Amazon Acquire the Audio-book Market?

Today we read about the biggest digital news to hit the news for many months. Surprisingly it wasn’t top to the industry news but its implications will be huge for many. Amazon has bought Audible for $300 million. We must also remember that Amazon last May acquired Michigan audiobook publisher Brilliance who had a catalogue of over 1,000 audio titles and releases 20 to 40 new titles a month.

Amazon's subsidiary CustomFlix supports both standard CD and mp3-CD audiobook formats in its "disc on demand" service which produces audio titles on CD on demand. The question it raises is when this model will flip into audio downloads. We questioned last May whether Brilliance bought for it content and list? Does this now make Amazon a publisher and fill in the last space in the value chain?

We also questioned whether Amazon wanted to continue referring audio customers to Audible.

The fact that Audible invested so heavily in developing its DRM technology and getting it accepted in so many platforms and that it has an exclusive agreement with iTunes until 2010 must have been a ‘no brainer’ for Amazon. The fact is digital audiobooks are Audible. Some may say that they have restricted the growth of audio, that there business model based on the old book club approach is wrong, but come what may, they are the digital audio download market today.

So were does this marriage leave the market? It certainly now belongs to Amazon. The relationship with iTunes is very interesting for Mr Jobs and Mr Bezos. What will happen next – the Kindle be an audio player too? Where does Amazon’s stand on MP3 and DRM music sit alongside Audible’s propietory DRM strength?

Only time will tell but Amazon are unlikely to walk away from the DRM strength of Audible and their marketing and buying audiobook clout has just increased ten fold.

The audio industry has to either fold under the Amazon umbrella, or adopt a different approach to DRM. It could be bold and follow music, it could adopt watermarks or it could face the realities of the marriage and hand over audiobooks to Amazon to run on their terms. We hope bold is the answer.

Prepare for the Future Today

We read today about the potential future of mobiles from two different and diverse sources our good friend and futurist Ray Hammond and the NY Times.



Imagine a hands free phone where you talk through speech recognition , see images through special contact lenses and project images from the phone onto screens. Is this fantasy or reality, available today or technology that has to be adapted for use?

A voice recognition service from Vlingo in the US now people talk naturally, rather than making them use a limited number of set phrases. The system is being tested at AT&T and Sprint and consumers with certain mobiles from those companies can now download the application.

A rival application is being tested from , Yap Inc and Nuance started its Nuance Voice Control system last year and is in use at Sprint and Rodgers and can be downloaded today to 66 mobile models. Thanks to its acquisition of TellMe Networks last year Microsoft is also in the voice recognition service space. With obvious applications such as GPS and in car ‘hands free’ the voice recognition world can only grow.



We then look to the future and read about engineers at the University of Washington who manufactured microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

Imagine reading a book through your lenses? Now there is the ultimate ebook reader a virtual display screen that only you would be able to see.


Imagine your mobile phone having a built in projector that could throw an image up to 50 inches wide.

The PicoP projector is here today and uses tiny lasers to project low definition images in a sharp 800x 600 SVGA at a 60 HZ refresh rate. The PicoP is ‘green’ and conserves energy by only turning on the lasers when it needs them and will turn off the Red and Blue lasers. Microvision said consumers could see PicoP-enabled phones as early as 2008.

OK so you take your phone to bed and project your ebook onto the wall.
All the above demonstrate that technology is being developed and adapted that will change how we work, communicated and do things. The key to all publishers in all media is having the digital content and context to be able to respond to the future.

Fighting Scientific Plagiarism

Southwestern Medical Centre researchers have developed a text-searching tool developed that compares multiple documents in a database for similarities, not only providing an efficient means of performing literature searches, but also offering a tool to combat plagiarism.

The eTBLAST program can identify duplication of key words and also compares word proximity and order, among other variables. It is helps researchers analyze an unpublished abstract or idea in order to find previous publications on the topic or in order to identify possible collaborators working in the same field.

In an article published last month in Bioinformatics, researchers used eTBLAST to analyze over 62,000 Medline abstracts from the past 12 years. They only found that 0.04% of papers representing potential plagiarism, but if extrapolated to the 17 million scientific papers currently cited in the database, the number of potential plagiarism cases would be around 7,000. They also found that 1.35% of papers with shared authors were sufficiently similar to be considered duplicate publications of the same data. In a further phase outlined in Nature an analysis of more than seven million Medline abstracts turned up nearly 70,000 highly similar papers.

The application can only highlight potential plagiarised articles it is still down to human reviewers to determining legitimacy. It is hoped that the knowledge of the existence of tools such as TBLAST will see the numbers of potentially unethical duplications reduce

Should Authors be Paid by National Archives?

Whilst the omnivores hoover up library’s works and national digital archives are created in the name of digitisation and preservation, there are questions about permissions and payment.If we remove the public domain works from the equation, should 'in copyright' works be digitised for free and who would receive any royalty paid?

We read about the authors who are refusing to let their works be scanned for an online archive at the National Library of Wales. A year ago the archive project received a £1 million grant to digitise modern Welsh writing. The library aims to gain the permission from authors to digitise the contents of 90 journals, published since 1900. Some 600,000 pages of Welsh literary works, including poetry, translations and reviews, and make these available online for free.

The library is asking for permission but we are all aware how difficult a task it can be in tracing rights owners. The library has also offered to take down from its site material by writers who discover they have been digitised and object.

‘The big issue that is going to face writers everywhere is that certain corporations want to digitise works that are in copyright without paying the authors,’ says the former national poet Gwyneth Lewis. She continued, "If a writer's work is going to be put on a different platform, rights need to be negotiated with the writer for that extension, and that hasn't happened, therefore they can't have the work."

Other writers are happy for their works to be digitised without a payment and believe that the cultural heritage is important or that they may have be ‘lost’ without this exercise.

National library librarian Andrew Green is reported as saying ‘Since the scope of the project runs back to 1900, much of this research is essentially a historical exercise; the majority of authors involved are dead.’ He goes on to further justify the action, ‘Our experience has been that 99% of copyright holders are happy to grant consent; the proportion of copyright holders who have not been contacted and would refuse is therefore very small.’

This incident,we believe, is one of principle and important in the issue of digitisation. Public domain works are not in question but works still in copyright are. Who will control the permissions to the works work online? If made available for free will the archive undermine the writers value or enhance it? What restrictions will be applied to ensure 'fair uasge'? If a royalty fee were to be paid, would this be direct to the author, via bodies such as ALCS or PLR, or to the publishers and agents as royalties?

We have rules with respect to copyright and they should be applicable to all and not to some.

The author is the creator of the works and its value and should be rewarded and not taken for granted in the greater scheme of digital projects. We have previously covered the issue of the adoption of ‘orphans’ and the US Orphan Act. We need to be aware that the majority of works sit is an area between public domain and 'in print' and that death does not negate rights. The older the works then often the more difficult to trace rights in this ‘grey’ area becomes.

If its ok for the library why not for others who may not be so open?

Browse the Internet on the Move

Mobile browsers have to date been consumer unfriendly. It was if the web could only be accessed via the laptop or on a limited service via the mobile. It was frustrating to try an navigate browsers which looked and acted old and clunky.
Now with only 2% share of the smartphones worldwide market, the iPhone’s Google feature outperformed all other operators over the Christmas period. Although it later fell back behind Nokia’s Symbian system, which has some 63% market share, according to data from Google reported in the New York Times, it still remained ahead of the rest of the pack.

