Mark Kolier’s Blog

Archive for March, 2011

Yesterday Amazon.com introduced the concept of a ‘Music Locker’. As a longtime advocate of Amazon I have been following the development of this release and was excited about its practical nature and customer-centric approach. Amazon is trying (unlike its rivals) to offer cloud access to music independent of the device being used. The music industry is not happy about this at all and is already jumping up and down screaming foul.

From an article in Tuesday’s New York Times – http://nyti.ms/f2lEbJ …The dream of these companies (like Amazon, Google, and Apple), along with many start-ups, is for people to be able to listen to their music from any computer or phone. But they have all run into the same problem: music labels and publishers would prefer that listeners buy a new copy of a song everywhere they want to listen to it.”
I don’t know about you but the idea that I should have to pay for a new copy of the song on any device that I own does not work for me – or anyone else I suspect. Are they serious? Yes there are problems with the technology’s inability to recognize whether or not a song has been purchased ‘legally’ or not. But the solution is not to throw the burden back on the purchaser to then buy it individually for whatever device on which he or she wants to listen.
One of my early careers was a musician – composer/artist. I did not have the discipline to slog day-to-day through the difficult music business. However I do recognize the effort and artistry that goes into creating music (and art or prose of any kind for that matter). Yet having people pay for individual device access to a song (or article) does not serve the artist or author – it serves the label or publisher.
There has to be a better way. I don’t believe it is incumbent upon me to come up with that better way but I will give it some thought. In the meantime I am very interested in what you think. Could you see yourself paying for individual access to music on your IPod or MP3 player, I-pad or tablet, computer, or in your automobile? Or would it just aggravate you as much as it does me?

This thought has been popping up in my mind consistently over the past few years. With voice recognition technology continually improving (I admit it still has a way to go), the need to actually keystroke in words is possibly becoming less and less relevant every day.

I don’t know about you but my handwriting is terrible. Never all that good in the first place, it has devolved into a text style instantly recognizable by nobody and sometimes not even by me. I am a far better typist since I type ALL the time and dislike having to write by hand. Since I grew up even before the advent of the personal computer (I was a proud owner of an IBM Selectric back in college) typing was a vast improvement over my even then lousy handwriting.

Teenagers today impress everyone with their mind-blowing speed when SMS texting. I also notice that kids are very fast and good at typing on a keyboard as well (their spelling – well that’s another story). But what if there was really good voice recognition software and technology that worked all the time? Perhaps I will receive notes from companies like Dragon and Nuance, as well as products from Windows, Google and Apple espousing how well their products work. I’ve used a few of them from time to time and my impression is they are improving but the learning curve takes too long – that is they take too long to recognize my voice to make the proper word interpretation.

Eventually voice recognition technology will be truly high performing. And the need to actually type one’s thoughts and ideas will be reduced dramatically. There will be a much higher value put on editing since the inability to think orally (unfortunately evidenced by too many people too frequently) will allow things like term papers and white papers to be much more easily started. But the finishing will then truly be the challenge – something that writers already are well aware of. Taking all those thoughts you have that then are translated into text that you can read on the page will be exciting at first as it will seem so easy. Yet crafting something that is both interesting and concise (brevity is beautiful after all), is not as easy as it looks – even when you don’t have to physically type the words.

Part of my process for “creating content” as it is now called, is writing and editing at the same time. Even after I finish the thought process I go back and edit. And then I edit again and again. So while I welcome advancements in voice recognition technology I am so wired into typing my thoughts it will not be easy for me to adopt its usage – at least for some of the time.
Of course then there’s eye tracking which was in the news this week as articles both in Business Week http://buswk.co/hbW9QS and the New York Times http://nyti.ms/giq0eA highlighted this emerging technology

I don’t long for my old IBM Selectric, but I wonder if I could really give up typing all together. Could you?

A business associate of mine recently moved to an interesting new startup in Silicon Valley called Inkling. The more I learn about this iPad application the more I like it – and like Adam Lashinsky’s fine March 23rd article in Fortune Magazine http://bit.ly/gG3Yhb – it makes me wish I could go back to college and use ridiculously cool tools like this to help me better appreciate things and learn more.

From Mr. Lashinky’s article: “Inkling, a San Francisco startup, recently added textbook giants McGraw-Hill (MHP) and Pearson (PSO) to its roster of investors, which includes Sequoia Capital as well as Felicis Ventures, Kapor Capital and Sherpalo Ventures.”

As a parent having one current college student already and another to enroll this fall, I am particularly sensitive to the cost of college textbooks. They were expensive when I went to college and are even more so now. Having college textbooks on an iPad (or any kind of tablet for that matter) makes all the sense in the world. Think about the many advantages of having all your college textbooks on a tablet. In fact I expect that high schools will follow suit shortly and have all of their textbooks available for tablet download –this is happening already in some places but is far from being adopted in any significant manner.

1) Less weight to haul around campus. Not only for college kids but how about that 94 lb. high school freshman whose back is being thrown out of alignment due to hauling around an Earth Science textbook, Algebra, English, Social Studies…you get the idea. Medical school students should particularly cheer the Inkling iPad application as they have to feel carrying around bricks disguised as books is way beyond getting old.

2) It’s greener by far ¬– And I will bet that you have a few old school textbooks lying around somewhere in your house or apartment – I know I have at least one that I’ve not opened since graduating and it will eventually be thrown out.

3) Web links don’t work using conventionally printed textbooks – need I say more?

4) Student’s natural curiosity can be more fully explored using a tablet – if you are using a conventionally printed textbook and want to investigate something more deeply you either have to pick up another book or volume (unlikely to say the least) or go to the web. With a tablet you are already on the web.

