Message from Michael - April 12, 2010

Message From Michael                                 

                                                                                                                        April 19, 2010                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

      THE RISE AND PHONE OF THE INNOVATION EMPIRE

      PAY PHONE AS YOU GO

      I WANT MY MTV

      SOCIETY’S SOCIAL SURGE

      COCKTAIL CHATTER – LOBBYISTS AND CARTOONISTS

 

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      THE RISE AND PHONE OF THE INNOVATION EMPIRE:  There are more people in the world with cell phones than there are people with clean toilets.  How’s that for a factoid?  It comes from a New York Times article by Anand Giridharadas which makes the point that while the U.S. is focused on innovation using new devices such as the iPad, much of the rest of the world is focused on finding innovative new uses for the basic cell phone.  Not only do other countries make much greater use of text messaging for everything from job hunting to voting, they use it as a flashlight, a television, a radio and even as a sort of credit card to pay bills and transfer money – something that hasn’t caught on in the U.S.  As to the cell – toilet comparison, the figures come from the International Telecommunication Union and the United Nations.  The I-T-C says the number of mobile subscriptions is expected to pass Five Billion this year.  Although Giridharadas does not go into the exact figures in his article, a little research shows not only is the comparison true, but that several other publications have also made the point.  A report by the United Nations University along with the World Health Organization says there are 2.7 Billion people without clean toilets in the world.  And I know this may fall into the category of too much 4-1-1 for some people, but the report says 1.1 Billion people defecate in the open.  And some 4-1-1 that everyone should note, more than 4.5 Million children under the age of five have died from diarrhea and other water-borne diseases in the past three years.  That’s roughly equivalent to the population of Ireland.

To put the numbers in perspective, the Central Intelligence Agency, which is the prime citing source for many of the numbers cited about the world, says there are more than 6.7 Billion people in the world today.  So, subtract 2.7 Billion people without clean toilets from that number, and you have Four Billion people with ‘clean’ toilets compared to Five Billion people with cell phones.  As a side note, the Internet World Stats put the number of people with Internet access at 1.8 Billion people, which represents more than one in every four (26.6%) persons in the world.  And for a little more perspective, another New York Times article profiled cell phone maker Nokia subsidiary Vertu which provides custom cell phones made of gold, platinum and titanium with price tags ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.  Or if you want, you can have a diamond encrusted version, starting at $80,000.

      PAY PHONE AS YOU GO:  Apparently more and more people are adopting that philosophy.  In an interesting twist on the cell phone discussion above, a new report by an independent technology and telecommunications think tank says more people are turning to pre-paid phones instead of the ‘traditional’ contract phones.  Two thirds of the 4.2 Million net subscribers added in the fourth quarter of this year were pre-paid phones, so that nearly one in every five cell phone users is talking on a pre-paid phone.  That translates into 54.4 Million out of the 285 Million wireless subscribers in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of last year.  Jose Guzman, the project coordinator with the group called New Millennium Research Council is quoted as saying, “the era of cell phone penny pinching is officially here.”  The report authors say the recession is primarily responsible for the movement, along with the fact that many of the pre-paid phones now offer an “all you can eat” variety of services not associated with pre-paid phones in the past.

      I WANT MY MTV:  They may want it, but they don’t need it, or at least not as much as they used to, according to a study released by Edison Research and Arbitron.  For the first time, the Internet has passed TV as the “most essential” medium in Americans’ lives.  More than two in five Americans surveyed (42%) cited the Internet as “most essential” just ahead of TV (37%), but way ahead of radio (14%) and way-er ahead of newspapers (5%).  Television is still the dominant medium for people over the age of 45, but for those between the ages of 12 and 44, it’s the Internet.  On a very much related note, the same two groups found in a different survey that nearly half of Americans (49%) believe that newspapers will cease to exist in the future.  What may be even more disturbing for my newspaper brethren is that number is a dramatic jump from just three years ago when ‘only’ a quarter (27%) agreed with the questionnaire statement:  in the future, there will be no more newspapers because everyone will be getting their news over the Internet.”   

