focus on a pioneering device locked it in to formats and concepts that reflected the fears and limitations of the book publishing industry more than it did the realities of a Web-enabled world of a multitude of content formats, publishers and delivery channels. Its onerous cut of Kindle e-book revenues also gave publishers a good reason to work with other platform providers to get a better piece of the action. The net result is that Amazon is in strong danger of becoming a book distribution channel that fails to lock in a new generation of book readers on emerging mobile platforms.

With Apple setting itself up as a primary download competitor, the question becomes whether Amazon wants to continue to try to be the Microsoft of e-books via its proprietary approach or to become the Google of e-books in response to this challenge. In other words, is Amazon willing to admit that it made a huge mistake in not aligning itself more with a cross-platform, open standards approach in preparation for the inevitable platform battles that required stronger technology partners? There may not be a black-and-white answer to this question, but clearly Amazon needs to focus more on channel strategies and content publisher relations than on multi-function platform development. This is especially important in light of media companies that manage multi-channel products - "Avatar" lives as a movie, as a game, and, inevitably, as videos, books and so on. Amazon should be focusing more on the question of how to be a download king for content of all kinds rather than a gizmo king.

The logical leading partner in this would seem to be Google, with its emerging Android and Chrome OS platforms, options that weren't on the table in any serious way a couple of years ago but which are now coming to market aggressively. Microsoft will certainly be in the mix also, but it's playing catch-up in mobile platforms at a time in which Google is preparing to soar past many established vendors with its cross-platform Android operating system. In February the Barnes & Noble Nook e-book reader will be the first model delivered to consumers based on Google's Android operating system, opening the door to thousands of applications that could be integrated with e-books easily on that device, as well as on other Android-based devices. While there are notable flaws in the Barnes & Noble strategy - too few books, no reader yet for other mobile devices - its use of the ePub standard for its downloads and an incorporated lending model is closer to what will help book publishers to integrate with many other kinds of content and platforms quickly and profitably.

Book publishers have, predictably, dug themselves into an early hole in the race for digital markets by rejecting standards that would make cross-platform use of e-books a simple thing for consumers. One of the great things about books traditionally is that they didn't require a special technology to use them. Why would publishers go out of their way to balkanize their market into dozens of different proprietary formats that can only discourage people from picking up books in general? While it will take some time to undo this damage, there is still time for book publishers to avoid the mistakes of the music and video industries and decide on formats that will encourage cross-platform use of e-books as simply and inexpensively as possible and which encourage developers to create functionality around e-books that enhances their value and their integration into Web-based content, collaboration and community services.

While there may be some sucking up of pride in Amazon's C-suite to make these things happen, they are absolutely necessary if Amazon is to extend its early ecommerce successes based on Web standards into mobile markets. Perhaps Amazon forgets that if it weren't for Web standards, the world would not have discovered its leading ecommerce services in the first place. Amazon needs to re-discover its appreciation of the power of Web-oriented industry standards for e-books and re-establish itself as a company that can carve out the broadest opportunities for content ecommerce via the widest array of content platforms. While this may not always sound like music to the ears of its publishing partners, it's the only way in which it will be able to offer a sound alternative to media companies that are locking themselves into proprietary platforms that will inevitably place Amazon in an awkward relationship with them. I don't put much hope on this happening in the short term - some changes at the top in Amazon may have to occur for this to happen - but it's likely their best road to success in the years ahead.

DeepDyve Content Rental Points the Way to Broader and More Flexible Scholarly Revenue Models

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:32:00 +0000

With more publishers of scholarly and learned professional journal articles trying to build revenues through improved marketing, the search, display and sales tools being developed by DeepDyve are finding stronger interest than ever 2010 among publishers. DeepDyve exposes free and premium scholarly content through its own search engine and through the search tools of partners and makes it available through its read-only viewing tool embedded in Web pages. This allows people finding articles to "rent" them on a once-off basis in read-only mode for as little as 99 cents. This can be particularly handy for people who would otherwise have little occasion to purchase a full subscription to a premium scholarly journal, thus opening up this premium content to markets that would otherwise not provide opportunities for new publishing revenues.

How much more revenue? In a recent discussion with DeepDyve CEO Bill Park, he indicated an estimate in the low billions USD for the total market available for "rental" pay-per-view style access to scholarly content. While this is certainly not enough to float the boats of scholarly publishers in general, it's largely found money that will increase their total revenues at a time when revenue growth is a challenge. That's a concept that attracts partners large, small old and new to DeepDyve's services, including newly announced alliances with De Gruyter, one of the oldest and most respected scholarly publishers, and CiteULike, a Springer-sponsored social boomarking service for scientific researchers.

For De Gruyter, an established brand still requires new marketing techniques to reach researchers who do not have access to paid collections in institutional libraries, while CiteULike, a venue that attracts researchers both in institutional and independent settings, provides a way for people in cross-disciplinary research to sample collections that may eventually be a part of their more permanent interests. In both instances the services of DeepDyve are well aligned with the needs of people involved in innovation management as they probe their own adjacent markets and test out new ideas that may be worth research and product investments.

Scholarly publishers are having to adapt to research markets that are increasingly moving beyond traditional academic boundaries, prompting both alliances with organizations such as DeepDyve and their own repackaging efforts to make topic-based slices of content available from a broad selection of their journals. While the topic-based repackaging has its merits, the DeepDyve approach to ad-hoc access on a read-only basis is an essential component of this repositioning of premium scholarly content, allowing publishers to test out what kinds of content are attracting premium access far more quickly than traditional marketing cycles are likely to capture.

