Decade of mobile: From the first camera phone to the iPhone 3GS
By Andrew Lim on Sunday, 27th December 2009
It's almost 2010 so we thought we'd take a look at what's happened in mobile over the past ten years. Everything has happened. No, really, have a look. From the first camera phone, to the first 3G network, to Windows Mobile, to the iPhone – it's been an incredible ten years. We can't imagine what the next ten years hold but we expect it will blow our phone-loving minds away.
2000 Sharp launches the first ever camera phone, the J-SH04. This year also sees the first Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone and headset.
2001 The first commercial 3G network is launched in Japan. Europe follows suit shortly afterwards and 3 launches the first commercial UK 3G network two years later.
2002 RIM launches its first BlackBerry smart phone. Sony Ericsson launches the T68i, the first phone to support MMS, allowing users to send longer text messages and even pictures.
2003 The Windows Mobile brand is launched with Windows Mobile 2003. Windows Mobile is widely used by businesses to do work on the move.
2004 Motorola launches a very thin clamshell phone called the Razr in the US and it soon becomes a global success. It's still one of the best selling handsets of all time.
2005 Sony Ericsson launches a superb new camera phone called the K750i and a great music phone called the W800i. These two handsets establish Sony Ericsson as a serious consumer player.
2006 Nokia launches the very simple Nokia 6300, one of the best-selling phones of the past ten years. HTC launches its own brand and LG turns its brand around by launching a fashionable phone called the Chocolate. RIM also revamps its lineup with a phone called the BlackBerry Pearl.
2007 Apple launches the iPhone in the US, Nokia launches a fantastic smart phone called the N95 in Europe and Samsung beats Motorola to second spot for global sales.
2008 The first Android phone is launched, the T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream). The G1 receives a mixed response but manufacturers are keen to engage with this new OS. iPhone SDK and iPhone 3G announced - native iPhone apps go wild.
2009 Palm launches a brand new operating system called webOS and a shiny phone called the Pre. Apple launches the iPhone 3GS and Motorola makes a comeback with the Dext and Milestone.
2010 There are rumours that Apple is going to launch a larger iPhone/tablet device. Palm will hopefully announce a new phone at CES and everyone hopes that Nokia will unveil something amazing.
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Showing 3 of 3 Comments
I don't think the rise of browser-agnostic website has anything to do with iPhone at all. It has been growing steadily, far before the inception of iPhone, supported by the growth of Firefox and other (and to some point, Safari on OSX) standard-compliant browsers.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Decade of mobile: From the first camera phone to the iPhone 3GS - Recombu
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Well said @seth. From TechCrunch. The Medium Is No Longer The Message, . . . You Are
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Seth Goldstein (@seth), the Co-Founder of socialmedia.com, which is building the first ad server based on people not pages. Its platform provides authoring, serving and reporting across different types of social media. All of its ads are real messages from real people. Seth is also the Co-Chairman of the IAB’s Social Media Committee.
Social Media and Identity
We are witnessing a profound change in the media and advertising industries due to the emergence of social media. Companies that did not exist ten years ago, like Facebook and Twitter, have captured significant share of the attention economy from traditional publishers. Underscoring this trend is the fact that at the same time that Businessweek was selling for less than $5 million (plus assumption of debts) to Bloomberg, Foursquare’s pretty cousin Gowalla drove up Sand Hill road and collected $8.4 million for a minority stake.
Amidst this disruption, media companies are chasing after “their” audience in order to continue to broker the attention of that audience to marketers. But just at the moment that media has mastered the art of blogging, search engine optimization and CPM yield management, they are now faced with a new set of consumer behaviors that elude their programming faculties: mobile devices, location-based services and the social graph.
Driving this change in consumer behavior is the emergence of social media as a means of content production. Social media started more than ten years ago with online personal communications tools such as Evite, Shutterfly and Blue Mountain Arts. Since that time, systems have been built to support broader and more subtle social interactions. This has been achieved primarily by the introduction of new creative formats that make it easy for individuals to express information about themselves (such as status updates, tweets and check-ins) and new distribution models that enable this personal information to be shared easily among friends and followers.
