I’ve been MIA for a while but am slowing shifting gears and getting back into action. I haven’t yet had time to chew over the significance of these news but I wanted to capture these thoughts before I forget them.

Print off-shoots of popular digital properties become the new low-cost revenue channel for publishers:

A few years ago the conversations in publishing buzzed around creating and optimizing web properties for print magazines. While this is still a primary focus, Meredith and Hearst have taken to using print offshoots to market their web properties. Case in point: magazines for Delish.com MixingBowl.com and Realbeauty.com

The content on mixingbowl.com and realbeauty.com is largely user-generated and there is some amount of  gratification and reward to a community than seeing their recipe in print.  Popular blogs (think the sartorialist, chocolateandzucchini.com etc) have resulted into books, so its only natural that popular web properties have their own print versions. But where do we go from here ?

Digital is so fragmented that new devices and platforms are constantly changing the dynamic between the content producers and the readers. I am curious to see how the content producers innovate to serve up this new audience.

Tying this post to my previous post about the iPad – instead of a print version of the mixingbowl or delish – would  an iPad application for recipes be more useful than a print magazine ? Just a thought.

There have been a few dismissals of the iPad. My Facebook feed was flooded for a few hours last night with friends calling the iPad an exaggerated version of the iPhone. While that judgement may not be far off the mark, I am personally quite excited for the iPad and the potential impact it can have on the content publishing worlds. So a few things off the top of my head:

New Markets – I think the main thing the iPad will do is unlock new markets and underserved audiences. I’m thinking my 50-yr old Mom or my 5 year old niece. The broad applicability and price points of this device will fill the niche for readers who want more than just books on their device and computer users who want a scaled down version of their PC. I’m curious to see how existing publishers will optimize for these markets and the platform.

Content: I’ve head some very smart people talk and discuss “the medium is not the message” argument. While I am not sure I even understand the more academic discourses on this topic, one thing is clear to me. The medium may not be the message, but the medium will certainly dictate and push for innovation in the deliverance and creation of the message. Much like what the iPhone did with the application community. I think it will be interesting to see as the iPad technology evolves, what kind of new markets and industries it decides to support. The strongest advantage the iPad has against the Kindle (sorry Nook – I’m not even sure, I should include you here in the competition!) is its iTunes network.

Over a pizza discussion with the team the other day, Justin bought up an interesting POV. He mentioned how the future should actually have been convergence of technologies into one device – but the iPad actually fragments this convergence. What are your thoughts about this?

Update: This news article re-affirms my initial thoughts about the iPad’s target audience: the middle-aged.

This is a quick post and more reflection than informed thinking!

Harvard University has partnered with FourSquare to help students explore the campus better. I think this is an excellent collaboration by an educational institution with a leading mobile-location based technology. Universities breed an environment of congeniality, amiability and the general desire to explore one’s surroundings and meet new people.

If Foursquare existed back when I was still in college, my social calendar and my social life would be far more interesting than it actually was without such games and technologies.

Foursquare on the campus has tremendous potential to evolve and become an all-encompassing social network for students. From knowing where your friends are hanging out after a class or where they are celebrating the results of a terrific exam — and hey – even stalking your professors to suck up to them for a recommendation for a job … Foursquare can only have a positive impact on the student life on campus. Thoughts ?

On the first day of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sketched out a short-term vision of the future of TV viewing that will (unsurprisingly) have Microsoft at the center of it.

Via Microsoft.com:

Subscription TV services, powered by Microsoft Mediaroom 2.0, will take viewers where they haven’t been before by extending TV experiences across multiple screens, including the PC, TV and mobile phone. The Mediaroom software supports whole-home digital video recording, on-demand capabilities, access to both operator-hosted content and Internet TV, and interactive applications. Mediaroom 2.0 combines client software with cloud-based services to provide viewers with access to a world of great content on the big flat screen in their living room, the PC in their office, and even the smartphone in their pocket.

“Our strategy with Mediaroom is to combine the power of client software and cloud-based services to greatly enhance the way consumers experience digital entertainment,” says Enrique Rodriguez, corporate vice president for the TV, Video and Music Business at Microsoft. “We want to make it easier for consumers to find and discover great content, to watch, listen and engage in new ways, and to do so anywhere and on any screen. Mediaroom 2.0 is a key milestone in our strategy, providing the software platform to power operators’ service clouds to reach more screens, and more people, with more content than ever before.”

