SIIA Information Industry Summit 2011
Jan. 25-26, 2011
Cipriani 42nd Street,
110 East 42nd Street, New York
Mobile devices—iphones and ipads—look to be the dominant information devices of the future. Will they radically reshape the market, Darwin style? Can one “predict the future by inventing it” as computer pioneer Alan Kay said? A panel of tech leaders focus on the four sectors that drive the next generation of innovation:
Document formats: driven by standards and market forces; ignore them at your peril
Applications: insights and inventions from leading edge users
Networks: what to expect from the billions in new investment from the carriers
This session, led by technology futurist John Patrick, will reprise his session from 2006 with a focus on the key Mobile Technology Trends – with insight into the next five years.
Panel Session – Top Mobile Technology Trends – A Moving Target
Date : Wednesday January 26th, 11:30 AM – 12:15 PM
Moderator:
John Patrick, President, Attitude LLC
Panelists:
Bill Godfrey, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Head of Global Electronic Product Development, Elsevier
Oke Okaro, General Manager and Global Head of Mobile, Multimedia, Bloomberg L.P.
John Paris, Sr. Director, Mobile Strategy, Time, Inc.
Robert S. Sutor, VP, Open Systems and Linux, IBM Software Group
JP – Wasn’t long ago that most phones were dumb, soon most will be smart. Cloud provides ways to make phones useful, utilities like Dropbox enable content to be in the cloud and local to your device. Social is the other major key to mobile, the Internet is now where you are.
JP – When will we see Time magazine on the iPad with a subscription?
JParis – Coming, quite a few downloads, now more like 130,000 downloads, more complaints about not getting a subscription, Apple discussions ongoing, but there has to be a solution. We either move forward together or not at all.
JP – Technical, pricing issues, but especially issues about who own the customer and data that tracks them.
JParis – Not necessarily about owning customer, mag publishers usually have all of the information anyway, we know where they live, we lose that in iTunes. [Why publishers gave in on this I’ll never know. Bad move.]
JP – Now that Bloomberg owns BusinessWeek, when will I not see a print version?
OO – Thinking of serving users, magazines won’t get cannibalized completely by mobile, they will get more options. When we talk about magazine we need to think about the experience delivered based on the platform on which it’s being delivered. Today we have a Zinio PDF, but that’s not what we need to bring to market tomorrow. Have to enhance the experience in ways that make sense to users. Working on bringing BB/BW to iPad and other devices, will be a great experience, with lots of capabilities that make sense to audiences.
JP – Tablets getting cheaper, you’re focusing on making the mag sizzle. This will take away from print editions, which will make mags more expensive.
OO – An assumption inherent in this is that the price will be different. We’re still working on the details, may not be the approach that we take. BusinessWeek reaches a global audience, time to delivery becomes an issue, printed here and shipped. The tablet is more aligned with electronic than print consumption, but it’s really up to the consumers, we’ll deliver the content and be thoughtful in our approach.
BG – In Elsevier, analogous issue is books for students, who don’t want books, they want answers. Wrestling with price points and content, we see a dramatic move away from the idea of the page or the chapter or the paragraph. Have to redesign the content to move them away from the content that they want. Have to think about how to make the interface dance over time. Price point aside, tablets can provide a tremendous channel.
JP – The tablet is a mobile device, it’s not just about phones. When I am reading Time on an iPad, will it have a social aspect?
JParis – You should have a social aspect, that’s the promise of products like Flipboard. Unlike the paper book the digital book or magazine knows who’s reading it and who those people know. Book clubs have been around for a long time, people immediately want to socialize content. Text books should have study clubs built in, novels have book clubs, and so on.
JP – Wired Magazine’s early iPad issue was novel for the first issue, but not enough to get people to buy a second issue, needed to be social.
