Akamai’s ‘State of the Internet report’ shows the average UK broadband speed is 3.5 Mbps and just one in 12 surfers are achieving 5 Mbps and above. At present, South Koreans can get speeds of up to 100 Mbps and Korea plans on raising the bar further with a tenfold increase in their ultra broadband to 1 Gbps by 2012 (200 times faster than our ‘fast’ 5 Mbps).
Whitehall’s shoot-for-the-stars plan? Well, their Universal Service Commitment wants every postcode in the UK to get a bare minimum of 2Mbps by 2012 (yep, just 2Mbps). In order to install this they’re talking about a 50p per month tax on landlines (cumulatively that’s around £1billion).
£6 a year to get a fibre optic line everywhere probably sounds like a reasonable deal. But the naysayers point out that the poorest – and least likely to take advantage of it – will be funding the speed and convenience for the wealthier.
It could be argued that if broadband is so important for the future of the UK’s infrastructure then our government should step up and make funding available. But let’s be honest, as our economy’s gone to hell in a hand-basket, the IT slush fund disappeared into RBS long ago. No, those who want to use the infrastructure to become more successful need to take care of things themselves – no body is coming to help (at least not any help worth having).
That’s where I think they’re looking to the wrong group to fund this. There’d be more traction and less voter pushback for a Business Broadband project (that’s my new label for uber-broadband).
UK business should be canvassed to put its hand in its pocket. Granted, now isn’t the best time to ask businesses for a handout, but when is?
Many large businesses operate on leased lines (such as banks) and don’t suffer the same bottleneck problem of demand we do but they too would benefit from faster coverage and the chance of increasing customer interaction.
This is an investment in their future, not a cost. As such, perhaps we could be allowed some accountancy leeway where we could do some fixed asset right down.
Contributing to it could be thought of like a church collection: the plate goes past everyone but only those who wish to partake do so. That said, we’d need the stern, furrowed brow of a priest-like character to make sure we all give fairly and not shirk out of our cumulative responsibility.
That’s where I see some A-list business folk coming in (think Alan Leighton, Alan Sugar, Deborah Meaden etc). These ‘celebs’ could form a steering committee. Their real value would be in persuading CEOs and proprietors to part with cash; they’d push the hard sell by demonstrating an understanding of their difficulties and a vision of the future.
Branches of request:
Peer levy – perhaps by business category e.g. shop keepers donate £500p.a. Perhaps by staff number (e.g. £75 per employee) or by turnover (e.g. £200 per £100k t/over).
Profits – pressure should be levied at those who stand to gain the most. That’s Internet service providers, search engines, telecoms companies and larger multichannel retailers for a start. Get the telecoms guys to dig as deep for this as they did for their 3G licences. Google donated $2 million towards the upkeep of Wikipedia this month because the strength of one affects the other.
Individual – the pot would also take private contributions. If Robbie Williams wants to throw in £100k to get a better Spotify connection it’s ready and willing to accept.
Google launched the Fibre for Communities program this year in the states. Essentially they want to pair up with providers and show the world that super fast broadband can get to the masses. The difference with a partner like Google is they’ll do so much of the heavy lifting. Personally, I’d take my Universal Service Commitment to the shredder and have Mr Mandelson on a plane to California (with his new pot of business money), persuading the Google team that the UK should be the first outside the USA to benefit from their new insight.
Have I got it all wrong here? If not, what would you and your organisation be willing to give over the next three years (if anything)?
Pixies, the Tooth Fairy and Big Foot have got nothing on Apple’s word of mouth phenomenon. The iPad was finally revealed today and brought the myth to a glorious Steve Jobs crescendo.
Under-spec’d, over-priced, underwhelming? Whatever. This thing is a glimpse of the future and it’s exciting – for some.
It’s certainly another nail in the coffin of traditional newspaper business. Take The Guardian for example: sales of 350,000 daily printed broadsheets need to pay for the 30 million visitors to their website (plus online ads, granted).
The iPad is another bullet the industry must’ve hoped to dodge. With ubiquitous use of smart phones, eReaders and tablets just around the corner, the physical paper is in the ICU. Long live the tree.
Wednesday was also the 100th anniversary of the death of Thomas Crapper, the man who revolutionised the flushing lavatory. Timely metaphor anyone?
On the right - Prevent search engines from indexing news content and have readers pay through a variety of subscriptions to recoup lost earnings from physical news sales. People have no right to free journalism and aggregator sites (especially Google News) are to news, what Pirate Bay is to music.
On the left –
If you build it they will come. The internet is an unparalleled open space where the common good is freedom of information without class divides. If providers open their content equally the market will ensure the winners are the cream of crop. Revenue will be made through increased attention and trust.