While the original version of Mediaroom enabled services to be viewed on TV set-top boxes and on Xbox 360 game consoles, Mediaroom 2.0 alleviates the need for operators to deploy redundant systems, allowing them to expand the reach of their television service to include Windows 7-based PCs via Windows Media Center, Web browsers on both Macs and Windows-based PCs and, in the future, compatible smartphones. Mediaroom 2.0 also gives TV service operators the ability to reach beyond their managed IPTV networks, extending their television services to their unmanaged broadband networks. As a result, operators have the ability to offer content from a vast number of television and Internet sources, and deliver it to more viewers in more places than ever before.

All of this gives people more freedom in where and how they access their entertainment, while also providing a familiar, consistent experience. For example, subscribers could start watching a show on one screen and finish watching it on another. They could also build a video queue on a smartphone and watch the content later on a TV or PC. While traveling they could watch a recorded TV program on a smartphone and later watch an on-demand feature film in HD on a laptop all via Mediaroom 2.0 enabled TV services.

The future of content is certainly about making it easier for consumers to find and discover great content; to watch, listen and engage with TV in new ways; and to do so anywhere and on all the screens of their lives. The actual device will become less important – we will simply expect a seamless content viewing experience with centralized content, DVR anywhere, on-demand features and interactive applications that can flow from screen to screen on any device. iPTV screen in the living room, smartphone on the subway, laptop in the garden….

This amazing data visualisation has been doing the Internet rounds recently and it’s definitely worth including as an opening 2010 post to highlight just how much content gets created online everday, (that and the fact that I’m a sucker for data visualisation?!).

Fact:

45 million Facebook status updates a day

5 million tweets per day

3 million Flickr photo uploads per day

For more thrilling and mesmerising educational insights I suggest you check out Online Education – the stuff they don’t teach you in college.

Social media is evolving from an engagement platform to an ecommerce platform.

With the year ending, I’ve been thinking a lot about where I was and what I was doing around this time last year. In December 2008, I was presenting to all my clients a Twitter 101 deck and giving them a practical, logical reasoning of  why they should consider jumping on Twitter. Fastforward 12 months and my agency is not only running and growing over 10 Twitter feeds for our clients, but we’ve gathered a rich  historical database of our results.

I want to try and imagine now, how the next 12 months are going to surprise me and knock the breath out of me. Social media and it’s evolution excites me. And for 2010, I’m putting my stake in the ground for E-commerce.

We are going to witness a major shift in how we approach social media. 2010 is going to demand stronger measuring tactics and more importantly, tangible results. Brand building, awareness, buzz and fan activation are important goals but clients and agencies alike will now push for more tangible goals: sales. A direct increase in revenue.

Dell just announced today that it credits about $6.5 million of its revenues to Twitter. Dell’s aggregate presence on social media (Facebook & Twitter) and its own community sites (Direct2Dell and IdeaStorm) has 3.5 Million + fans and followers that have collectively contributed to the $6.5 Mil rev. achieved.

What’s important to consider is the astounding growth (more than double!) in just three months following Dell’s announcement in June at having reached a 3 Mil revenue mark. Will the numbers reach 12 Million+ by 2010 ?

Granted $6.5 Million is a tiny piece of Dell’s $60 Billion revenues – but the unparalleled (100%+)  growth in just three months alone is worth noting.

We are just beginning to see the potential of driving sales through social media.

Another point to consider:

As financial and human-resources investment in social media continues to grow, it will only get more time-intensive and expensive for a brand to push their audiences to three different web-based destinations: 1) It’s own website 2) It’s Facebook profile and 3) It’s Twitter page.

I think by late 2010, it will be fair to expect brands to start prioritizing their investment and efforts, and arguably giving first preference to its social media destinations. I know it sounds far-fetched. The idea that a brand’s website can be completely cannibalized by its social media presences seems preposterous, but it just makes sense to me logically.

If I can grow the impact of my brand and my revenues ten times faster on the social web than via my website – why wouldn’t I just put more resources into my Facebook page?

Also, it is a LOT to ask a customer to fan you, follow you and also sign up for your email newsletter. Ecommerce needs to get streamlined – content needs to get streamlined.

