Chicago Sun-Times to Charge Online
December 19, 2011
In order to generate revenue from online content, a vendor must have a critical mass of digital information. Some of that information can be fluff, but a chunk should be what’s called “must have” content. Newspapers perceive themselves as having “must have” content. Most don’t and those with must have content have burned the fudge.
As most readers (including our two or three) have started getting their news online instead of reaching for the paper in the morning, print newspapers have been suffering.
Signs of this change are obvious in Chicago; The Chicago Sun-Times will begin charging customers to view content on their websites. In the Huffington Post article “Chicago Sun-Times Pay Wall: Paper to Charge Online Readers,” Sun-Times Media Chairman Jeremy Halbreich states, “It is certainly award-winning content and we need to find new ways to support it.” The article also tells us:
The announcement arrives one day after another round of layoffs at the paper, which Halbreich called the ‘final piece’ of 18 months of staffing reductions, Crain’s Chicago Business reports. Sun-Times Media has handed down hundreds of layoffs over the past two years.
In the same article, Sun Times movie critic Roger Ebert says he is upset with the pay wall concept and I agree. Ebert claims that instead of his reviews gathering dust in a pile, they are being read globally and daily online. Charging for online content will only cause readers to stray elsewhere to sites where they can get unlimited free information. Right now, the Sun Times is exempting mobile apps from the fees, which I think they should reconsider as an alternative to the pay wall. But I’m just a mere Kentucky gosling, I may be off on my business advice.
The big goose is not uncertain. The newspaper is likely to earn more from a bake sale than trying to replace the print based ad model with a pay wall. The big goose is, of course, Stephen E Arnold, our beloved leader.
Andrea Hayden, December 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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Google to Be Disappeared in 24 Months?
December 18, 2011
Ask a silly question. . . .
Well, it’s good to have a laugh once in a while. Search Engine Journal asks, “Will Google Be Around in 2 Years?” What prompted that query?
Turns out this question explored by writer Gabriel Gervelis was prompted by the Ted talk from Roger McNamee called Six Ways to Save the Internet. McNamee feels that index search is going down as a result in the decline of quality search results. Instead, he says, folks are turning directly to sites like Wikipedia and Twitter as well as to mobile apps for information. The article asserts:
The direct effect of this is that Google is losing the ‘biggest player on the internet’ status; this is something that they will not be able to regain control of. ’Is this happening?’, ‘What other ways will Google try to make money?’ I asked myself. After thinking about it I came to the conclusion that it is happening right now! Google is expanding outside of index search and ad serving to make up for the loss generated from this trend.
Yes, it’s called adaptation. Gervelis just answered his own question: Google will be around for far more than two more years because, if index search is indeed on the wane, the company will thrive on other sources of revenue. In fact, Google is kinda known for trying out lots of things at once.
. . . get a silly answer.
Cynthia Murrell, December 18, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
FirstRain Gets Some Azure Chip Love
December 18, 2011
According to the October 25 news release, FirstRain Recognized as “Innovative Business Analytics Company under $100M to Watch in 2011” by Leading Market Research Firm, the analyst firm IDC has included FirstRain, an analytics software company, in its 2011 list of “Innovative Business Analytics Companies Under $100M to Watch.”
FirstRain is an analytics software company that uses its Business Monitoring Engine to provide professionals with access to the business Web. The company’s semantic-categorization technology instantly cuts through the clutter of consumer Web content, delivering only highly-relevant intelligence.
The company was highlighted in the “Cloud-based Analytics” category for their innovative use of semantic analysis to extract and deliver high-value information from the Web.
IDC observed:
The value in using FirstRain is the breadth of its coverage, combined with its depth of selection and filtering so that it delivers the information that users need to see without cluttering their desktops or their minds with too much that is extraneous. It was easy to integrate into existing information delivery channels and because of the high relevance of the information that it delivered.
The fact that IDC even has a list of top business analytics companies shows how important search optimization software is becoming in the business world. Who knew that business intelligence would be the new black?
Jasmine Ashton, December 18, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Gray Lady Limping: A Troubled New York Times?
December 16, 2011
I don’t want to draw parallels between the management shifts at Thomson Reuters and the New York Times. Let me document the fact that another semi-surprise hit the struggling New York Times. Navigate to “NY Times CEO exiting, without Explanation.”
The Times Co gave no explanation for Robinson’s sudden departure, which caught analysts as well as company insiders by surprise. Speculation among industry observers and the analyst community centered on the company’s faltering stock price, which has declined more than 80 percent since Robinson was appointed CEO in December 2004. This year alone, shares are down nearly 25 percent, a performance that has frustrated investors.
