Digital Business

Watch a radio broadcast? Of course!

One of the things I particularly miss when on holiday or away on business is the BBC news. Anyone who has ever watched the news in the USA will know just how poor their news seems after being used to the BBC. The BBC is so completely available now that there is no need to miss any live news broadcasts from the them.

Last year, I spent six weeks in India and piped in BBC Radio through my laptop and listened as though it was no different from listening at home, apart from a time difference of five and a half hours. Sixteen years ago, I was lying in my tent with my brother in a forest in Cameroon with insects crawling all over the place, listening to the BBC World Service on our short wave radio. I can watch programmes I missed during the week on iPlayer too. I can watch those on my laptop, my mobile phone and soon, we will be able to watch iPlayer through our TV’s.

The BBC is just everywhere. And that’s good. They have almost reached saturation point with making themselves available and accessible. Unless they want to implant chips in our brains which receive digital radio signals, I can’t see how they can make themselves more available.

With this ‘availability saturation’, the BBC has now started to mix its media. Listening to the BBC Radio 4′s ‘Today’ news programme on the way to work recently, I heard an interview with the well known Kate Adie who was recalling Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. It was very interesting. And, in case you wanted to listen to it again, you can, of course, listen to it again on the iPlayer. But, if that was not enough, you can watch the recording of the interview too which is on the programmes web site.

Where next? I am intrigued.

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The platform is coming back

Whatever people say about Microsoft, it has made computing accessible to millions of people around the world. It has never been the most innovative company in the computing world but it has always made it that bit easier for more than just highly technical people to do things with computers. There will probably be a plethora of people commenting about the innovation they may or may not have suppressed in computing, but the fact is that over the last fifteen or so years having a computer in your house has not only become normal, it has become essential. 

So, Microsoft technology is not the most exciting technology but it is probably the most important technology that is out there in the world. Their technology has enabled masses of people to get onto the internet, write documents, send and manage emails, and manage your documents for a relatively good price. And more importantly, Microsoft has got people into habits from which other software developers have taken advantage by developing slicker, more flexible and more imaginative alternatives. 

But the biggest thing that Microsoft has done is build a ‘platform’ upon which most of us rely for our PC’s, laptops and servers. Without a common platform, software and computing would be a whole lot more expensive than the prices we are used to today. I can see the swarm of comments building for this post already from ‘open source evangelists’ already. There are plenty of excellent open source applications out there which are highly innovative.

The next big thing ‘boring but important’ change to a platform received further coverage on the BBC with the headline ‘Adobe Flash secures set-top deal‘. Many households with more than one TV in the house but ‘the box’ lives in a different room to the home computer. This has long been talked about. Microsoft and Apple have been building products to enable ‘digital homes’ so we can stream music around our homes from one computer or watch TV through our ‘media centre’. But they have never really been anything other than gadgets. Our internet service providers have been setting us up with bundles of TV, satellite, internet and mobile for some years now too, foreseeing the convergence of all our communications from one provider.

But that’s where the convergence stopped. As the communications cables came into our house from one provider, they split company inside the house and went their own ways to the devices which specialised in being connected to them. The good old TV, albeit an HD-flat-screen-surround-sound-digital panel thing, still has an entertainment spot of its own in the house. The PC or Mac is used for surfing the web to watch videos, collaborate or just browse away the hours looking at stuff you had no idea you were interested in until that very moment. But try surfing the web through your TV and it has been a pretty clunky affair until now. TV’s were not designed to cope with the rich animations and web sites with which we have become familiar. Watching TV through your laptop becomes a very solitary affair which is the opposite to how we have used TV’s for decades. 

But this announcement from Adobe moves us into the next phase of our PC’s, TV’s, DVD’s and mobile phones. Installing Adobe technology into the next generation of TV’s will start to enable web browsing and using rich internet applications in the manner to which we are used to on our laptops and desktops. People will be able to surf the web through their TV’s in a familiar way and, for example, they will be able to download or stream BBC TV programs from the iPlayer and watch them on their TV’s. 

