GigaOM » Bobbie Johnson

Evan Williams’ Medium acquires long-form journalism site Matter

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:00:09 +0000

Matter, the Kickstarter-backed, science and technology journalism startup cofounded by former GigaOM European correspondent Bobbie Johnson, has only been up and running for five months — but it’s already found a new home. Medium, the publishing platform founded by Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, has acquired Matter for an undisclosed sum, the companies plan to announce Wednesday.

Matter raised over $140,000 through Kickstarter, and Williams was one of its 2,566 backers. Matter, which publishes one story of at least 5,000 words every month and sells them for $0.99 apiece, will remain a standalone company following the acquisition. Johnson and his cofounder, Jim Giles, will work as part of Medium’s editorial team, which also includes former literary agent Kate Lee and former Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen.

In a blog post scheduled to be released Wednesday, Johnson and his Matter cofounder Jim Giles explained what will and won’t change:

“If you already know what we do, don’t expect big changes yet. Our service is an ongoing experiment, but we have no immediate plans to alter the team, the places we publish (our website and the Kindle store), or how much we charge for each article. More importantly, we have no plans — at any time — to stop crafting hard-hitting narratives about big ideas. One of the things that made it easy to join Medium was the knowledge that the company believes in great storytelling as much as we do, and is prepared to support what we do.

But we will be rolling out some changes in the coming months. We’ve already started using Medium to expand on the ideas we cover — see, for example, Amputees & Wannabes, the recent series of commentaries around Do No Harm, our story about people who desire to amputate a healthy limb. We’ll also be introducing some exciting changes at the Matter website — changes that will make the site better for readers, and improve our mechanism for supporting long-form writing.”

Medium, which Williams and Biz Stone launched in 2012, is a collaborative publishing platform that aims to let users write, annotate, read and recommend content in a clutter-free interface. The platform isn’t open to everyone yet; for now, a select group of authors are contributing. Matter is Medium’s first acquisition.

Williams spoke about the importance of long-form content at GigaOM’s Roadmap conference last year. Watch the video here:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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Pocket launches read-it-later partnership with Matter

Laura Hazard Owen — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 13:30:54 +0000

Pocket, the read-it (or watch-it, consume-it, whatever-it)-later service formerly known as Read It Later, announced its first publisher partnership — with Matter, the Kickstarter-backed science e-singles startup. (Matter’s cofounder, Bobbie Johnson, was formerly the European editor for GigaOM, and still writes for us occasionally.)

This is Pocket’s first publisher partnership. Subscribers to Matter (it’s $0.99 a month) can also access the stories from Pocket.

Other third-party reading apps are also adding subscription-only content from publishers. In June, Flipboard partnered with the New York Times, allowing paying NYT subscribers to access all of the newspaper’s content through Flipboard’s apps as part of the NYT’s “NYT Everywhere” initiative. And Pulse sells some Wall Street Journal content through its apps. Pocket says more publisher partnerships are coming soon.

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Kickstarter-backed journalism startup Matter publishes its first story

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 12:00:07 +0000

Matter, the science and technology journalism startup that raised over $140,000 from 2,566 backers on Kickstarter, is launching with its first article Wednesday. GigaOM readers are already quite familiar with Matter co-founder Bobbie Johnson, who was formerly our European editor. He still writes for us occasionally, but recently left to work on Matter full time and is ready to launch the service.

Like Byliner and the Atavist, Matter sells e-singles — longform journalism in digital formats. But Matter is only publishing science- and technology-related stories, while the Atavist and Byliner publish across nonfiction categories (and Byliner sells some fiction, too). Matter will publish a new story every month, all priced at $0.99 and all at least 5,000 words long. They are available in the Kindle Store and will be on iTunes soon; for now, readers can download both MOBI and EPUB formats from Matter’s website.

Readers can also become members. By paying $0.99 a month, they get access to all of Matter’s stories, as well as extras like audiobook versions and author-and-editor Q&As. They are also added to Matter’s editorial board and can share ideas for stories through collaborative platform All Our Ideas. (Anyone who pledged at least $25 for the project on Kickstarter is also on the editorial board.)

Matter’s first story is “Do No Harm” by science writer Anil Ananthaswamy. It’s about people who feel compelled to amputate a limb — a rare condition known as Body Integrity Idendity Disorder — and the surgeons who risk their careers to help. Ananthaswamy is a consultant for London’s New Scientist magazine, the author of the book The Edge of Physics, and a TED speaker. “Do No Harm” will appear in Amazon’s Kindle Singles store, giving it an extra promotional boost.

“We pay writers by whatever means we can,” Johnson told me. “At the moment, we’re mainly based around a flat fee or [pay by the word], but once we have real sales data we’ll probably experiment with revenue shares and other options.”

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Here’s what Europe needs to copy from Silicon Valley

Dan Crow, Songkick — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 12:00:01 +0000

Last week on GigaOM, the always thought-provoking Bobbie Johnson challenged Europe’s entrepreneurs to “shake off the past and stop playing a game that’s stacked against them”. He says we should stop trying to be the next Silicon Valley and instead focus on the next big thing in technology, whatever that turns out to be.

I agree with much of what Johnson says. He’s exactly right that Europe suffers from the weight of it’s own history; our inability to free ourselves from our history so often holds us back. I left the UK for California in 1996 because I felt the weight of this – real and perceived historical precedents were always being cited for why a good idea was “too hard” or simply “not what we did here”.