BG – Support 520 societies, many journals, which are their principle platform. Moving journals more online, idea is to create a converged online delivery platform. We drank the platform kool-aid, now building a content distribution platform from the ground up. Embed metadata, etc, now it’s SciVerse. Now have a platform that will deliver content, not just titles. Reading a journal article, get links to videos. Scopus apps can enable links to online journals, within subscription can get access to apps. HealthMash can take biomedical concepts, can provide topical navigation and suggestions in post-search results. We know reading habits are varied, some browse, others go deep, others have asymmetric interests, need content from multiple collections.
JP – Have devices, mobile internet, site says you don’t have Flash. When will Web standards win.
RS – We’ll always have format wars. Formatting is critical, but they have lifespans. Eventually people want access to all the books that I purchased, including ones which go into legacy formats. Something new comes along will be better, so we’ll constantly be changing physical devices and formats. Strategies put in place now have to bear that in mind. Formats would preferably be open, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the content is going to be free. Proprietary formats can take away from premium margins. New video formats for video create conflicts, but Apple and Microsoft may not buy into more open video formats.
JP – Blogging is a way of archiving my life, I am confident that my grandchildren will be able to read it, but looking at a basement filled with old PCs, it’s not true for all things.
BG – Well-formed XML offers some protection.
RS – A number of formats that help such as DocX, HTML 5 holds promise, has to be better than old book formats. HTML 5 is a real attempt to provide a more semantic view of content. Epub will evolve into a version that will look mostly like HTML 5 with CSS and less of a need for Javascript.
JP – Thinking out hundreds of years, magnetic media fidelity becomes an issue potentially. Counting on organizations replicating content onto new electronic formats to help it survive.
RS – Most content will have to live in the cloud.
BG – Must take content out of print and image it.
JParis – Confident about standards, with iPad I have two mobile devices now, a great experience to read a book on the Kindle iPhone app and then see the same page open up on the iPad. I’ll want all of my devices talking to one another.
JP – How does mobile media integrate with Bloomberg terminal business?
OO – The BW acquisition made total sense given the target audience, catered mostly to financial executives historically, in that space there’s a lot that can be leveraged to cater to a broader audience of business executives. Other vertical business such as government, law and sports build on Bloomberg’s core competency. BW flanks well, it’s about the deeper insight that complements core BBerg breaking news. In addition, when you’re reading, when you make references to people and topics and events, Bloomberg has the abliity to provide real-time data on those things. First and most important thing is to provide a great reading experience for the magazine reader.
JP – With regard to journals, students are told to use peer-reviewed journals. MOer than 75,000 journals. Will the process of peer review change because of mobile? Process has remained the same.
BG – Peer review is broad and deep, but the world’s researchers have changed along with the Web. All sort of Web-based materials submitted with articles. The Lancet used to be a flat, text-based experience, now has links, opportunties, etc. Not just end to end, it’s in the workflow. Today, 85 percent of legal searches start on free Web, many in health will start there also. Eventually they want answers from an authoritative source. [Sidestepped the question, peer review needs to change to enable content to develop as a widely accessible entity which evolves over time.]
Question – How will HTML 5 evolve?
RS – Thinking of the old Netscape/Microsoft camps for browsers, but there was a lot more infighting in the Microsoft team than conflict with others. Always a concern about backward compatibility. When you get a new browser standard, you need the support of existing browser vendors. What’s also happening is that orgs like Google want to experiment with features in browsers like Chrome. An academic view of standards creation mixes with experimenters, but money trumps all. HTML 5 will happen faster if there are a lot of people supporting it to make money.
BG – Publishers tend to go with dominant standard that will help them to make money, don’t over-influence them.
JParis – Some efforts from publishers in Web standards, ad networks especially talking about leveraging HTML 5 to support ad invocations cross-platform more efficiently.
RS – Steve Jobs insulted Adobe Flash, because HTML 5 was coming. Will Flash fall by the wayside.
Very nice panel, John did a very nice job moderating and drew out many good topics (JB).
The transcript above was provided by John Blossom.
Original link: https://profiles.google.com/101844248571144042569/buzz/EdXToVC14og
- SIIA Information Industry Summit 2011
- SIIA Conference – Buzz on the Panels
- SIIA IIS 2006 – Panel Session