Social media’s ascent has led to an Internet experience based less on pages and more on people. As a corollary to this (and counter to Marshall McLuhan’s thesis), the medium is no longer just the message. The permanence of words and images and their meaning in context has long been promoted as a foundation of media theory. In an increasingly real-time environment, however, content gives way to identity, and traditional contextual analysis gives way to dynamic social interactions.
The medium is the message . . . is the member. This is why there can be no discussion of social media without a simultaneous discussion of identity, and why the growth of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are one and the same with the growth of identity systems online. There are a number of technology and business trends that are converging around this thesis.
Here are some that seem to be of particular importance as we head into 2010:
- The only check and balance for Facebook is Twitter. Twitter is significantly smaller than Facebook in terms of users, and its social graph is asymmetrical and therefore looser. But what it lacks in terms of the size of its contributors, it makes up by offering a broadcast media model. Celebrities find it easier to reach large audiences directly by using Twitter. Even though Twitter follows far more of a media model than Facebook, it too is being pulled into the identity space by Google who is unlikely to integrate Facebook Connect under any condition. Google is bringing the Twitter API to the fight (while Yahoo and MySpace drop their identity ambitions and happily incorporate Facebook Connect). The interesting question here is Microsoft. Although it is impossible to imagine Microsoft siding with Google on anything these days, integrating Facebook Connect may end up doing to Windows what Microsoft itself did to IBM many years ago.
- Agencies are tired of being treated like commodity procurement organizations. They want to increase their margins through the application of data to media and become demand side platforms (DSPs). This is the strategy of IPG’s Cadreon unit and Vivaki’s “audience on demand network” which both look to add proprietary data from sources such as cookie exchanges and re-targeting databases. In addition to leveraging new data to better target existing creative assets, agencies wish to also transcend the one-off “give me a big campaign idea” business. Consumers will increasingly ignore the high-bandwidth, homepage-takeover distraction tactics of traditional online marketing. The average social media users have trained themselves to focus on real messages from real people. Agencies will need to learn how to produce low bandwidth advertising content that can be shared and distributed in lots of different ways by lots of different social groups, all the while preserving some underlying essential brand equity.
- Publishers don’t want their quality audiences sold cheaply outside of their sites. Their expensive sales organizations have no chance of maintaining high CPM rates from an agency that can offer the same audience to its client at a fraction of the price by sprinkling some cookie data on top of a remnant ad network buy. This will embolden premium (top 100) publishers to align themselves with consumer advocacy groups looking to erase cookies and anonymize users. ESPN and the WSJ would love it if all of their readers were rendered anonymous as soon as they clicked away. This echoes Murdoch’s supposed interest in removing his content from Google’s search engine index. The value of “free” distribution is materially impacted when the distributor is able to separate a user’s identity from the context of his consumption.
- Advertisers will recognize that they have a fiduciary responsibility to maintain their own social graph. Until now social media has been an ROI-free playground for brands looking to experiment with new formats. Marketers have built Facebook and iPhone apps, only to learn that distribution is not free. Now they are managing Twitter accounts and Facebook brand pages that deliver more scale, but still with limited insights that they can own and apply to the rest of their marketing initiatives. Consumers, meanwhile, are constantly talking about brands within their communities and are expressing their affinities for commercial products and services. Advertisers can no longer afford to cede knowledge about these interactions to the social networks within which they are occurring. Inevitably, companies will require their own social graph data that includes all mentions of their brands and information about the identity of users (and their friends) discussing them.
So what are media companies and advertisers to do as the former audience use their social identity as a fulcrum for content creation? To prepare for this change in the media economy, companies need to establish an identity framework that integrates Facebook Connect and/or the Twitter API. And in order to profit economically, startups might want to address one of the agency, publisher or advertiser challenges listed above.