Further right against ‘Don’t be evil’ - Stop the Google vampire by embracing its largest competitor instead – Microsoft’s Bing.
If Bing courted enough content providers to bed exclusively with them (by paying, say, the world’s top 50 newspapers and top 1,000 magazines) that would be a huge boon. Would it be enough to grab 10 or 15 percent of market share?
Of course it’s all about money for Murdoch, not attention and that’s where he and the digerati are looking at same issue from different ends.
Piano maker Kemble & Co is closing after nearly 100 years producing over 350,000 pianos. They were the UK’s last large scale piano manufacturer.
It’s a reflection of yesteryear when a piano was a central asset in the home. Mum and dad would teach their kids the odd tune in the hope of lighting their musical spark. Much more likely now to see a Playstation and laptop alongside the Sky box. Even if it were still fashionable, I doubt many modern living rooms are large enough to house a piano. I’m sure Kemble is a wonderful manufacturer but they belong to a sunshine industry that is clearly setting.
Another sign of the times is the UK release of Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle. If I were a newspaper boss I’d be doing everything in my power to have my subscription service available to e-readers and smart phones. If I want eyeballs, I need to be where they are.
So why on earth are only four titles available via Amazon? The Evening Standard and Metro are free in London, but not so here. Hello! Amazon’s profits were up 68% in Q3 with the Kindle now their largest selling item by value and by volume (that’s staggering!). The music industry was far too slow to realise digital was a game changer, you’ve got to ask will the publishing and newspaper guys have learnt their lesson?
I can’t help but think of the Royal Mail strikes in the same (dimming) light. With the CWU seemingly taking glee at delaying some 50 to 60 million items, surely they’re speeding up their own inevitable death march.
Right or wrong as the union’s position may be, letters are in the same ‘sunshine industry’ as pianos and newspapers. No picket line will change that.
Google are the hottest company on the planet and they have well and truly won the war on search. That aint news to you. Fighting them directly is a bit like voting Labour in the next general election – a waste of energy.
You can’t be more of a lion than the lion himself, so throw in the towel. Move on. Fight another battle. Use new rules or change the game (even slightly). Semantic search is the future battleground where the engine understands more of your searching needs and the data it’s mined.
To the untrained eye this looks like the same ball game but it’s a much cleaner slate. Rather like Formula 1 this year where the cars appear the same as previous models but they’re inherently different. The new rules in both fields promise some new victors.
What’s so new about this semantic search?
Data has moved on exponentially since Google’s inception in 1997 (or so). Blogs, microblogs (e.g. Twitter) other social networking sites and book marking services stream and highlight more information than anyone could’ve honestly anticipated in the 90s.
Harnessing this data torrent allows for real time search results. If you’d searched for “Iran election” in June you probably wanted the latest news and insight on the troubles, not a standard bit of Foreign Office research.
Context is also increasingly important. Typing “Jaguar in London” could produce zoo or a car dealership results. Intelligence is needed to distinguish which you needed (known as disambiguation).
Making sense of search based on context and fresh data is the Holy Grail (closely followed by monetising it). Semantic search is craving to do just that.
Who’s playing in the hit-Google-from-another-angle game?
Bing (from Microsoft)
Mahalo (50% original content, 25% search and 25% knowledge exchange)
Aadvark (Vark.com asks your network for answers)
OneRiot (a real time socially-relevant engine)
Kosmix (a web guide with a dashboard)
Hakia (tabs results: web results, credible sites, images and new)
WolframAlpha (type a question, get an answer)
Twine (a bookmarking site on steriods)
Some are more semantic than others but that’s just eight players who are all in their relative infancy. With Yahoo’s open API code, Boss, anyone has access to a huge engine and can adapt from the basic Yahoo chassis. Google may have called game over on search 1.0 but there’s a whole new future out there…
UPDATE: since drafting this in early August, Google have announced a “fundamentally big change” via their Caffeine update.
Clearly, this threatens to put Bing et al back into their corner while Google blazes ahead with market share aplenty and more advertising than MadMen could dream of. We all know that’s not guaranteed though.
A lot has been made of Eric Schmidt resigning from Apple’s board. The short version: he’s also CEO of Google and these two tech giants are really starting to cross swords.
While Google are undoubtedly an increasing ‘problem’ for Apple, I think most reports are in danger of missing the elephant in the room: Nokia. They have a 40% market share of the world’s mobile handset market. They produce a phone every 13 seconds, with around 1.1 billion customers today, and they are well and truly on a charge.
Nokia are unquestionably number one – larger than their top three rivals combined – yet they were accused of being asleep at the wheel when it came to the iPhone. Enter the Nokia N900 Smartbook, launched this week with, “Computer-grade performance in a handset” and Flash support (not yet available on the iPhone).
