Zuckerberg (Facebook) Declares A Year of Books

Celebrities have always influenced what people read, listened to and watched and we have many book examples such as Oprah in the US and to a lesser extent Richard and Judy in the UK. Now Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has stated his intent to not only read a book every two weeks, but to invite everyone to share the experience with him on Facebook. He has already launched a dedicated Facebook page called ‘A year of books’ and within the first 24 hours it has been liked by over 62,000 people.

The billionaire is known for his New Year's Resolutions and determination to accomplish his goals, which was conveyed in him not only learning Mandarin, but going to China to give a speech in it and promote Facebook in China.

Zuckerberg says, ‘Please only participate in the discussions if you've actually read the books and have relevant points to add. The group will be moderated to keep it focused.’ This itself could result in some 26 best sellers this coming year and ironically create more of a reading stir than any World Book Day. His first read ‘The End of Power’ by Moisés Naím, was published in 2013 and is a 300 page work on the changing nature of leadership today. Already the paperback appears temporarily out of stock in Amazon.com.

The big question is whether this is a whim or a strategic business move. It could catapult Facebook into the leading social reading position, but will they want a cut from their ‘halo’ effect? Will they want to sell direct and create their own retail proposition? Is it about creating an active reading community that they can mine in many ways to make money? Will the community expand past Zuckerberg’s reading list or be solely focused on it? Will Zuckerberg’s taste be restricted and prove unappealing, or be widened, or even bought by the highest bidder?

Perhaps it is just a new Year’s resolution, that if it works will continue past 2015 and if it doesn’t, will be like many other resolutions and be lost to history. 

Who Would You Buy; Readers Digest, B&N, Nook, Whatsapp?

This last week has seen three company potentially changing hands and although they are all very different in the price offered they are also very different in what they offer their new owners. So which would you buy and how much are they really worth?

Barnes & Noble

G Asset Management LLC has offered to acquire 51% of Barnes & Noble at $22 a share, valuing the bookseller at $1.32 billion. They also proposed to acquire 51% of the Nook e-book division at $5 a share.

The big question is whether the business is worth the valuation and also exactly what they will do with it in order to get their return.

Nook is clearly on the ropes, losing executives in a continual game of musical chairs and only this month declared it will shed engineers on Nook as they continue to haemorrhage business and try to dump their hardware development. Competition from Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle continue to dominate the market and with Kobo picking up the international new business and aligning with Kobo what does Nook really have to offer? Barnes and Noble made two fatal ebook errors in not expanding its International reach until it was too late and not creating an attractive and easy to use self-publishing and digital content business.

The retail business remains but is like a giant ship that has built on yesterday’s economic model and is increasingly challenged to tack and change course in what are choppy and dangerous waters.

The news of G Asset Management offer has increased the demand and trading in Barnes & Noble shares which closed still short of the $22 offer price, which would indicate that the market may be sceptical that the deal will go through. Analysts are expecting Barnes and Noble to announce a per-share profit of $0.61 on $2.03 billion in revenue, an 8.8% drop from a year ago. So even splitting the book and Nook businesses may not look that attractive and maybe Microsoft may wish to counter the Nook offer.

Readers Digest

Next comes a relative little publicised sale of Readers Digest for just £1 by Better Capital to a venture capitalist. Readers Digest was once a force to be reckoned with and dominated its marketplace. Better Capital bought the business out of administration for £14m in 2010 adding a further £9m of investment, but despite the title’s administration freeing a £125m black hole in Readers Digest’s pension fund they failed to stave off its collapse into a company voluntary arrangement last January. Now Mike Luckwell who made millions from the TV company behind Bob the Builder has snapped up Reader's Digest UK for £1.

Mr Luckwell wants to take on Saga and focus on the over-50s market and exploiting financial services opportunities who he states are increasingly active and under-served by other media groups.

“Over-50s have a very different life than they did 20 years ago,” Mr Luckwell said. “People over 65 are jumping out of aeroplanes now, it’s a younger type of audience with a ridiculously high proportion of the wealth and only 10pc of advertising.”

He plans to restart the Reader’s Digest product sales business and invest in its online services, even potentially charging for access to its website and couple this with an expansion into financial services. So is the brand recoverable and importantly is the mailing list that is key to its reestablishment sufficiently active to support it? The mail list may be huge but like all lists it ages quickly and becomes harder to mine effectively when the vast majority is postal and you wish to convert them to a digital business. However, managing the list and renting it could be attractive and the brand alone is a steal for £1.

