Aug
6
Open a Fab Lab and Re-Invent the Newspaper
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
First of all, a (very) old, (very) bad joke. The great Roy Thomson is sitting in an aircraft at Bangkok en route to Australia. “Get me the Bangkok Times”, he snaps to an aide. The young assistant returns in due course and gives the press tycoon his newspaper. “What did it cost us?”, the great man enquires. “10p”, replies the slightly surprized executive. “Cheap at the price if we got the properties as well” growled the newspaper acquisition legend. But this story comes to mind yet again from my 1960s publishing days not just because the price of a newspaper title is falling so rapidly, but because Roy Thomson was the last of a breed: he bought newspapers without any intention of imposing his views on the world, but simply – indeed, “purely” – to make money. Since his time, and I do not exempt Rupert Murdoch from this, newspaper proprietors have bought in to change the world, exercise power, develop a personal following or compensate for something missing elsewhere in life. And this week, as the Boston Globe goes for a pittance to an industrialist and now the Washington Post goes to Jeff Bezos for a mere $250 million we are back on the track created by the Chicago Herald Tribune: very expensive power jewellery for very rich people.
None of this will save a newspaper or make it more relevant to now-lost audiences. Jeff Bezos is an outstanding businessman who has created a singularly powerful ecommerce environment, but he may not have the answer to news in the network. Bob Woodward says on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “This isn’t Rupert Murdoch buying The Wall Street Journal, this is somebody who believes in the values that the Post has been prominent in practicing, and so I don’t see any downside,”
(http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/washington-post-sale-jeff-bezos-bob-woodward-rupert-murdoch-95226.html#ixzz2bDFk8ntc”), but for all we know at present, Politico, where I saw this story, is the true successor of political news and comment in newspapers. Jeff Bezos will be an experimenter and a catalyst for change, if we can go by his record, but while we wait it may be more interesting to see how the remaining assets of the Graham family fall. For example, will Kaplan go, and which Pearson competitor will try to offset flagging textbook fortunes by buying it (although even Kaplan is looking a bit past its best).
What would be good is a way of putting together the thinking of the best minds and begin to test and re-iterate models of engagement for networked populations. OK, we have done this before and the answer was Twitter – but I do not despair. The best thing that Jeff Bezos has bought may be a brand that he can transfer elsewhere for credibility and profit. All predecessors in the re-invention stakes have started from the idea that you take content first formulated from print and then re-condition it for online audiences. He doesn’t – or does not have to – think like that. And he will look at the Guardian, with 50 million online users, the voice of global liberalism in English, the place where everyone from Assange to Snowden comes to leak, and he will wonder why such a mighty distribution empire produces such pitiful revenues. And he will, as an online storekeeper, know which buttons to press to get revenues moving, since he survived the derision of the world for having no business model at Amazon – until his business model, once found, brought the consumer book industry to its knees and may yet point to its exit.
The keynote here is experimentation and re-iteration. All of us who work in the network must work this way now. Even in domestic terms, as I realised this morning when my wife said “I think we really need to have a 3D printer”. As is wise, I agreed, and then sought to justify my agreement by looking at the things that we might do in a small village in the Chilterns with such a device. And within moments I had found it! The largest number of installations of 3D printers and allied additive manufacturing technologies in Europe and the US is in so-called Fab Labs, many of them housed in libraries. My nearest Fab Lab, one of around 150 created in the past 5 years, is at Manchester, some 200 miles away. Here is its rationale: “Fab Labs – digital fabrication laboratories – were set up to inspire people and entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into new products and prototypes by giving them access to a range of advanced digital manufacturing technology.
The idea was conceived by renowned inventor and scientist Professor Neil Gershenfeld at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His idea was a simple one: to provide the environment, skills, advanced materials and technology to make things cheaply and quickly anywhere in the world, and to make this available on a local basis to entrepreneurs, students, artists, small businesses and, in fact, anyone who wants to create something new or bespoke.” (www.fablabmanchester.org) And here is something about their impact:
“A global network of over 150 Fab Labs now exists, connecting people, communities and businesses across the world and enabling them to collaborate, problem solve and brainstorm ideas.
Shepherds in Norway have used their Fab Lab to create a system for tracking sheep using their mobile phones, while in Ghana, people have made an innovative truck refrigeration system powered by the vehicle’s own exhaust gases.
