Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
Big Chance for Big Media: AP Tries to Jump on the iPhone Craze
The Associated Press, that symbol of all that is old media, has made a surprisingly tech-savvy move. As Forbes’ Brian Caulfield reported May 7, the global news service is hoping to gain a prime spot on a screen that is viewed regularly by some of the most plugged in folks on the planet – the Apple iPhone home page.
The AP is hardly the only news organization that wants to be in on the mega iCraze, but with its new “Mobile News Network” the AP has a shot at being placed as the first “News” button on the home screen of that ubiquitous toy of techno-yuppies known as the iPhone. At this point, only a handful of widgets are on that often used screen, and most are provided by new media giants like Google and Yahoo, or by Apple itself – such as weather, maps and stock quotes. (All this will soon change, but that’s another story.)
Caulfield describes old media companies’ desire to get on these phones their “best shot at digital relevance,” and I couldn’t have put it better myself. (Full disclosure, Brian was my editor at one time, and he still ranks among my favorite biz tech journalists.)
Like so many other news services, the AP chose not to carve out its own online destination, instead choosing to let Google, Yahoo and various news outlets aggregate and distribute its content. Now, with old media looking down the barrel of a gun, this kind of move could be too little too late. But it’s at least a sign that someone over there is thinking outside the box.
Caulfield reports that so far at least, Apple hasn’t announced that it’s taking up the AP’s offer. Could this be a case of closing ranks? For my part, I hope Apple decides to play ball on this one. To me, the AP is a little bit like the older aunt you invite to your party, knowing that even though she might not understand any of the talk about Twitter tweets or whether Robert Scoble’s going to show up, she’s intelligent and reliable – and she’s been around long enough to bring some experience to her observations of the world.
You Down With IDG? Yeah You Know Me
Steve Lohr of The New York Times writes today about publisher IDG and the state of its business. Like many magazine and newspaper publishers these days, IDG has been one that seemingly was struggling. Infoworld went online-only and Computerworld is now a fraction of its size and thickness from a few years ago.
But don’t let these print issues fool you, the Times reports that all is well with IDG who is raking in more revenue from online advertising (52%) than print advertising (48%) and is growing its revenue by 10% per year (70% of their revenue is from publications). Layoffs and killing print issues seem to just have been smart business decisions and not acts of desperation.
This article puts some debates to rest — whether online ads can replace lost print revenue, or, if there’s any hope for struggling companies publishing print publications. IDG is a niche publisher, which helps since they do have a loyal tech audience, and PC World and MacWorld are mainstays that will always do well, but it’s nice to see that there is hope for an online transition for many of the traditional tech publications we love here at LaunchSquad.
What’s become clear is that it’s not an online-offline thing — just because a publisher was never in print doesn’t mean it’s immune to the issues facing the publishing industry (see, CNET). And, on the flipside, there is hope and opportunity for formerly traditional print publishers like IDG.
I guess it’s easy to confuse struggle with change.
One Stop Shop for Docs
There is a new start-up in Southern California that I have been excited about for almost a year now. Docstoc is the latest brainchild of one of my former business school classmates, Jason Nazar and his partner, Alon Schwartz. It’s a user generated community where you can find and share professional documents, ranging from legal to technology to business and beyond. Docstoc announced this week that it has raised $3.25M in its series B round of funding from Rustic Canyon Partners.
Docstoc is a great example of the increasingly transparent world that we live in, a vast database of useful information that is part blog, part social community and part encyclopedia of free information. An interesting attribute and arguably the most compelling reason that this start-up attracted the attention (read: money) of such an esteemed, media-savvy venture firm is that it has popularized the ability to embed documents into any blog or website, a feature that we know very well in the PR world is popular in the blogoshpere and on news sites.
I like Docstoc for many reasons; the site has become my go-to resource for information that I might have had trouble tracking down previously, but I also think that it is leading the charge in changing the way that people use, store and share information. The site is still in beta, the company is brand new, so for me, I will be watching to see what it does with its $3.25M and whether Jason can get another winner off the ground…
My Tech Obsession Du Jour: The 2-D Barcode
Arguably the coolest thing about life at LaunchSquad is meeting cutting-edge clients who introduce me to new technology that I never knew existed. One such client is StoreXperience, a mobile retail company that harnesses the power of my favorite new tech tool: the 2-D barcode.
I have developed a genuine obsession with 2-D barcodes (often called QR Codes). Though they resemble traditional retail barcodes, 2-D barcodes can be instantly scanned by advanced cell phones to bring complex online content straight to the hands of consumer.