Companies: SocialMedia.com, Bazaar Labs Seth Goldstein is the co-founder and CEO of SocialMedia Networks. In his role as CEO, Seth drives the strategic direction of the company, overseeing the development of technologies and services to keep SocialMedia Networks at the forefront of social… Learn More
Website: twitter.com Location: San Francisco, California, United States Founded: March 21, 2006 Funding: $155M Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006… Learn More
Website: facebook.com Location: Palo Alto, California, United States Founded: February 1, 2004 Funding: $716M Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 350 million users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
Thursday, December 10, 2009
You know it's the end of the year when lists become popular. Here's The Guardian's 100 Essential Websites.
Illustration: Nigel Sandor/Illustration Works/Corbis
Andy Warhol talked of a time when everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. With hindsight, however, he might have wanted to revise that down to about five minutes. On today's web, phrases such as "here today, gone tomorrow" seem to involve ridiculously long timescales.
People who moaned that blogging represented a move to shorter attention spans – 250-to-350-word posts rather than 1,000-word stories – have now seen blog posts start to look big and, frankly, old-fashioned. Today's trendsetters are using "microblogging" sites such as Tumblr, Posterous and Soup.io, which are taking the opportunity for creative "borrowing" to new heights.
But the smash hit of 2009 has been (apologies: I know this will cause pain) Twitter, where 1,000-word stories are reduced to 140-character tweets. Short attention spans R us.
Twitter's rapid growth and open programming interface have given the site a wide impact. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of ancillary sites and services have been launched to help Twitter users post pictures, track followers, or – more usefully, from a commercial point of view – find out what the "hive mind" is thinking. Twitterfall is just one example. More recently, Listorious stepped in to make it easier to find and explore lists made using Twitter's new list feature, while The Twitter Tim.es cleverly turned selected tweets into a personalised newspaper. How many of these sites will survive is, of course, open to question. Some are less like standalone sites than parasites.
Major web players such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft also got involved. Both Google and Microsoft signed deals for Twitter searches, while Facebook paid it the ultimate compliment of more or less copying its service. Or, perhaps, copying FriendFeed, which many users link to both Twitter and Facebook.
Facebook, while far from new, was another big player in 2009, reaching more than 350 million users. And through Facebook Connect, it has extended its presence across the web. Once you have a Facebook identity – and you must have one, mustn't you? – then you can use it to access a growing number of sites and services. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The web might be a kinder, more polite place if people said things under their real names, which is what Facebook's about.
Those in search of their five minutes of fame or, more likely, five minutes of fun fun fun, headed for YouTube. Although it has been challenged by rivals such as Vimeo and Microsoft's Soapbox (RIP), its dominance has not been seriously threatened. Only the pornographers have been able to build much of a following outside YouTube.
Which is not to say that YouTube owns the web video market. The BBC has made a huge impact with its iPlayer catchup service, and in the US, Hulu has enjoyed great success with TV series and movies. Of course, both sites are showing videos that YouTube would love to offer, at a profit, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Music has been a significant player in the growth of the web since Napster, and its influence continues to grow. Spotify has made the biggest impact this year, gaining mindshare lost by Last.fm and Pandora. Meanwhile, Pitchfork has expanded its role as the web's authoritative music magazine, and The Hype Machine came to prominence as a source of instant erudition by tracking the music blogs.
Almost finally, it may be that we are seeing the return not just of the browser wars but of the search engine wars as well. Google still rules the world, but in Bing, it now has a competitor that does some things better and has, in Microsoft, an owner with deep pockets. Alas, Bing also does many things a lot worse.
Possibly the most contentious part of this year's list is celebrity gossip. The argument against would be summed up by a Wikipedian in two words: "not notable". The argument for is that sites such as Perez Hilton and AOL's TMZ are now helping to drive the news agenda. Even if you aren't interested in Michael Jackson's death, Tiger Woods's affairs or whatever, this stuff has become impossible to avoid. This is one case where many people would prefer the web's short attention span to be even shorter.
Blogging/microblogging
Now easier than falling off a log.
Tumblr Multimedia microblogging plus Twitter-style following.
