Yesterday's announcement by Digital First Media's John Paton, that DFM would be shuttering it's Project Thunderdome has provoked quite a bit of chatter. Much of that came in the way of schadenfreude, or "patonfreude", as Lucia Moses called it.
And, some of that is to be expected. John Paton has a big personality and he was not shy about touting the bold steps that DFM was taking in an effort to redefine their business. But most of the response was supportive, recognizing that bringing change is difficult, and we should celebrate the efforts, regardless of the results.
Ultimately, there were many huge challenges that DFM and Project Thunderdome faced.
As Mathew Ingram notes, a private equity-backed structure, does not lend itself well to long-term experimentation with new models.
But digging more deeply, there were many structural issues.
The basic idea behind Thunderdome was to create a centralized newsdesk to handle all big, national stories, with local properties handling local news. In many ways, that made sense, and DFM assembled an all-star team of digital news professionals, led by Jim Brady and Robyn Tomlin to lead it.
But that model may have been one of the big challenges for DFM.
While shared resources make sense, transformation of a business from print to digital can't be done by a centralized, shared unit. Innovation is not something that can be created externally and dropped into an organization, as though by an Amazon drone.
As Ken Doctor notes: "Thunderdome wasn’t universally received well within the company. Talk to the locals and you heard grumbles. Traffic to the new Thunderdome sections didn’t impress them. They didn’t like national imposition on local news judgment."
Successful transformation has to come from a blend of new and old. Embedding new capabilities, while empowering existing editorial resources, is probably the best path to success. Of course, there is always resistance to change, and we've seen many cases where the legacy organization rejects the implantation of an innovation team. But it seems that positioning Thunderdome as the future, and the local papers as "the past" left DFM with no bridge to navigate the present.
I've just started to use Poncho, the weather un-app from Betaworks and, at first glance, I'm impressed.
I have used a bunch of weather apps and, until now, the two in "regular rotation" for me are Dark Sky and the Weather Channel.
Dark Sky is a one-trick pony that executes that trick better than anyone else - it gives you the hyperlocal forecast for the next hour. So, whether you're trying to figure out whether to start the softball game, or whether to bring an umbrella to lunch, no one does it better.
I use the Weather Channel app for the more mundane task of checking the daily weather report before I leave for work in the morning. All I want to know is the current temperature and the expected high and low, along with whether it's gong to rain or snow. And the Weather Channel app does that reasonably well, as do a number of others. But, there's a lot of clutter there that most of us don't need.
Enter Poncho.
Poncho, founded by Kuan Huang, out of Betaworks, gives you the info you need, when you need it, without all that clutter. Poncho simply sends you a text message or email each morning, with a brief snippet telling you what you need to know.
There's no app required. Just go to the Poncho sign up page and answer a few critical questions (where do you live? what time do you wake? do you have pollen allergies?) and tell it whether you want your forecast via email, text or both. And, every morning you'll get a brief forecast with just the info you need to know, right when you need it.
What I love about Poncho is the simplicity. It's like the early days of mobile - when I got my first Blackberry in 2000, there were a number of simple auto-reply services. You'd email a question (e.g. stockprice for a given ticker) and a text response would come back. Sometimes, a brief text message is all that you need. We don't need a robust, full-featured app for every task.
So, we can all learn a lot about development from Poncho.
During the past 12-18 months I've had more conversations with publishers about tablet and mobile than about any other topic. In fact, it's probably more than the next three topics combined.
The speed in which mobile and table computing are overtaking the desktop is unprecedented. According to Deloitte, more than one in five Americans own a tablet device. And every day, new vendors and agencies come along pitching products and solutions. The result for most publishers is confusion.
In speaking with colleagues at Newstex, I learned that they were seeing the same confusion among many of their customers.
The eBook starts with strategy, exploring 7 mobile content business models, noting that many publishers overlook new revenue opportunities on mobile. From there, it aims to demystify much of the mobile landscape, helping publishers understand the differences in platforms and providing tools to simplify issues like the app vs mobile web decision.
The last half of the book provides an action plan to help publishers implement their mobile strategy. Examples and case studies are provided throughout to help you understand the decisions made by other publishers - and their implications.