Now all of that tech talk is dandy, but what gets me most psyched about 2-D barcodes is how creative types are bringing this tool into the real world: merging art, technology and design to make a real statement.
Since fashion seems to be the first frontier of 2-D barcode style, here are three companies to keep an eye on:
Lendorff Perhaps the most popular QR Code fashion statement comes from this English company, who have ingrained the barcodes onto scarves. The amazing Rob Walker dedicated his entire Consumed column to these guys last month. I now want to buy one for everyone I know.
Wikd This Dutch tech fashion company embeds individual codes onto shirts and hoodies, allowing wearers to customize the URLs on their clothing — and interested scanners to send private messages via their cellphone.
Denim Code This French company puts 2-D barcodes on the back pockets of their jeans. Can’t imagine this won’t lead to some seriously bizarre pick-up scenarios.
2-D barcodes are already very popular in Japan and Europe, and it is inevitable that they will be more widely seen Stateside soon. To get a peek at what’s in store for you, check out this Flickr gallery of international QR code statements.
All I Really Needed to Know, I Learned on Twitter
Yesterday was a busy day for me. I was in and out of meetings and wasn’t in front of my computer too much. You know, the kind of day when you’re sitting there in a conference room guessing how many emails will be in your inbox when you get back? 50, 75, 100?
Meanwhile, there were two news developments that I was eager to follow: The Pennsylvania primary and Yahoo!’s earnings. Normally on busy work and news days, I rush to my desk, fire up a browser and scan my RSS feeds and a few sites I know can get me caught up.
But yesterday was different. When I got back to my desk, Twitter was open in my browser and before closing out, I did a quick refresh to scan the latest from the people I follow.
Right then, I had one of those Twitter “eureka!” moments. Rafe sums it up elegantly when he says, “The people who laugh at Twitter do not understand it. Pity them.”
You see, as if a genie granted me three wishes, a handful of “Tweets” gave me the gist of the news I was so desperate to follow all day. Special thanks goes out to CNet’s Dan Farber who was live tweeting the earnings call and providing succinct updates as they happened:
-Yahoo CFO: Traffic acquisition costs are up 4 percent because the company has to compete. about 19 hours ago from Snitter
-Yahoo’s headcount dropped from 14,300 at the end of last year to 13,800, including 600 new hires, offset by the company’s layoff. about 19 hours ago from Snitter
-Yahoo generated first quarter free cash flow of $647 million, up 75 percent ….it includes a $350 million one-time AT&T payment. about 19 hours ago from Snitter
-Yahoo CFO: “Advertisers’ budgets may fall, but the ROI of online ads compared to other media may cushion the impact on our industry. about 19 hours ago from Snitter
-Yang affirms that will choose whatever option maximizes shareholder value, including MS….more money! about 19 hours ago from Snitter
In 5 Tweets, I had all the information I needed. Sure, there was no analysis, but that could wait.
On to the election. I read a quick note from Fred Wilson who Tweeted, “i’ve just learned more about the PA primary on Tweetscan than CNN and MSNBC combined,” and posted a URL with the majority of news updates and comments on the election from around the Twittersphere. After a quick scan, Fred and I were on the same page. Too close to call. Anderson Cooper can wait.
As I left the office to head home and watch the final results come in, I couldn’t help but marvel at how easily I was able to catch up on the news of the day thanks to Dan and Fred.
Sure, the era of information overload has its drawbacks, but sometimes we forget how sweet it is when it all comes together just right. Thanks guys. And thank you, Twitter.
Blogger comes out, WaPo not amused
As anyone on the receiving end of one of my link filled IMs, e-mails or Tweets can tell you, I love sports blogs. There’s a small circle of about 10 of them (led by Deadspin, Fire Joe Morgan, Kissing Suzy Kolber and With Leather) that have superlative, hilarious writing and style and attitude that is basically a giant middle finger to the traditional sporting press.
And, as a former sports writer, I can say that gesture is very much needed.
The two worlds collided yesterday after Michael Tunison, aka Christmas Ape on Kissing Suzy Kolber, was fired from the Washington Post after outing himself on KSK. This is interesting in many different ways.
For the most part, the vanguard of the traditional sports press despise bloggers because they aren’t trained journalists who went to school for four years so they can be treated like scum by athletes. For the most part this vanguard is a bunch of self-aggrandizing pathetic writers who couldn’t recognize important prose if it hit them in the face. The Washington Post took offense, not to some of Tunison’s edgier posts on KSK, but to the fact that he said he was “totally f**king hammered” in the picture accompanying his post outing himself. Because, you know, no respectable journalist has ever gotten drunk when his or her favorite team went to the Super Bowl. The parrot may have been a bit much.