Posterous Goes from instant microblogging into lifestreaming.
Soup A "super-easy" tumblelog for scrapbook keeping and lifestreaming.
Blogger Fast way to start blogging; training wheels for Wordpress.
Bloglines For reading web feeds. Smart and clean.
Wordpress Free, and most importantly spam-free, blogging.
Browsers
Do we all need five browsers nowadays?
Chrome Now here for Mac, and anticipating future world domination via Chrome OS.
Firefox Everyone's favourite is under attack from all sides.
Maxthon Based on IE code. If it stays "hip in China" it could reach a large global audience.
Cartoons
Everyone needs some relaxation. This is a visual one.
Dilbert It wouldn't be so funny if it wasn't so true.
XKCD Stick-figure strip poking fun at geek topics and relationships.
Celebrity gossip
No one needs this stuff, but it's starting to drive world news and web traffic.
TMZ Rose to fame when it broke news of Michael Jackson's death.
Perez Hilton Among the bitchiest of goss sites and often involved in 'interesting' celeb baiting.
Gawker New York-based media alert and gossip blog network, with fingers in many pies.
Create/collaborate
With all of us now living more of our lives online, these sites just scratch the surface.
Netvibes Your to-do lists, news, weather and photos on one page.
Scribd Shares 35bn words online: they can't all be wrong.
Slideshare Like YouTube for PowerPoint decks.
Zamzar Useful: converts files from one format to another.
Film
Sites to see before heading for the latest blockbuster at your local multiplex.
IMDb The most authoritative site about all things film and TV, which is why Amazon bought it.
Rotten Tomatoes Collects online film reviews, aggregates a score out of 100 and rates the film "fresh" or "rotten".
/Film Said to be the favourite film blog of directors Jason Reitman and Darren Aronofsky, /Film features news, reviews, interviews and a special UK update each Friday.
Cinematical Terrific film blog with a Hollywood focus.
Gaming
A field where handheld, bedroom and Flash games are becoming mainstream
Eurogamer Reportage, with breadth, if not always depth.
The Independent Gaming Source A great place to pick up on tomorrow's breakthrough Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare and PSN hits.
Pocket Gamer Still by far the best site on handheld gaming.
Gamasutra Where professional games creators hang out, and sometimes get jobs
Geek squad
Here be programmers …
Stack Overflow Where programmers gather to try to solve their problems.
The Daily WTF Daily dispatches from the coding warzone.
Joel On Software Essays by a former Microsoftie, now head of Fog Creek Software.
Government/public services/politics
Recycle Now Winner after a slight false start of the government'sShow Us A Better Way competition. What can you recycle close by?
British and Irish Legal Information Institute A database of laws. Only survives hand-to-mouth on voluntary donations; where's yours?
What Do They Know? Makes filing a Freedom Of Information request as easy as sending an email. Too easy, some in power think.
Upmystreet All the detail on your area you could ever want.
They Work For You A site set up by volunteers to keep tabs on our elected members of parliament – and our unelected peers.
Link economy
With millions of links on the web, we all need sites for sharing the best ones.
Digg Still the reigning champion of where the latest internet memes are though not always polite.
Delicious The thinking person's link aggregation site. We use it.
Popurls Aggregating the aggregators: the web in a window.
Metafilter Living if isolated proof that a site can be successful without pictures or video, and can also host thoughtful conversations.
Slashdot Now looking venerable and old, but "News for nerds" site with a jokey name (/.) still attracts a big, and often knowledgable, audience.
Techmeme Technology news chosen by computer, though it's now refined by human editors.
Location, location
Services like these blossom with a mobile phone that can access the internet.
Dopplr "Share your future travel plans with friends and colleagues", then find out if others will be there too.
Qype Localised search for pubs, restaurants, etc; also a bit of a social network.
Loopt "Transforms your mobile phone into a social compass".
Brightkite A "location-based social network".
Maps
The flipside of location-based services: seeing where you are.
OpenStreetMap A rights-free map created by people like you. Remarkably detailed and precise.
