SEO Outsourcing

Behind the Times: Murdoch’s Paywall?

sales — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:17:51 +0000

An article in The Guardian newspaper claims that Rupert Murdoch’s online version of the Times is losing “almost 90% of [its] online readership”. Transposing business models of print media into online deserves an unrighteous kick in the pants

In general, websites are support mechanisms for bricks-and-mortar companies and the attempt to elevate and transpose these business models to online, as many have argued in the past, is ignorant and bordering on the insane.

Does Murdoch not realise that the newsstand of the new media model is Google; and why has he thought it wise to remove all his publications from it? In addition, the media industry has not seen fit to take account of a report by Peter Horrocks of the BBC that news corporations need to specialise. What is the point of putting your news behind a paywall when your competition is reporting the same news that doesn’t?

Google, Twitter and Facebook demand that online dissemination is open and searchable. Murdoch knows better, he thinks, even though it has been reported that he only recently learned how to use email. And where on earth do online news, that is openly copied on to other sites and blogs, resolve into bottom-line economics?

John Gapper of the FT argues that Erich Schmidt’s remarks at the Google Zeitgeist conference on how the company is trying to work with news groups, including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp on new revenue models, is that “Google itself is agnostic”.

“Its attitude contrasts to the tendency of those such as Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian and Jeff Jarvis to equate innovation in online news with not charging. As Mr Jarvis wrote of Mr Murdoch’s “pathetic” web strategy, under which The Times and The Sunday Times will charge for online: By building his paywall around Times Newspapers, he has said that he has no new ideas to build advertising. He has no new ideas to build deeper and more valuable relationships with readers and will send them away if they do not pay. Even he has no new ideas to find the efficiencies the internet can bring in content creation, marketing, and delivery.”

At the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference last week, News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller talked about the company’s efforts to put “paywalls” on more of its content. However, he did acknowledge that you do lose unique users when you put up a paywall, but mostly it’s people who were only reading a single story or video. He said advertising was holding up quite well.

Really, well the Guardian doesn’t seem to think so. “Based on the last available ABCe data for Times Online readership (from February 2010), which showed that it had 1.2 million daily unique users, and Hitwise’s figures showing it had 15% of UK online newspaper traffic, that means a total of 332,800 daily users trying to visit the Times site.

“If none of the people visiting the site have already registered, the one-on-four dropout rate means that traffic actually going from the registration site to the Times site is just 84,800, or 1.06% of total UK newspaper traffic – a 93% fall compared with May.”

According to his biographer Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair, “Murdoch has not used the internet, let alone Google (he only recently discovered email) and so he cannot possibly understand the dynamics, demands and opportunities of our post-industrial, now-digital media economy. I use the internet and teach it and write about it and I still can’t grasp the complete implication of the change. I don’t think even Google can.” That’s maybe because they’re agnostics. But I don’t believe that either as the “content-is-king” cliché is a defining feature of Google’s ethos.

And Jeff Jarvis, of the Guardian, chimed in with: “The hard truth is that news organisations will shrink or die. No longer monopolies or oligopolies, the barrier to entry to their kingdom and business reduced to an inch, they simply cannot maintain their old scale, the size and margins that the City demanded. A new ecosystem of news, made up of countless smaller players operating under varying means, motives and business models, will undercut the big, old institutions. The hard iron that once was their advantage – the presses and trucks – have now become a killing weight around their craggy necks.

“Murdoch is a stranger in a strange land. All he has left to do is build a wall around himself and shrink away, a vestige of his old, bold self. Who would have thought that we’d end up feeling pity for the man? It’s almost enough to make me want to throw him a few quid. On second thoughts…”

As witness to the futility model, Murdoch has just butted out of the newsstand on organics and has now turned to Google AdWords on searches such as “London Newspaper” with: thetimes.co.uk/Subscribe. Trial the first 30 days for £1, and experience exclusive online content.” But the Times doesn’t exclusively report on London. Are we stupid enough to pay him for it when The Evening Standard is free, and does?

Maybe it’s a little but like the music industry, where bands these days make CDs for roadshows but receive scant revenue from them. The focus of the new business model here is to sell everything else but.

Mashable, I thought, might have a take on it and I looked for a survey on the subject. The data was taken from a survey of 27,000 consumers across 52 countries: “…Nielsen also found that nearly eight out of every ten (79%) would no longer use a web site that charges them, presuming they can find the same information at no cost. In other words, unless your organisation breaks lots of exclusive and important stories, charging for content will be a major uphill battle.”

The question is whether the Times is that exclusive, or is it just the case of an imprudent, anachronistic business model that relies on the vagaries of an old man?

