Colin's Corner

CES Roundup - 2011 The year of the “superphone” and “media tablets”

After a few years with a weak pulse, the energy, enthusiasm and crowds were back in force at CES in Las Vegas with estimates of around 140,000 attendees. 

Apple does not exhibit at the show but its influence on the industry was clearly seen in the product design and functionality of some the most interesting mobile products. These included advanced smartphones or “superphones” announced by Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG and many others.

These superphone come feature packed with dual core processors, large amounts of ram and storage, an HTML5 browser, and support for HD video, micro HMDI out, front and rear cameras, and video chat capabilities. Along with better data security encryption some even require finger print recognition to unlock the device. 3D on the phone is not too far away and may end up being much more successful than on TV screens.

Some of the current “Superphones” and others coming out over the next couple of year can function as extremely powerful computers that you carry around in your pocket.  Combined with secure file storage in the cloud, fast mobile bandwidth via 4G plus the ability to dock into peripherals such as keyboard and displays theses phones have the potential to replace many laptops.

The message being delivered at this year’s CES is that, over the next couple of years, mobile devices will totally exceed your expectations.   

Media Tablets

There were dozens of tablet announcements and lots of prototype demonstrations that focused more on technical specifications than the overall user experience plus the amount of developer support that would be at launch to support the hardware.  

One of the issues of having an annual event such as CES is that companies are forced to work to the organizers timetable rather than their own. This results in products often being demonstrated that are not quite ready for prime time. Some companies such as HP decided to hold off and will showcase the PalmPad on February 9^th at their own event.

A lot of the tablet attention at CES focused on Motorola Xoom’s one of the first tablets with a 10” screen that will ship with Android 3 (Honeycomb) the first version of the OS designed for tablets, and also on RIM’s Blackberry Playbook that has a 7”screen and is expected to do well with corporations.

However, one got the sense that everyone was holding back a fair amount of information while waiting for the details of Apple’s iPad 2 which is rumored to be announced around 1^st February with shipment early April. When asked about pricing, the answer was always “it will be very competitive”.  A year after the iPad was announced there appears to be some competition on the horizon although too many of the tablets are chasing features rather than focusing on the totality of the user experience.

 The implications for the media industry are enormous.  A very large number of people are going to be consuming a lot of content on mobile devices either through a mobile browser or via apps.

Theses devices will be as powerful as many laptops and will be able to receive and display rich media content such as HD video. Static content such as e-editions and digital replicas will start to phase out as the media industry shifts to delivering more dynamic, rich interactive content.

The ability to share and receive content over social networks also needs to be a core feature of mobile content. Today 50% of all active Twitter users are using mobile devices to share and receive information. You don’t have to be constantly monitoring your social network. Applications such as Flipboard make it easy to organize Twitter and Facebook content in a digital magazine style for easy reading when every you want.  Facebook “likes” and other sharing mechanisms are driving as much traffic as search.  With the CEO of Flipboard now on the board of Twitter, expect to see a very close alignment of these organizations.  As the CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo noted at CES – “Twitter is a technology company in the media business”

With the ongoing convergence of the computer, consumer electronics and wireless industries 2011 is being viewed, as a major inflection point for the mobile devices industry.   The often-predicted evolution of the Personal Computer era into one of Personal Communications appears to be finally here.

 

Networked Journalism Summit

I had the pleasure of attending Networked Journalism Summit , excellently moderated by Jeff Jarvis. I got a couple of minutes to speak about some of the transition strategies that have happened at IDG – Jeff has highlighted the comments on my blog previously - the light at the end of the press and Print Sucks (his headline) so I won’t repeat them here. The key point is that IDG is not emotionally invested in print – it’s invested in providing quality information to readers - no matter in which form they want to receive it  - print, online or mobile.  It’s about making audiences and their eyeballs available to marketers in appropriate ways. Longer term, some of the strategies that need to be pursued by publishers should include:

1. Continuing to build digital audiences - today, that's online - tomorrow increasingly mobile - I expect to seen significant mobile revenues towards the end of 2009 early 2010.

2. Focus on audience engagement - using KPIs to monitor improvement in engagement- IDG's Market Fusion program and the developments of the Engagement Intensity Index are solid examples of this approach.

3. Drive performance based solutions for marketers - especially around premium lead generation services, custom publishing, events and mobile- the launch of IDG Connect, http://www.idgconnect.com/ IDG’s central database to drive response programs has been extremely successful and now responsible for significant revenues.

4 Extend audiences and inventory via the development of a Vertical Publisher Network - the launch of the IDG Technology Network http://www.idgtechnetwork.com/ recognizes it's not all about being a destination site but rather focusing on the aggregation of content and audience fragmentation.

5. Look to build end-user revenue streams online - via appropriate e-commerce. A successful example is the Macworld SuperGuides 

6. Managing the print properties for "profit" - or at least ensuring there is positive contribution to overhead.

7. Preparing for the Web 3 - the Semantic Web  - thinking about content as objects and the relationships between content, companies, people and places - viewing the web as interconnected data and rich applications

8 Continuing to stay close to readers and advertisers - using research to help identify products that meet the needs of the marketplace.

The workshop discussions were illuminating, I sat in on the one focused on revenue lead by Fred Wilson   – while around 20 different revenue streams were identified – generally my sense was that publishers still are too focused on revenue model that are associated with print and are leaving opportunities associated with the data associated with their audiences and content.