Yahoo said that iPhone traffic also accounted for a disproportionate amount of its mobile traffic during this period and AdMob, who promote billions of ads on mobile Web sites every month, said it saw traffic from iPhones surge drastically around Christmas.

What this clearly indicates is that the iPhone is different, is being used different and will lead potentially to a revolution on what we use mobile phones for. Apple has raises the internet browser bar and consumers will demand that others follow.
So what does this mean to publishers? It is clear that the ergonomic and user acceptable mobile browser is close to mass adoption and that the iPhone is proving the tipping point. This extends the reach of marketing and promotion into new areas and past the jacket model that prevails today. As for content it’s almost inevitable that the digital renditions will be online with downloads to mobile devices. It is highly unlikely that the personal library will be on the mobile device and that it will follow the music model and dedicated device will not be for the mass market. So do you really want a sledgehammer reading device to crack this digital ebook nut?

Webispodes?

A new word has reached us ‘Webisodes’ which appear notto be chunks of a work so much as marketing extracts and new supplemental materials. Puffin is trialing "webisodes" on its, Spinebreakers.co.uk, teen site with the aim of engaging potential readers to a forthcoming title. Melvin Burgess' new title Sara's Face, will be the first webispode and go live on 21st January with new material being added at three day intervals. Some of the clips have been adapted from extracts from the book, while others feature new material from Melvin.

Only yesterday were we looking at a new service which created virtual entities that could be given personalities and fed background information so that they could become an automated 24 hour virtual person with whom anyone could chat and interact with. Soon we may be loging on to ask the likes of Sara about the book, her loves, dislikes and what she has been doing.

It is clear that with social sites and tools such as Second Life and others and technologies such as AI (artificial intelligence) we are potentially extending the interest and marketing pull from beyond the binding of the book.

Jobs says No to an iBook

Steve Jobs the man who gave us iTunes, iPod and iPhone is reported as commenting on the Kindle, "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore... The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."
The reality is that his current platforms are converging fast and he is unlikely to make a dedicated anything and the ebook is only one step away from his iWorld. His statements are more about his probable reluctance to produce a dedicated ereader which frankly we would both understand and support.

He also remarked on Google and their reported gPhone ‘Android’, "Having created a phone, it's a lot harder than it looks. We'll see how good their software is and we'll see how consumers like it and how quickly it is adopted. I actually think Google has achieved their goal without Android, and I now think Android hurts them more than it helps them. It's just going to divide them and people who want to be their partners."

What Apple and Google partners!!

Also this week Apple has unveiled their latest ultra thin utra light laptop 'Macbook Air'. It is 1.94cm thin, weighs 1.36kgs a 13.3" screen and incorporates the touch pad technology ofthe iPhone. Would we buy one of those and a iPhone full stop? Probably is the answer and the rest of the hardware becomes mere noise.

Who says you can't take technology to bed?

We often hear the comment ‘who wants to curl upo in bed with a screen when you can have a book.’ Maybe we are looking at the beds we know and love but not the Starry Night Sleep Technology Bed from Leggett and Platt in the US.

This bed has it all WiFi connectivity that hooks you up with a 1.5TB media server with four gigs of RAM, a 2500 watt surround sound speaker system with four 8-inch subwoofers, an LCD projector, dual temperature controls and DVR capability and it also features a built-in iPod dock. It boasts a detection system that can monitor your movement and breathing patterns, and even reportedly detecting heavy snoring and automatically raising the bed 7 degrees until the snoring stops! In addition its temperature control can cool you down to 68° or alternatively heat you to 117° on the other side, immediately ending temperature disputes.

Who says beds are for sleeping and sex. Its easy to see some folk paying the $50K price ticket and never wanting to get up. All that appears to be missing is the Goblin Teasmaid !

Predictive Text

Why do we believe that the future is bad? Why do we look backwards believing that the world we knew before served us better and that books as we knew them then were the best they could ever be?

Today we read in the Independent, Century’s Mark Booth’s thoughts on reading, digitisation and the revolution that is quietly happening around us. Having read his faultless grammar, prose and references to days lost, we somehow felt we disagreed. Rarely do we read something several times to make sure we have read it right, but we just had to this time.

The ‘glass certainly was half empty’ in fact we doubt it was even that full!

There are many points we could make about the article. For every negative expressed we could find many positives and it’s sad that such an article received the column inches it got in a broadsheet.

We would make three observations:
The argument that booksellers, in whatever form, are to blame for the celebrity writings and the current best sellers, is a bit like ‘Buster’Edwards and Ronnie Biggs pleading innocence on the grounds that they were mere reluctant bystanders to the Great Train Robbery. For Mr. Booth to blame the supermarkets, ‘This is because in the 1990s it was Waterstone's that set the tone for the trade. Now the supermarkets do’ – is a bit rum. The rise of celebrity writing certainly puts a new twist to ‘pulp fiction’, but the decision on what to publish is in the hands of the producer. Booksellers do not determine what is published, but publishers do and it is they that pay the high advances, determine the market and market the books and finally seek a financial return.

We agree novels and creative text will change, but it always has. From Biblical days, through to the troubadours, the subscription letters and writings of the early Robert Dodsley era, the instalment works, by the likes of Dickens, to today’s novels; a good story has always survived. The thing that often dictated the format, was in fact the format. We now have digitisation which is in fact exploding the book spine and breaking us out of the bound format that defined the story for so long. We see the emergence of the mobile novels in Japan. We can predict, that novels will be broken into digestible chunks, maybe even delivered in chapters a la Stephen King, or merely packaged thus. Is this bad? Well maybe for the printer or the publisher, who want only to work in complete books. However, it can create a whole new reading dimension that may be interactive and participative, or may just deliver branded fiction in a more sustainable way. The glass is certainly not half empty but half full!

The paper book will not disappear but the current economic publishing model and value chain will change. The only certainty is that there will still be authors and there still will be readers but everything in between is up for grabs. Will still be producing the volume of new titles at the current rate – no? Will we be reviving and becoming aware of past treasures and the long tail - yes? Will some books go fully digital- yes? Will some books remain in paper – yes and for many years these will be the majority of the market. The challenge is finding the balance and being able to respond to changing demand.

However, before we all herald in the new ebook age, we have to recognise that at best guesses there are less than 200,000 titles digitally available today. Forget the ereaders and the consumer where is the content? Why are publishers dragging their heels? We are still analyzing a market in a vacuum.

Ok where is the catch?

How often do we see something and ask why didn’t I know about it? If I didn’t know about it is there something wrong with it? Does anyone know about it or is it the ‘best kept secret’?

Well we received an email from PSik Solutions pointing us to their 1Book Print on Demand system. Our first reaction was that it looked small and neatly compact and the size of a big photocopier so what’s wrong with it?

It prints black and white, perfect bound books and a full colour cover and can produce a 300 page book in 6 to 8 minutes. It works unattended with the book merely dropping out of the front. In fact the selection and payment can be performed making it more like an on demand kiosk. So where is the catch?

The books are held as PDFs on an offline on a trusted DRM server which not only downloads the files but keeps track of transactions re royalty payments. The production costs is around $3 – 3.5 a 300 page book, printing at 600 and 1200 dpi and handling a maximum of 700 page and minimum 100 page books. It can produce books to a maximum size of 200mm x 280mm and minimum of 115mm x 180mm. We are still waiting for the catch.

