Adaptive radio may upend wireless spectrum system

James Collier runs Neul, a Cambridge startup that makes the green boxes, which house a new technology called adaptive radio. Today, anything that transmits long-range signals over the airwaves -radios, cell phones, television networks - broadcasts on a single, fixed frequency. Think of the 106.7 that appears on your radio dial. Both broadcaster and listener have to be tuned to the same wave. Each cell phone, similarly, has its own allotted frequency to communicate with nearby towers. Carriers must spend billions to license chunks of spectrum to make sure their subscribers can connect wherever they go.



A radio from Neul - or one of several startups working on similar technology - upends this whole system. An adaptive radio doesn't always use the same fixed frequency, but checks to see which frequencies around it aren't in use, then borrows empty air for a short-term connection. As devices move around, the connection can shift, too. Collier's loop around Cambridge is a demonstration - part of a trial led by Microsoft and other tech giants - that the idea works technologically. If it works commercially, too, it could change the dynamics of the wireless business.


 
An adaptive network could help companies in the United States such as AT&T or Verizon Wireless run their networks far more efficiently by squeezing more smart phones and other devices onto a given range of wireless spectrum.


 
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For Cumulus Media, Huckabee Takes On Limbaugh

Radio may seem like yesterday’s medium, but it remains hugely lucrative, with profit margins—before debt servicing—of about 30 percent, according to media research firm SNL Kagan. It’s a business that boasts low fixed costs: towers, transmitters, and talent. “The great thing about the radio business, it’s not capital-intensive,” says Michael Bergner, president of media brokerage firm Bergner & Co. “It’s old technology, but it’s easy and it works.” Overall projected 2012 industry revenues climbed to $14.6 billion from recession lows of $13.3 billion in 2009, according to research firm BIA/Kelsey.

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The ‘Rich Guy Play Toy’ Future of Newspapers

Media General is a chain of small-ish newspapers across America. Not a particularly prestigious or savvy chain of newspapers, and the company's value has been nosediving off a cliff for the past five years along with most of the rest of the newspaper industry. But Media General has now been purchased by Mr. Warren Buffett. And just like that, this mediocre little newspaper chain becomes the embodiment of the industry's future.
 
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Paywalls Proliferate, Most DIgital Pros Won't Pay For Them

While the figures may not be indicative of broader consumer behaviors, over half of digital media professionals who encounter online paywalls say they immediately leave the Web site, according to a DigiCareers survey cited by eMarketer. However, there was some good news for online publishers, as a substantial number said they looked into the details of access and pricing.

The bad news for news publishers: digital media pros were far more willing to pay for entertainment content than for news: 47% paid for movies, 36% for digital magazines, and 35% for music, compared to just 13% for news and newspapers.

 

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Why local firms dominate the Russian internet

Last year the number of Russians online went up by 14%, to 53m. That made Russia’s online population Europe’s biggest, just ahead of Germany’s, with lots of room left to grow. GP Bullhound, an investment bank, reckons that only 18% of those people shop online and that online advertising, though rising fast, takes up only 9% of Russian ad budgets.

The Russian internet market looks more like China’s than either resembles anything in the West. Baidu dominates Chinese search. Tencent plays a similar role to Mail.ru, of which it owns 7.8%. When the Chinese buy online they turn to Dangdang, 360buy or one of Alibaba’s online marketplaces rather than Amazon or eBay. They tap out a cacophony of short posts on Sina Weibo, not Twitter. And so on.

Read more at The Economist

How Apple became a cult in Hollywood

Apple's gadgets were discussed or shown 891 times on TV in 2011, up from 613 in 2009, according to researcher Nielsen. In the same year, iDevices appeared in more than 40 percent of the movies that topped the weekly box office, according to Brandchannel, which tracks product appearances. That's nearly twice the penetration of the next most common brands in Hollywood - Dell, Chevy and Ford.

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iHeartRadio Hits 10 Million Users Faster Than Facebook or Twitter

Digital radio platform iHeartRadio announced its user stats for the first time ever on Thursday, citing growth in an eight-month period that was faster than other popular services including Facebook and Twitter when they first opened up registration.

The growth of its new registration occurred more quickly than other platforms from Facebook and Twitter to Pandora, Spotify and Instagram right out of the gate. Although those services reach far more than 10 million users now, iHeartRadio said it reached the milestone faster than any other service.

