Look Beyond

Virgin's "On the Move" Mobile TV

Earlier this summer, Virgin Mobile announced plans to pilot live mobile digital television in the London area.

I got to take a look for myself last night as one of my friends has been asked to participate in a three month trial.  He's been given a Windows-based QTek 8020 smartphone with the capability to receive live TV from Sky News and Sky Sports News as well as 50+ radio channels. 

The system works by broadcasting over the DAB digital radio network and the quality appeared fairly good given the resolution of the phone's screen and its small display, although I did notice the image freeze occasionally.

This service is not designed for hours of continuous use given the limitations of a mobile's screen size, but it enables people to watch snippets of programmes, perhaps when running late home to watch the start of a live football match, or to see the latest weather report.  According to Virgin's press release, they also plan to eventually let customers record programmes for future viewing.

There's no doubting this service warrants entry into the Gadget of the Month (GotM) competition - see the beginning of my prior post for an overview of GotM - not least as my friend has been one of only around 1,000 people trialling the service before it launches.

BT to Launch Broadband TV

BT today announced it is to partner with Philips and Microsoft to deliver TV via broadband, also known as IPTV (Internet Protocol Television).  BT’s service will be a world first combining access to digital terrestrial channels, an extensive video on demand library, “catch-up” TV and a range of interactive services.  BT is planning to offer these services across the UK from late summer / autumn 2006.

Blogs - A Useful Introduction

Over the last few weeks I have talking to various people about my growing interest in blogs and have seen many puzzled faces.  So for those experiencing their first blog when visiting mine, click here for a definition of a blog on Wikipedia.

And for those working in a marketing capacity, I would encourage you to read my recent post on how blogs are changing the relationship between organisations and its customers and the challenges and opportunities this presents.

In a recent presentation, Charline Li, an analyst with Forrester, also provides an excellent introduction to blogging and social computing and how companies can tap into these technologies to develop deeper relationships with consumers.  Click here to view the 30 minute video.

Google - The 100 Billion Dollar Company

Last week Google announced record revenues of nearly $1.6 billion for the third quarter ending 30 September 2005, nearly double the same period in 2004.

Since the announcement, the company's market capitalisation topped $100 billion for the first time just 14 months after becoming a public company.  At the time of the Initial Public Offering (IPO), when their shares were priced at $85, Google was valued at $23.1 billion.

This meteoric rise puts Google in an exclusive club of only around 20 companies which have market values of over $100 billion.  This club includes famous names such as Microsoft ($271 billion), Intel ($143 billion), IBM ($135 billion), Coca-Cola ($102 billion).  But as Red Herring reports, none got there as quickly as Google which is just 7 years old.

Google's success underlines the huge impact the Internet is having on society as it becomes more entrenched as part of our day to day lives.  In less than 10 years the web has transformed how we research, consumer information and communicate.  And Google, although not one of the original search engines, has been at the heart of this revolution.

But does this make Google worth as much as Coca-Cola, a company founded back in 1886?  I am currently reading John Battelle's book, The Search, which may help to crystallize my view.

Adoption of Mobile Data Services

This week's Sunday Times reports that 3, the mobile operator owned by Hutchison Whampoa has relaunched itself ahead of a potential flotation.  Bob Fuller, 3's CEO declared that 3 was the embodiment of convergence: "we are not a telco, we are not a media company, we are not a technology company... our business is radically different because we are all three."

Does this claim sound familiar?  A throwback to the dotcom era perhaps?

3's data revenues from services such as ringtones, video calling etc. today amount to less than a quarter of its total revenue and widespread interest is unproven.

However, the ringtone phenomenon has the mobile operators and entertainment companies are salivating at the prospect of delivering mobile content such as television and music downloads via 3G networks.    And 3 is betting that mobile phones and not iPods or portable games consoles will be the device of choice for people to consume this content whilst on the move.

I'm yet to be convinced.  The take up of such services, even by early adopters, has been hindered by expensive data tariffs which need to fall considerably, to an affordable "all you can eat" or capped usage fixed price to attract greater experimentation and adoption by the mass market.  And I suspect most premium data services will be less of an attraction than simple mobile web access.

BSkyB's Triple-Play Move

Further to my prior post on its anticipated triple-play strategy, Sky today announced its first acquisition since its £1bn bond issue.  The company has agreed to acquire Easynet, a pan-European broadband ISP for £211m.

The transaction launches Sky into the telecoms business, enabling it to offer a combination of pay TV, telephony and broadband, pitching it against the likes of the soon to be merged NTL and Telewest and Homechoice.  It also provides additional competition for BT and firms such as AOL and Wanadoo.

This deal also takes Sky closer to being able to broadcast programmes over the Internet.  It'll be intriguing to see their strategy evolve in light of Apple's recent TV content deal as outlined in my post last week.