Microsoft’s mobile version of the Office suite, currently only available on Windows mobile devices, is soon to be available on Nokia handsets. And Microsoft and Nokia plan on developing several mobile apps together.
Apple fans have consumed rumours about Mr Jobs producing a tablet computer for several years but it’s yet to materialise. Enter Nokia’s booklet. Add to this momentum the fact they appear to be teaming up with music rather than dictate to the industry. Dave Stewart (50% of the Eurythmics group) is a change agent and big fettler in the Nokia world of the future.
Nokia are a capable chameleon. They’ve reinvented themselves from a paper and rubber manufacturer to an electronic giant turning over $70 billion. So when they say, “we will quickly be the world’s biggest entertainment media network.” we should really pay attention.
Their aptitude, coupled with some audacious strategic alliances may yet see CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo pull off a Finnish coup d’état.
They’ve flirted for years. Constant advances were spurned and due diligence seemed wasted but Ballmer’s finally got his gal. Well, sort of. This week has seen a sharing of search revenue, not a sale between Microsoft and Yahoo.
Despite her strong words of rebuilding and turning-the-tanker, we all assumed Carol Bartz’s number one play when she parachuted into Yahoo in January was to negotiate the sell. Is this a toe-in-the-water on the way to a full-blown takeover?
Of course, search is where the rubber meets the road on the Internet and as Steve Ballmer said, “This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.”
Not so long ago Yahoo’s search was ‘Powered by Google.’ If only they’d realised they were creating a seesaw of strength: as Google grew, Yahoo shrank. Fatal error.
It’s a ten year partnering, not an acquisition, but Google must be hoping this is a bit like the dog who chases cars and finally catches one. Can the undisputed also-ran in second place actually do anything different? Will the partnership lead to growth or confusion? What about the raft of other questions this throws up?
And, just in case you missed it, Amazon bought the highly respected Zappos earlier this month for about $937 million. I’m thinking the web just got a bit smaller but a couple of big players have sharpened their teeth further.
WARNING: this is a lengthy diatribe on ecommerce. If online retailing isn’t your thing then run away now. If it does float your boat then grab a coffee, my friend:
Scoble has been posting lately about the future of the Internet, calling it the Web 2010, others are more likely to call it Web 3.0. What will ecommerce websites look like in this future world? Amazon and the other ‘Web Whales’ don’t give us much of a clue what they are rolling out before the next Olympics, so here’s my take on some of it.
ECOMMERCE PROLOGUE
As the amount of data available to us grows exponentially, even the most naive of customers are suddenly morphing into prosumers (professional–consumer). Prosumers scan for information before actually shopping and they’re in your stores already. Armed with spec lists, reviews and price comparisons, they push back your sales team and POS with hard data and raw opinions.
Perversely, more data is seeing customers take longer to make decisions and impulse buys are now filled with doubt – “I should’ve checked the reviews on this.” It could be argued that retailers who engage the longest and build the most trust, will win the most favour (oh yeah, AND the most orders).
BLENDING
Firstly, from a marketer’s perspective, online wont replace offline. More than ever, we’ll see a blending of multichannel operations. Next.co.uk will still produce their very expensive catalogue and their website will outperform other channels, but their property managers will still have a job to perform. Ditto M&S and Tesco, but there is no question that the small and unremarkable of the high street will feel ever-more pressure from those dastardly dot coms.
DELIVERY
Free delivery is largely becoming the de facto choice online. With retailers pushing this, they’ll offer consumers in high street outlets the chance of delivery to home rather than carting it onto the bus. The visa versa of this is already becoming more popular but in-store collection is likely to be incentivised more as it’s a double opportunity for retailers: delivery is less costly as it remains within their own supply chain (they’re transporting from the hub to the high street anyway) and, as you collect, it’s far more likely that you’ll pick up that extra item (cross selling heaven).
MOBILE VALUE
Mobile web access will grow as smart phones continue to take hold but M-Commerce value will start from a low base – think ringtones and iTunes. However, these should see repeat visitors and as trust builds, value should grow. Until then, fears of data breaches and insufficient speed will prevent anything like widespread acceptance.
SEARCH
In-site search will gain intelligence as search engines are forever increasing shoppers’ expectancy of relevance, thanks to their ever-improving accuracy. Typing ‘white 16″ collar double cuff non iron‘ on next.co.uk results in “There were no documents that contained all of the words in your query. These results contain some of the words…” and they proceed to show me 225 products with a white luxury Percale bedset toward the very top. (Yes, they do list shirts with all those keywords.) Partnerships with the search guys are likely as algorithms need to improve.
SEARCH ENGINE PAYMENT
Facebook money and nano-payments are going to become a reality, but how about making your transaction on the search engine itself? If Google, Bing or Yahoo shows you a product you want from a five star retailer, there’s no real reason to jump through to the site at all. You could plug in your payment details right there, completing the transaction (Google checkout really starts making sense now, eh?). This will increase shopping speed where trust already exists.