So not only is "rental" content valuable in terms of its direct and ad-supported revenues, but also valuable because it is, in effect, "live" market research into "willingness to pay" habits in specific market sectors. It is then up to publishers, of course, to respond to the insight that they can gain from this sales data to consider new slices and titles that can respond to premium opportunities more rapidly. The more partners that a company such as DeepDyve gets, the more insight they are likely to have available to their partners via use and sales metadata to determine such trends. Should Google Scholar join the many established publishers already using DeepDyve, their metadata on content usage could become more interesting yet.

To some degree these concepts are "Publishing 101" ideas, but the speed with which research markets are shifting are changing the ways in which they need to be applied. With permanent collections of well-established journals constantly under the pressure of institutional budget cuts, the pressure is on scholarly publishers to define "must-have" collections that are really responsive to the needs of their customers. DeepDyve's content discovery and "rental" tools can help publishers to respond to both opportunities and threats to premium revenues more rapidly, even as they build premium revenues on an on-demand basis. Yes, this may seem like ancillary revenues to some publishers, but it is revenue that is both sorely needed and which can be a guide to where best to grow broader revenues that are more easily defended in challenging times.

Here Come the Tablets: More Reason to Love the Web?

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:04:00 +0000

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.

The Skiff initiative from Hearst is far more than a tablet gizmo, encompassing distribution on a number of platforms including smart/super phones, PCs and other devices on which their clients would presumably want to view content laid out in traditional print format - and pay presumably premium print prices for it. The reader itself has a display almost as large as a typical notebook PC, with wafer-thin construction, eInk-like resolution and touch-screen activation. The Que reader is a similarly "thin is in" device, but the content that it can manage is oriented towards both traditional media and enterprise document management. The idea behind both devices is that you can have the convenience of digital storage and display without the hassle of dealing with Web-oriented content formats.

The real rationale behind these initiatives, of course, is more of a regressive approach to content than a progressive approach. The Skiff screams at its audience, "Print formats are still relevant, darn it!" while the Que burbles out, "Web sites for collaboration? Nevah hoid of it." And in common to these devices both traditional publisher and enterprise document management business models hope to thrive by locking in support for bright and shiny new high-tech toys that amuse people enough to let them forget that they are paying not just for a pricey device but for outmoded ways of looking at content aggregation, integration and contextualization. The Web site for Skiff tells people first that it's a "publisher-friendly" device, meaning that publishers can obtain revenues from lock-in via proprietary formats while changing as little of its outlook on its revenue streams as possible.

I am hard-pressed to think of an army of executives who have to already juggle laptop PCs, smartphones and other gizmos who will find their world to be truly simplified by this emerging world of proprietary devices. There's little doubt that the tablet format for devices will begin to pick up steam this year, especially those that are touch-enabled devices that help to eliminate the need for physical keyboards. But much of the tablet buzz is smoke and mirrors for journalists, hiding the broader reality that most major publishers are faced with a world in which their revenue streams are drying up and unlikely to be propped up for very long by proprietary tablet plays. None of these devices seem to address the primary issue facing their operations: namely that the Web as a whole is far more interesting and engaging to its readers than any given publication.

Publishers do need to focus on quality editorial operations, to be sure, to ensure that they have a product that's worth the premium prices that they hope to extract on their tablet devices. But their real competition is not bloggers or online aggregators, but other Web formats. The ease with which video can be displayed both on PC and mobile devices and the rapidly accelerating integration of voice services into Web services is creating an environment in which an enormous amount of information is being created and shared with people around the world well before it ever gets into words. The prevalence of status posting services such as Facebook and Twitter make people aware of the first and best news coverage of an event to the point that follow-up reports are as redundant to the general public as they are to stock traders equipped with real-time news feeds.

Yes, the experience of print is engaging, and, often, seductive. But in an online world built around relationships, context and collaboration, investing heavily on keeping up the appearance of the seductiveness and power of print seems to make about as much sense as an 80 year-old investing in a fifteenth round of cosmetic surgery. Premium publishing models are important, but investing in outdated business models to drive premium revenues again and again is a non-starter. It will help to stem the tide of the Web no more than 3-D television or other diverting forms of repackaging. The movie "Avatar" succeeded not because of 3-D images but because it appealed to generations young and old who are moving into new forms of relationships with information and experiences via the Web, enveloped in them constantly to the point that publishing is becoming part of who they are, as I infer in Chapter 10 of Content Nation.

With this in mind, I think that the most important "tablets" are already in many people's pockets - Web-enabled smart/super phones that provide touch-activated access to content and applications that free people from heavy and expensive PCs. Most of these devices cost a fraction of the price of the premium tablet units being promoted for sale. When touch-sensitive tablet devices based on Google's open-source Chrome OS debut later this year, the need for price-sensitive access to full-display content will be underscored yet again. The publishing industry will never grow, much less survive, if it insists on locking its hopes into the most expensive delivery mechanisms available when cost-effective alternatives abound.

What publishers should be focusing on is enabling their content for cross-platform distribution as effectively as possible, demanding premium price points where warranted based on the contextual value of their communities, features and services, not on the fleeting value of a handful of specific devices. If we are headed towards a world in which people will be able to wave an RFID-enabled phone at an item to purchase it, or similarly to execute a business agreement, then publishers need to jump off yesteryear's bandwagon and tool content to be valuable where organizations generating products and services will be thrusting their marketing investments. Gimmicky tablets will prevent this no more than Cinerama-produced films stemmed the rise of television in the 1950s and 1960s. So congratulations to the tablet producers for sucking money out of publishers who should be investing elsewhere. Hopefully next year's CES will see some more sensible solutions to content display and distribution that will be true boosts to publishers.