Cloud removed by China on Google Android platform

sales — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 11:36:18 +0000

Google said it was “very pleased” that the Chinese government has renewed its ICP licence, thereby resolving a six-month stand-off. Had it not done so, it would not have had the platform to develop and market Android on the mainland.

Google’s ICP licence now runs to 2012, subject to annual renewals. On the strength of this agreement, Google rose in Nasdaq trading as the company avoided being expelled from the world’s largest internet market. “We look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China,” the company said on its blog last Friday.

Google’s stance has been rigid since January this year, when it announced it was no longer willing to censor results on Google.cn. The company previously announced: “We currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine. This redirect, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google.”

Now, they have changed their tune and this time it not solely because of its entry into China’s search market. This time its decisions seem more to be based on the mobile market. As Credit Suisse analyst Wallace Cheung said, he expected Android to become the most popular mobile operating system in China, beating out Apple’s popular iPhone. From evidence uncovered by Reuters, it seems mobile was its key motivation in its mission statement reversal.

While Google has struggled to build market share in online search in China, its Android device has a real opportunity to capture a significant share of the mobile market. According to a report by Chinaknowledge, there are an estimated 786.5 million mobile users in the country, and the first quarter of 2010 saw 39.12 million new mobile phone users delivered.

Google’s statement goes some way in explaining the decision: “…It is clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable — and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it’s up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn — so Google would effectively go dark in China.”

The dispute began in January this year, when Google said it was no longer willing to comply with Chinese regulations to self-censor content. But the strategic importance Google places on its involvement in China — from the candlelight vigils outside of its headquarters to the sheer number of users in China — Google is deemed important enough to the Chinese people that the government went back to the negotiating table.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said last Thursday that he expected China to renew the company’s revised application to deliver web services in the country after defying the government in March by ending self-censorship of the Chinese search engine and redirecting users to their Hong Kong site.

Following the announcement, Reuters chimed in with: “Google’s current search business in China accounts for a tiny slice of its $24 billion in annual revenue, with analysts putting its annual China revenue at $300-$400 million. But the long-term growth prospects are key. For one, Google is keen to provide non-search functions on the Google.cn site, such as music search and text translation.”

As China is the world’s largest internet market with nearly 400 million users, the potential is huge. But with an internet penetration rate of 25 percent, China’s online sector is still developing, compared to Japan and South Korea that have penetration rates between 70 to 80 percent.

But it wasn’t just a story about corporate intransigence, cyber attacks on the company’s infrastructure and the data mining of Gmail accounts of China-based activists, together with the attempts to further impede free speech on the web, that led Google to conclude that they would have to review the feasibility of their business operations in China.

A veteran former telecom engineer and analyst, Ed Snyder, argues that the momentum belongs to Google’s Android system, suggesting that music is the application that could provide Google’s open-source Android OS the chance to leap over Apple. He also predicts that the next-generation music platform, which is likely to be cloud-based, will be the major battlefield in the smartphone war.

Google recently revealed that it is activating about 160,000 Android devices a day — more than 14 million a quarter. This statistic demonstrates Android’s power to attract users. And with Apple’s reluctance to upgrade iTunes to a radically different concept, there is a golden opportunity for Google to undercut Apple, offering free premium features to users, like streaming services.

The license renewal allows Google to continue to operate Google.cn in the mainland market, in which the search engine can offer up products and services that do not require censorship, as well as continue to sell advertising on the site in a country with some 400 million Internet users.

It also removes a cloud over other Google business interests, in particular the licensing of its Android mobile phone operating system that in the future could be a strong source of advertising revenue in a nation of nearly 800 million mobile phone subscribers.

Newspapers survive financial fallout by cost-cutting

sales — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 09:02:10 +0000

A recent report issued by the OECD paints a gloomy picture for the future of newspapers. However, according to The Economist, the publisher of Bild and Die Welt “recently recorded the most profitable first quarter in its history”, with a profit margin showing a startling 27%.

Maybe that’s good news for the German publisher but it is an exception as declining readership, especially amongst the young, can be attributed to gathering news from the internet, especially in the US, the UK, Greece, Italy, Canada and Spain.

In the US, after disastrous results, the New York Times reported a first-quarter profit of US$83.3 million, up from US16.4 million year-on-year, but total revenues were down 3.2 percent year-on-year, and job losses in the industry have been especially severe in the US, the UK, the Netherlands and Spain.

The Newspaper Association of America reported that print and online advertising has fallen by 35% since the first quarter of 2008 and that circulation had dropped alarmingly, yet almost all newspapers have survived.