The purchase raises the question why no publisher who had any intentions to offer a direct to consumer offer did not stump up the cash to buy Readers Digest for a £1?

Whatsapp

Facebook announced last Thursday that it would pay $4bn (£2.4bn) in cash and $15bn (£9bn) in Facebook shares as part of the deal to buy the Whatsapp real-time messaging service. The app's founders and employees will get $3bn (£1.8bn) of the shares as four year restricted stock. Facebook previously bought Instagram for $1bn and has a strategy of extending its community offer buy acquistion.

Since the likes of Skype first showed that connecting people for free over the internet could build and deliver huge communities others have taken up the mantle. So does being able to offer even further growth as well as extending the offer make Watsapp a perfect Facebook fit?

It is not that the service is ad free, or has stringent privacy rules, or that it has relatively small in overheads in only having some 50 staff, as all these could change with the wind. What is important is that it has the community, the quality of the service and is easy and free to use. When you plug this into Facebook you have a rich community with multiple ways to effectively communicate and this starts to protect Facebook from others who merely copy and refine their current offer. The younger Facebook generation who may be becoming disillusioned with the site that is now being used by their parents and even grandparents, may be retained by the lure of comprehensive connection by any means under one roof and advertisers just value more connections and a larger community.

We may question the price paid but it is relatively chump change for Facebook to stump up and offers them a quick growth and increased valuation options. There are few who have the cash or the benefits case to compete with such a purchase but it is worth noting that Skype has gone somewhat corporate and dry since it was itself acquired by Microsoft and this has fuelled the likes of Whatsapp. However Facebook doesn’t yet have the same corporate treacle of Microsoft so can probably ingest Whatsapp a lot better.

So which is the best buy and which buyer offers the best investment strategy? All three are very different but all 

Digital Warming

Global warming is effecting our weather and being blamed for the extreme weather we are witnessing around the world. This year alone we have had exception gales and flooding across the UK, a heat wave down under and polar freezing weather in the US and Canada. We understand some of the causes, but we still appear powerless to predict the future weather past the short term.

Publishing has been effected by its own digital warming which has seen the extreme performance of some, demise of others and a general unpredictability of most.

Is there a critical digital point which tips the scales of all other channels, or are there a series of tremors and spikes that we now have to live with? Technology is fairly predictable but the combined impact of this and changing consumer and social behaviour is making what was once fairly predictable market into one which now appears to be stormy and highly volatile.

Polarisation and consolidation is a given and if anything will increase as the big seek to retain market share and control and the small carve out viable niches. This is not just impacting a few but is now prevalent across the value chain. However, the traditional industry is no longer defined by the book but increasingly by technology, markets and media. Amazon is barely twenty and Google, Facebook Twitter are all relatively newcomers. The recent combination of Random House and Penguin pales into insignificance against the size of the new technology, social and online players. Size as once defined is no longer as relevant as community, touch, engagement and the Wow factor.

Interestingly we see a relatively flat overall market. Some sectors may be experiencing greater decline as their market accelerates online, whilst others are more resilient and subject to a more unpredictable path. Prices have fallen and are under constant pressure, merely raising the RRP to compensate for the discount given becomes a vicious circle where the market will increasingly dictate the price in a price comparison world. We have seen publisher declare increased revenues but is this a trend or merely another spike? We have seen other publisher flat line, or decline and is this reflective or the corporate adjustments being made, their publishing mix and offer, or digital warming? Retailers have experienced the same volatility and only recently we have seen John Smiths go one way whilst other flat line or go the other way. Many retailers no longer have the property asset to fall back on and are now a one trick pony. The ebook market is also changing. No longer are we obsessed with ‘lookie likie’ eink readers that offer little but now are focused on mobile platforms and towards a permanently connected online cloud world.

Technology has done wonders to raise the profile of the book but appears to have done little yet to increase reading. We have continued somewhat naively to pour the physical content into the digital container without questioning the logic and consumer need. Some would say it is like giving the early mass literacy readers of the Victorian age ‘War and Peace’ to read as their first book. Books must now compete even more in a time poor, channel hopping, and choice rich market.

Instrgarm Raise the Digital Finger to Their Users

The service that shoot to fame and fortune by enabling users to share photos with friends has now taken the word 'share' and rewritten its meaning.

Take a photo load it on Instagram, share it with friends and now give it to Facebook to exploit and make money on and worst of all you can sit back and get nothing!