Whether you've already launched multiple iPhone, iPad and Android apps or are just trying to move past the hype and understand the mobile content space, this eBook provides quick and valuable insights. Download your free copy here.
A special thanks to Tom Shultz of Creative Attitude for his terrific design work.
For several years we’ve been dismissive about the idea
of an inevitable “Facebook phone”. Apple and Android have won the mobile phone
wars and, as Microsoft, Blackberry and others have learned, there are few
crumbs remaining.
But if rumors are true, Facebook just may have come up with
a strategy for success.
The Facebook plan is not to build hardware, nor create its
own operating system. Instead, the strategy is for a “Facebook Home on
Android” app launcher, with hardware built by existing handset makers.
The idea of a customized version of Android is not new –
that’s the approach that Amazon has taken with the Kindle Fire. But the
potential impact for Facebook could be great.
Current rumors suggest that HTC is building the initial
handset for the Facebook phone. The modified version of Android would provide
the ability to launch any existing Android app, but the home screen would be
Facebook-centric.
That approach is compelling. If you look at mobile usage
statistics, users spend up to a quarter of their mobile use on social networks.
For many of those users, having Facebook as their home screen would make sense.
For Facebook, a “Home on Android” could act as a Trojan
horse that would allow them to shift increasing amounts of activity to their
own platform. At launch, the Facebook Home on Android might simply be your news
feed, Instagram feed, games and Facebook chat. Yet, over time, that could expand. Rumors
suggest the initial search partner will be Google, but that could easily
change. Facebook Maps, Facebook Music or Facebook TV could easily follow.
There are still many unknowns. Will the Facebook Home on
Android version be forked, requiring developers to build custom versions of
Android apps, or will all existing Android apps work on the phones? Will
payments be handled through Google Play or Facebook’s App Center? Will the
Facebook Home launcher be made available for any Android phone or will it only
run on customized handsets?
We’ll learn a lot more on Thursday, when Facebook makes
their introduction. But one thing seems clear - with the Facebook Home on Android strategy, the idea of
a Facebook phone no longer seems silly.
The new version includes a curation platform that allows anyone to create a Flipboard "magazine" by curating content and sharing it with others. Here's Tech Readings, a Flipboard magazine I've created this morning.
The user interface couldn't be easier. From any article, simply click the + icon and add it to your magazine.
For the avid RSS reader/curator, this is a great new tool. Against the backdrop of outrage at Google dropping Reader, I realized that between most of my content consumption comes via Twitter and Flipboard these days, with Reader a distant third. With this new curation tool, Flipboard should become an even more important tool for me.
Yet I think the real opportunity for Flipboard will come with brands. As brands move into the publishing space, there's tremendous opportunity for them to create custom magazines for niche communities, using proprietary content, curated external content, or, ideally, a blend of both.
And this potentially creates new revenue opportunities for Flipboard. A professional version of the curation platform might allow brands to have some control over layout, to include their own branding and to package it up as their own branded app.
Those capabilities could also be of interest to publishers and informal curators within the enterprise.
Flipboard has delivered a great reading experience since its launch. There's an opportunity for them to create a similarly great experience for curation and publishing. I'm excited to see how brands and publishers begin to experiment with these new tools.
Best Buy (BBY) announced this week its intention to begin
price-matching prices from key competitor websites, such as Amazon (AMZN), Buy.com,
Target.com (TGT), B&H, Walmart.com (WMT) and others, for purchases made in its stores.
On its surface, it seems like a smart and aggressive
strategy for Best Buy to remain relevant and to discourage its customers from
showrooming, using Best Buy to view items, then buying them cheaper online.
Yet in practice, I don’t know how the numbers could work.
There’s no way to profitably run a brick and mortar big box retail business that matches the
best of online pricing.
For comparison, I just spot-checked a few of Best Buy’s prices.
And those three items are hardly unique. On almost every item
I checked, the Best Buy price was 20-40% higher than prices at Amazon and other
sites. The exceptions tend to be large screen TVs, where Best Buy is competitive
to the best online prices, and certain brands which are rarely discounted, like
Dr. Dre Beat headphones or an Apple iPad.