Primarily, newspapers have needed to cut costs so as to find a way out of the financial crisis by reducing payroll costs by up to 25%. There have also been adaptations, such as for example a group of New Jersey newspapers jointly producing features and editorials.

After staff pay, the second-biggest expense is paper, the price of which has plummeted by as much as 40% due to a global commodities slump. And with newspapers printing fewer words on smaller pages, most have survived.

But whilst the cost-cutting has been severe, it doesn’t necessarily follow that their balance sheets are particularly healthy. As The Economist points out: “While the bottom line for most papers appears to be stabilising, the top line is continuing to shrink as newspaper corporations continue their cutbacks.

Some of the key findings in the OECD report are:

* After very profitable years, newspaper publishers in most OECD countries face increased competition (free dailies, internet, multiple TV and radio sources) and often declining advertising revenues, titles and circulation as well as declining readership. The economic crisis has amplified this downward development. About 20 out of 30 OECD countries face declining readership, with significant decreases in some OECD countries.

* The share of advertising going to print newspapers has been declining for the last decade in most OECD countries, and the newspaper advertising market has more recently experienced large falls in offline and online advertising growth. On the cost side, costs unrelated to editorial work such as production, maintenance, administration, promotion and advertising, and distribution dominate newspaper costs. These large fixed costs make newspaper organisations more vulnerable to the downturns and less agile in reacting to the online news environment.

* “Reading news online” is an increasingly important internet activity. In some OECD countries, more than half of the population read newspapers online (up to 77 per cent in Korea) but at the minimum 20 per cent of the population read newspapers online. The willingness to pay for online news is low but increasing. In many OECD countries, TV and newspapers are still the most important sources of news but this is shifting with newspapers losing ground more quickly to the internet than TV. In countries such as Korea, the internet has already overtaken other forms of news.

* In many Western OECD countries the internet web pages of broadcasters and online newspaper sites play a large role in attracting news-related visits. More recently newspaper websites have seen strong growth in their own pages, with large newspapers reporting several million of unique visitors to their pages per month, including increasingly readers from abroad, a radical shift for newspapers.

* The impacts of the changing media landscape on news are pulling in two opposite directions. One extreme is that online and other new forms of more decentralised news will liberate readers from partisan news monopolies which have tended to become more concentrated and to dominate the production and access to news. The other extreme is that the demise of the traditional news media is with us (partially caused by the rise of the Internet), and with it an important foundation for democratic societies is at risk.

Newspaper publishers hope that the emphasis on distinctive content, as recommended last year by the BBC, as the best way forward, whether delivered to smart-phones, tablet computers or the internet.

The Economist thinks: “So far the few that have persuaded readers to pay for news online tend to have a reputation for distinctive coverage. The Financial Times … and the Wall Street Journal have leading positions in business and financial news, and successful pay-walls.

“Newspapers still face big structural obstacles: it remains unclear, for example, whether the young will pay for news in any form. But the recession brought out an impressive and unexpected ability to adapt. If newspapers can keep that up in better times, they may be able to contemplate more than mere survival.”

Google takes a bite out of Apple’s Tablet

sales — Thu, 13 May 2010 07:51:01 +0000

The bitter friction between Apple and Google following the release of its Android operating system was one thing, but sour relations between the two companies has reached a new stage of intensity following Google’s announcement of its own Tablet.

Steve Jobs recently accused Google of “stealing features from the iPhone” and that the company had “entered the phone business.” At a company meeting, he remarked: “Make no mistake, they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.” Apparently, this attack was met with “thunderous applause” from Apple’s employees.

No doubt this corporate squabbling is the result of the success of Apple’s new iPad, which has prompted other tech companies, like Dell and Toshiba, to enter the Tablet computing market.

In a report by the BBC, Appleis said to have sold more than 300,000 units of the iPad Tablet computer on its launch day in the US, which sent Apple’s share price up to a record high of $238.49. Forbes, however, says that Apple has sold its millionth iPad, after the Tablet computers had been on sale just 28 days.

Bob O’Donnell, an industry analyst with International Data Corp opined: “Anybody can make a Tablet. I could go to Taiwan, hire a contract manufacturer and make ‘Bob’s Tablet,” he said. “The hard part is doing the software and getting the applications.”

And with it the cross-partisan competition lines up behind its preferred brand: Dell’s Mini 5 Tablet will use Google’s Android operating system, while H-P is planning to use Microsoft software to power its Slate device. Some smaller companies are also selling their versions of the Tablet, with Fusion Garage, a Singaporean startup, offering the JooJoo, which went on sale in the US in March.

