Sunday, March 27, 2011

Ready to go

The Personalize MEdia Conference -- its fifth year -- is in Boulder, CO, June 20 and 21.
The agenda is simple: Meet the entrepeneurs who personalize books, magazines,newspapers and more.
It's happening. You just have to experience, to believe.

Monday, March 7, 2011

Exciting, or what?

So now we're getting real collaboration and competition in the possible race toward digital printing of newspapers and magazines and books. Is this what we've been waiting for?

The March 7 short from the magazine News & Tech, that covers this evolving situation better than anyone else.

From the magazine's online weekly report:

Donnelley, KBA team for digital press

RR Donnelley & Sons Co. and Koenig & Bauer AG announced a partnership to develop, manufacture and sell digital inkjet printing systems with piezoelectric printing head technology to the newspaper, commercial printing, packaging printing and securities segments.
Under terms of the deal, RR Donnelley said it will license its Apollo and other digital imaging technologies to KBA.
KBA’s new digital presses will be introduced in May 2012 at Drupa in Dusseldorf, Germany, the companies said.
“In our analysis, it was clear that RR Donnelley was uniquely positioned to partner with us from a digital print technology, experience and scale perspective,” KBA’s CEO Helge Hansen said in a statement. “It’s more than a sales and service agreement for existing technology. We look forward to jointly reinvigorating this industry with new digital imaging platforms.”
RR Donnelley said the deal brings together 1,000 engineers and imaging scientists. The companies said more details will be revealed at a later date.
KBA’s entry into the digital press arena brings to three the number of web offset vendors either offering or planning to market digital presses. TKS unveiled its JetLeader digital press in 2010 and is now marketing the second generation of the machine. The new model, the JetLeader 1500, is equipped with a high-speed multisection folder capable of creating newspapers with up to 72 pages and four sections.
Manroland, meantime, is teaming up with Océ to market a line of digital presses based on Océ’s JetStream and ColorStream platforms. The presses, using software and folders from manroland, are expected to be available later this year.
Heidelberg said it also intends to market a digital press in 2011.

Dilemma in a nutshell

The nature of the web is a link society. So to play there you have to accept that those publications that are rushing to the web, but not understanding its nature, may be doomed. Here is one of the best analysis of a real, ongoing transition.

What's so wonderful about this explanation is how contradictory results can be during the transition. Huge growth in online from print, due to the nature of brand, pre-digital -- but eventual doom behind a walled garden, due to the nature of brand, post-digital: perhaps.

Visit: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/03/06/the-fts-decline/

Here's the full text by Felix Salmon, March 6:

I had a hard-to-follow Twitter debate yesterday about the FT’s paywall, where a couple of FT types — Alan Beattie and John Gapper — told me that the latest numbers for digital subscribers show that I was wrong when I criticized the FT’s strategy in October 2007. I’m often wrong, so that wouldn’t come as a surprise. But in this case I think I was right.

Because the FT is a subsidiary of a much larger corporation, it can confine itself to releasing only the numbers it wants to release. But a few things are clear at this point.

Firstly, the success of the website — if indeed it is a success — has not helped stop the bleeding in terms of print subscribers. Daily print circulation was 485,000 at the end of 2000, and dropped at a rate of about 5,000 a year to 440,000 at the end of 2008. The rate of decline has accelerated sharply since then: print circulation is now 390,000, which means the paper has been losing around 25,000 print subscribers per year over the past couple of years.

The good news is that digital subscribers have been arriving more quickly than print subscribers have been leaving. In the past year alone, the digital subscriber base has risen from 121,000 to 207,000 — an increase of 86,000 people, all of whom are paying print-like subscription rates.

Exactly what those rates are is not easy to determine. FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw told me a couple of years ago that he loved the kind of airline pricing models where someone who paid $45 for their ticket can be sitting next to someone who paid $945 for the same service. So there’s a lot of opacity built in to the system. But I can tell you a few different rates.

Here in New York, if I lock myself in to an annual subscription, the FT will give me website access (including mobile and iPad) for $259 per year, or “premium” website access, including the Lex column and a couple of other bells and whistles, for $389 per year. If I want the physical newspaper delivered as well, that costs $440 per year. If I sign up monthly rather than annually, the minimum cost for the website is $312 per year, with premium access at $468 and the combined print-and-online subscription at $528. The newspaper-only subscription, with no website access, is annual only, at $348.

