Wireless: Think Local

by Melinda Gipson

The wireless market is expected to balloon from 3 million users today to more than 50 million by 2004, according to a study by the Yankee Group. But it’s critical that newspapers start developing wireless strategy and content today, according to speakers at NAA’s recent "Beyond the Desktop" executive summit in Williamsburg, Va.

Some carriers–notably AT&T Wireless–already have created subscription information services offering such commodities as stock quotes, weather and news. Others have Internet portals banging down the door. Sprint has a deal with Yahoo! to send customized stock, sports, weather, horoscope and news updates to users’ phones; the wireless provider gets a 5 percent cut of transaction revenues. Nextel, the third of the big three national wireless providers, received a $600 million investment from Microsoft and will deliver wireless access to a co-branded version of the MSN portal. Both Nextel and Sprint insist their content relationships are non-exclusive and that the door is open to other best-of-breed providers.

Two realities confront wireless-service providers. First, it’s too early to know what applications users will find indispensable. Internet-enabled phones using the nascent Wireless Application Protocol are just beginning to hit the market.

Second, the overwhelming amount of wireless traffic is–and will continue to be–local. Classifieds could represent the closest thing publishers can offer to "must-have" information in this environment, but not in their current form.

A publisher might make best use of the medium by sending subscribers short message-service "alerts," such as when a certain type of car or house becomes available. Such applications bear a close kinship with e-mail alerts that online newspapers already offer users on sports, stocks or entertainment.

The problem is that publishers haven’t invested the time and attention necessary to make classifieds more usable this way. Bluntly, newspaper content isn’t port-able. It must be databased and categorized to further the aim of "Newspapers Anywhere."

For publishers, creating wireless content "goes far beyond presentation. We have to build entirely new sets of products...to be in our readers’ lives 24 hours a day," said Robert S. Cauthorn, Arizona StarNet’s technology director. "Fortunately we have the assets for the foundation."

Bill Blessing, vice president of strategic planning for Sprint PCS, says content providers "have to make it simple, communicate it clearly, [and] price it in a simple, easy fashion." The aim is to extend to the soccer field or the shopping center things users already do, information they already receive or transactions in which they’re already engaged, he added, noting that he doubts users will pay much for wireless-information services.

"We think local content is very important," added Thomas J. Trinneer, director of product strategy and planning for AT&T Wireless Services, "but it’s hard to do deals with 1,000 different papers, especially with portals, media and content companies banging the door down."

To attract the attention of wireless carriers, publishers have to apply their substantial editorial and marketing talents to create information services both relevant and tactical to wireless users. As Nextel Online Vice President Mike Ozburn put it, "People want what they want." Wireless applications can’t be complicated and must duplicate the activities users find useful online. "We believe they want it to be personal; we believe they want it to be portable; we believe they want it to be hassle free."

Gipson is NAA’s director of new-media business development. E-mail, gipsm@naa.org. For additional coverage, visit www.digitaledge.org.

You’ve Got AdMail

by Greg Francis

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is among the first to offer temprary e-mailboxes to classified advertisers.

Once seen as threatened by the Internet, newspapers now are finding ways of using it to improve their bottom lines–even on the print side. For example, 10 papers are adopting a new service from USA.Net of Colorado Springs, Colo., called AdMail, allowing them to offer temporary e-mail addresses to classified advertisers.

The potential for increasing revenue appears every time a customer calls to place a classified ad. Sales reps can offer the option of "renting" an e-mailbox for a small additional charge. If the customer agrees, the newspaper provides an e-mail address that’s printed with the ad. The advertiser then retrieves responses from a mailbox at the paper’s World Wide Web site until the ad stops running.

In other words, the turnkey service is electronic update on the old "blind-box" concept. Gene Villareal, classified-advertising manager for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, now beta-testing the service, believes it will benefit advertisers by providing a new channel for responses. Because AdMail is sortable, it is especially useful to clients running multiple ads, such as recruiters and real-estate companies.

Andy Kramer, USA.Net’s vice president of public affairs, also touts the added online-traffic draw, the ability to eliminate labor-intensive traditional blind-box service and the customer loyalty and competitive advantage the service provides. For their part, customers get confidentiality, the ability to screen out messages, easy access and customizability, Kramer says.

