Opportunopoly

Online media opportunities abound if publishers are but willing to look beyond their traditional definitions. Opportunopoly examines emerging technology and market game-changers, thought leaders and, well, opportunities that may lie beyond the usual newspaper comfort zone.

MIT's Technology Review offers its view of 10 tech start-ups to watch. You can read their full write up starting here.  With the exception of Peer39, which I've already reviewed in Opportunopoly, the following selection seems the most likely subset that could pay off for publishers.

Pinger: Pinger lets you send voice messages without calling (and interrupting) the recipient. Instead, you speak a name or phone number into your cell phone and then leave your message, which sits on Pinger's servers. A text notification lets the recipient know that a voice message can be picked up by phone or on ­Pinger's website. Pinger cofounder Joe Sipher, a former executive at smart-phone maker Palm, describes the service as "noninterruptive voice mail." How would online newspapers exploit this? How about daily voicemail headline alerts? If Pinger is paying the freight for the SMS alert, and the user is calling you, there's no charge to the publisher.

Pownce: Twitter meets file sharing. Pownce allows users to send and receive large multimedia files, and to precisely control who receives those files and updates--something you can't do with Twitter. Then, users can send messages back to the originator of the message. One application might be a video or news podcast of the day to a subscription user base. There's even a phone-friendly version, even though free files can grow as large as 100 megabytes. Because the files come with advertising, this would require a partnership. 

Qik: Captures and streams live mobile video from a designated Web site, in addition to syndicating it through Twitter or any other social syndication networks MIT's example hails from the world of newsgathering, which is obvious, but when I visited the Web site, out popped the money application: the live, streaming video provided was a live, streaming classified ad from a guy selling his car!

Ushahidi: Takes SMS messages from "crowds" in crisis and places the messages on a map. While the application was developed by a non-profit for the upheaval that hit Kenya last December, it seems applicable to any citizen journalism application. Not to trivialize the intent of this invention sparked of dire necessity, one can only wonder whether it would work in sourcing parking spaces for the inaugural. The sophisticated and automated application of SMS messages to a map might well compliment MetaCarta's NewsMap application, though the latter would certainly not be a pre-requisite. (Disclosure: the author does market research for MetaCarta.)

Mashery: With the virtual floodgate of APIs or application programming interfaces technology companies are using to get publishers to self-customize to entrepreneurial innovations, at some point it becomes difficult to keep track of them all. Mashery's value proposition is that it seeks to manage this external, evolving code bases, providing security and standards updates. It even finds ways of introducing potential partners to each other. Technology Review says that this past Spring Reuters used Mashery to help launch its Open Calais project, a public API that gives developers access to semantically tagged news content.

With this relationship, Mashery may have made the most game-changing contribution to API's of all: it may have finally convinced publishers to think of their own content as prime fodder for syndication through these standard interfaces. Among the first "content" providers to "get" this was Best Buy, which reasoned that it could open a store on any Web site that had any interest in displaying its product catalog. In this case, Best Buy's Remix API contains business rules as well as hooks to display products and product reviews so any consumer anywhere can discover and buy it. According to a September CNET article, even Best Buy's shopping cart could be dispersed with its content through Remix.

What other publishers might look to infiltrate the Web rather than force users to a single destination? How about MTV? Mashery is apparently working with MTV to build a music video gallery of MTV, VH1, CMT and LOGO artists; let Web users send video dedications of such material to their friends through Facebook, MySpace, or other social networks; mine the video archive to "create the music application of your dreams;" or create a WordPress plug-in that could pull music videos into blog posts. 

What Mashery and these five other truly 3.0 Web technologies all seem to have realized is that the more personalized content and advertising becomes, the more it will be shared. The more widely it's shared and sourced, the more useful and potentially profitable it becomes. So, one key to discerning whether a technology is truly a game-changer is the extent to which it allows the ultimate consumer to contribute to, mash-up, play with or redistribute content in collaborative fashion. 

Mashable, Mobile, Monetizeable Multimedia: can we start a dialog around the 4M's rather than Web 3.0? Unleash the co-creator in your users -- even consider sharing the wealth their efforts generate -- and the Web becomes oyster to the pearl of your editorial and ad content. 

Comments

MGipson said: (Posting for Mashery's CEO) Hi, Melinda - thanks for the great post. NAA members might be interested to know about one of the most respected newspapers in the world, the New York Times, opening an API about two months ago at http://developer.nytimes.com - since that announcement, we at Mashery have begun working with several newspapers and other news organizations about opening APIs as well. The Times has taken an interesting approach that could serve as an example for others - they started by opening APIs for content that is not "current news" per se - beginning with a campaign finance API, and adding in things like movie reviews. As they see community reaction and understand the kinds of applications that are being built with the APIs, they will open other APIs over time, until everything they provide will be available through an API. Cheers - Oren Michels CEO Mashery November 28, 2008 7:00 PM

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