As magazine publishers are looking for ways to survive the digital revolution, there is one knight in shining armor – the iPad. At VDZ’s Digital innovator summit, the “magical” device was mentioned every second panel. Booths at the exhibition area showed protoypes of iPad applications, and CMS vendors stated that they are planning iPad support sooner then later.

However, amazingly enough, most of the people I’ve talked with never saw the iPad or held it in their own hands. Most of their knowledge about the device derived from Apple’s announcement and blogs – not first hand impression.

Though seems strange at first, that a whole industry would be betting its future on a device that almost no one  used or seen, when looking t the deatails, the iPad is a publisher’s wet dream:

1.  A sexy device

2. That provide a rich media experience, way better than the black and white Kindle

3. With embedded DRM, billing, and distribution mechanism

Based on iPhone and iPod success, iPad has the potential to become the magazine industry’s savior. However, magazines could not rely on single device or concept to be the answer of  all their woes.

Want to know what P&G told publishers about their future? check out this post.

Facebook is slowly removing many of the elements that made it a marketer’s wet dream.

Facebook announced several major changes that affect marketers using the platform to promote their services:
1. Splitting feeds to news feed and live feed – users see, as defualt, a feed with only content and comments from their friends. Information about groups etc was moved to a separate feed.
2. Removal of app notification - Facebook apps will not be able to send notifications to users.
These changes reduce the virality of the platform in a major way.
For example, if in the past one could invite friends to become fans of a page, and his friends would have seen that he joined, now they wouldn’t see it unless they look for it. This effect was crucial for virality of fan pages and applications. The same goes for notifications.
While many users rejoice, as they see more relevant and focused information on their feed and notification tab, marketers should rethink the way they interact in Facebook.

The two most important consequences for marketers are:

1.  Advertising becomes more important in creating traffic to Facebook applications and fan pages - without virality, paid advertisement within the platform, or in other channels, is an important part of any Facebook marketing activity

2. Fan pages and apps should provide more value to users, as it will be more difficult to attract repeat visitors.

In the next part we will discuss additional changes in the platform and what are the opportunities for marketers in this area.

Last week, the online video world rejoiced. For the first time, Hulu, the online premium video provider, had more viewers than Time Warner Cable subscribers. Pro online video folks all around gathered to support the revolution as it unfolds.

The only thing missing is, well, like in most cases, money. Hulu is making small time money compared to Time Warner Cable.

The paradigm of digital cents is very simple – services are much cheaper on the internet, and the value of goods is diminished when they are distributed or sold digitally. The full phrase states that the media industry is facing a challenge – as it transforms from analog dollars to digital cents. This issue is affecting advertisers who are asking agencies to shift dollars from expensive TV spots to cheaper online advertising, which in return hurts the media business.

Hulu, though delivering the same shows as TV channels, is not making as much money as the traditional providers. This is a major challenge to the whole media industry. But it is not alone.

The slow demise of the walled garden adds another pressure, to a different section of the value chain – the operators. The mobile market is a great example how technology is threatening the old world order. Early in this decade, when GPRS launched all over Europe, operators believed that the answer of their declining voice ARPU would come from selling content, such as ringtones and wallpapers.

The basis of this strategy was the operators controlled the availability of content to users – whatever an operator put on its portal could be sold – but nothing else. This way, by creating scarcity, the operators could gain revenues and control the subscriber’s experience.

Then came Apple.

And Google.

And Nokia.

And all these companies decided to break operator’s hegemony and tear down the garden’s walls. Android, iPhone and Ovi challenge the mobile operator’s ability to control the content and customer experience.

While media companies such as NBC and HBO don’t have a choice but to be a part of the digital cents game, operators have some ways to leverage this market disruption to their advantage.

Services are, in my opinion, a key to change the cents to dollars. Some of them are clear but still not done well, such as three screen syncing – allowing users to start watching a show on their TV set and continue to watch it on their mobile phone.

Some are based on cutting deals with the devil – and tightly integrate web services with traditional TV content. Several companies unveiled such services, such as TV and Twitter integration.

And some are downright evil, such as disregarding net neutrality and providing differentiated quality of services to content providers, based on deals with preferred content providers.