They even have a video of it action on their web site using a HP9050dn printer or a Xerox WorkCentre 275 but it can also use a Kyocera FS-9520dn. It is not new and has been around for a couple of years!

Ok we give up unless it costs a bomb, is unreliable or is short of something we missed what’s wrong with it? If it does the business we could at last see true demand printing based on distribute and print as opposed to today’s pseudo short print run print and distribute model.

A Good Week for Digital Music and a bad one for DRM

This week Sony BMG, which represents artists such as Bruce Springsteen, the Foo Fighters, Santana and Justin Timberlake, effectively put the final nail in DRM as we knew it in music and positioned Amazon’s digital music store as the rival to the market leader, the iTunes.

Sony are the last major label to release their catalogue to be available in MP3 format and DRM free. It is a great day for music, artists and potentially a bad day for pirates. It effectively kills off those cumbersome and consumer unfriendly DRM systems which drove many to the pirates. Although music still has the problem of ‘music for free’ one of the major issues is now disappearing fast.

The move also heralds the industry’s moves to create an effective rival to iTunes. It is almost inevitable the audiobook publishers will wake up smell the coffee and do the same both as DRM in this media does is not consumer friendly and also to create an effective alternative to Audible.
If we are asked why audiobooks have failed to really take off as predicted the answers are tied to DRM, Audible’s dominance and propriatry stands and book club model. True there are other issues such as price points but if the audio book publishers accept MP3 and no DRM then they may enjoy a larger slice, from a larger cake. Currently Random House are leading the way with their 3music trials and although Penguin got jittery and pulled out, logic will prevail.

There is Gold at the End of this Rainbow

Radiohead ‘Rainbows’ was the first to be offered as an ‘honesty box’ buy with fans paying what they thought it was worth to download it. The exercise was a huge success attracting new as well as established fans and generating a wide range of payments. Many in the press knocked it as a failure and predicted no or little sales of the album when it was released.

The album was released on plastic CDs and vinyl LPs on Jan. 1, with the CD priced at $13.98, though it could be found for as little as $7.99True the sales have not matched those of previous albums but it still sold 122,000 copies in the United States in its first week. It also reached number one in the UK weekly music chart. Demand for the album was such that some record shops put it on sale before the label’s planned “street date,” resulting in sales of about 9,000 copies the previous week.

The iTunes service, sold about 28,000 copies had not carried any of the band’s previous albums, owing in part to Radiohead’s demand that its recordings be sold only as complete works.
The sales suggested that the band’s name-your-price offering, and fans’ subsequent free sharing of files, had clearly reduced their sales but had gained them massive exposure, more fans and probably as demonstrated by Prince earlier this year guaranteed a bigger cash prize on the band’s tour of 20 North American cities this year.

Pushing back the Borders On Demand

We read today about Borders move into the on demand in the store offer with Tribeka.

It makes sense to offer the widest inventory and service the long tail through an on demand service. The consumers selects what they want and the assistant is able to produce it there in the store without the retailer holding any inventory. The store is no longer restricted to what it can put on the shelf but to what inventory it can tap into and service it can provide at point of sale.

Music, games, audio and software are all logical sales. After all in some stores you take an empty case to the counter and they retrieve the disc there so hardly any difference there then. The interesting area is whether the human and physical interface is seen by the consumer as added value, whether it migrates to a kiosk or what additional spin offs can be provided by having virtual inventory – that old shrinkage will certainly disappear.

So does this mean we shall see the Espresso book machine in a bookstore near you soon? Well last year’s potential sighting in a major store in Oxford Street didn’t happen and its still doubtful whether the technology is compact and robust enough today or more importantly the service will be viewed as added value. It will be great when it does happen but for today let us watch Borders experiment on demand and wish them well.

So how do we Identify a Chunk?

The trick to any machine to machine communication is identification of the product and clarity as to what to do. The ISBN was a great identifier and has served the industry well and no fits even more comfortably within the EAN structure. The adoption of the ONIX/XML message again was a significant step forward and has positioned the industry well in it e communication.

We read today of the edict that the industry should provide a separate ISBN for each digital rendition of a title. This makes logic sense as is what has to happen. After all who would dream of giving the paperback, hardback, large-print copies of the same title the same ISBN? The long overdue ISTC number, which is to identify and effectively group all impressions of the same title, also makes good sense. It’s just a pity it has taken so long to come through the process to the market.

The challenge however lies with the fragments or what is commonly referred to as chunks. The DOI is a great mechanism for referential linking and provides persistent resolution but is it the right means of identifying chunks? We think it may be a sledgehammer to crack a nut and its structure is not one that would be easy for the trade to adopt for this purpose. It works well in an online world of search and discovery but the trade environment it will be significantly different from the academic or educational ones. The question is about what we need to identify chunks for and what we want to do with them once identified. Even if we want to sell chunks do we have the pricing structure or the permission rights processes to do it and track the money through to royalty. Today the easiest solution to fragments is to issue them ISBNs and to link them to the title via a combination or an ISTC.

This issue will grow as content starts to fragment and break from the jacket which once held it so neatly and is a challenge to us all.

So You Think You Know People?

What would you expect to be the most searched words on Google? Yes you probably guessed right “sex” which in many countries is number one. However Google China report a slightly different emphasis and the names of three banks; China Merchants Bank, Industrial, Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank and the word "stocks" have become the most Googled words in China in the last year.

The most searched questions on the global list were "what is love" and "how to kiss" , but in China they were more interested in "what is a blue chip" and "how to invest in the stock market".

The results show that its not always as easy to predict people in a global world and local culture still prevails or its simply that the Chinese have a fixation on making money!

Libraries Switch On Visitors

We read from Reuters that according to a survey just published by Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than half of Americans visited a library in the past year and that the biggest users were young adults aged 18 to 30!


Books were not the draw as much as computers with Internet users being twice as likely to visit libraries as non-Internet users and more than two-thirds of library visitors in all age groups said they used computers while at the library. 65% of them looked up information on the Internet while 62% used computers to check into the library's resources.


Public libraries now offer virtual homework help, special gaming software programs, and some librarians even have created characters in the Second Life virtual world.


Importantly libraries are seen as a community and neighbourhood centre, a gathering place. It is interesting that when we first saw the entrance of the large B&N stores with their cafes and reading areas we felt they were a threat to the libraries and would become the neighbourhood hub.


In an increasingly digital environment it is easy to envisage the role of the library moving as many have predicted into the information centre. However the really interesting areas are remote borrowings and print on demand. If you live in New York and register you can borrow digital books online and never step inside the library. A number of the larger libraries are stating to explore print on demand using technology such as Espresso.


So why pay for an ebook when you can borrow it online? Why use an internet café when the library has one for free? Inter library lending is simple in the digital world so the title is never not available.


In his 2008 predictions, our good friend and publishing commentator, Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company states, ‘Sales of books in electronic form to public libraries will continue to grow’. Interesting times for library funding, strategy and for publishers.

Happy New Year!!

We welcome 2008 and believe following 2007 it will be the year that makes significant strides forward on digitisation. We will definitely not all be reading ebooks by the end of the year but publishing will certainly be further impacted by digitisation and closer to that elusive tipping point.