Hart Beat: Dow Jones Combines Enterprise and Media Operations

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:58:00 +0000

When News Corporation took over Dow Jones two years ago, it was quick to move out key senior Dow Jones managers and move in its own team that had a vision for how to make the brand a profitable and thriving outlet for business news and information. At that time I said on ContentBlogger, "The opportunity is for News Corp to enable a more aggressive melding of enterprise and media services as the differences between today's business media outlets and today's enterprise portals begin to narrow." I also speculated at the time whether Dow Jones Enterprise Media head Clare Hart would stick around to become a player in this mix or move on, suggesting that at least for a time she was respected enough that it was worth her hanging in there.

Two years later, Clare Hart and her work for DJEM remains respected, but times have moved on, and, according to news reports, so has Clare as the enterprise media group at Dow Jones is being merged with their consumer media group. Dow Jones CFO Steven Daintith is taking over the Dow Jones COO role for now, an indication that a promotion into that role for Hart was not in the offing, so moving on seems like a good bet for her at this time. While some may read "glass ceiling" or "Murdoch loyalists" into this move, I think that it's more a matter of where companies like Newcorp need to bring business information services such as their Factiva property to gain more profitability. The direction for more profits from the licensed business media sources in Factiva's database is definitely towards the online media side of Dow Jones operations, a move that requires a different set of skills than those needed to make subscription business information database services successful in increasingly complex enterprise technology markets.

As I noted last October in ContentBlogger when the Wall Street Journal Pro Edition was launched, the rise of real-time Web news aggregation is accelerating the need for business media properties to become more effective news aggregators. At the time I noted that this would be a good move to make better use of Factiva assets in the Pro Edition framework, a move that seems far more likely to unfold now that the siloing of Factiva and other Dow Jones enterprise assets has been eliminated. Among those other assets that are more likely to emerge more aggressively in the new alignment is the Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence group (formerly Generate), whose alerts-oriented mining of news sources will have a broader market to tap into via the Pro Edition platform. Thinking of Newscorp's push to gain more online revenues from paid content sources, these types of premium services are ripe for better integration into ad-supported Dow Jones content.

This is also, of course, a somewhat back-handed way to say that there really isn't much of a strategy available to Dow Jones to increase revenues simply by waving a wand over broader segments of its existing online content. That ship sailed many years ago, as the WSJ Online edition gradually moved towards a large portion of its content being available online without a subscription. Their hope lies in providing more value in their offerings to individuals who may not have access to large subscription databases and sophisticated alerts services in their companies or who have found access to such services harder to justify under central information budgets. Moving to make DJEM resources more available via their consumer and "prosumer" platforms is a natural bridging strategy into these needs that can set up broader enterprise sales strategies over time.

In the meantime, though, this move is somewhat of an admission that the subscription database business for business news is a dying business model. Factiva has been as aggressive as any other player in business information in adding features and integration capabilities to its offerings, but at the end of the day the value-add from such services is drifting away to enterprise technology players more quickly than Factiva or other enterprise news aggregators can counter with improved products and services. There are just too many enterprise platforms in which this type of content is needed, creating broad product and feature disintermediation. Harvesting structured information from unstructured news and information sources is one approach that many enterprise content vendors are taking to counter this trend, but this alone ultimately doesn't justify the typical subscription structure for news databases.

You can see where this consolidation of enterprise-oriented resources with consumer media resources at Dow Jones may spell problems in focusing on enterprise opportunities, but at the end of the day the software and the thousands of licensed content sources that Dow Jones pays for have to grow profits for them more quickly if they are to be worth the price. With enterprises increasingly reluctant to pay for licensed content that offers few or no advantages over Web-accessible content, the Web is the only probable point of strong growth for old-line news aggregators. This may not be a pretty transition for many Factiva staff, but it's one of those long-delayed and necessary moves that will at least set the stage for more robust growth in enterprise markets for Dow Jones in the long run - even if that growth comes from non-traditional channels.

Google Nexus One: Untethering from Traditional Models 1.0

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:12:00 +0000

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.

WiFi Plus Mobile = A Whole New Ballgame for Content and Communications

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:08:00 +0000

What can happen when you combine wireless broadband Web access with local wifi hotspots? A lot, when you come to think of it. Gizmos such as Novatel's "MiFi" unit that enable someone with mobile broadband access to set up their own local wireless "hot spot" have been out for several months, but the importance of these units is heating up with their connection to higher-powered broadband networks and the addition of features such as onboard data storage on SD cards. With more throughput and storage for data comes more ability to use these units to coordinate the bushel of devices that technophiles now travel with, helping them to synchronize communications with the world and with one another through one convenient hub. But it also presages a major shift in how homes, businesses and the world connect with one another for content.

Today most people have their mobile connectivity running in parallel with their home or office connectivity, including parallel networks for voice, video and data that cost a handsome sum for most people using them. Yet with one of these mobile network hub devices, it's easy to see how all but the most demanding uses for voice, data and video can funnel through a mobile broadband connection that can stay on our desktop or follow us on the go. Our smart phones, our eBook readers, our netbooks, our desktops, our in-home phones and our home entertainment devices can all be brought together on one seamless wifi-based communications medium.

