Google's Wave

Only yesterday we wrote about peeling back the layers of GoogleWorld and now we read about another. Wave, is a new communications platform that combines the likes of instant messaging, email, wikis, photo-sharing and document-sharing within a single browser. A collaborative, communications, open source navigation tool that can potentially bring under one roof and onto one platform all office applications: email, instant messaging, document-sharing and the like.

"A 'wave' is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more," Lars Rasmussen wrote on the official Google blog. "In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets and even feeds from other sources on the Web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content -- it allows for both collaboration and communication."

Wave could redefine applications and the role of the server giving users more control in how they communicate and where they communicate the key will be the ease of use and navigation.

Brave New World's 1,000th Article!

When we started this blog at the end of 2006 we had just finished the Brave New World report and set out to continue to inform the publishing community of digital media events, trends, opinion, insights and whatever we thought may be of interest. We never expected to write 1,000 articles and never anticipated to be still enjoying it today as much as the very first day.

It’s interesting that much of what we wrote in the report has happened, is happening, or is still likely to happen. Many of the threats risks and issues we envisaged have materialised. The omnivores we described have lived up to their billing and today we are faced with Google, Adobe, Sony, Amazon, Apple. These new entrants clearly talk about the legacy, the book, but do not share the same business drivers and models. Will they reshape the book as we know it today, almost certainly, but will it be once again driven and shaped by the format, or become format neutral and no long jacket bound?

It isn’t a surprise that Google followed by Apple and Amazon dominate the Brave New World index, with the Google Book Settlement being the most blogged about subject and the iPhone the most indexed device.

The report was written in the spirit of collaboration and promoted a vision of players working together to make it happen and support each other. However we have seen the increasing use of ‘exclusive’ digital deals. These can often have a marginalising effect and be counter productive in growing the market. Collaboration is a word much used and like interoperability is often little practiced. Many follow the new entrants and look to go direct to the consumer and in doing so adopt an ‘I am alright jack’ approach. The resultant duplication of effort may sort the real opportunities from the also rans, but it can also lead to much consumer confusion, duplication of industry effort and of course, waste. It is hardly surprising but understandable that today, as an industry, we still lack a point of digital reference, terms, table of comparisons and somewhere independent of ‘agendas’ for all to share and use. It is not surprising that many have exploited the lack of consensus, built their digital fortresses and land-grabbed orphan works.

There is still a lack of real digital leadership from within publishing and the big issues remain; DRM and its restrictive nature, territorial rights within a global economy, pricing and the $9.99 price point, the royalty model and author reward and the fact that digital is often an afterthought and produced on the back of analogue and linear production processes.

However, we see the digital shift starting to gain momentum and many opportunities ahead for authors and consumers. The big question is who will remain between these two in years to come? Who will be seen by both parties to add value and who will be disintermediated in the digital Brave New World?

Thoughts From India

As we sit in Bangalore in the India IT capital, surrounded by technology, some of the brightest technology minds and a hive of activity, we are still aware that outside the door on the street there is the stark reality of the disparity of wealth and culture that is and has always been India. The lights flicker and the generator kicks in. Last night we sat in a restaurant that clearly had a problem switch over to their generator and were repeatedly plunged into darkness. Yesterday in Pune was no different and one office we visited even said their biggest headache was the shared generator they had with the rest of the building. Some of the things many of us take for granted shouldn’t always be so.

Bangalore suffers like many cities in this area from a shortfall of power to demand. Without generators offices would suffer power outages on a daily basis. The vast majority of offices, hotels etc. have their own generators and diesel.

The interesting point to consider is if all the generators and diesel and investment in assuring continuity of supply were to be fully exploited (it is often used for water) this would even offset a sizable amount of the environmental issues, but this is India and it isn’t going to happen in the way we would expect.
Collaboration and co-operation in any environment as diverse and complex as a city is difficult. That’s why we have utility companies to do it for us. In the emerging markets and third world these often fail to deliver for a variety of reasons but the main one is that everyone has to fend for themselves and can’t always rely on the municipal and service provision we expect.

So what has this to do with publishing and technology within publishing?
Publishing is as diverse and complex a market sector as any. We and others have long argued that it is not one, but several sectors that were merely joined together by a common format, the book, but that digitization accentuates these and creates divergence.

Collaboration is a word often used and rarely practiced. This is understandable given the sheer numbers of organizations involved and the huge range in the size of these. We have industry bodies that do sterling work but are often lead by those who can afford the time and perhaps this is all we can expect.

Don’t forget to switch off the lights when you leave.

Harnessing the Publishing Network

The new market challenge is not traffic but turning networks and their traffic into money. Anyone can dream up a new service, or feature, but making it pay its way can often be hard. People often think that business models will remain the same or similar and those sales will grow expediently to accommodate all. The reality is that change brings new challenges that often confront the existing models.

What was the result on the music sector from the changes that the many P2P players such as Napster and Kazaa brought? Not only did their change the format, delivery, the breadth and range of tunes available and price perception, but ask where all the High Street music stores are today? When iTunes entered they found a way to channel sales and collect money. iTunes succeeded not because of the iPod but because Apple understood how to make money out of the latent demand for tracks. It joined the dots between consumer demand, an aggregated online repository and download service and an iconic device – simple but the best are always that!

When we look at newsprint we see new entrants in the form of the Internet news alerts, news aggregated services such as Google , the emergence of advertising options such as Craigslist and the new reporter - the blogger. Some newspapers will stand on the shore line watch the incoming tide and close their eyes. They can’t envisage the world without the authoritative watchdog journalist, printed copy and the profits they previously enjoyed. But the Internet doesn’t respect tradition it can democratise news and enable it to be not one way but a two way experience.

People now demand ‘my news’ tailored to meet their needs and tastes and they can do it in a heartbeat. Although the online subscriptions lights continue to flicker it’s only for a few who can command a price, for what is in the main, public domain news. The trick newspapers failed to do was to offer a customised service across newspapers and newspaper empires, but if network collaboration wasn’t in their dictionary it was in Google’s and Craigslist’s.

The Internet is about money and finding ways to make money from it is the game. Google was not the first search engine nor necessarily the best at the start, but what it understood was networks and how advertising revenues could be driven from people’s searching habits. It helps consumers find stuff on the web they could never find on their own and advertisers buy traffic. Simple, yet so difficult.

We now have to ask ourselves how we prepare for change, who will be the potential winners and who will be the potential losers. It’s not good enough to sit on the fence and watch, you have to participate. The hardest challenge is to get competing forces to recognise what they compete on and to start to collaborate on the rest in order to make a new offer that is different because of the collaboration. One of the best examples in publishing was the Crossref initiative and organisation one of the worst examples is the rights registry giveaway to Google. Collaboration is very difficult for most organisations, with every employee seeming to have ‘we know best’ running through their genes. Harnessing the huge publishing network offers the biggest opportunity, operating individually offers the same opportunity to others.