Wired Top Stories

Wired Top Stories

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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Ask Newt about SOPA or online privacy.

Imagine if your son or daughter created a brilliant mash-up for their English class that you thought was a perfect display of his or her personality, so you decided to share the mash-up on your family blog. Unfortunately, little Susie or Johnny included a brief movie clip or perhaps a fraction of a song in their class project, and suddenly your blog is gone thanks to a complaint from a rightsholder and the passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). If you want your blog back you can take the offending material down, and if you don’t want to do that, then you could sue arguing fair use. Regardless, it’s up to you to figure out what’s wrong and fight to have your blog re-instated.

A growing problem as the web and technology becomes more central to how we share, communicate and work is that an average person doesn’t know how abstract laws can affect their lives and the media doesn’t expose how well (or poorly) politicians understand technology. As a result, certain companies with lobbyists are getting away moulding our laws and policies in their favor and in the process they are going to hinder how Internet works and thrives.

Horror stories about SOPA abound, but what about your cell phone? Can a police officer search the contents of your phone during a traffic stop? Can a customs agent rifle through your laptop files as you return from a trip abroad? What about the history of your Google searches or checkins on Foursquare, can those be used against you in a court of law? These are not idle issues and instead of focusing on who is a socialist or paying  attention solely to where someone stands on social issues such as abortion or gay marriage, the broader media, politicians and citizenry need to start paying attention to and thinking about tech policy.

So while debates over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) will continue to rage as we head into an election year in the U.S. France, The U.K and other places, we should ask elected officials about how they view the Internet and how connectivity can change the world.

Thomas Friedman danced around the issue in his New York Times’ column Tuesday, when he suggested politicians need to be asked about how we can bring to bear the budding infrastructure we’re building to connect people and things to solve some of our problems. Sure the web is disruptive, and disruptive is scary, especially for politicians, but as technology becomes more engrained in our lives it also becomes a target for politicians. So we need politicians that understand it and view it as a tool, yes, one that can be abused, but also one that can be harnessed for society’s benefits, such as improving rural access to healthcare.

Rather than letting the web turn into a partisan issue kind of like spectrum policy has become, or letting industry interests try to cut the web off at the knees as the content industry seems to be doing with SOPA, it’s time to shape some questions that can help voters understand how politicians stand on various issues such as privacy, censorship and the real issues where the government’s views on technology will impact citizens’ lives. I’m not suggesting every Congressman must have a detailed understanding of what a DNS server is, but it’s time they stopped equating the Internet with nerds, and look ahead to how the web can improve government, lower costs and maybe solve some pressing problems.

Here are a few questions I’d like to see at the upcoming debates, but feel free to offer more in the comments below. Honestly, as citizens we also need to be thinking about how we would answer these questions (or want our politicians to answer them) as well.

• As the Internet is changing the skill sets demanded by employers, what does the federal/state/local government need to do to ensure our educational system keeps up? Are there subjects we need to add? Procedures we need to change? Skills our administrators and teachers need? Infrastructure that should be as important as a chalkboard is in classrooms?
• As people store more information online, what do you see as the biggest risks for consumers, corporations and governments? What laws need to change?
• Can you name an area of government where you see adding connectivity or developing a program that uses connectivity could improve service and/or save taxpayers money?
• Our digital footprints are forever and we’re now leaving digital records of every casual search, photograph, thought and place we visit. When much of this information was in a physical form, to get at this data required the government to justify the need to invade someone’s privacy. Our current laws don’t always protect digital information in this same way. Should it?
• Do you consider our current wireline broadband market competitive? How do we keep improving it? Is fiber to the home to as many places as possible a good goal for the government to pursue, recognizing it could cost taxpayers billions?

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The turning of the clock to 2012 means a new beginning for many. I am happy with simply tweaking what has been working by making things simpler and thus better. So as I look ahead, I hope that over the next few months, some of the technology products that I use the most will make incremental changes that could make life better for the people who use their products.

Here is my wish list, not in any specific order:

1). Twitter Sync.

