Nicisms

Innovation is such an exception thing to strive for. And I think that I am incredibly fortunate to land up in the market that I am in. Mobile is an innovative space.

Let me not get caught up in my own head and clearly lay out what I intend to say:

It’s simple idea but on that only recently dawned on me. I am fortunate to be in an innovate environment. Imagine if I was still a print writer? I’d be doing the same thing over and over and over, every day. I’d call my contacts, I’d gather information and construct a story from the information, I’d conduct an interview and write the story which would be edited, sub-edited and cut-up by the mechanisms in place. My byline would appear in the paper and the sun would set and rise again to repeat the cycle. Sure the focus of the story changes but more often than not it’s the same mechanisms.

Let’s look at an accountant, yes there are challenges in every client that an account might audit, but on the whole there is very little innovation in their market. Pascal might come out with an update, a law might be tweaked here and there and if an account is lucky they land an extremely strange client who they enjoy auditing, but the premise is the same, the actions are the same, the results are the same. NOTHING is new from year to year in the way that they do things.

Very similar situations apply to Lawyers, many GPs (which is a pet hate of mine), Judges and many other careers, career choices, markets and industries. There is very little that drives innovation.

Then you move in to the mobile industry and the market is booming, filled with innovation and change, constantly. That appeals to me.

Now don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying that other jobs or industries aren’t appealing and don’t have their own, relative levels of what some might term innovation. But where I am right now things change on a daily basis. My job spec today could be completely different tomorrow and in every likelihood will be entirely different next year when my current projects launch.

This motivates me and this keeps me interested in what I am doing. I hate being stagnant and I hate reaching a point where maintenance of a job is more common than innovation, creation and envelope pushing.

Is mobile, hyper-local, location-based news content the way to save mainstream media in the USA?

I think it might be. I have been watching closely over the past few months as newspaper after newspaper has fallen away in the US. It’s a very scary and very sad situation that American media finds itself in. Resistance to change over the past few years has positioned many papers in a dire situation where it’s a matter of shit or get off the pot. And many are shitting themselves.

Boston Globe is a one example that I have been watching withe extreme interest. Boston.com is a great resource that has not been used effectively enough to pull Boston Globe out of financial trouble.

The resistance to change coupled with a severe drop in advertising and circulation (with thanks to a recession and online media emerging as a force in the media industry) has left the Boston Globe almost crippled. Many people are set to lose jobs and Boston, the city, is set to lose it’s competitive media market. If Boston Globe closes down the city of Boston will be left with a single daily newspaper. This defeats the purpose of mainstream media acting as a democratic watchdog or fourth estate. With one media organisation remaining things are not looking good.

Enter hyper-local, location-based news content fed to mobile phones produced by hyper-local citizen media producers who put content up via cellphones on to hyper-local portals.

This is what Martin Langeveld of Nieman Journalism Lab had to say on the topic of Boston Globe:

Langeveld’s advice is to go (almost) online-only with Boston.com, and to launch or subsidise a network of hyperlocal sites all over the area, and launch a network of local niche verticals focussed on weather, traffic, jobs, entertainment, education and more. He proposes a tiered, variable pricing model for all, with most of the content free, but paid premium access for a “small but highly-engaged group.” This income could be supplemented with transactional revenue, through selling theatre tickets, for example, or facilitating restaurant reservations.

This model could also expose the Globe’s city-wide reach to a hyper-local market of advertisers (a longer tail than they would previously had access to). This coupled with a free/premium hybrid mode and the paper could be on its way back up.

Regarding the print side of things it’s a simple mechanic to alleviate some immediate strain: Make the paper a weekly and include the news created over the week from the hyper-local portals and citizens media. Pull city-wide, larger advertisers in to this weekly printed publication to subsidise the cost of the print and drop the price to allow for quantity to be sold and to make the paper appear to be more accessible to the everyday person in the street.

There is no quick-fix for papers such as the Boston Globe, that is certain. But it is imperative that these papers start to adapt or simply succumb to a swift death.

It has already been announced that I am leaving Zoopy at the end of May.

I didn’t really have anything solidified when I resigned from Zoopy so it is with great pleasure and pride that I can now say that I am moving to Vodacom as the Product Manager in the Social Networking Porfolio.

My time at Zoopy was well spent, I learned alot regarding myself, what I want to do and what I am good at. I also figured out where I think the market is heading, what the industry is doing and where I should be positioning myself.

Zoopy is doing fantastic things right now and are one of the online companies to watch this year.

I am going to be working very closely with Vincent Maher, who is going to be my new boss. I’ve worked with Vincent before and feel that I can only learn more and get better at what I do working at Vodacom for Vince.

If you haven’t realised it yet, mobile is not the next big thing, it’s the big thing.

I am incredibly impressed with Qik and the service it offers.

Basically it’s a live mobile streaming service. You download the software to your phone. Open up the application and click “Stream”. The video is then recorded and streamed live to your Qik profile.

Find me at qik.com/nicharry

Every year around this time there is a buzz. It’s a very strange buzz that arises and expands beyond industry, colour, creed, or any other classification you can think of. January/February is a very special time for me. It’s a time where people think things through, imagine things, create and define things. It’s a time when predictions are made or attempted and a time when everyone seems to be looking for the next big thing.

So what is the next big thing? What is going to make you famous? What will be the next Facebook or Google or fraction of these giants?

I have been hearing um’s and ah’s of the next “Killer App” or killer application. This phrase is taking a few different forms. Some more literal than others.

Andy Hadfield, on his blog, asked if Twitter is going mainstream. I knew what he meant but wanted to push the conversation to a different direction. I wanted to know what defines mainstream in South Africa since many of the online guru’s in SA think that the next Killer App is literally that, a single killer application that will launch a career, make a million or few and destroy the opposition.

This, as far as I can see, is an online impossibility right now. In fact, I think that it’s almost an impossibility for the next few years if you are talking strictly about fixed line internet. Even the coming Internet/broadband/fiber-optic revolution is going to take a while to penetrate the masses and therefore no online killer app in South Africa alone is going to be anything close to a killer app. It just wont.

Here’s a quick quote from my comment on Andy’s post:

I would be more inclined to argue that our precise problem here in SA is that we think a couple of thousand people makes something mainstream. The bare fact of the matter is that it needs to be a tool that is mainly used to be called mainstream (in my opinion only). Thus we could almost call facebook mainstream and be justified in that branding.

We could call Mxit mainstream and I would argue that Mxit trumps what twitter is trying to do.

So instead of us trying to push twitter in to the mainstream we should be looking at the ways the the majority of South Africans communicate (cellphones perhaps) and custom build a twitter-like solution that isn’t going to cost a bomb and provide the same functionality. Or would we call that Mxit or The Grid?

I think we need to think bigger, take products to market and then make them mainstream instead of trying to manipulate the word mainstream to suit our needs.

Simply branding something mainstream because the word was featured on the cover of a magazine with maybe 30 000 circulation cannot make something mainstream.

evl – “The prevailing current of thought, influence, or activity” – can you honestly say to me that twitter is a prevailing current of thought in the South African population, no, the South African ONLINE population. Even if we get the number of twitter users up to 10 000 South Africans that’s still probably between 3%-5% of all South Africans online on fixed internet using twitter. that’s not mainstream. that’s irrelevant.

There are three ways that I think Vincent will begin to see more local millionaires.

The first

is hyper-local content. That is what I think the next “Killer App” is. Hyper local is where it’s at when you combine it with the massive cellphone penetration in this country. An application like twitter is one that can be exceptionally successful in South Africa and reach mainstream status but while it is an online-centric application or service it is going to stay on the fringe in South Africa. We need to make hyper-local content contextual, relevant and easy to access. As far as I can see or believe in SA right now the contextualising of hyper-local and simplified content is going to be the winner.

The second

is a combination of things. The first entity is Africa. It’s one of the few untouched, untapped media markets. The second entity is mobile technology. The combination is a mashup of hyper-local, mobilised, African-centric content. I think that this, moving forward, could potentially be the combination of things that take South Africans in to the next realm of success (or the first depending on where you sit).

The third

is foresight. This is something that copyblogger has blogged about recently. We cannot beat those who entered this market first at their own game, especially not from where we sit.

From the Copyblog post:

The truth is, some models that worked a few years ago for early adopters are difficult if not impossible for new players to successfully get going today.

The key to avoiding this frustration is to see where things are going and become an early-adopter in the next big wave of the commercial Internet. Of course, even if you’re already doing well, it never hurts to take a look forward, right?

We need to sit where we sit, contextualise our problems, learn about our opposition and where the market is moving and make the first move. If we don’t make the first move we are going to be behind the early adopters again and have to wait man more years to have another chance to become the early adopters.

I am interested to know what others out there think the next Killer App will be, whether it is literally going to be a single application, a concept, a mindset, a minsdhift, a community or a project. Where’s the money at and is it actually about the money?