Launching Networked Globe

Network Globe aims to be one of the main sources for information on the Internet of Things

Out of the last six months of travelling, a new project has been born. Networked Globe is intended as a clearing house for news and opinion on the Internet of Things, Machine to Machine and all the technologies that surround these industries.

The intention is to have a daily update on industry news along with two or three feature pieces a week to start with. If gets legs, and an income, then we’ll be looking at extending the coverage.

Finding things to cover certainly won’t be a problem, equipment vendors and telecommunications companies are pouring into the space and security issues are already becoming a major concern, as this story on the vulnerabilities of home automation illustrate.

Hopefully this blog won’t be neglected as the focus shifts to Networked Globe, although there’ll probably be more posts about the usual rollercoaster ride about setting up a business.

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Book publishers and the cost cutting quandary

Traditional book publishers face a challenging future as authors find they get more value from self-publishing.

Traditional book publishers face a challenging future as authors find they get more value from self-publishing.

It was good to head across to Oakland’s East Bay Social Media Breakfast for Shel Israel’s and Robert Scoble’s discussion about their latest book, The Age Of Context.

While the book itself is an interesting overview of how the internet of things is changing the world, Scoble’s and Israel’s self publishing journey though combination of corporate sponsors, crowdfunding and alternative distribution models is an interesting tale in itself.

“Self publishing gives writers much more power than they’ve ever had before,” says Israel. “In many aspects, the traditional publisher just isn’t there any more.”

“By using the tech community and social media to market the book, I’ve sold more copies of The Age of Context in seven weeks than my previous four books combined,” Israel states.

Israel’s point illustrates the challenge facing traditional publishers, like many other industries the publishing houses have reacted to a changing market by cutting costs such as replacing experienced staff with fewer, less experienced workers.

Failing to add value

That cost cutting has the effect of making the businesses irrelevant; if a publicist has to rely on HARO or Source Bottle to contact journalists rather than a contact book built up over years of experience, then they are doing little the writer can’t do themselves.

One of the biggest advantages book publishers offered authors was rigorous editing — good editors are worth their weight in gold to both a writer and their book and in the past self-published books were notable for their lousy editing.

Today, that function has been almost eliminated by publishers have eliminated most in house editors. If a harassed, time poor contractor only has a few days to spend editing the manuscript, as what happened with my last book, then the publishers hasn’t added much to the product at all.

Similarly with design and layout, historically publishers have been strong on this front with experienced editors knowing what covers will work for certain genres in the bookshops. The cheapest graduate worker in the world can’t replicate that understanding of the marketplace.

Most damaging of all though to publishers was losing the distribution channels; when bookstores were the way most readers bought their books the publishing house’s sales team were essential for getting books on shelves. In an age of Amazon and online shopping, they are no longer the gatekeepers they once were.

Self publishing risks

That’s not say there aren’t risks with self publishing, particularly with having corporate sponsors pay for development costs.

Scoble and Israel overcame the increasingly stingy author advances by raising $105,000 from corporate sponsors to cover the initial researching and writing costs.

“We were scared to death that this was a credibility issue,” said Israel. “However our sponsors were incredibly good with not messing around with editorial credibility. They, like others in the book, got to see what was written to check for technical accuracy but not change the content.”

“An example is that Google was not a sponsor and Bing was, yet we said an awful lot more good things about Google than we did about Bing.”

Adopting the financial risk

The biggest risk of all for self-publishing though is being stuck with a stack of unsold books with a pile of bills for editors, designers and printing. In the past the publisher carried all the financial risk which was probably the greatest service they provided to authors.

Even that risk isn’t as great as it was a few years ago as print runs are cheaper and shorter while outsourcing sites make it cheaper and easier to find professional help.

As Israel and Scoble illustrate, book publishers have made themselves irrelevant to most authors. It’s probably the best case study of an industry reacting to change with cost cuts that ultimately destroy their own competitive advantage.

That’s something that other businesses and industries should consider when looking at how to deal with their own disruption.

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Crumbling cookies

Internet cookies are dying, what will replace them?

On the last ABC radio spot we looked at how our data is being tracked, in the following 702 Sydney program with Linda Mottram we looked at the role of Internet cookies and online privacy.