All of these numbers are significantly lower than they are in the UK, where a basic web subscription is $380 pear year, the premium subscription is $549, and the combined paper-and-online subscription is $845.

There are a few messages being sent here. Firstly, the FT is taking full advantage of its quasi-monopolistic status among UK consumers who are not particularly price-sensitive to charge very high subscription rates there. But it’s keeping its US rates lower because it’s still having difficulty breaking into this market. Secondly, the FT charges a significant premium if you subscribe monthly rather than annually — which says to me that monthly subscribers have tendencies to disloyalty and letting their subscriptions lapse. And finally, the FT is happy to sell a physical newspaper subscription for less than the price of accessing the same content (including the Lex column) online — indeed, the newspaper-only subscription cost is probably less than the cost to the FT of printing and distributing the physical newspaper six days a week.

While the FT loves to tout its combined subscriber base, then, it’s clearly following two different models at once. The newspaper business is the same as it ever was: lose money on printing and distributing the physical product, but make it all up with ad revenues. The online business, by contrast, is all about the subscription revenues, with ad sales being much less important. Gapper goes as far as to say that 207,000 digital subscribers could actually be worth more to the FT than 20 million unique visitors.

Conceptually, what the FT is doing here is holding onto the ad-supported model for as long as it can, while moving aggressively to a newsletter model for the online product. And the problem here is that while newsletters can be profitable, they’re never important*, and they never go viral: they cut themselves off from substantially the enormous world of opportunity afforded by being online. Successful websites get that way because people share them, with their friends and colleagues and Twitter followers — every reader is also a potential content distributor. Under the FT model, by contrast, the FT itself is at pains to be the only content distributor, and tells readers redistributing its content in incredibly natural ways that they are copyright infringers and in violation of the site’s terms and conditions.

Gapper reckons that the newsletter model means higher cashflow, higher CPMs, lower volatility, and higher p/e ratings. I’m pretty sure he’s wrong on the p/e front: there’s no way that the FT is worth anything like the multiples we’re seeing in the online-content space, whether you look at price-to-earnings, price-to-revenues, or any other ratio.

As for the other metrics, cashflow and low volatility are nice things to have, but massive growth is nicer. And for a news organization which aspires to grow from its UK base to become a genuinely global brand, it’s crucial. The FT’s paywall is structured very aggressively — you have to register after reading just one article per month, and then unless you subscribe you’re cut off after 10 articles per month. That’s good at maximizing short-term cashflow, but it clearly hurts growth: the FT doesn’t release numbers for unique visitors, but both Quantcast and Compete show FT uniques falling significantly over the past year, and actually being overtaken by Business Insider. What I said back in 2007 was that the FT was removing itself from the conversation; that’s exactly what seems to have happened.

I don’t doubt for a minute that the FT’s CPMs are very high. But they’re getting there the wrong way, by minimizing the Ms (the number of pageviews) rather than maximizing the Cs (total ad revenues). Eventually, the FT is going to be such a niche product, compared to other business and finance publications, that global B2B advertisers simply won’t see the point in buying it any more. What it should be doing is becoming so big and important outside the UK that major advertisers feel the need to buy it even if they have no desire at all to reach the UK audience. But it’s nowhere near that point yet, and it doesn’t seem to be getting there, either.

And if the FT isn’t serving advertisers well, it’s not doing so well for readers, either. Paywalls should always be completely invisible to subscribers, but the FT’s fails miserably on that front: subscribers keep on running into that wall on a regular basis, especially when they try to visit ft.com from their mobile device, or when they try to follow a link sent to them by a non-subscriber.

Meanwhile, it’s not just the cost of a subscription which is opaque — the broader FT franchise seems set up to make no readers at all happy with what they’re getting.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re very interested in China. There’s China content in the FT, of course, which will cost you a few hundred dollars a year to read. If you want wonkier and more in-depth material, a great place to look is FT Alphaville, which regularly takes FT content and then adds very sophisticated analysis and data. Confusingly, Alphaville content is free. And then there’s the Long Room, an elite forum for financial professionals to discuss such matters: that’s free, too. Over to the side, there’s also FT Tilt. That has its own proprietary China content for which it charges thousands of dollars, alongside contributed content which is free with registration. And finally there’s China Confidential, a newsletter which comes out every couple of weeks or so, costs even more than FT Tilt, and which has recently launched a spin-off called China Confidential Funds which doubtless costs more still.

