Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

Why old media will ensure the iPad is a hit

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Last week wasn’t an especially good one for Apple. The iPad launch never really matched its billing – it never really could – and negative press articles translated into a wobble on the NASDAQ. The week ended with CEO Steve Jobs allegedly telling a meeting of Apple employees that Adobe was “lazy” and that Google’s ‘Don’t be evil’ motto was “a load of crap”.

Yet while it is clear that Jobs and the Apple board have a few issues to deal with the company has still announced what could prove to be the most significant computing device of the decade.

So in spite of all the negative press why do I feel this way? Well firstly the iPad was never going to match its pre-launch hype. If the company had added an OLED screen, enabled multi tasking (at the moment the device can only run on application at a time which is probably unique among PCs) and added cameras and video calling, it would have delivered a device what would have excited the blogosphere. However it might have seen its shares tumble as the iPad would have retailed for twice the price it currently is.

So Apple chose to build a lower-end device with a competitive price to match and instead delivered a product that was felt by many bloggers to be a disappointment. However the iPad is just a start of a journey for Apple and its consumers. And the irony is that if previous debut product launches from Apple are anything to go by we really shouldn’t have been too surprised that the product was underwhelming.

When Apple launched the iPod back in 2001, it was hammered for producing a device that only worked with Macs, had limited storage and was cursed with terrible battery life. By the time the third generation iPod came along, to say nothing of the iPod mini, the device had got so sexy that everyone had bought one.

Even the now ubiquitous iPhone was given mixed reviews when it launched in January 2007. Sure the critics liked its touch screen interface but the phone itself was a shadow of the type of mobile being produced in Europe and the Far East. It wasn’t even 3G, but ran using an unfashionable and slow data technology called EDGE. Of course then came the 3G phone and the app store and now the iPhone is the best selling smartphone on the planet.

So maybe Apple has a habit of getting it right third time. If that’s the case we shouldn’t be writing off then iPad until we have seen Mk 3 in two years time (or indeed the iPad mini) which by then will almost certainly multitask, sport cameras etc. It will also be very wedded to the whole iTunes/app ecosphere and will surely boast a multitude of innovative and exciting iPad apps.

Finally, content companies believe strongly in Apple. In a world of indie media, blogging, and start ups Apple clearly has very strong relationships with heritage media and has a proven track record of finding new business models for those companies.

How about this idea? Big publishing houses aren’t making enough ad money from the web, while at the same time sales of periodicals, which do attract big ad spends, are declining. If those publishers can get their periodical content to look and feel like their paper versions on electronics devices they might be able to continue to attract the big ad spend of the paper editions rather than the limited ad revenue of the web versions. To do this they need to get the best device for reading their content to as many people as quickly as possible. Hearst Publishing is already thinking along these lines with its Skiff ereader. However ultimately it might make sense for all publishers to back one platform – i.e. the iPad.

It might even enough sense for the publishing companies to subsidise the price of the iPad or even give them away for free with subscriptions to their magazines both paper and digital versions. It might not happen now, but by the time we get to version three…

Posted in General, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

The web on your tellybox – an update.

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Adapted by the author from an original post at social Probiotic

A few months ago I wrote a piece on my own blog about internet content making its way to the TV screen. Not in a Media Center box kind of way, but a way that is done from the point of view of the television industry. It’s now time for the other big event of the braodcasting calendar, NAB in Las Vegas, which unfortunately, I’ll not be attending. There was however, a chance to see some of the things that will be on display there at the IPTV World Forum in London last month. Once again, for a show that is about using internet technology, there was disappointingly little about internet content to see. But here’s a run down of what some of the TV tech companies are doing with social media.

Accedo: This is more of an update from what they showed me at IBC, essentially, they’ve taken on the ‘app’ model for Facebook and Twitter so that you can view a cutdown version of these applications as a sidebar during your normal TV watching. In the same way that online applications such as thwirl and digsby recognise that some things need to be kept in the background while you’re focusing on your main task, Accedo will sit completely unassumingly until you want to share what you’re doing with your network. It also integrates with your EPG, so that just using the coloured remote buttons, you can update what you’re watching. Neat, look:

SeaChange: as a company I’ve done some work with before, I was curious to know what this middleware provider was up to in the world of web content. They’re showing off Affinity, a social networking engine for video-on-demand, essentially a tool that allows you to make and take recommendations for stuff in a VOD library, the idea being that people will discover pay-per-view content that they might not normally find (= extra revenue for operator). The problem I have with this is that it seems that the recommendations are done via collaborative filtering (i.e. you share what you like with your friends and vice versa), which means that the solution is only good when your friends like the same stuff as you AND they happen to have an Affinity enabled TV service. If it was linked to a social network’s API, there would be a lot more value from this and it wouldn’t necessitate the latter point.

