Feb

22

Viewable Impressions II

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments

Day Two began with a trip down Memory Lane – a presentation from the Editor of Estates Gazette (EGi) that at once reminded me that it is now 16 years since Mark Kelsey’s innovative interactive service at Reed Business engaged that most conservative of audiences, the British commercial property agent, and that EGi itself needs, like us all, to adapt to changing market circumstance. The old magazine is still there in print, and in replica on iPad (50% of users have one) with embedded video (this edition published a revolutionary 24 hours before the print!). The sale is still a bundle, and at £3,000 for an individual, and £30k multi-user licences fairly normal, cannot be called a low price deal. In difficult markets for commercial property net growth is a problem, but the hint in this presentation that the answer lies in data integration seems to me just right. Enable all that data on occupancy, planning history (zoning), ownership etc to be linkable, and you have the ability to mine the data for building reports (they have created 635,000 so far) and for custom re-use. They have just signed their first exclusive contract with a major agent: this data really needs to be used in conjunction with the agent’s own data to make sense. And of course they are redesigning, going global with links to major property trade shows etc, but to me the essence lies in the data. Get it all on one platform, encourage users to avoid print through the pricing bundle so as to increase margins, and then play the data game to become the bedrock internal information service provider for the agencies. Digital may make you smaller, but it should also make you more profitable and very sticky in increasingly less competitive markets.

Someone who clearly gets it is Charles Thiede, the CTO at Informa Business. His portfolio, with revenues around $400m and an operating margin of $140 m is 80% digital in its revenue base, and is concentrated around Healthcare, Global Trade (Lloyds, in print since 1724) and market research (Datamonitor). He spoke lovingly of the campaign for data discovery. Data flows naturally from the business – Lloyds report 65 million navigational positions on 72,000 commercial vessels each year – but everywhere it is locked up in spreadsheets, search results, structured databases, reports, filters etc. The message was clear: re-platform to enable access to data, allow modular and customizable research, and then drive directly towards integration with customer workflow. His current methodology is the Tableau data visualization tool, but this perhaps is less important than the principles involved: turn your customer into your collaborator, put personalization at the heart of the matter, and recognize that the user is now, in every sense, the Publisher, and you are the enabling service provider.

Regular readers here will know that a drought of such undiluted Kool Aid will have made your correspondent tired and emotional – or at least in need of a strong drink. And indeed some other presentations also drove in that direction. Bryan Glick, editor in chief of Computer Weekly, clearly took the right step when he and his colleagues deserted print in April 2011. But new owners TechTarget, while they have 200k Computer Weekly subscribers digitally rather than 90k in print, have a business with a revenue base closer to £5m than the £20 m they had in print at its late 1990s peak. The way to address this issue lies, as the previous paragraph indicates, in the service base rather than in events (good as they are) or other traditional industry diversification expedients. What happened to the Computer Weekly community, one wondered, and of its product data from those innumerable and interminable industry press releases? Or is this business that the new owner does in other ways in other places? To a certain extent the industry must get used to “Get Smaller – with bigger margins”, but that can only be tolerable if the full service supply opportunity is also being exploited. In this whole debate, only Charles Thiede mentioned the Internet of Things – a clue to how fascinated the magazine community, especially in B2B, has remained with the editorial and production process for news, and how detached they still remain from where their client interest really lies.

John Kennedy of IBM tried to improve the customer focus at the end, and Christian Ropke, Managing Director of ZEIT ONLINE, wanted to re-assure us that in a well-managed newspaper economy, loyal to print, like Germany, then online could run alongside print and succeed in pleasing differing tastes of the same readers. His 25,000 subscribers are 5% of print and generate 33m uniques a month. When he inelegantly proclaimed that “The Shitstorm Never Came”, I was left wondering. In the comfortable offices of Die Zeit, would anyone notice? Out there in commercial property, or shipping or technology sales life may seem quite a bit different.

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!

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