The whole structure feels a bit like Scientology: every time you reach one level, you realize there’s another, more expensive level awaiting you. The China story is of course absolutely central to the FT’s mission of explaining global business and economics — but instead of corralling its resources and creating the best coverage for its readers that it can possibly put together, it balkanizes those resources and has one group of people writing for the paper, another for Alphavile, a third for Tilt, a fourth for China Confidential, and a fifth for China Confidential Funds. From a sheer journalistic-quality perspective, this can’t possibly make sense. And it’s not like there’s a strong correlation between the price of the products and the quality of the journalists, either. It’s really just a mess, a desperate scrabble for revenues from a company which ought to be building the best unified global business coverage it can.

Overall, the FT strategy is exactly the strategy I would choose if I was faced with an industry in terminal decline, and wanted to extract as much money as possible from it before it died. And that’s sad, because the FT can and should be a major global player in perpetuity. Pearson should sell it now, to someone who can invest in it and make it relevant to a fast-growing business audience worldwide. If Pearson fails to do so, the annual decline in the value of the FT franchise will always exceed the dividend that Pearson manages to extract from it.

*Update: I’m getting pushback on this one bit in particular, where I said that newsletters are never important. They can be important within small, specialized groups or industries. But they’re never important to a general audience, or even a general business audience: they only become important when they start targeting very narrow groups like private-equity general partners or hedge fund prime brokers.

Update 2: Gapper responds. He talks about earnings growth at the FT Group as though it proves something — but it doesn’t, because that says nothing about earnings growth at the FT. (One would expect FT Group earnings to be increasing, if only because Pearson keeps on adding things like Medley Global Advisors to the group.)

More to the point, Gapper seems to have convinced himself that the FT’s high CPMs are entirely a function of its paywall, rather than a function of who its readers are. He compares revenues at the FT to those at the Guardian and at Gawker Media (!), and on that basis decides that the FT could never make an ad-supported model work. But of course the FT could still charge very high CPMs even if it was free, they would never come down to general-interest levels.

Gapper seems to think that I said that ad revenues from 20 million unique visitors would exceed subscription revenues from 207,000 subscribers. I never said that. But, pace Gapper, let’s do the math. He seems to think that Gawker Media is a good example of a site with 20 million uniques, so let’s use that as our example: it gets about 300m pageviews a month — 3.6 billion pageviews per year — from its 20m US visitors.

Gapper’s estimate for FT digital subscription revenues is $52 million per year. In order to get $52 million from 3.6 billion pageviews, you’d need revenue per 1,000 pages of about $14. Let’s say you have two ad units per page, and you can sell two-thirds of your inventory. Then in order for your ad revenues to exceed $52 million, you’d need CPMs of about $10 on average. I’m sure the FT can charge much more than that.

Meanwhile, the value of the FT itself is surely much greater with 20 million global readers than it is with 3 million — after all, the media business is all about building as large an audience as possible. Yes, it’s nice to have a diversified revenue stream, which is why Pearson owns lots of subscription-based products and is buying more. But that doesn’t mean the FT itself has to move aggressively away from advertising and towards subscriptions.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Libraries unite

If ever there were a push for ebooks from a source that can truly make a difference, especially in demanding and receiving a standardized format for epubs, it would be the libraries of America.
So this announcement is very interesting.
(You can go to this site to see the list of libraries that have joined the movement:
http://www.archive.org/post/349420/in-library-ebook-lending-program-launched.)

Internet Archive and Library Partners Develop Joint Collection of 80,000+ eBooks
To Extend Traditional In-Library Lending Model

San Francisco, CA – Today, a group of libraries led by the Internet Archive announced a new, cooperative 80,000+ eBook lending collection of mostly 20th century books on OpenLibrary.org, a site where it’s already possible to read over 1 million eBooks without restriction. During a library visit, patrons with an OpenLibrary.org account can borrow any of these lendable eBooks using laptops, reading devices or library computers. This new twist on the traditional lending model could increase eBook use and revenue for publishers.



Borrow in partner library"As readers go digital, so are our libraries," said Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. "It’s fabulous to work with such a great group of 150 forward-thinking libraries." (See the list of participating libraries below.)