But this doesn’t appear to be a bandwagon-jump ,as H-P is said to have been developing its own Tablet for five years and has released a handful of videos and blog entries about the Slate. But the problem with iPad’s rivals is that Apple has 140,000 apps that you can run, which makes it incredibly difficult for the competition to catch up.

The spat between the two titans of tech was summed up succinctly in a New York Times report as: “Today, such warmth [between Apple and Google] is in short supply. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Schmidt and their companies are now engaged in a gritty battle royale over the future and shape of mobile computing and cellphones, with implications that are reverberating across the digital landscape.

“While the discord between Apple and Google is in part philosophical and involves enormous financial stakes, the battle also has deeply personal overtones and echoes the ego-fueled fisticuffs that have long characterised technology industry feuds,” that has exposed “the clash between Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs offer[ing] an unusually vivid display of enmity and ambition.”

At the heart of the dispute is Jobs’ sense of betrayal: that Google has “violated the alliance between the companies by producing cellphones that physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone”.

But when you compare Apple’s controlled approach to the development of apps, the Google Android allows an open source approach to the submission of programs and also allow users to download them from third-party sources. The Google Android Tablet is also likely to provide support for Flash and will no doubt provide apps for Google’s services, such as Gmail and Voice, a practice Apple does not permit.

But PC World is urging us all to take a “reality check” in that they say the New York Times really stated: “Google is ‘exploring the idea’ of building a Tablet device. It is ‘experimenting’ with possibilities. Despite some bloggers’ tendencies to fill in the blanks with big words, there’s no indication that this is a done deal, let alone something that’s likely to occur at any moment.”

Is the pope a catholic? Aardvark returns immediate answers to life’s esoteric questions

sales — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:03:10 +0000

There seems to be a proliferation of Q&A sites, which assume to offer “answers” to anyone who poses a question. Aardvark, WikiAnswers and Mahalo are three new services that purport to deliver education on demand. But it’s not quite feasible, is it?

If you are of a mind to ask randomly trivial questions, you may be surprised that Aardvark, WikiAnswers and Mahalo have all arrived to assist you in your quest for knowledge. But ask something “esoteric” and these systems fall flat on their faces.

For example, should one be tempted to ask: “How many bones are there in the human body”, within minutes you would be emailed with the answer: 206. But ask whether or not it is right for the pope to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and subjectivity calls.

Aardvark has recently been bought by Google and is said that if you “ask questions” you get immediate “live” answers from your network, as Aardvark “finds the perfect person to answer any question in real-time”.

At the weekend, I decided to test the Aardvark service as I was idly browsing through online tech news and noticed a headline on the TechCrunch website pointing to it. I had earlier in the day been sent a link to a Guardian newspaper article, “Richard Dawkins calls for Pope to be put on trial”.

TechCrunch observed that Google has acquired a “promising social search startup Aardvark for around $50 million” and the short description of this story read that this new service “allows users to ask questions and get responses almost immediately from other users who are knowledgeable about the subject in question”.

On a whim I signed up, as I was intrigued to find out why Google had bought such a resource. It puzzled me how I could receive an “immediate response” to, for instance, the probe Prof. Dawkins was instigating. So, I asked an emotive first question: “Should the pope be prosecuted for crimes against humanity?”

But before we descend into the answers the company responded with, the article in question, published on the Guardian newspaper’s website, stated that Prof. Richard Dawkins, along with Christopher Hitchens, are paying lawyers to investigate the possibility of prosecuting the pope for crimes against humanity after a letter emerged from 1985 in which the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger urged that a paedophilic priest in America not be defrocked for the “good of the universal church”.

In the spirit of coincidental enquiry, I looked much further into the catholic church story and found a BBC World News debate, called Intelligence Squared, aired last year and available on YouTube, that centred on the question, “Is the catholic church a force for good in the world”.

Excuse me while I indulge you for a short while more. Arguing for this statement was the Archbishop of Abuja and Ann Widdecombe, a British MP; arguing against the statement was Christopher Hitchens, an English-American author and journalist, and Stephen Fry, British actor, writer, comedian, author, television presenter and film director. The result: 268 for; 1,876 against the motion.

The problem seems to be that these services pick up on a keyword, in this case “catholicism”, and then passes it down the line to the “experts” on the subject. The first responses were decidedly defensive and weren’t too far away from a recent BBC headline from an Iranian cleric that read: “Women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes”.

Mary, of Cincinnati, responded to the question thus: “Should the people of Thailand all be punished for the few who abuse children, women and men? I think the answer to both questions is no. Retribution is never as effective as forgiveness.”

