Hasta La Gadget!

Can print magazines survive, thrive and surprise, what with all the existing online, digital and mobile fare?

Absolutely, say media industry experts, adding that those who have declared magazines’ demise are off-track.

It may take under-served markets, unique delivery methods or tying print to digital, to enhance both media, they note.

Add a few catchy advertising tricks and you’re on a roll.

Innovation in Magazine Media 2015-2016 World
Report (courtesy FIPP)

Nivea, the global skin and body care brand, has made a habit of embedding cool and useful gadgets and devices in magazines.

This year’s popular item keeps track of children at the beach, according to Innovation in Magazine Media 2015-2016 World Report.

Nivea created a print ad with a tear-off bracelet containing a Bluetooth chip. The bracelet could be wrapped around the wrist of a child and linked to an app, turning the bracelet into a beacon and the app into a radar screen that showed parents exactly where their child was. If the child wandered past a pre-set distance, the app triggered an alarm.

Dubbed “Nivea Sun Kids,” the product’s sales and place saw a marked rise in the Brazilian market where sun lovers abound, and gave a boost to publications that carried the ad.

The Nivea protection ad
(courtesy FIPP)

Gimmickry aside, the report sheds light on significant trends shaping the magazine industry worldwide with caveats to publishers and editors who may have been sleeping at the wheel.

On content, the report notes that magazine media denizens seem to have been sidetracked by conferences, white papers, and study groups on native advertising, big data, mobile platforms, social media, responsive design, digital replicas, programmatic advertising, alternative revenue sources, and events to the detriment of content.

But all is not lost given initiatives of smart editors, reporters and start-ups who have contributed to the rejuvenation of audio storytelling, multimedia packages, graphic journalism projects to attract younger readers, briefing formats and sophisticated editorial games.

After asking the question “Is the importance of mobile exaggerated?” the authors reply with a resounding “Mobile is driving force of growth.”

They name sites like BuzzFeed, Sports Illustrated, People, and All Recipes as examples where between 50 and 75 per cent of traffic is coming from mobile devices.

The report’s authors also provide a handy graphic on how to measure mobile user engagement, courtesy of the American Press Institute.

It lists contributing content from mobile devices, comments, sharing, time and amount spent on content, and cross-platform interaction, to name a few methods.

How to measure mobile user
engagement (courtesy FIPP)

Which takes us to the importance of video and how it is “the dominant format for both content and advertising today and in the foreseeable future.”

With growing mobile video viewing, it’s only natural for advertising to be jostling for attention with online news or entertainment content.

“Fully 75 percent of brand marketers and ad agencies say digital video will become as essential to their business as TV advertising in the next three to five years, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB),” the report said.

Share of video consumption (courtesy FIPP)

The authors further point to rules for success in mobile advertising.

Among others, they include locations and contextual relevance, simplicity and functionality, responsiveness, social media support, helping consumers make their purchases, things to download, and rewards.

Eight rules for mobile advertising success (courtesy FIPP)

But there’s also the worry about digital advertising fraud, which often leads media and advertisers to fall prey to hackers who infect computers with misleading information about website traffic, readership figures and ad viewership.

To mitigate the spreading danger of advertising fraud, the authors offer strategies to detect and prevent it.

Digital advertising fraud (courtesy FIPP)

They include third-party traffic validation technology, being aware and involved, communicating about “bots” effectively and budgeting for security.

Bots are very sophisticated software programs often installed on a consumer’s computer through seemingly innocent means (e.g., offers of free stuff if the consumer will click on an ad, fill out a form, or download a toolbar or browser extension). Those “bots” then “click” on ads or run videos silently in the background (behind the consumer’s active web browser screen or even invisibly). The consumers have no idea what’s going on, other than perhaps noticing that their computer might be running a bit more slowly. The advertisers and publishers think they’re getting real human interactions. More sophisticated bots can collect consumer’s “cookies” (the URLs of websites they’ve previously visited or ads they’ve clicked). Those bots then appear to be “qualified leads” in the eyes of publishers and advertisers who think the ad campaigns are working.

So where does all that leave magazines and publishers and what else will they conjure up to attract readers?

Publishers have resorted to printing on paper towels, banana skins and coffee cups.

Imagine this: “Mexican free newspaper Mas Por Mas built paper towel dispensers equipped with water-proof ink printers and connected via wifi to the paper’s content feed. Every time a visitor reached for a paper towel, the printer would deliver ‘minute-by-minute’ breaking news plus a QR code readers could use to access the paper’s website for more details.”

Can print still surprise and delight? (courtesy FIPP)

Stay tuned for next year’s magazine report produced by the Innovation Media Consulting Group for FIPP, the worldwide magazine media association.

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Can earthquakes ever be predicted? This question is timely after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Nepal recently. If authorities had more warning that the earthquake was coming, they may have been able to save more lives.