This new digital lending system will enable patrons of participating libraries to read books in a web browser. “In Silicon Valley, iPads and other reading devices are hugely popular. Our partnership with the Internet Archive and OpenLibrary.org is crucial to achieving our mission – to meet the reading needs of our library visitors and our community," said Linda Crowe, Executive Director of the Peninsula Library System.

A recent survey of libraries across North America was conducted by Unisphere Research and Information Today, Inc. (ITI). It reported that of the 1,201 libraries canvassed, 73% are seeing increased demand for digital resources with 67% reporting increased demand for wireless access and 62% seeing a surge in demand for web access.

American libraries spend $3-4 billion each year on publishers’ products. "I'm not suggesting we spend less, I am suggesting we spend smarter by buying and lending more eBooks," asserts Kahle. He is also encouraging libraries worldwide to join in the expansion of this pool of purchased and digitized eBooks so their patrons can borrow from this larger collection.

How it Works


Borrow in partner libraryAny OpenLibrary.org account holder can borrow up to 5 eBooks at a time, for up to 2 weeks. Books can only be borrowed by one person at a time. People can choose to borrow either an in-browser version (viewed using the Internet Archive’s BookReader web application), or a PDF or ePub version, managed by the free Adobe Digital Editions software. This new technology follows the lead of the Google eBookstore, which sells books from many publishers to be read using Google's books-in-browsers technology. Readers can use laptops, library computers and tablet devices including the iPad.

What Participating Libraries Are Saying
The reasons for joining the initiative vary from library to library. Judy Russell, Dean of University Libraries at the University of Florida, said, "We have hundreds of books that are too brittle to circulate. This digitize-and-lend system allows us to provide access to these older books without endangering the physical copy."

"Libraries are our allies in creating the best range of discovery mechanisms for writers and readers...”
Richard Nash
Founder of Cursor, PublisherDigital lending also offers wider access to one-of-a-kind or rare books on specific topics such as family histories – popular with genealogists. This pooled collection will enable libraries like the Boston Public Library and the Allen County Public Library in Indiana to share their materials with genealogists around the state, the country and the world.

"Genealogists are some of our most enthusiastic users, and the Boston Public Library holds some genealogy books that exist nowhere else,” said Amy E. Ryan, President of the Boston Public Library. "This lending system allows our users to search for names in these books for the first time, and allows us to efficiently lend some of these books to visitors at distant libraries."

"Reciprocal sharing of genealogy resources is crucial to family history research. The Allen County Public Library owns the largest public genealogy collection in the country, and we want to make our resources available to as many people as possible. Our partnership in this initiative offers us a chance to reach a wider audience,” said Jeffrey Krull, director of the Allen County Public Library.

Publishers selling their eBooks to participating libraries include Cursor and OR Books. Books purchased will be lent to readers as well as being digitally preserved for the long-term. This continues the traditional relationship and services offered by publishers and libraries.



Borrow in partner library"Libraries are our allies in creating the best range of discovery mechanisms for writers and readers—enabling open and browser-based lending through the Internet Archive means more books for more readers, and we're thrilled to do our part in achieving that,” said Richard Nash, founder of Cursor.

John Oakes, founder of OR Books said, "We're always on the lookout for innovative solutions to solve the conundrum of contemporary publishing, and we are excited to learn about the Internet Archive's latest project. For us, it's a way to extend our reach to the crucial library market. We look forward to the results. "

Friday, January 28, 2011

OCE checks back in

The acquisition by Canon slowed OCE's printer developments a bit, but now they are back with the announcement of the new Colorstream.

http://www.printweek.com/News/1051378/OcE-heralds-new-era-production-colour-ColorStream/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH

Océ heralds 'new era' in production colour with ColorStream
Tim Sheahan, printweek.com, 26 January 2011

Dutch digital equipment manufacturer Océ has claimed that the introduction of its latest machine, the ColorStream 3500 heralds a "new era in production colour".

The company gave a European debut to the high-volume inkjet machine at its international headquarters in Poing, Germany yesterday (25 January).

The full-colour web press can print on a web width of 540mm and Océ is pitching the machine at customers operating in the transactional, transpromo, direct mail and book-printing sectors.

