Feb

13

After the Newspaper, the Russians

Filed Under Big Data, data protection, Education, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

Well, I think I have waited long enough! When Ashley Highfield became CEO of Johnston Press in the UK I had hoped that the next generation newspaper would pop out as speedily as the BBC iPlayer did during his digital reign at the BBC. But time is moving on and I feel that I must file at least an interim report on this front. And in doing so I will try to avoid the now useless words of the day, the “over-used and under-defined until meaningless “terms like Ecosystem and Curation which now litter this discussion until whole sentences can be written in code which only the originator can unpick – and which he dares us to question. Twenty five years as a consultant has made me value obscurity and multiple shades of meaning as much as the next man from McKinsey, but here I will try to avoid terms that defeat the object and soften the brain, and you can be the judge of my success!

The relationship with the newspaper has broken down, but not our relationship with the news. Excellent commentators like Chris Anderson have pointed out that very local news – the car crash on the next street, the local government decision on street lighting in an area – can have more lasting resonance than an international crisis or a distant war. Yet if we are interested in either type of information, we want all we can get until our interest peaks – and wanes. Our friends can be vital news sources alongside Reuters or AP. We need to be able to follow new themes without fussy form-filling, and we do not need to be bored by news updates on issues of no or of former concern. We want no intrusive advertising, but we are happy to be sold the new product lines of retailers who interest us, provided that they disappear when they cease to interest us. We want the back story in full when we want it, as a desirable default which we can call up but not as something which we have to endure on every theme that interests us. We want services that learn from us, yet also services which give us the opportunity to find new issues (“if you liked that, try this…”).

So the next newspaper is a community, with social networking elements, and an intelligent system with regard to internet-wide story-gathering. It looks to its readers privacy, and security, at every stage, and links to retail are permitted by assent of users only. It is dedicated to the avoidance of spam and casual advertising contact. In order to ensure that its lists cannot be sold for lead generation purposes it is probably a subscription service, utilizing some existing news brands to give it authority and credibility. Like Darwin’s tree shrews, there are some prototypes of aspects of all of this around, but no niche-dominating mammals are yet in sight. Facebook, with its graph search and its links to Bing clearly thinks this way, and poses a huge threat to the dessicated remains of the old guard press in Europe and North America. Yet Facebook may not survive its willingness to sell its audience. And at present it does not quite engage with the “workflow” of the consumer – this service must also link to user requirements in education (personal and family), to health and healthcare and to savings and investments – just like that good old jumbo Sunday supplement in print, only fully profiled. Facebook has the Recommendation style to do the job, using the community effectively to drive choice, but I believe it will be the inspiration of the next generation of solutions, rather than the floor plan.

Turn instead to look at some of the software available. Start with Gravity (www.gravity.com), the haven of the escaped crew of My Space regrouped under CEO Anit Kapur . But this is not another Community. It launched its Personalization API last week (1 February 2013) and has become a very effective technology for interfacing trad Web with the device world of mobile. And this is vital – Your Newspaper is very Mobile. Whether this personalization works for advertisers I rather doubt, but here is a technology which is ready to go for “publishers” and well worth experimenting with: press coverage of Davos noted that Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer had said that “interest graphs” (see Facebook above) were part of Yahoo’s future. Well, here they are in the present. And then, look at My6Sense (www.my6sense.com), the Israeli contestant in this beauty parade. Maybe the first move in mobile will be the personalised content bar of this type, since we currently seem lost for an interface on mobile platforms which enables us to unwrap personalised services at will… And now, go for a long browse on Trap!t (http://trap.it). Ignore that annoying exclamation mark! Here is a beta with a sample of 100,000 news sources just moving into AI gear to give a new twist to “adaptive reasoning “in the context of personalized information. It is founded on CALO technology – Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes – and comes out of DARPA (a first cousin therefore of Apple’s Siri). Despite the appalling linguistic crimes on this site (the founders, in true Silicon Valley mode, claim to have created a “cognitive prosthetic”), this is the closest that I can identify at present as the progenitor of the newspaper of the future. Mobile, intelligent, personalized ( yet suggesting new avenues). So who can implement, and what happened to those Russians?

The Russians in my headline are the Lebedevs, Alexander and Evgeny, Father and Son. And the context here is the fact that they own London’s evening newspaper, the Evening Standard. Formerly a DMGT property, this also entails owning some 33 hyperlocal web services around the London region. And the UK’s regulator, ever dedicated to preventing dangerous concentrations of media power in Britain, has just awarded the local television franchise for London, London Live, to (you have guessed it) the Lebedevs (presumably on the grounds that they were not Murdochs!) For once, I applaud a monopoly, since this media integration in a region large enough to sustain development at scale could be the spawning ground for the rise of MyNewpaperInLondon, as they will probably call it. When real broadband comes to the UK it will come to the London region first (the EU/UK plan calls for 100 mb/second by 2020, though that plan has been reduced in funding from £50bn to $24bn so the British government can build a prestige railway line to the North!). Whatever the politics, this intense content concentration, plus mobile, plus infrastructure, plus all of the available intelligent software equals an immense opportunity. Hope we are all equal to it!

