“There are 2.2 billion mobile phones in the developing world, 305 million computers but only 11 million hospital beds,” said Terry Kramer, strategy director at British operator Vodafone at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week. That’s why Vodafone, along with the United Nations and the Rockerfeller Foundation’s mHealth Alliance have banded together to advance the use of mobile phones to better aid those in need of healthcare in the developing world. […]
Examples of the mHealth projects included:
* Sending mobile phone owners updates on diseases via SMS.
* Letting health workers in Uganda log data on mobile devices from the field.
* In South Africa, the SIMpill is a sensor-equipped pill bottle with a SIM card that informs doctors whether patients are taking their tuberculosis medicine.
* In Uganda, a multiple-choice quiz about HIV/AIDS was sent to 15,000 subscribers inviting them to answer questions and seek tests. Those who completed the quiz were given free airtime minutes. At the end of the quiz, a final SMS encouraged participants to go for voluntary testing. The number of people who did so increased from 1000 to 1400 over a 6-week period.
* In the Amazonas state of Brazil, health workers filled in surveys on their phones about the incidences of mosquito-borne dengue fever.
* In Mexico, a medical hotline called MedicallHome lets patients send medical questions via SMS.
Tagtechnology
As promised, here are some ideas for new business models for professional journalism. This is geared towards established companies rather than start-ups.
I’m ignoring established revenue streams. Not necessarily because I don’t think they can’t work, but because I’m trying to focus on new ideas. I don’t necessarily think the following ideas can successfully support massive newsrooms on their own – but they could certainly bring in additional revenue. Think of this as a proof of concept that there’s room for innovation in news media business models.
Leverage archives and brand
What do the established media companies have that upstart online companies and bloggers don’t? Massive archives of content – decades of material. How can this be leveraged to make more money and fund the newsrooms producing new content?
The other thing established newspapers and magazines have is a recognizable brand. More on that later.
Idea # 1: Provide business information services – compete with LexisNexis
I don’t know exactly how LexisNexis works. I assume they license archives from the New York Times and others. So this is already a revenue stream for the papers who sell content to Nexis.
But what if they fired the middleman and expanded their offerings? Gannet, AP, Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post Company, and a few other companies could find ways to offer a lot of value. The Time’s open search API is interesting, and the possible start of “newspapers as platforms.”
They’d have to compete head-on with Google (I assume Nexis already is) to provide premium business with premium access programs and meaningful search systems. Business intelligence companies might be good acquisition targets. The key to success here will be not in just dumping tons of raw data on companies, but finding unique and useful ways to sort it and find value in it. Which is exactly what newspapers are supposed to be doing for the public.
There’s a conflict of interest potential here, but I’m not sure having a few big “business information service” clients is any worse a conflict than having a few big advertisers.
Idea # 2: Offer archival material – maybe personalized
Time has a publicly accessible online archive of all their articles all the way back to their beginnings in 1923, including covers. This seems really smart since they can run ads on all these millions of pages (I don’t know if they make more than way than by selling to Nexus and similar databases, or if offering everything up for free like that prohibits them from also selling to databases). They also have special collections based around particular themes or people, like World War II and Johnn Lennon.
The New Yorker sells a DVD of their complete archives. I don’t know if there’s any sort of topical sorting features on the DVD to help you find stuff based around a theme.
But here’s an idea: Couldn’t Time, The New Yorker, and any other magazine or newspaper with sufficiently deep and archives and quality content sell hard cover commemorative books and/or slipcase editions on topics of special interest to collectors (like WWII, John Lennon, JFK, Marilyn Monroe). Books of photos, stories, covers, etc.
I’m sure a few such thing already exist, but it seems there could be quite a market for such products.
When Time published their archives my friend and Buckminster Fuller historian Trevor Blake went through their archives to read everything they had ever published about Bucky. I don’t know if there would be a huge market for, say, a Harper’s Buckminster Fuller Archive but it gives me another idea: media companies could partner with print on demand services like Lulu to sell special customized archives of material from their archives. Build a simple interface to let people drag and drop text and pictures into a template and charge them a premium for a nice hardbound collection of material. Maybe even let them make their customized books available for sale and cut them in on the profit.
Idea 3: re-invent the online classified
There’s only so much leverage a small local paper or alt-weekly can get out of its archives. But they do still have their brand names. So whatever online offerings they may have will probably draw a lot of attention – the trick is to monetize it.
Papers have been complaining that Craig’s List killed their classifieds, and are therefore killing their papers. I’ve got news for them: Craig’s List is far from perfect. It’s ugly. It’s been years since there’s been any significant improvement (since the addition of RSS feeds I’d say).
There’s plenty of room for local papers to compete with Craig’s List. They just don’t want to have to give the bulk of their classifieds out for free. Why not? Craig’s List changed the game (actually, eBay did even before that), so it’s time for papers to start playing it. Simply Hired and Indeed compete with CL for job listings. OK Cupid competes with them for personals. Cars.com competes with them for auto listings. Get in the game.
Select Alternatives is making some headway here, offering online personal sites for alt. weeklies. The Portland Mercury uses ’em and I’ve heard very good things.
Hint: there are major opportunities in geolocative services.
Conclusion
In short: papers should be acquiring and partnering with tech companies, and hiring innovative software developers. There are plenty of untapped markets that newspapers are in a unique position to take advantage of if they’re willing to experiment and innovate before it’s too late.
The New York Times will not go quietly into the dark knight of new media. Amidst constant rumors of the death of traditional news, the much-respected industry stalwart is moving quickly to build a compelling and forward-looking solution that redefines “the newspaper as platform”, as ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick notes.
Today the NYT announced that 2.8 million articles will be exposed to the digital world through the site’s API, allowing anyone to link, annotate, mashup, and crawl the data for meaning. This opportunity to construct data visualizations that abstract patterns & trends from within the articles is perhaps the most interesting element that immediately adds human value to what is otherwise an overwhelming amount of information (2.8 articles).
The recent Twitter Superbowl visualization, as well as other visualization experiments at NYT.com, are indicators of how the company is gathering data and parsing it in meaningful ways. A list of Twitter posts related to the Superbowl is just a long index table. Even reading the Summize Search feed for such a huge event is dizzying. But a geo-located, timeline mashup of tweets & key terms with a map of the US is immediately valuable to anyone trying to get a bead on trends. Their implementation is simple & entertaining, and you can derive substantial meaning at a glance.
The next step is offering meaningful business information from this data and competing with LexusNexus.
“A voyage to fabled Timbuktu in a flying car may sound like a magical childhood fantasy. But this week a British adventurer will set off from London on an incredible journey through Europe and Africa in a souped-up sand buggy, travelling by road – and air.
With the help of a parachute and a giant fan-motor, Neil Laughton plans to soar over the Pyrenees near Andorra, before taking to the skies again to hop across the 14-km (nine-mile) Straits of Gibraltar. The ex-SAS officer then aims to fly over the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, above stretches of the Sahara desert and, well, wherever else the road runs out. But forget Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – this flying machine is based on proven technology.”
(via BBC News. h/t: The Adventure Blog)
John Robb writes about the potential for transformation of the educational system:
* Lectures. Videos of lecture series, plus associated materials, are available for many courses at some of the best Universities in the world (i.e. see MIT’s open courseware). Online videos are not only better than in-person lectures in many respects, they also allow you to get the best. There is no need to recreate the lecture with tens of thousands of less qualified/exceptional teachers.
*Application. As MIT is finding out, JIT (just-in-time information) in combination with simulated application of the concept to real scenarios is the best method for success. The advent of computer simulated virtual worlds for in the computer gaming industry have proven this combination (JIT info and immediate application) can train kids to adults in complicated and complex tasks in a fraction of the time other methods require.
* Collaboration. The business world is already shifting on online collaboration as a replacement for most in-person work (the economic crisis will only accelerate it). In my personal experience developing exceeding complex products, its possible to conduct the entire process from ideation to delivery online without any face to face contact (at great savings in time to direct expense). Unfortunately, this ability/skill/mindset isn’t central to the educational world, despite the fact that students are currently doing much of this already in their private lives with social software.
Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has announced that his organization will be cutting half its staff and ending in-house development of Sugar, the Linux-based operating system that ships on its tiny XO Children’s Machine laptops.
Even though the OLPC project has been praised by the mainstream media, the free software elite and humanitarian organizations for its goal to supply low-cost, educational computers to developing countries with little or no technology infrastructure, the project has been beset by a host of problems and delays. The worldwide economic downturn has slowed hardware orders, but the project was largely sidelined by the revolution it helped create — a wave of low-cost, low-powered laptops built to run Windows, like Intel’s similar Classmate PC. Now, even the OLPC project is transitioning to Windows after realizing it’s what customers want. […]
Sugar will continue to grow, thanks to Sugar Labs, an open community founded by OLPC-er Walter Bender dedicated to building up the OS.
Update: as of 11/10/09 leading security expert Bruce Schneier also recommends AVG and Malwarebytes.
We seem to be in the midst of one of those periodic malware epidemics. I’ve been hearing from other IT pros and savvy users that they’ve been seeing some nasty stuff lately. Now’s a good time to make sure your antivirus and spyware protection tools are up to date, and consider getting better ones. I’ve been doing this stuff professionally for about 10 years now, and the very best tools I’ve found at any price are, in fact, free.
Removal
Spybot used to be the king of free spyware removal tools. But it just hasn’t kept up with the times. Malwarebytes’ Antimalware is the best removal tool I’ve ever found. I’ve managed to save some systems that I was certain would have to be wiped and reloaded. I’d recommend downloading it and running it even if you don’t think you have any malware right now.
Prevention
AVG Free Edition tops all the professional antivirus software I’ve ever used (and I’ve used AV products from Norton, CA, TrendMicro, and McAffee). Very little gets by it, and it has a relatively low CPU/memory overhead. Personal edition is free, but business users will have to pay (worth it, in my opinion). The free version has some limitations, but the next product seems to make up for it:
Windows Defender. Yes, a Microsoft Product. But this is as good as any active protection solution I’ve used, and better than most. This one’s free even for business use, as long as you have a legit copy of Windows. It’s not as good as Malewarebytes for removal, but excellent for protection.
The combination of AVG Free and Windows Defender has been remarkable for me over the years, and has been solid for all the friends I’ve setup with it as well – even relatively clueless users surfing unsavory sites.
His solution is an elegant new software stack called Jolicloud – users will download Jolicloud to their Netbooks and then install it. Whatever operating system and software is on the computer will be wiped off, and replaced with a stripped down Linux operating system and custom browser. […]
For competition, check out Good OS, which is another stripped down operating system that’s perfect for low end PCs. Good OS is different, though, in that the company is targeting device manufacturers to add it as a dual boot option. Jolicloud is going straight to the consumer to encourage them to try it out.
Compared to the current job market, IT professionals should recall the collapse of the dot-com bubble with a fondness for the good ol’ days.
That’s according to the latest bi-annual IT salary survey from management consultant Janco Associates, which has painted a dreary picture for tech workers. The firm called current conditions “a perfect storm” of company closures, layoffs, cost cutting, outsourcing, and retirees returning to work. That massive surplus of IT talent is matched by what the firm reckons is the lowest hiring demand it has observed in the 15 plus years it’s conducted the salary survey.
The study said that extensive layoffs, cost-cutting and hiring freezes have eliminated higher-priced positions, and in some cases lowered wages.
(via Cryptogon)
Business Intelligence. The enterprise will increasingly use cloud agents and semantic analytics to better understand their customers, markets, finances, and internal workflows. Companies will engage in behavioral modeling and web meme profiling more aggressively. With diminishing worforce resources due to budgetary constraints, increased investment into automation and intelligent software solutions will give businesses more information and feedback without requiring as many large paychecks. Electronic business workflows, services, and applications will evolve to write more intelligent metadata and semantic subtext into file formats while similarly reporting usage analytics out to dyanamic data streams. All of this data will be sorted by cloud agents, filtered, parsed, and then rendered to rich media layers (eg Flash) for practical visualization and analysis. All documents and file types will evolve to contain more legacy information about who and how the file was created, when & where, who has access rights and to what degree, who has reviewed them and what comments have been attached. Such intelligent files will enable greater and greater usage by both human and cloud agents.
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