Speaking at the event, Roland Stasiczek, international director of marketing continuous-feed printers at Océ, said the addition of the ColorStream 3500 cemented the company's status as the "biggest continuous-feed provider in the industry.

"The ColorStream 3500 takes the digital experience of Océ to provide a highly-flexible machine that is also low risk as it is based on proven technology," he added.

The manufacturer's new press can print at speeds up to 75m per minute, the equivalent to 505 A4ppm on a single unit configuration or 1,010 A4ppm on a twin model. The 3500 prints at a resolution of 600dpi.

Although the new machine is available in a four-colour configuration with the option to add a fifth or a sixth colour when required, customers can also opt for an entry-level mono model with the option to add colour further down the line.

Sebastian Landesberger, executive vice president of Océ Production Printing, said: "By consequently expanding our continuous feed colour family, we can cover the widest range of market requirements.

"The Océ ColorStream 3500 meets both full-color and monochrome demands, along with the need for efficient simplex and duplex printing."

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Socially curated

Using Twitter or Facebook or any number of social media sites as the basis, there are now appearing socially curated magazines and newspapers.

There is http:www.paper.li for the newspaper online format. And now this from TechCrunch:

(http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/sobees-launches-ipad-app-newsmix-a-socially-curated-digital-magazine/)

Sobees has made a business of creating innovative social media clients, particularly focusing on bringing Twitter, Facebook and social search to the a variety of platforms. Today, the developer is getting into the news business with the launch of NewsMix, an iPad app which presents news and content shared by your social circle in a magazine format on the device.

The app, which costs $2.99 in the App Store, allows you to create and mix a digital magazine composed of content shared in your Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds (Google
Reader and feed search). The app will categorize content in a magazine or show news in a separate timeline format for Facebook and Twitter. And you can view photos and videos in separate sections.

In terms of social capabilities, the app allows you to comment and like Facebook posts directly from the magazine, and you can share articles on both Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. The App also allows you to email content and send articles to Instapaper.

Sobees founder Francois Bochatay says that the app contains the startup’s proprietary curation technology, which will will automatically prioritize and curate Twitter and Facebook posts based on your interactions with the app.

Of course, NewsMix sounds very similar to the enormously popular iPad app Flipboard, which also curates articles and images from your social streams like Twitter and Facebook, and presents them in a magazine-like format. Pulse also plays in the space as well.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Free to change

Is it true that if a newspaper company is not laden with debt it has a fighting chance today? That's the question that seems to be answered by Wall Street's positive attitude toward newspapers that have little debt and the negative attitude toward newspapers with lots of debt.

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2011/01/wall-st-spanked-debt-laden-publishers.html

So goes the analysis of Alan Mutter, the so-called newsosaur who makes a big deal out of remembering/experiencing setting type one letter at a time. I, too, remember, linotype machines, and linotypists (what a breed) and the smell of molten lead and the joy of reading stones upside down and backwards.

All that aside, here is Alan's blog:

Wall Street repudiated the shares of debt-heavy newspaper companies in 2010 at the same time the stocks of generally less leveraged publishers advanced.


In a decidedly mixed year for the 11 remaining publicly traded newspaper companies, share prices last year soared as high as 51% for A.H. Belo while they plunged by an almost identical amount – 50.5% – at GateHouse Media.


As illustrated in the table below, the shares of six publishers rose in 2010 at the same time their peers went south. If you average out the winners and losers, the shares of the industry rose about 1% during the 12 months that the Standard and Poor’s index of 500 stocks gained 12.8%.


But the average performance for the industry is meaningless in light of the wide-ranging performance of the individual stocks.


The principal reason for the sharply disparate performance among publishers is the amount of debt loaded on their companies. Belo has zero long-term debt on its books, while GateHouse is staggering under $1.2 billion in debt, an amount equivalent to nearly 13 times its EBITDA in the last 12 months.


EBITDA – which stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization – is a common way of measuring the profitability of companies. Financiers divide a company’s debt by its EBITDA to gauge its ability to repay the money it borrows.


Given the uncertain future for newspapers after 4½ straight years of declines that brought total industry advertising sales in 2010 to approximately half of the record $49 billion achieved in 2005, some authorities believe newspapers should borrow no more than one time their EBITDA.


While this goal was beyond the reach of the publishers who borrowed aggressively to expand their empires prior to the financial meltdown, the newspaper companies with the lowest debt generally fared the best on Wall Street in 2010.