The consumer needs the availability and ability to buy digital content and secondly the elusive reading device and ‘must buy’ pull. Until sufficient content is available we are trying to create an ereader market in a vacuum and although the device is less of an issue consumers want a ‘safe buy’ that has legs or a price that makes the purchase a ‘no brainer’. What they have today is format confusion, DRM madness and over engineering and a price ticket that says ‘special’ not ‘commodity’.

So what are our ten 2008 predictions?
1. Content – a significant rise in volume as more publishers realise that this is not a ‘wait and see’ game. PDF will be dominant over XML and we may well see the epub standard start to become a real consumer format standard and be fully adopted by ereaders. The publishers with established digital programmes will start to digitise their development process based on XML.
2. Context – widgets , widgets everywhere. The effect will be similar to when book jackets were first developed in mid 90s and the impact will be as great. Rich metadata will be the order of the day. Bowker and Nielson will have to respond but may find the world has moved on again.

3. Rights – permissions and licensing will grow in importance and will someone step up to provide that elusive clearing house once promised prematurely by the likes of Rightscenter.com. Yankee Book Pedler and Subrights.com?
4. Retailers – will come out of the background and start to take control of the channel again. The chains will expand their digital metadata repositories and do much scanning and collection of rich material. Following Amazon and Dymocks others are likely to endorse their own eroutes.
5. Publishers – more digital directors, more conversions and much activity. Some true small innovators are likely to rise to the occasion.
6. Audio – the death of DRM is inevitable and closely linked to music and in its wake what will happen to Audible and its monopoly? Consumers will vote with their clicks and the book club model is unlikely to succeed. The use of Watermarking technology will grow.
7. Standards – the only standards that matter now are the consumer ones. Adoption of simplified DRM, user interfaces and maybe a continued migration towards ‘508 compliance’. Digital drop ship communications standards are the exception and need to be developed and adopted.
8. Readers – an upgraded Sony, Kindle and the introduction of the Apple offer. The key is not the reader but the content but what is becoming crystal clear is that platform convergence onto the mobile and its network is certain.
9. Gorillas – Google, Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Amazon, Nokia etc. take your pick as they will all dictate how they see the world.
10. Waste – we envisage new opportunities from the digitisation process that will not only increase productivity and depth of by-product but will also start to change inefficiency within the supply chain that only is possible with digital content and context.

We may well get some things wrong and it’s often impossible to gauge the pace of change, but there are also bound to be some left field entries. What could happen that we don’t expect today? We always assume the opportunity or the threat is from within but these more often than not are from outside. For example; we have seen the power of Google to hover up content from publishers and libraries but as we migrate into a digital world other media groups may see more synergy with their content and some new acquisitions start to happen.

Childrens' Second Life?

When we think of children’s entertainment with think books, games, TV, toys, films etc. We often automatically think of the format before we think of the content itself. Is Peter Pan a book, game, film, cartoon, merchandise or all rolled up into one? How do children want to see their favourites, as books as films or as an ‘experience’?

We read today in the New York Times about the growing success of web sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz, were entertainment companies are building virtual worlds for children. Not only can they experience but they can participate and belong in a part online role-playing game and part social scene. These children’s versions of Second Life are proving much more popular and Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at the research firm eMarketer, estimates that 20 million children will be members of a virtual world by 2011, up from 8.2 million today.

More than six million unique visitors logged on to Webkinz in November, up 342% from November 2006. Disney last month introduced a “Pirates of the Caribbean” world aimed at children 10 and older, and it has many themed worlds on the way. Nickelodeon, has the successful Neopets and is spending $100 million to develop a string of worlds. Coming soon are Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera and worlds based on D. C. comics properties from Warner Brothers. Not to be left out toy manufacturers Lego and Mattel are entering the market along with many technology companies. There are now over 10 virtual worlds that involve caring for virtual pets.

Disney’s largest online world is Club Penguin, which it bought in August for $700 million and at the time it already had 700,000 members paying fees of $5.95 a month and delivering annual revenue of almost $50 million.

The interesting question all this activity throws up is what comes first? In olden days the books created the story that moved onto the film and then spun out to the merchandise but does this still hold firm? Will we see the virtual world coming first? What will be the impact on the development of new content and the trading of rights? Many questions will be answered by the money. We will always have books that go on to be successful films but will we have ‘worlds’ that go on to sell books?

RIAA Play King Canute

The record industry stands like King Canute commanding consumers not to copy and share music and like Canute it appears doomed to fail. It has filed over 20,000 lawsuits against music fans but has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing. The tide has truly swung.

The Recording Industry Association of America, continue to spew out letters to college students and others demanding payment and threatening a legal battle but has it finally lost the plot and gone a step too far?

Jeffrey Howell, from Scottsdale Arizona refused to pay up and took the case to court. Howell, kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, something that many of us do. The industry now maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer. It beggars belief that the RIAA want to pick a fight with almost all its public. It agues that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

The Washington Post reports that the RIAA web site says: "If you make unauthorized copies of copyrighted music recordings, you're stealing. You're breaking the law and you could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars in damages."

In a Los Angeles Times poll, 69% of teenagers surveyed said they thought it was legal to copy a CD they own and give it to a friend. The RIAA cites a study that found that more than half of current college students download music and movies illegally.

The Washington Post put it succinctly in saying, ‘The RIAA's legal crusade against its customers is a classic example of an old media company clinging to a business model that has collapsed.’
The RIAA has created a market of customers who specifically now look to buy independent goods so as not to deal with the big record companies. There are salient lessons here for all intermediaries.

Nescape RIP

Today brings more news that demonstrates that no one can assume the right to exist in the digital world forever. Netscape Navigator, the world’s first commercial Web browser will no longer be developed and effectively die in February after a 13-year run.

Netscape once competed handsomely with Microsoft Explorer but could not compete when Explorer was bundled into the ‘package’. Netscape has since seen the emergence of its open-source cousin, Firefox and now other browsers such as Safari. Where Firefox now commands around 10% of the browser market Explorer dominates.

Some may argue that Microsoft’s dominance was bad and unhealthy but others would say it was good for development in that software only needed to be built to work on Explorer and often trying to port it to other browsers and maintain backward compatibility was a pain if not always possible. The new challenge lies in the mobile world and whether browsers such as Safari can become the de facto standard

People will still be able to download and use the Netscape browser indefinitely, but AOL who paid $10 billion for the product will stop releasing security and other updates on 1st February.

Even the Mighty Wal-Mart Can Get it Wrong

Wal-Mart has withdrawn its online video download service which it pioneered with Hewlett Packard only a year ago. Wal-Mart was the first major retailer to partner with all of the major Hollywood movie studios and TV networks to offer downloads the same day titles were released on DVD. The service was launched in February and was hailed by media industry experts as a "game changer" that could introduce millions of DVD buyers to the practice of downloading.
Videos purchased on Walmart.com can be played using the Microsoft Windows Media Player or the Wal-Mart Video Download Manager, but cannot be transferred to a computer other than the one used to download them. Wal-Mart will continue offering physical DVDs for sale at its stores and online

HP spokesman Hector Marinez said the company decided to discontinue its video download-only merchant store services because the market for paid video downloads did not perform "as expected."