Google Maps Street View Virtual tourism with practical applications, too.
Money/finance/consumer fightback
We all need someone on our side.
Money Saving Expert Does what it says on the tin.
Say No to 0870 Direct-dial numbers, not expensive national-rate ones.
Consumer Direct Government site for consumers.
Music
Last.fm British-made, now CBS-owned, music recommendation station.
Amazon Now has its own MP3 store in the UK as well as the US.
Hype Machine Picks up the latest news by tracking the music blogs.
Pitchfork The magazine of the music web, now with video, and lots of great lists.
Offbeat
The Onion Still the satirical newspaper of record. If it's not in the Onion, it's probably happened.
B3TA Beyond classification; its forum has spawned many memes … and more than its fair share of trolls.
Lolcats respite from stress with daft cCaptioned cats and other animals.
News Lite respite from stress with daft cGreat source of news that's much too trivial to print.
Oddee Setting an internet standard for sets of curious and mildly amusing pictures, not cats.
PostSecret Notes of secrets sent by people who want them posted. So they are.
Passive-Aggressive Notes Would it be too much trouble for you to have a look?
Photography
Flickr The granddaddy of photo-sharing sites.
Picnik Photo editing in your browser.
Picasa Google's photo organisation and editing tool.
DPreview The web's best guide to cameras. Now Amazon owned.
Reference
CIA Factbook All the data you need on pretty much anywhere.
Wikipedia en.wikipedia.com the gradually growing user-edited encyclopaedia is Still a first port of call on most topics.
Internet Archive/Wayback Machine The web in aspic. Useful for research into how the web used to look.
Metacritic Aggregates reviews of movies and DVDs, TV programmes, music and games
Wikileaks Anonymous source of a huge range ofleaked documents. If you dig, there's something important there
Search
Google dominates but Bing is challenging, and Yahoo and Microsoft are left in the dust.
Google So good it's become almost synonymous with search.
Bing Microsoft would like you to bing it, but its "decision engine" still has a long way to go.
Wolfram Alpha An "answer engine"that delivers when it has the data, but not that easy to use.
Social software
Two years ago it was nascent; now it's embedded in our culture. Chances are high you're a member of at least one, and perhaps all, of these sites.
Facebook Still changing and growing to become not just your home on the web, but your ID provider.
LinkedIn Contact sports for business users.
Ning One place to start your own social network – just as Madonna did – though it has yet to really take off.
Travel
Expedia Still the daddy when it comes to travel sites, and particularly good if you can bundle a flight with a hotel and other services.
TripAdvisor Essential reading for the user reviews of hotels, but it now covers much more.
Laterooms Specialises in hotel discounts.
Twitter, and associated
Twitter has proved itself over and over this year, from the Chinese earthquke to the Mumbai attacks to the Madoff fraud as a vector for news.
Twitter The ur-site, where you can create an identity (or several).
Twitter Tim.es Creates your personal newspaper based on your friend's tweets.
Twitterfeed Posts blog contents to Twitter.
TwitterCounter Graphs the growth in your followers.
Twitterfall Tracks trending topics; enables custom searches.
Listorious Twitter lists make it simple to follow large groups of Twitter users, and Listorious makes it easy to find the best lists.
Video
YouTube Dominant provider of video content online.
Vimeo Better rights control than YouTube and a cleaner interface
BBC iPlayer The king of the online catchup services.
Hulu The networks fight back with their own video site, which may make the UK in 2010. We hope.
Videojug The motherlode of instructional videos, all in one place.
Virtual worlds
Second Life Continues to exist and is, apparently, still popular, but not the media darling it was.
Entropia Universe Set in a distant future on the untamed planet of Calypso.
Club Penguin Minigame-tastic virtual world for youngkids.
Moshi Monsters "Educational" virtual world for kids.
Visual arts
Saatchi Gallery Gallery, listings and artworks for sale.
Art Daily The first "art newspaper" on the net.
Culture 24 Everything about UK galleries and museums.
