Turner retains spirit of innovation

Posted on January 5, 2007
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Daily Report on how Turner (part of Time Warner) has managed to retain a spirit of innovation - specifically on the web and sets out some of their success to date and how they are looking to develop a number of new mid-range businesses.

Turner has set up a small team to develop more Web businesses. Many of the ideas for new Web ventures originate within the company’s ranks and Turner management has given the team broad license to experiment. 

The article goes on to point out that …

Turner’s low-cost, niche approach contrasts sharply with the strategy of some rivals. For one thing, it has no “digital czar” steering its overall strategy. Turner Chief Executive Phil Kent says centralizing Web functions can stifle creativity. Turner has also resisted the temptation to put its TV brands, with the exception of CNN and Cartoon Network, at the center of its Web effort.

Also embracing the idea of being quick to market with a focus on continuous innovation/development:

Recognizing that its core properties, TNT and TBS, were of little value on the Internet, Turner decided to build Web sites with new names. Typical of that strategy is veryfunnyads.com. Late last year, David Rudolph, the Turner executive who heads the Atlanta development team, challenged his colleagues to conceive and implement a new business concept in 30 days. “The goal was to say within the company that it doesn’t take years to go from idea to launch,” he says.

The team missed its deadline: It took 40 days to put the site into service.

links for 2007-01-04

Posted on January 4, 2007
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Media syndication startup Mochila gets $8M funding

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Journalism, Newspapers, Paid Content, Technology | Leave a Comment

Red Herring reports on the new funding for Mochila.  They have an interesting model that combines good return for publishers on their licensed material when it is syndicated (70%) and a resonable 30% on any ad revenue generated from free material (40% goes to rights owner) - in both cases Mochila keeps 30%.

“The barriers into the media business are now very low. They’ve taken away the barriers of being a buyer of media,” Charles River Ventures partner Austin Westerling said. “What they’re basically doing there is creating an ad network on top of already high-quality content. I think there’s quite an interesting opportunity.” 

 

News aggregation and copyright in Europe and China

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Journalism, Newspapers, Search, Technology | Leave a Comment

Good item from IHT on changes that are likely to reign in rampant “piracy” by Chinese web sites re-purposing content from newspaper sites and in Europe an overview of the ongoing court case by AFP against Google News.

According to one recent academic study, newspaper readership in China has declined sharply in the past three years, with the proportion of people who say they read a newspaper at least once a week falling to 22 percent from 26 percent since 2003.

A major presumed cause for the decline is that big Internet content providers, or portals, have become one- stop sources for all manner of information, from news and entertainment to blogs. Until recently, for most portals the general practice involved lifting news and other information directly from other sources, sometimes crediting the original source and sometimes not, but rarely paying for it. 

 

Decline and fall of a music empire

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Broadband, Copyright, Digitisation, Entertainment, Future, Music, Newspapers, Paid Content, Technology, Trends | Leave a Comment

The FT reports on MusicZone’s slide into administration.  There is upside for the industry in terms of the growth of digital revenues but this growth is no where near enough to cover the dramatic decline in the revenue from physical formats. This will all sound very familiar to newspaper executives.

The downward trend has been clear for five years but recent figures suggest that the decline in CDs and DVDs has accelerated. The IFPI, the music trade association, reported a 10 per cent slide in physical format sales in the first half of the year around the world.

Ged Doherty, the head of Sony BMG’s UK operations, predicted two months ago that CD sales would halve over the next three years.

“We predict digital growth of 25 per cent per year but it is not enough to replace the loss from falling CD sales.”

Mr Doherty warned that, if current trends continued, by 2010 the industry’s total revenues could be 30 per cent lower than they are now. He said: “We have to reinvent.”

Layoffs imminent at The Philadelphia Inquirer - expected to cut 17% of newsroom staff

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Current Affairs, Journalism, Newspapers, Trends | Leave a Comment

Amounting to 68-71 employees. The International Herald Tribune reports that the move follows the sell-off of the title by Knight Ridder to McClatchy who subsequently sold to a group of local businessmen.  The move has been closely scrutinised to determine whether a local and privately held ownership (rather than centralised and corporate) could work.  

But things changed over the summer as advertising revenue for papers across the country plummeted and circulation continued its years-long decline. At The Inquirer, the consolidation of local department stores and telecommunications companies has meant fewer ads, with revenue falling 10 percent in September 2006, from September 2005.

Daily circulation fell 7.6 percent, to 330,000, in the last year. Sunday circulation was down 4.5 percent, to 682,000, in the same period.

Yahoo and Dash hook up to provide mobile local search

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Broadband, Future, Good Things, Newspapers, Search, Technology, Wi-fi | Leave a Comment

In an interesting development Yahoo and Dash have announced a deal that will allow them to integrate local search technology within in-car SatNav and will connect to the internet via mobile phone or wireless network where available.

“It really is a new implementation of mobile search,” says Peter MacDonald, senior director of business development for Yahoo Local. “People need to find information about local businesses and what’s around them not just when they’re at their PC.”

links for 2007-01-03

Posted on January 3, 2007
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Germany quits search engine project - aimed at developing European competitor to Google

Posted on January 3, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Future, Newspapers, Search, Technology | Leave a Comment

The International Herald Tribune reports that Germany has opted-out of the European funded research project aimed at developing a search engine that could compete with Google.

But according to one French participant, organizers disagreed over the fundamental design of Quaero, with French participants favoring a sophisticated search engine that could sift audio, video and other multimedia data, while German participants favored a next- generation text-based search engine.

“In Germany I think there was also resistance to the idea of a top-down project driven by governments,” said Andreas Zeller, chairman of software engineering at the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken, Germany, which supplied advisors to Quaero. “Success in the end is something that can’t be planned but is something that begets itself.”

It sounds like the two countries disagreed on the basic objective. One of the French participants commented that:

“We wanted to develop multimedia search and the Germans wanted to develop text search. Part of the problem is that talk of a European challenge to Google exaggerated expectations.”

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