      SOCIETY’S SOCIAL SURGE:   From the same two groups, yet another study shows the percentage of Americans with a profile on a social networking site has doubled in the past two years.  Nearly half (48%) of those aged 12 and over say they have a social profile online, compared to a quarter (24%) in 2008.  And although as you would expect, young people are more likely to have a social networking profile, it’s not just about them.  Three quarters of teens (78%) and 18 to 24 year olds (77%) have profiles, but so do two-thirds (65%) of those aged 25 to 34 and half (51%) of those 35 to 44. In keeping with other studies about where people get their news and information, the Edison/ Arbitron survey says that nearly a third (30%) of those people visit their social networking sites “several times a day” which is not quite double (18%) what it was only a year ago.  As one of the authors says in the report, social networking has now become “mainstream media behavior.”    

      COCKTAIL CHATTER:  According to The Center for Public Integrity, the health care legislation was the subject of the “most expensive and intense” lobbying battle in history.  More than 1,750 businesses and organizations spent more than $1.2 Billion, using more than 4,525 lobbyists – a record eight lobbyists for every member of Congress.  And the center notes that there is another, possibly even more expensive, lobbying battle coming up – financial regulatory reform.  Former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s Fox news special “Real American Stories” won its time slot, beating everything else on Cable TV at that hour combined.  However, the special which was run in the Greta van Susteren’s On The Record time period, was actually down 10% in viewers from van Susteren’s previous week’s show and down 28% in demo’s, according to website TVNewser.  And in the interest of keeping message readers on the cutting edge, visit the website streamys.org, to see the winners of the Streamy Awards recognizing the best of online ‘webisodes.’  Ironically, the online show was apparently a technical disaster, but you can watch the winners at the website.  The winner of the best news or politics site was the increasingly popular but somewhat tiresome Auto-Tune the News, which synthesizes newsmakers voices and inserts synthesized voice characters. 

      WORTH NOTING:  In what some free press advocates see as a canary in the media mine, Apple has rejected an app proposal from a political cartoonist who just won a Pulitzer Prize.  Satirist Mark Fiore’s application was rejected, according to the letter sent him and made public by the Nieman Journalism Lab, because it “ridicules public figures” which is a violation of Apple’s program license agreement.  Apple attached a screen grab to its rejection letter showing the White House gate crashers interrupting a Presidential news conference, as an example of the offending material.

      ALSO WORTH NOTING:  Although there has been extensive coverage, I would be remiss if I didn’t note the local television stations which won Peabody Awards:  WYFF/ Greenville won for its special following donated organs; KTVU/ Oakland for its coverage of the BART train station shooting; KHOU/ Houston for an investigation into discrimination in the Texas National Guard; WFLD/ Chicago for what the judges rightfully called the “horrifying video” of the beating death of an honor student at a high school, but more rightfully its follow-up coverage; and KCET/ Los Angeles for its ‘eye-opening coverage’ which showed there are more legal, medical-marijuana dispensaries in the city than Starbucks franchises.  And although I doubt seriously that my former colleague Steve Kroft will ever read this, a note of congratulations to him as well for his double – two Peabodys for his work with 60 Minutes.  And I also would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the Pulitzer Prize where two newspapers scored triples – The Washington Post and The New York Times.

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Message from Michael - April 12, 2010 - iPad, Peace and Broadband

Message From Michael                                 

                                                                                                                        April 12, 2010                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

      THE BROADBAND FACTOID

      COMMODITIES AND FRANCHISES

      I THINK; THEREFORE IPAD

      DESTINATION PEACE

      IF MAN IS STILL ALIVE

 

We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael.  But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line. 

