The Chinese Internet colossus with the cuddly mascot is admired for its success, loathed as a predatory copycat, and full of big plans to break into the U.S.
Tencent is the Internet Goliath you’ve either never heard of or know little about. Yet 674 million Chinese actively use its QQ service, and hundreds of millions more are familiar with its cute cartoon mascot, a winking, scarf-wearing penguin that has helped make Tencent one of the most recognized brands in the country. With 11,400 employees and more than $3 billion in revenue in 2010, it’s become the largest—and, by its competitors, most criticized—Internet company in China. Now Tencent’s ambitions are expanding into the U.S. and elsewhere.
Read more at Business Week
Friday, August 12
U.K. Prime Minister Suggests ‘Pre-Crime’ Blocking of Social Media
British Prime Minister David Cameron has told Parliament that he is investigating whether to stop people communicating via social networking sites if they are known to be planning criminal activity. In the statement he released to the media before he spoke to Parliament, he also said: “when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.”
Read more at Wired
Read more at Wired
Thursday, August 11
Most Popular Online Activities
According to a Pew Internet Project report reveals that 92% of adults who go online use email, with 61% using it on an average day. These numbers that put search and email at the top online activities by U.S. adults make search engine marketing increasingly important. Search remains most popular among young adult Internet users ages 18 to 29.
Experts believe the proliferation of smartphones continues to keep this medium at the top of the list. Companies such as Buckaroo continue to build new features into email platforms that pull in other media, such as search and social.
Read more at Media Post
Experts believe the proliferation of smartphones continues to keep this medium at the top of the list. Companies such as Buckaroo continue to build new features into email platforms that pull in other media, such as search and social.
Read more at Media Post
Wednesday, August 10
Think different
Clay Christensen revolutionised the study of (innovation) with “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, a book that popularised the term “disruptive innovation”. This month he publishes a new study, “The Innovator’s DNA”, co-written with Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen, which tries to take us inside the minds of successful innovators.
Mr Christensen and his colleagues list five habits of mind that characterise disruptive innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. Innovators excel at connecting seemingly unconnected things. Innovators are constantly asking why things aren’t done differently. For all their reputation as misfits, innovators tend to be great networkers. But they hang around gabfests to pick up ideas, not to win contracts.
For all their insistence that innovation can be learned, Mr Christensen and co produce a lot of evidence that the disruptive sort requires genius.
Read more at The Economist
Mr Christensen and his colleagues list five habits of mind that characterise disruptive innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. Innovators excel at connecting seemingly unconnected things. Innovators are constantly asking why things aren’t done differently. For all their reputation as misfits, innovators tend to be great networkers. But they hang around gabfests to pick up ideas, not to win contracts.
For all their insistence that innovation can be learned, Mr Christensen and co produce a lot of evidence that the disruptive sort requires genius.
Read more at The Economist
Mixed Sales for News Magazines
By and large, circulation trends at weeklies were flat from January through June as sales across the magazine industry fell more than 9 percent over all. Subscription numbers can be manipulated by publishers cutting prices or deciding to cut back on unwanted circulation. For that reason, newsstand sales are often seen as a good proxy for the overall health of a magazine.
With newsstand sales falling, there was some concern that advertising could be next.
Read more at the New York Times
With newsstand sales falling, there was some concern that advertising could be next.
Read more at the New York Times
Tuesday, August 9
Ad Money Reliably Goes to Television
The economy is faltering and consumers are scared, but you wouldn’t know it by watching television, where advertisers are still pouring in money. Last week, companies like Viacom, CBS and Time Warner reported windfalls in television revenue, much of it from growing ad spending.
Other corners of the media industry — like publishing — may have fewer reasons to be confident about their prospects. The Washington Post on Friday said that print advertising revenues had slid by 12 percent in the second quarter, while revenue from display ads on its Web sites slid by 16 percent. The New York Times had a 6.4 percent decline in print advertising revenues at its properties in the quarter, but a 2.6 percent increase in online advertising.
Broadly speaking, forecasters have been anticipating a slight pullback in ad spending growth this year.
Read more at the New York Times
Other corners of the media industry — like publishing — may have fewer reasons to be confident about their prospects. The Washington Post on Friday said that print advertising revenues had slid by 12 percent in the second quarter, while revenue from display ads on its Web sites slid by 16 percent. The New York Times had a 6.4 percent decline in print advertising revenues at its properties in the quarter, but a 2.6 percent increase in online advertising.
Broadly speaking, forecasters have been anticipating a slight pullback in ad spending growth this year.