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Video games could help identify security threats

The government is spending millions of dollars to determine whether video games can be designed as instructional tools for intelligence analysts, who help compile reports that U.S. officials use to identify potential threats from emerging foreign powers.

Officials said they view the multiyear research program, known as Sirius, as an effort to improve analyst training for college students, who could become tomorrow’s analysts.

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Amid Media Upheavals, Television Holds Sway

Brian Wieser, an analyst with the Pivotal Research Group who was once the top advertising forecaster for the Interpublic Group of Companies (says) “The durability of television,” despite its flaws, stems from something “most observers forget,” Mr. Wieser said, that “advertising on television satisfies most large marketers’ goals better than alternatives, and its advantages hold as more consumers watch more TV more often than any other medium.”

“Advertisers use television because they need to make everyone aware of the differences in brand attributes” between their products and those sold by competitors, Mr. Wieser said. “And as long as TV is viewed as the primary driver of brand awareness, TV will grow its revenue base.”

And grow it has. According to Nielsen, television ad revenue in the United States last year totaled $71.8 billion, up 5 percent from 2010. It was larger than for any other medium and was perhaps the first time the figure has topped $70 billion.

“As long as you have advertisers in these oligopolistic categories, operating on a national scale and looking to drive awareness for massive audiences, TV keeps growing,” Mr. Wieser said. “The growth of the Web will come mostly at the expense of print.”

Read more in the New York Times.

Release of big-name games could revive sales

etailer GameStop reported last week that first-quarter sales fell 12.5% on a drop in store traffic due to fewer blockbuster titles. Overall April retail sales were $630.4 million, down 32% from $930.9 million in April 2011, reports market tracker the NPD Group.

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Mobile money in Africa

MANY people know that “mobile money”—financial transactions on mobile phones—has taken off in Africa. How far it has gone, though, still comes as a bit of a shock. Three-quarters of the countries that use mobile money most frequently are in Africa, and mobile banking in some of them has reached extraordinary levels. A new survey of global financial habits by the Gates Foundation, the World Bank and Gallup World Poll found 20 countries in which more than 10% of adults say they used mobile money at some point in 2011. Of those, 15 are African. Sometimes, though, mobile banking goes hand in hand with the familiar kind. In Kenya, where a staggering 68% of adults use mobile money (by far the highest rate in the world, partly because regulation is extremely light), more than 40% also have ordinary bank accounts. Read more here

China’s film market is proving tough for foreign studios to crack

Last year China’s box-office take rose by more than 30%, to over $2 billion, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. The number of cinema screens in China has doubled in five years, to nearly 11,000—again, second only to America. China’s box-office revenues may overtake America’s by 2020. Yet China will not grant Hollywood the access it desires. Until recently only 20 foreign films could be screened at Chinese cinemas each year. In February the number increased to 34—though only if the extra 14 are shown in 3D or large format. Read more here

Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’

In 1989, the Japanese game-making giant Nintendo (released) Game Boy. The unit came bundled with a single cartridge: Tetris, a simple but addictive puzzle game whose goal was to rotate falling blocks. And so a tradition was born: a tradition I am going to call (half descriptively, half out of revenge for all the hours I’ve lost to them) “stupid games.” In the nearly 30 years since Tetris’s invention — and especially over the last five, with the rise of smartphones — Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry.

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

In 2009, 25 years after the invention of Tetris, a nearly bankrupt Finnish company called Rovio hit upon a similarly perfect fusion of game and device: Angry Birds. Today it has been downloaded, in its various forms, more than 700 million times.

Stupid games are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits.

In the era of consoles, most games were designed to come to life on a stationary piece of furniture — a television or a desktop computer. The games were built accordingly, around long narratives. Smartphone games are built on a very different model. The iPhone’s screen is roughly the size of a playing card; it responds not to the fast-twitch button combos of a controller but to more intuitive and intimate motions: poking, pinching, tapping, tickling. This has encouraged a very different kind of game: Tetris-like little puzzles, broken into discrete bits, designed to be played anywhere, in any context, without a manual, by any level of player. The Angry Birds creators like to compare their game with Super Mario Brothers. But the first and simplest level of Super Mario Brothers takes about a minute and a half to finish. The first level of Angry Birds takes around 10 seconds.

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The Data Journalism Handbook

The Data Journalism Handbook launched this past weekend at the School of Data Journalism, based at the 2012 International Journalism Festival in Perugia. It is a one stop shop for reporters interested in learning about data journalism and includes a free, open sourced web version so anyone can access it.

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Nielsen Reports a Decline in Television Viewing

For the first time in years, Nielsen is reporting a slight decline in overall TV viewing in the United States. In the last three months of 2011, the average American with a TV set at home spent 153 hours and 19 minutes watching traditional TV each month, about 46 minutes less than they watched in the last three months of 2010, according to Nielsen, which monitors a sample of United States households to produce TV ratings every day.

Per person, the decline comes out to be about 30 seconds a day, hardly a seismic shift. But cumulatively, the decline is significant because– to the astonishment of some in the industry — total TV viewership has been steadily rising year-over-year despite a plethora of other entertainment options. It may suggest that some people are opting for Web video or are spending more time playing video games and less time watching TV.

Nielsen also said Thursday that it believes the total number of American households with television sets is continuing to shrink. Last year, for the first time in 20 years, Nielsen said the figure dropped to 114.7 million, from 115.9 million previously, despite a rise in the total number of households in the country. Nielsen attributed the drop both to economic factors and to technological ones.

Americans are not turning off. They are shifting to new technologies and devices that make it easier for them to watch the content they want whenever and wherever is most convenient for them. As such, the definition of the traditional TV home will evolve.”

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Global Smartphone Market Is on Fire

"Here is what we know is true -- smartphone growth has gotten simply ridiculous," James Brehm, senior strategist and consultant with Compass Intelligence, told the E-Commerce Times. "Smartphone devices are now on par with feature phones, and low-priced offerings mean even budget-minded consumers can have one." More than 106 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in March, according to ComScore's MobiLens -- up 9 percent versus December. The worldwide smartphone market grew 42.5 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2012, noted IDC in its recently released Mobile Phone Tracker report on the mobile market. Read more here.

How Assignmint Will Change Freelance Journalism

A new startup hopes their integrated freelancer workflow and financials system will change the media industry.

New startup Assignmint has an ambitious goal: To change freelance journalism as we know it. The company, headed by former New York Press and Forbes Traveler editor Jeff Koyen, will offer a complete pitch-to-payment cloud workflow system for freelancers and their employers. It helps digitally manage work assignments, editorial calendars, invoices, pitches, expenses, contract information, and payment. Freelance journalists, meanwhile, will be able to have access to all their outstanding invoice and payment information in one place. The startup also plans to implement a clip and algorithm service to match freelancers with potential new clients.

While Assignmint will only handle writers and editors when it launches in late 2012, the firm plans to open their doors to freelancers and employers from the rest of media--along with financial services, academia, IT, fashion marketing, and other fields in 2013. The company's profit model is based upon their payment system: Assignmint will handle freelance payments on an company's behalf in exchange for an employer-paid service fee. Other revenue streams will include premium subscriptions for editorial teams, white-label enterprise installations, and custom services such as tax form fulfillment.

Read more here.

What happens to our digital property after we die?

Online lives have increasing economic and sentimental value. But testamentary laws offer muddled and incomplete ways of bequeathing and inheriting them. Digital assets may include software, websites, downloaded content, online gaming identities, social-media accounts and even e-mails.

Service providers have different rules—and few state them clearly in their terms and conditions. Many give users a personal right to use an account, but nobody else, even after death. Facebook allows relatives to close an account or turn it into a memorial page. Gmail (run by Google) will provide copies of e-mails to an executor. Music downloaded via iTunes is held under a licence which can be revoked on death. Apple declined to comment on the record on this or other policies. All e-mail and data on its iCloud service are deleted on the death of the owner.

Laws, wills and password safes may clash with the providers’ terms of service.

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Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human

Every 30 seconds or so, the algorithmic bull pen of Narrative Science, a 30-person company occupying a large room on the fringes of the Chicago Loop, extrudes a story whose very byline is a question of philosophical inquiry. The computer-written product could be a pennant-waving second-half update of a Big Ten basketball contest, a sober preview of a corporate earnings statement, or a blithe summary of the presidential horse race drawn from Twitter posts. The articles run on the websites of respected publishers like Forbes, as well as other Internet media powers (many of which are keeping their identities private).

The universe of newswriting will expand dramatically, as computers mine vast troves of data to produce ultracheap, totally readable accounts of events, trends, and developments that no journalist is currently covering.

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A Progress Report on a College Paper's Pioneering Metered Pay Wall

In what was believed to be a first for a college news outlet, The Daily O'Collegian at Oklahoma State University began charging for online content.

A year in, Catalino's admittedly informal goal of 100 paid subscribers was met and exceeded. On the one-year anniversary, there were 156 paid subscribers, and as of last week there were 177. Not a windfall, considering the paper has a print circulation of 25,000 and a regular online audience of 2,000, but enough that Catalino recently upped the annual fee to $15 for new subscribers.

The O'Collegian worked with a company called Press+ to launch what both call a "metered system" in March 2011. After viewing three free articles within a month, readers outside a 25-mile radius of the Stillwater campus and without an .edu email address were asked to pay $10 for a year of unlimited access.

College newspapers are not a huge business priority for Press+ and counts about 50 on the client list, but he predicts that more and more will turn to the company for help with either seeking donations (the option most current clients choose) or charging for online content.

The company's geo-location technology is crucial for college outlets because they can aim pay requirements solely at readers outside the campus community, preserving limitless access for students, faculty members, and local residents. If a mega-story breaks and a college newspaper wants full exposure for its content, it can exempt that coverage from the metered system.

Read more here.

The end of the $60 video game is near

According to The NPD Group, physical content sales were down 8% in 2011. This year hasn't been a cakewalk either, with sales continuing to slide. Though some of the blame can rightfully be foisted upon the decline of the once-mighty Wii, it's apparent that people aren't buying games like they used to, and the industry is scrambling to figure out why. But most agree that it begins — and likely ends — with the high cost of new games.

The top perennial franchises like Halo, Elder Scrolls, Battlefield, and Madden aren't going anywhere, at least for a while longer. Games that critics and consumers universally laud as "must-haves" can continue to support this massive premium. But it's the mid-tier titles, the unestablished IPs, the riskier endeavors, the worthwhile games that don't quite master the magic formula, that will never get off the ground.

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Why social media will reveal French election winner

Can an election be won on social media? That question is being increasingly asked in France, before the first round of the presidential election.

The French are very much online now: 75% of people surf the web while 25 million have Facebook accounts, out of a total population of 66 million, of whom 43 million are voters.

With the emergence of the Social TV phenomenon, one can see TV and social media now complement each other. Ever since the Socialist Party's primaries, political TV broadcasts have caused a torrent of comments on Twitter, as TV audiences joined up on this huge virtual couch to minutely analyze politicians' statements. TV broadcasts words uttered by candidates while the social media host chats about the candidates' words. And it's on these social networks that judgement on the candidates' credibility will be passed. This is because their promises and the figures they bandy about are fact-checked in real time, by journalists and experts, ensuring a simultaneous and enlightened subtitle service that underlines the politicians' rolling spiel.

So the answer to my opening question: "Can an election be won on social media?" is: in France in 2012, most probably "no". However, the question: "Can social media predict the name of the next French president?" calls for a positive answer.

Read more at CNN

Can the dubious art of selling become more scientific?

The rise of the internet means that sales are changing. Customers bone up about prices online and are less likely to fall for a seductive pitch. There are still often huge differences in the performance of sales forces both within and between companies. Many Western corporate bosses are trying to turn sales from an art into more of a science. Entrepreneurial salesmen, doing whatever it takes to reach their numbers, can now be tracked and controlled. “Sales Growth: Five Proven Strategies from the World’s Sales Leaders”, by three McKinsey consultants, belongs in the selling-as-science school.

The book argues that data, process management and outsourcing can do as much for sales departments as for other areas of the corporation. Firms should not hesitate to re-engineer their peddlers. They should create sales “factories” where sales teams are ministered to by support people from other disciplines, and equip them with computing devices rather than briefcases. Companies still have plenty of Willy Lomans not selling much. They should seek to standardise performance by finding out what the best salespeople do and making sure everyone applies the same techniques (which sounds obvious, but not many people do it).

In emerging markets, on the other hand, selling is still personal—and old-fashioned. So companies that are trying to bring more science to sales at home will still need to master what some call the “steak-and-a-show” method when entering new markets. Industrial sales in China, especially, depend on long, close relationships between salespeople and customers.

Being a salesman in the internet age is getting harder. Sales forces are being cut and replaced with technology, and the job is losing its appeal. The popularity of the title “sales associate” on LinkedIn, an online network, has fallen dramatically in the past four years. BMW’s boss in America, Ludwig Willisch, admitted to the authors of the McKinsey book that it is hard to persuade people to go into sales these days.

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Google glasses: A view of the future

Google revealed last week that it was working on a pair of Internet-connected spectacles able to do “everything you now need a smartphone or tablet computer to do—and then some.” The glasses will display readouts on the lenses, above the normal line of sight; as you’re walking, Google Maps directions will “appear literally before your eyes.” When you meet someone new, their social-network profile will appear next to their face. Google claims to have already built a prototype, despite skepticism from the tech world that such technology yet exists. But if Google can bring this wearable computer to the masses, we’ll be nearing the point “where the line between human and machine blurs.” Read more here

WTOP, Washington DC all-newser, repeats as America's top-billing station

New BIA/Kelsey revenue estimates put Hubbard Radio's WTOP (103.5 and various simulcast stations) at $64 million in 2011 revenues. From the researcher's new Investing In Radio update, here's the top 10 list for 2011:

WTOP (News) Washington, DC  Hubbard Radio LLC  $64,000,000
KIIS (CHR) Los Angeles Clear Channel  $57,000,000
KFI  Talk  Los Angeles Clear Channel  $48,100,000
WBBM-AM  News  Chicago CBS Radio $48,000,000
WCBS-AM  News  New York CBS Radio  $47,500,000
WHTZ  CHR New York  Clear Channel  $46,000,000
KROQ Alternative Los Angeles CBS $42,000,000
WINS  News New York  CBS Radio  $42,000,000
WLTW  Lite AC New York Clear Channel  $42,000,000
WFAN    Sports/Talk  New York CBS   $40,500,000

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Can the Computers at Narrative Science Replace Paid Writers?

Narrative Science will certainly replace some types of human-generated writing, the stories they're most excited about are the ones journalists rarely cover. Because of readership expectations, no journalist would write a story with relevance to only one person, or a few—sports writers, for instance, don't write about Little League games in the first place. Instead of simply tallying wrong answers, your kid's standardized test results make highly specific study suggestions—in language that would do an English teacher proud. Log in to check your portfolio, you'll get an expert analysis on how your stocks are doing, with suggestions on what to trade our buy. As Slate's Evgeny Morozov notes in a recent article, "automated journalism" could result in news stories appearing differently to different readers. As Narrative Science continues refining and improving their authoring platform, two future grails stand out. First, Hammond would like to be able to train the platform to look for conclusions that haven't yet occurred to human clients. It can only report on story possibilities that human programmers have trained it to "see." Second, they hope to move beyond numbers. Though humans delve in stories and narratives, computers are simply much more adept with numbers. Further developments in computer understanding of human language could blow the current technology open. When Narrative Science can scan written documents with the same comprehension it brings to number sets, its viability increases dramatically. Read more herehere

2012 Jobs Rated Report

Professions that provide us with our news - Newspaper Reporter and Broadcaster - ranked among the worst jobs in the nation, according to the new 2012 CareerCast.com Jobs Rated Report. Lumberjacks, who work on the hottest and coldest days in a highly dangerous occupation with a low salary and a history of high unemployment, were rated as having the worst job in the nation. "Many jobs in the media are characterized by high stress, short deadlines, long hours and a poor hiring outlook," explains Tony Lee, publisher of CareerCast.com's 2012 Jobs Rated Report. To see the full rankings of all 200 jobs and the report's methodology, go here.

Radio Revs Growing

Total radio advertising revenues will grow 3.5% in 2012, according to BIA/Kelsey’s “Investing In Radio Market Report,” largely thanks to intensive political advertising. BIA/Kelsey also expects strong continued growth in radio’s online revenues. In 2012 BIA/Kelsey sees total “over-the-air” local radio station revenues reaching just under $14.6 billion. If accurate, this forecast would be a welcome return to growth after a distinctly mediocre 2011. They see radio’s online revenues reaching $767 million by 2016, suggesting a cumulative annual growth rate of 11% per year from 2013-2016. The fact remains, however, that online revenues are still a relatively small part of the radio business. Read more here

Magazine Ad Pages Down 33% From 2006

While they have not fared as poorly as their print cousins in the newspaper business, consumer magazines have taken it on the chin over the last few years. Last year, total ad pages as measured by the Publishers Information Bureau were off one-third from their peak of five years ago, having declined 33.4% from 253,494 in 2006 to 168,742 in 2011. This is partly the result of the closure of some titles, as the total number of magazines tracked by PIB fell from 252 to 221 over the same period. But even magazines that survived endured steep losses. Read more here

The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart

Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone's favorite book was by Faulkner or Woolf or Roth. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition and cultivation of our literary kings and queens.

Well, that time never existed. Check out these stats from Gallup surveys. In 1957, not even a quarter of Americans were reading a book or novel. By 2005, that number had shot up to 47 percent. I couldn't find a more recent number, but I think it's fair to say that reading probably hasn't declined to the horrific levels of the 1950s.

Read more here

the new spirit of business

Centralised, hierarchical systems made sense in a world in which information and knowledge were relatively scarce commodities and could be tightly controlled, but the decentralisation of knowledge, brought about by the inexorable rise of the internet – combined with a collapse of trust in traditional sources of authority and expertise – legitimises the creation of flatter, decentralised operational models. Rapidly changing customer expectations powered by social media are forcing institutions to become more open, transparent and responsive and to operate in close to real time, as opposed to the painfully slow pace of institutional time.

Agility, flexibility, a willingness to exercise judgement and an ability to improvise will become the defining characteristics of successful institutions in the next decades. This means fighting the instinct to solve every problem through rules and regulations and recognising the limitations of long-term planning and the painfully slow nature of most internal decision-making processes.

It means accepting the need to operate in real time and making the organisational and cultural changes necessary to achieve it. And most importantly, it means building a strong, self-sustaining, trusting organisational culture rather than in investing in yet more process and bureaucracy.

The future is loose, messy and chaotic: now is the time to embrace it. Read more here

Young people just aren’t that into cars these days

Young people just aren’t that into cars these days. For many Millennials, getting a license and buying a car—once considered rites of passage—have taken a backseat to “buying the latest smartphone or gaming console. Read more here

Which tongues work best for microblogs?

Though Twitter, with 140m active users the world’s best-known microblogging service, is blocked in China, Sina Weibo, a local variant, has over 250m users. Chinese is so succinct that most messages never reach that limit, says Shuo Tang, who studies social media at the University of Indiana.

Japanese is concise too: fans of haiku, poems in 17 syllables, can tweet them readily. Though Korean and Arabic require a little more space, tweeters routinely omit syllables in Korean words; written Arabic routinely omits vowels anyway. Arabic tweets mushroomed last year, though thanks to the uprisings across the Middle East rather than any linguistic features. It is now the eighth most-used language on Twitter with over 2m public tweets every day, according to Semiocast, a Paris-based company that analyses social-media trends.

Romance tongues, among others, generally tend to be more verbose. So Spanish and Portuguese, the two most frequent European languages in the Twitterverse after English, have tricks to reduce the number of characters.

Though ubiquity and flexibility may give English hegemony, Twitter is also helping smaller and struggling languages. Basque- and Gaelic-speakers tweet to connect with other far-flung speakers. Kevin Scannell, a professor at St Louis University, Missouri, has found 500 languages in use on Twitter and has set up a website to track them. Gamilaraay, an indigenous Australian language, is thought to have only three living speakers. One of them is tweeting—handy for revivalists.

Read more here

Is Pinterest the next Facebook?

Pinterest (is) the fastest-growing website of all time. In March the site registered 17.8 million users, according to Comscore, a 52% jump in just one month -- and it isn't even open to everyone (would-be "pinners" must still request an invitation to join).