5) You can pay for what you need – the current model allows students to purchase chapters for $3. I suspect that model is still being tested but the ability to buy incrementally is a good idea by spreading out the cost of purchasing a textbook over a longer period of time. And we all know there are many teachers that don’t always instruct from every chapter in a textbook.

Right now Inkling is only available as an app for the iPad since the company was started by CEO Matt MacInnis who worked at Apple before founding Inkling. I expect an Android app is in the works and when RIM releases its PlayBook tablet in April one would be developed for that as well in time.
Here’s a link to a CNN Money video on the Inkling Application featuring Mr. MacInnis from last year – http://bit.ly/bcA192.

It is often joked that education is wasted on the young. Even if that’s not true I am really jealous and wish I could go back to college and have my iPad with this application in my backpack.

Wouldn’t you?

Now that Motorola has its Xoom on the market, and RIM is ready to take orders for its new PlayBook tablet in April, Apple’s iPad will have to stand up to some competition after having the market all to itself for just over a year.

As more and more magazines utilize digital tablets as a method of distribution much has been made of the reader experience in reading magazines on tablets. Despite the killer technology few publications have truly embraced the tablet medium for all it is worth by using video links, photo links and in so doing providing a much more rich experience for readers.

I don’t yet have a tablet (but I am thinking about it and getting the iPad is most likely) but have seen a few of the magazine applications on tablets and often they look like magazines on a digital flat screen. Nice but nothing earth shattering.

One advertising medium that many people will not be sad to see go is magazine insert cards (there are two kinds 1) the bind-in which is either stapled into the book or glued to the spine, or 2) the blow-in which really is blown into the magazine with air so that it floats loosely inside). The cards have been a part of magazines for as long as I can remember- that’s more than forty years and I bet it’s longer than that. In fact I tried to find out when magazine insert cards were first put into newsstand and subscriber publications and had some difficulty finding any information I could be confident was correct.

Our company has produced more than a billion insert cards (both blow-in and bind-in but almost no smelly ones for fragrance companies) over the years. Clients like to use them because – they work. Those of us in the business know that the magazine (or book as we like to call it) is ‘broken’ which is to say it opens where the cards are inserted and stops the reader even if momentarily. A corresponding advertisement with the bind in offers the reader and opportunity to respond in a number of ways. By phone, over the web by using a landing page or personal URL (PURL), or even to call a phone number listed on the card. Different phone numbers are frequently used for different publications so that we can accurately track response by individual publications.

But that cannot happen in a digital publication. Of course ‘interruptive media’ like a bind-in card can be done as a pop-up in a digital magazine but the effect is decidedly less impactful. As more and more people adopt tablets to read publications what will be lost to marketers is an opportunity to stop the reader and allow them the chance to reply when they want – now, later or never. The plus side is that people will no longer have to complain about ‘annoying bind in cards’ that are seen as a waste of paper (true if you are not interested in what is being offered). But I bet people will complain about something else. They always find something.

Have you ever responded to blow-in or bind-in cards in magazines?

Maybe they are on vacation. After travel agencies and travel agents themselves are vanishing one by one and have been for a long time. Like most people I had thought of this many times before although I don’t frequently arrange for my own travel but sometimes I do.

The internet killed the travel agency business right? Well sort of. One recent blog report on ‘That Said’ http://bit.ly/hBnSOZ noted that less than 1 in 10 people use travel agents. That figure probably does not surprise anyone especially me.

At a Rotary club meeting today one of our charter members (almost 30 years now) Judy White spoke about her travel agency – Wilton Center Travel www.wiltoncentertravel.com which she started in 1978 as part of her ‘third career’ as she put it. As I listened to Judy list the virtues of why she is the lone remaining travel agency in town I thought ‘I wish I would have known her story sooner as it likely would have had me sit down with her and have her help arrange a past family trip or vacation’. That’s not to say that I won’t do that now but I feel as if we might have missed some opportunities to make great past family vacations even greater.

Having been to all seven continents (and at 70 plus years young she is soon off to the Galapagos Islands with her granddaughter – what energy!) and having been to every destination in the brochure she handed out, the level of Judy’s credibility is virtually unsurpassed in the travel business. She also noted that people’s misperception of travel agents is rampant. She related that from a pricing standpoint travel agents normally can match the lowest prices found on the internet nearly every time. The message is – you will not pay more to use a travel agent. How many people have received THAT message? The travel industry does a lousy job supporting the legion of remaining travel agents.

And experience counts. Big time. People that think they want to go to particular destinations because they look nice in the pictures on the internet are using hope as their strategy for picking the right place. Travel agents like Judy KNOW about the destinations people are considering. They can advise you of what’s really going on with their inside connections. When is the last time you got that kind of information over the internet? And if you have a problem with a reservation you made over the internet exactly who are you going to call? Good luck with that.

People seem to think that ‘beating’ a travel agent out of their fees is to be worn as some sort of badge of honor. But what they don’t realize is that there are very few fees paid directly to a travel agent (air fares are one exception as that is a turnover fare the airlines charge travel agents so you are probably better off buying airfares on the internet in most cases). So by surfing it up on the web looking for your vacation you are probably not ‘winning’ that game at all and while all the time you spend rummaging through a myriad of travel and vacation sites may be an enjoyable experience and even exciting, it probably is not the most practical way to go about booking hotels, cruises, tours and the like. After all time is money isn’t it?

It appears to me that the travel agency business is poorly represented by ASTA (American Society of Travel Agents) their association since key attributes as I’ve described are hardly promoted at all (if at all). Perhaps ASTA could use a new marketing agency (sorry I could not resist)?

Are you running your business like a travel agency? If you are running like Judy White does then I think that’s a good idea. Here’s hoping people like her hang around for a really long time.

What do you think?