This is likely to accelerate the move in voice communications away from traditional point-to-point circuit networks and towards an era in which voice communications are a feature of integrated voice, data and video services. It also means that we're more likely to overcome some of the global connectivity issues that exist for mobile devices: be it CDMA or GSM networks underlying mobile broadband connectivity, if you're near a hotspot of some origin, you should be able to get voice and data communications. Services such as Skype will certainly prosper in the process, but other services such as Google Voice, which help voice communications to get routed to any number of devices, are also likely to prosper as voice communications become more identity-centered rather than phone number-centered.

The bigger picture, though, is of a world in which inexpensive broadband hub devices can be placed easily in small communities and used to power local communications with both the outside world and with people within the community. Today we're seeing these devices powering personal communications, but I think that the larger potential is for devices that can connect communities with one another first and foremost with a minimum of technology. If you are living in a community in which each person cannot afford a mobile phone, that community may be able to afford collectively one connection to the outside world which is shared with a MiFi-like device that can make its connection available to the community in a reasonable scope, say a kilometer or so. People in that community could then use their mobile devices to communicate with one another and with the world, with very little ongoing cost to any one person beyond the initial cost of their own device. Most importantly, you could set up these local communications networks with or without direct connectivity to the outside world. You could have your own local Web of sorts, perhaps even with services such as Google Wave being used on a federated basis to facilitate content collection, communications and collaboration.

In turn, these individual communities could cooperate with other local communities to build "bottom-up" communications networks, developing regional communications systems that may be centered around local languages and dialects, connecting to more commonly used languages found in the "outside world" through a handful of communications access points. Every kilometer or so you could poke a solar-powered hub device into a convenient spot to keep the influence of a particular network growing. All of this would be developed on global communications standards, of course, enabling new ways to connect to the world over time, but regional communications would thrive, with or without help from the "outside world."

While the more than 1.4 billion people already using the Web are certainly a significant marketplace, I do believe that much of the future power of Web-based communications will be found in the expansion of more "bottom-up" networks amongst the five-plus billion other people in communities that find themselves on a different economic and cultural playing field than the rest of the world. We talk sometimes about the "dark Web" of content unavailable to search engines on the Internet, but there's a far greater "dark Web" of knowledge and culture that's beyond the Web altogether. The "top-down" Web will penetrate this arena only so far, as it tends to be in the hands of people who have, in their own way, a great deal of autonomy, in part because of their economic isolation. But as the "bottom-up" Webs begin to meet the world of the Web as a whole, it will be exciting to see how both economic and culture opportunities for people on both sides of this divide develop.

Fortunately there are devices coming along that should help to accelerate this convergence. The One Laptop Per Child organization is targeting the release of a $75 device called XO-3 that is a bone-simple tablet equipped with wireless communications. As technology tends to push towards such visionary price points sometimes more rapidly than the pioneers, I think that it's safe to say that within a few years the convergence of such devices with localized broadband networking will enable communities around the world to join the Web age in ways that may surprise the rest of the world. So if you're looking for great new opportunities in content markets, I think that "going local" may take on a whole new range of meaning shortly. We'll keep you posted on these trends throughout 2010. Have a happy new year celebration and best wishes for a prosperous 2010!

Shore Communications Inc. Waves Goodbye to 2009

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:28:00 +0000

What a year it's been.

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.

Farewell, Editor & Publisher: How Many Canaries Can You Ignore?

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:42:00 +0000

In the process of selling off several of its core B2B entertainment industry titles, Nielsen Business Media also announced the eminent closing of Editor & Publisher, the century-plus old trade publication that had chronicled the ins and outs of the news industry. At a time at which magazine closings seem to be about as regular as train stops on a commuter line, E&P's demise is not exceptional in many ways. Any number of trade publications are struggling to survive in an era in which online media enables unlimited competition for the attention of its readership and for its advertisers' and subscribers' cash. But there is something particularly poignant about E&P's shuttering. After all, if an industry which insists that the quality of its content will be its distinguishing factor cannot support the high-quality journalism covering itself, then how can they expect others to do likewise for their own interests?

There are few people who can scream about canaries in coal mines and get away with it for long, and I am no exception to that rule. If you haven't figured out that most publishers are caught between highly skilled staffs oriented towards traditional publishing platforms and new platforms that can't deliver them decent salaries with room for both management's profits and platform reinvestment, then you must have been clipping your bond coupons on a tropical island. But that doesn't mean that publications like Editor & Publisher have to die. What it does mean, though, is that in some ways the publishing industry is returning to its roots of scrappy, independent publishing that may do better without the overhead of large, corporate parents.

This doesn't mean that news publications will always do best as independent outlets, but it does mean that publishers that are mean, lean and more focused on their markets than on hitting the train back to comfortable suburban homes are going to do just fine. The good news is that Web infrastructure is perfectly suited to such operations, most especially when publishers listen to their audiences and engage them effectively. An interesting an ironic example of this positioning is the recent rebirth of Conde Nast's former Portfolio.com Web site by American City Business Journals as a portal oriented towards the owners of small and medium businesses. With a platform that is well designed to slice and dice content and functionality for any number of focused local and topic-oriented markets, ACBL's no-nonsense approach to publishing is far more emblematic of what will succeed moving forward in profitable B2B and consumer media than the high-gloss world of major media companies.

