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AOL is dead!

The New York Times Bits Blog has a feature about the difficult times AOL is facing.

Heck, AOL used to be a great company. Back at those times, when the internet was just an add-on to there main service. (They actually were late in recognizing the internet as the next big thing). Then internet access meant access disks and CD-ROMs, not broadband routers. Internet access meant hourly charges, not flat rate offers and multi gigabyte downloads. Back at those times Steve Case still ruled and AOL set to conquer Europe. I even applied once for a job at AOL and later got a job offer from them.

Today, building up the AOL portal to compensate for the dying internet access business in today´s times of Facebook, MySpace and Flickr doesn´t work. AOL is dead.

Newspapers and their future

Wired has an interesting article on how newspaper publisher are shifting gears due to the digital revolution and Web 2.0.

Last spring, The News-Press, a Gannett paper in Fort Myers, Florida, heard that readers from a new housing development were being charged up to $45,000 to connect to the water and sewer system. Rather than assign a conventional investigative reporter to the story, "we asked our readers to help us find out why the cost was so exorbitant," says Kate Marymont, News-Press executive editor.

In some ways the future newspaper won´t be what a newspaper is now or used to be 50 years ago. On the other hand, people still prefer above-average quality of articles and selection of stories by professionals. They both like articles written by journalists and articles by bloggers, though the earlier my sometimes not be so good and they latter may be much better the average.

In terms of interactivy, I think that sometimes people like to take part in the game, and sometimes they like just being receivers. In comparison, YouTube does change television, but YouTube isn´t television or television should be more than YouTube.

Link block II

Here is today´s list of URLs:

• worth reading: bits blog, powered by the New York Times
• bloglines has a iphone enhanced version over at i.bloglines.com
• vite.at - Vienna IT Network, including a research and educational focus
• in German: Ist die Festplatte eine Wohnung? (Internet-Recht)

Clever recommendations

Amazon has some clever recommendation pages. No dull reloads when changing an item, recommendations for those categories where you already bought one or the other item or have stored a product in your wish-list; no recommendations, but information on new or popular products in the other categories. A simple modell with simple navigation and usage, yet very powerful.

Click value

Here´s an interesting quote on eMail marketing and eMail newsletters (via paidcontent.org):

“People don’t use the unsubscribe feature anymore,” said Stephen Howard-Sarin, VP at CNet Networks Business. “We have thresholds set up so that we automatically stop sending e-mails to people who have stopped voting for our content by clicking. If they aren’t getting value, neither are we and neither are our advertisers. Besides, we make sure our click-through rates are based on a group of people who really want us.”

This is actually to similar to an approach I´m using in a concept I´m writing for a new product. The value in the newsletter isn´t anymore in the newsletter, but in the links embedded in the newsletter. Interesting, but radical, perspective and shift of information delivery. Similar to the non-email approach of "we won´t send you any more leaflets, if we don´t notice any purchases".

Digital Economics

Seamus has a nice take on the differences between newspapers and online media:

Newspapers are packages. They bundle together "everything that the reader should want to know on that day". Digital is all about unbundling - as iTunes et al shows us, serving the digital consumer is about slicing and dicing the packets that work in a way that serving the pre-digital consumer was not.

Moreover, in the current mashup hype, digital is about re-bundling unbundled content, repurposing content or allowing the user to spin the data around himself. Again, no closed walls anymore.

Online Storage

Online Storage, while very appealing, faces quite some business hurdles. Nik of Omnidrive takes a look at The Economics of Online Storage. Worth reading, as it compares the costs of providing online storage with the costs of GMail.

So with online storage, the cost is not so much in the storage, with that being a cheap one-off cost of around $1 per GB, but the cost is in the bandwidth.

Wiki´s for Project Management

It´s not a surprise that the tools of the blogosphere also help those working in project management: blogs (to keep project groups members up to date) and wikis to exchange knowledge and ideas. So far I´ve had good experience working with Instiki (based on Ruby, about which or rather Rubyonrails everybody keeps talking about these days anyway), TiddlyWiki (which lets you save text in the same file!, uses an overdose of Javascript) or Basecamp.

COMPANICE has an interesting quote about how the BBC uses blogs:

Die BBC besitzt seit 2 Jahren ein Bulletin Board [...], seit einem Jahr interne Blogs (mittlerweile etwa 70, [...]), und seit einem halben Jahr kommen auch Wikis zum Einsatz (um Projekte zielgerichteter zu bearbeiten).

The BBC is using a bulletin board for about 2 years, has about 70 internal blogs, and since a half year is also using Wikis (to keep track of projects).

Great, isn´t that? However, those tools aren´t real project management tools, they can only by used for these purposes, but do not include support for project management methods such as WBS (work break-down structure). More on that at some other time.

Microsoft Gets You a Job

Microsoft has a couple job-specific resume templates. Just select senior sales manager, locomotive engineer or legal firm accountant. Voila. Change address and send it off. Just joking! Also available in German.

DVD rulez

It´s interesting what might happen one day should the movie industry had to decide between theatrical releases and the DVD:

Barry Meyer, CEO of Warner Bros. Entertainment (at the Milken conference): "It may be, in the future, that theatrical releases may well become the value add..in terms of inducing customers to buy by adding various scenes etc...right now we set the value of the movie by theatrical release and then video...in certain territories, it may become the exact reverse..."

The digital area changes it all!