Also interesting was the departure of Martin Nisenholtz, the person who has matched the dismal performance of the Financial Times’s online services. After pulling the New York Times from LexisNexis, the New York Times demonstrated that it was unable to generate big dough when it came to leveraging its brand in the online world. I view the misguided handling of the LexisNexis deal as the first benchmark in the Times’s fascinating financial decline. Business school case study anyone: LexisNexis to the first Times’s online service to the current line up of services to the fumbling of its own indexing to the handling of About.com to today. Yowza. I am glad I am in rural Kentucky, semi retired, hopeless confused, and no longer working in the newspaper industry. Anyone hear the sound of dead trees falling in the forest? When you walk alone and get lost, one can spend quite a while in the wilderness. Watch out. Here comes another dead tree falling.
Stephen E Arnold, December 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Thumbs Up for ReadCube Web Reader
December 14, 2011
Google’s new news reader, which strikes us as a “me too” type product, is getting lots of attention.
We’ve found a nifty tool that lets you interact with your PDFs. Designed for researchers, ReadCube Web Reader lets you highlight and add notes to PDF documents. It also helps you find articles through a search feature that accesses Google Scholar, PubMed, or any library of documents that you import. I could wish for more search options, but perhaps they’re on the way; it’s still in beta, after all.
The application learns your interests over time, and will suggest online articles published within a specified time frame. It will even go find more information about your article, if it’s available.
The folks at Labtiva, who developed the software, aim to “make the world of research more accessible and connected.” On the startup’s about page, we learned from the write up:
Our mission is to improve the pace of scientific discovery. ReadCube was started by a researcher and a computer scientist to address the challenges faced by scientists. What started in a Harvard College dorm room as a tool to help organize and find scientific papers quickly turned into something rather more.
Now the team has expanded beyond the Boston area and hopes their innovation will help researchers around the globe.
I downloaded the beta version and played with it a bit. It’s intuitive and sports a clean design. I’m curious to see what it will decide my interests are after I’ve imported some more articles. It’s definitely handy to be able to highlight and make notes right on the PDF, rather than creating a separate Word document.
Kudos to the Labtiva team; let’s see where they go from here.
Cynthia Murrell, December 12, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search Is a Distraction
December 8, 2011
You probably know that the Pew research outfit has revealed that most people go online for what I would describe as “displacement activities”. What’s a displacement activity. My recollection is that it is non directive activity which distracts an unemployed English major, a failed Webmaster, or a self appointed expert from deep thinking about one’s existential condition. In other words, goofing around.
Google’s search app for the iPad has picked up an unwelcome feature. Well, unwelcome to me, not to Google; ZDNet reports, “Google adds instant previews to iPad search app.”
This annoyance is just one new feature included in the recent Google Search update for Apple’s iPads running iOS 4 or iOS 5. The release has several enhancements that should make it more competitive with the built-in Safari. I hope most are more helpful than the instant preview; we learned from the write up:
The app now includes Google Instant, so that search results stream in as people type. Google has coupled this with its Instant Preview technology, giving users a quick look at a destination site without having to load it. These results show up in a string of previews, similar to Google’s overhauled image search carousel, which lets people swipe through images much like music albums in Apple’s cover-flow view.
Some folks must find this feature useful, but for me, it’s just distracting. I start to type “pecan pie” and get botany lessons on my way to a recipe? Thanks, but no thanks. I have enough trouble staying on task without my app offering tempting tangents. Great platform for a business model: distracted clicking. Surf’s up.
Cynthia Murrell, December 8, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
DataExplorers and Why Financial Information Vendors Fear a Storm
December 4, 2011
I am still amused that my team predicted the management shift at Thomson Reuters weeks before the news broke. Alas, that 250 page analysis of the Thomson Reuters’ $13 billion a year operation is not public. Shame. However, one can get a sense of the weakening timbers in the publishing and information frigate in the Telegraph’s story “DataExplorers Looks for £300m Buyer.”
DataExplorers is a specialist research company. The firm gathers information about the alleged lending of thousands of institutional funds. I am not familiar with the names of these exotic financial beasties. The aggregated data are subjected to the normal razzle dazzle of the aggregation for big money crowd. The data are collected, normalized, and analyzed. The idea is that an MBA looking to snag an island can use the information to make a better deal. Not surprisingly, the market for these types of information is small, only a fraction of those in the financial services industry focus on this sector.
