Category: The Internet

Why Newspapers Will be Dead Soon

Posted on

Read this post this morning by a former editor of the Chicago Times.  He writes: 

Several years ago, the Washington Post convened a series of focus groups to learn why most individuals under the age of 45 did not subscribe to the newspaper. It’s not that people didn’t like the Post, reported the American Journalism Review in an article describing the research project in 2005. The problem was that the respondents – many of whom happily consumed news on digital devices – drew the line at piles of old newspapers cluttering up their lives.  According to a Post executive quoted by the AJR, more than one respondent declared: “I don’t want that hulking thing in my house.” 

Totally true. I don’t want the actual paper showing up every day and creating another task for me to do.  I’d rather just read it somewhere and then forget about it.   A few other facts listed that i thought were interesting:

  • Print newspaper readership ranged from 16% of forty-somethings to only 6% of those in their twenties (survey by Pew).  By contrast, Pew found that 30% of Americans aged 50-64 and 48% of those over the age of 65 had read a newspaper on the prior day.
  • Pew found that only 29% of the American population read a newspaper in 2012, as compared with 56% in 1991 – the first time researchers asked the question.

The newspaper is totally dead.  People like me and my age are not reading it at all. The USA Today given to me at the hotel is totally ignored.  This is part of a general trend of things we like as stated by Mary Meeker in this 2012 report.  Such as: 

  • We don’t want to own CDs, haul around books, buy cars, carry cash, or do our own chores  
  • We will use smartphones to buy, borrow or steal media
  • We will rent shared cars at home or book shared rooms when traveling
  • We will hire people to buy groceries or cut the grass
  • We will use apps from Starbuck’s and Target to pay for lattes or redeem coupons.  
  • We prefer short-term gigs that allow us to arrange work around ours lives, rather than arrange their lives around our work. 

This isn’t 100% true for everyone, but it’s not not far off

iPhone5: 3 months in

Posted on

I wrote a post about 4 months ago about the iPhone5 and what I thought about it.  This was before i had purchased it or even used it.  

I have now been using my iPhone 5 for over 3 months and really love it. It’s a nice upgrade over the 4. I like the thinner size, the bigger screen, the faster processor, and the super awesome camera.   All things considered, it’s pretty damn sweet.  I even have been using Siri in the car to play music and send quick text messages.

There’s a lot of buzz around Apple maps being terrible and some android phones being better.  For me, Apple maps have been great although i just installed Google Maps and found that to be even better.  I’m sure some Android phones are better or at least come close to the iPhone, but at this point, they are all basically the same.  We’re so far past regular cell phones that are just phones that we’re all winners.  These smartphones are just ridiculous in what they can do.  Quibbling over megapixels, LTE coverage, the number of apps, and features such as turn-by-turn is such a great problem to have. 

Election Thoughts: Twitter and Nate Silver

Posted on

The election is over and we can get on with our lives.  For me, living in Colorado meant that our television stations were nothing but ads either telling us that Romney was a bastard or that Obama was incompetent.  I know people who believe those messages and I don’t want to really talk about whether they’re right or wrong. It’s just exhausting.

I loved watching my Twitter feed on election night. I have to say that for live, unpredictable events like disasters, elections, and sports, – twitter really shines.  That said, i was also really impressed with the coverage on television.  The big board on CNN was way more informative with actual stats than any other medium. They knew where things were going down, when they were happening, and why. Twitter was snarky and fun but TV was actually helpful.