Signs are already pointting in this direction. Earlier this year, 1800-Flowers quietly opened an E-commerce store on its Facebook fan page.

On it Facebook page, 1800 Flowers accepts payments with all major credit cards and will soon implement Facebook’s proprietary payment platform. (Although the company only has about 8000 fans on its page (and not much fan activity – but that you can attribute to the fact that 1800 Flowers it not exactly what you’d call a passion brand.)

A friend of mine who works at a luxury fashion brand informed me that her company is “definitely” selling products on Facebook starting 2010. Facebook is one of their strongest focus for next year.

These are just my top level thoughts on a topic that is going to become very important and talked about next year. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. If you are a brand, I want to know more about how you are looking at measuring success in social media. Let’s keep this discussion going!

The picturesque, if somewhat storm-weathered, town of Dingle in the most south western peninsula of Ireland was the backdrop to Saturday night’s world-first showing of Intune Technologies’ laser-based next-generation network (NGN) technology.

In the front foyer and backrooms of Benners Hotels on Main Street, Dingle, locals and visitors could watch a live, high definition transmission of a rare performance of Snow Patrol and an extended entourage of Irish musicians (16 in total!) from St. James’ Church across the road.* Those with iPhones could also watch the show without any of the usual lags or video outages.

The broadcast was delivered over an optical burst packet switched fibre network, which came through on its promise of uninterrupted, premium quality content – something that has been unachievable before now. The implications are massive for future content delivery.

Just consider the traffic generated by the BBC iPlayer – the iPlayer generates 20-25% of UK (pop 60M) Telecom Traffic after two years from only 1.5m subscribers in 2008.

With Intune Networks Technologies underpinning the next-generation web, humans’ addiction to video will grow exponentially, with digital content multiplying by a factor of 10 over the next five years to take the volume into Zetabytes.

* I was lucky enough to have a seat in pew no.4. in a total audience count of 60 – an amazing Saturday show in The Other Voices Series, due to be shown on RTE from Wednesday Jan 14th 2010.

It finally happened. Valued at $13.74Bn, Comcast is buying a 51% stake in NBC Universal. (GE will continue to own 49% stake in NBCU) As part of the deal, Comcast owns rights to buy GE’s remaining stake over time.

In its Programming group, Comcast already owns E! Entertainment Television, Style Network, Golf Channel, VERSUS, G4, PBS Kids Sprout, TV One and Comcast Sports Group. To this, Comcast will now add cable channels such as USA, Bravo and MSNBC. Comcast will also have more clout in Hollywood with NBCU’s Universal Pictures and NBC TV network and production operations.

This deal is so intricate and complex that it’s going to substantially change the face of media industry. As the Washington Post puts it, Comcast could own more than one out of five television viewing hours.

One facet of the deal that I’m curious to learn more about is how it will effect online video distribution. NBCU is an investor in Hulu.com (alongwith Fox, and Disney) and Comcast owns Fancast.

Fancast, much like Hulu, allows fans instant access to videos of TV Shows, movies, and other content. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts has often referred to his commitment to “Anytime Anywhere TV.” But where Fancast has failed and Hulu succeeded is in creating a community and a sense of transparency, goodwill and excellent customer service. What also concerns me is if Hulu and Fancast have the same owner, is that in the best interest of online video distribution? The other closest competitor in this space is TV.com (owned entirely by CBS)

We’ll be watching this space closely.

If two years ago everyone wanted their content to ‘go viral,’ now everyone wants to ‘crowdsource’ their content. Back in August of 2008, Tim Devin created a project that incorporated elements of both these buzzwords, but did it in an authentic way that generated a passionate and devoted following. His I left this here for you to read project was a true original that was created to explore the relationships between people and their environment.

Devin is a Boston-based conceptual artist and writer. His work deals with humanizing public space, and combating what he views as the negative effects of urban anonymity (such as people’s emotional isolation, and lack of attachment to their environment). Recently Tim was nice enough to answer some questions about “I left this here…”:

ContentDecoded: What was the impetus to start this project?

Tim Devin: For me, “I left this here for you to read” was an art project. I’ve done a number of projects that involved leaving things in public for people to find. And I’ve done others that involved gathering people’s stories. Another thing that I’ve tried to do is to get people to notice the other people around them, to think about all the strangers around them—and to notice their environment more. I like to think that “I left this here” combines these things; I think that’s where it came from.

