We’ve written before about the need for newspapers to be “digital first” and to think like startups as they try to adapt to the evolution of the media industry. Can a traditional newspaper take an even bigger step and actually help give birth to new technologies or services by acting like a startup incubator? At least two of them are planning to give it a try: the Philadelphia News Network just launched an incubator, and Digital First Media recently launched a venture-capital arm and says it plans to invest in tech startups. While both of these efforts could easily fail, at least these two media entities aren’t just sitting back and relying on paywalls to save them.

The Philadelphia incubator is known as Project Liberty, and is being operated by Ben Franklin Technology Partners, a non-profit agency aimed at fostering new business in Pennsylvania — who also chose the three existing entrants to the program — but will be based in the same complex that is home to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, as well as the online site Philly.com. The project is being funded by a 0,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, which has backed a number of media-related startups over the years, and gives the three startups six months worth of office space and other support while they work on partnerships with the papers.

New technologies could help companies adapt

Read/Write Web has an overview of the three startups that have been accepted to the program: CloudMine provides an API service that makes it easier for developers to come up with new applications, and another named SnipSnap lets customers scan printed coupons and then use them online — a natural fit for a newspaper that carries plenty of advertising inserts. The third is ElectNext, which is developing a web app to help readers decide who to vote for, a goal that has an obvious fit with the editorial side of the newspapers.

The CEO of the Philadelphia News Network, meanwhile — former Newsweek publisher Greg Osberg — has said he has much bigger goals for the project, and that he wants to “find the next Foursquare and house it at Philly.com.”

Whether that’s going to happen or not remains to be seen, but at least the startup idea shows a spark of life from the newly reformed newspaper company, which was created after lenders to the previous owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News bought the assets out of bankruptcy. And it’s not the first unusual venture to come out of the new media company: earlier this year, it announced a plan to offer discounted Android-based tablets to readers who signed up for one or two-year subscriptions to the Inquirer and the Daily News.

Digital First Media, the parent company of the Media News Group — which owns a chain of newspapers across the U.S., including the Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News — is also wading into the tech-startup funding game. The company’s CEO, John Paton, who helped turn around the bankrupt Journal-Register Co. before taking the helm of Digital First Media, last month announced the creation of a new venture-capital arm that will invest in media-related tech startups. Paton said this approach was a natural outgrowth of the company’s “digital first” mantra, which he has outlined in a number of presentations as well as on his blog.

Experimentation is something more companies should try

I admit I was skeptical when I heard about Digital First’s new venture-capital entity, in part because it sounded like the media company was going to try and compete with the hundreds of VC firms and angels who are already trying (and mostly failing) to pick the next Foursquare or Facebook. But Paton said the emphasis of the new venture would be on partnering with companies that could help the company take advantage of digital media in new ways, which is something more traditional media outlets should be thinking about.

Other media companies have already taken similar steps in this direction: the Financial Times just acquired the company that developed its HTML5 app, which allowed the newspaper to do an end-run around Apple’s restrictions on iOS apps — as well as the 30-percent fees it charges content companies that offer subscriptions. And the New York Times helped give birth to News.me, a social content-filtering app that was later acquired by Betaworks, a New York-based incubator run by John Borthwick, in a deal that gave the newspaper shares in the company. The NYT also has its own in-house incubator of sorts in the beta620 lab project.

As Om and others have mentioned, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the explosion of incubators — a trend that didn’t end well in the last tech bubble — but despite the low odds of success, it’s still interesting to see companies like the Philadelphia Media Network and Digital First Media trying to think outside the box a little.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users John Donges and David Daniels

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Continue reading NASA-sponsored study finds lengthy spaceflight can impair astronauts’ vision

NASA-sponsored study finds lengthy spaceflight can impair astronauts’ vision originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 05 Nov 2011 07:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Poor Netflix has had a rocky six months.  It’s like having a friend go into complete, total meltdown and trying to decide when you should start planning the intervention.

After Netflix announced it was splitting its streaming and DVD delivery services into two separate companies, they made a complete 180-degree turn and combined the services again.

Just this week, Netflix announced their Q3 earnings, and while they met expectations, they lost 800,000 subscribers. Now the market is punishing them. In after-hours trading just after the announcement, they lost nearly 30 percent of their stock value. In opening trading the next morning, they were down another 10 percent. While all that loss may not have been avoidable, the industry is wondering why Netflix decided to make this move so quickly.

Colin Dixon of The Diffusion Group (TDG) succinctly referred to this whole event as “premature bifurcation.” And he’s right – many of us within the industry may have seen this split as inevitable, but the timing and the way Netflix has handled this announcement hints at a larger, more complex situation.

Why break up with yourself?

Why would Netflix choose to split itself apart?  And why completely change the name and make two different services to interact with their company?

It all started with the Starz negotiations: Netflix landed a great deal with Starz in 2008. For only million, Starz gave Netflix access to some pretty good movies to stream because the perceived value of streaming was very low at the time.

