Ellen Wallace
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – A coincidence? In the process of researching Barry Callebaut and Magnum ice cream this morning for a business story on the new long-term partnership between the Zurich chocolate company and Unilever I visited the Magnum Facebook page. Wow! 2.5 million people like the page. That is impressive, no matter what they have done to achieve it, but equally impressive is the thought that of that much ice cream being eaten regularly enough to turn them into fans.
I went to my freezer to see if by any chance we had some, but no luck. I fancy trying out one of the new Ghana chocolate ones, mmm. A 10-minute walk up to the local gas station and back probably burns off enough calories to offset half of one of these; I’m willing to check it out tomorrow.
And then a few minutes later I had this spam message, and I wonder if Facebook stats are headed in the same manipulated direction as too many web site stats: “Buy 2,000 guaranteed Facebook fans worldwide. Process completed in 1-2 days. All fans are 100% real Facebook users.
Ah, my friends, I thought I knew ya.
I’m hoping the Magnum fans are really real.
Ellen Wallace
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – I agree with the Wikipedians, all 1,800 who voted that the English version of the site to which they contribute should be whited out, blank, tomorrow, 18 January. In the name of saving the Internet and its honest users, the US Congress is considering laws that, if passed, could take on a life of their own and might one day well have the opposite result, reducing the freedom of information online.
If the voice of Wikipedia, added to criticism by the White House over the weekend, can stop the legislation in its tracks, that is good news for the rest of us using the Internet right now.
Please read the Wikipedia pages on these laws, as a starting point, the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, to understand the broad reach such laws would give to the American legal system.
The US is not alone in trying to create legislation that reaches beyond its own borders, but I am concerned about growing American public acceptance of the notion that the tentacles of the American legal system can and should reach beyond US borders. These laws are too often created by politicians keen to please hometown voters who know precious little about the rest of the world.
I’ve covered the new US-Swiss double taxation treaty and watched US pressure on Switzerland build, to obtain bank data, in recent months. It’s done in the name of virtue and protecting honest taxpayers. Most of us are probably on the side of these (not to mention that we’re probably mostly pro-democracy and anti-terrorism, two more US political buzzwords) but there is a more sinister side to this bullying behaviour and I’ve concluded that a rambling American bureaucracy can too easily take advantage of laws made in a different time and for different purposes. The result in this case shows little understanding of and respect for Swiss laws.
Why would Internet laws that are widely viewed with skepticism outside the US as censorship be any more respectful of other nations’ legal systems than tax legislation? Those who write the laws don’t interpret and enforce them.
Ellen Wallace
© 2011 Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte's web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The great tech war of 2012 is warming up, writes Fast Company, meaning that four biggies are stepping on each other’s toes and pretty soon the slug fest will begin, featuring Amazon, Apple, Facebook nnd Google. “There was a time, not long ago, when you could sum up each company quite neatly: Apple made consumer electronics, Google ran a search engine, Amazon was a web store, and Facebook was a social network. How quaint that assessment seems today.” [bold added by GenevaLunch]
I like Fast Company, a magazine that produces some well-researched and well-written material. But even here, we can’t call it a magazine, in these days of amorphous companies, including amorphous media.
Media is still a line of business, the question is whose
Here’s how Fast Company, what I would call an online news magazine, describes itself; if you look hard you’ll find the word media in there, and note the lack of italics, which are generally used to denote the name of a publication: “Fast Company is the world’s leading progressive business media brand, with a unique editorial focus on innovation in technology, ethonomics (ethical economics), leadership, and design. Written for, by, and about the most progressive business leaders, Fast Company and FastCompany.com inspire readers and users to think beyond traditional boundaries, lead conversations and create the future of business.”
If you’re one of the sticklers who still wants to know why GenevaLunch calls itself an online daily newspaper when we don’t have a print version, I can only say a) I usually shorten it to “we’re an online daily” to avoid the debate and b) at least we produce news and that’s our main business. We’re part of a shrinking industry, with newspapers trying to hold on to that part of what they do while looking elsewhere to make money. We’re staffed by volunteers, in answer to your unasked question, what’s our business model.
Make way for quasi-news
The latest development in the news industry is the quasi-news business, with two branches. The first is smaller social media tacking on news services to make their sites sticky. At first glance this looks like a smaller, shadow version of the big upcoming tech wars, but that’s an illusion. They mostly stir around the news rather than producing it themselves, they have no editorial team overseeing news although they sometimes hire a reporter or two, hapless freelancers. These groups are a target for the second branch of this new business, companies that produce and sell “news” cheaply to other businesses which want to pitch their own news service without going to the trouble of manufacturing the news themselves. I am getting several calls a week from these new companies, most of which claim to be in London (I have my doubts). Their news packages are a mix of public relations rehashes and re-arranged aggregated news.
