commbasics

Just on a hunch I googled the term "industry leading."  In the past week, the technology world has  11,640 leaders.  According to Dow Jones there are only 5,000 startup in the US at any given time. I'm just sayin'....

Ed Sperling will be walking the floor and taking meetings on behalf of New Tech Press during DAC on Monday and coming back Tuesday.  We are setting up appointments for him, so if you have any burning news that isn't getting covered by the primary news organs in the electronics industry... and you would like to see it happen ... give us a call at 650-366-8212 and let's see what we can schedule.

For those of you who have had to find workarounds or have been absolutely flummoxed by style issues on the site, my apologies.  Typepad instituted some new formatting bugs .... I mean features, that made my former format unusable, and required I use formatting that screwed up certain aggregators, including Firefox and my own favorite Newsfire.   I've redesigned the site so it HOPEFULLY works again.  Let me know if you're having any problems.

I've had several meetings with people in the media industry the past few weeks.  One was just last night..  Something is happening.  I can't really say what right now because I've promised I won't.  But the media world is about to do something I really never expected it would do.  It's going to change the way it does business.  It's going back to the roots of the democratic process of information gathering and it is going to stop relying on the traditional forms of financial support that have caused our current situation. The problem is that most of the technology industry still thinks that going to trade shows and putting out press releases on the web is the be all and end all of communication strategy; that five to 10 customers is all they have to be concerned about.  When the media makes the transformation, a lot of companies are going to drown, and not just little startups.  This is going to swamp some Fortune 1...

Interesting  AP Story  today about the Belgian press suing Goggle over publishing and storing the publications content.  They're asking for more than $70 million in reparations. Without taking a position on this issue it is interesting to note that it is a definite trend.  Google has already lost suits with American newspapers on this issue.  If this trend continues, the only think Google will be good for is finding where your news release ends up, maybe.  The free information on the web may end up being worth its cost.

The Washington Post had a story over the holiday weekend that reinforced the philosophy of New Tech Press and this blog and opened up quite a conversation with a daily newspaper publisher I was advising. The story was about Joshua Bell, a world-renowned violinist who participated in a Washington Post experiment on the nature of beauty.   The question posed was: What would happen if you put a well-known musician in a Washington DC metro station and had him play for quarters.   The hypothesis assumed that the music would be so compelling that the commuters would stop dead in their tracks and toss handfuls of money into the violin case.   Didn't happen.   Only one person stopped for a few seconds and there wasn't enough money in the case at the end of the day to pay for Bell's cab fare.   The finding of the experiment was that when you place an outstanding message of beauty and truth in the context of a busy commuter station, the context overtakes...

On my long list of things to do has been to call Bill Barron, vice president and publishing director at Hearst Business Communications and have a chat about New Tech Press.   Bill, ever the go-getter, beat me to the punch last week right after the Microemissive Displays  story broke on New Tech Press  and the media network.   He wanted to arrange a meeting with his team about how Hearst could work with us. So Wednesday, my "homeboy" of business development and I were on the phone with Bill, Electronic Products Editorial Director Murray Slovick, and EP's Managing Editor Bryan DeLuca.   It wasn't a long call because these guys get what New Tech Press is doing.   The bottom line: Electronic Products and it's sister publications at Hearst are now a part of the New Tech Press media network. Electronic Products and the Hearst organization is one of the few bright spots in BtoB media right now. They understand which way the wind is bl...

The damage that the drop in advertising has caused in the B2B media is spilling over into the daily business press as well.  Just heard that  Katie Hafner  is no longer reporting for the New York Times after 10 years covering technology.  She's also been at Newsweek, BusinessWeek (where I first met her) and several other publications. Yeah, I know there have been lots of layoffs in the daily press.  The point is that lots of clients over the years have wanted to get into "business press" publications about their wonderful technology and, until recently, that was a very remote, outside possibility but not completely out of line.  If the business press is laying of technology reporters like Katie, well, let's just call it an impossibility now.

The problem with marketing in most technology companies is that it isn't marketing. It's sales support. And most marketing VPs are, in reality, sales engineers. Real marketing is a conversation. A marketer doesn't just listen to the customers, but to the customer's customers, and to the the people that influences those people. After he's done listening, he then starts thinking and formulating responses and directions that he believes will open paths for the sales people. Before he responds, he tests his hypotheses with this audience he's developed to establish a reality basepoint and only then hands off to the sales team. And if he doesn't see any paths open for the sales people at least three years down the line, he arranges for an exit for the company that provides value for everyone involved -- his company, the company's customers, and the acquiring entity. I've been thinking about all this with the news that another small technology company...

I hear lots of questions about the state of the media and how companies can communicate their messages in our current situation. Most of them are not to good. Here's a few to consider: What's your circulation? (Asked in reference to New Tech Press) That's a really bad question, at least if you're honest about what you want to accomplish. Most companies have stopped advertising and supporting B2B media because they claim the circulation doesn't reach their target market and they don't want to advertise to a bunch of people they don't care about. That's why I said "if you're honest." The real reason companies don't support mass media is because they think the can get it for free through PR. Can you get us into EE Times/Information Week/BusinessWeek? (asked in reference to Pr services) Again this is both bad and dishonest Companies that ask this question don't spend anything to support the media because they claim it doesn'...

Our first article is on the site but still in protected mode at New Tech Press . It goes live to the world on the 14th. If you want to see it, drop me an email and I will send you the password. If you haven't been keeping up, New Tech Press is a brand new idea in journalism and if you want to know why we are doing it, here's the basic problem we are dealing with, as stated by the Firesign Theater maniacs: Everything you know is wrong. In support of that premise Chris Edwards posted a discussion of the trend among bloggers toward blacklisting PR folk for sending them useless crap. I understand the frustration because the amount of crap the press has to deal with is rising as the media ranks shrink, along with their ability to handle the load. In the past few months I've been hearing from journalists all over the country; men and women who are consummate professionals, skilled in the ability to research thoroughly and report objectively on the news that affects us all on...

I've been pondering the conversation I had last week with marketing guy about whether print is viable as a communications medium -- particularly for B2B communications. There were a couple of posts that kept the brain juice flowing. First, Brian Fuller points out that the changes in Middle East culture and politics are causing a boom in the newspaper business. Second, Rich Karlgaard, did a mini-review of the Amazon Kindle that mentions he can't look at a display for more than 30 minutes at a time. This brings up two very significant issues that we like to overlook in our inexorable march to a digital future. Number one, more than half of all the internet traffic in the world occurs within a 100 mile radius of San Francisco. Much of rest is split up among the rest of the United States, Europe and Japan. Only a very small amount comes out of the Middle East, South America and Asia where most of the world's population is. Access to digital media is very limited still ...