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A laboratory for news & media innovation - News3.0 Facebook Group

Twitter is already a wonderful place to connect to exciting ideas and people interested to sit in the driving seat of media and news innovation.

There is a lot more to explore in a joint approach and collaboratively on an international level. So it's time to proceed with experimenting with social platforms to connect the right people.

Two days ago I set up a News3.0 lab group to connect to explore the future of news using Facebook as a platform.

If you like to explore innovative ideas, platforms or even work on new process or content concepts join us on Facebook.

Facebook News3.0 Lab group

How HTML5 Will Change A Journalist's Desktop

 

As a journalist you probably won't have to care about programming. But from time to time it is necessary to get at least an idea of the impact of a technological development. HTML5 will have impact on how journalists might work tomorrow.

How will HTML5 enrich the user experience?

Think of a scenario where you're on the road and you have to complete an article. No Internet cafe is around the corner to upload your latest changes. Google Gears is an existing technology to use in this case. Gears is an extension for both Firefox and Internet Explorer that allows to navigate on websites offline. It eases synchronization when going back. Such extensions were called plug-ins if they add additional functionality to an existing software solution, e.g. a browser.

HTML5 makes it even easier to browse and work offline, but without an installation of a plug-in like Gears. It will use storage on your computer to save your article for later upload or synchronization with your blog.

HTML5 also supports geolocation. Maybe you like to use the GPS based location information from your mobile device to tailor search results, tag your Twitter updates or Twitpic uploads from a reportage, and more. If HTML5 will be the language standard of Safari on your iPhone you won't even need iPhone Apps to set up nice user interfaces for your readers to browse your articles online.

Nice article: Livehacker - How HTML5 Will Change the Way You Use the Web

A Picture Is Worth A 1000 Words - Google Goggles

I was in Cologne last weekend, a city in the middle of Germany I do love for its cultural richness. Although I travel there from time to time I still feel a little bit lost without a trace of what restaurants might be worth a visit or what places would be cool.

No problem if you have a mobile device with an Android operating system in your pocket. Google Goggles from Google Labs runs on Android version 1.6+, Google's mobile operating system. If you already have e.g. a Nexus One click on the "market" button to get access to the tool.

How does Google Goggles work? - A combination between GPS data localizing your position and compass does the job. Google will deliver detailed information of the current scene, e.g. today's carte. It works with sights, artwork, labels and book covers but in a slightly different way. If you take a photo of a sight Google uses image recognition to access related information. All these examples illustrate how powerful Google's blended search already is. By the way, "blended" search is Google's search across all vertical search directories integrated into Google (books, images, video, etc.).

Imagine if face recognition and social data, which are already indexed and retrievable via Google, will be available via Google Goggles as well. Search your name in Google to get to know what the world already knows about you.

The powerful technology behind the restaurant recognition (GPS + compass data combined) will be helpful for street journalists as well. Photos taken outside can easily be linked to location. Validation of pictures will be easier if location data were added. Remember the "famous" Twitpic picture "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on a ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy."

A Design Study - How Will News Be Consumed Tomorrow?

Bonnier R&D published a conceptual video of a corporate collaborative research project into the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices like Apples iPad on Vimeo.

Of course I was curious enough watch their video today. 

After some initial scenes where the general design approach is explained their design partner BERG reveals a prototype idea of a first screen. The entry page is dominated by images and headlines without further paragraphs of text. My impression was: yes, also newspapers could be designed that way. Visuals would take on the role as springboards or entry points into news. Rich textual information would be offered on deeper levels of the information architecture to provide with background information where appropriate. Video footage would take precedence over images over text. Infographics will be added where needed to illustrate the facts. Fast access to newspaper style reading should be enabled on the start page as well.Of course all kinds of feedback mechanism are a must.

But who owns the data of how iPad magazines will be read?

Phlogging - What's Next After Blogging: Journalism On the Move

Broadcasting, lifecasting, mindcasting, ... . While this world is more and more on the move, journalists will now phonecast news to the world . One of the startups currently supporting mobile journalism is ipadio.com. The software solution, a pending patent, allows journalists to broadcast from any phone (iPhone, Android, ...) in realtime. It syndicates content with social media and blogging platforms ... Shall we better call them "phlogging" (phone + blogging) platforms now?

Review: 1Cast - Personalized Video News Casts

Kirkland (Washington-US) based Onecast, Inc. offers personalized news feeds or "casts" via its web and mobile-based video platform, which can be watched on your iPhone or Android device.

Casts are automatically updated with the latest clips from sources like BBC Worldwide, Agence France Presse, Reuters, CBC and Al Jazeera as they come in. News are available online just minutes after the original broadcast. Service is currently available only to US based customers.