And that experience is consistent with what I’ve seen in the
real world. There was a Best Buy across the street from my old office. Any time
I tried to buy anything there, I found their prices to be 25-50% higher than
the online price. I might pay that premium for an emergency pair of earbuds, but for
anything over $25, I found myself ordering via the Amazon app instead, often
before leaving the store.
So, how might Best Buy adapt to a world of price-matching? I
see three possibilities:
First, Best Buy can hope that while price-matching becomes a
useful marketing campaign, customers don’t bother to actually do it in
practice. This seems unlikely to me, unless they either make the process too
difficult to perform (“let me find the manager for you” or “you just need to
fill out this 12-page form and we’ll match the price”) or perhaps deploy cellular
signal jammers in all their stores.
The second option is
for Best Buy to work with manufacturers to create custom versions of its
products for their stores. This is the trick that the mattress industry has
used for decades, to make price comparisons difficult. When mattress
discounters like 800-Mattress sprang up, department stores scrambled for ways
to keep their artificially high prices up. The solution was for mattress
manufacturers to create “exclusive” models available to each department store
or retailer. So, you can’t compare the price of the Stearns & Foster Delana
mattress from Macy’s, as that model is not available at Sleepys or elsewhere.
Might Best Buy try something similar? Could they ask Canon
to make a Vixia HF M50BB (or similar) which is only available at Best Buy? That
might be a bit more difficult to do across some product categories (I can’t
imagine Apple participating) but for some products I could see it. Truly unique offerings would be most compelling, but that's really hard to do with electronics. Home retailers like Target (TGT) can get designers to create custom collections; FAO Schwartz has unique toys that Toys R Us can't offer. But there's not as much flexibility with electronics. Maybe a custom color for a phone or camera, but that's about it. Another
option might be to create custom bundles. Perhaps a flat screen TV, a wall
mount and HDMI cable could be bundled together into a package that is exclusive
to Best Buy. Smart consumers might compare the bundle to the price of the unbundled components, but you won’t have a one-click price check from a barcode.
A third option might be for Best Buy to treat big ticket
items as loss leaders then offer private labeled accessories, unique to Best
Buy. This is not far off from their current process for large screen TVs. Their
prices on these tend to be fairly competitive, as they know people price
compare before dropping a thousand bucks on a flat screen. But they hit you up
for a $59.99
HDMI cable and a $119.99
wall mount, items that can be purchased for a third that price at Amazon.
If they truly wanted to be price-competitive, Best Buy would
make it easy to check competitive prices in their stores. But they’ve actively
avoided this to-date. Best Buy actually incubated a startup, Tecca, which offered
mobile apps providing detailed information and comparisons on electronic
products. The apps included barcode scanners which returned pricing from
Bestbuy.com, Amazon.com and Google Products. Yet although they funded it, Best
Buy was never comfortable enough with Tecca to encourage its use in their
stores. Tecca was shuttered late last year, but could have been the centerpiece
of this new “price matching” strategy.
I think Best Buy will likely employ the use of bundles and
white-labeled accessories to improve margins, while using price-matching on
major items as loss leaders. That approach may slow the showrooming somewhat,
but it doesn’t seem like an effective long-term strategy for a profitable
business. They can’t possibly sell enough overpriced accessories to support
1,000 big box stores across the U.S.
How do you think Best Buy will handle price matching? Add your thoughts in the comments.
I'm writing an ebook aimed at helping publishers develop and implement their mobile strategy.
One section of that book will spotlight apps from publishers that get it right. I've got a bunch in mind, but would love to get your suggestions on content apps that are deserving of recognition.
First, to define what I'm looking for, I'm focused on apps from publishers, not on generic readers. So, the NY Times app would be a fit, but Flipboard or Pulse would not.
The focus can be b2b or b2c; I'll include native apps, mobile web apps and hybrid apps in the discussion. Content can be text, images or video. And I'm looking across a wide range of business models - free apps for brand awareness, paid subscriptions, content-enabled mobile commerce, digital-print bundles, sponsored apps and more.
Pearson (NYSE:PSO) has taken a 5% stake in the recently spunoff NOOK Media LLC division of Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS) with an $89.5 million investment.