Visualisation
Information is Beautiful Creating effective infographics is one of today's key skills, and on this site, it's also an art.
Infosthetics.com An archive of some of the finest examples of "information aesthetics".
DabbleDB Create online databases and analyse them.
• Which essential sites have we missed? Tell us below• This article was amended on Wednesday 9 December 2009. Picasa is no longer for Windows only; Streetwire.org is no longer operational. These have been corrected.
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Rumor Has It...? 10 Tips for Viral Marketers From a Military Propaganda Manual
10 Tips for Viral Marketers From a Military Propaganda Manual
Monday, December 07, 2009
Do you know that signature line from Henry Jenkins about how if it doesn't spread, it's dead? Yes, well, this is the "if it doesn't spread, you are dead" kind of thing: a military rumor manual dated 1943, now declassified, and unearthed by a colleague of mine. Plenty of solid insight for the designers of spreadable media, some already familiar from the books like Made to Stick
and Rumor Psychology
, written more than half a century after this document. My top ten favorites follow, mostly verbatim. And I really like how they use of "design" and "rumor" in the same sentence:
1. Effective rumor design requires special kinds of intelligence on Rumor Targets.2. The design of a rumor is largely determined by the job it has to do. The slogan-type rumor ("England will fight to the last Frenchman") is especially adapted to summarizing opinions which are already widely accepted. Narrative-type rumors, on the other hand, aim at introducing information which will create or shape new attitudes.
3. The successful propaganda rumor is self-propelling in a high degree, retains its original content with a minimum of distortion, and confirms to strategic requirements.
4. The form and content of a rumor should be tailor-made for the channel through which it is to be initiated. (The best type of rumor to be spread through diplomatic circles: clever epigrams.) Different channels of rumor initiation and dissemination frequently require different forms and contents for the rumor.
5. A successful rumor must take advantage of the state of mind of the people for whom it is intended.
6. The rumor should be sufficiently brief and simple to survive in memory of successive narrators.
7. The rumor's plot should recapitulate precedents and traditions in the history and folklore of the group.
8. A successful rumor is a function of the momentary interests and circumstances of the group. It provides justification for suppressed fears, hatreds, or desires.
9. Unless most subtly handled, counter-rumors may emphasize and increase the effectiveness of the rumor to be countered.
10. Design different rumors that reveal the same "information".
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Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Your Glass Half-Empty / Half-Full? From The NYT. For Media, a Sunset Is Followed Quickly by a Sunrise
Historically, young women and men who sought to thrive in publishing made their way to Manhattan. Once there, they were told, they would work in marginal jobs for indifferent bosses doing mundane tasks and then one day, if they did all of that without whimper or complaint, they would magically be granted access to a gilded community, the large heaving engine of books, magazines and newspapers.
Beyond that, all it took to find a place to stand on a very crowded island, as E. B. White suggested, was a willingness to be lucky. Once inside that velvet rope, they would find the escalator that would take them through the various tiers of the business and eventually, they would be the ones deciding who would be allowed to come in.
As even casual readers of media news know, those assumptions now sound precious, preposterous even. Calvinistic ideals are no match for macromedia economics that have vaporized significant components of the business model that drives traditional publishing.
The most popular books of the holiday season have become cat toys in a price war between online and offline retailers. Newspapers still hang onto a portion of seasonal ads, but the retail chains that place them have consolidated into a much smaller cohort, and much of their spending is bifurcated between old and new media marketing. Magazines intended to help the reader primp for Christmas parties are, in many cases, half as big as they were just a few short years ago.
Pages are down, spending is down, revenues are down, and the biggest feature of this holiday season in the media kingdom has been layoffs and buyouts at Condé Nast, Time Inc., The Associated Press, and yes, The New York Times.
(And it’s not just Manhattan-centric endeavors. Published ambition has been diminished by new realities elsewhere, most recently in the announced closing of The Washington Post’s remaining domestic bureaus. Last week, in an interview with Howard Kurtz, the executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, said it plainly: “We are not a national news organization of record serving a general audience.” Yeow.)