Twitter is trying its very best to make its service more accessible to what some call “normals.” It is a good aspiration to have. In the interim, what Twitter needs is the ability to “sync” across multiple devices and platforms.

How many times do I need to read the same “direct message” or “@ replies?” The fact of the matter is that syncing across platforms is table stakes in today’s modern & highly mobile web. And if they have trouble developing this, maybe Amazon can license it to them.

2). Amazon Match

This holiday season, I signed up for iTunes Match and now I have nearly all of my music in the iCloud. Now Amazon needs to build something similar — for lack of a better word, let’s call it Amazon Match. I have bought hundreds of books from the Seattle-based online retailing giant. What I want them to do is make all of them (or at least the ones that are available online as e-books) sync to my Kindle account.

If they want to charge me an annual fee, I am perfectly fine with that. It is one way of keeping me loyal to the Kindle platform and keeping me using it more often. Kindle as a front end for my cloud-based book library isn’t far fetched: they are making videos & music one acquires through Amazon available on Amazon Prime, so why not books?

3). Instagram-to-Blog

Instagram just might be the most used social app on my iPhone (after Twitter.) I love using it because it allows me to cross-post photos to various platforms – Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Foursquare. However, there is nothing I want more than for Instagram to build support for WordPress (& other blogging platforms such as Squarespace) so I can post my photos directly to my personal blog at the same time as I do on other services. It allows me to share my experiences with others who are not on Instagram and allows me to keep a permanent record of those experiences.

4). Connect the Apps

In December 2011, Path relaunched and with it created a unified social and mobile experience. It combined photo sharing with location, video sharing and a whole lot of other little incremental changes that basically helped the Dave Morin project recover from its early blunders.

However, the biggest take away from Path is that we need ways for mobile apps to connect with each other better and create enhanced experiences across platforms. Right now, mobile users need to enter data (photos, locations etc) into different applications multiple times. The ability to mix and match the data from other apps is going to help us realize that “data is the new plastic.”

5). Un-Swiped

My iPad has become my preferred way of consuming information — video, text and photos — and has started to suck time away from my Macbook Air. This move to iPad has created many new reading experiences and some of them like the Flipboard and Zite are quite spectacular. And then there are the OnSwipe-enabled WordPress.com blogs, which are a lot less so. It is the one iPad-centric view that needs to be retired — or at the very least it shouldn’t be the default setting for those blogs.

What is on your wishlist? Share with us.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Wired Top Stories

Wired Top Stories

Wired Top Stories

While 2011 was a very busy year for the technology industry, the constant rate of innovation and activity in the market shows that things probably won’t slow down in 2012. Below, we’ve rounded up some of GigaOM’s biggest stories of the year — roughly in the order that they occurred — with a bit of insight on what each could mean for 2012.

• AT&T’s billion bid to buy T-Mobile
• Facebook makes its data center details public
• Google and Facebook battle for the social networking crown
• Netflix screws up — again and again
• Spotify launches in the US
• Google buys Motorola Mobility for .5 billion
• Solyndra crashes and burns
• Hewlett-Packard’s soap opera
• Steve Jobs dies at age 56
• The tech IPO makes a big comeback

AT&T’s billion bid to buy T-Mobile

Sunday mornings are usually pretty sleepy in terms of business news, but March 20th, 2011 was an exception. That’s when AT&T announced its plan to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom AG for a whopping billion. A deal that huge naturally catches the attention of everyone: The media, consumer groups, industry competitors, and perhaps most importantly, federal regulators. After nearly nine months of back-and-forth about the legality of the merger that came to be known as AT&T-Mo, the deal fell apart: On December 19, AT&T ended its bid to buy T-Mobile as its CEO Randall Stephenson pledged to “continue to be aggressive in leading the mobile Internet revolution.”