The investment values NOOK Media at $1.789 billion, unchanged from its recent spinoff. After the Pearson investment, the Barnes & Noble stake will be reduced to 78.2% of the company, with Microsoft (MSFT) owning the remaining 16.8%.
"With this investment we have entered into a commercial agreement with NOOK Media that will allow our two companies to work closely together in order to create a more seamless and effective experience for students. It is another example of our strategy of making our content and services broadly available to students and faculty through a wide range of distribution partners."
At the same time, Barnes & Noble filed an 8K indicating that "the Nook business will not meet the company’s prior projection for fiscal year 2013″.
The NOOK is a product in a tough position. While the NOOK HD has aimed to expand its capabilities beyond that of a single-function e-reader, it faces a highly competitive market. Traffic generated by Nooks are a fraction of that from the Kindle and are a rounding error when compared to the iPad. As single-function gadgets are subsumed by smartphones and tablets (see iPod for example), the life expectancy of the standalone e-reader market will be short.
As I've previously written, I don't see a promising future for the NOOK as a general purpose e-reader or tablet. Instead, they should narrow their focus to the educational and early reader markets, where they are better positioned for success. As I wrote last fall:
Barnes & Noble needs to root itself deeply into the textbook market. That market is up for grabs and it seems that Apple or Barnes & Noble will become the likely winner. Barnes & Noble should move quickly to secure the needed partnerships and focus its efforts on winning there.
The educational technology market remains somewhat fragmented. Apple has clearly set its sights on the classroom. I think it's time for Barnes & Noble to focus all of its efforts on this market. If the Nook cannot gain significant market share in the education space, it will have no viable future as a platform.
During the past week, my Twitter stream has been filled with
various thoughts on the demise of News Corp’s (NWS) tablet-centric news app, The
Daily (including my own). Some, perhaps in an effort to be provocative, have
suggested that the end of The Daily signals the idea that tablet-based
publishing itself has proven a failed model. Here are a few of those stories:
The failure of The Daily says little about the future of
tablet publishing, and mostly tells the tale of a failed publishing initiative.
Let’s take a look at what The Daily was:
A tablet-only (to start), paid
subscription, consumer app, providing general news content, with a very high
budget.
Now, let's break that down into its parts:
Tablet-only: By the end, The Daily had moved beyond tablets
to include smartphone, and also had integrated the ability to share content via
the web. But to start, it was a single-platform (iPad) product. And the fact
that it was optimized for the iPad was both a strength and a weakness.
Paid subscription consumer news app: the good news is that
we are seeing paid content take hold in various markets. But consumers are only
willing to pay for content not perceived to be readily available for free elsewhere.
High budget: one of the challenges large companies have when
trying to launch something new is that they bring with them high cost
structures. Startups don’t dangle 7-figure salaries to attract talent, but
large companies fall into an expense base that’s not sustainable. Oh, and The
Daily was the only app to run a Super Bowl commercial.
Yet, despite that high cost structure, The Daily really only
faced a challenge once News Corp split into two companies. As part of a single,
diversified entertainment business, a $30m annual budget for the Daily was
almost a rounding error, easily covered by box office proceeds for the movie Avatar in Poland.
Not much to pay for a real-time R&D lab, whose learnings can be applied throughout the
multi-billion dollar company. Yet, split off into a business already wracked by
difficulties, it became an expensive luxury.
So, what lessons can we learn from The Dailly
Mobile First vs Tablet-Only: There’s a real difference between being Mobile First and
being Tablet Only. The Daily became a walled garden, making it difficult to
share content or to shift your reading from one platform to another.
In building digital products, it’s critical to understand
user behavior. Will users skim your content on their mobile device during the
morning commute, marking content to read on the desktop when they get to the
office? Or, are they marking content during the day to read later on their
tablet on the ride home? Do users need to share your content with peers?
Particularly for b2b content, the need to shift from one platform to another is
critical.
User Experience Matters: While The Daily ultimately failed in reaching their goal of
a half-million paying subscribers to a consumer news product, they did exceed
100,000 paid subs. That’s pretty impressive considering the ubiquity of free
news sources on tablets and the web. User engagement was high and they created
many real fans. Rather than a boring “replica” app, the Daily created a
compelling user experience, leveraging the iPad in ways few others have done.