The caveat to this approach, though, is that the scrappy publishers must push themselves to the extreme to take advantage of highly affordable publishing technologies to outpace major media companies in having audiences adopt their brands on the platforms that they prefer. This is to some degree why blog-oriented publishers such as TechCrunch and The Huffington Post have survived and thrived in online media. Having been handed the equivalent of a guerrilla fighter's AK-47 automatic rifle in today's affordable social media publishing technologies and deploying the tactics and strategies that they enable, lean and agile online-first publications and their technology partners have carved away a good portion of the meat of publishing's profits.

It's not as if the major media companies can out-tech these smaller rivals easily, either. The expense and useful life of proprietary content technology development is rarely beneficial to a publisher today. There are some exceptions to this rule on the very high end of content markets such as in financial securities trading and other specialized professional functions, but in general it's source-agnostic content technologies that have defined today's most successful publishing platforms. For general media markets, publishers have tried again and again to gain the upper hand through sponsoring source-specific content technologies that simply don't deliver all of the information and experiences that people expect now through source-agnostic technologies.

It's what you might call a prolonged mourning for the mass-production printing press era, the ability to define a marketplace through a technology that only traditional publishers could afford and master easily. Sorry, that train left the station a long time ago. By ceding their technological superiority to others, publishers sealed their fate years ago. If Compuserve had knocked the socks off of the Web in its ability to amaze and delight content audiences, it would still be around today. Consortium services like Hulu are trying to regain some of that high ground of technology, but as long as they fail to leverage all of the content that people find to be valuable based on the artificial divide of "it isn't real content," they will always fall short of audiences who know "real" when they see it.

In short, I do think that the closing of Editor & Publisher is a small but significant landmark in the history of publishing. It marks the point in the publishing industry's history when it admitted that it no longer really cared about its traditional strengths. Print publishing and the editorial disciplines that drove it are now officially legacies that will inform the future, but no longer define it. There will continue to be print products indefinitely, and highly customized print products are likely to be a growing marketplace for some time. But when an industry will no longer buy coverage of its own traditional operations, then it's time to admit that a chapter in that industry's history has been finished. I wish the very best of luck to the staff of Editor & Publisher, they have put out quality journalism in the face of enormous industry change. I hope that we will see E&P resurface in the near future as a web-first publication, perhaps with a focus on the future rather than on the past.

What's the New Normal? Mark Logic Digital Publishing Summit Examines Cross-Platform Publishing Opportunities

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:06:00 +0000

While Mark Logic is far from the only game in town for cross-platform publishing technologies, its recent Digital Publishing Summit at the Plaza Hotel in New York City was a huge down payment on establishing itself as a thought leader that could merge the best of East Coast and West Coast thinking in enterprise and media content markets. As one would expect with a vendor-sponsored conference, the day was filled with "friendlies" who use and support Mark Logic and its XML-based databases, APIs and content delivery services. But it if you had to pick friends, CEO Dave Kellogg and staff picked some friends who had excellent examples of how cross-platform and cross-source publishing is "the new normal" that is helping to drive value in the publishing industry. The trick is, though, is that this new normal is filled with some ironies that the content industry is still struggling to absorb.

With a packed ballroom listening on (nothing like "free" as the price of admission for networking in this economy), Dave Kellogg opened with a lively video, followed by Outsell's David Worlock pointing out that user-oriented networked services, not pre-conceived publications, are the key to this "revolution" in publishing services. Yet at the same time his slides showed a pyramid of value-add content services from simple published documents to "workbenches" that seemed to be quite standard in its pre-conceived product flow. Databases are indeed key components in today's publishing environment, but as exemplified by Mark Logic's technologies, the database is now - that is, whatever a user needs it to be in the moment. Both enterprise and media oriented publishers are discovering that publishing cultures centered around traditional databases, be they for traditional editorial content, business data or multimedia, are not agile enough to respond to the demands of their markets.

Richard Maggiotto, Founder, President & CEO of Zinio, highlighted similar ironies that print publishers face in confronting mobile markets. Zinio is moving beyond simple "page-flipping" technology for magazines on PCs and mobile devices to enable video-like animations of content, including ads, to draw magazine publishers into more appealing online presentations in their software. One demo that Richard flashed on the screen was for a $30,000 watch, paid for by a manufacturer that refused to produce Web ads. A beautiful ad, but the question becomes: how can you build a market based on a tiny sliver of people who are using iPhones but preferring magazine-like layouts of content? Building beautiful and engaging content is a plus for any audience, but no arbitrary container in today's online world is going to fence an audience in to your message for very long.

I had to take a phone call at this point, so I missed a good portion of a presentation by Chris Tse, Director of Information at BusinessWeek, who focused on their "BX" social media initiatives. Ironically, when I came back, Tse was explaining how social media content was harder to monetize than traditional editorial content, although he acknowledged that it would probably grow in its revenue impact over time. So even when you have good design, interactivity, repurposed content and social interaction, there's no guarantee that you'll have the systems in place to match revenue opportunities to your content - or have a sales force that knows how to sell it.

Kent Anderson, Executive Director for Product Development at The New England Journal of Medicine, a leading Sci-Tech journals publisher, showed off a popular "diagnose the disease" quiz

that they had ported over from their Web site to the iPhone, and, through Mark Logic's infrastructure, easily retooled for Google's Android and other mobile platforms. The growth of the app's use on iPhone was quite extraordinary, paralleling the growth of overall iPhone use. But when Kent was quizzed about the impact on overall subscription revenues in the Q&A, he expressed some optimism for future, non-free applications in mobile markets but didn't offer any indication of how the app helps to boost core journal subscription revenues. Certainly highly functional mobile apps can help to build a publisher's brand value through higher engagement, but there needs to be a clear conversion strategy devised to ensure that the engagement actually converts that brand value into revenues efficiently. Repurposing content in and of itself doesn't ensure those conversions, though it can help to define a much larger addressable marketplace.