Read more…

A leaked police document that claims Freddie Gray was “intentionally trying to injure himself” while in the back of a police van in Baltimore after his arrest is being questioned due to inconsistencies with earlier reports.

Gray died a week after his videotaped April 12 arrest due to injuries sustained under uncertain circumstances while in police custody, sparking protests in Baltimore and around the nation.

The Washington Post reported on Wednesday night that a prisoner who was in the van with Gray allegedly told investigators he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the police vehicle, and said he believed Gray was “intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a document written by a Baltimore police investigator.

The initial shock of the report quickly transitioned to uncertainty and skepticism after questions were raised over the details. WBAL’s Jayne Miller told MSNBC that the Post’s story was “inconsistent with what we reported.”

“We have reported for some time that by the time that prisoner is loaded into that van, Freddie Gray was unresponsive. Secondly we have no medical evidence that Freddie Gray suffered any injury that would indicate that he had injured himself,” Miller told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Wednesday night.

Gray was only in the van with the second prisoner for the final five minutes of the ride, Miller told Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday evening. There is “no evidence [Gray was] banging [his] head against van,” Miller tweeted. Jane Cook, an attorney for the Gray family, called the report “speculation” as she had seen no evidence supporting it.

Jason Downs, another attorney of the Gray’s, told the Post the prisoner’s statement was new to them.

“We disagree with any implication that Freddie Gray severed his own spinal cord,” Downs said. “We question the accuracy of the police reports we’ve seen thus far, including the police report that says Mr. Gray was arrested without force or incident.”

While the timeline of Gray’s arrest remains incomplete, Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said that before the second prisoner was loaded into the van, an officer had to “pick [Gray] up off the floor and place him on the seat.” Police said he asked for medical attention at this point. He had earlier been placed in leg irons after an officer felt he was becoming “irate,” police said.

Police also admitted Gray was handcuffed but not secured with a seat belt while being transported.

Miller also pointed out that on April 23, Commissioner Batts said that the second prisoner had said Gray was “mostly quiet.”

Another issue that arose from the Post’s report was the fact that the second prisoner was unable to see Gray, as he would have been separated by a metal partition in the van. The prisoner who allegedly gave the account is in jail, and the Post has not been able to reach him for comment.

His identity has been withheld.

The affidavit obtained by the Post was in an application for a search warrant seeking the seizure of the uniform worn by one of the officers involved in the episode with Gray. The document is part of the investigation into Gray’s death, and the police investigator who wrote it is unnamed.

As the Post notes, there is no other evidence supporting the purported claims of the second prisoner. There is no video of his time in the van either.

As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said on Wednesday night, the leak to the Washington Post is the first information we have seen of the investigation into Gray’s death. “Leaks like this always serve somebody’s purpose,” Maddow said, “We have no idea who gave this to the Post.”

Police have maintained that they do not know how Gray suffered the fatal injury, and have been joined in their investigation by the Justice Department. Police Commissioner Batts has admitted to mistakes in how Gray’s arrest was handled, saying he should have received medical attention and that he should have been secured while in the back of the police van.

Baltimore residents have been joined by others nationwide in their demands for answers of how what happened to Gray during and after his arrest on April 12 for a weapons charge. Gray was pinned down by the officers making the arrest, and then loaded into the police vehicle for transport while conscious. When he arrived at the station, a medic was called and Gray was taken to the hospital. He died a week later. Gray “gave up without the use of force, “ Baltimore Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said. None of the six officers involved in the arrest described using force with Gray. A cell phone video showed officers dragging gray while handcuffed towards the police van. Video showed Gray on the ground conscious and talking, and police said he requested medical attention.

Baltimore and cities around the nation have seen protests, demanding answers of how Gray ended up dead a week after an arrest on April 12 for a weapons charge. After running from the police, Gray “gave up without the use of force, “ Baltimore Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said. None of the six officers involved in the arrest described using force with Gray.
A preliminary report on Gray’s autopsy showed he had no injuries other than that to his spinal cord.

A cell phone video showed officers dragging gray while handcuffed towards the police van. Gray can be seen on the ground conscious and talking, and police said he requested medical attention. There is no other evidence of what happened to him after this point.

The six officers involved with the arrest were suspended, and their names released last week.

The police are to conclude their investigation into Gray’s arrest and death on May 1, and will then give the case to the state’s attorney office. Their findings will not be made public immediately.

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I’ve always been into multi-functional furniture: like the wave-activated lamp that used to sit on my bedside, lighting the room, and scaring away any potential mates. So I desperately want this LED-powered lamp, which not only looks cool, but tells you in a glance what it’s like outside.

Read more…

By Alison van Diggelen, host of Fresh Dialogues

This evening, Elon Musk announces details of Tesla’s new products: not cars, but battery storage for the home and for the business/utility. As Musk teases, “For the future to be good, we need electric transport, solar power and…”

So why does Musk call battery storage “the missing piece” and why is it so significant?