Specialized, hard-to-find information beats generic news: This one almost goes unsaid, but while many companies are
finding that users will continue to pay for information they can’t find
elsewhere (particularly in b2b),there’s no appetite to pay for content where
there is a viable free substitute. Editorial quality and a big marketing budget
can’t overcome “good enough” free alternatives.
SIPA members, by definition, should not face the problem of
selling generic information to consumers. These companies offer niche products
aimed at b2b markets. During this session, we’ll be exploring trends in mobile
and tablet use, particularly among business users and explore how to develop an
appropriate mobile and tablet strategy. We'll take a hands-on look at publishers who are doing it right (and a few who appear to be on a misguided path). I hope to see you there.
There's an interesting discussion going on this morning on Fred Wilson's A VC blog in a post called Rethinking Mobile First. I'd encourage you to read the entire post AND the comments, but here's a short recap, along with my thoughts.
Fred's post is in response to a post by Origami Labs and Everyme co-founder Vibhu Norby questioning whether mobile is the right platform for many new app developers to focus on and why Origami is pivoting from mobile first to web first.
The Norby post highlights the fact that mobile-centric startup success has been limited to a handful of apps:
Only a handful of apps have succeeded mobile-first: Instagram, Tango, Shazam, maybe 2 or 3 others
The challenge, as he notes, is that the conversion process from download through true engagement eliminates most users. In the case of Everyme:
At best, we retain 5% of users through the entire onboarding process. Attempts to fix it have raised it only nominally. We are not alone on that count even amongst apps with much better onboarding and many more app versions than our own.
In his response, Fred notes that despite the fact that it's hard, it's necessary:
But just because something is hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do it. I am convinced the next set of large and valuable consumer facing services will be built with mobile as the primary user interface. You can see it in the success of Uber and Etsy this holiday season. That's where your users are most of the time. And if you don't design your products and services for what is rapidly becoming the dominant UI, you will not maximize the success of your business in the long run.
I tend to agree with Fred on this one. Mobile IS difficult. It's hard to get your app noticed in the first place, hard to get users to download it and even harder to get them to return to it a second, third and fourth time. But that's not altogether different than the web experience. In the early days of the web, people bookmarked sites all the time. I had hundreds of bookmarks in my Netscape bookmark manager. Of those hundreds of bookmarks there were even a dozen or more than I returned to frequently, but most just sat in the list, never to be clicked again.
Your platform is not the biggest factor in user engagement. Your application is. Are you providing a compelling experience that users rely upon in their daily life? If so, I'm convinced you can deliver that experience on any platform. That's not to say that the experience won't differ on the mobile platform than on the desktop, but if you deliver value, users will return.
That said, the platform is key in how users interact with your app. Does your onboarding process require users to type a lot? That's fine on the web, less so on tablets and a real challenge on smartphones. Does your business model depend on running tons of ads on every page? Again, that may be fine on the desktop (though I could argue otherwise), less so on mobile devices.
The key, of course, is understanding what you are enabling users to do, then optimizing your offering (whether a native app, a mobile web app or a web page) to deliver that capability as simply as possible. Understanding your audience is critical. Are you aiming for smartphones or tablets? Do you expect a lean forward or a lean back experience?
And mobile first doesn't have to mean app-first. For publishers, mobile first can simply be rethinking your content so that it thrives in a mobile and/or tablet experience. That may mean creating shorter articles with more images and video content. If you build web pages that look great on tablets, they'll probably serve you well on the desktop. The reverse is rarely the case.
So, is mobile development easy? Not at all. Is there a simple path to success? No. But does that suggest that mobile-first is not the right strategy? No. Your customers are shifting more of their time to tablets and mobile devices. Mary Meeker's latest study shows that 29% of American adults currently own a tablet or eReader. And it's safe to say that after this holiday season, that number will probably be more like 33%. Is that a trend that you're willing to bet against?
Success will come to those publishers and developers who understand their audience and delight them with engaging products on the platforms where they are increasingly spending their time.