AUGMENTED REALITY
Augmented reality will take place using your photo library. A plug-in will scan your local machine and online (esp Flikr and Facebook) to find an image that it can use to best display the latest wares from Asos.com and TopShop.co.uk. It will superimpose clothes onto you and put you on an exotic location, not a paid model, in true CSI style.
SIZE AWARE
Zappos, the US shoe mail order giant, budget for a 20% return rate. Size aware sites will pummel that kind of error. Using the augmented reality above, you could see yourself in specific sizes: perhaps the large (your normal size) is a little too loose and viewing the medium shows it to be more correct. Obviously, very accurate pixeling and measurements from the site are a prerequisite. Women will be addicted to this feature; men might well become extinct from the high street.
3D
Why wouldn’t future sites look like merchandised finished stores? We’ve all seen Second Life and other virtual reality sites. Well, imagine you could ‘walk’ the whole store or teleport to the men’s shoe department. The store’s branding could even change to suit your mood – upbeat and funky, or perhaps click to change the ambiance to sedate and sophisticated.
SOCIAL PLUG-INS
This is where the likes of Facebook are betting on the big money. You’ve seen the sonar picture in the Batman movie where Morgan Freeman can view the whole of Gotham thanks to everyone’s mobile phone acting as a radar device. Well, as you ‘walk’ through the 3D reality store and into others in the shopping centre (because they’ll collaborate, as retailers know proximity brings success), you will be aware of your social media contacts – Julie is 50m off to your right, David is in the café upstairs. Virtual geotagging would allow you to meet them/talk/show as busy.
FRIENDLY FOCUS
Social advertisers are of the mindset that if you like snowboarding, heavy rock and fast convertibles, they can serve you ads that will interest you i.e. heavily targeted. They’re also of a mindset that your friends wont be too far off that choice spectrum either. If you’re golf mad then it stands to reason some of your contact book will be fellow golfers, right? Therefore if they can define you, they reckon they can define your group.
If our virtual store knows that ten of your friends bought something from the homeware department, it might well show you an offering from that neck of the woods. If it knows two of your mates browsed a particular shirt and another one bought it, perhaps it might show you the shirt. But wait, you don’t all want to look the same (though you may well want to buy identical music and games) so the store’s intelligence shows you similar styles, but not an identical shirt.
4th DIMENSIONAL WEB
The focus on friends and your group above is referring to the social graph (a modern take on six degrees of separation, if you like). The problem with that graph is that as your social list grows, the trending becomes diluted. Let’s say you ‘friend’ two people you work with: one is into motorbikes and cooking and has married four times; another is a spinster and likes books and knitting – correlation is becoming far more difficult (simple example, but you get the idea).
You ‘friend’ people almost on a daily basis because you’ve touched each other in some way. But it is NOT an indicator of similarity. However, if you and I are connected *and* we’re both members of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Institute of Directors and we also list similar books and blogs as of interest, then the algorithm could rightly pair us on the same graph. The trouble is, which graph: perhaps occupation (to serve job ads), but music and clothing? How about sport and movies? Will we both like cricket?
Incorporating the social graph along with real time search is what the master mathematicians are coding right now. It will make the web more than 3D. The intelligence and relevance will mean no serious retailer will have a standard look. Very few visitors landing at the home page will see identical layouts and offerings. The big players will become more relevant and successful because of it.
VOTING RIGHTS Scoble had this down when he said, “So, if someone says “Pluto’s rocks” there should be an aggregator that lets you see how many people talked about Plutos. Obviously only people writing on their iPhones FROM Plutos on University Ave.”
He’s talking about your contacts (friends again) informing you of what’s well regarded, but there’s also the possibility of the wider view from perhaps the whole of Twitter or Friendfeed. I’d say this could split in two, similar to paid ads appearing above the SERPs in a Google search with your closest friends (easily ID’d beause of most interaction) biased toward the top. The intelligence knows that I’m biased to my friends views, but still shows me what the masses think.
MOBILE NETWORKING Jason Calacanis says that the Mobile SNS (social networking services) is up for grabs in the United States. I’ll take his word on that, and I’ll completely agree that social networking will shift from the desktop to your pocket. The phone coupled with geolocation tools will become networking nevada.
BRILLIANT BAR CODES
The cubic generation of bar codes is coming where data matrix squares will replace the traditional lined rectangle. But we’ll also see QR (quick response) codes more frequently in the UK (they’re common in Asia and North America). The QR code can look like art, but when scanned, usually by a mobile phone camera, it reveals data. These can take you to micro sites, or vouchers, or secret passages to hidden info (known as easter eggs) – like game cheats and movie trailers for example.