Pinterest, for the uninitiated, is a deceptively simple-sounding, insanely addictive social media site that lets users collect and share images on digital pinboards. Most social-networking sites have first become popular among tech's early adopters along the country's coasts. But Pinterest found its most passionate users among the Midwestern scrapbooking set -- a mostly female group -- who have turned to it to plan weddings, save recipes, and post ideas for kitchen renovations.

Essentially, Pinterest excels at something that's very hard to do on the web -- help people discover new things. If you can name what you want, after all, Amazon (AMZN) and Google are pretty good tools for helping you find it. But what if you don't know what you want? Social-networking sites have helped businesses influence people, but they are imperfect. People use Facebook and Twitter to talk to each other, not necessarily to discuss things they might want to buy. In contrast, Pinterest users are more often in a shopping mindset when they are using the service. If you're keeping a pinboard called "Spring handbags I'm considering," there's a good chance you'll click through and make a purchase.

Read more here

Many Magazines Racing to Capitalize on Pinterest

Pinterest, the social site that lets users post images from the web to their personal "pinboards," has been around since 2010. But brands and publishers' notice of it has been increasing, partly because every image "pinned" links back to its source, offering new traffic to anyone who can capitalize.

Pinterest is now being hailed as one of the fastest-growing platforms, reaching 10 million monthly visitors more quickly than Facebook or Twitter did. It ranks among the top 30 U.S. sites by total page views.

 Read more at AdAge

Seeing a Future in Tablets, Magazines Unveil the Digital Newsstand

After more than two years of preparation, a consortium of magazine publishers will release the full version of its digital newsstand, which gives readers the chance to purchase magazines for a monthly flat rate.

Next Issue Media, a group of publishers including Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc. and News Corporation, will announce the latest version of its tablet application, which will include 32 magazines like The New Yorker, Time, Vanity Fair, Better Homes and Gardens, Elle, Esquire, Wired, Fortune, People, Real Simple and Sports Illustrated.

The group has good reason to want to put its digital editions on tablets and make them available to readers. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, digital circulation of magazines — on tablets, paid Web sites and mobile phones — has doubled in the past year. A total of 223 magazines reported more than 3.1 million digital copies of their publications in the second half of 2011, compared with 195 magazines that reported 1.5 million copies in 2010.

Read more at the NY Times

IPad: The PC Killer

For the the PC industry, however, the tablet age could prove catastrophic. In recent years, PC makers have relied heavily on corporate consumers to hold on to their shrinking market share. Now even that’s under pressure.

Owners of the iPad know how the device reduces the number of sit-down sessions at the PC. With the growth of cloud computing—where music and pictures are stored on servers out on the Net—the tablet could well end the PC’s run as consumer tech’s center of gravity.

Read more here

Will the iPad kill the PC?

Your personal computer is headed for the recycling bin, said Dan Farber in CNET.com. With the unveiling of Apple’s latest iPad last week, it’s clear that tablets will soon replace the “desktops and clunky laptops that were the face of computing for decades.”  Nearly 120 million tablets are expected to be sold worldwide this year.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, said John Naughton in the London Observer. Tablets may be flying off the shelves, but consumers, not businesses, are buying them. 

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Big Newspaper Publishers Cut Work Force 7% in 2011

While 2011 saw fewer announcements of layoffs and buyouts in the newspaper industry than previous years, attrition continued quietly and relentlessly, with the nation’s biggest newspaper publishers trimming their combined work forces by 7.2% over the course of the year. The total newspaper headcount fell from 55,537 at the end of 2010 to 51,564 at the end of 2011. Not coincidentally, all these publishers also faced continuing ad revenue declines. Read more here

an internet minute

The news media's imploding business model

Smartphones will soon be the primary news source for most Americans. That's if anyone can still make money by reporting. Pew research has a new survey showing that tablets and smart phones are now 27% of Americans' primary news source. The overwhelming share of this is phones, not tablets; and a reasonable view says this will rise to 50% in three years. Makes sense: just as radio became one of the big purveyors of news because it was the medium that traveled with you, so should mobile. If the news business on the web is depressing, contributing to the existential angst that has gripped every established news organization, mobile turns the story apocalyptic: there is no foreseeable basis on which the news establishment can support itself. There is no way even a stripped-down, aggregation-based, unpaid citizen-journalist staffed newsroom can support itself in a mobile world. Read more here

Watching TV and doing Social Media

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