It doesn't sound right but Facebook's photo-sharing site Instagram has just updated its privacy policy, effectively allowing it to grab the right to sell its users' photos to advertisers without notification, or money. They have even condescended to giving all Instagram account folders a deadline date of 16 January, but also denied them the opportunity to opt out.

The changes also mean Instagram will share user information with its parent Facebook which bought it earlier this year for $1bn. The sharing of information also now extends to other affiliates and advertisers. In other words whoever they wish to share it with.

Earlier this month, Facebook's vice-president of global marketing solutions, Carolyn Everson said: "Eventually we'll figure out a way to monetise Instagram." Well, it appears it didn’t take them long to sort that problem out and now they have literally grabbed their user’s images and information to exploit as their own and for free!

International technology giants appear to be currently rewriting the rules at their whim and fancy, avoiding tax with not a blink of and eye, taking personal pictures to sell them as their own, sharing information with who they wish and generally behaving very questionably. We have seen policies such as this be reverted before, but it’s now very much a case of ‘Catch us if you can.’

See update on their policy from Instagram in comments

Technology Skills In Demand

What do you think is the technology skill in most demand today?

As all companies fight to be seen in the ever expanding digital arena then the demand for the right technology skills increases. It’s a simple case of supply and demand.

Freelancer.co.uk claim that job adverts for top digital jobs grew between the second and third quarters of this year from 189,917 to 230,614, that’s over a 20% hike in demand. Following the redesign of the EBay site demand for developers there rose some 44%.  Facebook advertisers and Internet marketing demand was up 12%, search engine optimisation 12%, HTML some 8%.

An interesting trend was the continued increase in demand for Android app developers, which was up some 16%, compared to Apple iOS’s demand growth of 8%. This clearly demonstrates that Android is now holding its own and Apple is being pegged back by the onslaught of devices from the likes of Samsung. However, the biggest demand growth was associated the ‘paperless office’ and the transition from paper documents to online and cloud based services.

Technology is changing and with it the skills and demand for developers and support to exploit it. Nearly a quarter of a million jobs were reported for skills which did not exist a few years ago and itself again demonstrates the volume of demand in the marketplace.

Do Sales Rise as Discoverability Cost Increase?

As the roles across the value chain of the various publishing sectors change we find ourselves asking, how much does it cost to acquire a new customer, to retain them and to do business with them in an environment where prices remain at best unstable and at worst are falling?In the old world costs are fairly well defined, but in the new world these become far more complex and all tend to add small increments to the overall cost of doing business

Who should do what, and spend what to promote what, is an interesting challenge with authors, publishers, retailers all trying to be the communications hub with their consumers? The buzz word today is 'discoverability' and how we can all channel our resources (money and effort) to making it work.

Google, Twitter, Facebook all are about advertising and maximising their opportunity for businesses to pay to be see over the crowd. If you want to be seen at the top of the search then search optimisation is a key and money is the answer. If you want your tweets to resonate then again money is the answer and now Facebook is to join the game which gives you details on how many people have viewed what has been written.

Anything that gets searches, tweets and events and posts ‘seen’ is fair game and with it obviously comes an army of helpers to enable businesses to exploit these facilities at an additional cost. Facebook now plan is to introduce their new post service in the US and has begun tests in New Zealand. The cost is thought to be $7 a post and obviously could raise significant revenues for the social giant.

What is clearly now starting to appear is a whole series of new toll boths and additional cost options to doing business on the internet, or as some would suggest – doing business. Social and Search giants are not alone in creating new additional and compelling charges , the banks, insurance and other financial institutions have done it for years. The questions are now whether the market can sustain the overall costs, who should respond and how and who should channel their resources elsewhere? 

It is after all easy to spend money but often much harder, or increasingly harder, to make it>  

LinkedIn Uploads Slideshare

LinkedIn and Slideshare

View more presentations from LinkedIn

The takeover and initial public offering (IPO) season appears to be in full swing in technology market and following Microsofts dive into Barnes and Noble we now have LinkedIn’s acquisition of Slideshare and Facebook’s share price for its upcoming IPO being set at at between $28 and $35 per share, which values the company at between $85bn-$95bn (£52bn-£59bn).

The Facebook IPO is now set to become the largest internet share offer topping Google's 2004 valuation of $23bn. News Corp must be kicking its heels that it got it so wrong with MySpace who were number one only a few years ago and are now slipping into obscurity.