Ericcson: Yes they do TV, in fact, they were showing last.fm on TV – not the actual videos, but essentially, it’s an ‘app’ built for playing music through your TV when you get very bored of adverts for ringtones on VH1. I’m not entirely sure where it sits in the network because they don’t seem to be talking about it in any of their literature or website, which is a shame. I liked the demo though, it looks pretty slick and my TV has better sound quality than my PC, so I’m all for taking this particular service to the living room in another way (I currently use the last.fm app on my iPod quite frequently for that type of thing. Pic below:

CompleteTV: Now I have to say I’m more than a little disappointed with these guys. Despite having a fairly nice booth at IPTVWF, and splashing the YouTube Logo across it a couple of times, looking at their site, I fail to see how that was any more than lip service to online media making its way to the TV in any genuine form. Fear of content producers… perhaps. Now, that might sound harsh, but here’s the thing… CompleteTV makes boxes – not a great start… boxes for the consumer (even worse, since most of this stuff will migrate to the network in 3-4 years), which, with the whole wealth of social media goodness out there can do all this: “browse the internet and act as an email/instant messaging client”. Wow. I’m hugely underwhelmed.

Finally I wanted to quote a great article from the March/April issue of Future Media, in which Jonathan Webdale has interviewed Anthony Rose, one of the big cheeses behind the iPlayer, who said that “2007 was the year the BBC chose what you watched, 2008 was the year viewers chose what they watched and 2009 would be the year your friends choose what you watch.” As long as it’s not the rest of the Shiny Red team choosing, I’m keen to see how it goes.

Tags: future media, nab, social media, tv
Posted in Social Networking, Video, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

How the Guardian’s Ian Tomlinson G20 video changes the media landscape

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

An astonishing piece of amateur video obtained by the Guardian shows just how much the world has changed for big media players. The footage shows Ian Tomlinson, the man who died at last week’s G20 protests in London, being struck by a police officer and falling to the ground minutes before suffering a fatal heart attack.

You can view the film and make up your own mind about the incident, now the subject of an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. My focus here is to discuss how the footage and surrounding story has played out across old and new media in an exceptionally powerful and converged way.

The Guardian has scored a major coup, not just in getting hold of what is an extraordinary news exclusive, but for how it has successfully delivered the story via its traditional print product, its own web site, and across social media too. (I have to declare an interest as my husband David Taylor works on the Guardian’s home news desk and has been pivotal in developing this story over the last few days.)

Consider this: The Guardian had an exclusive, yet it chose to share its content before it appeared in print, running the video and a first break on the story on its web site yesterday evening. In the ‘old’ days of print journalism this would have been inconceivable, to the point that the red top tabloids would regularly run weak front page stories in their early editions, revealing their big exclusives only in final 3am print run.

As soon as the video appeared other newspapers’ sites were linking to it and capturing the footage or still images to use themselves, and crediting the Guardian. Meanwhile broadcasters including the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 featured it extensively on their news bulletins, again promoting the Guardian name.

At the same time, social media was fuelling the story, with Guardian journalists using Twitter to share the video URL. Mass retweets followed and within hours, “Ian Tomlinson” was trending on Twitter as one of the 10 most written about topics.

Today the Guardian’s print edition has extensive and detailed analysis of the film by reporter Paul Lewis to augment his online story, while the web site is offering bloggers the footage to embed. And rival media from the agenda-setting Today programme to competitor broadsheets are still crediting the Guardian as the source.

So what does this tell us? Firstly that high-quality content is crucial - without an exceptional story none of this would have happened. Second, strategic use of the right media channels – print, social media, web site – can have a multiplying audience effect not a minimising one. Third, that media businesses now are not “papers” or “web sites” but brands, regardless of how we consume their content. The Guardian’s liberal stance helped it secure the story, and its brand has been strengthened by the extensive cross-promotion it has since received.

Tags: David Taylor, death, G20, Guardian, Ian Tomlinson, Paul Lewis, Video
Posted in New Media, PR and Marcomms, Social Networking, User Generated Content, Video, Web 2.0 | 11 Comments »

My Social Media Highlight of 2008

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

I have been thinking what my social media highlight has been over 2008 and I realised that this is a tough job. There so many highlights to choose from so I have put them into the following categories:

Creative Campaign: Nike’s Paul chasing. Great use of interesting online content that keeps you returning to the site, supplemented with offline activity such as advertising.

Social Media Tool: I don’t think that anyone could have missed the rise of Twitter throughout 2008

Social Media Story: Comments from Max Gogarty’s travel blog in the Guardian - Also topped as Shiny Red’s most red story of 2008, I can’t be alone

Event: Fresh in my mind is last night’s Twinterval. It was refreshing to see so many like-minded people and also meet people that I have been tweeting at for a while but have never met

Campaign that I have worked on: This has been a tough one, but for the amount of time the video made me giggle the winner has to be Yell’s Party Planner campaign

Video: I was impressed by EA’s reaction to a glitch in their Tiger Woods game

What is your social media highlight of 2008?

Posted in General, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Kudos where it’s due…and who’s your unsung tech hero?

