Lowering the digital barriers

There has never been a better time for innovation in the digital economy.

That's the conclusion of Lorraine Warren,researcher in Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at the University of Southampton.

According to Lorraine

1. Widespread access to broadband technologies

2. Smartphones that enable new forms of communication, handheld internet access and bespoke applications development

3. Software platforms that enable a high degree of networked connectivity and communication, such as blogs, wikis, twitter, Facebook, ning, youtube, flickr.

4. Readily available real-time geographical location data

5. Increasing availability of government datasets to the public, such as data from the Ordnance Survey in the UK

are all lowering the barriers to disruptive innovation.

Why a wait and see strategy sometimes is best for social media

Be an early adopter not an innovator.

That's the strategy that companies should adopt when approaching social media according to Jeremiah Owyang.

The early adapters

Learn from the failures of innovators, they reduce risk. Often they have the opportunity to explain how it works to others. Become the case studies that other groups follow

and his tips?

1. Examine your organizations adoption patterns. First, define how quickly your organization responds and adopts to technologies, and factor into your considerations.
2. Be a Category Ahead Of Your Company. If you’re responsible for new technologies at your company, your personal adoption should be a level or two ahead of the organizations adoption, as you cannot effectively deploy for your company if you don’t personally understand the impacts of the new technologies.
3. Track The Category Ahead Of You. Find an individual that’s above your adoption category (the early adopter watches the innovator) and be sure to watch their behaviors and learn from them. Adopters are often blazing their own trail, and may not ever follow anyone.

South Africa implements Geo taging for HIV treatment

A great example of the use of geo mapping techniques comes from South Africa where

Vodacom’s the Grid, South Africa’s first location-based mobile social network available to everyone who has a WAP-enabled cellphone, has mapped out close to 11 000 HIV-related support services covering prevention, treatment and support across South Africa.

According to the report from the country's media update

This initiative sees the Grid partnering with the HIV-911 programme – a comprehensive guide of HIV and AIDS related support services in South Africa. The main objective of the programme is to ensure that information about HIV support services are accessible to all South Africans. HIV-911 is funded by United States Agency for International Development / President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief through the Foundation for Professional Development.

A chance for media innovation

Simply putting content behind a paywall is not in itself the solution to the problems of the industry.

As Paid Content reports the comments of the Times Media’s digital development head Hector Arthur who says

The Times must meet the “commercial necessity” to innovate before raising the paywall next year,

He adds

We’ve been focusing on what will that mean for the reader. .. and what will that mean for our journalism.” Within that, he’s emphasising presentation: “It’s important to innovate around how you deliver.

The engine is the content, the car the aggregation, and the engineer the journalist.

An interesting take on the problem of news (Ht-Martin Belam)

News consumers are mainly interested in news coverage, not content. Coverage is a service that promises to keep its users "in the loop" about what is relevant to them and their peer groups. It is delivered by selecting content on readers' behalf – i.e. through aggregation and curation – and while it relies on content it is more than that. Because it is an ongoing, day-to-day service, coverage is all about loyalty: once consumers find a provider they like, they come back to it. And because of hyperlinks, in the web coverage providers need not be content providers (and vice-versa). This means that media brands' power – including their pricing power – will increasingly be a matter of how well they aggregate content – whatever its source – and not just how good their content is.

Nico Flores writes on his blog On Demand media

His description of the example of the technology and the car is a great read and for journalism

the engine is the content, the car the aggregation, and the engineer the journalist

and adds that

Tim Berners Lee's invention of the hyperlink created the perfect frictionless interface between two formerly integrated industries: publishing and aggregation. It does not matter that this did not come about in the gradual way that Christensen describes (i.e. through a slow process of industry evolution) but as a quantum leap, before the industry was ready

Newspapers should stop thinking as fixed products and start acting valuable, branded interfaces to on

CJR carries an interesting interview with Rob Durst, a Boston-based business and technology consultant who believes that newspapers can remain viable.

How? Well according to Durst,if they move quickly and use innovations such as “mobile codes.then have a cahnce of surviving.