Shannon Holman, Director of Content Management for McGraw-Hill Higher Education and Lee Fife, VP of Publishing Solutions for Flatirons Solutions, put on an excellent demo of McGraw-Hill's Create online custom textbook creation application. Their development of Create was based on the assumption that they needed to empower their customers to design and customize their custom textbooks online, instead of relying on institutional sales forces. The Create application does an excellent job of fulfilling this mission, enabling its users to choose specific sections of books, insert personal course materials and papers and produce both PDFs and bound, custom-printed textbooks on demand with remarkable ease. This interactivity that allows clients to package content the way that they really need it packaged was probably the closest example of "the new normal" during the day's presentations. But even here, the very success of the Create application leaves McGraw-Hill's institutional salespeople scratching their heads somewhat. Better that in the long run, though, then becoming a captive of sales methods that may be out of date.

The final featured speaker of the day was Gordon Crovitz, former Publisher of The Wall Street Journal and a founder of Journalism Online, which is preparing to launch in 2010 an online content ecommerce service that will enable people to have one single sign-on for accessing premium content sources across the Web and mobile platforms. Crovitz outlined at a high level the range of use and pricing models that the Journalism Online platform will support, such as single-article micropayments, multi-article/time-based payments, bulk multi-publication subscriptions and print/online bundled subscriptions.

Interestingly, both the questions that came up from the audience afterwards and some discussion in the panel discussion following Crovitz' panel indicated that there was still a fair amount of resistance from some people in publishing to this concept - and not necessarily for the reasons that you might think. Some people were concerned about Journalism Online being a publisher-centric model, solving their own particular pricing problems but not necessarily solving problems for audiences. This is a reasonable point, one that highlights how publishers are to some degree still on a fishing expedition for successful online revenue models for premium online content that no technology alone can answer. Yet Crovitz emphasizes that premium's opportunities lie where people already believe in your content brand. In other words, premium plays well when you have a relationship with an audience that's already valued above the norm. You may, as Crovitz suggests, convert only a fraction of them, but if the relationship will support it, then demand it where the value suggests that it's worth it to them.

So what is "the new normal" in the era of repurposeable content? To put it succinctly, it's having content that's always ready to attain its highest value in audience-defined moments. Be it through search engines, self-published and self-packaged content, real-time collaboration or easily repurposed and relicensed data and editorial content, the companies that can chase those moments most effectively wins. Sometimes this means being able to aggregate content from any number of sources more rapidly and effectively than anyone else, based on your insights into audience demands. But often it means letting your content flow to where your audiences want to consume it and to be ready to know how to make money with it once it gets there. A multi-platform strategy for repurposed content is not simply slamming the same product into different packages.

Multi-platform publishing also requires the recognition that it's not about platforms at all - it's recognizing that your audience has to be the center of your publishing at all times - and to recognize that each platform and application may draw out a different audience persona from the same person. It's not enough to ask "What does your customer do ten minutes before and after they use your content." It's also necessary to ask your audiences, "who are you" in each platform environment. Your hardcore diagnostician may be all business on a PC, but be out for kicks or socialization on their iPhone - or vice versa. These types of variations only enhance the need for good content multipurposing infrastructure, even though that infrastructure will not guarantee that you'll be offering the content that they want most.

Mark Logic's Digital Publishing Summit probably raised more questions for publishers than it answered, but that's probably not a bad thing in a market in which publishers have very few clear-cut options for succeeding in content markets. It also left outside the doors of the ballroom the uncomfortable fact that many platforms are in use today that enable people to aggregate content on their own with minimal assistance from traditional publishers. You can have the best aggregation and monetization strategy in the world, but if your audiences are creating and aggregating more content than you can, then it's going to be an uphill battle for most any publisher. But within those constraints, Mark Logic is showing the way to a "new normal" for publishers in which matching any content to any audience demand is creating a much more flexible, responsive and audience-centric publishing industry.

Endgame/New Game: Google Search Moves Focus on The Moment of Highest Content Value

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:56:00 +0000

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.

Google Scholar Takes On Legal Content: Are Enterprise Suppliers Threatened?

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:18:00 +0000

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.

Making More Pies: The "Google Phone" and Chrome OS Aim to Expand Content Markets

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:58:00 +0000

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.

Darn, Why Did They Think of It First? News Media Companies Adapt to Online Value Points

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:04:00 +0000

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.

Business Information Consolidation: D&B Pursues InfoGroup to Diversify Offerings

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:20:00 +0000

While business information remains a robust market segment in the content industry, it has not been without its challenges in recent years. Increasingly rapid changes in organizations and careers trigger demand for ever-fresher information on companies, people and products, making services that can help it to be found and used effectively critical to most business operations. What was once an industry of bulk data, mailing lists and a few integrated company reports is now a market that demands integration of business information into sales and marketing platforms, strategic dashboards and all-in-one online services.

It's no surprise, then, that Dun & Bradstreet is among the companies mentioned by Reuters putting in a bid for infoGroup, the Omaha, Nebraska-based business information service that produces mailing list services and OneSource, an integrated database of global business information sources targeted at major corporations. D&B finds itself in the awkward situation of having a "gold standard" reputation for its core company information listings but relatively few options for it to leverage that information for greater profits in its own operations. D&B's Hoovers online business information service is doing well in capturing users in small and medium organizations with a mixture of subscription and ad-supported services, but that leaves larger organizations and bulk data services to others - including its parent D&B.