My initial assumption, and forgive me here if I am wrong, was how dare someone living in a country such as Thailand have the gall to pose such a question? Maybe I was wrong to think that, but if so what led her to respond to this question with reference to Thailand, a country in which almost everyone is buddhist?

Okay, forgiveness is one measured approach, but it hardly convenes an educated answer to the question of whether or not the pope should be prosecuted for deliberately appointing a known paedophile to the conclave.

The website network.nationalpost.com commented that Dawkins’ point of view has recently been dealing with certain discomfiting suggestions about relations between religion and the brain. And on absorbing that research, “he must live in dread that one day he will read scientific evidence that religious belief is essential to survival and therefore to, uh, evolution”.

From my point of view, as neutral as I started out, I also received the following from Aardvark. A man in Paris said: “No, it’s not his fault that priests don’t take their mission and vows seriously. He should however, take all the dispositions to prevent these abuses from happening ever again.”

Reasonable enough response, I thought. From Vienna: “I’m not sure if thos [sic] is technically possible for him - chruch [sic] law is quite complex!”. And from Barcelona: “Of course but he won’t do. Lot of money and power and he’ll not lose,” which was annoying, given such a weighty topic should be summarily dismissed on the grounds of winning and losing.

By using Google’s core engine as a reference, it allowed me access to hours of research into pro- and counter-arguments on the subject, but instead I received immediate bias from the human reference library Google thought fit to buy just two months ago.

Following Mary’s many platitudes of love and forgiveness in the vein of: “Buddhism is centered on the love that connects us all. Jesus has the same message,” just didn’t wash. It was not the question I posed and of all the responses I received, not one was neutral; all of the “experts” fell back on entrenched personal truths. Mary, in particular, was the most unhelpful about the question, stating, “Glad I could provide an outlet for your hatred of catholicism”.

Although religious homilies may often excoriate what is considered the main ills of modern society, primarily it’s hedonist post-modernism, it is not really the point of my question. And maybe Aardvark’s responses says much about the Vatican that in the age of wireless communication and the internet it still uses smoke signals to announce the election of its pope.

But all this doesn’t adequately explain what Google and co are doing buying up these Q&A sites: they should at best answer simple enquiries and leave the eternal where it belongs, as the answer can be called 42 by anyone who wishes it to be so.

Cloud Computing Hauled Over The Coals By Greenpeace

sales — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:47:41 +0000

With the growth of developing economies and the vast amounts of energy needed for cloud computing, publicity-conscious Greenpeace has criticised the ICT industry’s data centers, where utility power comes primarily from coal.

But by some quirk of fate and timing and imagination, cloud computing, based on an infrastructure whereby data is delivered to devices directly from the internet in real time, has all of a sudden been impacted by the shadowy voice of Greenpeace.

A study, “SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age”, highlights the significant and rapidly-growing footprint of the ICT industry and predicts that, because of the rapid economic expansion in places like India and China, demand for ICT services will quadruple by 2020.

The report finds that by then PC ownership will quadruple to four billion devices – with laptops becoming the main source of global ICT emissions – and that mobile ownership will almost double to nearly five billion over the same period.

As the world’s demand for content is delivered in real time, this growth comes with an increasing demand for energy, with virtual mountains needing to house this swelling data deluge.

Alarming and environmentally damaging according to Greenpeace, individual contributions including five-second snatchments of the banal, need not only to be available for instantaneous access by others and will need infinite data dumps to do so – the home of the data center.

Greenpeace says that data center builders must become “part of the solution to the climate change challenge, rather than part of the problem” and urge operators to “power their data centers using renewable energy”. They are also pressing US Congress to make “renewable energy more readily available”.

The recent salvos should perhaps be put into context because In its new report, “Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change”, shows that data centers and telecommunication networks “will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatts hours of electricity in 2020, more than triple their current consumption and over half the current electricity consumption of the United States — or more than France, Germany, Canada and Brazil — combined.”

But Greenpeace has been accused of blatant hypocrisy through its glaringly obvious publicity campaign. Digitaltrends reports: “You have to break some eggs to make an omelette, and apparently, you have to burn a couple watts to keep the world tapped into an always-on, instantly available ecosystem of content, ideas and information.”

The article goes on to complain that while “forward-thinking companies like Google and Facebook continue to wring every bit of utility possible from the energy they use, and help their users reduce CO2 footprints in the process, Greenpeace has nothing to do but heckle from the sidelines…”

Greenpeace is said to be targeting data center operators to meet standards it doesn’t itself meet, as some of its servers are also powered by coal and nuclear. Let’s not forget, headline-catching topics like cloud computing attract publcity to the “good cause”.