As noted in the table below, modestly indebted companies like Scripps (almost no debt), the Washington Post Co. (debt equal to 0.5 times of its EBITDA), Journal Communications (debt of 1.5x its EBITDA) and Gannett (2.0x debt) enjoyed neutral or favorable treatment on Wall Street in the last 12 months. On the other hand, the shares of GateHouse (12.9x debt), Lee Enterprises (6.4x debt) and Media General (5.8x) were sold off. (CORRECTION: Owing to a data transcription error on my part, the ratio of Lee was overstated in the original post; the number publisher here now is correct.)


There are some exceptions to the trend:


:: Shares of the New York Times Co. dropped 20.7% even though it trimmed its debt to 1.8x times EBITDA from a ratio of 3x a year ago. One drag on the shares of the Gray Lady may be the two-tiered ownership structure that gives family members superior voting authority over public investors.


:: McClatchy’s stock rose 31.9% even though its debt is 4.4x its trailing operating earnings. Here is the likely reason for the bounce: While the company looked at the end of 2009 like it might not be able to avoid joining several other over-leveraged publishers in bankruptcy court, MNI appears to have dodged the bullet by slashing expenses, boosting profits and reorganizing its debt.


:: News Corp.’s shares advanced by 3.3% despite an 8.8x debt load. The likely reason for this is that the company’s worldwide broadcast, cable, satellite, movie and other non-newspaper franchises are performing sufficiently well that investors are willing to tolerate a higher debt load.

What's behind the seemingly schizophrenic approach to investing newspapers?

The divergent performance of newspaper stocks in 2010 suggests that at least some investors are willing to put their money on companies with low debt burdens in the belief that the publishers will have the ingenuity, revenue and cash flow to morph their companies into successful players in the digital age.

Heavily indebted publishers, on the other hand, are forced to limit investment in their companies, because they have to earmark a disproportionate amount of their profits to interest payments. To maximize profits to pay their hefty interest bills, many publishers have cut staff, squeezed newshole, curtailed circulation and taken other, similarly counter-intuitve actions to come up with the money necessary to stay one step ahead of their creditors.

The selloff in highly leveraged newspaper companies means that Wall Street is rejecting publishers who are not able to invest in the long-term growth of their businesses.

At the simplest level, investors want to put their money into companies that have the best chances of growing in the future. But many investors probably also fear that the over-extended publishers eventually could go into bankruptcy to offload their crushing debt, a step that would render their investments worthless.

Choosing to be safe than sorry, investors last year steered clear of over-levergaed newspaper companies.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Mad as hell

Howard Beale in the movie Network (1976) first and definitively expressed how you come to feel when your media cannot get the story right; when the media doesn't talk to you; when the media doesn't see the reality you live every day. When the media is not being the MEdia.

(Watch it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_qgVn-Op7Q&feature=player_embe)

Howard Beale: I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep guns under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street.

Nobody anywhere seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. We sit watching our TVs while some newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. Everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house. Slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller.

All we say is, “Please. At least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, my TV, my steel-belted radials. I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.”

I’m not gonna leave you alone. “I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest or riot. Don’t write to your congressman. I don’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about depression, inflation, the Russians, the crime in the streets.”

All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say “I’m a human being, goddamn it. My life has value.”

So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up now and go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore.“ I want you to get up right now, Go to your windows, open them, stick your head out and yell: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore.”

Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the oil crisis. Go to your windows, open them, stick your head out and yell: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more."

Big Blue weighs in

When IBM says its going to be big, you can bet on the fact that they already have developed product and are about to flex muscle. So to some degree the trend is inevitable.

To see the whole story: http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=76602

The new year brings visions of the future, with technology predictions from IBM, Intel and others. IBM's vision is based on what it's working on and include harnessing heat from data centers, personalized systems, and long-lasting batteries. Intel's vision also focuses on its work, including hybrid tablets/netbooks and device sensors.

It's crystal-ball time. Along with vows of making more money and losing more weight, the new year prompts visions of what the technology future will hold.
IBM has issued its big-five predictions, based on what it's working on and a five-year time span, visualized with an animation on YouTube. For data-center managers, the company envisions all that heat from computers being harnessed to heat water or cool buildings. Big Blue also sees commuters in this bright future enjoying the evolution of personalization in GPS-equipped smartphones and car-based systems, with real-time traffic data, displays of alternate routes, and details on parking availability making traffic jams a thing of the past.