Fast-forward to 2011. Netflix is now available on so many devices and touting the largest subscriber numbers for a MSO, so the perceived value of that license goes up quite a bit. This makes it a lot harder for Netflix to negotiate cheap prices; hence the very public break up this summer.

So, how does Netflix improve its bargaining position? Oddly enough, by weakening themselves (or at least appearing to be weaker), they position themselves to negotiate for a better price. Let me explain: by splitting the two entities apart, they show much lower subscriber numbers to potential licensees as reasoning for lower pricing. By still having the two companies under one roof, Netflix gets to play the beggar during negotiations for streaming in regards to subscriber numbers, while still offering combined DVD & streaming licenses as an incentive. Therefore, a “weaker” Netflix might have been stronger from a negotiation standpoint.

The problem is, they couldn’t come out and just say that, so instead we get the standard Netflix hubris, disingenuous apologies, and some new branding.  And ironically, now Netflix is much weaker than it planned.

Experience teaches at the cost of mistakes

Despite all the missteps, I still would like to see them succeed. Netflix may be down, but they definitely aren’t out of the game.  Let’s face it, they still have the largest online subscriber base for video content, they have announced rollout plans in new markets, and have recently announced some great new content deals.

Unfortunately, the industry is still learning what customers do and don’t want. Netflix is our canary in the coal mine as they find new and exciting ways to create a burgeoning business model while pissing off content makers and alienating their own customers in the process.

If Netflix doesn’t rebuild itself soon, then maybe it is time for that intervention. And if this WSJ article is correct, that intervention could come in the form of takeover interest. Either way, to regain subscribers and prove the streaming business case, Netflix needs to get back to signing content deals.

Andy Beach is Vice President of Marketing and Product Development at SeaWell Networks, a Canada-based company that specializes in online streaming video delivery. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user jcoterhals.

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In this article I will be writing about the benefit of having an IT support service on hand should anything go amiss with your companies IT. I am the owner of a rather small business – we have eight employees, including myself. Over the recent years our business has become ever more reliant on e-mail, the fax, the internet – including broadband – as well as our ability to connect each employee within an in-house computer nework.

I would have to admit that each of our members of staff are hardly what I would call experts in IT and therefore when something used to go wrong we were very much stuck! Around two years ago I decided to enrol the help of an IT support London company. This has probably been one of the best decisions that I have ever made, as I will explain in the next paragraph.

Ever since signing the contract with the IT company we have seemingly had more problems than ever. But when something goes amiss they are very good as they come round to see us at a drop of a hat. They even came to look at, and fix, our photocopier a couple of weeks ago – very impressive. It really is a huge piece of mind thing – knowing that they are they whenever we need them – and as I say, we certainly have needed them! As an example about six months ago we were unable to send and receive e-mails. Now on average each employee will receive around twenty e-mails per day therefore you can see the issue with this. But within a few hours our London IT support had fixed the problem.

If you have a small business and if you do not already have an IT support service in place then I certainly would recommend one to you.

The word on the street is that Sprint is betting the farm on an exclusive for the iPhone 5. It will commit almost billion to Apple for 30.5 million iPhones and it won’t even start to make money till 2014. Crazy? Yes and no!

Apple has to love this deal–it basically ensures a nice revenue stream for them, even if the world goes into recession and demand for mobile phones stalls. Second, it takes away some of the Android momentum at one carrier where Android has done well. (I know T-Mobile wants an iPhone too, and too bad they are not getting it.) Now for Sprint, I agree there are risks, but they are calculated risks. The exclusivity of iPhone 5 to Sprint is what reduces the risk around this arrangement.

For starters, globally, the average revenue per user for iPhone is about 1.5 to 2 times the average ARPU for all other phones. The numbers are better in the U.S. On an average, in the U.S., average revenue per user for iPhone is about a month, according to Chetan Sharma, principal at Chetan Sharma Consulting. That works out to about ,080 a year.

Now if  Sprint manages to match Verizon’s performance (it added 2.2 million iPhones during the first two months of the launch of the iPhone 4) during the first six months and another million iPhone users in the next six months, it can attract about 3 million iPhone customers to its roster. I am presuming these will be new customers who would switch to Sprint because of the “exclusive” availability of the device on the Sprint network, or they are fed up with AT&T or Verizon.

That works out to about .2 billion in revenues. And given that analysts estimate Sprint to clock in revenues of around billion in 2012, what we are talking about a nice 10 percent bump in revenues for the company. The presence of the new iPhone would also reduce the churn on Sprint’s network and thus would provide the much-needed stability to their revenue stream.

So as I said –crazy yes, but not completely loco!

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In April, Texas Instruments announced its intention to snatch up National Semiconductor for a cool .5 billion. Now, almost six months later, the acquisition is complete and TI can tack another few percentage points on to its already market-leading chunk of the analog chip market. At least for now, National will operate as a branch of TI’s analog division, which now accounts for over 50-percent of the company’s revenue, and keep its (reasonably) well known brand name alive. For a few more details on the deal, check out the PR after the break.

Continue reading Texas Instruments wraps up purchase of National Semiconductor

Texas Instruments wraps up purchase of National Semiconductor originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Sep 2011 00:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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