A common criticism you hear of America is that it has no history. This profoundly misunderstands one of America’s great strengths – it is a place where people escape from history and are free to re-invent themselves and thus invent the future. The future is a better place to be than the poorly recalled past.

I’m not so convinced by the argument that the tech industry should not look to Silicon Valley as its inspiration. Johnson writes:

The problem with ‘the next Silicon Valley’ was that we took it too literally. Focus on ‘the next’: What will the next huge technology-led industry be? What will the next center of innovation that touches everyone be?”

Silicon Valley has been the global epicenter of innovation and wealth generation for more than 50 years now. The reason it continues to be the home of so many great tech companies decade after decade is because it continually reinvents itself.

Johnson notes how Shenzhen in China has become the region where most of the world’s electronics are built. It took over from Silicon Valley, which as its name suggests, was originally all about building electronics – with companies like Fairchild, Intel, HP and Cisco. That dominance was overtaken by the microcomputer industry which became Silicon Valley’s major driver of innovation in the late 70s and early 80s with companies like Atari, Apple and Seagate.

In the ’90s the web industry — with all due respect to Tim Berners-Lee — was established in California through Netscape and the first generation of dotcoms.

In the 2000s web search and social innovation on the West Coast led to Google, Facebook, Twitter and many others.

Every decade or so, Silicon Valley profoundly reinvents itself. It has repeatedly created the next huge technology-led industry. What drives this? Is there something magical in the water? No. Silicon Valley is not a specific set of companies or industries. Silicon Valley is a way of thinking about the future and creating companies around those ideas. It is an experimental approach that allows people to solve real problems by listening to users when possible and leading them when required.

It is a set of support structures — such as a critical mass of smart entrepreneurs, great technical universities, adventurous venture capitalists, innovative tech incubators — that allow that thinking and experimenting to be quickly embodied into the next great company.

When tech entrepreneurs in Europe talk about creating the “next Silicon Valley” — whether it’s in London, Berlin or Dublin — we mean importing this way of thinking and reproducing these support structures to allow us to figure out and create the next huge tech industry. The Silicon Valley approach is exactly about freeing yourself from the constraints of the past and allowing the experimentation that generates ideas that can change the world.

So, I’m not afraid to say that in London we’re trying to create a new Silicon Valley.

The explosive growth of innovative tech companies here is proof that it’s working. There are companies exploring how to reshape finance, building the new world of personal manufacturing, processing vast amounts of data to make the world work better and even (for my part) trying to make live music work better.

There are hundreds of companies trying to invent the future. Some of them will succeed, thanks to our ambition and using the techniques that work so well in Silicon Valley.

Dan Crow is the CTO of Songkick. He was previously a technical lead/manager at Google, co-founder of Blurb; Chief Scientist at Unicru and engineer at Apple.

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Welcome to GigaOM Europe

Bobbie Johnson — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:57:10 +0000

Well, hello.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a little addition to the GigaOM navigation bar: Europe.

That’s because from today we’re adding a new channel to the network that brings our coverage of European companies and issues into one place. The idea is to give Europe’s exciting companies and centers of innovation — important global cities like London and Berlin — the same sort of smart analysis, deep context, thorough reporting and insightful coverage that GigaOM gives to their American counterparts.

The fact is that Europe is home to a vibrant technology industry, with world-leading companies in mobile, digital media, cloud technology and e-commerce. We’ve been covering it increasingly over the past year, but now it’s time to bring it all together.

Our coverage here will be both wide and deep, ranging across our core subjects like startups, media, broadband, mobile and emerging technology, all from a distinctly European perspective.

So why now?

I’ve written before about how Europe has changed over the past few years, and a few months ago Om documented some of the exciting developments taking place.

Ultimately, we believe that not only is there an under-covered base of businesses in Europe, but there is also a new generation of international startups and digital companies being built here — and that the changes happening as a result of this shift deserve the kind of attention we can give it.

To get us there, I’m being joined by a fantastic team.

Robert Andrews, our senior editor, international, joined as part of the acquisition of paidContent earlier this year. Robert, who launched paidContent:UK in 2007, is a veteran with deep expertise, experience and insight. I think his view on the continent’s media businesses, and the disruption they face, is unparalleled — and I’m really excited that he’s part of our team now.

We’ve also hired David Meyer to report on the burgeoning startup scene in Berlin. David, who has been writing for ZDNet in the U.K. for the last few years, joined us a little over a month ago and has been taking on the task of covering his beat with gusto. We think we’re the first major technology site to have a real presence in one of the world’s greatest, most creative cities, rather than just parachuting in, enjoying a little clubbing and currywurst and then heading off again.

We’ll also be supporting our coverage with events, starting with Structure:Europe — the first transatlantic edition of our cloud computing conference — to be held in Amsterdam in October.

It’s going to be great, with top innovators from Europe and Silicon Valley joining GigaOM editors to debate topics such as big data, the cloud and global regulation. We’ve already got some visionary speakers lined up to take the stage, including Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon; Nick Halstead, founder and CTO of DataSift; and JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at SalesForce. More speakers will soon be announced, and pre-registration is now open.

At the same time as doing all this, we will not be turning the European channel into a ghetto, separate from the rest of the GigaOM network. It is precisely because we believe the best European entrepreneurs and businesses can compete on a global basis, that we will be placing the bar for our coverage high.

You won’t find small funding announcements about me-too companies, and we won’t waste your time publishing scurrilous rumors. What you’ll get is our trademark coverage of the ideas, people and companies that are making this region such an exciting place to be right now.

The bottom line: if it’s important and it affects Europe, you’ll read it here.

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