'Citizen Scientists'

Traveling may become easier, but virtual travel and expanded entertainment may make actually going someplace less important. IBM foresees glassless 3-D moving holograms that allow friends to share their telepresences, and that enable entertainment to blur the line between make-believe and reality even more.

While smartphones and other mobile devices have become more powerful, they are still limited by battery life. IBM envisions smaller batteries that last 10 times as long as current ones, and that can draw their power from air or from static electricity generated by the user.

Finally, the computing giant sees sensors inhabiting all manner of vehicles, devices and facilities, such that "citizen scientists" will be able to help real scientists and researchers map their environment by collecting and transmitting data about everyday surroundings. In other words, we all become Google Street View vehicles.

Not to be outdone by the people at IBM, Intel focused its predictions on just 2011 -- all of which, of course, involve areas of Intel R&D. Technologies picking up steam, according to Intel executives, include smart TV, hybrid tablets/netbooks, and "perceptual computers" that use object-recognizing, GPS and other sensors to create the next level in on-the-spot recommendations, such as when you're on vacation.

Intel also sees 2011 ushering in movie-like digital signs not unlike those in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, a surge in home energy-management devices, and a further blurring between consumer and enterprise devices. And, for those who think Moore's Law has reached its limit because the number of transistors on a chip cannot keep doubling about every two years, Intel says the law is still active and on the books in the new year.

Clouds in Your Future

Industry research firms, of course, are all about making predictions. Forrester sees hosted private clouds outnumbering internal clouds three to one, the arrival of industry-based community clouds, and workstation applications with cloud computing behind them, bringing high-performance computing "to the masses."

Al Hilwa, program director for applications development software at IDC, predicts HTML5 will begin to replace HTML "on some aggressive sites" by year's end, although Adobe Flash and Silverlight "will not go away" because of their "high-end effects, pixel fidelity, and content protection." He also sees a further heating up of mobile-application platforms, adding that "more than one vendor will provide tools that bring iPhone apps into their ecosystem."

One word that has dominated IT throughout 2010 has been "cloud," and Hilwa sees a wider adoption in 2011 of cloud application platforms, or what he described as "database, middleware and tools as a service." He predicted that in 2011 and beyond, these platforms will be more widely adopted by ISVs before "they gain serious traction in large enterprises."

Speaking of clouds, Gartner sees cloud computing in 2011 as tangled in a continuation of "inflated expectations," while IT management software and solutions company CA Technologies thinks 2011 will be the year when the talk about cloud computing's potential "will become a reality."

CA also expects organizations to change "their perception of cloud security as stronger, more advanced security options are deployed as cloud services from organizations that specialize in security," providing a level that most businesses cannot obtain by themselves.

With all these forecasts for the new year and beyond, it's wise to remember that predictions are quickly forgotten once the future shows up.

Another one gets personal

You could say another one bites the dust. But I'd rather say another one gets personal.

(Visit: http://www.editorsweblog.org/multimedia/2010/11/board_members_of_la_nacion_confirm_closu.php)

Full text from EditorsWeblog:

Board members of La Nacion confirm closure of print edition

Posted by Emma Heald on November 16, 2010 at 9:50 AM
Board members of Chilean newspaper La Nacion approved on Friday the closure of the daily's print edition due to circulation decline. The 93-year-old newspaper will be only available online, Milenio reported.

According to media reports, the last print version will circulate on November 28, Efe revealed. However, neither the publishing company nor the government, which owns 69 percent of the newspaper's shares, could confirm the date. "The newspaper will not close," said government spokeswoman Ena Von Baer to Efe. "The government's desire is to keep the newspaper. It has asked the directory that this diary is maintained in a sustainable manner that suits the new time."

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

Virtual directness

One of the fastest ways to get a response directly from an individual is online with a product of direct interest, such as a virtual product involved with a virtual game or experience the user is enjoying.

Here is a good look at the growth and size of that "direct mail" world.

(Go to http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/31/the-year-in-virtual-goods-by-the-numbers/)

Here is full text from Techcrunch on Dec. 31, 2010:

By Ted Sorom

Editor’s note: Guest author Ted Sorom is the CEO of Rixty, a virtual currency platform.