And here´s a good analogy how explain the appeal of file sharing (vs. the revenue allegedly lost by the music industry): Assume, you invited a thousand people to come for free to spend a 1 week holiday in Florida -> 750 people gonna come. Now, if you invite them to coma at their own expenses only a much smaller fraction of the people will come. The same should apply to downloading music (of new and unheard bands), the people downloading the music are not necessarily lost sales!

Product value in the digital age: Another marketing goody discussed at the Milken conference (actually by Hillary Rosen, former head of RIAA) - not mentioned at paidcontent.org: if e.g. a bicycle or a candy bar get´s produced, once it leaves the factory it has a maximum value. On the other hand, a movie or a song is virtually worthless once it´s released, it only get´s it´s value once a group of people likes watching the movie or listening to the song (or rather millions of people watch the movie or listen to the song). So the worth is derived from the value of the product to a group or a peer group (compare: social, network driven behaviour).

Urchin goes Google

Google acquires Urchin, maker of the Urchin Web Analytics software. The web analytic company is one of the top recommendable spots in the web statistics field, besides - of course -  WebTrends - now owned by Francisco Partners - and - free, yet very powerful - Analog.

Update: SiliconValleyWatcher has more information about the two deals (Urchin & WebTrends) and links web analytics software to tagging. Reminder to myself: Check how ClickTracks fits into this.

PPM

No, PPM doesn´t stand for punches per minute. Rather, I though of passionate product manager (in German "Product Manager aus Leidenschaft") as my aspired job profile. Hence the similarity to this job offer: Verkäufer aus Leidenschaft (m/w) Medienbranche - Kennnr. H13.695.

Work portrait

Just found this presentation (not really new, it´s from 2003) about employment at SAP (PDF, in German).

Wrong country? :-)

Taken from a telecommunications company´s career website:

- or another country -

As if I were looking for a job in the wrong country! :-)

2005 online media outlook

Ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish takes a look at online advertising in 2005 and notes interesting trends and developments in their 2005 Online Media Outlook report (PDF).

On of the trends for online advertisers is to integrate search with other digital marketing efforts:

... in one campaign, among searchers who clicked through to a client’s site, those that were also exposed to display media ads had a 23 percent higher conversion rate.

Expect a higher combination of ads and paid search with "real" search results at search engines, along with new features at yellow pages, specialized search engines (such as for real estate) and city guides - often in cooperation with mobile carriers and other companies.

Another interesting direction worth noting is personalization: think toolbars, anonymous user profiles, search histories, targeted search and advertising, privacy issues abound!

Avenue A | Razorfish recommends: don´t ignore your website! I add: take a long at your website logs. There are a bunch of tools to do that. Or hire someone who understand them - hire me! (blatant plug)

Apple´s tipping point

Paul Nixon has an excellent graphical presentation on Apple´s Tipping Point. He´s showing how Apple is finally targeting the mass market with the iPods and the new Mac mini. With over 10 million iPods sold worldwide, Apple has gain enough momentum and public awareness of it´s products to attract former Windows users to it´s offerings.

The Sweet Spot. Until January 2005, Apple had no iPod or PC products that served the mass market. With the launch of iPod Shuffle and Mac mini they have finally converged two product paths with the mass market in mind.

Great presentation. Reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell´s book The Tipping point. Look inside! His new book Blink! should be also very interesting. It´s about such things as "momentary autism".

Personally, even though I´m excited about Apple and their marketing power I won´t switch from Windows. I certainly will join the iPod generation and buy an iPod shuffle.

Michael Gartenberg from Jupiter Research has another analysis: the iPod´s success isn´t about the technology, it´s about usability, marketing and cleverly combining features so that they suit the customer.

Apple ... was first, however, to factor in three areas that were of most importance to consumers - battery life, form factor and connectivity back to a PC (in terms of sync as well as support for MP3s natively).

Compared to other flash-based MP3 players, the iPod shuffle doesn´t seem revolutionary. It doesn´t have a screen, yet it remarkably easy to use, has a low price and  the design that you´d expect from Apple. It will certainly be a great hit and propel Apple to new heights. (See also shipment numbers at Apple`s contract manufacturers: 400.000 - 500.000 iPod shuffle per month)

Numbers

Apple shipped 4 million iPods in the past quarter, Palm shipped 1.5 million Treos and Dell shipped 8 million PCs and 185k Axims. Very nice, but Nokia shipped over 50 million handsets in the same timeframe.

via Russell Beattie (PC business converging with mobile business)

Internet trends

Morgan Stanley has an new Internet Trends Presentation. I like reading those reports, giving lot of information on international market trends.

Brave new shopping world

Certainly a clever application for camera-enabled cell phones: Amazon Japan has introduced a new service called "Amazon Scan Search", where users can scan product barcodes with a downloadable application, compare prices and purchase from Amazon.co.jp right from their phones. On-the-spot price comparison!

I guess this will put reseller´s into a frenzy, as consumer will try to get a lower price right at the store by showing the Amazon price to the shop clerk. For smaller prices difference, customers won´t bother to ask as there´s clearly an advantage to take the product right away (once you actually hold it in your hand) than wait for it to arrive by mail.

Then, of course, the savings have to be greater than the costs of using this application - Amazon should get volume discounts though and be the only one that bills the customer (for both the service and data transport).

Save the Fast Forward Button

Ed Felten held a lecture at Princeton covering Technology, Politics, and the Fight to Control Digital Media. Interesting, worth watching (RealPlayer or WindowsMedia Stream)