DataExplorer’s revenues reflect this concentration. According to the write up, the company generated less than £15 million in annual revenues in 2010 with a profit of about £3 million. The margin illustrates what can be accomplished with a niche market, tight cost controls, and managers from outfits like Thomson Reuters. That troubled outfit contributed the management team at DataExplorers.
Now here’s the hook?
The company is for sale, according to the Telegraph which is a “real” journalistic outfit, for £300 million. That works out to a number that makes sense in the wild and crazy world of financial information; that is, 100 times earnings or 20 times revenue. The flaw, which I probably should not peg to just Thomson Reuters, has these facets:
- The global financial “challenge” means that there may be some pruning of information services in the financial world. Stated another way, MBAs will be fired and their employers may buy less of expensive services such as DataExplorers
- If the financial crisis widens, the appeal of “short” information may lose a bit of its shine. Once a market tanks, what’s the incentive for those brutalized by the sectors’ collapse to stick around
- Thomson Reuters is pretty good at cost cutting. Innovating is not part of the usual package. This means that DataExplorers may be at the peak of its form and sea worthy for a one day cruise in good weather, and once a deal goes down, the new owners may have a tough time growing the business because marketing and research will require infusions of capital to keep the vessel from listing.
Net net: DataExplorers is an example of an information property which may be tough to get back into growth mode. The buyer will be confident that it knows how to squeeze more performance from a niche information product. And that assumption is what contributes to the woes of Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, and many other high end professional content producers. Optimism is a great quality. Realism is too.
Stephen E Arnold, December 4, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
France: Getting Open-Sourcey, Mais Oui
December 2, 2011
The H announces, “French government tenders for open source support.” This is an interesting shift; there are very high quality commercial software companies in France. We learned from the write up:
“The authorities are looking for a three-year support contract, worth two million euros and covering two-thirds of the country’s twenty-two ministries as well as the Court of Audit. According to Le Monde Informatique, this will include departments ranging from the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Justice and Freedom to the Ministry of Sports and Ministry of Culture and Communication.”
The list of software to be supported is extensive, including infrastructure, operating systems, desktop applications, and development environments. The ones that peaked our interest are the enterprise applications like Lucene, Alfresco and Nuxeo and databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL.
It will be interesting to see who the French government selects to cover all these open source bases.
Cynthia Murrell, December 2, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The State of the Library Debated
December 1, 2011
Joho the Blog recently reported on a meeting regarding the history and future of libraries in the November 22 post “Physical Libraries in a Digital World” by using the Harvard Library as a case study.
According to the article, As more and more books accumulated at Harvard there became a need to find other places to store them. One, initially unpopular, option became to store unused books in an off site repository known as the Harvard Depository (HD).
The article states:
“Now more than 40% of the physical collections are at HD. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences started out hostile to the idea, but soon became converted. The notion faculty had of browsing the shelves was based on a fantasy: Harvard had never had all the books on a subject on a shelf in a single facility… Shelf browsing is a waste of time if you’re trying to do thorough research. It’s a little better in the smaller libraries, but the future is not in shelf browsing. Open and closed stacks isn’t the question any more. It’s just not possible any longer to do shelf browsing, unless we develop tools for browsing in a non-physical fashion.”
The task force predicted that within 40 years over 70% of physical books would be off site. Several of the people in the meeting suggested moving the majority of the physical books to be accessed digitally as a way to save money.
As unfortunate as it may be to lose the books that have been salvaged for up to 500 years, we also need to come to terms with the fact that libraries are no longer being used the way they have in the past so why take the extra time and money to salvage them?
Jasmine Ashton December 1, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
China: Quite a Market Despite a Softening Economy
November 29, 2011
My recollection is that Facebook and Microsoft are working to find a way to tap into the China market. Other outfits—for example, Google—tried to change China’s policies. I wonder how well that is working out. Why the interest in China. The Economist reported that the country’s ecommerce sector seems to be chugging along. I read the dead tree version of the story “The Great Leap Online”, The Economist, November 26, 2011, page 78. The authoritative sounding super capitalistic machine shop asserted:
In a new report, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) calculates that every year for the foreseeable future another 30 million Chinese will go online to shop for the first time. By 2015, they each will be spending $1,000 a year—about what Americans spend now. BCG calculates that ecommerce could rise from 3.3 percent of China’s retail sales today to 7.4 percent by 2015—a jump that took a decade in America.
You may be able to find a free digital version of the information at either www.bcg.com or www.economist.com. Finding a way to work with the political realities of China may be of more utility in the economics sense than trying to get the koala to knock off the nocturnal leaf munching. I can see a zoo keeper lecturing a koala, but the koala may be disinterested.
Stephen E Arnold, November 29, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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