The big winner to me for this election was Nate Silver.  If you don’t know Nate, and I didn’t until a little it ago, he’s a guy who first gained recognition for developing a system for forecasting the performance of professional baseball players.  One day he woke up and wanted to the same for politicians.  Last election in 2008, he built FiveThirtyEight.com (538 is the total number of electoral votes out there) and used his crazy smart algorithms to predict, with really cool charts, who would win.  When the final votes came in, he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 state and all 35 Senate races that year.  Way closer than almost every one else.   Continue reading “Election Thoughts: Twitter and Nate Silver” →

Thoughts on the iPhone 5

Posted on

At the Kapost office yesterday, about half the company was glued to live-blogging of the iPhone 5 announcement.  What we saw was only a blog but watching it was quite a show.  A few things stood out for me:

 It’s all about the LTE.  Most people don’t realize what LTE is and what it means.  Forgot the ads you see for 4G right now – those are lies.  What most people are getting as 4G isn’t really 4G. LTE is wireless internet that is 20-50x faster.  Once you get it, you won’t need to upgrade for speed for a long time.  It’s like going from a bike to a motorcycle.  Sure, in the future you can get a faster motorcycle, but the major upgrade has happened.  (more info on LTE here)

The magic of Apple.  Only two companies make money in the mobile phone business: Apple and Samsung.  You could read that as Apple and the people who are best at copying Apple.  Apple make money because they convince us to buy something that we didn’t know we need.  The iPhone 5 is really just the same phone, but they go out of their way to show us how it is both the same and something totally different.  It’s thinner (ooohhh), it’s faster (aaaahhhh) and has more and better bells and whistles than ever before (applause).  I don’t know of any other company that asks and gets an hour of my time for them to explain to my why i should buy their product.

Desktop to Mobile.  The transition from computing being a desktop/laptop world to a mobile world is totally complete.  The graphics on the iPhone 5 now rival console gaming units.  There was a demo of a race car game and the rearview mirror on the car was showing accurate graphics.  At this point, the phone is literally just a smaller computer. Sure, not everyone has a smartphone yet, but they will and it will be a fascinating world when companies start taking advantage of the fact that everyone in the world is carrying out a crapload of computing power in their pocket.

I’m still rocking the iPhone 4 and plan on preordering a new phone at midnight on the 14th.  In fact, everyone I know who has a 4 or older is planning on upgrading to the 5.  Are you?

My Fav Stuff: Tech Tools and People I Follow

Posted on

I re-posted an interview last week that I did for KillerStartups.  That one was all about Kapost.  Here’s the 2nd half of that interview that’s more personal stuff.  I never get a chance to write about this stuff on Loo.me so i thought i’d share. 

—-

What is your favorite tech tool?

I personally love basalmiq. I getting into wireframing a lot these days. What i love about it is that it allows me to get thoughts out of my head. I was never a great artist, and now I don’t have to be.

 

What’s your “man, I wish I would have thought of that” startup and why?

(I’ve written about this on Loo.me before here)

Nobody is really doing the startup that I’m waiting for yet.  I want a startup to launch a service that will record everything I do.  Not just API’s into Foursquare but allow me to import email, telephone and credit card info. I want all my digital files indexed by person I did it with and where I was at the time (person and location). I don’t remember phone numbers anymore due to my cell phone and I want to stop remembering conversations, meetings and what I ordered.  The companies Evernote andTimehop are getting close but they aren’t quite there yet. I really can’t wait for this service. I had this idea since 2005. To me, it’s inevitable that it’ll happen someday. 

Are you a Mac, Windows or Linux kind of guy?

I love the idea of Linux, but I love the usability and power of the Mac more.  At this point, I’m a big fanboy with iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air and AppleTV.  In 2012, that’s a great place to be.

3 people we should follow on Twitter?

1. Michael Arrington– and you should read his blog. He is one of the few people who legitimately has something to say and substance beyond the headline. I usually always enjoy his posts.

2. Fred Wilson– Although he’s widely known, I still think he has a great grasp of web products – how they work, why they succeed and where they are going. Very few investors or entrepreneurs can articulate trends, thoughts and findings very well, but he does a great job – and he does it every day.

 

3. John Borthwick – He doesn’t blog or tweet much, but I admire what he’s doing at Betaworks. It’s sort of the old-school studio model where you have a group of talented folks and you churn out product. People used to do this with albums and films, and he’s doing it with web companies. I think it’s great. Anthony Batt (@djabatt) had the same idea 10 years ago and he’s just now starting to do it at Ashton Kutcher’s company.