Last week, I sat down with Tesla board member, Steve Jurvetson and we discussed why these new products will make such synergistic sense for Tesla. He describes how the powerful troika of Tesla, SolarCity and the Gigafactory will work. This missing piece has the potential to revolutionize the clean energy industry and disrupt grid energy as we know it.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation. You can listen to the full interview at Fresh Dialogues.

Alison van Diggelen: Give us the case for battery storage. Why is Tesla going into battery storage for the home and utility scale?

Steve Jurvetson: This may be the first peek into a unified theme across companies…Elon Musk is an incredibly prolific entrepreneur, having come up with, or been at the founding team of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, PayPal, all different industries that seem to have nothing to do with each other.

Now the troika of SolarCity, and the Gigafactory and Tesla comes into light for the first time: There is synergy.

Say 20 years out, there’ll be a distributed utility where Solarcity has the solar cell installation, leasing and basically ownership, installation and the whole shebang, actually building panels as well for solar on homes, everywhere.

Well, once you get enough of that – last I checked they have around 40% market share in the US – you start to generate so much energy that you are like a variety of utilities combined, but it’s ephemeral. If you’re not using that energy when generated, it goes away. So right now, you push it to the grid and it’s expected the utility can use it, especially since solar is produced at peak hours.

But what if you wanted to get rid of the grid altogether? You’d need distributed storage …if every solar cell came with a big battery that could smooth out your daily needs, then you could just disconnect from the grid. You could certainly lower the generation capacity of the grid…that pushes on fossil fuels and nuclear.

How to pull that off?

As a customer of Tesla and SolarCity I see my solar cells and I see my car and think, can’t we just connect these together? If I need to suck energy out of my car, I can use it to buffer the load from my cells, but it’s not so easy…

Part of the synergy and leverage is that Tesla is planning to build an enormous plant of batteries, anticipating the 3rd generation vehicle…you’re going to have some excess capacity, potentially for some period of time as you ramp up.

There will be blocks when you produce a lot more batteries than you might need in that particular month… what are other interesting things you can do with them? What would you do with those batteries at the end of life of a car? Those battery packs are really useful for secondary storage uses.

The Gigafactory isn’t named that just out of hubris. It would be the largest factory in the world by footprint and they’re going to eventually build many of them.

That one factory alone at scale would exceed global capacity today. So this is an unfathomable amount of batteries. I really have to credit Elon for realizing that these numbers pencil out to be so enormous and to share that with the world, before he had the solution in the bag.

van Diggelen: Talk about the utility scale side. If you were a utility…(say) in charge of PG&E today, talk about how you’d be feeling and what you might be doing to deal with this?

Jurvetson: On the one hand, you’re threatened by solar and you’re going to do all your dastardly deeds to try to quench and kill innovation, because that’s what big companies do, it’s in their blood. That’s what they’re expected to do.

But on the other hand, they need this too because whether by mandate or the goodness of their hearts…so mandate…they do more wind, do more solar. Many of those wind farms you see, on Pacheco Pass, they’re not doing anything useful. They may be spinning but they’re not even hooked up sometimes. There are rules and regulations to generate the capacity but not to actually make use of it.

So part of the problem with time shifting is you have different needs at different times, wind is often a nighttime peak, so storage is needed throughout to pump water…there are all kinds of things you can do….in demand response. There’s a lot of inefficiencies in the utilities where they’ll build peaking gas fired power plants that are just turned on for a few hours in the year at most for those peak needs. So all that infrastructure just because you couldn’t do needs sharing or have the capacity to buffer.

If you had big old battery sitting there on the grid, you wouldn’t need that. So distributing that allows you to put it near the point of consumption and point of generation in a solar context.

van Diggelen: What are the markets for these utility scale batteries? Would it be companies like Apple that are going solar in a big way or is it to sell to PG&E?

Jurvetson: Good question. In general, there’s a whole cascade of markets: everything from consumers for their home, businesses and utilities themselves. The utilities can go to all kinds of technologies, even telcos like for a cell phone tower, you need storage there as well, especially in places like India and elsewhere.

There are technologies like flow cell batteries, compressed air solutions being developed…there is a variety of ways to approach this. Tesla’s approach is just leveraging what they know best which is lithium ion chemistry and batteries and a battery management system…so you can potentially address a whole range of these.

van Diggelen: So it’s the same batteries they use in their car?

Jurvetson: Exactly…

***
The interview took place at the Commonwealth Club, Silicon Valley on April 21 2015. Check back soon at Fresh Dialogues Clean Tech for more highlights from out interview re SpaceX, robots and AI.

Jurvetson is owner of the first Tesla Model S. More from Fresh Dialogues

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