Message From Michael 
April 12, 2010
THE BROADBAND FACTOID
COMMODITIES AND FRANCHISES
I THINK; THEREFORE IPAD
DESTINATION PEACE
IF MAN IS STILL ALIVE
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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
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 21st 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
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 21st, 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
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.
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