It’s pretty obvious that Tunison was canned because of the blog.
Anyway, the reaction has been pretty comical. The fairly sizable KSK and Deadspin communities reacted by taking over Dan Steinberg’s blog at the WaPo online.
The traditional media’s reaction to blogs is a constant source of hilarity. For the sports media to get upset over fans writing about sports is the epitome of stupidity – they are, after all, the people the media is (or should be) writing for. What difference does having a piece of paper make when you’re spouting off about sports? Just because I went to journalism school, does that make me more qualified to write about baseball than the guy with an accounting degree who spends his spare time crunching baseball stats? No. If he knows more than me and can write, well…
There are plenty of reporters who are embracing new media and are doing fantastic work, so it’s very unfair to lump traditional media in one big group, but a message to those who are afraid of blogs: Get over it. You’ll be working for one soon enough.
When Advertising Strikes
There are no Cinderellas…
A recent ad, above, run during the NCAA basketball tournament in the past few weeks aims to dispel the idea of Cinderellas in sports by showing famous “Cinderella” college sports teams such as Boise State (a must watch YouTube video) and Georgetown (alma mater of our own Melissa Biles and Leonora Stevens) practicing hard late in to the night. Cinderella got lucky, these teams didn’t.
I thought the ads were spot on, and gave fair credit to those Cinderella teams for being good, not lucky. The truth is, there isn’t a ton of luck in sports and all of the teams depicted definitely did their share of practicing and hard work to rightfully upset their opponents.
So once this commercial was followed by a CBS montage of number 10 seed Davidson’s run to the Elite 8 that included the recurring image of a glass slipper, I realized that this was an example of when advertising strikes the network. CBS looked clueless and shallow, taking credit away from Davidson’s talent and hard work by attributing their success simply to luck.
And since when are high heel glass shoes and 6′9″, 280 pound athletes analogous?
Advertising may be the lifeblood of tv networks (and pretty much any media for that matter), but in this case, to me, it seemed almost as harmful to CBS’s credibility than, say, a wardrobe malfunction or scandalous GoDaddy commercial.
Other than the lottery and the Lucky Charms leprechaun, when it comes to sports, careers or, say, building a small startup into a great company, it’s easy for other people to chalk unexpected success up to luck… But in reality, there really are no Cinderellas.
Yes YouTube Can?
Can John Legend and Scarlett Johansson have an effect on Barack Obama’s campaign? How about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? The Pussycat Dolls?
A lot has been written about whether YouTube will influence the upcoming election; it’s nothing new. But has anyone come up with an answer? Many of these videos are judged on how many people have watched, but as anyone in advertising will tell you: eyeballs are one thing, influence is another.
For example, an Apple “1984″ ad spoof depicting Hillary Clinton as Big Brother got more than 7 million views on YouTube and a huge amount of press, mainly around who the creator was. As information came out about the individual who created the video, the fact that it was one random guy who felt like making a smear ad weakened the influence of the video.
Recently, Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas produced a video (embedded above) that included 37 celebrities in support of Obama and was based around a speech he gave in New Hampshire. In just one week since it was made public, it has received 3.5 million views on its home site, Dipdive.com, and more than 7 million views on YouTube — one week, 10 million views. Plenty of eyeballs, let’s move on.
What stood out about this video was that it felt like the first political video that really carried some weight. While talk of young voters influencing elections has been a hot topic the past few presidential races, the reality is that this is the first year we are seeing a serious increase in young voter turnout — the New Hampshire primary showed a 14% increase in voters 18-29 over the 2004 race. The Huffington Post agrees that this year, young voters will be a decisive group.
As a member of this voter demographic, it is pretty clear that while there is significant motivation to vote, for the most part we don’t necessarily dig deep into the issues or policies of each candidate… And let’s be honest, they don’t differ that much. On the democratic side, more of the talk is about who would be best to beat the opposition in the general election. Whose character would most likely get ripped to shreds? The fact is, many decisions are being made and answers are being found through non-traditional and non-qualifiable mediums, like YouTube.
So, back to the video. Based on Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech, the video uses one of the most influential groups of people on young people today — celebrities. These aren’t the ones getting pulled over for DUIs or in bitter custody disputes. These are sophisticated, well-respected (and very attractive) celebrities fully endorsing Barack Obama and evoking emotions and memorability that hasn’t been present in other political videos. It doesn’t reek of propaganda and the celebrities come off as passionate and physically invested in the Obama campaign.
I do not intend to endorse a candidate here, but want to point out how the simplicity of the “Yes We Can” video combined with the emotion and passion it evokes succeeds in not only attracting more than 10 million viewers in a week, but more importantly, helps influence a now powerful, and easily influenced, group of voters.
