Monthly Archive for September, 2007

The New York Times discovers how free pays!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/9/2007
in Technology
. 6 Comments

I was listening to George Hook, Karlin Lillington and Simon McGarr on The Right Hook yesterday discussing newspapers’ online business models.

They referred to the New York Times and how it charged for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives (what it perceived as premium content).

Overnight the New York Times abandoned this model in favour of free access to all its content.

Mark Evans has looked at the numbers and shows how free could make financial sense:

TimesSelect was an pretty interesting experiment that attracted about 227,000 subscribers and $10-million in annual revenue. But the growth clearly wasn’t there to justify the status quo…

Let’s assume, about 20% of the NYT’s content was behind the walled garden. Now that it’s free, the NYT could added another 2.6 million unique visitors. Let’s assume, the average online NYT reader consumes a healthy 20 pages/month. This would give us 52 million more page views a month.

If you can generate $20/CPM per Web page from these additional page views, that’s $1-million of revenue per month or about $12-million a year

Anyone want to put a bet on how long before the Irish Times changes its model to entirely free? This lifetime? The next lifetime? Not in a million years?

Irish Times subscription page

Are IBM, Google and Sun ganging up on Microsoft?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/9/2007
in Microsoft, Open Source and office 2.0
. 1 Comment

I see IBM are now jumping into the free Office software arena by launching IBM Lotus Symphony.

IBM Lotus Symphony is a free download from the IBM site (registration required).

Up until now, Microsoft’s competition in this space has come from OpenOffice and Google - neither of whom have a strong track record in the Enterprise Office space! The entry of IBM into this space is game changing.

As well as making Symphony free for download, IBM are also committing 35 developers to the OpenOffice development project. Again conferring the the IBM seal of approval on OpenOffice suddenly marks it up for serious consideration by larger companies.

Seen in light of these recent announcements, Microsoft’s recent move to capture the student market for Office begins to have an air of desperation about it!

Google launches online presentations

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/9/2007
in Web 2.0 and office 2.0
. 2 Comments

Google announced today that they have added an online presentation function to their Google Docs and Spreadsheets. The new application is called Google Docs Presentations and its functionality is available under the New menu:
Google Docs Presentations

You can import existing PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, OpenOffice files and you can email documents to the application. However, there is no support yet for Apple’s superb Keynote presentation software.

Uploading a file to Google Docs Presentations

Uploaded presentations render quite well and you have all the usual revisioning and collaborative abilities you have to come to expect from Google Docs.

Uploaded presentation

Nathan Weinberg has a great article on how to embed Google Presentations into blog posts/articles - what is really amazing about this functionality is that it combines GTalk with online presentations - giving the ability to chat and present simultaneously from your blog/website.

This is slowly eating not only into the Office suite of applications but also into the web conferencing arena.

First iPhone photo editor app?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/9/2007
in Photo Sharing, Technology, Telecoms and Web 2.0
. 5 Comments


Pixenate on the iPhone, originally uploaded by pxn8.

Having recently successfully deployed their Pixenate FaceBook app (a photo editor for Facebook), it looks like Sxoop Technologies are now out to be the first company to deploy a photo editor for the iPhone!

How cool is that? There is a beautiful fit between the iPhone, which people will be using to take pictures, and photo editing software.

Go Walter - woo hoo!

Ubuntu first impressions

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/9/2007
in Linux, Open Source and ubuntu
. 20 Comments

Using Wubi, I installed Ubuntu onto my Vaio laptop over the weekend (Ubuntu is a Linux distro - an open source operating system).

Apart from some nervousness on my part about losing any info from my Windows partition, the install was completely painless.

Ubuntu Screenshot

The interface is really slick - it is obvious that lots of time and thought went into the look and feel of this OS.

It is also incredibly fast (despite being installed into a single file in the Windows partition as opposed to a normal install). From a standing start to being able to open a web page Vista took four minutes thirty seconds on this machine. Ubuntu took one minute fifty seconds on the same machine.

I’m trying out Evolution now (email client) and I will start trying other apps as well to see how they compare. For now though, I am impressed.

Dublin SilverLight event

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/9/2007
in Microsoft and Silverlight
. 2 Comments

I have written about Microsoft’s Silverlight environment several times since they debuted it at ReMix07.

For the end-user, it is a Flash-like plug-in which allows viewing of apps and media written specifically for it.

For the developer, Silverlight allows apps written in managed code to be delivered via a browser to Internet users in a platform agnostic manner.

It certainly changes what can be done with a browser and I have no doubt that Microsoft themselves will begin to use it to roll out Rich Intetnet Apps and try to regain some of the lost Internet space (Offlce Light, anyone?).

How do you find out more about Silverlight? Well, Fergal Breen of IrishDev is hosting a SilverLight event in Dublin next week (Thursday Sept 27th in the Cineworld Complex, Parnell Street, Dublin):

Martha Rotter, from the original Silverlight crew, invites you to witness how Silverlight can light up the web with Rich Interactive Applications

The event looks interesting and is free (!).

Registration is required.

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