Apr
7
The Long and Mobile Road
Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Whatever you say in public – and this is as public as I get – tempts providence . It follows therefore that one should tempt providence properly , and bring down a whole building on one’s head rather than a mere ceiling . So here goes:
” I know the successor to Facebook ”
There , it is really quite easy . And it came to me naturally while contemplating the plainly inadequate oarsmanship of the Brothers Winklevoss and the demise of BeBo , suffocated in its sleep by the new regime at AOL . The twins , litigants in the Facebook case and winners of a $65 million dollar bonus for losing , are plainly seekers after Lost Causes . Thus they were rowing in the Oxford boat defeated by Cambridge in the recent Boat Race . I am not sure if they were connected to their lawyers and launching an appeal against the race judges while still rowing , but I am pretty sure that their mobiles were close by , and that their stay in the UK has been an intensively networked experience . And that is where , if they truly want to defeat Mr Zuckerberg , they should be investing their winnings . For the successor to Facebook is lurking out there in the mobile networks even now , built for the network , and not adapted to it as Facebook was .
Over at News Corp , the senior strategists are doing all-nighters to work out what AOL just got : neither MySpace or BeBo will make it . I could save them so much time . The answer is : Go and buy www.foursquare.com . Here is a made for the network social media environment that lets users rate the places that they visit , put them into the social media context , give them credit and points for discovering things ( I could be “mayor” of my local pub if I was’t too busy drinking there ) , and above all , like Facebook , give them credit in the eyes of their peers .
Amazingly then , tomorrow’s social media on the mobile/cell network appears to be a close relation of a number of web-based antecedents . Craigslist for a start . Mobile networking is all about spatial awareness and recommendation . Other parallel players might be the splendid www.brownbook.com , derived from the recommendation directory world , or Qype in Hamburg , Germany. If you are too late to buy FourSquare then there might be some ideas here . The latest BrownBook release now lists 34 million commercial entities globally where you can make comments and recommendations .
Once FourSquare is up and away bigtime ( sorry , the language goes with the subject) , you will want to create the real time links that show you when your friends are checked in to the bar or restaurant or hair salon or pub that you are just approaching on the street outside . Then the fun begins , but early investment before concept maturity is advisable . And only a few things remain to be said . One is that having discovered this I seem to have let the cat out of the bag before buying a major ( or any) stake . Which is why I am poor . Secondly , I seem to be saying that the future of social media and directories are inextricably linked , which is not where I thought I was going to end up . Lastly , if the history of the network is about constant innovation , then BeBo , MySpace and FaceBook can all be described as players who innovated once , and then stuck to the knitting . Which is why they will all be overtaken by the Next New Thing . And , guess what , you read it first here !
Mar
10
Contains No Nuts
Filed Under B2B, Blog, internet, online advertising, Publishing, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
I am used to the questions . Many arise from a need to challenge or or a need for re-assurance or a fear of silence . So the person who asked , this week , ” what is the technology launch that is the best indicator of media futures ?” , wanted , I think , something like ” iPad , or , err , something else mobile-ish….”.This would have helped her view that she is afloat on a sea of uncertainty , but bobbing in the right direction .
My answer is the Cisco CRS-3 , the newest router which really equips the internet as an integrator of digital video (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2011300638_cisco10.html) . It could , say Cisco , move the entire Library of Congress in one second , or the entire archive of every film ever made in four minutes . But the thing that fascinates me at the moment is the way in which networks with embedded technologies like this will remove the volume/speed excuse that has traditionally lain beneath the reluctance of niched information providers to give whole solutions to user problems/demands . This is no where more obvious than in STM , which is where my second question arose .
“Well, ” he said , ” you clearly took a shine to Globalspec : what is the equivalent in STM and why are they any better than we are “. I ignored the challenge implicit here , and replied that my pick in STM over a decade had been Nature Publishing , and this was about attitude . ” Full of geeks and nerds , eh ? ” Not at all , I replied ( mentally writing the title to this piece as I did so),
but it is certainly true that they are very quickly responsive to change , and experiment publicly in beta and in conjunction with their users until they find useful combinations that fit . Clearly therefore the new Nature iPhone App ( http://www.nature.com/mobileapps/) is not the end of the story , but it demonstrates Nature’s keen concern to get involved , early on and with an open mind , and strive to create utility for their users . This was the case with Connotea , their ground-breaking social tagging environment , with Scintilla , their news-tagging activity , with Nature Networks and with the network local hubs . It seems to me that the attitude here is service -orientated and not product -centric , and that the logic says that users who are involved in service developments and have a stake in them are less likely to go elsewhere , especially if they started with Nature as grad students .
This does not mean that more traditional business development activities can be ignored . Nature has to be top of the heap in quality terms . Over a decade its content coverage has improved mightily and , through its associated publishing , it is now well on the way to core coverage across the “hard ” sciences . In one sense nothing is more traditional than recruitment advertising : once an area of neglect this is now a keystone of the arch and a factor which helps cement the Nature community together . I predicted to my interlocutor that I thought education would be a continuing interest , and that I was vitally concerned to see how Nature was able in time to make rafts of multiple media experimental evidential data available to users . Their Gateway strategy , from Cell Signalling and Neuroscience , had led the way in this field : when , I wondered , would it become the norm for research published by Nature to be linked to the evidential databases behind the work .
He leapt upon “education “. ” You mean Second Nature on Second Life – if we had all gone there we would be bankrupt “. Well , I have no idea what Nature has spent with Second Life , but I do know that when people like me stop writing about things , then other people tend to think that they have ceased to exist . Plainly wrong . Traded revenues on Second Life in 2009 totalled , in real world dollars , 567 million , a 65% increase on the previous year . And in December , with 770,000 unique users during the month , residents/users checked out $ 55 million in earnings converted into cash . Not centre stage , but certainly not dead ( see also .http://lindenlab.com/pressroom/releases/22_09_09 )
And no doubt Nature will be pursuing other educational initiatives : pulling Scientific American under the same management is undoubtedly a step forward in this regard. While continually consolidating and refining their offerings through the lessons taught by their users , I have also no doubt that their tradition of experimentation will continue to thrive in a company increasing divergent from its peers in this respect . Elsewhere the impact of technology , while far-reaching , has often been isolated from the thinking about editorially constructing a research journal . But then , Nature was always more than just a research journal .
Last word with Google . In the week of the Cisco announcement , they indicated an experiment with Dish to create Google TV-Search (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10465956-93.html ) , a way of intercombining a Google search and a set-top box , while TiVo announced new digital video recorders which bring back video from the Web . This is the next New Frontier : we need to calculate the impact on the expectations of users in B2B, STM or other areas of business and professional information now , while we are at the on-ramp , not when we are facing new competitors . This is what Nature have done so well .
PS In my note Viva , Las Vegas , and here , I have tried to emphasize the continuing importance of virtual reality , so it was good to see UBM relaunch the Comdex compueter show as VR only(.http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10463726-93.html )
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