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Apologies for blowing our own trumpet, but I do so on behalf of people too modest to do it themselves…

Congratulations to Ashley, Chris and Katie, founders of Shiny Media and subsequently of Shiny Red, who’ve just been named among the 1,000 most influential Londoners by the Evening Standard. Also namechecked in the new media category are Apple’s Jonathan Ive (slightly stretching the definition as he hails from Chingford and now lives in California…), James Murdoch and, er, Lord Rothermere, chairman of the DMGT which owns the Evening Standard. Elsewhere Kate Moss, Stella McCartney and of course Boris Johnson also feature.

And Ashley’s also bigged up in T3’s list of 50 most influential people in technology alongside that man Ive again, Steve Ballmer, Sergey Brin and Jerry Yang among others.

As ever a depressingly small number of women make the cut – two suggestions from me would be Jemima Kiss of the Guardian, and former Microsoft exec Judy Gibbons, now at Accel Partners and heading up innovative UK start-ups like mobile content aggregator Mippin.

Any other unsung tech heroes out there who you think deserve a shout out?

Posted in Blogging, Mobile, New Media, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Web 2.Cool

Monday, September 29th, 2008

For the third year running, Aston Martin has been taken the honour of coming top in CoolBrand’s annual list of the coolest brands in the UK, published today. And while you could predict the inclusion of luxury companies and products such as Bang & Olufsen, Ferrari and Dom Perignon, social media giants Facebook, YouTube and the ubiquitious Google have also made the top 20 this year.

There’s no doubting these brands continue to be successful in their own right. But replacing the likes of Prada and Green & Black’s shows that while the expert panel (which includes designer Ben de Lisi as well as Future Laboratory partner Tom Savigar) continues to see the aspriation in “cool”, innovation and changing the way we communicate are making an impact on what brands need to be to gain that kind of mindshare.

As CoolBrands council chairman Stephen Cheliotis points out: “There is one unifying key to all of the brands – they’re all brands that have consistently innovated, refused to stand still and are at the top of their game.”

Posted in Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Learnings from IBC – part two

Friday, September 26th, 2008

Since my last post was a little on the negative side, it’s time to lighten things up and talk about some of the sool stuff that was on show at IBC. So here’s a run down of my picks of the show:

Accedo: These guys (from Sweden) put stuff on your TV that isn’t TV content – usually games and interactive services – but at IBC, they were demoing a service wher social media applications such as YouTube, facebook and flickr to the TV screen. While it can be argued that things like Windows Media Centre do that already, Accedo’s slant is that they’re not simply replicating the web experience, but actually optimising the application for the TV platform. From what I’ve seen, this really comes to life for media heavy apps like Flickr, where you can present high quality slideshows on the big screen.

However, for some of the more communication based web-apps, you’d want to combine the TV experience with the online experience. Inuk Networks, the company behind student IPTV service Freewire used the show to talk about what they call “a truly converged triple-play IPTV service incorporating television, voice and PC applications within one interactive interface” Round the corner, expect to see “Lewis is watching Prison Break” as an automated Facebook status update, and things like updating your twitter feed or sending social network messages from within your TV’s EPG. Inuk’s Nick Ruczaj also told me that they’re planning to open up the Freewire API to let folks build their own widgets which will add interaction to the viewing experience. in my opinion, IPTV apps would be a great place for budding developers looking to get a foothold in the world of media convergence.

Speaking of which, Qualcomm had some interesting concept demos which looked at using 3G blended with its MediaFLO technology to get the Inuk-esque interactivity on mobile phones. It was nice to watch, and while it’s a concept at present, I think the issue here is going to be screen real estate. Only devices like the iPhone are really going to be able to deal with that much information on screen in a useable way. But with plenty of device manufacturers replicating the big screen interface, it won’t be long before concepts become reality.

Posted in Broadcast, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

We’re in the world’s top 50 PR blogs!

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

And we’re pretty pleased with that! In the week that we’re generally showing off and unveiling our glam new look we also got our listing up in the AdAge Power list, which according to Matthew Watson’s excellent maths means we’re 39 in the global top 50 PR blogs.

It’s rewarding with the hard work and attention that’s gone in to building the Shiny Red blog. It’s been a really fun and educational process since the first unassuming post in 2006, and it’s something the whole team love doing and learn lots from.

Having seen Vero’s well-read post about PRs and bloggers this week, I’m reminded again how lucky we are as social media PRs to be able to get involved in this way – traditional PR doesn’t offer the same opportunity to be a broadcaster or journalist. The experience of publishing our thoughts online is so valuable both to communicate Shiny Red’s knowledge and personality, and and to learn as practitioners. I remember publishing my first ever blog post (bless) which wasn’t even under my name, but was a good moment of realisation about how it feels to put your own words out there. It certainly makes building and ‘pitching’ stories a lot more strategic when you can reflect, from experience – would I write about this?

Thanks to Matthew and Spinning Around for getting everyone into a bit of ranking mania it’s been good to see how our more localised communities line up and discover some new blogs too.

Posted in Blogging, General, New Media, PR and Marcomms, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »