Posts Tagged ‘Gradde’

Paramountclips.com – Way To Go!

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Paramount Pictures has launched paramountclips.com, an online video clip service where you can search for a specific clip and then online buy licensing rights for various forms of usage. Initially, it is for corporate customers only, but ultimately, the site will be opened to consumers as well.

Now, this is about structuring, re-packaging and distributing already existing material. I couldn’t be happier than to hear about this. Not only because these types of systems is something that Voxbiblia.com has been producing for quite some time, but because the future of media – at least one of the keys to it – lies right here. As a user, the opening up of archives and the chopping up of content, makes it possible to re-package and add stuff to material that has already been produced and thus to serve material in a new and value-adding context. We don’t need to reproduce everything again. It is all about the packaging, stupid.

In science it is common to speak about your sucess depending upon you standing on the shoulders of giants, i.e. others who have treaded the path before you and whose research has been instrumental for you. Now we can start using that same concept for publishing as well.

Or, maybe not. Paramount is still way, way alone in activating their digital assets. But if more would do the same the horizon would brighten considerably.

Johan Jorgensen

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Covey Puts A Nail in the Publisher Coffin

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Stephen R. Covey, author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” has moved e-book rights of said title, plus “Principle-Centered Leadership” from Simon & Schuster (who aren’t happy about it) to RosettaBooks, an e-book publisher who will make the titles available through Amazon. Mr. Covey is however probably very happy about it, since he can keep more than half of the sales, whereas standard royalty from paper-publishers are around 25%. You can read an article from the New York Times about it here (interesting discrepancy; it is free without registration when you access it from New York Times mobile site m.nyt.com, but if you want to read it through the regular site you need to register first).

The whole deal highlights the unsure legal situation. How much of the rights to a title actually resides with a publisher? Is it paper only? Digital? The right to record it? Film rights? Combinations of text and audio? The right to add comments, pictures or take slices of the material to an anthology?

In short, it is a mess. Publishers, however, don’t want to talk too much about it. A situation in which they actually don’t have the rights anymore (at least not for the most interesting future channels) to a material that has taken them decades to build up is a spectre of almost unimaginable board-room horror.

I mean, not only do publishers face a situation where the value of their magazine brand portfolios are diminishing on an almost daily basis. Now, their book catalogues might be wiped out as well.

Now, these aren’t really news. The publishers have for a long time strived to secure digital rights as well, but in many cases it has proven a hard nut to crack. Authors have simply taken a “let’s watch and see” aproach, in many cases not being too happy with how publishers have pushed their creations. And the news of Mr. Covey doubling his margins in the e-world won’t help.

Johan Jorgensen

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The New Development of Tablets – More of Less

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

We have all heard the rumors of Apple’s upcoming tablet. It’s supposed to do all kinds of magic tricks. But why don’t you also take a peek at SI Tablet, something that Time Inc. has developed together with The Wonderfactory, on whose site you also can see it.

If we are to believe what we see and hear on the tablet front (but bear in mind that The Wonderfactory seems like the sort of creative Manhattan web agency/advertising bureau where hard core tech geeks would wear anything from giant chicken suits to paper bags just to avoid being seen sneaking in and out of the office) it is going to be a rush to market in 2010.

Now, what are the implications if this vision is true? Let’s just point to a few core ones.

For one, it is going to be mightily expensive to produce content. An ordinary article would need a production budget the size of a TV show.

But if people enjoy what they experience, we will see the same type of scale effects and centralization that we have seen elsewhere; i.e. magazines need to get even larger in order to be able to afford to deliver. Fewer books would be published, but those that would pass the eye of the needle would be multimedia monsters. We would consume more of less. More Harry Potter and Sports Illustrated. Less of everything else.

It also means more content owners would need to come together. Today different organizations have different rights for different formats. That implies a jockeying for position and a fight concerning who has the most of the most relevant formats. Is it the publisher? Is it the TV networks? Is it the Hollywood Studios?

It also means that background information will become more important. People will want to see developing stories and be able to access more stuff. So, databases need to be updated, access to more information needs to be secured. Once again, a fight between open information, and controlled copyrights. And, in many cases, a fight just to open up already existing archives within existing organizations.

And how will we pay for this? Enter app stores, new advertising models, bundled devices, cell phone operators, the likes.