What this means for 2012: As GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham pointed out, despite the failure of AT&T-Mo, major changes in the wireless space are inevitable and consolidation will continue:

Now that the deal is off the table, the industry can return to solving the big question that plagues wireless in the U.S.: How the heck will operators get the spectrum and build the networks they need to support robust demand for 4G wireless services and still make money. … AT&T’s bid to get more spectrum wasn’t just an attempt to take out a competitor; it really did need more spectrum for its LTE network, and having T-Mobile’s AWS airwaves ready for an LTE deployment would have made AT&T’s migration path a lot simpler. As operators move from 3G to 4G services such as LTE, they are learning the costs associated with remaking and upgrading their networks are substantial. And as they look ahead to spectrum-hogging standards such as LTE-Advanced, they need more megahertz.

Facebook makes its data center details public

Facebook's Prineville, Oregon datacenter

Most big Internet companies spend a lot of time and money on designing and maintaining data centers. But typically, these companies keep the nitty-gritty details of how they manage the servers that power their operations to themselves — the makeup and quantity of servers that run Google has long been some of the search company’s most highly-guarded secrets, for example (though Google has been sharing that data as of late). Facebook, however, decided to start telling the world about its data center details.

In April 2011, the social networking company debuted the Open Compute Project, in which it provided full specifications of its computing infrastructure. The reason, Facebook says on its OpenCompute.org website, is to help improve technology as a whole:

“We want you to tell us where we didn’t get it right and suggest how we could improve. And opening the technology means the community will make advances that we wouldn’t have discovered if we had kept it secret.”

What this means for 2012: More sharing in the infrastructure space, particularly around how to reduce energy consumption of data centers. Executives from Intel, RackSpace, Arista Networks and Goldman Sachs all joined the Open Compute Project’s board of directors. Of course, pledging to be “open” is almost always good PR, but with this particular initiative Facebook is leading the way with concrete efforts for real transparency in a major industry issue.

Google and Facebook battle for the social networking crown

In June, Google launched Google+, its newest answer to the social networking space that in recent years has been dominated by Facebook. That move seemed to spark renewed vigor from Facebook to maintain its social edge and the next week at a quickly-assembled press event for a new in-Facebook video chat app powered by Skype, Mark Zuckerberg kicked off what he called his company’s “Launching Season 2011.” This season also seemingly culminated with the September debut of Timeline, a dramatically different new Facebook user interface. Google, meanwhile, directed increasing amounts of its attention on trying to make Google+ a success.

What this means for 2012: Even more competitive activity and expect the year to be cut throat. Facebook and Google are showing no signs of backing down from the battle, and with its own bold new redesign, Twitter has thrown its cap into the ring to be the social networking site of choice.

Netflix screws up — again and again

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings

What a year it’s been for Netflix — and not in a good way. It all began in June, when the company announced changes in its pricing structure (splitting its DVD rental business from its online streaming business) that would significantly boost prices for the vast majority of customers. Not surprisingly, that didn’t go over so well. So in September, CEO Reed Hastings apologized for the changes and took back the price hike. Instead, he said, Netflix’s DVD rental business would be rebranded as Quikster and essentially put up for sale as the Netflix brand moved to a streaming-only model. That didn’t go over so well, either. So less than a month later, Netflix once again backtracked, killing the Quikster proposal and electing to keep DVD rentals in its core business. Wall Street analysts lauded Netflix’s ultimate decision to keep DVD rentals alive, but Wall Street punished the company nevertheless: Netflix share price dropped from nearly 0 earlier this year to about now.

What this means for 2012: Netflix has its work cut out for it, having closed out 2011 with its lowest customer satisfaction ratings in company history. GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler recently put it thusly:

“Netflix is still the clear leader in the online streaming space, with about 24 million subscribers. But for years Netflix has relied on the virtuous cycle of positive word-of-mouth to help propel its growth. With customer satisfaction declining rapidly, it’ll have to work harder to retain existing customers and to win new ones.”

Spotify launches in the US

Spotify, the popular Europe-based on-demand music streaming service, finally made its highly anticipated debut in the United States in mid-July. A couple months later, the service got an extra boost with a deep integration with Facebook that let users easily listen to songs on Spotify and share them with friends through the social networking service.

What this means for 2012: The buzz around Spotify seems to have spurred other online music services to bring their A-games to the space. Expect more innovation from Pandora, MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody and others.