LinkedIn is the biggest socil network for professionals and is the place to not only connect to your business network but to find people and jobs. It is like a gaint Roldex and who’s who of the business world, hosting discussion groups and connecting business people to business people. It not surprising that they have now acquired Slideshare for US$118.75m. Slideshare is what it says on the tin a place to share slides which as everyone knows are used everyday by business people and in business conferences. SlideShare users have uploaded more than nine million presentations and had nearly 29 million unique visitors last March.

So we now have the social giant Facebook which is reshaping how we share and communicate in communities and with friends and LinkedIn which is starting to reshape how business people connect, reconnect and expand their networks and knowledge. LinkedIn has still got some places to go and could still have some parts of the jigsaw to plug in but is clearly destined to grow further. An ex collegue said to me recently that he didn’t get LinkedIn until he lost his job and now he gets it 100%.

The new LinkedIn will now enable professionals to also discover people through their presentation content and that starts to open up significant avenues for further growth as well as becoming an effective store and archive of business content. Imagine if LinkedIn next bought the likes of Wattpad? 

Facebook Buys Instrgram For $1 Billion

One of the most popular apps Instagram has been bought by Facebook for a cool £1billion.

We have all become happy to share our thoughts via blogs, twitter and Facebook, our business contacts via LinkedIn, our social circles via Facebook, our videos via YouTube and our photos via Facebook and Instagram. Instagram has been downloaded and used by a staggering 27 million people, including many celebrities. In fact, the app has only just been released onto the Andriod platform and we only downloaded ourselves this weekend. So in theory the app has the potential to double its audience!

The app is like Adobe Photoshop plus much more and allows users to alter and post images on their smartphones and tablets. It offers stylistic filters, frames, and special effects to photos. Options can transform a straightforward snapshot into something very special.

Kevin Systrom, the the 26 year old CEO, who turned down an offer to join Facebook in 2004, founded Instagram only 15 months ago. With only 13 employees, Systrom now has hit the $1 billion jackpot. Systrom also retains 40% of the company and lands £400million from the deal, which values the business more than the likes of the New York Times!

Although Facebook has a reputation for buying up start-ups and then integrate the technology Systrom has reassured users that Instragram will continue to exist independently of Facebook and will continue to add new features to the product. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg commented , ‘This is an important milestone for Facebook because it's the first time we've ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don't plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.’

As we develop our social skills it is going to be very interesting to see how ownership and privacy evolves. What is clear is that a handful of services will know a significant amount about us which can be used both positively and negatively and how much control the individual ultimately has will be very interesting to watch.

Buffy the Facebook Mobile Slayer?

Will Facebook’s ‘Buffy’ be the vampire mobile slayer or a step too far?

Facebook are widely reported to be working with HTC to create its own Android smartphone, which is due out in 12 to 18 months. According to The Wall Street Journal the Facebook phone project has been codenamed, ‘Buffy’.

However why does it need to have its own hardware? Facebook is already tightly integrated into many Android smartphones and it is very questionable exactly what Facebook would gain over the wide adoption it already has. If Facebook believe that ‘Buffy’ could tightly integrate other Facebook services such as their email it could turn many off if all their all email and messaging from the phone have to be done through Facebook?

Facebook isn't a hardware company and perhaps they should stick to what they are good at. Even the likes of Google have struggled with the hardware and ended up buying Motorola and launching a Nexus with Samsung and Microsoft has many hardware nightmares most notably with their Zune player.

Ironically HTC, the world's fourth-biggest smartphone brand shares have fallen by 7%, which is the maximum allowed in one day. The fall has been driven by a cut its growth forecast. HTC had earlier forecast growth of 20% to 30% but despite a booming market now expected revenues for the final three months of 2011 to be little changed from a year earlier. This demonstrates the growth of Android adoption by many players.

Equally interesting is the news that Google and Samsung have confirmed that there are volume issues with their flagship mobile phone the Galaxy Nexus and Apple and that the battery problem that has dogged the new iOS 5 Apple operating system remains unfixed.

However, the one thing that is clear is that smartphones remain at the core of mobile technology, Android is now leading the wave and the more platforms tightly integrate applications and services the more the smartphone will become the device of choice. This has a significant bearing on how media providers, channels and cloud based services must adapt.

Facebook: For Delete Read Archive?

What do you say on social networks and who you connect to may be one thing, but does the information collected against you go much deeper? Importantly, if you delete it, is it in fact deleted, or stored against you forever? Many of us are careful how far we embrace the social network world, but does that apply to everyone?

