(Ed: Vittorio Zambardino, the head of new media strategy at Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso, one of the biggest newspaper chains in Italy, is guest blogging from “Beyond the Printed Word” Conference in Rome…day two of the coverage…day one here)
On the second and last day of “Beyond the Printed Word” conference in Rome, things turned towards what can only be termed at science-fiction at this point. Prototype technologies like high speed publishing and electronic ink
–electronic “ink” that can be electronically manipulated on a plastic page that can be used over and over again, a sexy technology which perhaps won’t be launched until the end of the current decade–were the order of the day. It was also a Nordic dominated day: the results of a mobile TV test at University of Tampere, Finland [Ed: Hey, I’ll be in Tampere from Nov 12-14 and giving the keynote at the MediaWeek festival there?anyone there who wants to meet up?] were explained by the project leader, Prof Cai Sodergard.
However most of the audience attention was taken by Torry Pedersen, director of VG Net, the internet division of the most influential newspaper in Norway. The story he told is exactly what the audience had been wanting to listen: a success story, a proof that someone’s making real money by publishing a news site. It has a 12 percent profit margin in the last quarter. But it has yet to make the BIG money, but he’s confident it will. The Holy Grail of online profits were described by Pedersen in six points: 1) Build the website as a traffic machine, by updating it continuously and being sure that every story published is new, alive and interesting (not a difficult thing to do if you stuff your site with sex, sports and private life of actors/actresses!); 2) Try every new way of delivering advertising in every important part of the site. Pedersen showed some animated commercials, actually the same we watch on TV, displayed on the site (they work!); 3) Innovate frequently; 4) Stay away from beauty both in terms of design and in terms of services (and hey, don’t be scared by the idea of delivering ringtones and games; it would be suicidal snobbishness); 5) Use any means to deliver your content: in any form (mobile distribution); and 6) Push hard on user-generated content, such user forums, users pages, post cards, CDs compiled by users etc.
Then the conference went into the Sci-Fi phase. Mobile is the buzzword, repeated incessantly by Nordic newspaper executives who stress the opportunity of merging the heavy internet usage and large mobile phone usage typical of their countries.
Then there’s another issue: printing and delivering papers in a large country to few readers is expensive. That’s where the E-Ink solution comes in…One of the future trend–according to the conference speakers–is not the end of the Newspaper but that of paper meant as the way of giving life to newspapers as a product. The demo staged by a Philips person about the E-Ink project has received mixed reactions [Ed: In partnership with 14 Swedish newspapers and Ifra, Phillips has developed and tested a prototype device – an “e-reader” that uses e-ink. As they foresee it, users would download their daily newspaper–and other reading materials–into a thin, plastic hand-held device that they would then take with them.]. Imagine a two-fold brochure, whose content is constantly reloaded through a Wi-Fi connection. There are no colors, downloading requires a user-activated connection, and on-field texts have showed mixed results (Us Europeans people like it more than British!). The project people hope that the early adopters versions will come out sometime in 2006/7, and it will be mainstream–home users–by 2015/2020.
Mobile TV, a prototype of which has been made at Tampere University, Finland, will come in much sooner than that. Nokia’s among the manufacturers of the product…a generation of walking couch potatoes is here.
Comments have been disabled for this post