Cookies – tiny text files that store visitors’ details on websites – have long been the mainstay of online commerce as they track the behaviour of web surfers.

For media companies, Cookies have become a key way of identifying and understanding their readers making these web tracking tools an essential part of an already revenue challenged online news model.

Cookies also present security and privacy risks as, like all Big Data, the information held within them can be cross-referenced with other sources to create a picture of and often identify an internet users.

These online data crumbs often follow us around the web as advertising platforms and other services, particularly social media sites, monitor our behaviour and the European Union’s Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications is the first step by regulators to crack down on the use of cookies.

Similar moves are afoot in the US as regulators start to formulate rules around the use of Cookies, in an Australian context, the National Privacy Principles apply however they are of limited protection as most cookies are not considered to be ‘identifiable data’, the same get out used by US government agencies to monitor citizens’ communications.

Generally these rules promise to be so cumbersome for online services Google is looking at getting rid of cookies altogether .

Ditching cookies gives Google a great deal of power with its existing ways of tracking users and ties into Eric Scmidt’s stated aim of making the company’s Google Plus service an identity service that verifies we are who we say we are online.

Whether Google does succeed in becoming the web’s definitive identity service remains to be seen, we are though in a time where the questions of what is acceptable in tracking our online behaviour are being examined.

For the media companies and advertising, putting the control of online analytics in the hands of one or two companies may also add another level of middle man in a market where margins are already thin if not non-existent.

It may well be that we look back on the time when we were worried about  internet cookies tracking us as being a more innocent time.

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Who will fill the online advertising opportunity?

The State Of The Internet report reveals the twenty billion dollar advertising opportunity that still hasn’t been taken.

It’s been a big week of reports with three major sets of findings being published; Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, IBM’s Retail Therapy and, the biggest one of all, Mary Meeker’s annual State Of The Internet.

With a PowerPoint overview weighing in a 117 slides, this year’s state of the internet is a meaty tome with some fascinating observations that compliment Cisco and IBM’s findings which hopefully I’ll have time to write about on the weekend.

On slide five of the State Of The Internet is what hasn’t changed Meeker describes the $20 billion internet opportunity being missed.

Basically online advertising is not keeping up with the audience, the time spent on media versus advertising spend is lagging.

mobile-market-opportunity-mary-meeker

What’s notable is that this is the third year that Meeker has flagged this disconnect, yet advertisers still aren’t moving onto the web in the way audiences are.

The print media industry though seems to be dodging a bullet with a disproportionate amount of advertising continuing to spent on traditional advertising – 23% for only a 6% share of consumers’ time which implies there’s still a lot of pain ahead for newspapers and magazines.

For the online media, it shows there’s a great opportunity for those who can get the model right.

What that one graph shows is that the disruption to the mass media publishing model is a long way from being over.

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Discovering an online media model

Who will be the David Sarnoff of the web?

Peter Kafka of the Wall Street Journal’s All Thing D blog has been closely following Google’s attempts to position YouTube as a successor to television.

Key to that success is getting advertisers on board to spend as much money with online channels as they do on broadcast TV.

To date that’s failed and most of the online ad spend has come at the expense of print media – the money advertisers spent on magazines and newspapers has moved onto the web, but TV’s share of the pie is barely changing and may even be increasing.

The challenges facing web advertising is discovering what works on the new mediums.

McDonalds Canada Behind The Scenes campaign is touted as one of the success stories of YouTube advertising, although Kafka isn’t fully convinced.

McDonald’s modest ad tells a story, flatters viewers by telling them they’re smart enough to go backstage, and still ends up pushing pretty images of hamburgers in front of them. That’s pretty clever advertising sort-of masquerading as something else but not really.

We’re trying to apply old ways of working to a new technology something we do every time a new technology appears.

Moving from silent movies

Probably the best example of this is the movie industry – if you look at the early silent movies they were staged like theatrical productions. It took the best part of two decades for movie directors to figure out the advantages of the silver screen.

Shortly after movie directors figured out what worked on the big screen, the talkies came along and changed the rules again. Then came colour, then television, then the net and now mobile. Each time the movie industry has had to adapt.

It isn’t just the movie and advertising industries facing this problem; publishers, writers and journalists are struggling with exactly the same issues.

