Matter/Anti-Matter

It's always good to be the first, and while crowdsourcing, the trend, may have jumped the shark, a fully crowdsourced creative agency is a bold creative experiment and still news. Two Crispin Porter + Bogusky alums, John Winsor and Evan Fry, together with Claudia Batten, the founder of Microsoft-acquired video game advertising shop Massive, have launched Victors & Spoils (V&S), "the world's first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principle."

V&S says it will "provide businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world's most talented creatives." The press release promises that "perceived crowdsourcing flaws will be addressed through world-class creative direction delivered through the use of the reputation-ranked Victors & Spoils crowd" but stays mum on how exactly the crowdsourced creative department will operate.

In any event, V & S is eating its own dog food. The first line you notice on its web site (after the humble "Welcome To Victors & Spoils. Let's Change An Industry") is "Why does this site look so plain, Jane?" and the answer is: because the site design, the look and feel, and even the logo are being crowdsourced.

Whether crowdsoucing yields better creative results, who knows? It certainly is a differentiator. V&S COO Claudia Batten twittered that she got calls from five Fortune 200 CMOs in the first five days since launch. We will follow this one closely.

It's busy times in the e-book reader world, with Barnes & Noble launching Nook, Plastic Logic making noise about a new Que reader (no doubt to counteract B&N's announcement), and Amazon lowering prices on the Kindle.

The Nook is the device getting the most buzz, having been launched a few days ago. It's white, has an e-ink screen, and is priced at $259, all like the Kindle. But it also adds a nice color touch screen "strip" below that is used for browsing and buying new books. It's an interesting of-the-moment alternative to the Kindle's keyboard.

The Nook's biggest distinguishing feature is its ability to wirelessly "lend" e-books to another Nook user for 14 days. During that time the lender cannot read the book, just as if they'd handed over a physical copy.

This is very reminiscent of the sharing feature Microsoft built into Zunes from the start, in fact this was one of the Zune's biggest distinguishing characteristics from the iPod. However, it did not help the Zune get above single digit market share. So is lending (or borrowing) really a feature that people care about?

I think the Nook has a couple of things going for it that didn't work for the Zune.

1. The Kindle isn't a monopoly
The Kindle, on which I was unduly harsh when it first appeared, has been the most popular e-reader. But it does not yet have the massive market presence that the iPod did by the time the first Zunes came out. (Amazon has not released sales numbers, but TechCrunch estimates it somewhere north of a million.) This matters because lending and borrowing are only attractive if you believe there will be other people near by you whose taste you trust to borrow from.

The tide was clearly against the Zune by the time it came out, which did not give consumers confidence that there would be other Zune users to get music from. In that case, it was just safer to stick with the leader, the iPod.

2. Books are better for short-term sharing
Music is something that, if you like it, you will want to listen to for a long time. The Zune has quite strong restrictions on how long somebody can listen to the song after they first borrow it, and for the lender not all songs can be shared. This makes for a suboptimal experience for the borrower, and frustrating inconsistency and confusion for the lender.

However, with many books a single read will do, so a limited borrowing time is less problematic. It's why libraries worked for so long. (I'm not sure if the self-destruct on borrowed books starts from the time of lending, or the time of first reading. From a reader's perspective, obviously, the second is preferable since with our busy lives it might be a while before you get to starting a book.)

But Barnes & Noble should also take a lesson from Zune and apply the lending rules universally across all titles. Don't let happen what happened to Microsoft where the studios placed restrictions on certain songs and artists who were hot at the time. Barnes & Noble is in the fortunate (for them) position, however, that book publishers are in a much weaker state than music labels.

I can't help wondering if Barnes & Noble is pitching the wrong angle of lending, though. Lending is altruistic, whereas borrowing is selfish. If I'm a prospective Nook buyer, I'm more thinking about what's in it for me than how I can be beneficent to my fellow Nookies (Nook owners).

Forgive me but I have to plug something my company (Frog Design) is involved in. I'm only doing this because it is such a neat event: In collaboration with Frog, NPR will host a unique Digital Think In this Friday in our offices in San Francisco, bringing together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations.

Hosted by NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and General Manager Kinsey Wilson, the Think In will harness the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators. Participants include leaders at the leading edge of technology and media innovation from academia, venture capital, internet design, public media, social media, and research. Notable participants contributing to the day-long brainstorm include: Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist; Reid Hoffman, Chairman and co-Founder of LinkedIn; Roger McNamee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners; Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer of Mozilla; Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist and creator of Google News; and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, among many others.

The Think In will explore five main topics that are significant to NPR's ecosystem and its future: social media and connection to the audience, the organization's national network of more than 800 stations, the potential of its open API, expansion of platforms, and its diversified revenue model. After an NPR overview and an opening session, participants will break out into small groups to develop concepts that NPR can incorporate into its organizational roadmap.

The event will be live-blogged and the Digital Think In micro-site will feature live video streams of the opening and closing sessions. In addition, attendees will be tweeting the event throughout the day using the hashtag #nprthinkin. NPR's Andy Carvin will be posting to YouTube and Flickr under "nprthink," and updating NPR's Facebook page.

Join the NPR Digital Think In (remotely)

For one week, Swiss author Alain de Botton was living the life I've always wanted to live. As the first-ever writer-in-residence of London's Heathrow Airport, he was working on his new book on site, observing, documenting, and philosophically charging the emotions and motions of the two arguably most interesting things in life--people and planes--in transit, in situ.