Endemol Targets the "Third Screen"

The Guardian reports that Endemol is to launch two new mobile phones TV channels in the UK.  Mobiles are being touted as the "third screen", after TVs and PCs.  Endemol will first launch a channel featuring "bizzarrest and weirdest" clips with a comedy channel to follow.

Well Informed?

Neal Goldman, founder and former CEO of CapitalIQ (acquired by Standard & Poors last year for circa $225 million), this week launched his latest venture, Inform Technologies.

Inform, currently in beta, is a news service designed to enable users to more easily piece together the background to a current story of interest using a variety of related web news sources and blogs - the content available spans 4 days.

The service automatically extracts and tags content from news stories related to things such as  companies, people, places, industries, topics etc.  This enables a user to navigate the web of related news by clicking one of these tags. 

As the service is currently in beta it is obviously a little rough around the edges.  But I did find the interface a little clunky.  Existing subscription-based news aggregation services such as Factiva and LexisNexis do offer some of this capability today although their coverage majors on news wires and print publications rather than web-based sources.  But they're not free services.

So has Inform the potential to succeed?  Following the write-up in the New York Times, Inform has attracted a lot of comment in the blogging community, not all complimentary - one example here.

My view is that it clearly is work in progress but there seems much to do to make it more user friendly to the casual user - I suspect professional researchers will continue to demand the breadth and depth of traditional media sources available in services such as Factiva.  I'll be keeping a watching brief.

What do you think - go check out the website for yourselves. 

VeriSign Acquires Moreover

The content story of the day is the announcement that VeriSign has acquired Moreover Technologies for approximately $30m.  This transaction follows hot on the heels of its recent purchase of Weblogs.com for $2.3m.

This is an intriguing move by VeriSign, best known for its network infrastructure business.  Its rationale is that the blogosphere has defined a new framework for publishing content on the Internet but the fragmented supporting infrastructure is having trouble keeping up. 

The advent and growing popularity of blogs and RSS feeds have changed the dynamics of where and how information is consumed and is turning traditional online publishing on its head.  As is so eloquently described in this post on VeriSign's own blog (which gives an insider's view on this transaction), the humble ping, a mechanism for bloggers to notify all those interested that they've published some new content, is responsible for this paradigm shift. 

The ping has enabled companies such as Moreover to tag and syndicate harvested content in a structured feed, all in real-time.  It has also enabled RSS readers to provide the content consumer with relevant stories delivered to their desktop without having to manually go and seek out new stories of interest on the web.

Increasingly, traditional media and corporate websites will adopt the same publishing model as the blogosphere and VeriSign wants to be at the forefront of building a resilient and scalable real-time content distribution platform - "the plumbing" - to support this.  You can read a summary of a PaidContent.org interview with senior executives of Moreover and Verisign here.

Watch this space!

Controlling the Corporate Message

Netimperative published an interesting article today on the use of blogs by the corporate community in the UK.  According to a recent survey conducted by SixApart and Lewis PR, only 11% of CEOs and communications directors from UK companies have developed either a personal or corporate blog.  That is despite 43% agreeing that blogs will become a major source of information in the future.

Being fairly new to the blogosphere myself, I'm still discovering the existing online conversations I want to contribute to.  And as I mentioned in my first post, public opinion can now be influenced like no time before by individuals.  Customers, competitors, suppliers, journalists and employees are all blogging.  So the corporate message has become much more difficult to control as individuals are empowered like never before.

A recent example.  Matthew Peterson was one of hundreds of thousands of consumers who had bought a new iPod Nano following its launch.  But he soon discovered the Nanos he and many others had bought had display screens which damaged easily, often within hours of purchase.  So Matthew set up a site (flawedmusicplayer.com - now taken down) as a means of seeking the comments of others who had similar experiences and to pressure Apple into acknowledging and dealing with the problem.  Within days, his site and numerous other blogs had literally thousands of comments from people commenting on these problems.  Traditional media also picked up on the story giving it even greater prominence.  In response, Apple acknowledged the problem saying there was a "vendor quality problem" (and not a design issue) and stated that it affected less than 0.1% of shipped products.  Apple also offered to provide those affected with a replacement free of charge.  In this example, Apple responded quickly and extinguished what could have been a PR disaster.

So organisations are putting themselves at significant reputational and commercial risk if they do not monitor and respond to these online conversations in an agile and positive manner.  And these conversations are happening today, with or without the participation of the organisations they may concern.  So there is a great opportunity, perhaps an imperative, for organisations to influence these by actively participating.

Just last week, Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm in New York converted their corporate website into a blog - Fred Wilson, one of the partners, explains why here.  This may be an extreme approach for most but there are some valuable lessons to be learned. 

Lewis PR recently held a breakfast seminar to discuss the impact of blogging on the corporate community and provides some thoughts on the dos and don't of creating a corporate blog.  You can view the presentations here - well worth taking a look at.