1Cast is a typical News2.0 application which offers technology (personalization, video distribution to web and mobile, near-to-original broadcast clips) but without unique content. Without unique and relevant content sources the service is highly vulnerable. Also competition in this part of the news value chain of technology platforms is too strong in my opinion. Unless you have no exclusive access to content, technology alone will never be the road to success. News3.0 differs from this approach since unique content providers, the journalists themselves, are major players in the future of news.

Breaking Down Barriers Against More Value

Cameras today are proprietory machines full of man-made barriers to new and exciting features. They were built to fullfill marketing and sales purposes and not to exhaust all current opportunities. 

Think of a camera's mission to house technical innovation and not to be primarely a vehicle to drive companies' sales. You will end up with what Standford computer science professor Marc Levoy and his graduate student Andrew Adams would call "camera 2.0".

In a collaborative approach between Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory, Nokia Research Center Palo Alto Laboratory and also supported by Adobe Systems, Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, and the Walt Disney Company, they developed an open source camera to enable users to create new features for the camera by writing aps that control all the camera's functions -- focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. Cameras could be taught new tricks with downloadable apps, analogous to iPhone apps.

Camera 2.0 shows that if you release innovation by breaking down barriers you might get even higher value to serve people better. The next level of news - News3.0 - will need to discover ways to utilize the open source concept as well. There is more value in an open than in closed systems - in the long run.

More details can be found on the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory website. You can also read the official Standford press release.

YouTube Video:

From Print to Online to Print - The Changing Value Chain

An article from Read Write Web¹ rose my interest today. It was Google's announcement that all content from Google Books is now searchable from the Search Options panel the company introduced earlier this year. That was not a surprise at all. But what's the big picture?

Just one day before, September 17th On Demand Books announced Google has signed an agreement with On Demand Books (PDF), which grants them access to Google's vast library of public domain books. Now if you're interested in a book which is public domain you can easily print it on demand - at least at any of the places which have already an Espresso Book Machine^®. Now a book of 3-400 pages can be printed with a speed of 145 pages per minute and at a cost of about 1 cent per page within 3 minutes. In our sample for $4. The machine can be purchased for as little as $100,000. A demonstration of the machine can be watched online at YouTube: The Espresso Book Machine.

"Unfortunately" the current legal issue with all non-public domain books is that they're protected by copyright which protects them from being illegally copied - at least that is the mission of the law. What would happen if this barrier falls?

Secondly: let's think of an author who does not longer want to wait for her book to be published. She signs a contract with Google for a revenue share when her digital book available in the Google Book "store" will be printed on an Espresso Book Machine^®. Google becomes Amazon but with the power of a publisher.

⁽¹⁾ Source: RWW on searching Google Books

News2.0 - What (social) business models have failed?

I found the following interesting information on Adam Tinworth's blog today: 

"NEW YORK - As the bid deadline for ailing BusinessWeek magazine approaches the McGraw-Hill title is revealed to have spent $16m on creating its social networking site, which is generating little cash. BusinessWeek launched its social networking venture Business Exchange in 2007. By 2008 it had spent $16m on the site, which is estimated by the New York Time to have generated just $600,000 in revenues."

All print titles even the larger one fail to launch a profitable social networking strategy. At least I haven't heard of any lucky one. This fact goes hand in hand with my own experience with my premium club on XING.com a few years ago. Special interest communities have little momentum to create net effects so that investments. Net effects are a MUST for many of the Internet business models to be successful. Many titles in Germany have moved to social networks instead of starting their own for that reason. As long as you are positioned as specialist and not as something for the masses these seems to be the rule.

For whom? - User Centered Design

Design is not l'art pour l'art. Design is a planning process. As a verb, "to design" refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component with intention (Wikipedia on Design).

Yes, many companies develop products for markets which do not exist. It's not that these markets are simply not ready for the innovation to take off. It's because there is NO need for the product or the service so far. In that scenario companies have to create the need before they can sell to anyone.

User centered design or UCD is a design philosophy and a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of the end user are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process (Wikipedia on UCD).While intuition is nice and probably many designers and creatives claim to design by intuition, user-centered design requires much more testing and optimization of the end user experience. The process therefore typically starts with intensive gathering of user requirements before the process of designing starts.

Even how users can participate varies and defines the approach taken. In cooperative or participatory design users and designers are involved equally. Contextual design refers to the actual context in which design will be used. Anyway all approaches refer to ISO standard Human-centered design processes for interactive systems (ISO 13407 Model, 1999)