While the infoGroup bidding process could go any number of ways, including a "no-sale" decision, my guess is that we're very likely to see D&B come out on the top of this process. D&B and infoGroup have much to offer one another, in terms of both operations abilities and markets. For infoGroup the pluses it brings include a huge wealth of business and consumer contact data, its ruthless efficiencies in driving out costs from data acquisition and maintenance and a OneSource platform that brings together a very broad array of high-quality business information sources in both its own online services and in enterprise platforms such as CRM and business intelligence portals. For D&B, its company ratings, profiles, Hoover's online savvy and its highly respected brand and enterprise sales and support organization would combine to provide a parent that could build a far more complete portfolio of business information services. No merger is perfect or without pain, but this looks like one that will create some pretty strong market mojo.

And it will take some mojo to keep up with the changes in the business information market over the next few years. The emphasis on business information services is on integration, real-time freshness and usefulness and having all of the sources at your fingertips needed to make decisions about corporate strategy, sales and marketing. Companies like Axciom and Experian are expanding their footprints in business information services rapidly, making an expansion of D&B's overall profile in business information services a priority if they are to leverage their brand effectively. And in the wings are expanding business information services from Dow Jones, and probable expansions by Thomson Reuters as well - with perhaps even an acquisition of LexisNexis assets from Reed Elsevier in play. Throw in younger business information brands such as Jigsaw, InsideView and Zoominfo beginning to cater to not only online-aware companies but core corporate markets as well, and you can see that business information is not a sleepy content market sector by any stretch of the imagination.

This appears to be one of those situations where two companies with both the right needs and the right level of maturities in their operations and management come along at the right time. It took a few years for infoGroup to whip its properties into better shape, and it's taken a few years for D&B to integrate Hoover's operations effectively and to identify the greater opportunities for their products and services. Here's hoping that these two companies find that their fits are as complementary as they appear to be.

Cutting Losses: Smith Bows Out as Reed Elsevier CEO

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:20:00 +0000

In a move that shocked many B2B media insiders - including Incisive Media CEO Tim Weller - global information provider Reed Elsevier has announced the resignation of their CEO Ian Smith, to be replaced by Erik Engstrom, CEO of their Elsevier division. While early speculation from FT's Alphaville blog depicted the management shift as "a proper executive-level knifing," more considered comments from industry analysts and insiders in The Independent seem to indicate that Smith was falling on his own sword in recognition of some major challenges not easily resolved by someone with limited media experience. Three key factors were arguing strongly for changes at Reed Elsevier sooner rather than later: the selloff of Reed Business Information assets had stalled, pre-tax profits were down 52 percent in half-year results and investors lacked confidence in both projected earnings and Smith's aggressive recapitalization efforts. With Smith's mentor Jan Hommen having departed from Reed Elsevier's board in January to head the ING bank, a graceful exit was probably in order.

For all of the corporate drama that this move has generated, it's easy to forget that Smith's move to float more stock to reduce debt and to fund Reed Elsevier for more aggressive organic growth was a very sound move, even if it is one that displeases investors in the short term. The real question is whether Engstrom will be up to the challenge of using that capital effectively in a struggling economy. Certainly Engstrom's Elsevier unit is the most effectively positioned business unit in the Reed Elsevier empire today, with deep and widely successful enterprise information products and a growing folio of academic and scientific publications. Yet as relatively strong as Elsevier may be, growth will be a major challenge for Reed Elsevier, even if the economy is laid aside as a contributing factor.

The key problem that Engstrom faces is that few of the tricks that have worked for Reed Elsevier in the past are likely to lead to growth in the future. B2B magazine publishers over-romanticized the likelihood of revenues from traditional channels in the face of massive changes in online information delivery and were therefore ill-prepared to adjust to cutbacks in events attendance and slimmer online ad revenues. At the same time growth by title acquisition, licensing and data integration was making for a relatively rosy top line for Elsevier and LexisNexis but failed to leave enough room in budgets after debt and development costs to fund new product development. Fairly aggressive staff and operations streamlining at LexisNexis have improved the outlook for their business information operations somewhat, but the overall forecast for both LexisNexis and Elsevier highlights modestly incremental product development.

On the surface the smart approach would seem to be to "Glocer-ize" operations at Reed Elsevier as rapidly as possible. Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer moved rapidly in recent years to pare away redundancies and legacy products with limited upside and to focus operations on enhanced integration of enterprise content services across their holdings. Unfortunately there are far fewer synergies available between LexisNexis and Elsevier than those found in Thomson Reuters holdings, with the cultures of the two divisions still remaining miles apart, both literally and figuratively. With ever-broadening competition for the core content licensing services of LexisNexis, including more aggressive development of Dow Jones' enterprise information holdings, Reed Elsevier looks increasingly like a company with one fairly stable boat and three heavy anchors failing to find a bottom.