 

      THE BROADBAND FACTOID:  Americans ‘consume’ three times more broadband space than anybody else in the world, according to Internet backbone supplier Cisco.   In an interview with Beet.TV’s Daisey Fuentes, the company’s ‘Vice President for Worldwide Service Provider Marketing’ said American consumption is about 12 gigabytes a month.  That’s the equivalent of 32 to 40 DVD’s a month.  The global average is 4 gigabytes a month.  Even more astounding, VP Suraj Shetty says that with the addition of 3D video, 4G mobile and teleconferencing, that consumption will jump to 15 TERABYTES per person per month.  Shetty says that is the equivalent of 3,750 DVD’s.  The interview was part of Cisco’s publicizing its new ‘superfast’ router which is capable of 320 terabytes of data transfer, which Shetty, who obviously loves factoids more than me, says could transfer the entire Library of Congress content in one second.  And here is another one from Shetty – according to him, with this new router, “every movie ever made across the globe could be transferred in four minutes.”  Not too coincidentally, the Cisco announcement comes at the same time that the Federal Communications Commission released its 60-point action plan for improving broadband access across the U.S.  The commission laid out the dates for so-called NPRM’s – Notice of Proposed Rule Making.  Media law firm Fletcher, Heald and Hildreth notes that the NPRM schedule is over a year, and that is only the notice period; it is not the actual rule making.  And they add that “in a fine print footnote that reads like a disclaimer for some new medicine,” the agency notes that the schedule only applies to the FCC, not other government agency which, the law firm notes, is “a major carve out” since many other governmental agencies will have significant say over the broadband issue. 

      COMMODITIES AND FRANCHISES:  That’s not the normal way you think of news, but that is the description used by Tom Rosenstiel, Director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in a discussion of the State of the News Media report at George Washington University.  In brief, commodity news is news you can find in a lot of places, while franchise news is news you can find only at one news organization.  That becomes important when you consider the fact that nearly two thirds (60%) of the people get their news from aggregators and a third (30%) get news from people or institutions that are not news related, but that they follow on social media sites or get through emails from friends.  As Rosenstiel put it, people “acquire news” throughout the day.  It reminds me of a previous study that indicated people already knew much of the news before they sat down in front of the TV set or picked up a newspaper.  That is why the original report suggested that a niche strategy – being a site for a particular kind of information – may be a profitable strategy.  It was not part of his discussion but the original report cited a study by Outsell that nearly half (44%) of the visitors to Google News just scanned the headlines and didn’t even read the article.  Admittedly I covered this in my original summary of the state of the news media report, but the idea of commodity versus franchise news is so interesting that it was worth a follow-up.  Besides I’m still trying to make sense of some of the numbers.  For example, on one side of the spectrum, Rosenstiel and the report say that only 7% of the people get their news from one platform but that half get the news every day from a local newspaper or local TV.  On the other side of the spectrum, only three percent get news from ten or more sites on a regular basis and that the top 7% of ‘news’ sites reported by Nielsen get 80% of the traffic.  Most people have two to five ‘favorite’ (although Rosenstiel was cautious using that word) site, but again much of the information comes through aggregation sites, and aggregation sites that rely on ‘old media.’      

      I THINK; THEREFORE IPAD:  Actually the opposite may be true.  By many accounts, the purchase was as much emotional on the part of some Apple true-believers as it was intellectual.  One wag (me) said it was ironic that the iPad was released on Easter weekend, because for many it was like a religious experience.  Regardless, it worked.  More than 300,000 iPads were sold on the first day and more than half a million in the first week.  By way of perspective, Mac news website TidBits says Amazon’s Kindle has sold a Million units, but that’s since its introduction three years ago in 2007.  And for more perspective, the first generation iPhone sold 270,000 units on the first day.  The iBookstore reports that a quarter million books were downloaded on the first day of iPad sales and a Million “iPad-savvy” Apps were downloaded on that first day. Of the amazingly huge number of 185,000 Apps now in the App store, 3,500 are iPad-savvy.  It should be noted that many of the other apps will play on the iPad, just not as well.  Some of those iPad-savvy apps include the three national newspapers (USAToday, Wall Street Journal, New York Times) along with ABC News, which has jumped in with both feet, CBS which put a toe in the iPad water, MSNBC, NPR and… Marvel Comics.