CD: Crowdsourcing is the “it” buzzword of the moment, did you always intend this to be a group project?

TD: It was always a group project. I came up with the idea and the design for the magazine, and then asked people I knew to contribute material, to help edit it, to help assemble the pages, etc. After a few issues, I thought it would interesting to completely open it up, so that anyone could do any of the jobs, if they wanted to. I thought this would make the finished magazines more interesting, and maybe eventually they’d look completely different than my original concept. I also told people they could go and start their own if they wanted to. So far, two different groups have taken me up on that, and a few more people are talking about starting their own, too.

Involving other people more actively seemed like a good way to go, because then I wasn’t in complete control. Making it more open made it an Everyone Involved Project, not just a Tim Devin Project.

CD: What was the hardest things to source? The content, distribution, printing, etc.?

Getting people to submit material was really easy, actually.. The majority of the people involved in the project were writers, artists, poets… Over 100 people submitted work—maybe 150. This is probably because it’s difficult to get published, and the magazine offered to print everything it received, within certain guidelines. I think another factor is that, even if you do get published, your audience is limited to the type of person who will buy that particular type of book or magazine. The idea behind this project was that whoever found the magazine might read it. I think this last reason is why a lot of people are doing guerilla art lately—it potentially connects you with a bigger audience.

Distributing was popular too—I think because it’s relatively easy, and fun. And because most people thought leaving a gift for a stranger was a nice thing to do. About 100 people volunteered to help distribute the magazines.

Printing, editing, design, etc.—these weren’t as popular. A couple people helped with design. A half dozen helped with editing. I think this is because it’s a lot of work, and everyone was a volunteer.

CD: Do you think your model could be replicated on a larger scale? If so, how big?

TD: Coordinating all of this was a lot of work. I think what was great about the magazine was that it was completely open to everyone, but this made it a lot of work for me. If anyone wants to make a larger-scale open project like this, I wish them the best.

CD: What was the single most surprising result or learning from this project?

Most of the people who helped leave the magazine around for other people to find told me they were glad to have done something nice for a stranger. It’s reassuring that people like this exist.

CD: Would you ever try something like this again?

I’m actually working on a smaller open project right now. It’s a project about what residents of Somerville, MA think (or hope, or fear) might happen in the future of their community. It’s called “The history of Somerville, 2010-2100.” It’s a lot smaller than “I left this here,” but I’m using some of the same tactics.

There are several interesting learnings from this project. I particularly liked that the content wasn’t limited to a certain topic. People were allowed to write about things they were passionate about, not what some corporation wanted. Also worth noting is the ‘crowdsourced’ distribution model. By doing it this way, you create opportunities for discovery that becomes part of the narrative in and of itself. Clearly scale is an issue, but I would think that something along these lines could be interesting for a niche brand that is looking to connect with a specific demographic (age, location, economic, etc.).

- Interviewed by Rick Liebling, who now deserves an honorary mention and Editor Status on our website!!

Ever since I first came  across digital artist Jonathan Harris’ project, We Feel Fine, (flashbacks to gushing blog post praising Harris & buddy Kamvar), I’ve signed up to the Jonathan Harris fanclub.

His recent work, World Building in a Crazy World, is another exquisite addition to the Number27.org portfolio, if only based on the premise that Harris once again causes to stop, ponder and wonder where are we headed, (and even more specifically, where is digital content headed).

After five years of living in Fort Green, Brooklyn, Harris decided to head for the hills of Oregon to take a fresh perspective on the current digital world and what that world’s future could be. The resulting series of vignettes are, as Ed Cotton of Influx Insight put it “a great reminder that it’s often smartest to take the opposite point of view and to value people’s intelligence and ability to engage in things with a deeper meaning.”

Here, here to appealing to the highest common denominator.

In the real-time digital world of 140 Twitter characters, 550 Facebook friends, and a never-ending stream of conversations, tools, “new features” and endless conferences, are we as digital natives loosing sense of what it means to be engaged in deep and meaningful interactions? As marketers, can we really claim to truly engage consumers in experiences that are enriching?

Please read the digital philosophers’ thoughts on ideas (or “city ideas” as he puts them) and consider a little trip to the country side for some real idea generation. Oh, how nice to be still in thought.