A 4th for fun… 

4. Bill Simmons– I’m a big listener/reader of his. To me, publishing and media is changing pretty rapidly. The old school had traditional journalists that are objective and do research to gather stats and then report them. On the other end of the spectrum, there are bloggers who are entirely subjective and shout out their opinions without any facts. There is a middle ground emerging of opinionated folks who have been given access previously only provided to journalists and they can message both an opinion and well-researched facts. Bill is a pioneer there and his insights into sports are great.

Kapost Interview on KillerStartups

Posted on

The other day, I gave an interview about Kapost to KillerStartups and i realized that i have a lot more to say than i thought i would.  I’m going to republish some of it here.

First, I haven’t talked much about Kapost on this blog, so i’m going to republish those questions first.  Here they are:

What’s kapost all about and what makes it stand out from the competition?

Kapost is a content marketing platform. Many businesses are spending less money on ads and more money on creating their own content. The idea behind that is that you can spend $5k a month in search ads and have a spot at the top of a search results page, or you can spend $5k a month creating content and have links in the search results page. These links are more authentic and over time much more effective. But, as a result, you have many businesses becoming publishers and creating a lot of content. What Kapost does is manage that content for them and provide insight into which content is working. Similar to how a CRM like Salesforce helps a sales team organize and evaluate performance from a formalized business process, Kapost helps a marketing or publishing team organize themselves and eventuate how they are doing from a content perspective.


Continue reading “Kapost Interview on KillerStartups” →

More Forward or Die

Posted on

I was reading BusinessWeek and there was a good interview with Cisco’s John Chambers 

Companies that don’t change get left behind. Since I became CEO [in 1995], 87 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500 are off the list. What that says is that companies that don’t reinvent themselves will be left behind.

Wow. I love that. You see this all over the place.  The companies that will be killing it in 10 years probably don’t even exist yet.  They say that each person today will have 8 careers by the time they are 65.  The world changes pretty fast now. It’s exciting. 

Marines vs. The Roman Army

Posted on

 

This is a pretty great story.  A worker in Iowa was checking Reddit and saw that someone posted a question, 

Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit]? 

He immediately posted a response and began it with a narrative of what that actual experience must be like.  His response got such a positive response that he wrote another, and then another.  The story he concocted was so awesome that he got signed by an agent and got a deal to turn it all into a Hollywood film.  

It’s a great story and even more interesting because it shows how modern-day publishing is changing.  I think Reddit and Digg are much more similar to future newspapers than the Washington Post or New York Times.  If we’re getting all our information on the internet, it makes sense for it to be an interactive medium we’re reading.  It also proves that “the masses” (i.e. some guy in Iowa) is just as capable of generating quality content as a journalist.  


Steve Jobs on the Post-PC World.

Posted on


  
I listened this morning to a podcast where Steve Jobs was interviewed at the All Things D conference. He talked (around 45 min mark) about the post-PC world. I thought it was a pretty interesting analogy He states:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farm.  As vehicles started to be used in urban centers, and as America started to move into those urban centers, cars got more popular and innovations like automatic transmissions, power steering and things you didn’t care about in a truck started to become paramount in cars. Today, maybe 1 in 25 or 1 in 30 vehicles is a truck where it used to be 100%.  PC’s are going to be like trucks. They will still be around and provide a lot of value but they will be used by 1 out of X people. 

This transformation will make some people uneasy.  People from the PC world, like you and me becasue PC’s have taken us a long way. It’s brilliant.  We talk about the post-PC era but when it really starts to happen, i think it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. Because it’s change.  A lot of vested interests will change. Things will be different.  I think we’re embarked on that.  Is it the iPad? Who knows?  Will it happen next year, 5 years from now, 7 years from now? Who knows? But we’re headed there.

The post-PC world is interesting. I find myself doing more and more on my iPhone and i can see a day where i don’t bring my laptop with me on trips anymore as the iPad and a keyboard will be plenty.