Archives for January 2008

The Future of Newspapers

January 28, 2008 Leave a Comment

Close on the heels of my side box comments about NewCorp’s influence being felt at the WSJ.com, I listened to an interesting discussion on KQED’s Forum about the Future of Newspapers on Friday. It was an interesting discussion that included Phil Bronstein, the departing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The discussion about how newspapers make money and can continue to make money today was quite interesting. Especially when you extend the same concepts to online services and this mentality of free advertising supported services. My biggest complained about my recent visit to WSJ.com was that there were all these animated advertisements that started to jump out at me. It was very distracting and frustrating, I felt like I had to work extra hard just to find and to read the article I went to the WSJ.com to read.

We find ourselves in an interesting catch-22. Ideally, you create a product or service that others find valuable and willing to pay for. With advertising, you create a product or service that can attract a lot of eyeballs and then sell advertising to support it. Who cares if the product or service is hard to use or requires you to spend more time on it than you should to accomplish a task…that’s more eye balls, more clicks, more advertising revenue.

I have thought that mixing the internet advertising technology with the newspaper would be the best way to support that business. Have customer configured ala-cart services and advertise within those services that helps pay for these services. Customers get to read what they want and the advertising helps pay for it. But, how do you allocate the advertising resources out to pay for the content? that could lead to popular content thriving while the meaningful, but less popular, content being starved.

So then, how do you pay for the services that our society as a whole really needs? How do newspapers pay for the in depth reporting on social topics that are important (even if us readers don’t realize it yet)? Is it enough to have the popular content pay for the not so popular content?

This is a constant battle that most founders and CEOs of web2.0 like startups are dealing with every day…pay for service or advertising paid service. The parallels continue…

Open Source Wifi

January 24, 2008 1 Comment

A while back I learned about an interesting company that was working to blanket San Francisco with free wifi access. Meraki and their Free the Net San Francisco campaign are using an interesting method, similar to open source, to provide free wifi to San Francisco. Anyone can sign up to get a free wifi providing station that can be plugged and placed near a widow or on a balcony and you’re instantly extending the base wifi signals that Meraki offers. So, rather than trying to build the complicated infrastructure needed with multiple stations providing the wifi signal, and coordinate leases for places to put these stations…they just give them away!

The stations appear to draw a small amount of power, so they shouldn’t cost poeple a lot of money to leave on all the time. And, like any ‘free’ service, there is supposed to be small adds that get displayed. I say supposed to be becuase I haven’t actually been in a part of San Francisco where yet where I could fine their network, but the Wall Street Journal article about them indicated the advertising.

Side Box: Speaking of advertising, looks like effects of News Corps acquistion of WSJ publisher Dow Jones is now evident. As I went to the WSJ while writing this article, I was litterally bombarded with advertising like I had never seen before on their site. Sad to say, that’s not the WSJ online anymore…and I’ll be sticking to the print version where at least the ads stay within their boundaries on the page…

Not surprising, Meraki is backed by Google. This could be Google’s way of helping to provide the ubiquitous free network access that keeps coming up from them every so often.

Signs of Recession

January 24, 2008 1 Comment

Today I overheard a strong indicator that we are in a recession. Listen to any economist and they will say that the one thing that has kept the economy humming along was the housing market. People were still spending money either on their houses or because of the equity in their houses. Once the sub-prime mortgage crises came to lite, we had various opinions on what would happen to the economy.

Today I learned that 3 Day Blinds will be closing 64 of their stores/showrooms. This is almost 40% of their 170 stores across the country. For those who aren’t familiar with 3 Day Blinds, they make custom blinds with a 3 day turn around (as if you couldn’t figure that out from the name). They do business via their website as well as their stores. Considering the nature of buying blinds, most of the time you want to see what you’re going to get before placing your order, it makes sense that they would have stores. With the strength of the housing sector, they had good business and growth.

But, now with consumers spending less, even on their homes, they are shuttering stores. It will be interesting to watch the stock returns of the other companies that revolve around the home owner (i.e., Home Depot, Lowes) and see what their returns are from the last quarter. If the consumer isn’t spending as much money on their own house…that’s the strongest indicator that we we are in a recession.