But does it live up to the hype, which would be pretty hard to do when you consider Apple uses such words as “magical” and “revolutionary,” and I lost count on how many times they use the word “best” in the promotional video on their website.  One of the biggest questions surrounds the fact that the iPad does not accept Flash video, which is the most prevalent video format on the Internet.  That is why, some speculate, that YouTube, for example, is not one of the iPad/ Apple “recommended sites.”  Instead, the video must be provided (I’m sorry, but I’m going to go geek on you) either through CSS3 or HTML5. Two of the leading tech gurus are Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, and David Pogue, of the New York Times.  Mossberg says the iPad has “the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop.”  Pogue is decidedly more restrained calling it, first off, just a larger iPod Touch but he says your reaction will differ, depending on whether you’re a geek or a ‘normal’ person.  Geeks are going to quibble’ about issues like the Flash; real people are going to like it IF they like the basic concept.  But to really get the low-down, go to Popular Mechanics which despite its 50’s era heritage, has some 21^st Century understanding.  There you will find iPad idiosyncrasies such as the fact that it won’t sync with Mac OS’s older than X 10.5.8, but it will sync with Windows OS’s going back to XP.  In the end, reviewer Glen Derene says he is not convinced the iPad is a computing revolution, but it is a “very satisfying lean-back media” but one that is not a “must have… yet.”

Finally, apropos of nothing in particular, but speaking of Apps, I have found the coolest app on the iTunes store.  It’s called Top 100, and with it, you can listen to the top 100 songs for every year from last year all the way back to 1947.  I have been listening to songs I never heard, and songs I only dimly remember, and songs that still make me dance.     

      DESTINATION PEACE:  Two of the largest media groups in India and Pakistan have formed an alliance to help bring the peoples of the two warring countries together “by shaping the discourse and steering it away from rancor and divisiveness” because too often “opportunity knocks unheard on doors bolted on the inside.”  (Isn’t that a great line?)  It is called Aman ki Asha – Destination Peace.  And the two groups are The Times of India and The Jang Group of Pakistan.  The two groups say in their joint statement that “the media can begin the conversation where a plurality of views and opinions are not drowned out by shrill voices…. (and that) public opinion is far too potent a force to be left in the hands of narrow vested interests.”  Recently I had the honor of having dinner with, Mir Ibrahim, the CEO of GEO TV which is part of The Jang Group.  He explained the concept and gave me yet another quote of the kind writers dream of:  “the truth no matter how bitter is more patriotic than a lie no matter how sweet.”           

      IF MAN IS STILL ALIVE:  Apparently the year 25-25 has become the year 20-12, according to psychics, psychos and media myth-makers, because at the point of the Winter Solstice, December 21^st, of that year, “the world will be transformed” and either a massive black hole will throw the complete solar system out of whack or we will “reconnect with our cosmic heart.”  Personally I’m hoping for the cosmic heart.  In any case, all of this “cosmic rigmarole,” as an article in Archaeology magazine puts it, is based on the ancient Maya calendar, and their obsession with timekeeping.  In about A.D. 200, the Maya decided to revise their calendar to make it align with their own myths about their origins, using 20 as the basic calculation standard.  The result was The Long Count – a period of 13 baktuns as they called it, or 1,872,000 days as we would call it. At the end of The Long Count, Archaeology magazine writer Anthony Aveni says, the “Maya odometer” turns over and “the world begins anew.” Author Aveni, who is professor of astronomy and astrology at Colgate University, says it is not clear what the Maya thought would happen on that date which, in the Maya calendar, translates to 13.0.0.0.0, but it is not the cataclysmic end which he says the English-speaking world has uniquely created.

      FOOTNOTE:  The message has gone big time.  We now have a contributing writer.  Well, actually, it’s one of my daughters who sent me a note about The Masters Golf Tournament being televised in 3D.  Then coincidentally on a visit to our friends at Turner Entertainment Networks, I got to watch part of the tournament in 3D.  Some of the tech group were showing people what it looked like, using the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ 3D systems.  Pretty amazing.  More on 3D in later messages.  In the meantime, if you want to contribute material for the message, just email me.      

      SUBSCRIPTIONS:  If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com.  You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.