Hypocrisy aside, Greenpeace strode on with: “We are calling on IT industry giants to put their might behind government policies that give priority grid access for renewable sources like wind and solar energy…IT companies should also support economy-wide climate and energy policies around the world that peak climate emissions by 2015…The great innovators of the digital age can and should be leaders in promoting an energy revolution.”

It is a bit strange that by announcing what I’ve had for lunch contributes to climate change and even though some may think they are on sturdy ground to dismiss Greepeace for duplicity and manipulating the media, the issue of cloud computing and its environmental impact cannot now remain unaddressed.

This is a new angle for the ICT industry to come to terms with at a time when the long-forgotten Copenhagen climate summit fiasco has been almost universally neglected.

Remember the row over whether to ditch the Kyoto protocol and its legal distinction between developed and developing countries, in which developing nations saw the so-called developed world try and wriggle out of its commitments to climate change?

Many observers at the time blamed the US for arriving at the talks with a paltry offer of emissions cuts on 1990 levels at just 4%. The final text of this farcical agreement made no further obligations on developing countries to make cuts.

Does anyone recall at the end of the summit John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, saying: “The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport”?

Now, perhaps, the ICT industry’s business leaders can lead the way and positively react to concerns about the sustainability of its data centers. If it fails to do so, its shareholders just might.

Is howling mad King Rupert a visionary in disguise?

sales — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:03:30 +0000

In TechCrunch’s “The Madness of King Rupert” by Paul Carr he reports, incredulously, that News International is to install a turnstile on its websites this June and wonders whether Murdoch is simply a barking latter-day George III or visionary.

Newspaper sales have been in decline for quite some time now and companies have been searching for a business model that will make money from their websites. News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks said it was “a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition”. Accepted, but is the Times is specialist enough to make that claim? If not, Paul Carr is right and readers will go elsewhere for content when they reach the turnstiles.

The BBC spent a long time looking at how the newspaper industry could change its model, detailed in a 94-page report by Peter Horrocks on the subject. Subsequently, the Corporation came under fire from the Murdoch clan as being uncompetitive, as television license fees pay for its content.

But at TechCruch, the writer had this to say about it: “Really the only possible reasoning – outside of madness – that’s left for Murdoch’s behaviour is that he’s cleverer than all of us. Perhaps if we just watch quietly we’ll soon see the true genius behind his plan. After all, that’s what happened back in the 1980s and 90s when he launched Sky Television – a British-based satellite TV channel. Back then no one in the UK paid for television (we’d been brought up on free to air TV with little or no demand for cable) and there were no signs that they were ready to start – and yet in less than a decade Sky had become one of the country’s biggest broadcasters. Perhaps that’s his plan with the Times as well – make the content of his new online editions so unbelievably compelling that subscribers will be forced to sign up in their droves?”

Compelling. The Times? James Harding, its editor, recently made comparisons with news and the music industry. “People said the game is up for the music industry because everyone is downloading for free. But now people are buying from download sites.” Who exactly is buying from download sites? Not in my backyard they’re not.

According to the BBC, the latest figures show that The Times and Sunday Times have 1.22m daily users but Media research company Enders Analysis told the BBC that anyone who believes the Times papers will get the usual 5% conversion after the paywall is installed is in “dreamland”. She also doesn’t believe Mr Murdoch’s strategy represents the endgame for his loss-making papers. “If it fails, Murdoch will think of something else. He has been supporting his loss-makers for years.”

Paul Carr believes that “moving its content behind a paywall will be the death of the Times; one of the world’s most respected newspapers and a British national treasure. Even with a relatively modest subscription cost of £1…it has been shown time and time again that the hassle factor of making even a small payment to access a website will result in a haemorrhaging of readers.”

Another source, Emily Bell, writing for The Guardian, says that: “The paywall, the value gate, the towering edifice of unharvested cash, call it what you will, the debate about paid-for content on the web is increasingly about anything but the actual sagacity of putting a turnstile on your website,” arguing that quality journalism is the real issue at stake.

Specialist publications, like the Economist, Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times already have audiences who are charged for digital content but I would not place the Times in this category.

Philosophically, Ms Bell continued: “The paywall debate at heart is partly pragmatic, as the risk of implementing the strategy is high and the rewards are unknown; but also philosophical, about whether journalism is viewed as a commodity or a democratic necessity.”

However, one comment by “Ariel Bender” on TechCrunch’s “Howling Mad Murdoch” article said: “It won’t be long before the New York Times joins the WSJ on the iPad as a paid app. Before too long everyone will take a stand against Google’s vampiristic business model, leaving them to choke on their own hubris and die. That will be a happy day, indeed.”