Soon after, we will see the move of the Adobe platform onto mobile phones to enable richer applications to be used on them than is now possible. There is Adobe technology out there which allows this to a certain extent but it is not good enough yet to be able to maximise the potential of the mobile phone to publishers, broadcasters and software developers. When this happens on mobile phones, we will see an explosion in the media which is streamed through them as well as the applications which are used on them.

So, as this activity happens in the background, quietly getting on with building the platform the results of which we will soon become familiar, just remember the name of the company Adobe and have a look at this site and get a feel for how the next platform is being built and what it will mean to you. It’s not the most exciting read you will have, nor may it seem to be terribly important. But, it will be part of your life in the very near future.

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There is something really interesting happening in the publishing world. There appears to be a groundswell of interest and action in bringing ‘digital’ to books.

Most of the talk is about getting books onto mobile devices as e-books and there are more companies setting up to resell e-books through the mobile web.

Take ‘GoSpoken‘, for instance. I downloaded a free title from the site to try. It’s pretty easy. I downloaded it onto my Nokia N96, which has the BBC iPlayer and can use either my wireless broadband or my 3G connection. The e-book is quite easy to read and I will probably read it all the way through at some stage. But it’s still just a book on a phone. A bit dull, really.

I believe that the rush to get books onto mobile devices is a step too soon right now. The number of adults who have accessed the web from their mobile phone or PDA now in the UK is small.

According to ‘emarketer.com’ only 8% have accessed the web using a 3G mobile or PDA. It may sound a lot, but how many have downloaded an e-book and read it on their phone? Not many, I suspect.

I believe there is a stage to go through first before we see widespread use of mobile devices for reading books. Here’s why.

I read military history books a lot. I like the books for many reasons so I won’t wax lyrical about the smell and the feel of them. It’s more to do with the fact that I want more details. I want to see a Google Map, for instance, showing phases of a battle and locators showing where individuals took buildings with their bare hands and a bayonet. I want to read more about the people in the books and what happened to them afterwards.

So, give me a web site to visit or a desktop application to download more details. While I’m there I am quite happy for the publisher to make some recommendations of other things I might like to read. Give me a coupon to redeem in a shop or online, if you like.

For children’s books, I think the Harry Potter films had it about right. They had books which came alive with moving images embedded in the pages. That was a great idea.

Publisher have got to make e-books interesting. Not just available. Start by making printed books more detailed and compelling before rushing in to making them available just making an electronic version. Use your customers imaginations and ask them what they want. Provide them with the richness available through the Internet.

And make e-books a better experience by getting your customers used to reading them by taking them through an evolutionary experience rather than getting rushed into hyped-up mobile frenzy.

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Image via Wikipedia

You have to admit, it’s an exciting time right now. When the numbers that the business reporters talk about that have been lost in our banks (and I mean our banks) have so many zeros on the end of them that you don’t know whether you are in Zimbabwe, in Sir Fred Goodwin‘s pension committee, or AIG‘s “How can we make this seem less than the world’s biggest ever corporate loss Committee“, then you know you are in trouble.

Funnily enough, I read an article yesterday saying that Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway fund had fallen by 9.6% in the last year. That does not seem too bad at all in these times!

But what it highlights is one thing which we all need all of them time when in sales and marketing, and that is information. I learnt from an early age in business that if you don’t ‘know your numbers‘ about your sales pipeline, your forecast, your actual sales, or the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, then you are not doing your job correctly.

With information comes insight. With insight comes the ability to make judgements and plans. Without information, you are guessing at best, and speculating at worst.

Any digital marketer worth their salt will know about Google Analytics. It is a free tool which allows you to gather information about your who is using your web site, where they have come from and gone to after visiting your site.