Today Europe vs Facebook points the finger at the social network site and once again asks many questions about the extent of personal data stored and its usage and archive. As Facebook’s European users are administered by its Irish Facebook subsidiary, the case is being driven through the Irish Data Protection commissioner, and falls under the Irish Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003

The case is being brought by an Austrian law student, Max Schrems. Who requested personal data being held about him and discovered that the site had some 1,200 pages of personal data that he received on a CD. The amount of data was not the issue, but more disturbing was that much of what he received he claims had been deleted. This included rejected friend requests, actions he had taken to "defriended" someone, a log of all Facebook chats, photos he had detagged of himself and the names of everyone he had ever "poked",

The data also included some email addresses and other information he claims not to have never uploaded to the site, but which he assumes were gathered from another user's profile. Some would suggest enables Facebook to build ‘shadow profiles’ for people who may not even use the site.

Remember that even though you press delete, defriend, remove your data, it may never get cleared and could be stored for ever to be used in a manner you never intended.

Facebook says any user can download their "personal archive" and probably many may now start to do so.

It's Good To Talk Socially

So is it cut and dry that Facebook rules and the rest remain ‘also rans’? It’s true that the more we invest our time and capture our information the harder it is to wean us off our favourite social network drug.

Social networks now matter to business not just to spread the word and promote their service offers but in building communities. Therefore all businesses must view these as essential communication channels and invest accordingly. The business that fails in the future may well be the one without network communication.

As consumers, we have often demonstrated as liking for joined up thinking and tightly integrated applications. Amazon, Microsoft and many others have proved that the best product doesn’t always win over that which is user friendly. Amazon’s ‘one click’ is a perfect example of something small and simple that is both attractive and compelling to many. We have also seen earlier social network service leaders stumble as users demand more joined up services and as the boundaries of the network and service functions expand.

As we master one new service we soon want it neatly joined to the rest. One of Amazon’s smartest moves was their affiliate programme which built their brand through others. The ‘one stop shop’ will continue to be attractive to many.
So what is so attractive with the social network of Google+?

Some things such as the contact ‘circles’ would appear neater but much off it looks and feels very similar to others.

However there are differences.

Conference calls have long been a essential business tools and the "mobile hangout" feature, allows Google+ users to also now enjoy video chats with groups of friends. Whilst "Hangouts on Air" would allow anyone with a video podcast to broadcast it to the widest audience. Google has not only developed the hangout service but are set to demonstrate it through the rapper star to promote his very own hangout and new medium.

So is Google+ now developing social networks and starting to compete not only Facebook, but also the likes of Skype. It certainly has the potential to adopt a holistic approach and recognise that users use search, maps, youtube, etc and wrapping them in their own social world may be more effective than presented them disparately in others.

However the 64 dollar remains- will users move their community service to others or remain with their current investment and also is any technology lead sustainable in today’s highly integrated world?

MySpace Heads Downhill, Whilst S&S Seek A Tweens Social Solution

Remember a social networking site called My Space? It transformed Lily Allen from a bedroom performer into a star and the Arctic Monkeys from an obscure Sheffield band into headliners. It once had the market share of social networks and was the place to socialise, but today it is shrinking, looks like yesterday’s news and is no longer the hip and the place to be seen.

MySpace have already tried to refocus the service on music, but perhaps music alone and a ‘music destination’ is just not enough.

Analysts ComScore claim that MySpace lost more than 10 million unique users worldwide between January and February this year, reducing the number of users from 73 million down to 63 million. Worse still is the year on year drop which equates to some 50 million. Some may say these figures are very respectable and they would be if the trend was in the ascent but in the decline they could so begin to freefall.

MySpace has already announced plans to cut some 500 of its workforce and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp 2005 purchase is starting to turn into a dog and some would now value it at around just 15% of the £330 it cost.

Facebook and YouTube have established themselves as the social hotspots today with many now falling by the wayside. MySpace even faces further competition from streaming services and blurring of media MySpace looks destined to become either very niche or quickly forgotten part of News International.

Meanwhile there are plenty of social wanabees and last week Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing has launched an online interactive book club for tweens on Everloop, a recently launched social media platform for tweens. Simon & Schuster had launched the club to connect tweens with favourite books and authors and will begin with "Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life," by Rachel Renee Russell and "SPHDZ Book (hash)1!," by Jon Scieszka. Book club members will be able to engage in online discussions with authors.