If operators will succeed in finding the right services and implement them in the near future,  we might see that they will rise to play a more significant role in  the media industry.

It’s phenomenal growth shows that a limited, real time network answers a market need, which in turn becomes an opportunity for brands and service providers.

We also see a phenomenal click through rate on links in Twitter messages, probably due to the fact that  Twitter users are there in order to interact and consume content. This interaction makes Twitter a powerful distribution platform.

Twitter started the real time microblogging revolution.

But, risking actually having to eat my hat for this post in the future, I believe that in the long run it won’t sustain as an independent network.

Twitter suffers from several core issues:

1. Lack of context – there is almost no way to track conversation and actually understand how conversations develop in the network

2. Limited extensibility – the 140 characters limit makes it extremely complex to create services based on this protocol (tip hat to Gil Dibner for this one)

3. Lack of groups and filtering – users cannot group contacts based on interest or other parameters and broadcast a message only to them. For example, if I am on a diet, and would like to share it with a community in real time, it might be the case that I wouldn’t be interested that my business partners will be aware of that. Today, the only way to do it is to create separate Twitter accounts for each group, and convince relevant people to follow it.

4. Non intuitive interaction and interface – how many times did you try to define what’s Twitter to your mom? And how easy it is with Facebook? And how complex it is for new users to “get” what is it all about? I believe that this is one of the main reasons of the 60% service churn reported recently.

I strongly believe that real time Microblogging will prevail – as it has a lot to offer. But taking these issues into consideration, we will see that Twitter as a service, will have limited long term growth.

So what will be the future of Microblogging?

1. We will see more and more communities integrate Twitter-like functionality in their sites – for example, no reason why a diet site won’t allow users to interact in a closed, real time, microblogging environment. These niche real time communities will fragment Twitter potential user base and diminish the value of a general purpose network.

2. Major portals will add their own version of microblogging as well – Yahoo! is already doing it, and Facebook/Friendfeed deal might show the direction they are taking. This will be another nail in the coffin of Twitter as general purpose network.

3. Twitter as an independent network will either collapse due to spam, lack of groups and other issues, or will be bought by one of the major online players – for their users base. It will always have a hardcore fan base, but it won’t be enough, in my opinion, to sustain it financially.

Twitter might be the forerunner in bringing the real time microblogging revolution to the masses. But it might well be,  that just like Che Guevara,  it won’t enjoy the fruits of the revolution it created.

You are tech savvy and a social media enthusiast with REAL followers on twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. You speak Hebrew and English fluently.
And you love all things beautiful, and appreciate the importance of visual elements in everything we do.

It would be also great if you have project or account management experience, B2B or B2C marketing know how, you love all things Mac, have video editing, directing or shooting experience and you are an active blogger

We are a B2B/B2C digital agency, with publicly traded international customers, that is expanding its operation. We believe that the relations between brands, companies and customers are changing fundamentally, and there is a need for a new breed of marketeers that understand different platforms, know how to integrate them, and how to create value to for customers and brands/companies alike. We also believe that there are new ways to communicate with customers, that doesn’t necessarily require buying expensive media.

If we work together, you will create and execute multi-platform digital and real life activities that challenge traditional advertising and PR industry.

If you’d like to apply – send us your CV. It can be video, images, or plain old paper. You can find us at Jobs AT pravdam.com or on Facebook (Kfir Pravda)

Huffington Post, the forward thinking media company, released what they called “social news”, and what we will call “Facebook connect integration in a website”. Users can now log in to the site with their Facebook credentials, post their comments on HP article on their wall, and subscribe to their favorite bloggers.

This move is brilliant, as it harnesses reader’s social graph for Huffington Post’s benefit – and increases engagement and exposure to its content. I’ve registered yesterday to the service, wrote a comment on an article, and received responses on this article on my Facebook profile – from people that never read or even heard about Huffington Post.

Gigya, one of my favorite startups, is making this process even easier, with their socialize platform, which provides a unified API to various social networks.

I am still amazed to see that only small number of media companies are harnessing Facebook Connect and Twitter API as a mean to increase exposure and virality of their content. I hope that Huffington Post will publish a study that will show if their latest move increased exposure.