This only seems to upset people when the subject is politics and government power, but the quasi-news industry makes sure there is plenty of celebrity stuff to keep interest high. I was told in a call from London last night that they can give me any mix I like of Lady Gaga and what’s happening to the euro.
I turned down the offer.
ProPublica (journalism in the public interest) carried an article in May about the implications of “PR up, journalism down”. Author John Sullivan noted that “the Pew Center took a look at the impact of these changes last year in a study of the Baltimore news market. The report, “How News Happens,” found that while new online outlets had increased the demand for news, the number of original stories spread out among those outlets had declined. In one example, Pew found that area newspapers wrote one-third the number of stories about state budget cuts as they did the last time the state made similar cuts in 1991. In 2009, Pew said, The Baltimore Sun produced 32 percent fewer stories than it did in 1999. Moreover, even original reporting often bore the fingerprints of government and private public relations.”
The demand for news is there, it’s just moved to FB
Farhad Manjoo, author of the Fast Company article, writes that “Facebook, meanwhile, is now more than just the world’s biggest social network; it is the world’s most expansive enabler of human communication. It has changed the ways in which we interact (witness its new Timeline interface); it has redefined the way we share—personal info, pictures (more than 250 million a day), and now news, music, TV, and movies.”
News is like any other product, with R&D, production, packaging, distribution
FB is a distribution channel for news. What does this mean? That someone still has to produce the news in the first place, a fact that quick sharing of news among friends, online, tends to blur. At a social media evening jointly hosted by the US Mission in Geneva and the Diplomacy School a young woman in the audience declared that like most of her friends she doesn’t get her news from news organizations, but from friends online and their links.
Duh, I was a little surprised that for a graduate student she doesn’t seem to have asked herself where the news originally came from, since I don’t think she was talking about citizen news and iReports, which were mostly a flash in the pan and are now used by media to make them appear connected and interactive. I don’t think she meant the Arab Spring with direct-from-the-battle-line reports or the boom in news moving around on cell phone informal networks in Africa. I’m pretty sure she was referring to the various bits and pieces of news shared by friends on FB, Linked in, Twitter and on local social networks, the stuff I see batted around by my friends, colleagues and acquaintances who somehow became online “friends”.
This is news without the packaging. Packaging is part of what magazines and newspapers and now online media offer. The friends distribution system is a free-for-all. The cost goes down as a result of this loss of packaging and distribution, a fact media are beginning to realize can work in their favour.
A nod to the brand
The danger is that the brand disappears. Fast Company is lucky because I made my source clear here, cited them and linked to them. A few hundred other unscrupulous people won’t bother and will rewrite some of what Manjoo wrote, never giving him the credit he deserves for a really interesting and rich article.
And while I’m being honest, I will admit that I found his article because one of my FB friends is The Browser, who makes me sit up and notice all kinds of interesting articles (thanks, dear Browser folks).
Ellen Wallace
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – There are the products, the design, the packaging, the marketing, not to mention the financial success, and then there are the ads. Some will say Steve Jobs made Apple what it is today, but he had a little help from his friends, and Ad Age reminds us that the advertisements during Jobs’s reign were part of what made it all so fun.
Here are their picks, the 10 best Apple ads starting back in 1984, or “1984″, depending on how you see it.
Good luck Tim as you step into Steve’s shoes, and please keep those ads rolling.
Ellen Wallace
The Guardian has 13 magical photos of the lunar eclipse, which some of us missed in the early hours of Tuesday 21 December. My favourite is the sheep in Country Antrim, who seem to wonder what the fuss is all about, although I suspect they were worried by the change in the light, as sheep are worriers.
I watched the beautiful white moon, first to my left, then to my right as I drove from Vaud to Valais last night, along the elbow of the Rhone near Martigny. But the eclipse, which I had forgotten about, occurred early this morning Swiss time, and apparently the moon dipped below the horizon just before the eclipse, leaving it to Americans, north and south, to watch the event. Flickr carries a nice collection of amateur’s photos from around the world.
Magical it was: the first lunar eclipse to come on the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, since 1378.
Tonight we have a full moon, bright and white and, we hope, bringing clear skies and thawing temperatures to help travellers make it home for the holidays.