Magazines and newspapers should stop treating their publications as fixed products and start thinking about them as valuable, branded interfaces to online content and services. They can do this using mobile codes, which are essentially printed barcodes that readers “click on” using a camera phone—kind of like clicking on a Web link with a mouse. QR (quick response) codes are a good example. They are in widespread use throughout Asia. QR codes contain a Web address, and your phone’s browser automatically connects to that Web site when you take a picture of the code with your camera phone.

How innovation in thinking can increase your circulation

A great story on how newspaper's innovation can lead to increases in circulation comes from Lithuania whose.

free Lithuanian paper 15min went from a daily to a three-days-a-week schedule. The decline in the local advertising market (45-50%) caused publisher Schibsted to take drastic measures. The paper now distributes 93,000 copies on the days it is published.

adding that

The paper is also more active online. The 15min website attracts now 60,000 daily, 205,000 weekly and 600,000 monthly unique users. The citizen journalism site IKRAUK is doing well, getting around 10,000 daily visitors and many news feeds from the users as well. 15min also launched a Facebook page, getting 7500 fans in the last three months.

But the biggest innovation?

the underwater laminated 15min paper, which is being used in Vichy aquapark in Vilnius, people can read news while laying in Jacuzzi.

The rubber newspaper

The latest in newspapers is the rubber version.Not joking this is the real thing according to innovations in newspapers.

Well, now we have the first fake prototypes but the time is coming and soon or later we will have the first “flexible tablet readers”

.

Knights news challenge launches for 2010 awards

This year's Knight's News Challenge has launched on the 1st September with a total bursary fund of $5m to the projects selected.

They are looking for innovative ideas that develop platforms, tools and services to inform and transform community news, conversations and information distribution and visualization.

There are three rules to the competition,that the project uses digital, open-source technology that it distributes news in the public interest,and the project can be tested in the local community.

On change to this year is that the project doesn't have to be live and can be judged on closed basis with only the judges seeing the results.

All applications must be made online before the 15th October.

A complete community connection-maybe I have seen the future

I have been reading a fascinating piece (Ht Sarah Hartley) from Steve Buttry which he describes as a

vision for transformation of our media company and of media companies in general.

Strong words indeed and Steve wants his company to become the " Complete Community Connection."

How well it will

1. provide an interactive, well-organized, easily searched, ever-growing, always updated wealth of community news, information and opportunities on multiple platforms. We need to become the connection to everything people and businesses need to know and do to live and do business in Eastern Iowa.

2.For businesses, we will be their essential connection to customers, often making the sale and collecting the money.

The C3,as he dubs the project will retain news as being essential to mission and identity,but acknowledges that it

needs to be a portal through which you can easily reach any information or activities in the community. We need to provide a conveniently organized, easily searchable treasure chest of information that feeds multiple products that consumers reach in a variety of ways:

The important point is that the content will be driven by the marketplace and will reach some people who never read the paper

by doing important jobs such as connecting them with people of common interests or helping them find the products and services that help them live their lives.

I fully recommend a complete read of the article-it may well be the future

How does the web make you feel?

NESTA hosted an event in which they launched their Mediasnacker project the web makes me feel

The project explores how young people feel about the web and also the reasons behind the emotions.

This is the Wordle that came from it

Innovate to survive

That often asked question are newspapers in terminal decline is answered by Peter Preston in today's Observer as he replies to Emily Bell's apocolyptic vision of earlier in the week.

Reminding us that five years ago the Independent started a trend amongst the tabloids in shrinking and which they all followed apart from the Telegraph,Preston reads something into comparing the sales figures of the four qaulities over the five years.

can you totally put aside the thought that the one daily that didn't shape down has endured the biggest losses in headline and full-price terms - and that the first two quality tabloids in the ring are both recording higher ABC sales than they were five years ago?

he asks

Whilst saying that

A Times drop of under 20,000 in five years isn't systemic collapse. A Guardian surge online that brings in more than 23 million unique users a month on top of a million-plus print readers isn't carnage.