Week of May 26, 2008

Google Android: First Look

Friday, May 30, 2008

Google's mobile phone application platform, Android, will launch later this year, and it was showcased for the first time this week at the Google I/O conference. While there are a lot of questions remaining to be answered (not the least of which is how many carriers wills support the platform by selling the phones), our overall initial impression was positive. As phone geeks (PMG staffer Jim Kerr has both an iPhone and a Nokia N95), we liked what we saw. In fairness to Apple, the prototype looked exactly like an iPhone, from the touch screen interface and movement-based navigation to the boxes for the integrated Google Map application, which looked exactly like the phone utility boxes when an iPhone user uses an iPhone. The, by now, iconic "slide to open" was given a twist by the Google, with users able to define their own geographic shape to use to slide to open the phone.

That small touch-taking an iPhone staple and making it more customizable-makes the Android a real threat to the iPhone. Just look at the robust developer community around the iPhone, which exists solely around a hacked phone that 99% of iPhone users don't even have access to. Imagine that excitement moved over to an open system. Even with the iPhone developer SDK being released next month, the Android OS from Google and a phone with similar style could easily explode in popularity if the applications created for it far outstrip the iPhone. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it is exactly what happened to the Apple PC in the eighties, which fell into marginal market share thanks to the mountain of applications being created for the Microsoft OS in comparison to the Mac. We predicted this possibility back in January in our New Media Landscape report and the twin rollouts of the Android OS and the iPhone SDK will have a huge bearing on how this plays out.

Comscore Seeks To Own Digital Media Measurement

Thursday, May 29, 2008

There are a lot of ways to measure web usage, from the venerable Alexa to the more recent offerings like Quantcast. But the two services used with the most regularity and considered the "best" are Nielsen and Comscore. Comscore clearly wants to dominate the digital measurement space and has announced it is purchasing mobile usage measurement firm M:Metrics. This is a compelling purchase for Comscore, as it puts them at the pinnacle of a burgeoning business category: Mobile. It also allows Comscore to create a complete suite of digital measurement products, from online video, web usage, and audio streaming measurement to the same metrics for mobile.

NY Times To Be "Programmable"

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

In what will clearly a seminal event in traditional media, New York Times CTO Marc Frons stated on the Media Bistro website that that the newspaper was working on an API (programming interface) that would allow the entire newspaper to be programmable. The goal is to make the entire newspaper customizable by cutting it into chunks, which could then be syndicated by outside partners are re-structured by users. While many traditional media sites have moved in this direction, this will absolutely the most dramatic example of old media completely embracing the segmented and customizable nature of the Internet. The API will be done by the Summer, and the goal is to have a significant amount of the functionality available to the public within six months.

The New York Times and the BBC have been uniquely aggressive with the Internet from the old media position. The New York Times purchased Blogrunner to directly address news aggregation sites like Techmeme and Reddit, while it made a strategic investment in Wordpress, the world's leading blog platform. For traditional media companies looking for guidance as to where

Facebook To Open Source It's Application Platform

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

One of the major trends we focused on in our 2008 New Media Landscape report back in early January was the concept of openness. We predicted a quick move to openness across a number of media categories. This week brings another example of that trend, as Facebook is being reported to have decided to open source its application platform. The result is that any social network-and indeed any website-will be able to integrate Facebook applications. Why would they do this? Well, as we wrote about in last week's Pollack Media Confidential, the walled garden nature of Facebook is putting it under tremendous pressure from outside companies, and this is one way to at least take part in the inevitable openness we predicted.

The real question is how Facebook will be able to monetize the increasingly segmented nature of social networks today, but that's a story for another time.

Happy Memorial Day

Monday, May 26, 2008

No post for today.