The Internet video business remains uncertain and is changing rapidly and this move shows that even the big players can get their digital moves wrong. Who would expect Wal-Mart, HP and the major studios to get it wrong? However, we must also look to the digital success stories and ask if we expected them to get it right? What is clear is that there are many experimental services right across the digital arena and predicting success is often down to making money or as Amazon proved sustainable cash flow.

Today we look back at some of the services that didn’t make it, wrong technology, wrong business model or just wrong time.

Talking eBooks

Talking books are one thing but talking ebooks?

Iranian inventor Ramin Sedighi has demonstrated a prototype of his talking ebook , which is designed for education. The system translates and explains out loud texts and words the moment its electronic stylus touches its screen. It also "explains" pictures, although press reports doesn't "explain" whether it does image recognition or whether the books need to be specially formatted.

The device could provide a very effective method for teaching subjects such as foreign languages and will be available in early 2008. It contains a USB port, audio output, electronic pen, 512 megabyte memory for storing 15 books and a SD card which can store 60 books as its flash memory. It works with electricity or battery, is as big as a 13-inch laptop and is light enough to be portable.

The question is whether the western world is ready for a new technology from Iran?

US Consumers are Becoming 'Broadcasters'

New consumer statistics from a Deloitte & Touche new-media survey of 2,081 Americans, conducted October present some very interesting insights to the US market and consumers.

• 
  38% are watching TV shows online with 20% viewing video content on their cell phones daily or almost daily.


• 
  36% use their cell phones as entertainment devices (only 8 months earlier the same survey only found 24%, an increase of 50%)


• 
  45% are creating online content like Web sites, music, videos and blogs with 32% considering themselves to be "broadcasters" of their own media.


• 
  62% of consumers aged between 13 and 24 and 47% aged between 25 and 41 are using their cell phones as entertainment devices, (up from 46% and 29% respectively).


• 
  54% socialize via social networking sites, chat rooms or message boards, and 45% maintain a profile on a social networking site.
  

Interestingly for advertisers, 85% still find TV advertising to have the most impact on their buying habits, with online ads second best, with 65% and magazines at 63%. Clearly the adveryising power of the Internet is coming of age.

Samsung Flat TV Update

Samsung has announced it has developed a 31-inch ultra-thin organic screen, raising the stakes in an worldwide race for organic displays. Active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AM-OLED) is seen as a growth driver because they produce brighter images and use less power. The displays are only 4.3 mm thick, or one-tenth of a typical liquid crystal display panel, and consume less than half the electricity needed for a 32-inch LCD screen, making them attractive to the green movement.

Samsung SDI is also planning to mass-produce 14-inch screens in 2008.

The interesting thing is that as the quality of screens improves and they shrink in size then the potential for reading becomes greater. The screen is where the digital rubber hits the road and will determine whether consumers adopt them for reading or keep them for just for entertainment.

The World is Definately Flat!

Sony will stop making rear-projection televisions and focus on liquid crystal display (LCD) and organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology in the flat-TV market. This follows similar moves by Seiko Epson Corp and Hitachi.

Demand for rear-projection TVs, which were once dominant in the large-sized flat-TV market, has been dropped as consumers switch to the flat screens and cleaner design living. Sony expects to sell more than 10 times as many LCD TVs: 10 million LCD TVs this fiscal year through March, up from 6.3 million the previous year.

Manufacturers are all working on LCD technology for TVs, as well as another technology called Plasma Display Panels, or PDP. Earlier this month, Sony began selling a small 11 inch TV that uses a relatively new but expensive flat-panel technology called OLED which we wrote about earlier this year. Sony's XEL-1 measures just 3 millimeters, or 0.12 inches, thick and delivers clear vivid images.

However the market is very competitive with many collaborative deals similar to the one where Sharp provide Toshiba with all their LCD screens. What is clear is that Flat is the only way forward today and the race is on for both the large and small screen market.

Warner Rolls over to DRM Free

Until now Warner has been resisting selling music downloads in MP3 format without DRM. However this week they relented and signed a deal with Amazon. This raises the number MP3 files available for download via Amazon to close on 3 million songs. Major music labels Universal, EMI and thousands of independent labels had already signed large portions of their catalogues to Amazon. Only Sony remains in the DRM camp and the odds are they will roll over very soon.

Interestingly the recording industry had argued that DRM itself is not what makes some songs incompatible with some digital players, but the fact that there are different versions of DRM in use. The fact that Apple DRM was proprietary and not licensed to others was a major area of concern.

Amazon only sells MP3s, rather than a mix of protected and unprotected music on offer at stores such as iTunes and Zune.

What does all this tell the book industry?
· Multiple, complex and proprietary DRM doesn’t work and is not acceptable to the consumer.
· The major houses dictate the rules and never work as one so.
· The Audible model on audiobooks is not sustainable and is counter productive to the industry.

The industry needs to quickly establish the middle ground on formats and service before others dictate it to them. However this has been the challenge for the last few years and the reality is this consensus is difficult in an industry that is so fragmented and poor at collaboration.

Reviewing Our Predictions For 2007

At this time of year every paper is looking both back over the last 12 months and forward over the next. Predictions are made and quickly forgotten so what did we envisage for 2007 and how accurate were our predictions?

We got some wrong:

· Macmillan’s audio MP3 player. Made less of a noise and more of a whimper and certainly didn’t create any momentum. Wrong
· 508 compliance. Still an issue too far for many and has still to have the impact the US government seek. Wrong
· New technology, in the form of OLED screens, or the Hearst reader. The screen technology has still to make its impact. Wrong

We got some right:
· The announcement and initial roll out of a new distribution environment and services to support digital content within the existing channel. Gardners Digital Services announced and starting to move forward. Right
· The start of real POD services based not on short print runs but distributed printing at affordable prices. POD still moving at pace and people now looking to distribute to print rather than print and distribute. Foyles looked at the Espresso machine. Right
· Richer and richer bibliographic services and the need for every publisher to engage in its provision, even if they don’t sell digital content. Spot on and the world went widget mad.
· Increased importance of Internet sales, emarketing and community engagement and participation. The Internet is clearly here and becoming pervasive in all markets. For the bookstores it is now a must do. Right
· Omnivore fears will stoke more publishers to join their ranks but major publishers will continue to build their repositories and control their digital assets. Right fear and uncertainty made the biggest critics spread their bets and the libraries queue got even longer.

And some are hard to measure:
· Booksellers will increasingly sell old, used, new and digital side by side. Not yet but certainly coming

So we must now compile our list for 2008...

Another Giant Technology Step Forward

Intel last week announced a tiny drive called Z-P140 that could help bring the power of desktop computers to handheld devices.

The flash-memory-based hard drive, is bout the size of a thumbnail and weighs than ‘a drop of water’. It is one of the smallest on the market competing with similar chips from Samsung, which store data in gadgets such as Apple's iPod nano and iPhone.

It currently comes in two- and four-gigabyte aversions, which are available to manufacturers for use in handheld devices. The first products featuring the new chips will be available in January. However the Intel chip has been developed with a standard electronics controller built in, making it easy and inexpensive to combine multiple chips into a single, higher-capacity hard drive of 16 gigabytes today. Only two gigabytes is required to run some operating systems, such as Linux, along with software applications and it will work well with Intel processors, which make it useful for the ultramobile-PC market.

