Technology

I think the iPhone 3G is gonna be big. … D’uh! That’s a pretty safe statement. After today’s announcement, and after drooling over its new features on the Apple website, I tried to check my AT&T account to see when my 2-year contract is up, so I can upgrade to the new iPhone without paying an exorbitant price to do so, and check on data plan pricing. wireless.att.com was so overloaded I couldn’t log in even with repeated attempts.

Assuming Apple can produce enough of these things to satisfy demand, I’ve got to believe that there will be enough iPhones out there (1st-gen and 3G) to support development by news and media companies of services specifically for the iPhone platform. In fact, I’d say any publisher not getting ready to serve an onslaught of iPhone users should have his/her head examined.

I also think that the state of the new iPhone is such that it will cause a lot of its users to abandon reading print newspapers, if they haven’t stopped that already. Traditionalists can pooh-pooh the idea of a tiny phone replacing a print newspaper, but I have no doubt that for many people, it will.

(Hmmm, I seem to have neglected this blog for quite a few days. Back to it…)

This afternoon I listened in on a webinar by Widgetbox.com, which develops free tools for anyone to use in creating web widgets. The company and its offerings are impressive. The widget-making tools are super-useful for publishers large and small — but especially the latter.

Something I find interesting is the company’s business model. It offers its widget-making tools and services entirely free. You might expect a company like this to offer some basic free functionality, but charge for upper-tier services. But as the webinar presenters explained when asked about Widgetbox’s business model, there’s a one-price-for-all plan: Free.

The company plans to make money with programs where developers who use Widgetbox to create their own widgets can optionally participate in programs where Widgetbox sells ads to accompany widgets, and shares the revenue 50/50 with the widget creator. If you don’t want to participate in those programs but plan to sell ads around your widget, as I understand it, that’s fine with Widgetbox and they’ll let you use their technology for free.

It’s a great deal for users, that’s for sure. I’ve included a screen shot of a little widget I created using Widgetbox for a comic-strip project I’m working on. It took literally a couple minutes to create it. (It’s just a screengrab because that site isn’t live yet.)

Earlier today I listened to NPR’s Talk of the Nation, where the topic was online business models, with an emphasis on how to make a business from free content and/or services. A more typical model, according to the panelists, is giving away 90-99% free, with paid premium content or services. That’s sometimes called a “fremium” model.

Widgetbox seems to have eschewed even that. I hope its model works, because it’s a win-win for everyone involved. Let’s just hope the company can make it work financially.

On one of my current projects, I made a bad choice of web hosting company. Fortunately, we figured out how bad this service was before launch, so transition to a new host didn’t disrupt anything. Whew!

I just want to give a little shout-out about a great service that helped me transition the website (which is built using Wordpress) to the new hosting company. EZSiteMove.com came to the rescue after my failed attempts at figuring out how to move everything over and have the site be completely operational.

They did a great job in the time advertised, and the rate was reasonable. Two thumbs up!

The flamboyant new owner of the Tribune Co., billionaire Sam Zell, visited one of his properties in Virginia, the Daily Press, yesterday, and (according to this report) told employees this:

Tribune’s smaller newspapers, including the Daily Press, would serve as a ‘petri dish’ of innovation, where new ideas would be tested and incubated before being passed along to the company’s big three: the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Newsday of Long Island, N.Y.”

I have to say, while I think Zell is on the right track with trying to shake things up at Tribune, he’s got this backward. Letting the smaller properties in a chain try the innovations and then passing them along to the flagship papers is something the newspaper industry has already been doing — and I think that’s part of the reason the industry is still in such a mess. It’s not bold eough.

Some of the largest newspapers are bleeding badly; layoffs and buyouts are the order of the day, and quality of the product is deteriorating. (My local paper keeps getting thinner; the day is very near when it’s no longer worth it to renew my subscription.) Zell should be telling his flagship papers to stop stalling and start innovating big-time. Waiting for experiments from the hinterlands to pan out before implementing them in Chicago, LA and Long Island is a going-too-slow approach.

Zell is known for being a change agent. So why doesn’t he demand that every paper in the Tribune chain innovate like there’s no tomorrow? Tomorrow is going to suck if they don’t.

Look, pure-play Internet companies have demonstrated that there are billions of dollars to be made from innovating. I’m sure that Zell believes the newspaper industry can reinvent itself and take part. So why would he take such a conservative approach? How odd.

What do you think?

From NYT today: “Google Sees Surge in iPhone Traffic.”

Apple’s iPhone, of course, is the first mobile phone that has a decent web browser. So it’s predictable that buyers would be using that function a lot. (I use a Blackberry, but the web interface — not to put too fine a line on it — sucks in comparison to the iPhone’s. I seldom use it for general web browsing or searching because it’s so clunky.)

The figures cited by the Times show that iPhone owners use the web a lot. Even with only 2% of the smartphone market, iPhone web traffic to Google outdoes the more widely adopted smartphones. I notice a friend who has an iPhone surf on it constantly, so I’m not surprised.