In Afghanistan, people are fashioning customised prosthetic limbs, while in South Africa a government and business backed project is creating simple internet connected computers that hook up to televisions and cost just ten dollars each.”
Compared to this record of innovation, surely re-inventing what the newspaper means in the network would be easy? And once we are fully functional as the first Village Fab Lab in Britain we may have a go at that too!
Aug
5
The Future is Already Past
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Is there a better instance of “speed of change” than that just when you are instancing something as a prime example of future change, you next read of it as history? We keep reminding ourselves that change is running at faster rates than we imagined, or than we experienced in childhood or at other times. My usual counter to this has been to point out how slowly things happen. Between announcement and implementation whole decades seem to yawn, so that when the signalled change does take place, we experience something like dejas vu. Yet I do share the “speed of change” experience myself, and last week, just as I was writing about the automation of aspects of building design and construction, I started to tell a friend, standing on my soapbox as a former farming person, about the developments one could forecast in agriculture. “And so”, I recall ending my peroration,” it is plain to see that the tractor is a robot waiting to happen…”
Well, he was kind enough to wait an hour or so before sending me the article about research at John Deere, and while looking at that I came across Jaybridge Robotics (www.jaybridge.com/news) and their work with Kinze to create Kinze Autonomy, the driverless tractor. This development is capable of performing a complete harvesting workflow in a geo-location-based systems environment which was launched in Iowa on July 29th. My friend kindly wrote “Your prediction was History – but remind me why I needed to know…” And there lies the problem: we need to know how our users are likely to adapt to change at the same time that they make that decision. In an information market where corporate planning times have diminished from a standard five years when I entered work, to a budget plus a forecast it is becoming peculiarly hard to negotiate the hair-pin bends of market change while keeping an eye on the horizon. I even have one colleague who does two six month budgets a year and still complains how hard it is to cope with changing circumstances.
Last Friday, Sonoma issued their interim results. How often have you read a media company boss like Harri-Pekka Kaukonen, President and CEO, say things like this:
“Learning’s solid performance continued in the second quarter whereas
structural changes accelerated in consumer media.
Advertising markets in Sanoma’s main operating countries continued to be
depressed. The likelihood of clearly improving market conditions in the second
half of the year is estimated to be low. In addition, circulation sales
continue to be under pressure, impacting our sales and profitability”
For the past five years we could have produced automated statements to this effect for every media player throughout Europe and North America. And while I am sure that the wise folk at Sanoma have new strategies to roll out in due course, I find it deeply disturbing that much of the consumer print media marketplace seems to have been sleepwalking for the last five years, and for the five years before that when structural change began. So do we really have a ten year reaction time to fundamental change? Lets move forward quickly to James Dolan, CEO of Cablevision, the fifth largest cable player in the US, as quoted this morning by the Wall Street Journal (http://onlinr.wsj.com: “The Future of Cable might not include TV”). Now here is someone who can imagine the impact of structural change when he senses it. In the wars between programme makers, internet distributors and video channels like Netflix he seems determined to be prepared, even if he is not a television player in the future. Allocating capital expenditures of $1.1 billion last year to upgrading his network, he is determined to work as a broadband distributor, offering higher speeds, greater outdoor wifi access and cloud-based storage allowing users the ability to record up to ten items at the same time. He notes that his kids (he has six boys from 6 to 26) use Netflix on Cablevision Broadband. One of his investors remarks” Jim has a multi-generational view, a longer term view”. Some people see change, and are able to think about the unthinkable.
Sometimes the best way to envision the future is to watch other people betting on it. This is why the start-up markets are so interesting, to me at least, and why watching the drift of interest in venture capital-backed plays can be so useful. I have to believe that setting up VC-style growth greenhouses makes sense (as Macmillan Education and Science, and a number of others have grasped). I noted that some now believe that the tech development impetus in Europe has moved from London to Berlin (http://newsle.com/article/0/86896557/), but where it is does not really matter. We all have to go there and see what is happening. In the UK there is a traditional gap between university science park developments and tech development zones like London’s Shoreditch, so I was pleased to see Elsevier sponsoring the Global University Venturing Summit (http://www.globaluniversityventuring.com/pages/global-university-venturing-summit-brussels-oct-16th.html) which takes place in October this year. If you want to smell the future, get into meetings like this, stop thinking about what has changed and start thinking about what will.
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