In 1999, the flash-memory market was nonexistent, but in 2007, it amounts to $15.2 billion and is expected to continue expand at pace offering much to the technology convergence and the potential one device fits all dream. One flash criticism is with respect to memory cells, which hold the electrical charges that represent data, tend to wear out quickly. However, Intel says that the new memory cell can have data written to it and erased from it up to 100,000 times and therefore no single cell gets overused.

Hymns on line

The US Christian publishing market is significant in its size and has long been innovative with developments such as its own TV channels. The major dominions all have large publishing interests and these are complimented by major houses such as Zondervan. For many years the sector has been one of the most switched on publishing sectors in the US. We remember the Sunday Baptists, some ten years ago, offering a subscription service to sermons on demand which printed locally each week at the church. In our blog on October 23rd we wrote about Godtube and its video service Godcaster.

We have long said that religion, like travel, is a natural early digital publishing opportunity. It is often consumed in chunks, is multi dimensional and multi format and as proven by its oldest and bestselling title - will always sell to a loyal audience.

HarperCollins UK has announced the launch its online hymn offer which features some 1,800 songs. Through its website, http://www.missionpraise.com/, users will be able to search by the song number from the hymnbook, composer name or title, compile play lists and share these with friends, print lyrics, download sheet music and listen to a simple version of the song online.
The website will go live on 14th January and will feature three bestselling hymn-books; Mission Praise, Junior Praise and Carol Praise and also has a chart of the top ten most popular songs. Subscription can be as an individual or as a group and is currently discounted.

Somehow I still cherish the sight of a congregation fumbling through a well worn hymn book as they rise to their feet to sing and the odd noise of a book being dropped onto a stone floor. Pre printed sheets will not be the same, nor will the rolling autoque, or video screen, but you can never rule anything out tomorrow.

A Year in Digital Music is a Long Time

When iTunes started to dominate the music download market it looked a forgone conclusion that their position would be sustainable and that combined with the iPod the market was sorted. A year is a long time in this digital age and now many are starting to question iTunes position with some very interesting new services which do not replicate but shift the business model in different directions. What was its strengths – the combined channel and player, plus defined price point, may yet prove its weakness.

First we had the pretenders to the iTunes crown- Sony’s Connect, MTV's Rhapsody America and Microsoft’s ‘me too’ Zune service. Interestingly these are all suffering and irrespective of their high profile backers are not matching their expectation. Perhaps merely copying a good idea is not the key?

One of the biggest shifts came from the artists who started to take control and redefine their own value chain. Prince exploded into the Mail on Sunday with Planet Earth and introduced both a new channel and new model ‘free with paper’. Radiohead told the record companies where to go, released themselves and started with an honesty box price approach. McCartney and Mitchell went to Starbucks and sold well through a new label plus retail format. Madonna bought herself out of her record company for £50 million and aligned herself with her merchandising and tour values and is now rumoured to be soon followed by Robbie Williams leaving EMI. Who would be a record company today?

Then came the rights management-free MP3s from EMI Music, Universal Music Group and a handful of independent labels. After years of fighting Napster, Kazza, and even the public, the music industry finally realised that perhaps restrictive DRM was not the answer. Something many consumers could have told them years ago and the record companies then lurched from DRM to non DRM in a heartbeat. Amazon stepped up offering DRM free, Jobs claimed it was his idea all along and the likes of Amazon jumped from nowhere to the third largest download retailer behind iTunes and emusic. It interesting to note that Amazon’s entry and achievement is without Sony BMG and Warner Music Group catalogues -who still weirdly, think that they control the music business.

Then there was the ad supported business model and the service we have written much of and admired from its concept – Spiralfrog. After much delay it finally launched in the US with all major labels and many independents onboard. The question is whether it took too long and in fact lost its own momentum? Others have now jumped on the same bandwagon and its questionable whether that delayed launch is going to be a wait too long? Slacker has jumped in and stolen much ground not only moving fast but starting its free, ad-supported customizable online radio service and following this with a portable device that uses Wi-Fi to update channels, and a subscription service tier that offers users more functionality for a monthly fee.

Now we have the likes of Nokia launching a free download model based on restricted models and service subscriptions. They certainly have the market clout and pressence and will give the iPhone and interesting race. The question in this area is where the mobile carriers or the mobile makers will prevail?

The latest service to turn our heads is IMEEM. They started effectively on one side of the fence by letting users stream free music, then when the record labels initiated legal action against the service, Imeem implemented filtering technology and an advertising system from Snocap to reward the companies every time a user played one of its songs. Interestingly it is a music centric experience and offers a different social interaction that others don’t. Will it succeed? We think so but there again the New Year beckons and 2008 is likely to see as much change as did 2007.

Palm RIP?

Remember Palm that handheld manufacturer and one of the first to offer an ebook reader?

Palm, which has a worldwide staff of 1,150 has announced that it is lay off around 10% of its staff. Palm has struggled against stiffening competition on all front over the past year. Palm warned last week that it now expects to post a second-quarter loss and revenue is expected to some $20million below expectations.

Interesting, one has to look hard to find even a mention of an ebook reading capability and they obviously aren’t going to be a big player in the ebook world which shows the fickleness of the market.

The Joys of Price Fixed Markets

Amazon has been ordered to end free delivery on books in France.

It has taken three years but the French Booksellers' Union (Syndicat de la librairie française), has finally got their way and Amazon now has to start charging for the delivery of books and pay compensation to retailers. The reason is that the courts in France ruled that it unfair trading practice..

Retail prices, particularly of books, are tightly regulated in France where selling products below cost to attract customers, is illegal. Books retailers must also not offer discounts greater than 5 percent on the publisher's recommended price. The free delivery offered by Amazon exceeded the legal limit in the case of cheaper books.

This victory follows that earlier this year against Alapage.com, an online bookseller with operations in France, Spain and the U.K.

As always, we wonder how this is going to work out in the global digital world? It is understandable when one looks at the discounting mess the UK finds itself in today to pine for the return to fixed prices. We are were we are and there are only two winners; those who set the prices and those who buy at discount. The loosers are the creators who get poor reward for selling more units and the retailers who live in a reactive environment they can't control.

Penny Fiction

An interesting article from Associated press tells how ebooks are being sold and used to support gamers. The important point was made that these are used as reference aids to help the people play the games but also that some of the material is short, as few as five pages, and commensurately low priced, at $1 or $2. They have broken out of the physical rules and adopted an open PDF approach caring less about piracy and more about accessibility. Even their larger ‘books’ are priced cheaply and they recognise it is perfect for electronic distribution."The more we treat a PDF like a book, the less likely people are to get it," Gareth-Michael Skarka, of Adamant Entertainment said. "You price it low enough that the consumer thinks of it as disposable."

Toronto-based Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. publishes 120 to 140 romantic novels per month, all of which are also sold in the US as e-books. Although these sales only represent a fraction of their sales they are starting to see traction and have started selling short stories exclusively as e-books, pricing these at 89 cents.

The point may be that we have to rethink the book just as the K novel has been re thought in Japan. Maybe someone should step up to the Dickens serial model. After all that is what Jobs did to music by moving from the CD to the track.

Maybe we have to stop linking the price to the physical book after all it makes no sense for it to be linked to the hardback and then be linked to the paperback when that comes out. After all it’s the same product!

Is Google in taking us up into the Clouds?

Imagine a world where you don’t need to worry about data. Where your files are only accessible by you, from anywhere around the world, on any device you wish to use. One immediately starts to worry about security, accessibility, backup, but are these real issues or are they a reflection of how we thought yesterday, when we have to own physical things ourselves in order that they we ‘safe’?