There’s an obvious recommendation to be made to media companies as a result of this story: Get ready for serving many more mobile customers with your content and services. The iPhone is the tip of the iceberg, and more iPhone-like smartphones are coming soon. Now’s the time to gear up.

Since it’s winter and much of my exercise has been indoors, I’ve been watching DVDs to pass the time while on the treadmill or bike trainer. Right now I’m watching old episodes of “My So-Called Life,” a great drama from 1994. In case you don’t remember it, Life was a “realistic teen drama series that takes a look at a 15-year-old girl and her trials and tribulations with being a teenager and dealing with friends, guys, parents and school” (description from the Internet Movie Database). While critics loved the show, it nevertheless got canceled after only one season.

I fell in love with this show when it came out, but re-viewing it more than a decade later, it’s even more poignant. (That could be because my eldest daughter is now 15, and Life’s fictional family is identical to mine right now: married couple with 2 daughters, and the youngest TV daughter is about the age of my youngest daughter.)

But I’m not writing this blog item to recommend the show. (Well, I do; it’s good.) Rather, watching the episodes I’ve been struck by how much things have changed since 1994. That was the first year after I left the traditional newspaper world and started working an Internet career. I was one of those rare birds who dived in to the online world then. Most people still didn’t understand it, much less made it a big part of their lives.

I suggested to my 15-year-old that she watch the first episode of My So-Called Life, and she did. What surprised me is that she thought the show was OK, but it didn’t reflect her life. 1994 suburbia was different enough from today that she couldn’t relate to it.

Part of her “that’s how it used to be reaction” is probably because of the technology differences between then and now. (The emotional and relationship story lines certainly haven’t changed.) In 1994, no one had a cell phone, and certainly not every other teen you know. The Internet wasn’t part of a teen’s life (unless you were a tech geek). The computer in your house was probably shared by everyone, and was pretty lame compared to today’s. There was no MySpace or Facebook, and teen relationships were still based on personal interactions, not digital ones. Most everyone still got their news from the daily newspaper and TV news.

As we enter a new year, I can’t help but look back to 1994 and marvel about how far we’ve come. Digital technology now so pervades our lives that even looking back only to 1994, it seems like a very different world. It was one that today’s teenagers can’t relate to, because it seems foreign to them.

As news and media companies embark on figuring out how to survive and prosper in 2008 and beyond, they might want to keep this in mind if they hope to be relevant to my daughters’ generation.

I’m an outcast in my family. I’m like Apple’s “PC Guy” in a family of “Mac Guys.”

This morning I learned that my mother-in-law just got a new Macbook after a life of using PCs. This was a few months after my father-in-law switched from lifelong use of PCs to a Mac. Within the last year, my wife and 2 daughters each have gotten Macs — again, switching away from PCs. Oh, and there’s my (now ex-) business partner, who switched to a Mac in 2006.

I’ve been using a PC since 1995, when I gave up using a Mac because in those days, every new Internet application that came out was for PC only; the Mac versions usually came out 6-12 months later. But I’m ready for a change back. PCs have gotten so annoying, with all the crap that accumulates on them: the spyware, the viruses. (Last time I upgraded Norton Anti-Virus, Firefox slowed to a crawl, and I’ve yet to find a solution.)

Maybe Santa will put a Mac under the tree for me this year. Let’s see, have I been nice? … Umm, my start-up company nose-dived this fall. I doubt Santa can afford it.

But seriously, my family can’t be an aberration. There seems to be a serious move away from PCs. Have you noticed it in your circle of friends and family?

Amazon’s Kindle e-reader device was just introduced, and it does look very cool. It’s what many of us have been hoping would come along for years — a truly wireless device that will allow purchase of books, magazine subscriptions, and newspapers, as well as pick up feeds of blogs. Roger Fidler must be pleased.

Check out this video for an overview of the device:

Of course, as amazing as the Kindle appears to be, the glaring deficiency is the black-and-white screen. I don’t know … I’m just not sure I could plunk down several hundred dollars for a device that has me reading newspapers and magazines without color. I look forward to later versions with color screens. That’s got to be a tough technology nut to crack.

I have an early e-book reader sitting in a box somewhere — it was manufactured by RCA. That thing is so clunky and underpowered compared to the Kindle. The interface to download books is “stone age” compared to the Kindle’s wireless (and wi-fi-less) connection to the virtual bookstore. The technologists are getting really close to giving us a great personal digital reader.

Canon has stopped making film cameras. It’s about time. Film? Get over it.

(But there are still holdouts, it seems. My daughter is going to summer arts camp again this year, and plans on taking some photography. The camp insists on teaching them darkroom techniques and how to develop photos with chemicals. Why don’t they teach them blacksmith skills, too, while they’re at it? Sheesh.)

All of a sudden, the single monitor on my desk seems so inadequate!

(And if that’s not enough, check out Brad Feld’s treadputer.)