That feeling of age, of a coming sunset, is tough to avoid in all corners of traditional publishing. Earlier in November, the New York comptroller said that employment in communications in New York had lost 60,000 jobs since 2000, a year when the media industry here seemed at the height of its powers.
I arrived in New York that same year as part of Inside.com, a digital news site conceived to cover a media space that was converging and morphing into something wholly new. The site covered the mainstream media’s efforts to come to grips with new realities and efforts by new players to cash in on emerging technology.
Few of us could have conceived that in the next decade some of the reigning titans of media would be routed. Profligate dot-com ad money that had fattened print went away in a digital wipeout, and when digital media came back, it was to dine on the mainstream media rather than engorge it. After 2000, jobs in traditional media industries declined at a rate of about 2.5 percent annually and then went into a dive in 2008 or so. (Inside.com, an idea before its time — hey, let’s charge for high-quality, business-oriented content — disappeared after about 18 months.)
That carnage has left behind an island of misfit toys, trains whose cabooses have square wheels and bird fish who are trying to swim in thin air. The skills that once commanded $4 for every shiny word are far less valuable at a time when the supply of both editorial and advertising content more or less doubles every year.
Where do all the burgeoning pixels come from? Everywhere, and cheap at that. An outfit called Demand Media now tests headlines for reader salience and cranks out thousands of articles and videos daily that it pays about $20 apiece for.
Web crawlers grab expensive content and replicate it far away from the organizations that produce it. Various media labs are now testing algorithms that assemble facts into narratives that deliver information, no writers required. The results would not be mistaken for literary journalism, but on the Web, pretty good — or even not terrible — is often good enough.
For those of us who work in Manhattan media, it means that a life of occasional excess and prerogative has been replaced by a drum beat of goodbye speeches with sheet cakes and cheap sparkling wine. It’s a wan reminder that all reigns are temporary, that the court of self-appointed media royalty was serving at the pleasure of an advertising economy that itself was built on inefficiency and excess. Google fixed that.
Certain stalwart brands will survive and even thrive because of a new scarcity of quality content for niche audiences that demand more than generic information. The chip that was implanted in me when I arrived at this newspaper — you might call it New York Times Exceptionalism — leads me to conclude that this organization will be one of those, but the insurgency continues apace.
Those of us who covered media were told for years that the sky was falling, and nothing happened. And then it did. Great big chunks of the sky gave way and magazines tumbled — Gourmet!? — that seemed as if they were as solid as the skyline itself. But to those of us who were here back in September of 2001, we learned that even the edifice of Manhattan itself is subject to perforation and endless loss.
So what do we get instead? The future, which is not a bad deal if you ignore all the collateral gore. Young men and women are still coming here to remake the world, they just won’t be stopping by the human resources department of Condé Nast to begin their ascent.
For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down.
Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.
For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com
http://twitter.com/carr2nRecommend Next Article in Business (39 of 41) » A version of this article appeared in print on November 30, 2009, on page B1 of the New York edition.
From AdAge. Customer Centricity Is More Than Just a Marketing Trend
Stay on top of the news, sign up for our free newslettersWhy Customer Centricity Is More Than a Marketing Trend
Its Definition Has Implications That Should Reach Deep Into the Marketing Organization
by Michael Radigan
Published: November 30, 2009We live in a world of trends. The Walkman, Pinot Noir, the Lambada, animated gifs, tree hugging, the mullet. Some endure; some don't. One recent trend in marketing is customer centricity.
Michael Radigan Nearly 2 million results -- that's how many pages show up on Google when you enter the keywords "customer centricity" (heck, it even has its own Wikipedia page). The philosophy is far from radical, but it's also one that is sadly not commonly executed in many marketing organizations. So what does "customer centricity" mean, anyway? A dime-store definition is this: "Customer centricity" means focusing on the customer you're talking to rather than on the product you're trying to push.
Seems simple enough, doesn't it? But this deceptively simple definition has implications that should reach deep into the vitals of a marketing organization.
