Back from China

Just back from China, a place I love to visit because the quotient of innovation and social and cultural change is so high. Even as the US is having one of our periodic economic meltdowns, the average Chinese man in the street seems more prosperous, confident, and optimistic than when I visited only last year. There are many clouds to this silver lining; still, it's a fascinating laboratory for moving the needle on a massive scale.

Whenever I'm in China I enjoy making photos wherever I go. Maybe it's my attempt to freeze a few moments in a land where so many things these days are shockingly ephemeral. In any case, a favorite picture from this trip is a woman entrepreneur in Kunming (click photo to enlarge). She's a classic study in what it takes to build a winning brand, including innovation, confidence, a unique sense of style, creative problem solving, differentiation from the competition, and a product that raises the bar. All of us working to build value for companies could take a few lessons from this savvy lady.

Back in October

The blog has been on summer break and now I'm off to China for the rest of the month. I'll be back in October with an update from Asia and more posts, coming soon.

What a Difference a Day Makes!

I didn't need Dinah Washington to remind me that in "24 little hours" I went from leading-edge cool yesterday to has-been this morning, thanks to the release of the eagerly awaited new 3G iPhone. Luckily the new iPhone 2.0 operating system, also available today, works on old phones like mine and adds significant functionality even to the "vintage" models. The excitement is so high that many people looking to upgrade old phones haven't been able to connect to the iTunes store where the software is available.

After trying unsuccessfully for about an hour I started searching for options and came across a Macworld article that provides a link you can use to download the software directly, then you "restore" your iPhone to the new settings. It's a bit complex; be sure to read through the comments for specific instructions. I had to restore twice--not sure if that's part of the process or if there was just a glitch, but in any case it worked for me and I've been exploring some of the third-party applications on offer in the new App Store.

There are a number of mobile media apps--for now, most free to download and without advertising. The NY Times and Associated Press both offer iPhone-specific news apps. They're both useful; the one from the Times has a more polished interface while AP's offering allows you to set a location (no automatic detection) for local news. Bloomberg has a very nice financially oriented news app. There are several location-based apps that seem ready to plug into location-based advertising. The Google app also collects location up-front; can mobile ads be far behind? I like NowLocal's concept: they automatically detect your location and provide the latest news in your vicinity. Another interesting app is a citizen journalism effort from Fox News, UReport, which encourages iPhone owners to send breaking news photos directly to the local Fox outlet. And there's a personalizable mobile portal from Pocket Express. In all there are over a dozen apps so far in the App Store's News category.

There are more than a dozen radio-related apps. For example, AOL radio (which is free) brings 150 CBS radio stations and more to your iPhone. There are many audio apps, for example, Jott for iPhone, which promises voice-to-text (speak to the phone and it stores your message as a text memo) as well as a host of "talking phrasebooks" that range from free to about $10. On the content creation side, for bloggers who use TypePad there's a handy app with that service. NewsGator has a free RSS reader, NewsNetWire, or you can buy iRSS for $5, but I prefer my generic mobile reader from PressDisplay. There are a number of video apps as well.

For long-form reading you can download an e-reader, with options ranging from free to $10, or directly buy classic (copyright free) novels for a dollar or two apiece.

The only app I've noticed so far that integrates advertising is the free version of Twitterrific, a third-party Twitter client. If you don't like ads you can pay $10 for essentially the same service ad-free.

I'm only beginning to crack the surface...you can guess how I'll spend the weekend! But it's already clear that the iPhone software development kit has provided a huge boost to mobile media. The utility is here now; more coherent monetization won't be far behind. Many applications are free today in order to judge unfettered demand and determine the optimal business strategy: sales (low demand) or advertising (high demand). Keep an eye on: how things that are free now get monetized; how ads are integrated into the experience; and how audio and location are integrated with content and services. The fun is just starting!

"Yanked by Yelp": When Social Media Goes Bad

In retrospect it seems inevitable: email spawned spam; search engines engendered "black hat" SEO, now it's time for Spam 2.0, when spam enters the domain of user-generated content. An article last week in the San Francisco Chronicle tells the story: a network of mutual back-scratchers--primarily small businesses--exchanged favorable reviews on the locally powerful Yelp review site. When Yelp discovered the spam scam it deleted most of the offenders' reviews, prompting outrage and talk of a class-action lawsuit from those "yanked by Yelp."

Yelp defends the decision as vital to protecting the integrity of the brand, much as major search engines must be diligent about demoting or purging irrelevant or falsely inflated links. Companies hosting email and search services spend significant resources trying (not entirely successfully) to purge spam. The Yelp case gives notice to Web 2.0 businesses that it's their turn now to mount big cleanup efforts. Chances are that, as with other forms of spam, Spam 2.0 will remain a fixture on these sites for the foreseeable future. Spammers will get smarter and the effort required to keep them at bay will only increase. Over the longer term, Spam 2.0 will be a bigger problem for social media than current headaches such as inappropriate content or language.

Perversely, the rise of Spam 2.0 is a positive indicator for Web 2.0. Spam only afflicts the largest and most successful web apps with the greatest commercial potential: email, search...you see the pattern. The rise of social spam is a strong rebuttal to doubts about the popularity, credibility, sustainability, growth prospects, and revenue opportunities of community-oriented Web 2.0 models.

Yelp took the right approach: they acknowledged companies' need for a role in the conversation and started Yelp for Business Owners, which encourages owners to "claim" their businesses on the site, communicate openly through a structured channel, and use customer comments to improve operations instead of being too quick to refute negative information. The good guys will be glad for the opportunity; but Spam 2.0 is probably here to stay.

Feed Readers Evolve

It's been a few years since there was much exciting news around feed readers--software that allows users to collect and display content feeds in formats such as RSS and Atom. One early leader in the technology, Pluck, even shut down their reader product in January 2007 in order to refocus the business on social media. Nevertheless, newsreaders are an interesting concept with the potential to dramatically shift control from publishers to users, once again underscoring the democratic nature of the web.

Some recent innovations are starting to make the newsreader space interesting again by finding alternatives to the uninviting unstructured, text-centric approach that characterized these products in the early days. A few examples:

MSNBC's Spectra: This beta product blows the doors off the visually boring scroll of text that had become synonymous with feed readers or, as MSNBC's marketers put it, "merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum." Surprise, the colorful, animated interface turns out to be functional as well as fun. News categories are color-coded, you can save articles to read later (must be online), and there's keyword search. A significant limit to the current product is that it's essentially a front door to the MSNBC news service; you can't add feeds from other sources. Spectra is a free and web-based.

TalkingNews: TalkingNews, also a beta, decouples the newsreader from text entirely: it uses text-to-speech technology to turn RSS and Atom feeds into simulated podcasts. You can also add your favorite podcasts to your TalkingNews reader. There are four voice options for hearing your feeds. The audio files are downloadable so, like conventional podcasts, they're available offline. TalkingNews is web-based. Basic membership, limited to two channels of two feeds each (max 60 minutes of audio per day), is free, or you can upgrade to a $19.99 annual subscription that offers ten channels of ten feeds.

PressDisplay, a Canadian company, offers a configurable viewer to organize and read news content from over 600 newspapers around the world. There's a mobile version as well as a text-to-speech option, "Newspaper Radio." You can filter content by language as well as on a spectrum from user favorites to editors' choices. You can select content from PressDisplay's many news sources, but can't add personal favorite feeds. PressDisplay is web-based, but there's a downloadable PressReader that allows offline access. There are three subscription options ranging from a limited free plan to unlimited access for $29.95 per month.