It is a brave new world in which we will consume more and more stuff digitally. But which ways and methods that will prevail remains to be seen. The same goes for media organizations. The crystal ball is foggy. But:

Once upon a time content was king. Then distribution became King Kong. For the future I place my bets on anybody that can leverage their digital assets by providing well structured and packaged content to multiple devices based on what the user wants.

And here’s the weak point in the SI Tablet and similar visions. It is old thinking, based on old models for publishing content in high volumes on paper. But in a new, fancy wrapping.

Currently technology is far, far ahead of publishers. Publishers need to get at least up on par with tech companies in order to make something truly great of the brightly glowing future of new form factors like the tablets.

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Voxbiblia tecknar avtal med Verbum Förlag

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Pressmeddelande, 9 december 2009

VOXBIBLIA OCH VERBUM FÖRLAG I NYTT BIBELSAMARBETE

– Tillsammans ska Voxbiblia och Verbum ta fram nya sätt och metoder att sprida och distribuera Bibeln, inklusive banbrytande digitala tjänster

Voxbiblia, som ligger bakom den svenska inläsningen av Bibel 2000 och siterna Voxbiblia.com, Voxbiblia.se och BibleSearch.org har tecknat ett samarbetsavtal med Verbum, Sveriges ledande utgivare av religiös litteratur. Avtalet innebär att Verbum får tillgång till såväl Voxbiblias inläsning av Bibel 2000 som digitala publiceringssystem specialdesignade för Bibeln

– För oss är detta en central satsning på att levandegöra Bibeln, bland annat mot konfirmander. Genom nya kombinationer av fysiska och digitala produkter kan vi göra Bibeln mer användar-vänlig och därmed öka intresset för Bibeln. Det gör också att Verbum kan behålla sin position som Sveriges ledande Bibelförlag, säger Andreas Strömberg, affärsutvecklare på Verbum.

Voxbiblias digitala publiceringssystem för Bibeln har blivit mycket uppmärksammat. Förutom att göra det möjligt att lyssna, ladda hem och embedda ljudfiler finns även omfattande sökfunktionalitet och användargenererade rekommendationer. Voxbiblias inläsning av Bibel 2000 är gjord av några av Sveriges bästa röster, såsom Stina Ekblad, Roger Storm, Henry Ottenby och Ulf-Håkan Jansson och de ger ett nytt liv åt texter som annars lätt faller i glömska utanför kretsen av de ivrigaste Bibelläsarna.

– Voxbiblias roll är att driva teknik- och konceptutveckling för Bibeln och att agera partner till förlag och andra bibelspridande organisationer. Eftersom Bibeln har samma struktur oavsett språk lämpar den sig extremt väl för Voxbiblias koncept med central utveckling av teknik och metoder som sedan kan tillämpas på alla Biblar i hela världen. Vi är mycket glada för att Verbum nu blir vår partner i detta arbete. Att göra Bibeln tillgänglig på nya sätt som t ex MP3 är viktigt för att nå nya målgrupper och utveckla användandet, säger Johan Jörgensen, VD för Voxbiblia.

För mer information, kontakta:

Johan Jörgensen, VD, Voxbiblia, 0735 200 633, johan@voxbiblia.se, www.voxbiblia.se

Andreas Strömberg, affärsutvecklare, Verbum, 0702 42 35 04, andreas.stromberg@verbum.se, www.verbum.se

Voxbiblia är religöst, tekniskt och finansiellt fristående från enskilda kyrkor och samfund. Vi arbetar med banbrytande publiceringsteknik och genom våra lösningar levereras några av världens ledande Bibelinläsningar. Mer information: www.voxbiblia.com.

Besök gärna även www.voxbiblia.co.uk, www.voxbiblia.se och www.biblesearch.org


Verbum Förlag är Sveriges ledande utgivare av teologisk litteratur och ett av marknadens största fackboksförlag. Utgivningen är främst riktad till kyrkor och församlingar, och rymmer utöver böcker även undervisningsmaterial, handböcker och musik. Kärnan i verksamheten är teologisk, men utgivningen speglar även livsfrågor, andlig vägledning, sökande och växande i den kristna tron. Verbum sätter livsfrågorna i centrum. Verbum Förlag ger ut böcker och musik under namnen Verbum och Cordia. Mer information: www.verbum.se.

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Why We Need New Publishing Systems

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Have you ever seen a publishing system? I bet you have. Enter new content, move through workflow, publish on site. La-di-da. Same-same all the time.

Have you ever seen an interesting publishing system that makes it possible for you to do something with the content you already have? I bet you haven’t.

How come all publishing systems are so focused on news? Is that where the bulk of interest can be found with the public? I’m not sure. I’m not sure at all. To me, re-packaging material and putting it in context is a core part of the future of media. I can easily see magazines (if that is the future, that is) which are compiled of already existing articles. No new stuff. Who needs more news? I, for my part, need more intelligence.

What to do about that? You can do plenty.

At Voxbiblia.com we have for quite a number of years tried to push our publishing ideas to the Bible publishing world. The notion is that the content – in this case the Bible – is the core of the onion, but in order to be able to navigate such a complex material you need more ways into it.

We have built systems where we de-construct the content (the Bible really consists of roughly 3,000 contextual passages) and make it possible for users, experts and ourselves alike to select, re-package, comment and distribute differently depending on individual preferences; i.e. we work with content we already have and by adding new ways of reaching it, we add new understanding, new distribution channels, new forms of context and – hopefully – new users.

I won’t bore you with details, but it is pretty obvious that you can use the same type of technology for any type of content that is structured and can benefit from being de-constructed and then re-constructed again. Not only other religious texts, but poetry, educational material, short stories, encyclopedical material, comic strips, you name it.

How come it hasn’t been done yet? Beats me, but I guess it is a combination of publishing maturity and legal (the right to re-publish parts of a content in a new context is most times NOT a part of the license agreement…).

For quite some time we have therefore felt like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness. But the last few days a couple of things have happened:

On Tuesday, Google launched its Living Stories project which makes it possible for you to follow an ongoing story, complete with timeline. A good write-up can be found in the New York Times here. Finally! To gather material concerning a specific topic has been done by newspapers for quite sometime now. And before that it was spoken about for another decade or two.

I’m in fact rather surprised that Google took this long to dive into the issue. But now that they have, maybe things will progress with a greater speed. And it would for sure be good to be able to follow an ongoing story from several sources at the same time, even though it still is a little unclear as to when that will happen, since this is a project done in co-operation with the New York Times and Washington Post and each ongoing story currently comes only from one newspaper.

The second piece of news is that a number of Big Publishing Companies, including Time, Condé Nast, the Hearst Corporation, Meredith and NewsCorp have poured an un-specified amount of money (presumably millions) into a new venture that is to experiment with content systems/software to take content to devices in both a richer way than is possible today, but also to devices that yet don’t exist. You can read more about it in the New York Times here.

Now, what will happen to that consortium is yet to be seen. But maybe things finally start to move. Maybe.

If you have any intel or suggestions concerning this field, please let me know.

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New Payment Systems Galore

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Now, what is it with all these payment systems? They tend to emerge in groups. And fail in groups. It seems we’re currently in a new wave of releases.

Nokia is transforming itself into a bank (or, rather, their operator friends). The appstores of this world is trying to position themselves as the micropayment par preferance. Squareup.com has introduced a card reader that can transform your iPhone to a payment terminal (and to an ideal skimming device). And serial entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal has landed $10 million in first round financing for gWallet, which is – yes you guessed it – a new digital/virtual currency that also will work on your cell phone.

I guess PayPal and Digital River are sitting idle, rolling their thumbs (not).

The funny thing is of course that none of this development – or at least significantly less of it – would have happened if telcos had behaved well with their premium SMS solutions, charging the normal 2-4% transaction fees plus traffic.

But, hey, why shouldn’t they open up for competition in this field as well? I mean, they effectively gave away their long distance market to Skype. Search services run circles around their once so proprietary data. And now, them celebrated payment systems, based in bunkers  filled with Big Iron from IBM, DEC and Unisys, is up for graps.

Unless they change, re-negotiate their international agreements and start focusing on what they can deliver, given the horrendous margins in text messaging.

But, then again, why would they? So, perhaps this new wave of payment solutions are here to stay and indicate a brave new world of micropayments and digital transactions distributed to everywhere. That will change how we perceive and do business.

Maybe I even one day will be able to use a micro payment system to buy a telco.

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