Owen Brunette

Some favorite TED bookmarks:

No message but you should watch these three humorous minutes by Renny Gleeson on social phone use; or some game theory regarding Iran; or even using house plants to provide air quality.

My all time favorite is the discussion of the developing world illuminated by some great graphics.

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Rupert Murdoch was much derided for his attempt to promote the use of pay walls (The requirement to pay before receiving access to the site), but the New York Times and others are singing the same tune with their support of Steve Brill’s Press+ paywall software. The New York Times have announced they are going to use it for some of their blogs though they haven’t announced which blogs yet.

Rupert Murdoch described two kinds of readers. Those who arrive through search engines, about which the content provider has minimal information, and loyal readers. He has difficulty monetizing the fleeting search arrivals and relies on the demographics of the loyal readers to sell advertising opportunities to those with significant advertising budgets. The resulting conclusion that this search traffic must be behind a pay wall was derided by many commentators as nostalgic nonsense.

Maybe Mr Murdoch is just dealing with the reality that search driven traffic comes with insufficient data to allow advertising to pay for the cost of paying journalists.

While loyal readers and advertising may pay for the lower costs of digital content for main stream content there is going to be a section or category of content which can’t raise, say $200 per story, and for these more specialized articles to be written by paid journalists there needs to be some kind of pay wall model. It is easy to imagine this for specialized trade press particularly targeting high margin businesses such as financial services but what isn’t yet clear is how large the paid market is under main stream brands such as the New York Times or the New York Post.

Outside of high volume advertising based model, and the paywall model, the remaining models are of sponsorship, subsidy, pro-am journalism and advertorial where there is no attempt to make significant revenue directly from the content. The recent comments by Jeff Jarvis regarding hyper local content and CUNY’s venture with the New York Times are leading in this third direction with a combined pro-am and advertorial flavor maintained with minimal advertising revenue.

All of these models will inevitably exist for different kinds of content both for separate publications or combined within different sections of the same publications. We just need to let things settle out and see how much content is going to be consumed under each model.

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One of the topics that came up in this week’s Thursday Morning Coffee Meetup was the extent to which companies should be following social rather than financial objectives. Most people want to do their bit for society and it seems that possibly the majority of people in the startup community are wanting to adopt a primarily social or charitable focus to their activities. I can’t help worrying that this is not a realistic path for most of the people following it. If one is generating cash then diverting a potentially significant proportion to charity definitely helps us all but trying to factor in social objectives to every business decision leads to some very difficult decision making.

One can barely travel to a client or deliver a product and present it as ecologically sustainable. Even the much heralded virtues of the ingredients of some chunky ice creams are really greening of a product which clogs arteries and even kills off customers. Trying to be truly consistent could lead to some very long office meetings. The effect would tend to be a weight on the ecologically and socially conscious businesses. The more equitable way forward, I would argue, is for people to be better informed to be able to make the decisions they need to make and to be less shy about regulation so that businesses are on a level playing field that takes account of wider social impact. For each company to try to decide this for itself is a less practical solution than the regulation adopted in Europe, Japan and increasingly in China.

The prevailing wish in the discussion this week to have corporations manage the decision is probably in large part an effect of being in US culture where there is minimal regulation, little supervision and a lack of any notion that government should have a more active social role. Or even be effective in general. Corporations seem to be looked to to solve all problems. Our national government spends less than 0.5% of spending on education, less than 1.5% on social programs and a total of 48% of non overhead spending on the military. So the idea that the national government should be taking care of social expenditure, taxing carbon emissions and other destruction often seems foreign. It does seem though that at least the need is being identified, which is a cultural change for the US, if the solution being discussed is still a very different one.

Governance, Management, Society, Technology, Toys, Travels, Uncategorized

I have been trying a Skype collaboration plugin (Which they call an Extra) called Yugma. Of course despite having a good impression of the Skype brand before downloading some potentially time wasting tool I read the user comments.

So the comments were more promising than a competitors where most people were discussing problems trying to uninstall that product, but what really interested me was how high the expectations were in people’s comments of interaction from Skype and the Vendor of the Extra. People expected to be listened to and interacted with. They didn’t expect a faceless corporate stony silence.

They expected the kind of meaningful response that one would want from an account rep in an offline environment. In this case they received it from Yugma in the form of Liz who begins and ends her post with her name. Something which I noticed I reacted positively to.

The need to be aware of and rapidly responsive to customers in all communication channels is so important in today’s customer service. It is so much easier and more cost effective to achieve with web sites and modern communication but sadly so many companies drop the ball and allow the geographic separation to cause them to disregard customers in a way which they never would in person. For customers to love the product and recommend it these communications are so important.

I installed Yugma, the product with better user comments and responsive human customer service. Of course it doesn’t seem to function with the latest version of Skype. It’s difficult to apportion blame but given the comments to this effect and the lack of response from Skype it rather appears that Skype don’t have their act together in managing the versioning of Extra’s from this and other Vendors. Yugma +1, Skype -1. Of course if the app execution worked one could really award some points!

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