Gorilla marketers will appear to make these bleeding edge, scattering them around cities and towns, but within a year the Pepsis and Fords of the world will drag them to the mainstream.
CHANNEL CONFLICT
Manufacturers want greater penetration and control and they can achieve both by cutting out the middle man and going direct to the consumer. When your products are as hot as Apple’s you can do as you please. Retailers are still falling over themselves to tout Apple’s wares despite the possibilty of losing a sale to apple.com. However, the majority of brands have their hands tied by the threat of retaliation (i.e. refusal to buy) from their retail partners.
It’s thought that 50-60% of customers looking for a branded product begin their search at the manufacturer’s website. Manufacturers will look for ingenious ways of capturing that consumer rather than just being a megaphone of information. Ship to store is the most obvious route but the marketing steps ahead of that will be ingenious – hooking in TV advertisment widgets for instance.
BRANDS
Own brand products will become even more obligatory. Did you know Amazon has had their own private label line-up for five years? China’s best will also feature far more in Europe as they cash in on the knowledge we’ve given them. It’s bite-the-hand-that’s-fed-you time.
I love making lists. Of course it’s nothing compared to the palpable pleasure of completion by crossing tasks off. But if you want to get multiple and complex lists out of their silos, you’re looking at making a mind map.
You can botch these together in Word, Powerpoint or even Excel if you’re determined enough, but I’ve found a couple of better solutions:
Mindomo – this is a web-based platform that serves ads to pay for its free basic accounts. It’s surprisingly fast, very easy to use and comes with enough features to create a professional looking map. Dragging topics around and rearranging is very easy. You can format in 12 fonts, add some symbols alongside your text box and even upload your own images.
It’s an impressive package – lightweight and intuitive. The only thing I feel it’s calling out for is the ability to save as a PDF. Remember it’s in the cloud so backing up becomes a screen print.
Mindmap Pro – software available for PC or Mac from the Concept Draw team. This feels like a well-built piece of software but it can be a bit unintuitive e.g. holding CTRL and scrolling your mouse ball won’t zoom in/out. It’s also not as easy as Mindomo to place a topic and its subtopics exactly where you’d like.
That said, it looks slick, is very robust and has some nice extras regarding brainstorming and task scheduling (although no Outlook or iCal sync up).
Conclusion – if you need a one-off visual map for a meeting next week then Mindomo is perfect for you. However, if you want to work offline on several maps that you want to own yourself then you could do far worse than spending £140 on Mindmap.
Extra – I’ve also been told about mindmeister.com. It’s another web-based system that looks on a par to Mindomo, although I’ve not tried it for real. My fear with these web-based systems is if their business model fails and they unplug it one evening, you might well see your precious maps obliterated….
Ship’s Biscuit points us to this stunning advert from Philips (by Tribal DDB Amsterdam and Stink Digital). It’s promoting the first Cinema 21:9 TV which has the same viewing dimensions as – you guessed, didn’t you – a cinema screen. That means no more adjusting the aspect ratio with black bars or cropping, just the movie as it was born to be watched.
Personally, I’ve had a pretty awful time with my Philips TV and DVDR combo and I’ve sworn never to buy the brand again, but I can’t deny salivating at this. Quality advertising indeed then. Check out the microsite.
Ignoring the small matter of legal and moral issues for a moment and putting a marketing hat on, you have to say that The Pirate Bay are riding on the crest of a PR wave.
The news yesterday that the owners of this gateway to free content now face jail and bankruptcy has taken their awareness from teens and geeks, to the living rooms of the masses.
The BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones was on last night’s 6pm news and actually demo’d how easy it was to download new blockbusters or the #1 album! (Not nearly as provocative as the Click show running its own botnet attack, though).
Surely The Pirate Bay’s visitor numbers will be spiking right now as even those without an iTunes account try to find out if they can get the latest fix of Brad or Angelina without paying for a cinema ticket? Considering they don’t plan on closing the site, one can presume this spike will become a step-change in future analytics.
It’s the age-old journalistic problem of news creating awareness, possibly creating demand. Trouble is, what’s the alternative?
Richard Branson recently launched PitchTV to help entrepreneurs find investors – a mini Dragons’ Den if you like.
The hopeful amongst you can upload a two minute video which gets voted online and the favourites will be broadcast on Virgin planes. Getting your ideas seen by business travellers would be a huge coo (for exposure if nothing else!).
The barrier to this is simply time. Don’t be thinking about spending your seed money on pucka cameras and an editing team. You can do the lot with a Flip and stopwatch for under £100 (honestly). Here’s the third example to be put online. You could’ve created something of equal quality last weekend if you’d wanted to.
