20% Content + 80% Suck = Dead News Sites

Best quote of the week “News sites can no longer capture reader’s attention with 20 percent news, and 80 percent suck.” comes from Erick Schonfeld’s piece in TechCrunch

Schonfeld nails it in his rebuttal of Arnon Mishkin’s article “The Fallacy Of The Link Economy” which contends that Google and others steal content when they aggregate headlines. Coming from the telecom world, I understand that the disruption caused by technology can wreck havoc with business models. For the incumbent telecom carrier or for the incumbent newspaper publisher the disruption is devastating. However, for Mishkin to believe that people want to consume news online by visiting a newspapers’ site with “20 percent news, and 80 percent suck” is just wrong.

Schonfeld’s points nail the reasons that I canceled my 19 year subscription to the dead tree edition of the Wall Street Journal (although I still pay for access to the on-line edition) and why we don’t get a local paper anymore. I do not need a “bundle” of news collected in a paper when the majority of the content is not relevant for me. I get far better quality and quantity of news by aggregating the topics that I care about with Google Reader and Times. Twitter provides better breaking news updates.

To the publishers – embrace the multiple front pages to your content, and focus on creating awesome content.

[As an aside, the video channel aggregators (also knows as cable operators) better get ready; the same technology wave is coming for them next and nothing shrinks margins faster than disintermediation.]

Is 4G Wireless a Threat to Wireline Broadband?

Over at GigaOM, Stacey Higginbotham has an interesting post on the threat from 4G to cable/telco broadband where she extends the current 3G business models to conclude that 4G isn’t a big threat.

Stacey makes some interesting observations about the current wireless data market and how those practices might extend into 4G (WiMAX and LTE) deployments. However, I believe we have our first glimpse into answers with Clear’s market launches.

As of today (and who knows what the network management policies will be in the future) Clear does not cap data transfers and does not have restrictive TOS. The speed & cost is competitive against DSL & cable, especially for those people who only qualify for basic speeds.

An item that the post does not address is the customer experience for ordering and installation. If you order cable service, it can be several days to get installed – WiMAX changes the provisioning game. During a recent project a co-worker ordered Clear in Atlanta and was blown away with the whole experience. He ordered Monday, had the WiMAX modem/router on Tuesday (shipped UPS overnight) and was up and running with 9Mbps service. His previous experience ordering broadband was a painful wait, painful install, and problematic reliability. I could even see a scenario where customers are provisioned via WiMAX on the same day – walk up to a kiosk at the mall and walk away with a modem.

A second item not addressed in the post is the way that mobility options change the value proposition for customers. If the analog landline vs. cellular primary line taught us nothing else, it was that some customers will value mobility over call quality to the point of substitution. I believe the same thing will happen with a portion of broadband customers. If you move apartments every year do you want the hassle of cable disconnect/reconnect? If you can purchase a bundle that has wireless 4G at home and a USB 4G connection for the road – for same/less than the cost of a 3G data plan from Verizon why wouldn’t you?

I will concur with Stacy on one point, physical landline connections will scale much better over the long run. However, I think that she is discounting the competitive threat and disruption of 4G data in the market.

@mattpavlik

Road Warrior – Wisconsin Edition Part 2

In the first part of Road Warrior – WI Edition I outlined how I set-up my connectivity, established a good work environment and kept client transparency. This post focuses on back-up plans for connectivity and remote file access.

Back-up Connectivity Plans

Any good plan can have a glitch and planning for glitches is the difference between a speed bump and disaster. Since connectivity was so important to my work, I made sure to have an alternative – the portable, cellular hot spot called MiFi. A terrific device that was used several times on the trip, the MiFi uses a cellular modem to connect to the Internet and relay that connectivity via WiFi to any device in a 20-50 foot radius. I have been able to surf the web on my iPhone and connect to email on my laptop through the single MiFi connection. It’s not cheap (about $60/mo at the time of this entry) and the data plan has some caps in the “unlimited” plan, but in a pinch it works great. (check out my videos of the MiFi Unboxing at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oezlDfvIwds and the MiFi in use http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJmIjffyReQ )

I also had a USB dial-up modem in the event that things got really hairy. Fortunately I didn’t have to break it out since dial-up is soooo sloooow. [ advertisement - buy broadband from your local phone company! Your computer will thank you and so will I. ]

Prepping at the office

I also took a couple steps to ensure that I would have access to anything I needed on my work PC. I decided to travel with my personal laptop instead of my work laptop since I like my Mac better than the work PC and the Mac can handle all the media editing I do on the road. To ensure that I had access to my files I had two plans – auto syncing and remote access.

To auto sync my most frequently required files between computers I use DropBox http://www.getdropbox.com/ . The free version of the service allows 2GBs of files to be synced between computers. I have found DropBox to be more reliable than iDisk and it is very user friendly. There are lots of benefits to using DropBox but the best benefit for my Wisconsin trip was having local access to my files which would later sync to my work PC. I prefer local access over pure cloud-based solutions whenever possible since you can still work on files while you are off-line. DropBox automatically handles the hard part of taking your files off-line – the program keeps the changes in sync once you are back on-line.