It’s a successful combination of eyeballs and influence. While Obama Girl will make you laugh, “Yes We Can” brings out a whole different set of emotions, Obama supporter or not.
MySpace Major Label Music Artists Seeing Solid Traction on Facebook; Indies - Not So Much
Facebook’s Pages feature, which debuted only five weeks ago, is beginning to gain significant traction on MySpace’s four-year-old music platform, with some interesting results.
Based on a sample of MySpace artist Top Tens in three categories (Unsigned, Indie and Major-Label),major-label bands that have engaged fans in Facebook are seeing the greatest success in building a Facebook fan base, followed by independent label bands and unsigned bands.
For example, even though Alicia Keys and Nine Inch Nails (currently an unsigned artist) have similar-sized MySpace fan bases (Keys’ 400k to Nails’ 528K), Nine Inch Nails are only able to cultivate a fan base half the size of Keys’ on Facebook, proportionately speaking. Tila Tequila, another MySpace phenomenon (#1 in the Unsigned category with 2.4M fans) is also only about half as able, proportionately, as #1 MySpace major-label artist Chris Brown to build out a Facebook fan base.
The trend is fairly clear across the categories: mainstream, major-label artists are, proportionately, 2.75 times more able to draw fans on Facebook, proportionate to their MySpace fan bases.
50% of the current MySpace Top Ten artists in each category now have a Facebook Artist Page. A few artists, like Hawthorne Heights,
invented pages posing as people on Facebook, to get their bands on
Facebook before the Facebook Pages feature debuted last month. I was
unable to assess those numbers because Facebook won’t reveal them
unless you’re the artist’s "friend". Even if I were to use those stats,
the fan metric would have been unequal to how the other artists were
measured.
I was initially interested in investigating Facebook’s traction in the
music space because my new band, Reds, lacks a MySpace page. Even back
in 2003, when I first joined MySpace, I was very ambivalent about the
platform, mainly because I wasn’t wild about the look of the musician web pages - the bric-a-brac HTML was a little much for me. I can’t see a huge advantage, personally, to creating a MySpace page currently, but my 21-year-old drummer disagrees with me. Probably because a lot of his buddies are still using MySpace.
If my own Myspace Vs. Facebook musical orientation is in question, I wrote this post listening to Styx, Rush and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis on Pandora.
[One note about methodology, I had to estimate MySpace fan amounts for Kanye West and Yo Gotti (which I pencilled in at 1M and 100K, respectively) because they did not post this number on their MySpace pages. I estimated this based on the comment/fans ratio that held constant for similar Top Ten artists (same genre, same silo).]
The ‘B’ in Baron Stands for Blog
I love the Golden State Warriors, and the addition of star point-guard Baron Davis almost three years ago has helped turn around one of the two hopeless sports franchises I have been a fan of since childhood (the other is the Cubs, yeah). Other than being an amazing basketball player, having Jessica Alba as a best friend, and leading his team to the biggest upset in NBA history last year, Baron is a blogger, and quite a good one at that.
Baron’s blog represents one of the best qualities of blogging — giving people access to information, personalities and insights into things they never had access to before. For example, who would have ever know that the Warriors had a book club if Baron hadn’t written it in a blogpost? Who would have known that he started an education focused foundation called Teamplay? (As a side note, I really like the fact that the Warriors have a book club — as I wrote in my last blogpost, reading leads to good things. Like, say, an NBA title?)
Since he started his blog, Baron has exposed a side of himself that people most likely did not know about — for example, he’s literary (favorite book is To Kill A Mockingbird), he’s a philanthropist and he’s against the Iraq war. For sports stars, marketing themselves has become far more important than ever before. Athletes are traded and signed to huge contracts not only for their skills, but also for how many seats they can be responsible for filling in a stadium.
Outside of sports broadcasts, athletes have only been represented in shoe or underwear commercials (Bo Jackson, Michael Jordan) at the mercy of the sponsoring company. Baron’s blog is a great example of how blogging offers a great way for athletes to reach their fans, market themselves how they want to, and touch their fans on a personal level without the influence of the powers that be. This personal connection will keep fans as fans even if these players get traded, retire or sit out with an injury for an extended period of time.
More and more athletes are jumping on the blog bandwagon, some more eloquent than others, and their blogs will undoubtedly be successful since this is the first time people have really had this kind of access to the professional sports world and to athletes before.
Bo may know football, baseball, soccer, cricket, hockey and golf, but I don’t think he knows blogging.
Baron does.