For the audience, there’s the added benefit of not having to watch the Simon Cowell wannabies lash into the dreams of everyday passionate people in ‘the Den’. Oh yeah, there’s also an annual special prize from Sir B himself, and my bet is that’ll be some first-rate business support not recycled Christmas socks!
The Old (Barrichello), the Pretender (Button) and the Skint (the Brackley team) have pulled off a spectacular one-two in Melbourne to kick off the Formula One season.
Continuing the B fest, they’ve shown: Belief – evidently they kept working hard when a full closure was more than likely. Brains – the clean sheet of ‘09 regulations allowed them to show innovation beyond McLaren’s and Ferrari’s dreams. Bravery – in the management buyout (and subsequent cut backs).
Brawn GP, now a euphemism for ‘Giant Killer,’ really have shown us it all this weekend.
Commentators said the grid was turned on its head. That’s untrue as the back of the pack looked all too familiar. But the midfield have undoubtedly caused the former front runners a major headache. To the victor go the spoils. Well, perhaps a Virgin.
Side quote: The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was the genius (Sid Caesar).
The New York Times blinked first and opened its 2.8 million articles allowing users to build things with its content via API.
But the Guardian has suddenly become the pie-piper of the newspaper business by opening up its data more fully. The Guardian trumps NYT by allowing for-profit use of the data (opposed to NYT’s non-profit stance) and it allows full data from articles and pieces, as opposed to excerpts.
With the newspaper industry crumbling by the month, this really is a stake in the sand by the Guardian. They’re clearly enthusiasts of the freemium business model and I applaud their bravery. Will it be follow us or die; or is it a case of a freemium too far?
As usual, Mathew Ingram and Greg Stirling have great takes on it but I really want to know what the industry is planning next. This is a modern day equivalent to the steam liners fighting back against the passenger airliners of Howard Hughes et al. We’ve all heard enough whining about Google their ilk eating newspapers’ lunch – what are they cooking for dinner? Photo credit: Terje S. Skjerdal
Free is synonymous with Internet. It’s likely to become more so with Microsoft’s Office Live and cloud-based solutions from Google, Zoho and the like.
Enter Aaron Wall (SEObook.com), one of the Internet’s geek superstars. He is to SEO what J.K. Rowling is to wizards. Mr Wall started out with a desire to learn and has become a true guru of search. His latest [free] tool is an upgraded version of the SEO toolbar that’s been pumping iron.
Okay, Page Rank’s relevance is a moot subject but this toolbar also gives you: domain links, page links, directory links, site age, monthly usage and loads more – check out the video.
This is a simple but penetrating tool – he warns that too much use may have engines thinking you’re scraping data! The power of these freebies never ceases to amaze me and SMEs should be lapping them up. Get hooked up here.
Crossing machine and cinema gives you machinima. It’s a geek’s bedroom hobby that’s breaking into Hollywood. Companies like Rooster Teeth show game content and skew it to a story rather than playing the game itself. Halo and World of Warcraft are classic petri dishes for this art.
Well, things look to be going all Sky One for this genre. These creations have attracted A-list attention as “a collaboration with fifteen leading episodic television writers from popular series–such as The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld–to develop 15 original episodic comedy pilots…”
There’s plenty of talk lately about what the blending of online TV will mean with the BBC, ITV and BT soon to become bedfellows on a common platform for IPTV (known as Project Canvas). We shouldn’t be closed to the fact it’ll be as much about content as it is accessibility. New ground is soon to be broken, I hope it’s original and entrepreneurial and not all crass reality show spin offs.
Newspapers are in their twilight years. With every print run, they step closer to oblivion. Of course, you’re smart and you know full well that they exist for advertisers, not news, and there lies the rub: ad revenues are dwindling at an alarming rate. Oh, but what to do with that high brand equity and shrinking readership? Go online, right? Surely they’ll read us [insert major name] on tinterweb and we can sell banner ads instead of print ones?
If they’re half as committed to that oversimplified strategy as I believe they are, why don’t they help us digest their content more easily? Granted, they’re much better than they were (understanding that we don’t want to log in to read was a real boon) but much boundary pushing is needed if they’re going to carve a real niche out of the net.
Next to Google Earth, RSS is the best thing about the Internet. It’s simple and brilliant. Instead of typing in dozens of web addresses to check out what’s new, you can tell the web which sites you’d like to read and watch them all come into one page (or reader) as and when they refresh themselves. Instead of buying a paper or magazine which will have a good proportion of waste (i.e. I won’t read) Google can deliver 100% relevant content to any desktop or mobile device I choose – for free. Helpful. Genius. Time saving. Wonderful.