Google buys Motorola Mobility for .5 billion

Andy Rubin (Google) and Dr. Sanjay K. Jha (Motorola) onstage at Mobilize 2009

Google shook up the dog days of mid-August when it announced plans to acquire Motorola Mobility for .5 billion. Once the deal is closed (it’s expected to go through in early 2012) Google will have bought access to Motorola’s portfolio of 17,000 current patents and 7,500 patent applications across wireless standards and non-essential patents on wireless service delivery.

What this means for 2012: The deal is such a huge one that all of its ramifications will take a while to become clear, but Google’s ultimate goal is to further strengthen the mobile strategy it built with the Android mobile operating system. With some 700,000 Android devices being activated daily, Google is already well-positioned in the mobile space — the Motorola investment shows that the company is in it for the long haul in mobile.

Solyndra crashes and burns

Solar panel maker Solyndra was one of the highest profile companies the cleantech space has seen in recent years, garnering visits from President Obama, and applause from Vice President Biden, DOE Secretary Steven Chu and then California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The company even received a 5 million loan from the U.S. government.

So when the company filed for bankruptcy in August 2011, laid off more than 1,000 employees, and essentially lost the entire tax-payer funded loan, it was a huge blow for a number of industries: Technology, venture capital, and of course solar power. Ucilia Wang wrote in-depth about the story behind Solyndra’s rise and fall for GigaOM.

The bigger trend behind Solyndra has been global crashing solar prices. Thanks partly to Chinese solar companies flooding the market with low (and below) cost solar panels, solar panel makers throughout the world have been struggling and have been going out of businesses. While that’s not good news for those firms, it’s great for consumers, businesses and utilities that are buying solar  panels — solar has never been cheaper.

What this means for 2012: Being that the Solyndra implosion will go down as one of the biggest venture capital losses in history, VC firms will be understandably hesitant to invest in solar companies for quite some time. Also, the federal grants awarded to Solyndra have become a punchline of sorts in the political arena, so the U.S. government may also shy away from supporting solar companies for a while.

Hewlett-Packard’s soap opera

In August, Hewlett-Packard raised eyebrows when it announced plans to spend billion in cash to acquire Autonomy, a UK-based software and services company and said it would look into selling off its billion-a-year PC business. Investors and the industry at large were stunned by both moves which, apparently, were the last straw for HP’s board as well. A month later, HP fired Leo Apotheker, the CEO who brokered the deal and set the PC change in motion, and brought in former Ebay CEO Meg Whitman as his replacement.

What this means for 2012: As GigaOM’s Barb Darrow writes, 2012 is a crucial time for HP to work to “repair its reputation and restore itself to the status of IT icon.” Whether the company will succeed in doing so remains to be seen.

Steve Jobs dies at age 56

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ death on October 5 was a big story for the world even beyond the tech community. Although his passing was not completely unexpected — Jobs had suffered from pancreatic cancer and related complications for some time, and had stepped down from the CEO role at Apple in August because of his health — his death deeply affected many people. Jobs was hugely influential through his work at Apple and as a tech industry figure in general.

What this means for 2012: WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg recently told GigaOM that he thinks Jobs will affect tech in the months and years to come:

“Steve Jobs’ passing affected me more than I expected. I think we’re going to enter a golden age of design, just by virtue of thousands and thousands of founders and designers asking themselves, ‘What would Steve do?’ The things that these people will create will be even bigger than Apple. That’s part of his legacy.”

The web IPO makes a big comeback

A number of venture-backed web companies made their stock market debuts this year. LinkedIn (LNKD), Pandora Media, Zillow, Groupon, Zynga, and TripAdvisor- all went public in 2011. While not all of these companies had stellar post-IPO stock price performances, the very fact they got out the gate is a win in itself for investors and founders.

What this means for 2012: By the looks of it, the IPO wave is just getting started. Analysts say 2012 promises to be another big year for tech IPOs, and in the spring 2012 public offering expected from Facebook will likely be the star of the show.

Some images courtesy of HackingNetflix, whiteafrican, hyku, jdlasica, and Mathieu Thouvenin.

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