Ellen Wallace
G3 technology was a huge leap forward in telecommunications, maybe not quite the same as people landing on the moon, but it felt close. I remember the day I bought my first iPhone in Sierre, in canton Valais, and minutes later, riding up the mountainside in Switzerland (I wasn’t driving), I watched a clip my son had just sent from China, shots from a film he was making about riding a motorcycle across Tibet. The landscapes had a lot in common, and our so-distant worlds had just come together. It felt like a miracle.
So 4G should be the next great leap, right? Fourth generation wireless technology, that will bring us another set of miracles.
Not quite so, it seems. The ITU (International Telecommunications Union) in Geneva some months ago put out a tough definition of 4G, that next great leap, but the market players who had new products they were calling 4G didn’t make the ITU grade and there were no products on the market that could honestly be called 4G.
In the end, the market rules: US carriers kept saying in their advertising that they offered G4 and in early December, the ITU quietly backed down, according to David Twiddy, writing in the Kansas City Business Journal, and other tech watchers.
We consumers will have to wait a bit longer for the family video from the moon, in real time.
Links to other sites: Going Wimax, Slashdot
Ellen Wallace
Tap-and-pay: do I really want to marry my credit cards to my phone?
Good news, bad news and tech news: they all seem to come in batches. Today it’s the turn of tech news.
Apparently I will soon be able to marry my phone and credit card, not just have them occasionally dating. But marriage is a serious business and I’m not sure I’m ready for it in this case. Google has unveiled what it is calling an “unannounced” product, a credit card size phone that could be the next generation after the Nexus One smartphone. A friend from the US was telling me yesterday that one of his favourite iPhone apps is a barcode reader that promptly tells him the best price and where to get it on products he’s interested in buying. He then orders it and pays for it and within minutes he owns one of the best deals in town.
The new Google phone, reports AFP, “runs on fresh ‘Gingerbread’ software and is imbedded with a near-field communication chip for financial transactions, according to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.” Schmidt showed off his new toy/product at a web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Schmidt says the industry calls it tap-and-pay, and the phones will replace credit cards. No news on who is building the flatscreen phone.
Lift and the art of digital technologies “as a pervasive layer around people, artifacts and places”
The Geneva Lift Conference 2011, 22-4 February, focusas as always on what the future can do for you, but the next one is more precisely defined by Lift team member Nicolas Nova: “”This year the theme corresponds to the idea that digital technologies can be seen as a pervasive layer around people, artifacts and places; objects as well as individuals, are simultaneously active and passive concentration points.”
Try to pack that into an image that works onstage, on posters and elsewhere! But Bread and Butter, the agency that has long worked closely with Lift, has done it, and the explanation behind the idea offers interesting food for thought.
The death of the e-mail, again
A BBC special guest, young and sexy and intelligent about world affairs, said this morning she has no intention of giving up her e-mail and shifting entirely to Facebook, which she uses. The Washington Post weighed in on the ugliness of the Facebook logo. PC Magazine suggests Facebook is headed down the same “dark road” as AOL, making the same e-mail mistakes. The occasion for all the digital ink was Facebook sending out rumours a week ago followed by the news itself Monday of its new e-mail system. The news turned out to be less dramatic than media feared or expected. Here’s what the Facebook people themselves say about it:
“We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they’re on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.”
So life has just become simpler because we now have even more options, if you follow the argument.
Ellen Wallace
And it gets better: for being anti-competitive!
This was one headline that landed in my mailbox which I couldn’t ignore. How bold! How brave! How – stupid? Telecom TV‘s final sentence makes it worth a read through, from headline to the last bit, with a lot of interesting stuff about the machinations that are part of lucrative government contracts. We’re talking here about the e-mail contract for the Department of the Interior. Voters in the US are thinking today about where their tax dollars go, and re-shaping Congress based on where they think their tax dollars should be going. I wonder how many of them would vote for Google, how many for Microsoft.
Ellen Wallace
Telecom TV’s reporter Leila Makki has just put out a video with all the little gadgets you need, including an iPad and waterproof cases if you want to avoid caveman camping. So if you’re planning to invite junior out for a week in the woods or on the mountainside it looks like you might want to find out first what he or she thinks is necessary, in addition to canned beans. True, there are great little powering up gadgets and GPS systems that might save your lives, but this sure isn’t camping the way it used to be!
Ellen Wallace
Media rumour has it that I’ll soon be able to get free GPS from Google Maps Navigation for my iPhone – that the company is starting with the UK and Ireland this summer and then the rest of Europe will follow. Google people in Zurich, surely you can push Switzerland up the list? After all, most Europeans taking long car trips pass through Switzerland as they drive somewhere else, since we’re on the north-south and east-west axes.
I hope 20 Minutes is right about this.