Not so the experience you’ll find online at most of our British newspapers. Check out this article by Timothy Fadek at the Guardian.co.uk (note: no RSS in their address bar). Where is the feed for this page? There’s the usual social networking buttons, but what about a longer term buy-in? Sure, you can subscribe to the RSS feed from the business home page and get hooked up. The trouble is, it feeds you the whole of the business section (approx 270 posts per week) not the daily missives of your chosen journo or subject.
Telegraph.co.uk and timesonline.co.uk (what a dreadful URL) help you a wee bit by offering a selection of feeds, but they’re insufficient. You’ve got more chance of most writers cooking you dinner tonight than giving you an easy to find RSS feed. It’s a genuine shame that their technology is missing such an opportunity to gain attention and eyeballs.
A 20 second brainstorm on what could be better:
Allow us to plug in to ANY correspondent/writer;
Allow us to filter the feed by keyword or tag e.g. I want Brian Moore at the Telegraph.co.uk (actually possible if you’re persistent in your quest) but only on international rugby, not his club rugby, football or general pieces;
Allow us to skew to excerpt or full text (don’t force me to your site to read a whole article – it’s just tight);
Allow us to take the feed live, daily, weekly or monthly (as a magazine would arrive);
Allow the feed on keyword only but across all sections e.g. Lewis Hamilton could be in several areas other than F1 sport; and,
Allow a matrix of any the above.
RSS is chronically underused; newspapers could blow it open to become one of their saving graces. Of course, their content (and their contributors) is another matter entirely.
Internet Explorer 7 is apparently vulnerable to a new Trojan that can steal passwords. Firefox evangelists are looking even more smug as 10,000 websites have been compromised since the vulnerability was discovered.
It’s apparently geared towards gaming sites, but everyone’s thinking it wont be long before fraudsters engineer something more sinister. Think about your online payment company’s details being opened up. On second thoughts…
Google launched some really innovative services in November. Here’s a quick video round up:
1. Search Wiki:
I’m not sure I’m ‘feeling this’ but its going to be interesting to see how the long tail affects results. What if 1,000 people voted your site to #1 when searching ‘4 star restaurant London’? Equally, what happens when gaming shysters bin your site? Google are saying it wont affect ‘normal’ results one bit, but you can already hear Google’s algorithms working overtime on extra servers with this 100% fresh, user generated (therefore true?) data.
Regardless, Google is getting to know you better (because you’re signed in). The big question is what will it create now it has that knowledge?
2. Voice activated search:
Only on the iPhone at present and it’s said to prefer a Californian accent, so be warned. All very Star Trek though, eh?
3. (and my favourite) Gmail video chat:
This coverage could really give Skype a run for its money.
Jason Calacanis shares a number of attributes, along with the initials, of Jeremy Clarkson. Both are tall, gregarious and outrageously outspoken in their quest for PR. (According to .net magazine, Calacanis called SEO ‘bullshit’ and a ‘wasted industry’ while speaking at a search engine conference, and said anyone from PayPerPost should kill themselves.)
But, unlike Clarkson, Calacanis is more than a one-dimensional critic: he’s a creator. This is the chap who started Silicon Alley Reporter and brought us Weblogs, Inc before selling up to AOL. His latest project is the human powered search engine, Mahalo.
Paid humans review the Wikipedia pages Mahalo includes (opposed to volunteers) and humans also scrutinise the Google results to reduce the risk of gaming. The two results are mashed up to provide what Calacanis reckons is the ultimate in search accuracy with a massive dose of trust thrown in.
It’s just out of beta having reached 100,000 search terms and attracted 4.6 million uniques in August – no alternative search engine has broken the 1 million barrier. But like so many ‘new’ web projects (think Twitter) they aren’t even trying to make money yet as Calacanis’ profile has secured the project five years of funding.
It’s about building a useful service that people want, but Calacanis is also very ambitious. He wants to create the next Wikipedia or Yahoo and carve a 10% market share out of search. It’s early days but keep an eye on this guy; he’s far more that just a mouth.
Apple’s frustrations have been well documented over the summer: the MobileMe fiasco, the debacle over the iPhone launch/sign up, patches for freezing MacBook Airs and several other dents in the pristine name of all things Jobs.
This will make your company’s pen, mouse mat and umbrella trio look like impulse buys at Aldi. Yes it’s your logo on a lovely gift (who wouldn’t like an iPhone as a thank you) but when you can add your ‘training talks, product overviews, CEO speeches, promotional videos, or other custom content’ it becomes an even more powerful and relevant message.
I’m sure you’ve heard the world economy is broken. With so much reporting of the negative it’s easy to obliterate the positives. Here’s a couple of diamonds in the rough for you though:
- Apple finished their fiscal fourth quarter (to 27th Sept) with sales up 35%. All the numbers have gone north which is amazing for a hardware business. 3G iPhone sales are astonishing at 6.9 million for the quarter (more than the first gen did in a year!).