Read more at the New York Times
10 Apple iOS apps for mobile journalism
iMovie ($4.99)
You've made it to a danger zone. Using iMovie on your iPad or your iPhone you can quickly shoot and edit short clips of the events you might be seeing around you. Once you've created a clip you can easily export it to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and CNN iReport.
1st Video ($9.99, or $29.99 for Pro iPad version)
Apple might develop iMovie, but for a more journalist-focused solution some may want to take a look at 1st Video, which combines video, audio, image record and edit capability with broadcast quality audio editing to produce .mov video files. Video created can be shared via YouTube, the version for iPad seems especially interesting.
CoveritLive (free)
This tool for live event reporting is used in the field by the likes of Sky, Fox, the Washington Post and others. It integrates with the CoveritLive platform (registration required). You can then use the app to publish photos, audio and video in real-time, approve comments, publish live commentary, post and manage Tweets and more. There's an offline mode, support for multi-tasking and other cool features in this solution.
Report-IT Live ($29.99)
Somewhat more affordable, this app helps you broadcast live. It records audio in HD quality, which it dispatches using a 3G or Wi-Fi network back to your IP-enabled audio set-up in the studio. This is an interesting solution because audio is bi-directional, so you can get messages from your studio. This solution also lets you save audio locally if you want to upload it for later broadcast. You do need to have specific equipment to make use of this solution.
Dragon Dictation (free)
Create written news reports on the go, speak them into the iPhone mic using this app and the software will chat to the Nuance voice recog server, where your utterances will be transformed into actual written words. Send Tweets, update status messages, send SMS or notes, write emails. Transcriptions can be pasted into any application using the clipboard -- caveat emptor: you need an active network connection for this solution to work.
Evernote (app is free)
A great tool for researchers, Evernote lets you add text, images and audio to documents using your iOS device. The results can be accessed using other mobile devices or the Web. There's interesting features such as geo-tagging and the solution offers wide cross-platform support.
Read more at Computer World
Monday, August 8
TV Morning show uses Google+ Hangouts for webcams
KOMU-TV was the first TV station to put Google Hangouts to work, letting viewers drop into a live video chat right on the anchor desk, even while the newscast is on the air. But an Australian morning show is using Hangouts in a different way, piping several behind-the-scenes webcams into a Hangout, then showing it live on the air. Both KOMU and Australia’s Channel 7 illustrate the shortcomings of Hangouts for a broadcast model. In the case of KOMU, only 9 people can join at once (Google’s limit). For Channel 7, there’s no interactivity.
Read more here
Read more here
Sunday, August 7
Letting Bots Do Our Tweeting for Us
In her book Alone Together, sociologist Sherry Turkle observes that our personas on social networks are already fake—they’re not so much who we are as idealized projections of who we want to be. “It’s like being in a play,” as the subject of one of her studies explains. “You make a character.”
Doing this is hard work, Turkle writes, because we have difficulty squaring the actual details of our lives with the images we want to project. But computers are free of the ego and pretense that cloud the process for us. Once they get the basics right, social bots could prove to be more authentically fake than we are.
Read more here
Doing this is hard work, Turkle writes, because we have difficulty squaring the actual details of our lives with the images we want to project. But computers are free of the ego and pretense that cloud the process for us. Once they get the basics right, social bots could prove to be more authentically fake than we are.
Read more here
Facebook: Personal Branding Made Easy
Every time you post something on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram, you’re influencing—or trying to influence—how the world views you. Each carefully crafted 140-character message that goes out into the metaverse fills a publicly accessible database that defines you to people you’ve never met. In the end, it isn’t who you really are. It’s the hilarious, adorable, fascinating, intelligent, so-worth-Friending version of you. Social media isn’t about having a conversation with people you know. It’s about advertising yourself. It’s not social; it’s media.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have a personal brand. It’s what the Internet is best at. But no matter how you slice it, a social network is a public place. And posting there is like choosing what T-shirt to wear or how to cut your hair: It’s another way to control how the world sees you. You are not your Facebook page or your Twitter feed. They’re just snippets of you. And no one ever had a real, honest conversation with a snippet.
Read more here
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have a personal brand. It’s what the Internet is best at. But no matter how you slice it, a social network is a public place. And posting there is like choosing what T-shirt to wear or how to cut your hair: It’s another way to control how the world sees you. You are not your Facebook page or your Twitter feed. They’re just snippets of you. And no one ever had a real, honest conversation with a snippet.
Read more here
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