Sandlines

I picked up my iPhone this morning and thought “it’s just about perfect, except it could be bigger…”

I guess I’m not alone – it seems the good folks over at Cupertino have been on the same thought. And, as regulars on this blog will know, I’ve been a consumer of ebooks on my iphone for a long time.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the media about how the iPad may help publishers embrace the digital era – especially this excellent post over at Gizmodo, which identifies that Apple are trying to do what they did with the iPod: not haggle about the early adopter audience who’ve already bought a Creative JukeBox (or Kindle in this case) but rather reach the rest of the world. Those regular consumers who just like great kit that works.

The impact on marketing is huge. The transition of apps from the iPhone to the iPad will be an enormous opportunity for marketers who’ve succeeded in engaging their customers to the extent of committing to a download. This might be content driven – or commerce driven – or other ‘marketing as a service’ approaches. And yes, I’m look at you, fashion retailers, banks and other service providers.

My colleagues at my new employer, Lyris, are working on an app for a fashion retailer that already looks great on the iPhone. If the high net worth customers of this brand do, as I suspect they will, end up with iPads to do their surfing, they are almost certain to use it to do their online fashion shopping.

Are you ready for that?

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the price of success

I’ve been twittering on and off for a while now – trying to figure out how it fits in with all my other activities – and gradually finding it more and more interesting over time. Already this year, the buzz around the microblogging service has kicked up several gears: Stephen Fry’s often witty stream-of-consciousness has been a highlight, but I’ve been gradually seeing more and more of my friends and business contacts using it.

Links back and forth with blogs (alerting to updates), Facebook, various IM and LinkedIn status messages seem to have potential.

One of my LinkedIn connections has been using his status to advise media sales people when he is in ‘buy’ mode – I’m curious to learn how this will impact the quality of his media buys.

Twitter has also gained considerably attention in mainstream media this month: suddenly DJs on Radio 1 are talking about it incessantly.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that  @gordonm’s tweet yesterday about Twitters desire to monetise their service by charging businesses for using the service in a commercial fashion was essentially a link back to the Brand Republic site.

I don’t know how many followers @gordonm has at the moment, but the suggestion of how effective this can be found in @stephenfry’s history, where his mere mention of a site can bring their servers to a standstill. Mr Fry has over 150,000 followers today.

So how long before Twitter becomes part of the marketing landscape? And how will they develop sufficient revenues so that they can improve their up-time (Twitter.com is down as I write this)?

One interesting example: on Monday my flight from Heathrow was delayed by 2 hours. I tweeted “Desperate rush to h’row this morning was futile: flight delayed 2 hrs +. Grrr.”  This from my iPhone.

Almost at once I had a response from Boarding! inviting me to post details of airport to them to meet up with other stranded travellers.

It’s going to be an interesting one to watch: can Twitter do what other social networks are struggling to do and crack the social networking revenue stream conundrum? My guess is there’s a way to make it work via mobile perhaps. AFullerView evidently has some ideas as well.

Anyone else?

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Since my last post, two key things that combine to lead to this post:

• I bought an iPhone (perhaps not earth-shattering news)
• I’ve been travelling an indecent amount

And guess what? I found myself using the internet en route far more than is normal, even for me. I found myself playing some time-eating games, listening to some music, keeping up with my emails, talking to friends, family and business contacts… all far more than even I did on my previous (extensive) roster of smartphones, PDA’s and laptops.

Apple just have a knack with usability that other manufacturers are miles off matching. I used to like the ability to surf the web on the move – now, for the first time, it’s actually a pleasure to do so.

I’ve always argued that Apple are the best in the business for their marketing and ability to create a ‘wow-factor’. But also that they are rarely actually the best machines (and almost never the best-priced equipment). I think the iPhone ticks all the boxes (well, except best-priced).

Guess I just joined the herd.

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G1 vs Jesus-phone

Ah, the mighty battle between T-Mobile’s G1 and Apple’s jesus-phone.

Yesterday morning (having finally made a decision between them) I took delivery of the G1. Tomorrow they’re coming to take it away again.

Now don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot to love about the G1 – but it’s all about the Android platform. The problem is the hardware: there are just too many niggles there to let me feel I’ll be able to stand 18 months of this phone.