The global virtual goods industry put up some very impressive numbers this year. From special Easter eggs to virtual ad campaigns, virtual goods sales have grabbed their share of headlines over the past twelve months. Now with social gaming on the rise and everyone from your teenage nephew to your grandma to your old rugby teammate buying a “little something” to sweeten their online game, here is a look a back at the year in virtual goods sales.

$7,300,000,000: expected global revenue generated by the virtual goods industry in 2010. This is huge, considering the $60 billion generated in 2009 by the video game industry as a whole, and clearly shows that browser-based gaming is making great strides.

$2,100,000,000: The projected size of the US virtual goods market in 2011.

80,000,000: the all-time high number of Farmville players. The ubiquitous title for social gaming the world over, FarmVille surpassed its 2009 high mark of 50 million monthly active users, hitting this new peak in early 2010. You can now stop pretending you’re not addicted to your precious online farm. It’s ok… you’re among friends. Oh, and now CityVille is larger than FarmVille and approaching FarmVille’s all-time high with 75 million monthly active users.

20: percentage of Electronic Art’s overall revenue generated by digital sales. These aren’t just avatar items and XP boosts; the figure also refers to full-game downloads and downloadable content (DLC) to enhance console games. EA’s CFO Eric Brown notes that their “digital sales usually start with the sale of a physical disc, especially on the current generation of consoles.” But the upcoming Star Wars MMO is guaranteed to boost DLC consumption; want a blue double-ended light saber? It can be yours, if the price is right.

90,000,000: number of Pet Society virtual goods sold every single day. According to developer EA/Playfish, their most popular title has 20 million users, double that of World of Warcraft. It’s no wonder that EA was willing to pay $400 million to acquire the hot social developer in 2009.

$635,000: New world record for the single largest purchase in an online game, in this case a virtual intergalactic resort in Planet Calypso. A few years ago the same seller, Jon ‘Neverdie’ Jacobs, sold $335,000 worth of virtual real estate in Entropia Universe. While the majority of microtransactions cost just a few dollars, there are rare occasions where individuals spend serious money on virtual goods. Clearly, the virtual “Club Neverdie superdome” was a sound investment for Jacobs; the new owner (Yan Panasjuk) anticipates that the property will continue to grow in value. He is now dedicating 40 to 60 hours a week to the game, and has been playing MMOs for over a decade. Both parties are serious about their virtual worlds. Mr. Jacobs, also a career gamer, has already made over half a million dollars in online real estate.

4,000,000: total number of items in IMVU’s virtual goods catalog, making it the world’s largest. Based in Silicon Valley, the company runs a hybrid chat, gaming and avatar site. There are over 5,000 new items added every day, primarily created and uploaded by IMVU’s own user community.

10% (and growing): percentage of overall item sales in OurWorld generated by the resale market. The multiplayer gaming destination aggregates hundreds of third-party games into a virtual world with over 16,000 virtual items. OurWorld’s CEO, Derrick Morton, states, “In the last half year, we’ve seen our resale market explode. We think that a healthy secondary market is key to running a good virtual economy. If the players can’t trade amongst themselves, the virtual goods really have no value.” Think of it as virtual Craigslist.

220,000: number of “Summertime avatar baseball caps sold in Roblox, a blocky MMO playground. These hats were available for tickets, a free currency that all players get for logging in and which can be traded for Robux or vice versa. Rest, Relaxation and Roblox: gotta keep those virtual “rays” out of your eyes!

15,000,000: number of virtual hot dogs eaten by non-playable characters in LOLapps’ Ravenwood Fair (nom nom). The Facebook game saw huge growth last year to over 100 million monthly active users (MAU), and recently released an interesting info-graphic detailing their rise. For instance, 2 billion quizzes have been taken and 8 billion gifts have been sent!

Two: the factors that drive players to buy upper-tier items in online games, as opposed to just spending $0.99 here and there. The first is Value: Net Dragon’s value packs deliver the same bulk discount that players might find in a real-world big box store. The other big factor is Rarity; limited supply drives up demand. This often comes in the form of a “box” (such as the VIP Box in GameCampus’ Shot Online golf) which contains a wide range of items plus a chance to uncover the game’s rarest and most valuable equipment.

And with that, we wish everyone a Happy New Year. By this time next year, these numbers will look small.