Posts tagged ‘Apple’

The Media Business Might Need a Savior, but Steve Jobs Isn’t It

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When Steve Jobs speaks, people listen. Not only do they listen, but their jaws drop slack, a droplet of saliva drools to the chin to dry and the head nods in happy obedience.

Steve Jobs ImageThat’s all well and good when you’re talking about hordes of mindless fanboys who have given over their souls to the Apple CEO and his product line, but it’s a bit disconcerting when you consider how well Jobs’ spiel plays in a media business desperate for new ideas on how to preserve itself. As we plow deeper into our Age of Non-Monetization, it’s easy to see the attraction to Jobs’ sales pitches, like the one he gave at the AllThingsD conference last night. There he once again struck his Jesus Christ pose, a would-be savior replete with the increasingly gaunt, almost ascetic visage that is so easy to submit to. It helps that he’s got the hardware, the closed-off ecosystems so difficult to disrupt, and the swelling market capitalization to boot.

He’s also got a great line that underlies his media-oriented addresses, even if he never quite drops it literally: I saved the music industry and, dear news providers, I can save you, too.

Too bad it isn’t true.

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Beyond the iPad: Get Ready for the Internet of Things

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Earlier this year, at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, I was struck by a remark that I thought I heard from Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg. “By 2020,” he said, “50 billion devices will be wirelessly connected to the internet.”

GlowCaps Remind People to Take Their PillsI was going to tweet his statement from @breakingmedia but hesitated because I thought I must have misheard. After all, that’d be more than 10 times the current number of mobile phones in the world—an already incredible 4 and a half billion—and about four web-connected devices for every person on the planet. While those of us who live in the narcissistic media navel of New York are often tempted to imagine that everyone totes an iPhone, iPad and laptop—as well as whatever desktop is getting dusty in their study at home—it seemed a stretch to imagine the average resident of, say, India or China using four or more devices. I concluded that either I wasn’t paying proper attention or Vestberg was indulging in a little bit of corporate boosterism—Ericsson is in the business of enabling mobile connections, so 50 billion of them would be good business for the Swedish equipment manufacturer.

Then, at about the time the iPad was released, I had the chance to talk with David Haight, AT&T’s VP of Business Development, Emerging Devices Organization. Ten minutes of conversation with Haight is enough to change your vision of the future from one where everyone is carrying a wireless internet device like a mobile phone, to one where that device in your hand connects you with an internet of things all around you. Everywhere.

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Magazine Apps for iPads Need Work. Here Are Five Ways They Can Improve

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I’ve spent a bit of time recently with the iPad, looking at some apps that were developed for magazine brands. It’s an experiment I assumed would be like of the those YouTube videos in which a cat, against all rules of nature, takes to nurturing a bunny or a baby squirrel: cute, compelling and somewhat dread-inducing, because you know this moment of cross-species nurturing won’t last forever.

My conclusion, after looking at 10 or so apps, is that the iPad teat won’t yield much for troubled magazine publishers if they don’t sort out some big problems with both content and commercialization.  You can already find more than a few examples of print titles trying force into the iPad content and design conventions that were honed over print’s long history. That is not a good thing, considered in the light of most print mag’s past attempts to go digital. The development of your average consumer magazine website, with its unpredictable content mix and garish, often Flash-heavy design, makes for a generally clunky experience.

On one hand, the missteps are are acceptable—it is early days after all. On the other, it’s scary, especially if you care about how these businesses will succeed in the future. The good news, of course, is that it’s far from too late to fix what’s wrong. Here are five ways to do it.

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