Connecting young readers and authors is hard as sites like Facebook are very conscious of the dangers of social networking and bans a reported 20,000 children a day from using the service. So along comes Everloop to fill the gap between the ages of 8 and 13 and ties every child to an adult but just because the adults like it doesn’t mean its hip to the kids and it still has to police this ultra sensitive market? Once a child is no longer a tween then by its own rules it moves on and probably to Facebook. If Everloop succeeded it could be huge, if it fails it goes the way of Bebo, AOL and others who have been down this path.

The problem for publishers is that they are struggling to build up a network and build a service. When the figures don’t meet expectation they then have to determine whether its down to them, or the service.

Half The UK Registered on Facebook!

Experian Hitwise’s latest report claim that social networks are the UK’s favourite online destinations. Facebook and Twitter registered 2.4bn Internet visits in the UK in January and Facebook claim that it now has 30 million registered users in the UK alone which equates to half the population!

This comes at the same time that the BBC released its latest stats for the iPlayer, which reveal that more people than ever, some 125 million hits, were streaming live content through over the service. They also claim 2.1 million requests were delivered to the iPad alone in February. The total hits in the month was down from 162 million to 148 million but interestingly some 23 million of these were from Virgin Media iPlayer TV requests.The BBC also claim that there are proportionally more daytime and late-peak users of the service and the majority of users are under 55.

The blurring of the entertainment and social services is seen as one of the main drivers in UK traffic. Sites such as Facebook are increasingly hosting content from entertainment sites and this is driving more social interaction and stimulating more take-up. This in term attracts more businesses to advertise, promote and generally position them on the social map.

There are still strong calls, especially in the EU to tighten security on the social networks and EU law and directives. The main EU thrust today remains focused on "the right to be forgotten", letting users "withdraw their consent" to their data being held. It is felt that service providers should prove that they need to keep the data, rather than individuals having to prove that collecting their data is not necessary.

So we are now clearly seeing a step change from the vertical web services of email, blogs, flikr, youtube etc to one which overlays these within a social network construct that is wider in its appeal and deeper in its richness. Mobile technology such as tablets and smart phones are enablers that now are increasingly permanently connected. It doesn’t mean that the verticals disappear it merely means that these become the feeds that are consolidated through the likes of Facebook.

With half the UK population apparently signed up it clearly now says that we are starting to socially communicate, interact with media, express ourselves and collect and share content and opinions.

Interesting Mobile stories that caught our eye.

Where are You?

Ex England Rugby captain Will Carling left his iPad on the train but was determined to get it back. He used the built in GPS to follow the device as it went literally around the houses and updated his progress to his 46,000 twitter followers.

Logging on through his PC he could track its movements via MobileMe app and even sent a message to it telling the people who had it that it was being tracked. The device was eventually handed into the railway station’s lost property office and reunited with its owner.

Above the law?

Users who watch BBC TV via their Anroid and iPad /Phone devices with no TV licence are unlikely to be caught. The new free app enables users to watch and listen to the BBC on the move and appears to be genuinely ‘free’. Mobile devices be they tablets or phones can’t be tracked and so can avoid the £145.50 licence fee. The detection is still very much based on addresses with 97% of households holding a licences and although the BBC plans to force a registration to catch offenders this would appear an easy one to avoid.

Mobile Facebook

We have all enjoyed Facebook apps on mobiles an dthey are some of the popular apps but now Facebook have gone one step further new HTC and INQ, Android smartphones that offer greater Facebook integration. A dedicated button will take the user straight to Facebook and will place Facebook features prominently on the home screen.

The Facebook phones will feature video and photo alerts as well as text and home screen that instantly updates as friends post messages and pictures on the Facebook.

This is not only a win for Facebook users but also Google’s Android platform. It offers retailers opportunities to seel and promote more on Facebook Places, which shares the user’s location with friends and provides special offers from retailers.

The INQ Cloud based phones, which will also integrate the Spotify music on demand service.

Two Lost Souls Join Hands

Earlier this week we wrote about the dire straights Nokia now find themselves i9n today as everyone seems to be passing them on their journey down the charts.
As if to compound the issue they have now announced that they are to partner with Microsoft and that it will now use Microsoft's Windows Phone as its main smartphone platform, cutting research and development in its own platform which is dying on its feet. However some woulkd suggest that putting to lame dogs together doesn’t make a good one it merely puts two dead dogs together and could hasten the decline of both.

The once dominant Finnish phone market looks as if it is going to experience terminal decline and the appointment last year of Stephen Elop, a former Microsoft executive, as CEO looks like it set the agenda and there are even rumours that he may relocate to Silicon Valley.