While speculation remains in the air about a possible move to merge Wolters Kluwer operations in to Reed Elsevier, the more probable short-term solution would seem to lie in disposing of some or all of LexisNexis as promptly as possible while its asking price is still worthy. One possible solution would be to spin off LexisNexis operations to Thomson Reuters or Dow Jones to bolster their competitive positions in legal and business information. Thomson Reuters would be a better strategic fit overall for a spinoff, especially if Thomson Reuters could flip back some or all of its scientific holdings to Reed Elsevier, but regulatory concerns about merging LexisNexis into Thomson West would probably make a wholesale spinoff to Thomson Reuters doubtful. A more probable resolution to overcome regulatory hurdles might lie in offering LexisNexis legal assets to Dow Jones and its news licensing assets to Thomson Reuters, which has lacked archives depth since returning its interest in Factiva to Dow Jones.

Whatever the specific solution may be, Reed Elsevier needs cash to focus on building up its scientific and medical assets for growth as rapidly as possible. Cheap financing as a means to grow stables of titles is off the menu for a while, thankfully, so Smith's forecast for organic growth requires an acceptance that it will have to come by focusing far more aggressively on its Elsevier division. Elsevier is not without its own challenges - scientific publishing faces strong pushback from corporate and academic libraries that find it increasingly hard to afford the full range of journals that most publishers offer - but both scientific research and applied sciences are markets still crying out for productivity gains that would warrant increased product investments. By contrast, productivity in legal markets are moving away from many of LexisNexis' core database strengths, which would benefit from more integration with other platforms.

There's always the possibility that Engstrom may decide to go for short-term gains and shuffle the Reed Elsevier portfolio just enough to tweak out a year or two of decent earnings. Here's hoping that he finds the courage to make some very tough decisions as to what is likely to provide the best returns for Reed Elsevier investors in both the short run and the long run. Moving on a sale of LexisNexis, by far the most attractive disposable asset available from Reed Elsevier, will enable them to take advantage of its value while it still has some attractiveness in the enterprise information marketplace. Without further integration of their information with financial market information and successful media operations, LexisNexis is not likely to contribute significantly to Reed Elsevier growth for some time to come. We'll see how Engstrom decides to cut his losses, but here's hoping that his moves help to strengthen both Reed Elsevier and enterprise information markets overall.

Going Pro(sumer): Wall Street Journal Pro Edition Targets Web-Aware Enterprises

noreply@blogger.com (John Blossom) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:37:00 +0000

I've been suggesting to my friends at Dow Jones for more than five years that they needed to consider how to use their Factiva content more aggressively on the Web as a source for virtual aggregation of news and business information. Well, five years isn't that long in enterprise content product cycles, I suppose, so when I tweeted the announcement by Dow Jones of its new Wall Street Journal Profession Edition yesterday morning, I was pleased to see that the WSJ had finally started to package licensed content from Dow Jones Factiva's news and business information database into an editorially-managed online edition. The WSJ Pro package will be strictly a premium offering, offered at first only to Dow Jones' enterprise customers starting in November, with wider availability expected next year.

In a loose sense you can think of WSJ Pro as a Huffington Post for business professionals, a mix of content developed by WSJ staff writers and six sections of sector-oriented business news and information culled by WSJ editors from Factiva's extensive database and Web search infrastructure. However, using the extensive search-based analysis tools that Factiva has amassed, WSJ Pro will also provide its subscribers with the ability to unearth trends from its content. With a year of archived Factiva licensed content available along with two years of WSJ archives, WSJ Pro subscribers will be getting access to both content and trend analysis from in-depth premium business information sources unavailable in on the Web in many instances. Other must-have features such as custom alerts for email and mobile devices are also included in the subscription package, which will cost USD 49 a month.

Some are labeling the WSJ Pro package as a shot across the bow at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, which is a shot not too far off the mark, given that for decades many financial services companies have been able to negotiate similar price points from major financial information services for people off their trading floors, who used them mostly for news retrieval and casual price quotes on securities. WSJ Pro is aimed largely at such people, who are very Web-centric already in their information retrieval habits and looking for something a little more professional-grade. The trading arena itself uses more machine-executed trades and the remaining people on trading desks using very sophisticated analysis packages, so there are fewer people who can use the high-grade financial information products developed by companies like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. It makes sense, then, to focus on average professionals accessing better-than-the-Web information about business and finance who are willing to use a ad/subscription-supported prosumer product like WSJ Pro.

This move is also, of course, a way to counter some of the stagnation that Factiva faces in large-scale enterprise subscriptions. With central information budgets facing cutbacks in many of the enterprises targeted by Factiva and other major business information providers, using a more media-oriented model for delivering business information to specific individuals who are willing to pay for it offers Factiva a way to slide its content over into a new sales profile that can weather central budget cutbacks by appealing more to individuals who may be willing to carry a personal subscription to their products from other budget sources - perhaps even from their own pockets. Pioneering Web business information providers such as Hoover's have established the viability of this type of media/subscription model for years, so there's no reason to think that it won't succeed for Dow Jones as well.

So as much as professionals who already use Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters services may be targets for WSJ Pro, clearly a broader range of enterprise business information users may find the package to be appealing. The "prosumer" segment of business information is likely to be one of the fastest growing segments for business information use in the years ahead, as central information budgets recover slowly from the effects of the economic downturn while more aggressive executives in need of support for decision-making decide to up their personal investments in business information to close their knowledge gaps.

You can quibble a bit about the pricing, perhaps, which is not high compared to WSJ print packages but at a non-bulk price still a little high compared to some premium business information services, but no doubt WSJ has done their homework on this and is likely to meet their revenue goals with their "prosumer" WSJ Pro package. I have little doubt that this package will be a strong success - if but because both Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters are now scrambling to come up with business news assets that can help them to broaden their own offerings. When you get the incumbents moving quickly, you must be doing something right.