We are all familiar with the concept of servers that store data and effectively make this happen within a localised environment such as a company or service and the migration of applications onto these same servers making the demands on the client machine smaller. Cloud Computing just takes this a step, or leap, further.

To know how you'll be using computers and the Internet in the coming years, consider the typical Google employee his software and data--from pictures and videos, to presentations and e-mails all reside on the Web. They are already starting to practices what is considered by many technology experts to be ‘cloud computing’. Google already lets people port some of their personal data to the Internet and use its Web-based software. Google Calendar organizes events, Picasa stores pictures, YouTube holds videos, Gmail stores e-mails, and Google Docs houses documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

It is widely expected that Google will launch a service next year that will let people store the contents of entire hard drives online. Industry watchers believe that Google will pull together its disparate cloud-computing offerings under a larger umbrella service. But they are not alone, Amazon's Simple Storage Service, offers unlimited and inexpensive online storage, AOL’s Xdrive services offer a capacity of 50 gigabytes and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, is currently in beta, with a one-gigabyte free storage limit.

Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple are all sitting atop huge volumes of people's personal information and a number of online applications, but these need to be integrated. Many now believe Google has the culture to push the boundaries and tie together the pieces of cloud computing to make it happen.

New Copyright Rules for All?

We read with interest the lengthy report on the recent European publishers and copyright debate under the European Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding. She is introducing a package that she believes ‘…will cement copyright as the cornerstone …create the appropriate balance between ownership and access … that says that member states shall ensure that subscribers to electronic communications services or networks are clearly informed in advance of their obligations to respect copyright and related rights and of the most common acts of infringements and their legal consequences.’

She also said the European Commission will focus on how Internet search engines work and help users to critically assess online content and would ask member states for support by organising events in 2008 on ‘the exchange of good practices’. She also gave support to an open standard project called the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), developed by publishers to allow them to control what is identified by Internet search engine robot “crawlers.”
What does this mean? More initiatives, more consultancy fees, more confusion and many grand words.

Then came the debate:
Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at online society SecondLife, told publishers that digital rights management (DRM) could be a hindrance.

Ronald Schild, CEO of German book marketer and publisher MVB, said the biggest challenge for industry is to reconcile the needs of the copyright holder with the public right to get information, and “not make the same mistake as the music industry” by using DRM. Stephanie van Duin, director of business development at Hachette Books, also said the publishing industry needs to learn from “what happened to the music industry.”

Mario Tascon, director general for content at Spain’s PrisaCom, said Internet and newspaper are two totally different media. David Hanger, president of the European Federation of Magazine Publishers and former publisher of The Economist, said readers have an irreplaceable love for magazines.

Claude Droussent, editorial director at l’Equipe, said that it will be impossible to tell readers to wait until the next day’s morning daily print version to obtain information about developments that have ended many hours earlier. He said his company’s motto is “one media, one content,”
Kees Spaan, vice president of the European Newspaper Publishers’ Associations and president of the Dutch newspaper association, said that without advertising there would be no newspaper. He harshly criticised Internet search engines like Google and Yahoo for giving away newspapers’ content without partnering with the publishers to ensure they are properly paid. But Jean-Christophe Conti, European vice-president for search marketing at Yahoo, encouraged publishers to put their content free online and to make partnerships with search engines so all can benefit from big advertisers.

So much posturing, many differences of opinion, and even more initiatives from Brussels; no change there then.

Jouralists should check their stories

We again spent time following through the links of a news article reported in The Bookseller to discover yet again the posting was noise. The article referred www.Webooks.co.uk making Starting a Business in France by Richard Whiting, the first in a series of books to go online during the coming months.

Forget the press release and look at the site. One side is a white label store for Audible and the other is a not live, their catalogue is all about overseas property, news is more diatribe on overseas living and retirement,and on their contact page you find a link to www.mybookstoreandmore.com which a US ebook and pbook store with some 600 titles in ebooks of dubious quality.

Really it takes 5 minutes to check stuff out and the Bookseller should know better.

The Cat is out of the Bag

The music business appears to be switching its business model so fast that it is in danger of really screwing itself. Imeem has now finalized a licensing deal with Universal allow it to position Universal songs and videos for free, on-demand, and interactive streaming.

Imeem has also completed licensing agreements with Warner, Sony BMG, EMI Music. Imeem is now using the catalogues to power an ad-supported business model that shares revenue percentages. Although it is a fresh revenue source for the record companies today it is not a substantial earner.

According to research group eMarketer, networking-based revenues will move from $900 million this year to over $2.5 billion in 2011.

The issue is not whether the model will work but how many will succeed and whether by introducing this the cat is effectively well and truly out the bag and never going back in. Imagine you stream all you want for free and then save the files and repackage them why would you ever buy anything again? The softweare to capture, convert and do this is here and available to today and sitting on a laptop near me. The risk is not that it succeed but that it doesn’t match expectations.

Are You LinkedIn?

So we have teenagers on Bebo and Myspace, students and young aspiring socialites on Facebook and professionals on LinkedIn. The world divides into social clubs. They are all trying new things with degrees of success or in the case of Beacon and Facebook failure. LinkedIn, which was the fastest-growing social network in October, attracting over 17 million registered users globally and about 5 million unique visitors in the US.

Now LinkedIn has opened up outside software developers, starting with BusinessWeek magazine. LinkedIn’s aim to migrate from an online contacts and referral database into an indispensable daily tool for business users. It is also participating, along with MySpace, in Google Inc's OpenSocial developer network that seeks to create a way for all developers to write software that will work on all platforms. MySpace is also a member of OpenSocial.

McGraw-Hill's BusinessWeek will link keywords, such as company names, to the LinkedIn service. Visitors to the BusinessWeek site, who place their mouse pointers over certain keywords will trigger a pop-up box detailing how many of their LinkedIn contacts are related to the company or keyword. Unlike Facebook LinkedIn win have greater control over what developers do on the service and thereby avoid it being taking over by some of the less useful and frivolous developments that have found themselves on Facebook.

The latest rumour is that LinkedIn may soon be acquired by News Corp and would make a logical sister for the recently acquired Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co Inc this week.

Disney World 2.0

Walt Disney's Internet arm is about to launch a UK portal aimed at teenagers and showcasing its games, films, music and social networking assets. The Disney.co.uk Web site will launch on next week and follows the launch of the concept in the United States earlier this year. The Disney site, like its U.S. sister will have at its heart a feature called Disney Extreme Digital, aimed at children that allows them to customize multi-media content simultaneously while watching and sharing videos, messages, music and games.

The site has parental protection and prompts children to use Disney-proposed online chat phrases that are polite. The UK Web site will include what Disney describes as "snack-size" movie and television clips, podcasts and locally produced content alongside archived and new material.

Disney will have a mix of business models based on advertising, sponsorship ,subscriptions and transaction-based services and will have online shopping for their products.

Disney has opted not to aggregate with other s content and focus on leveraging their own brand and content. One only needs to look at the success of the Disney parks, films and width of their content to see that they have the brand pull to succeed where many others will fail to do so by themselves.

Educational Games

Doug Thomas, an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, is developing a game for students ages 10 to 12. He believes that games teach students to experiment and grasp ideas in ways that textbooks don’t.