Most of what you read online, including this blog, is just old style print writing or journalism being published on a digital platform. Few of us, including me, are pushing the boundaries of what the web can do.

Waiting for Sarnoff

David Sarnoff figured out how to make money from broadcast radio and television in the 1930s with a model that was very different from what the movie industry was doing at the time.

Sarnoff built Radio Corporation of America into the world’s leading broadcaster and the modern advertising industry grew out of RCA’s successful model.

Today both the broadcasting and advertising industries are applying Sarnoff’s innovations of the 1930s to the web with limited success. Just like movie producers struggled with theatrical techniques at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

Figuring out what works online is today’s great challenge. Google are throwing billions at the problem through YouTube but there’s no guarantee they will be the RCA of the internet.

We may well find that a young coder in Suzhou or a video producer in Sao Paolo has the answer and becomes the Randolph Hearst or David Sarnoff of our time.

The future is open and it’s there for the taking.

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Social media’s irrational exuberance comes to an end

With the tech industry’s irrational exuberance ending, the focus is now on building good businesses rather than worrying about hype, spin and fools with more money than sense.

Last week saw the annual Y Combinator demo day where the startups funded by the incubator get to strut their stuff and it appears the age of social media hype is over.

In the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog, Amir Efrati reports Social is Out, Revenue is In as the companies showed off their income streams rather than the number of users which has been the measure for free social media apps.

That social media is out shouldn’t be surprising as the services have been tracking a standard Gartner Hype Cycle with a boom in services, coverage and investments that’s now turning into the inevitable bust and a fall into the trough of disillusionment.

Coupled with that fall for social media services are the disappointing stockmarket floats of Facebook and Groupon which have cruelled the enthusiasm for investing in tech startups with lots of user but not much revenue.

Last week’s headlines featuring Yahoo!’s purchase of Summly for $30 million and Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads for an estimated $150 million show how the days of greater fools writing billion dollar cheques is over as more sensible valuations take hold.

Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads is more interesting than Yahoo! buying a teenage wunderkind’s venture in that Amazon is cementing its position at the centre of the global book publishing industry.

Goodreads has been one of the quiet social media success of recent years having built its subscriber base to over 16 million members sharing book reviews and reading lists.

The book review site is a natural fit for Amazon although the head of the US Authors’ Guild rightly worries the company is becoming a monopoly.

Of course the obvious retort to this is that someone else could have bought the site and Forrester’s James McQuivey speculates on why an established publisher didn’t do so much earlier.

This year’s Y Combinator Demo Day and the acquisitions of Goodreads and Summly show the era of irrational tech exuberance is over.

For good businesses operators and investors this is not a bad thing as everyone can now focus on building good businesses rather than worrying about hype, spin and fools with more money than sense.

Photo of Ashton Kutcher speaking at Y Combinator by Robert Scoble through Wikimedia commons

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Who will build the next Barnes and Noble?

The rise and fall of US bookseller Barnes & Noble shows describes the changes in our society and the urge to join online and real world communities.

As US bookseller Barnes and Noble shrinks its store network, Mark Athitakis has a tribute to the once ubiquitous chain in The New Republic.

Barnes and Noble was never popular among US independent booksellers because of the perception, probably true, that the chain drove locally owned stores out of business.

What it offered though was a safe, comfortable place for booklovers to gather in suburban shopping malls. As Mark points out, it created a community.

Its stores were designed to keep people parked for a while, for children’s story time, for coffee klatches, for sitting around and browsing. That was a business decision—more time spent in the store, more money spent when you left it—but it had a cultural effect. It brought literary culture to pockets of the country that lacked them.

In recent years that community moved to coffee shops, in the United States B&N’s role was taken by Starbucks, at the same time our reading habits changed and the business of selling books and magazines became tougher.

Now that community is changing again, as the online societies like blogs, Facebook and Twitter become important, the coffee shops have responded with free wi-fi which is a perfect example of how the online and offline world come together.

That need to create communities, either physically or online, is a driving human urge.

Online that role is being catered to with social media platforms and sites like food, mommy or tech blogs where like minded people can gather.

Down at the mall, Barnes and Noble catered for that need in the 1980s and Starbucks in the 1990s. What will follow them may be the next big success in the retail or hospitality industry.

Image courtesy of Brenda76 on SXC

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