With the increasing movement for creating desktop applications which connect with databases on the web, there comes new opportunities for understanding your customers and the effectiveness of your marketing. eBay Desktop and the BBC iPlayer are examples of these types of ‘Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s)’ which are making web based tools available on your desktop

Today, I saw that developers can now build these RIA’s and incorporate Google Analytics tracking code into them so that  marketers can track not only what customers are doing on their web sites but also in their desktop applications. They build them using tools like Adobe AIR and Flex.

Marketers are able to be accountable for their campaigns to depths not possible five years ago. A marketer will be able to see what type of PC you are using, where you are using it, what you are reading, what interests and what encourages you to buy in detail from wherever you access their site.

You might think that you have stepped off the bus into ’1984′ with this type of talk.  Or you can think of this as a good thing because it will save you time in future because you will find what you are looking for more quickly.

Whatever your thoughts, if you are marketer, you can be more confident that you know exactly how well your products are faring in detail, unlike our investment bankers who seemed to have lost track of business basics in the last few years.

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The recent ‘Tools of Change for Publishers’ conference in New York seemed to sum up the tension in the publishing world on where their industry is heading. “Will printed books survive?” is one question which is being asked but, more importantly, “How do we keep control of our content while embracing the digital potential?” seems to be the main question on publishers minds.

The newspaper and magazine publishers are facing a dilemma. They were quick to adopt technology to reach their customers but they have trained their audience to expect a free online version of their favourite newspaper. Now that their circulations are falling, they appear to have no way to attract subscription paying customers to read their newspapers.

Magazine publishers in certain categories, such as ‘lad mags’ have seen their circulations plummet as the credit crunch hits and the magazines are ditched in favour of more wholesome entertainment like Sky Sports. Other magazine categories have seen the opposite trend in their circulations. For example, the circulation of The Economist has risen and people are happy to £4 for well written content.

Amazon recently launched the ‘Kindle 2’ which their chief, Jeff Bezos, said had been named to illustrate that their eBook reading device had been designed to be the starting point for enabling consumers to read book and newspapers in a digital medium and not an end point. That is a nice analogy although you still need something to light the kindling wood to get the fire going.

Furthermore, the use of mobile phones for reading and viewing content is growing. Personally, I now use my Nokia N96 to watch BBV TV and listen to recent radio shows using the installed iPlayer before I switch off my bed side light at night. That phone combined with improved 3G coverage has enabled me to view content in ways which I simply could not have achieved two or three years ago.

There seems to be inertia as publishers wait for the big product which enable them to provide their content in digital forms which does not see them in the position that the music industry is in where they are fighting a tactical battle of trying to catch up with their customers desires to buy music in ways which does not involve them buying an album on CD of which they only really want to two tracks. As the article in The Economist suggests “An iTunes moment.”

The Amazon Kindle 2 looks like a nice product. It has a 3G connectivity, it is light and slim and it can hold 1,500 books, it “reads like real paper”, it “boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and even crisper images” and there is a range of 230,000 books as well as newspapers, magazines and blogs to choose from.

Listening to people have used the Kindle 2, one theme stood out for me and that was one person saying that they now read more books as a result of having the device. That is why I like my iPod. I listen to far more music than I ever used to. It’s just easy.

Despite some sceptics in the UK, I think the Kindle 2 will be a success and, like the iPod, it will be improved all the time and the richness of the internet to which we have recently become fans will soon be available. I believe the ‘big thing’ for publishers and their authors will be their ability to have a closer relationship with their audiences in the digital world and they need to provide applications and tools to enable that as well as getting their books ready for Kindle-like products.

To use a Stephen Covey phrase, the Kindle will be a ‘big rock’ around which publishers must create other tools and applications which will enable their audiences to have richer experiences with their volumes of content. For example, cook books which link to short videos on techniques, or Sci-Fi books with links to fantasy games.

Publishers just need to do it. With digital, they can build things quickly, test them and assess the results rapidly. Just stop waiting for the ‘iTunes’ moment’ because it is already here. 

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