While seen as a particularly good match for the vulnerable recruitment and real-estate categories, USA.Net will benefit classified ads of all stripes, others argue. "[All categories] have equal opportunity for different reasons," says Dean Welch, classified-advertising director for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

Francis is an Arlington, Va., free-lancer. E-mail, grfhome@aol.com.

At Seybold, Future Shock

by L. Carol Christopher

Until now, the nominal thinking about newspapers and new media has been linked to the World Wide Web–new business models, content debates, and whether to cannibalize the print product in the interest of more immediate delivery of breaking news.

But the pace of change beyond the narrow newspaper niche grows faster still. At Seybold San Francisco’s Web Conference, a glimpse of what’s coming down the millennium pike suggests that it might not even involve the World Wide Web as it’s thought of today. Consider:

E-books. Dick Brass, Microsoft’s vice president of technology development, predicts a 20-to-30-year transition away from paper products altogether. Brass predicts by that by 2003, we’ll have an eight-hour, 2-pound portable device far superior to today’s laptop technology, with a price tag of between $800 and $900. By 2004, we’ll have tablet PCs.

E-title sales will break the billion-dollar mark the following year, and outpace paper titles by 2008, he predicts. A self-publishing model could emerge by 2010, around the same time flexible reflective displays weighing as little as 8 ounces hit the market. By 2012, expect a nostalgia-based ad campaign encouraging people to buy more paper titles, but Brass still predicts that 90 percent of all book titles will be electronic by 2018.

In the nearer term, Microsoft Clear Type technology, included in Reader software entering beta testing for release early next year, will improve screen readability, now the biggest stumbling block to pervasive online reading. Designed to work on PCs and laptops, Clear Type also will make provisions for highlighting and margin notes.

E-mail. Though less sexy than the multimedia Web, e-mail has a stronger one-to-one marketing ability, said Isabel Maxwell, president of CommTouch Software Inc. Why? So many Web sites, so little time–nearly eight new sites pop up in cyberspace every minute, she said.

Browsing and surfing are the pursuits of the few people with leisure time to pursue the overwhelming proliferation of sites. Internet companies must learn from traditional marketers to "reach out and grab" their customers by e-mail.

E-mail updates remind visitors of changing products and encourage return visits. HTML-based e-mail with clickback links already generates higher clickthrough rates than banner ads.

Maxwell cited Amazon.com’s "permission-based advertising." The site asks users if they would like to be notified when another book on a similar subject or by the same author becomes available.

"Write early and write often," Maxwell encouraged, while urging attendees to follow traditional etiquette and to avoid being intrusive.

Discontinuous change. "Just because we can’t imagine the world moving any faster doesn’t mean that it won’t," threatened Mark Anderson, pundit and publisher of Strategic News Service. Why? There are six revolutions occurring simultaneously, said Anderson: The Internet revolution, including a communications revolution; the Information Revolution, which he deems more important than the Industrial Revolution; e-commerce; globalization of commerce; consumerization of world technology markets; and "Pax Americana," the world peace required for global collaborations to develop and mature.

Expect quantum jumps in e-commerce and the number of European users, Anderson predicted. This Christmas, he expects e-commerce to be the dominant method of purchase. Among Anderson’s other predictions:

European developers have begun to break Visa’s hold on the U.S. market, so start looking for universal smart cards to replace today’s bulky wallets.
Health issues surrounding the use of cell phones–which soon will be the only phone–will be offset by a tiny headset linked to a cell phone in your pocket. Anderson says it’s already in use in Nordic countries, where people appear to be walking down the street mumbling to themselves.
Cheap satellite technology has led to global computers, with systems more complex than we can understand, which will require greater redundancy and fail safety.
DSL/broadband will make the quickest appearance in NFL cities, the entry to an era of new global hegemony.
Microsoft may be in trouble in the U.S., but it’s been busy elsewhere around the globe.
New ’Net assistants will act as remote terminals to supercomputers. These assistants will actually be cell phones with authentication capability enabling e-commerce and smart-card technology.

Is any of this astounding?

No. But it is a wakeup call to newspaper technologists to step up their pace, investigate how developing technologies will affect existing products, and consider new partners to help develop innovative strategies that will lend new vigor to newspaper Internet efforts and exploits.

L. Carol Christopher is president of Christopher Communications in Berkeley, Calif. E-mail, cchristo@weber.ucsd.edu; phone, (510) 444-7841.