Feb

6

The Collaboration Game

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Education, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Multi-tasking may be beyond me. I am finding it very hard to travel and blog at the same time. And having traveled 10 hours by train and over 50 in a plane in the past 14 days I must beg forgiveness for the gap in production on this blog. And the annoying thing is that many of the things encountered on these travels have been red meat for bloggers.

Take as an example last week’s Information Industry Summit, organized as ever by the SIIA and held this year at New York’s Pier 60. This is a really important industry event, and I was pleased to be amongst a crowd of some 250 who enjoyed a very varied and interesting agenda. And specially interesting for me these days since these conferences provide a verbal map of industry sentiment. One would have thought, for example, that for many SIIA members 2012 was a disaster worth forgetting. Consolidation goes on apace but many of the “great” players of yesteryear took considerable reverses, and investor sentiment about the “information industry”, if that means failing print to some, must be flagging. With McGraw-Hill dividing into two, and selling the weaker part, and News Corp dividing into two and racking up real problems in the bad bank side, there are plenty of examples of near terminal troubles. And yet the room was full as ever of investors and analysts. I cannot be certain of course whether they were there to pick over the wreckage, or to re-invest post-digital development, but they are still there. And while they are there I really think we should give them a vision of the future which is not framed by our rear view mirror.

So the conference began with George Colony, the articulate and persuasive father of Forrester, giving a talk about Thunderstorms. Indeed, this was a recurrent theme. It reminded me of where we have been these last 20 years. Do you remember the long years when every conference started with a Christensen-esque speech on Disruption? Well, we learnt to live with Disruption, and we ignored the wonderful advice of the author of the Innovator’s Dilemma. For the next five years we were Crossing Chasms, getting one foot into the digital world, rebalancing ourselves. Well, does anyone know if we crossed? Or are we still poised? Then every media sector got involved, and all of a sudden we were Transitioning and Migrating. These may have been words which pleased investors at the time, and helped to explain why nothing much was happening at discernible speeds, but using them now seems laughable. How many major print-based powerhouses of 1993 can you name that have a stake in digital markets that matches a Google, or an Amazon, or a Facebook? We have businesses like Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier who have carved out niches in digital workflow, and players like Pearson who dominate education markets which have been slower to move to the network. But giants? Those have been built anew and elsewhere.

So when the conversation turned to Thunderstorm last week I wondered whether Americans had adopted the English art of under-statement. Cataclysm was the word that came to mind that week as I read Gannett’s results statement. If George Colony meant that our industry was under water then I might agree, but I suspect that he was looking or a metaphor for mindless violence, but came up short. Yet the metaphor led me to the totally sane, healthy and interesting part of the week. One objective of my trip was to help my friends at TEMIS, the French semantic analysis software company, launch their LUXID Community, a collaborative network of software players, content companies and platform providers. I was delighted to find some of the themes of the launch event taken up in the main conference. Look for yourself at http://www.temis.com/join-the-luxid-community or come to one of their meetings and express a view.

When extra-ordinary events take place, and change the entire landscape in which we work within a timeframe as short as 20 years, our reaction as businesses might reflect how we react as individuals in an earthquake or a tsunami. We pool our resources and pull together. I believe in what TEMIS are proposing because I do not think we will develop solutions for customers, or exploit to the full the digital opportunities given us by our content, our data, our market knowledge or our ability to develop high quality software unless we work together. Collaboration and co-operation are essential even if tomorrow we also need to buy or merge with some of those with whom we work today. Above all, this collaboration must extend to our customers: the lonely years of competition for competition’s sake must end, and we have to embrace our customers as partners – or they will become our competitors in ways which would be very toxic indeed.

Here then is a theme we could use to re-invigorate investors. Ask them to score us in terms of our proclivity for partnership. Look at us to see if we have a culture of experimentation that involves combining resources and attributes from several different sources to create a value which would have been otherwise impossible. As we move into a networked world where most service and solutions providers will sub-contract, outsource, partner and collaborate as easily as breathing then we in vital information markets could be leaders in proving that Vital is just as important as Big – and maybe more profitable. The LUXID Community may be a small step, but we could look back at this week as a very important one.

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