Combining Nokia with Windows Phone platform looks ill conceived and is highly unlikely to draw users away from the rampant Android and iPhone platforms.

Are You Linkedin?

Facebook is for friends and family, whereas Linkedin is for business and contacts and Skype for international VOIP. That’s the way we use the three social networking sites with Twitter often a mere distraction and something does less and less of.

Now Linkedin has announced an initial public offering which could value it at some $3bn.This may be tiny in comparison to Facebook’s $50bn valuation, but it marks a maturing of these social sites and if successful, could lead to others such as Twitter, Skype and Groupon following their lead. It also shows the high valuation of these companies in comparison to their revenues and profit, (Linkedin generated $161.4 mill revenues and $10 mill profit mainly through its premium subscription service in the first three quarters of 2010).

Facebook today claims some 600 million members to Linkedin’s 90 million users, but both are growing at a significant pace, both globally and within communities. Facebook being more personal attracts a different advertising and sometimes demographic profile that the business focused Linkedin. Here Linkedin can score with members with high disposable incomes and often large business budgets. Linkedin can also literally connect new business opportunities and even, stimulate job changes and advancement.

These new social giants are interestingly now competing for our attention whilst not competing in their offer. Its more a case users finding the right ‘horses for the right course’.

Ten Digital Reflections

If we look back over the decade of the ‘noughties’ we see ten technology/service step changes which have all in their own way enabled publishing to be digital. They may have not been the first to market, but were first to get it right and change things.

iPhone: The iPhone redefined the mobile, the user interface, the operating system, the application, the look and feel and much more. It combined the best of the iPod and iTouch and brought them to a smartphone. It made reading on a phone acceptable and was adopted by young and old.

Amazon Kindle: It started out as just another eInk device and ended up a multi device platform, leaving many so called pretenders in its wake. The single focus Amazon applied and their determination to evolve and protect their customers investment in Amazon, was what ultimately swept the others behind them.

YouTube: Youtube did for film what iTunes did for music. It became the enabler, the changer, the vehicle that promoted us from video watchers, to video makers. It gave the masses a common platform to express themselves and view alternatives. It was and is a 'starmaker'.

epub: As a standard it unified the industry and effectively became a 'category killer'. It is far from perfect today. Many see it not one standard, but as a mere container, with many issues and variations. However it effectively killed off Mobibook, MS Reader and nullified Adobe ebook. It enabled everyone to believe we had a single standard.

Widgets: They may have been overly engineered by some and lacked a common specification, but they started to make everyone think outside the box. Context started to be used to promote and sell content. We started to use the jacket as a container for content, metadata, bibliographic record and even to be a two way communication vehicle. Unfortunately, widgets were often not understood, lacked industry standards and leadership and remain waiting to be fully discovered.

Facebook: Many will ask why Faccebook? Why not MySpace, Bebo, or even those many publishing only pretend social networks? Facebook wasn’t the best social network, but it was the one that was adopted and accepted by all. It may have started as a narrow college vertical, but it then became inclusive of all and it was this that ultimately separated it from the rest. Why do we need book social networks such as Copia or BookRabbit when we have Facebook that can include all book social connections?

ACS4: When Adobe killed off ACS3 and embraced epub under the intial Adept service many industry players said 'no way'. Adobe quickly adapted it to what is now ACS4 and it soon became the DRM service across multiple devices. Love or hate DRM, it is here today and Adobe continues to be the glue that secures epub and Aebooks (PDF) on many devices. It offers the reader the ability to buy from a wide range of resellers and read files on a wide range of readers. It offers the author and publisher the security.

The Blog: We now have social networks, twitter and a host of ways to express and share our views. Some would suggest that the blog post has had its day and that the 'real time' snippet and interaction of Tweets is more powerful. Others would suggests that 140 characters says little and merely reflects our growing sound bite culture. Whatever, blogs were the vehicle that redefined journalism and writing and enabled many to be able to express themselves to a wider audience.

The Google Book Settlement: We all have an opinion on this audacious attempt to highjack an industry for little more than chump change. It sits still on the shelve awaiting judgement, but it has single handily woken everyone up to the issues facing copyright in the digital age, the challenges of orphan works, the nonsense of territorial rights in global digital economy and the fact that as a rights business, publishing stands exposed without even a basic rights registry.