Harsh, but if Bender has it right, then maybe Howling Messiah may be a more fitting epitaph when micropayments find a common platform.

World Cup Accommodation

sales — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:15:49 +0000

World Cup Accommodation for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, due to be held from June 2010 in South Africa, is expensive. But 3 Lions Football Village provide no-frills, basic accommodation in simple dormitory-style units, from just £39 per person a night!

3 Lions Football Village Accommodation is targeting England supporters and, according to the company’s website, is “the place to experience the 2010 FIFA World Cup”, as it is offering “much more than just a place to stay” and claims to offer the “best vibe in town”, catering for 18+ers who want to party.

The site will cater for a 24-hour party atmosphere, with no neighbours, no closing times and no last call at the bar, which is to be stocked with cheap drinks in their massive beer tent with a big screen television.

The accommodation is located in Randburg, not far from Johannesburg and Rustenburg to the north, where some of the matches will be played. On 12th June, England start their World Cup campaign against the USA in Rustenburg, The World Cup is to be staged at ten venues across South Africa: Johannesburg, Rustenburg, Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Polokwane, Nelspruit, Bloemfontein and Pretoria.

At the site, not only is it going to be one huge party but there are subtleties to it too, like English being spoken by all staff members and a full maid service and regular shuttle services to local destinations with free airport collection and drop-off. And to make the English fans feel more at home, they will be providing full English breakfasts, an internet cafe, an international phone service and will arrange trips to local hotspots such as nightclubs, casinos, shopping centres and other local attractions.

Of concern to some is safety, but 3 Lions have this covered too: they will be providing 24-hour security patrols, lockable personal cabinets and a central office safe to store valuables.

All World Cup games will be shown on big screens and there’s also no need to go off-site to change money as they have our own exchange bureau for both credit cards and cash.

As far as the accommodation is concerned, all rooms are the same size (3 metres x 3 metres), and can be furnished in any one of five different configurations with natural and electric lighting, a heater/aircon unit and a daily maid service including bedding and towels.

The following extras are available from 3 Lions Village Accommodation:

ONSITE
» 24 Hour security patrols, a lockable cabinet per person and a Central office safe for your valuables
» Big screens showing all the games
» Round-the-clock facilities including a first-aid office
» Massive beer tent
» Exchange Bureau: credit cards and cash accepted (pounds and euros)
» Full English breakfast served
» Internet cafe and phone service
» Entertainment provided (pool tables, dart boards, golf driving range, paintball)
» DJ and music
» Poker competitions and football pools for small betting

OFFSITE
» Regular shuttle services to local destinations
» Trips to nightlife hotspots, casinos, shopping centres and local attractions
» Safaris organised from 1 day to 1 week in duration
» Golf days
» Shuttles to local soccer games and pick up points
» Arrangements for travel to further destinations
» Trips to Sun City, Soweto and the Cradle of Humankind

V9 Design and Build has designed and built the website for 3 Lions Football Village on Three Lions Village.

Mobiles To Change Economics Of The Internet

sales — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:06:04 +0000

Handset manufacturers and software providers are all champing at the bit in carving out market share for projected mobile apps sales to reach $17bn by 2012. The global appetite for mobile apps will explode over this decade, but what about mobile SEO?

What for many is glaringly obvious, mobile is set to become the primary access point of the internet in this coming decade. But where do we fit in?

In yet another encounter in the big tech wars, this time it’s Apple that titan Google is taking on. Over the past few months Google’s mobile operating system, Android, has debuted on a host of smartphones, which has riled Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs enough to tell his employees: “Make no mistake, Google wants to kill the iPhone.”

Taking this to heart, Apple this month sued Taiwan’s HTC Corp, the maker of touchscreen smartphones using Google software, accusing it of twenty hardware and software patents infringements related to the iPhone.

As if to make matters worse for Mr Jobs, a recent article in TechCrunch confirmed his fears: “I’ve been using the Nexus One with TMobile since mid-December as my primary mobile phone. This is the best Android-powered phone to date. It’s also the fastest and most elegant smartphone on the market today, solidly beating the iPhone in most ways. In this rapidly evolving market there is sure to be something better just around the corner. But if you are looking to buy a high-end smartphone right now, this is the phone for you.”

But what will come of this in a time some prematurely describe as the Year of Mobile? According to Jason Steinberg of ClickZ: “2010 is the year of mobile…Everyone in advertising and media has been hearing that statement for nearly three years running. And for the last two, it’s been followed up with a less than reassuring ‘and this time, we mean it’.”