There’s an even bigger cherry on the Jobs’ cake with $24.5 billion in the bank (up nearly 60% on last year) and no debt. When staring at a more-than-possible downturn their rivals must feel it’s an unfair advantage.
- The world’s largest retail park opened this month in, of course, Dubai. With almost 600 retailers trading, the ‘Mall’ is operating at just half capacity.
As a Formula One fan I’m sometimes asked, “Don’t you find it all a bit boring?”
How can you find the pinnacle of racing, boring? Okay, it can be a little repetitive because they ARE doing laps after all, but it’s where sport and engineering meet at their finest point. A combination of supreme teamwork, athletics, marketing and more than a sprinkle of show business all provide a wonderfully inspirational sporting event. If NASA decided to field a race team, they’d do so in F1.
And this season has been electrifying with seven different winners. Last year’s world champion lost his mojo and raced like a castrated stallion. Both McLaren and Ferrari teams and drivers made several errors that helped take the world championship down to the nail-biting wire. Alonso regained some credibility – certainly more than the sport’s stewards managed to withhold. And we waved goodbye to a great British driver in D.C., whose character will certainly be missed.
The best man won in the most exciting finale anyone can remember. Congratulations Lewis Hamilton; an eight-time world champ in the making…
A good while ago I heard website editor of the Telegraph.co.uk, Marcus Warren, being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s The Message. He was quoting figures that showed 5 million new users for his site month on month.
I’m sure Mr Warren is no different from hundreds of other managers and directors responsible for websites in that he’s focused on talking about one of the most raw stats available (granted, it’s factual and very impressive). Business numbers in the black and not the red are generally regarded in the positive, but web traffic demands more examination than a cursory look at one or two sets of statistics.
I’m willing to bet that a massive percentage of these uniques, perhaps between 70 and 90%, land deeply i.e. not on the home page or submenu pages (possibly from Digg or Stumbleupon as much as from the big search engines). Of course this is an excellent example of “if you build it, they will come”.
However, I’m also willing to bet their bounce rate (people who exit the site quickly after visiting only one page) is also between 70 and 90%. If I were responsible for targeting Mr Warren I’d want to see visitors staying on site longer and I’d want fewer bouncing – yes, even at the expense of total visitor numbers (presuming my previous guesswork is good). A million visitors leaving inside 3 seconds and returning to Google to improve their search term does nothing for your site. In fact it hinders because it confuses your analytics and success becomes more difficult to ascertain.
I’m in no doubt that the Telegraph’s web traffic is growing because of their increased content. More relevant content equals a larger web presence, which should lead to more search results pointing to you. Just think BBC, the mother of all sites.
Chasing such headline numbers as unique visitors is misguided but commonplace. It’s better to look at how engaged a site is with potential and current customers. How many pages are listed on the major search engines (and how many pages are published)? How often is content updated? How keyword rich is the copy? What does the site offer its audience other than ‘get into my shopping cart’?
Mr Warren and his ilk will tell you this is where the real work comes in: the writing, the images, the advice pages, the tips and FAQs, the alternative viewpoint, the video tutorials, the understanding of your market, the educating of your customer. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not recommending spamming the system with a load of useless link bait but sites do require deep and relevant content.
Of course, it’s all very time consuming and not directly attributable to today’s sales figure, but it’s absolutely invaluable. Just ask the chap from the Telegraph.
Akamai’s ‘State of the Internet report’ shows the average UK broadband speed is 3.5 Mbps and just one in 12 surfers are achieving 5 Mbps and above. At present, South Koreans can get speeds of up to 100 Mbps and Korea plans on raising the bar further with a tenfold increase in their ultra broadband to 1 Gbps by 2012 (200 times faster than our ‘fast’ 5 Mbps).
On the left –
Piano maker Kemble & Co is closing after nearly 100 years producing over 350,000 pianos. They were the UK’s 
They’ve flirted for years. Constant advances were spurned and due diligence seemed wasted but Ballmer’s finally got his gal. Well, sort of. This week has seen a sharing of search revenue, not a sale between Microsoft and Yahoo.
You can botch these together in Word, Powerpoint or even Excel if you’re determined enough, but I’ve found a couple of better solutions:
Mindmap Pro
Ignoring the small matter of legal and moral issues for a moment and putting a marketing hat on, you have to say that The Pirate Bay are riding on the crest of a PR wave.
Richard Branson recently 
The Old (Barrichello), the Pretender (Button) and the Skint (the Brackley team) have pulled off a spectacular one-two in Melbourne to kick off the Formula One season.
The New York Times blinked first and 
Not so the experience you’ll find online at most of our British newspapers. Check out this article by 
Internet Explorer 7 is apparently 