For remote access to my work machine the only real option was Windows Remote Desktop since my corporate IT folks lock down better tools like LogMeIn ( http://www.logmein.com ). After completing the configuration work on my work PC access into the corporate network is pretty straight forward except there is no Mac client for Windows Remote Desktop. I used Parallels ( http://www.parallels.com ) to emulate a Windows operating system on my desktop in the event that I needed to remotely log into my work machine. Remote access was a back-up plan since DropBox gave me the files I needed and most of my other work is done on Entourage which is the Microsoft Exchange client for Macs.

In my last installment of Road Warrior – WI Edition I will discuss a new Adobe service that I used to deliver a presentation remotely.

Road Warrior – Wisconsin Edition Part 1

While traveling back to the homeland to visit family and friends, I needed to take two weeks off work for travel and sufficient visiting time. However, I didn’t want to use up all of my vacation time for the trip. The solution – my boss agreed to let me work remotely for a few days. By remotely I mean out of the state not just working from home. Things went quite smoothly, partly because I am tech geek, and partly due to some good planning. Here are the highlights of my key insights to working successfully on foreign turf.

Connectivity

While this element of successful remote work is the most obvious, it is worth underscoring the importance of good connectivity. The majority of working-while-traveling occurred during a visit to my father-in-law. His wonderful house on a Wisconsin lake has a major drawback – no broadband Internet (pause to catch your breath). It also has a second connectivity drawback, no cell reception (pause for your heart to restart). I made arrangements to work out of his brother’s office in town, which has broadband and better cell coverage. When working remotely there is no substitute for good broadband. Email access is snappy, things like VoIP & Skype work great and you don’t have to waste time dialing-up or waiting for the phone line to free up.

Location

What is true in real estate is also true in remote working – location matters. Sure, I could work out of a coffee shop for a few hours and while there is usually good broadband at any coffee shop these days, that location doesn’t provide the kind of privacy or professional working environment I want. I like being able to walk away from my laptop to use the restroom and not having to worry that it won’t be there when I get back. I like taking a conference call on my phone without the worry the espresso machine will drown out my voice.

Even if my father-in-law had broadband available at his home, I still would have sought a location that didn’t have the distractions of well intentioned interruptions – like my son displaying a fish he caught.

Transparent to my Clients

Although people coming by my desk won’t find me there, everyone else did not know that I was not in my office. My main work number is actually a Google Voice ( http://www.google.com/voice ) number, which means that calls route to whatever phone I’m near. When I’m at the office, I answer on my office phone line. When I’m working 1,000 miles away from my office, I answer on my cell phone. Any caller wouldn’t know the difference.

Thanks to good connectivity, a professional working environment and the magic of call forwarding I never had to apologize for diminished work capabilities.

My next post will cover my contingency plans for connectivity and the remote access to files.

RebelVox – Morphing the Phone call, Voice mail, Text message

A nice intro to a company that has rethought the approach to making “phone calls” by taking advantage of presence information. It is exciting to see an evolution in the metaphor of communication.

Watch 10 min video click here

Buzzword watch: “Missed Rendezvous” When two callers miss each other while leaving voicemail or listening to a voicemail greeting.

High Definition Camcorder – Canon Vixia HF11

Santa Claus was good to me and picked out the exact High Definition video camcorder that I would have picked for myself this Christmas. Recently, a few friends had asked me why I selected … I mean, why Santa selected that particular video camera. My response…

The Canon Vixia HF11 (which will be surpassed in February by the new cameras that Canon just announced January 2009 at the Consumer Electronic Show) is a great all-around camera for my personal video needs (family video, children sporting events) as well as some light video production work (shooting video of speakers and for my video podcast). My main reasons for selecting the HF11:

• HD. I mean really, high definition video on a consumer camera is so much better than standard definition on a consumer camera. The first crop of HD consumer level camera were nothing to get excited about, the image processors were poor, the video was muddled, the media was often tape-based.
• Selectable frame rate depending on the desired effect. A “cinema mode” at 24 frames per second progressive scan, as well as 30fps Progressive and 60fps Interlaced. Video buffs will tell you that Canon is using a technique to simulate these modes and that they are note “true” which is technically true. However, this is a consumer level HD camera and I wouldn’t expect that level of performance, yet.
• Hot shoe for shot gun mic. The connector on the top of the camera makes it easy to connect the Canon shot gun microphone which is a must for those school performances that you shoot from the back of the room.
• Microphone in jack ( handy for the podcasting and production work )
• 100% SD memory recording. Fewer breakable parts, faster transfer to computer for post production work.
• Additional slot for SD media which complements that internal memory. Canon does sell another version of this camera that is exactly the same except it doesn’t have any built in memory. The built in memory means that you will never forget to have memory with you (pardon the irony of that statement please).
• Up to a 24Mbps recording bit rate – the best bit rate that you can get for AVCHD. Companies are still refining their video compression algorithms but generally speaking, the higher the bit rate, the better video quality. The encoding format that is emerging for high definition video is AVCHD and the best bit rate that is supported in the format is 24Mbps. Some previous generations of HD video cameras only support up to 17Mbps.
• Good enough image sensor (the latest Canons have denser image sensor – more pixels – but a 3.2 megapixel image sensor is good enough for HD video and I don’t need/want a 8+ megapixel image sensor to use the video camera as a still camera.)
• Canon Digic image processing. Good color reproduction and below average noise in the video.
• Built-in light for illuminating low-light situations.