Matters came to a head when I had to call T-Mobile’s (excellent) customer service centre… and met with the typical “press 1 for…” numeric menu.

To do this on the G1, you have to take the phone away from your ear, open the keyboard and then hit the appropriate key. Madness!!!

I think Android will win through in the end: it’s early stage, but the interface is intuitive, adaptable, amazingly flexible, powerful and very fast. But it’s a genie trapped in a cracked bottle.

The App Store (Android Market) is a delight to use – even better than the iTunes App Store – and will (I firmly believe) win out when the depth of apps swells to fill it, as it has over at Apple.

Meanwhile, as Martina King, then MD of Yahoo! UK & Ireland, once said to me: “A phone needs just one killer app: it needs to make calls.” Both the G1 and the vast range of windows mobile phones appear not to have picked up on that yet.

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Who moved my nuts?

Many, many moons ago I helped start Associated Newspapers online efforts. Back in those days (mid-90s) there was much debate about how traditional publishers could embrace online media – but essentially two models were emerging: replicate the content online (the most common model) or develop extensions to the core titles that maybe used some content but were likely to originate their own approach ‘in harmony’ with the parent publisher.

Oh, and then there were the others, such as Time Out, who were famously terrified about what online was going to do to the bottom line.

So a decade and a bit slips by, and online is now a major medium. Could overtake TV spend shortly. Over in the US it seems to be getting the blame for ‘killing’ newspapers.

And still we find the print publishers trying to work out how to make their digital strategies pay for the demise of traditional income sources.

The most recent example of this hit me this morning – Asda (!) are launching the wonderfully named ‘Asda Digital Newsagent‘. Yes really.

Asda Digital Newsagent

Seems to me to be a very similar model to Zinio, who I believe do pretty well in the US. And who have a pretty decent (free to air over Safari) version online for the iPhone.

But come on – from a consumer point of view, do I really want to ‘read’ a magazine on my computer? Books, well yes of course – on a handheld, for portability. And I can see some value in the iPhone pages at Zinio… though the ‘free’ price tag about the content suggests no-one expects you to replace buying the magazine that way.

Magazines are typically consumed as a treat. I remember when, at Associated, we were launching the ill-fated Charlotte Street site for femails (sic). My wife, perceptively, pointed out that you couldn’t take a website into the bath and flick through the pages. It’s a different type of experience entirely.

Meanwhile, iGizmo has set up a decent online magazine, which looks at first glance like some of the Asda Digital Newsagent titles, but adds considerable extra functionality to the flat magazine style.

So Asda’s version simply sells you an image of each magazine spread, wrapped in a bit of navigation to dress it up. And then charges you exactly what you’d pay for it in print.

I may well be proved wrong on this, but I really don’t see how this can possibly produce a worthwhile business model. For readers OR for advertisers (the ads (especially the double page spreads) are even easier to skim past than in print.

I, for one, will not be buying.

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even wetter than the real thing?

As the sun passes the yard arm and my thoughts (already?) start turning to what I might be consuming down the pub this evening, I was entertained to read that the iPint app on the iPhone (developed by a UK agency to promote Carling’s particular brew) is now the subject of a lawsuit from the US developers of a notably similar looking app called, er, iBeer.

I’ve never really seen why someone would pay $2.99 to get iBeer, personally, but I loved the creativity involved in Carling’s use of a similar looking but functionally different (yes, apparently, that’s the truth) app as one of the first ‘advertising’ uses of an iPhone app. A simply great piece of engagement marketing.

I wonder how much extra mileage all parties will get out of any ensuing PR coverage?

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Over at Forbes.com, speculation has been raised that the iPhone already has a larger number of ebook readers (people that is, not apps) than Amazon has sold Kindles… this is based on 390,000 downloads of an app called Stanza.

cover flow on your bookshelf?

Interestingly, this far outpaces the eReader software I’ve been using. I can’t see figures for it, but I believe the number to be around 1/3 of that CORRECTION: about the same (see comment below). I suspect this difference in take-up relates to the choice of ‘free’ books available on Stanza rather than offering access to a paid-for store with a broader range of titles. I will watch with interest to find out if the 390,000 who have tried Stanza stick around with it.

What it certainly reinforces for me is that, as discussed earlier on Sandlines, the future of ebooks is with devices you already carry, not new stand alone devices.

