Convergence Conversation

Date:               Thursday 25 March 2010
Time:              18:00 - 20:00
Venue:            Intellect Offices, 10-12 Russell Square, WC1B 5EE
Chair:              Ved Sen, founder and CEO, ThinkPlank
Speakers:      Simon Bell, British Library, and
                         Jonathan Glasspool, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topic for this Conversation:  ‘Publishing 2.0’ 

Amidst the doom and gloom of media and advertising, newspapers (w More...

Top Stories, 14th December 2009

• Devices: Google tries its hand at a handset
• Strategy and Finance: AT&T throttles heavy users, Sprint's McGuire: "We must break the Big Bell dogma"
• Digital Advertising 2.0: Telefonica launches ad platform in 18 markets
• Broadband: Kigali gets WiMAX
• Regulation: Bruce Schneieron the future of privacy.

Rich Karpinski Editor of Connected Planet (previously known as Telephony Online) has been blogging from the first-ever Telco 2.0 America Executive Brainstorm: if you weren't there, there's a taste of the event here and here.

Meanwhile, pictures and details of what is supposed to be a Google Phone leak. More...

Future Of TV Advertising Conference, London

 

Here’s a nice chart depicting the top money makers from ad placement inside video clips on the youtube.com. The business potential from content sharing seems strong enough to drive Sony and Universal into building VEVO later this year.

I am a firm believer that there are more ways (other than advertising) to leverage on content at a mass scale. Of course this may require  further developments in network access; we should forget that only a tiny fraction of internet access is effectively high-speed.  However, this is good example of business transformation in the current economy and social setting (including unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted material – piracy in short). More...

About 10 years ago, it became fashionable to say that "voice is just another sort of data on an IP network". VoIP, it was suggested, just turned telephony into mere bits, just like any others.

I want to extend and explore that description of subset/superset: I assert that "content is just a special sort of application on an IP network". It's just big chunks of software.

In both cases, there is a strong empirical evidence of truth, but the one word which is out of place in each sentence is "just", at least in the short term. Nevertheless, both assertions provide a view of how things change over much longer (10+ year) periods. More...

Lord Mandelson is right to try to stop the illegal distribution of music and video. The scale on which it happens distorts incentives for participants in both the communications and the creative industries; and we should anyway give special care to our artists and creators whose existence is often uncertain enough without adding callous disregard for the protections copyright offers them.

He should however accompany his efforts with a requirement on the music and film companies to supply retail entertainment services on reasonable and non-discriminatory wholesale terms, instead of the highly questionable approach they currently take, demanding equity stakes, disproportionate advance payments, and coercive tools such as short term licences and put options, which benefit neither the artists and creators, nor entertainment retailers and ISPs, nor consumers. More...

I use Facebook quite a lot in my personal life.

I've started noticing how much it's impacted on my use of various other messaging services. Firstly, about 50-60% of incoming messages to my main Yahoo! personal email address are now Facebook notifications and alerts. Secondly, Facebook IM has now risen to about 50% of my total IM sessions, typically with a different set of people to those I contact via Yahoo! or Skype IM.

I'd also say that since the beginning of this year, I've added maybe 120 Facebook contacts, compared to maybe only 30 new friends' numbers in my phone. And there are definitely some scenarios where I'll prefer to send people Facebook messages rather than email - especially if it relates to an event, but also because the threading makes it more like an ongoingand personal conversation, perhaps because you're only a click away from someone's profile, so you always have a better idea of what's g More...

At the risk of piling on the agony, Le Monde has a nice piece today on the decline of print media within household budgets in France (Google translation here), including this chart showing huge declines for newspapers and books - but keep in mind the last data point is 2005, arguably when the real pain was just beginning. Elsewhere, a colleague noticed a good example of a relatively "uncool" industry seemingly getting the structural shift - UK housebuilder TaylorWimpey's results presentation yesterday (see slide 15) contained a pledge to cut classified ad spending in half (to slightly less than 1/3 of total marketing spend, in favor of online. More...

I've just got off a call hosted by the Mobile Entertainment Forum, with the GSMA, Vodafone & O2, talking about mobile APIs that are being exposed to developers. A lot of good stuff about categorising & standardising APIs, and some really good insight into what developers and content companies seem to want to get access to.

HOWEVER, as can be surmised by the MEF trying to insert itself in the process, this is very heavily "entertainment-centric", and here we are mostly talking about "legacy content", ie purveyors of monolithic chunks of video, music etc.

My general view, though, is that in the big scheme of things, legacy content really isn't that important. More...

An interesting insight into the world of the UK consumer comes in the form of Deloitte’s ‘State of the Media Democracy’ survey. The survey launched recently, seeks to understand the myriad of ways in which consumers interact with media and entertainment, forecasting how this will change in the future.

In the current sea of uncertainty the survey’s findings are somewhat of an anchor.
From the findings it’s clear that TV remains the favourite media source for most, with scheduled programmes still the preferred method for watching the nations favourite shows. More...