Lightening Source: LSI came of age during the decade. It quickly became the aggregator and distributor of print on demand titles. First exploited by academia and smaller niche publishers, it has now grown into a vehicle to maintain back lists, produce short print runs and enable ‘lost works’ to be brought back into print. Interestingly it also enabled Ingram to quickly grow its digital offer.

Some may ask why we did not include Android, OLPC or even the iPad. The answer is a difficult one in that they all have had a dramatic impact on the market, but we feel that they and others still to offer or consolidate a step change.

What are your top ten and have we missed the obvious?

The Queen Goes Social

Facebook now boasts more than 500m users but can now boast royal patronage and the Queen to its list of subscribers.

The Queen is launching British Monarchy Facebook page and this follows her Flickr account earlier this year, joining Twitter last year, the establishment of a Royal Channel on YouTube in 2007 and the Queen has reportedly fully embraced the web and sends e-mails.

Buckingham Palace says that its Facebook page is not a personal profile page and users will not be able to add The Queen as a "friend", but are abler to "like" the service and receive updates on their news feed. The page will also feature the Court Circular, recording the previous day's official engagements and information about royal events and ceremonies, all searchable on a UK map.

We wonder if Stephan Fry will be upset at now being only second in line on the technology front?.

MySpace Going One Way And It's ....

MySpace was the social network and then came along Facebook. Some would suggest Murdoch bought the wrong one, others that he bought the right one and that is why today its in different position.

It looks like MySpace has finally realised that it has lost the battle with Facebook and now seeks to reposition and redesign itself from the world's largest general-purpose social network to one focused at musicians and music lovers.

Artists with flare and some design can visually convey their personalities more on MySpace than through Facebook's corporate colour and presentation and as long as the artist is there the fans will be there too. Artists will get three choices of design; the old- MySpace design, a magazine-like format, or a video format with mobile versions to follow later this year.

Meanwhile, Facebook still has its growing user community which in true social trems creates even greter growth. So the question is whether musicians want to live in a ring fenced social network or project themselves to a bigger community. If the later then MySpace is going only one way and that isn’t up.

The interesting question is what MySpace will do with all the user information from those who drop of their new site?

Sykpe and Facebook to Join Forces?

Imagine the largest social network site joining forces with the largest VOIP provider and the boost that both will get in connecting peoplei every way!

The dots will soon be joined if the partnership, according to All Things Digital, between Facebook and Skype happens. It is claimed that the companies will integrate functions enabling users to call and SMS Facebook friends from Skype, Skype will integrate Facebook Connect and users will be able to video chat with Facebook friends.

Skype claims some 124 million active users and 560 million registered users, while Facebook claims over 500 million users. The geographical strengths of each service will also create further growth for both. It also enables Facebook to gain better leverage in the mobile market. It certainly looks both a logical and win win relationship.

The user will gain free Skype basic services and free Facebook with revenue being created from click-through ad revenue and in licensing.

Facebook Skeletons Keep Coming!

We talk one minute about bad PR and the next about skeletons in cupboards. When we discover one skeleton in a cupboard we deal with it and move on. When another is find another its only natural to raise more than an eyebrow.

Remember the millionaire brothers who rowed in this years Oxford Canbridge University Boat? Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, together with Divya Narendra where co-founders of ConnectU, and took on their former Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg. They claimed that Zuckerberg the CEO of Socail Network Facebook had taken their software code and business plan. In 2008 they settled out of court for some $65 million in Facebook stock and cash. The dispute still rages on over the company valuation and some would suggest that there is there is no smoke without fire.

Now Mark Zuckerberg have had another potential skeleton in New York web designer Paul Ceglia. Ceglia has filed suit against Facebook and company CEO, claiming an April 2003 contract which would now entitle him to around 84% ownership stake in Facebook. The case is over a 7 year old contract signed by Zuckerberg and Ceglia, the designer. The contract is claimed to pay Ceglia some $1,000 and a 50% stake in the site. When it was nothing the 50% was worth nothing but today that could be substantial. The lawsuit also claims that Ceglia is entitled to "an additional 1% interest in the business for every day after Jan. 1, 2004, until it was completed." The terms apparently state, "It is agreed that Purchaser [Ceglia] will own a half interest (50%) in the software, programming language, and business interests derived from the expansion of the service to a larger audience."

Ceglia seeks a declaratory judgment and relief in the form of monetary damages and 84% ownership -- worth between $5.6 billion and $9.24 billion, which is based on Facebook's estimated value of between $6.5 billion and $11 billion.