"Modern Prometheus," uses the story of "Frankenstein" to teach ethical decision making, with the student being forced to make a series of choices that impact the game's outcome. The student must help the doctor cure a plague that is threatening the town. Do they steal body parts from a cemetery, a key requirement for curing the disease.

The students play the hour-long game individually, then discuss their choices with their teachers and classmates.
Thomas is also collaborating with Professor Sasha Barab, of Indiana University whose "Quest Atlantis" game is used by 4,500 students around the world.

The Internet is arriving at Terminal 1.

The cabin crew will be coming among you to hand out your complimentaary , drinks and laptop connevctions. In the event of turblance please log off.

From next week several US airlines will start to test Internet service on their planes. JetBlue Airlines will offer a free e-mail and instant messaging service on one of its planes, and in the coming months several airlines American, Virgin America and Alaska plan to offer broader Web access.

The plan is to create wireless hotspots in the sky once the plane has reached cruising height. Virgin ,who were an early pioneer of in flight entertainment, plans to link the technology to its seat-back entertainment system, enabling passengers who are not travelling with laptops or smart phones to send messages on flights.
The question is whether the cat is out of the bag? How can you allow internet access and not VOIP services such as Skype and we are already facing the prospect of mobile calls. Imagine a long haul flight next to a chatterbox. However it looks as though the initial speed will be equivalent to dial up so will restrict many broadband services.

Will they or won’t they charge? A nominal sum of $10 looks on the cards but at a charge so low why not give it away?

Internet access offers everyone an opportunity to sell or connect to a consumer who is strapped into a seat and really is a captive audience. The opportunities for publishers and retailers is significant and the hand baggage check in queue will grow as everyone brings on board their laptops, Blackberrys, PDAs, mobiles, iPods etcs.

News , Noise and Old News

Its weird that you see something in the press and wonder where you first read it and then what is behind it. Today we were drawn to an article stating that reading on iPods may soon get a lot easier. You may have seen the article but if not it came from the Hindusania Times which immediately caught our interest as it wasn’t usual source for such stories. The article linked to the Asian News International article which was identical word for word and published 3rd August, 2007. Both articles referred to a Daily Mail Article that was far more detailed and published on the 3rd August, 2007.

There’s obviously no news like old news.

How do we reward the songwriters?

Music continues to loose its way and it looks more and more likely it will go DRM free and be free to consume on an ad paid model. 7digital the London based download store has dropped the price of its 3 million catalogue of MP3 tracks to 50p which way below iTunes 79p. Can you remember the original iTunes price point and do you care? Prices are tumbling, DRM is loosing ground and the record companies are all scrambling to do any deal that generates any money.

It raises the question of royalties and how the creators and performers get paid. The Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) is proposing to charge Canadian internet and wireless users $5 per month to compensate musicians for revenue losses due to illegal file-sharing. They also propose the radical step of making the sharing of music on peer-to-peer networks legal. So its like a web licence fee you pay irrespective of whether you consume, or don’t, or even if you already pay a service such as iTunes. What next? Lets have a tax on connecting to the web or an extra levy on MP3 devices including PCs. Taxation models don’t work as they create administration which adds a cost and in turn dilutes net revenues and that is without proportioning out the spoils.

Let wake up and smell the coffee, music is changing both its business model and how it is being delivered. Let’s ensure the artists and writers are correctly rewarded through the revenues raised and not sold short by clueless record companies who lurch from one mind-boggling deal to another.

What does this mean to books? Not a lot today but it shows what can happen when the kids take control of the chocolate factory.

Nokia Want the Music Consumer

Nokia plans to offer unlimited music downloads. The world's biggest mobile manufacturer has announced a deal with Universal that will effectively give customers with certain phones unlimited access to millions of tracks for a year and allow them to keep the music afterwards. The other major labels are in discussions to follow Universal.

So will this latest lurch by the record companies challenge the previous pay-per-track sales model? What will be the impact in the relationships between the carriers and phone manufacturers? Who will own the consumer, Nokia, the carrier, the record label, the advertisers or the artist?

So it ends up free illegal downloads and sharing versus relatively free legal downloads. The consumer certainly is the winner here, but what about the artist, the writerand the cost of development?

Research firm Understanding & Solutions estimates that mobile music is around 13% of global music retail value and that the mobile music market should grow to $11 billion by 2011.

Nokia's new venture is due to start in the second half of 2008 and no doubt the game will have change again by then but what is clear is that Nokia have taken the music market and flipped it upside down. They are positioning themselves for a fight with Apple and the mobile carriers and record companies are mere pawns in this may muddy the waters but to-date, unlike the Nokia-Universal offer, customers cannot burn their music or transfer it onto a PC, meaning it is lost after the contract expires. They can only share music with other MusicStation customers while their contracts are current.

Is Facebook Fatally Wounded?

Imagine you put all your details into Facebook and were one of the millions who backed the social site over the others. Just like Gordon Brown the days are getting longer the news worse and the whole world seems to be unravelling in front of Zuckerberg’s eyes. The speed of decay within a fickle market who are always expecting something better is in the wings, is alarming.

For a social media company, they failed to understand the first thing about communication; through their arrogance they have alienated the press. The bad press extends from the blogosphere to mainstream media and bad press is causing advertisers to vote with their feet and jump ship. It didn’t have a safe adult at the helm offering experience guile and stewardship and appears to be operating its way out of its mess like a child in a chocolate factory.

In weeks Facebook has turned all the people who supported it into a mob begging for blood. It’s gone from media darling to devil, from the place to be the place not to be. It is fast becoming the Northern Rock of the social networks but doesn’t appear to have a ‘white knight’ in the wings.

Spam and Facebook

The two areas we hear most about with respect to the Internet are spam/junk email and social networking sites. To some the later is a godsend to others they are both pains.

One of the major social sites - Facebook believed that they can walk on water got their advertising concept Beacon wrong and misunderstanding the market and and worst of all their users. They presumed users would not object to their details being shared on purchases made on partner websites to Facebook friends via News Feeds. The backlash caused the social networking destination to quickly respond, "Users must click on 'OK' in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site."

London Online 2007 claims that nearly 400 people have already joined the Facebook group for the show and requested visitors to join and start making connections in advance of the conference? We found the group just above ‘Vote Crystal Sexy Lady Contest 2007’ with 260 members and below ‘Get "Lady In Red" by Chris De Burgh to Number 1 in the UK in 2007 Campaign!’ with 700 members. Glancing through the profiles of the 435 people in the group we found only 3 people we knew. Maybe we don’t know many people or maybe the people we know haven’t go the ‘me too’ bug.

The dreaded junk mail maybe closer to being dealt a blow.


Mr. Kirsh was an M.I.T.-trained engineer, who has a strong track record of technology innovation which has made him a fortune of over $240 million. He has now created Abaca who claim that they can filter out 99 percent of all spam, and supports the claim with a money-back guarantee.

Abaca turn the normal spam blocking approach on its head, profiling the recipient of e-mail rather than the sender. Abaca, recognize that the ratio of spam to legitimate e-mail is individually unique and that it is also a singular identifier that a spammer cannot manipulate easily. By assessing the combined reputations of the recipients of any individual message, the Abaca system determines the “spaminess” of a particular message. Mr. Kirsch asserts this provides a high degree of accuracy in deciding whether the message is spam.