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Maybe the whole point of twitter is that it is time-sensitive. If you feel that strongly, stop reading now.

But a colleague of mine was twittering from a conference that my company, Silverpop, staged yesterday in London. He was using his pet iPhone for the task.

Apart from showing some of the things that I’m professionally interested in, I was curious about how the twitters worked to develop a historic record of how the event worked. I’d love to hear any feedback!

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This has been brewing in my mind for a while, so it’s about time I talked ebooks – and the devices on which they’re read. And AFullerView’s comments on the subject have nudged me to action.

Following Sony’s belated entry to the UK market, the likely arrival here of Amazon’s Kindle, and the already available Iliad, there’s been a lot of talk about the future of the humble-yet-mighty book.

Jeanette Winterson wrote an impassioned, if Luddite, piece about why she’s not a fan, though somewhat muddled up with a defence of the importance of spelling correctly… a somewhat linked, but discrete topic. Her main criticism is that ebooks don’t make it any easier to get books into people’s hands.

Well, I do and I don’t agree. Not sitting on the fence: I want to make an important distinction.

I don’t believe the ‘dedicated device’ route is a good way forward for reading ebooks. Particularly via the Sony eReader approach, which (in true Sony style, limits you to buying a proprietary DRM format of books that is at odds with the best range of ebooks available online, over at the excellent Fictionwise.

And there’s good news. If you own a decent smartphone, you can read books in a variety of formats right there – on your iPhone/iPod Touch (by far my favourite ebook reading device to date), on Windows Mobile devices (I’ve had a couple of those) and on old fashioned PDAs. I started reading ebooks back in 2002 on my Palm T3, and I’ve never looked back.

The screens have become gradually more eye-friendly. The range of books is slowly but steadily increasing. The price is appropriate – a little less than a printed book. Reader: this is the way forward. And as the digital ink that makes the Sony device look so good gains currency, the experience can only improve.

And if you go down this path, the green credentials of ebook reading are pretty decent too: you’re simply expanding the value from a device you already have, so no overhead there. And no trees.

Book 2.0 in action

Crucially, it means that hefty tomes, such as Neal Stephenson’s new 800 page wopper, Anathem, is reduced to something that puts no additional strain on my briefcase for my commute.

So, better screens on existing ’smart devices’ = less eyestrain, less backstrain, less bagstrain. And removes the ‘barrier to entry’ issue from Ms Winterson et al… it’s not just putting books in the hands of people who haven’t tended to read them, it’s putting the opportunity for entire libraries there.

= result.

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Those ARE real people down there... just click and see!

Sandlines is idly pondering his No. 1 FAQ, namely “what happens next”?

I wrote a few weeks back about buzzword inflation in the form of Web 3.0, as a framework for speculation. For me, one of the key elements is going to be the increase in relevance online. And a key driver for relevance is location.
Location has long been a tricky beast to observe on the web. Local IP addresses (especially outside the US) are difficult to get right, leaving declared location (via registration data) the nearest thing we often have for an answer.

But people are pesky things, They’ve an irritating tendency (at least, irritating in this context) to move about – i.e. changing their location, therefore their criteria for relevance shifts with them…. pub vs office vs coffee shop vs living room etc.

That said, they’re pretty ingenious too. Witness the invention of devices such as the iPod Touch (on which I wrote this post) or the iPhone – or other (gasp) smartphones, PDAs, laptops, UMPCs or even the Asus EeePC. All with internet capabilities of varying levels of usefulness and usability.

And guess what? They are terrific at pinpointing location. If I use my iPod Touch with WiFi and go to Google Maps, it puts me within 500m of my actual location. And not a cellular transmitter in sight. So, an opportunity for better (ie more relevant) search results for web users; better targeting options for advertisers… a better online experience all round.

That still creates challenges: how do you generate the content that provides relevance online? It’s easy enough to get macro level local content, but the more granular stuff is much harder to obtain. Businesses old (Yell.com) and new (UpMyStreet, KnoWhere.co.uk) try, but I think it’s unrealistic to expect traditional approaches to editorial to fill the gap. You need to generate community - for communities. In other words, user generated content: reviews, listings, groups etcetera. It is happening, but there’s still a way to go.

Location is going to be critical to the Web 3.0 future. Watch this (local) space.

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