Of course there are other considerations when making the jump to HD video. If you plan to do your own editing you need a computer with adequate horse power. In addition, HD video eats storage space for breakfast and lunch and dinner. Make sure that you have a plan of how to store and back-up all that data otherwise you will find your computer’s hard drive is full with video.

So far I’m very pleased with Santa’s selection and I’ve been putting the camera to good use.

Pew. The Internet in 2020 – Hang On

To prep for some over-the-holiday thinking on the future of communications, I downloaded the latest Pew Future of the Internet survey “Future Of The Internet III,” a study released on 12/14/2008 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and was pleased with the amount of perspectives they gave me to digest. Predictions are a tricky business but Pew has come up with an approach that is a combination of “Wisdom of the Crowd” and extended commentary which yields some consensus while leaving room for dissenting opinions. I have only scratched the surface of the report (it’s 100+ pages) and haven’t thought through the implications on my project but wanted to share a couple highlights and some comments.

Mobility is where it’s at.

Pew survey consensus: Mobile phone/device will be the primary connection tool for most people in the world.

Comment:  Where I think this prediction is a little misleading is that “most people in the world” don’t have access to the kind of infrastructure that we do in the US and therefore a mobile phone/device is likely the only device within reach for the developing world.  While I certainly see a lot of potential for mobility services, it is also important to remember that wireless doesn’t go everywhere and though it is often perceived as a panacea for providing connections the technology does have limitations.  My view is somewhat skewed by my years of working for companies that provide wired connections, and I continue to see long-run advantages for wired networks.  At the same time a wired network benefits from the augmentation of wireless local access.

Incremental network improvement, not complete replacement.

Pew survey consensus:  Improvement to the infrastructure of the Internet is more likely to occur through incremental improvement and not a complete replacement.

Comment:  Although many of the technologies that make the Internet possible are quite old (Ethernet, TCP/IP, DNS) and have weaknesses, it is unlikely that there will be a movement to establish a new Internet.  To do so would be a costly endeavor, and would cut off the largest benefit of today’s Internet – the number of points that it connects.  The most valuable part of any network is the number of potential connections that it makes (Metcalfe’s Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe’s_law )

Protecting content will remain challenging

Pew survey consensus:  The digital economy will still struggle with charging for content, illicit use of copyrighted material and monitoring the use of content.

Comment:  From the view of knowledge workers this issue is an important one.  While it certainly is an issue that the media industry has struggled with as music, TV, movies have become digitized – it is an issue that increasingly impacts many people outside the media industry.

Touch it, talk to it, love it.

Pew survey consensus:  Our primary means to interact with technology will be touch and speech.

Comment:  User interface sure could get a lot better.  The mouse/window interface was the last big advance that I can think of and while it is better than the command line world for most functions it is still clumsy. 

 

I’m looking forward to digging in deeper to the research and to balance the perspectives here with Grown Up Digital the latest book by Dan Tapscott discussing the Net Generation.

New tools can deepen connections

A request

I have a request. Take 5 minutes and write a paragraph/list about what your friends should know about you – anything that you believe is recently relevant. Email the paragraph/list your friends right after you write it.

The reason for my request

I have been playing with some of the tools in the “social media” space (blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, podcasts) and paying close attention to how others are using those same tools.  I am amazed by how many ‘little’ things I have learned about my

Nicest wrong number message ever

OK – This one is a little out of the ordinary for my blog, but it was the best place that I had to share it. I was going through my old voice mail messages the other day and came across a wrong number message. Usually, if someone misdials, the message is a quick hang-up or a message for someone you have never heard of. This guy seemed sincerely sorry that he dialed the wrong number. Take a listen.  Click here for wav file. 

I think I find this message interesting because it is the exact opposite of what we have come to expect, but there is no reason that we should not expect this kind of behavior. Next time you misdial, be nice.

A Really Nice Podcasting Set-up

Recently, one of my clients asked for a budget proposal for setting up a recording studio specifically for podcasting. As part of their 2009 budget planning process they needed a placeholder amount for equipment, software and hosting. The podcasts could include anything from interviews to readings to announcements/programming information. I modeled a lot of the choices after Leo Laporte’s set-up which is outlined in the Kevin Rose visit http://revision3.com/systm/podcasting/ Although I couldn’t go wild on the budget, they did want a set-up that would be very solid, something they could grow with and grow into. Below is the list that I put together for them which provides for a very good recording solution at a very reasonable price ~ $6K. While some of the equipment