To back that assessment up, the BBC reported: “…developer activity for the iPhone has risen 185% in advance of the iPad’s April arrival. Applications for the iPhone can be ported over to the new device. We have definitely seen a shift back to the iPhone with the anticipation of the iPad and a little bit of the disappointment with the Nexus 1 (Google phone), Simon Khalaf, chief executive of Flurry Analystics told business site MarketWatch.com.”

Already, Google’s Android Marketplace has more than 30,000 apps made for smartphones running on its mobile operating system. Chetan Sharma Consulting told the BBC that the charging model which dominates the app ecosystem is changing. “Advertising and the sale of virtual goods has helped expand choices for developers and we will see all of that ramp up in the next couple of years.”

And, of course, the possibilities are enormous, with 270 million mobile subscribers in the US alone and with 29.1 million of them smartphone users. And in addition to the high numbers in the US, the majority of users in the developing world are going online for the first time using a this device.

As David B Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School, told the New York Times: “The new paradigm is mobile computing and mobility…That has the potential to change the economics of the internet business and to redistribute profits yet again.”

Like many in the industry, Google recognises that more and more people are accessing the web via mobile phones rather than the desktop and has openly stated that the Nexus One represents “the next frontier” in the company’s core business.

There can be no doubt that mobile marketing will play an increasingly important role in the overall marketing mix; from searching on the move to social networking, all platforms will become the new staple of internet search.

Although Apple’s recent legal action against HTC may have wider implications for all phone makers that use Google’s Android operating system, Ian Fogg of Forrester Research said that the case against HTC, in which Apple alleges infringement of 20 of its patents, could be the first of many.

But whatever the current legal wrangles, localized content is what search instantly delivers on these devices, so products or services will increasingly need to be related to a geographic area, if they don’t already, and sites should focus on the keyword phrases that identify the geographic scope of the business.

To emphasise this trend, Google Blog comments: “If you’re like us, you’re constantly looking for things in your neighbourhood, whether it’s [restaurants in zurich] or a new [dentist in houston]. If you specify your location in your query, we often show your results on a map…”

All very interesting, but where does all this leave mobile SEO when results from internet search and mobile internet search appear so indistinct at the moment?

India Photography: Sadhus, Beggars, Gypsies and Others

sales — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:53:50 +0000

Narratives of India and Nepal, told through the lens of a digital Nikon, carry with them the seduction of difference; and it is almost impossible to really know India and Nepal unless you stand amidst it.

Landscape and portrait photographer Brian Moore started his career in the late 70s and early 80s in India and was the “official” photographer for houseboat owners on Dal Lake in Kashmir at the time.

This year he took inspiration and travelled back to India to take a series of inspiring, real life reportage-style photographs, covering the length and breadth of the sub-continent, some of which he has published in his first book titled “Sadhus, Beggars, Gypsies and Others”.

At times a photographer’s life is a nomadic one. With a hint of colour and vibrance, mixed with the assiduities of grace and humanity, a photographer stakes out their own internal, artistic territory: from the resonating prime colours of Rajasthan to less majestic images of indifference and survival, Brian Moore uncovers a life besieged by desire and acceptance.

In his first book, he tells endless tales of the sub-continent’s culture, its people and environment, allowing his story to billow and bluster in the power and momentum of trips into the Great Indian Desert, the Bombay slums, its soothing shorelines, its rural life and of the hardships of Himalayan mountain village life.

Before leaving his native Australia, Brian acquired a Nikon camera with a range of lenses and, with his playful armoury of anonymity during intimate moments, this approach gave him the edge in overcoming starched and unnatural poses of the people he chose to photograph. His shots include the people and landscapes of Rajasthan, Varanasi during the recent the nightly aarti (fire) ceremony, Nepal’s mountain people and breathtaking views and, to a lesser extent, other destinations he chose to shoot in.

His majestic colour and black-and-white landscapes are given depth by a devotion to clarity and precision; and his portraits set out his stall for how he views the country to be at its very heart. Brian shot exclusively on a Nikon digital and, in so doing, has made archival fine art landscapes and its people come alive.

The flexibility of shooting digitally enabled Brian to experiment. With his impressive photographic style and technique, Brian Moore’s talent and experience of exploring the colourful characters of India, with his almost anonymous approach to its people, captures images that are the embodiment of India’s life, emotion and environment.

Brian Moore details his real life reportage-style photographs in first book, being showcased on Blurb, which profiles the people of India and Nepal. It is for sale on http://www.blurb.com/books/1219016.