Rafat Ali of paidcontent.org has published an interview with David Levin, for the past 10 months CEO of UBM where he has sold off £1.6bn worth of assets in order to refocus the company on b2b magazines, websites and trade shows.
Monthly Archives: January 2006
Internet wins over older consumers
According to research from Burst Media, reported by The Kelsey Group blog, Americans over 55, often thought to be the really difficult market to crack, are deserting traditional media in favour of the internet with 36.6% now spending less time reading magazines, for instance, in favour of the delights online.
A year of Google new products
According to theOfficial Google Blog Google launched 77 new products in 2005!!!
Tagging – connections as value
Jeff Jarvis’ Guardian column on tagging makes the point that the huge rise in the popularity of tagging demonstrates that the value of the connection between ideas outweighs in the nakes ideas themselves. This is similar to a psychological point Doc Searls was making that conversation is the basic form of human interaction and the human brain is optimised to work at this level.
2006 – the year of unbundling
Doc Searls predicts that 2006 will be the year when media unbundling really takes hold. He has a long post on the implications here.
Human Chip Firm Plans IPO
Red Herring reports that VeriChip, a firm which specialises in RFID tags for human implantation, intends to file for an IPO. In 1993 when I was involved in the Reed Elsevier Innovation Programme with Strategos one of the more outlandish discontinuities we came up with was the move to chip everything, including humans. This seemed to be hard to take at the time, but it’s interesting how, bit by bit, the story is unfolding. The Red Herring article goes on to say that the RFID industry is slated to become a multi-billion dollar industry over the next five years.
Co-incidentally, CIO Insight reports at the same time that Kimberly-Clark, the paper products giant, is investing millions in a factory to prove the uses of RFID – even though it is not expected to bear fruit for a couple of years.
Boing Boing story
This is one of the more pointless ways to spend the past 28 and a half years.
News agenda for the citizen journalism era
An interesting and inspiring online “leader article” by John Robinson, editor of the News and Record sets out to explain how the traditional newspaper is going to use its websites to expand citizen journalism. It sets out very clearly what it believes local newspapers will need to do to continue to be relevant in a Web 2.0 world. There are clearly lessons here for all publishers…
New Year’s Wishes
A few things I would like to see in 2006:
- Longer life batteries for laptops – 10 hours would be useful
- Large -size flash memory – say 40GB
- Gadget makers standardise on one data connection and one power supply – it drives me crazy that my house is so full of adapters and cables
Afterthought…
Kurzweil predicts, on current trajectories, that $1,000 will buy you a PC with as much processing power as a human brain by 2020. Given that kind of time frame, anything goes!