Let me play this out a bit more. Let's assume that you acknowledge the concept of customer lifetime value. Are you also factoring in the expense of that marketing? If so, my guess is that you're looking at it at a global level (campaigns or products or programs), because breaking the expense side of the equation down to a customer view can be technologically challenging. It requires boatloads of data and sophisticated analytical models based on more time-series regression analyses than you can shake a stick at. So, mostly, we take a fairly straightforward propensity-to-purchase model and rank our audience. Then we select the top X deciles in that ranking and invest.
In a truly customer-centric world, that's no longer good enough.
Previously, I wrote on the topic of "wasted conversations," and there was some lively debate about "missing the importance of brand awareness." However, brand awareness, brand preference, brand impact, etc., can all be measured and tracked. Certainly, a single conversation doesn't have to result in an immediate sale, and that's why the lifetime-customer view is so fundamental to a customer-centric philosophy. Repeat business is what makes our Wall Street godfathers happy, after all.
Another implication of this customer-centric, lifetime-value view of the marketing relationship is this: We have to stop living in a 90-day world. This is particularly important when it comes to the importance of factors like brand awareness, because the measurable effect of brand advertising on sales lags behind that of stimulated sales, stubbornly refusing to limit itself to a convenient 90-day window of time. We not only have to shift from product centricity, we also have to move away from calendar centricity.
So. Here we are on Planet Customer Centricity. Let's take a look around. We embrace the concept of customer lifetime value, our horizon stretches way beyond the fiscal quarter, and we understand the role of brand advertising as much as we know that of the directed-sales stimulus. Now, let's take another look at the expense side.
"Given your current propensity to purchase, Judy Six-Pack, we can send you an e-mail, but we can't send you a $5 coupon. Or, we can talk to you on Twitter, or through a Super Bowl ad, but we can't afford to send you a catalog. Because if we do, our aggregate CLTV/E won't hit target."
Now we know who is worth talking to, and how, and when. For those "wasted conversations," we still have non-addressable, wide-reaching, inexpensive "air cover" to build and maintain awareness, to increase propensity to purchase. Now, our job is to convert the customer from a waste of our resources into an asset that will provide lifetime value to us at an acceptable level of investment. How will we do that? By offering Judy Six-Pack value in return. Yes, another funnel.
So, moving from Earth to Planet Customer Centricity isn't merely a shift in focus from widgets to individuals. It's a whole new marketing mindset that will transform much of current strategic planning, marketing and media optimization, and force us to revisit the way we conduct conversations with our customers.
So here's a revised definition: Customer centricity means focusing on the customer, both in terms of the value you offer, but also in terms of the long-term value that the customer will provide in return.
The good news is that by embracing a truly customer-centric philosophy, your CFO will be a much happier camper, because now you can quantify your investments and returns in a way she understands.
There are plenty of ways that your customers will benefit, too, but I'll save that for another post. Right now, I have an appointment with my barber. Goodbye, mullet.
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2 Comments
By FFcommunicator | charlotte, NC November 30, 2009 02:12:21 pm:Yes, that's the way it's supposed to be but agencies are slow to understand this model. Firms and their clients must establish and nurture trust. Sadly, many firms are still out there trying to make a quick buck. Read "The Trust Manifesto" at http://www.famefoundry.com/1085/the-trust-manifesto@FFcommunicator
Fame FoundryBy KilmanAtwood | dallas, TX November 30, 2009 02:44:33 pm:Michael,
What you want your customers to think of your brand is "wow, they think of everything." The only way to get there is with data, and as you put it "boatloads of it."When customers start saying "they really get me and they think of everything" is when you have become customer centric. You have to understand your customer, and they need to understand you. It's extremely hard because large brands have to pool everyone together in user groups and other breakdowns because it is just to expensive to have each customer as it's own data point.
Customer centricity is much more achievable for small businesses. Small businesses need to get a system down early and invest into that system as the company grows. Companies trying to become this are behind a huge 8-ball.
Adam Atwood
Kilman Atwood Inc.
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