Social distribution, the harnessing of social graphs for media distribution, is the most important opportunity for media companies in the near future. Is your media company ready for the challenge?

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• Huffington Post, Facebook sync up on social news (news.cnet.com)
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Bashing Apple is the new black in the blogosphere. It started with Michael Arrington that announced that he dropped iPhone due to the Google Voice Debacle, followed by a less than accurate  (to say the least) post by  Calacanis where he bashed Apple for reasons starting with Google Voice story to their unwillingness to open iTunes to competing MP3 players.To sum it up, some people believe that Apple is nothing but an evil force  with an awesome design capabilites

Now, I don’t consider myself a fanboy (though I own two Macbook Pros, iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPhone, and a life size poster of Jobs in my living room), but a lot of these arguments are lame.

Let’s start with the definition is Evil. Evil is a big green monster eating small children , World War Two otrocities, the guys who let Kevin Costner do Waterworld, and the inventors of hair metal. A company that creates awesome products but doesn’t like to play nice is not evil, but aggressive at best.

Why iTunes doesn’t allow to sync music with other devices? WHY WOULD IT? Does anyone stops Microsoft, Archos, or any other manufacturer to create their own sync application for Mac and PC? NO. Apple doesn’t block other sync applications, they just have the strange tendency not to shoot themselves in the foot.

Why AppStore approval  process suck so much? Cause they weren’t prepared for the amount of apps they need to authorize. iPhone developers know it, so why are they saying that it makes Apple evil? Unorganized at best will be my choice of words.Yes, Apple needs to get their act together, but at the end of the day – if developers don’t like the way things are they are more then welcome to develop for other platforms. Like Windows Mobile. Ha? no hands? why? CAUSE THE iPHONE ECOSYSTEM IS WAY BETTER THAN ITS COMPETITORS. After years of mobile developers eating crap from carriers and aggregators , who leave them with %10 of the revenues, they have the chance to make decent money. True, it is still hard, but at least they keep 70% of the revenues!

Now, the Apple Tax – the strange claim that Apple products cost more than its competitors. Well:

1. Mercedes costs more than Toyota.

2. You pay for quality

3. No one is forcing you to buy Apple

4. Apple doesn’t have low end products at all. Comparable hardware costs the same  in some markets.

5. Don’t buy if you don’t like it

6. The real Apple Tax is iPhone battery life, but that’s a whole different  post

The funniest thing ever is that people are protecting Google from Apple. GOOGLE. The guys who know almost everything about us, starting with our search history, through our emails, documents and even location. If Apple didn’t do the right thing with the Google Voice application, the big guys from FCC will know what to do with them – but, do you really believe that Google needs protection from Apple?

So let’s put things straight – Apple are selling high priced, high quality technology products, and isn’t interested at all in helping the competition. It is a business, not a peace corps branch.  Strange guys, I tell you.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Apple, the App Store just isn’t you (macworld.com)
• Apple is really pushing its luck (componentoriented.com)
• Apple: You Can Be Jerks Until Grandma Gets Mad (ricksegal.typepad.com)

How will video and collaboration technology impact your life and work in 2025?
This is the question we will try to answer on IMTC’s annual event, taking place on the 17th and 18th of November, 2009.
With telepresence, online collaboration, social TV, and standardization advancements, our cubicle and living room will never look the same.

In IMTC we practice what we preach. Therefore, we decided to have a full blown virtual event, utilizing commercially available products and technologies.

Are you a thought leader in visual communication, online collaboration, social TV, the future of the living room, or any area that is relevant to collaboration, video or communication? Come and speak at our event – without leaving your office, via video conferencing, chat and remote presentations.

Here are some of the topics we thought about – but please feel free to contact us with additional relevant topics:
1. HTML 5, standard web video delivery and its effect on the value chain
2. Online collaboration status
3. Metadata and what it means for media companies and users
4. HD voice
5. Democratization of video conferencing and Telepresence in the living room
6. Social TV
7. Triple play in the living room – what’s next?

As a speaker you will be requested to send us your proposal, and write a short blog post about your topic that will be published in relevant blogs.

Interested? Email us at kfir AT pravdam DOT com with 2025 in the subject line.
Please send us your proposals by September 30th.