My own fascination with airports started at an early age thanks to the location of my parents' house. I grew up with planes taking off and landing at the nearby airport, and as a student I spent one summer vacation working as a baggage handler on the tarmac. Ever since, aircraft noise makes me feel at ease, and if I could, I would become a permanent tenant of Narita's Star Alliance lounge, where I would watch planes all day.

Airports have also long piqued the interest of artists of course--from Brian Eno's "Music for Airports," to Steven Spielberg's "The Terminal," to 747-turned-designer hotels. Exhibiting equally the technical routines and the emotional excesses of 21st century civilization, airports serve as mundane settings for the dramatic and dramatic settings for the mundane--de Botton, as Heathrow's writer-in-residence, set out to capture both.

The assignment was simple: De Botton was commissioned by the British Airports Authority (BAA) to spend a week in the middle of Heathrow's bustling Terminal 5 and write about life at the airport. He got his own desk, was awakened by Air Canada every morning, and immersed himself into the airport logistics while living his usual ascetic life (judging from all photos, he wore his signature blue shirt all week). Most of the time he observed and conducted what design researchers would call ethnographic research--knowing that you can best study human behavior, on any given scale, when you're close enough to the action but not part of the commotion. The personal union of researcher and writer raises some interesting questions: Where exactly do you draw the line between observation and interpretation? Where does research end and authorship start? Is research even possible without storytelling?

But these are technicalities. Of bigger concern for reviewers appears to be the "precarious line between creative independence and commerce," as the Guardian calls it. Blog site Gawker, among others, was fast in chastising the unconventional book deal as a shameless and rather desperate PR stunt, but the alleged cynicism reflects more poorly on the critics themselves: Isn't the greatest cynicism of all to look for the cynical in all things? For the record, de Botton insists that BAA gave him complete editorial freedom and that his writing was thoroughly subjective and as unbiased as it can possibly be. He is not the first writer to experiment with commercial book mandates (bestselling author Fay Weldon shocked the arts world in 2001 when it emerged that her latest novel had been sponsored by Bulgari) and smart enough to know that his "Heathrow Diary" project might stir up a controversy. It would have been much safer, from his PR point-of-view, to not pursue it.

Yet de Botton's interest in airports seems genuine: "There are many places in the modern world that we do not understand because we cannot get inside them," he told the Guardian. Moreover, he believes the project is philosophically sound and in fact truly innovative as it revives an old tradition of underwriting: "That one of the largest organizations in the UK should take an interest in a book is almost quaint, like sponsoring a poet," he said. "On behalf of my fellow beleaguered writers, it's nice that writers seem to matter."De Botton already has plans for the next underwritten project: "I'd like to be a writer in residence at a nuclear power station."

And sure--why not? I think we have to overcome the notion that a distinction between marketing and publishing is still possible. Herman Miller's See magazine was one of the most artful and best-curated print magazines out there, Strategy + Business by Booz is one of the sharpest business publications, and there are countless other examples of high-quality corporate publishing. What is wrong with the idea that not only marketers need to be good writers, but writers can be good marketers, too--for the common good of public life? Brands, advertisers, and PR agencies shape the cultural fabric of our societies as much as museums, galleries, artists, and writers do--if the mechanics of their complex interactions are more exposed these days, this can only be a good thing. As long as the involved parties' agendas are transparent--as they were in De Botton's airport project--readers can judge for themselves how valuable they find the products of such collaborations: there is no free lunch, there is no free content, after all.

Aside from that, it is naïve to assume that PR agencies and brand marketers are all evil and unconditionally push for a lopsided, overwhelmingly positive expression of their brands. By now, most of them are happy to tune into the choir of conversational marketing evangelists who understand that authenticity trumps news which may be good but lacks credibility. In this vein, Dan Glover, creative director at Mischief, BAA's PR agency, told the NY Times that "If we funded a brochure that said how wonderful the airport was, people would switch off because they'd think they're being marketed to." Instead, he added, the Heathrow Diary campaign sought to stimulate "branded conversations" among travelers "through the experience of seeing a top literary figure at the airport--and potentially being a character in the book--and by receiving an exclusive copy to read on your travels. The overarching objective is to make a passenger's time at Heathrow the best memory of the trip."

It all goes back to the pillars of "meaningful marketing": Add value, create a (social) event, be a change agent, engage the audience, don't market products, produce! Clients turning to artists and storytellers to create "meaning" for their brands intend that the return-on-meaning transcends the original assignment--the wealth spreads and generates a "meaning surplus."

In this case, De Botton wasn't hired to write an image brochure for an airport whose bad reputation is well known. The "Art of Travel" author took advantage of the opportunity to study one of his favorite subjects first-hand, and rather than just bitching and moaning about the notoriously inhumane experience of having to spend time at Heathrow, he and his client actually did something to make the experience better for travelers. The result of his work, "A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary," was published on September 24, and BAA is distributing 10,000 free copies of the book to Heathrow passengers (it is not devoid of irony to create artificial scarcity by limiting the book's free distribution to one of the world's most frequented travel hubs). Afterward the book will be available for sale through Amazon's British Web site and traditional bookstores. De Botton's "Heathrow Diary" benefits the publisher, the writer, BAA, and travelers--a win-win-win-win and a story with a happy landing.

Read excerpts from "Heathrow Diary"

[Image credit: LA Times]

by Jon Kolko, Associate Creative Director, Frog Design

I've just returned from the IDSA conference in Miami, and I'm both convinced that, in ten years, there won't be an IDSA conference to go to - and that isn't a bad thing. I don't mean this in a disparaging sense; I enjoyed the conference, caught up with old friends, made new friends, and learned a bit. But a trend that I've observed at past conferences is only more evident this year, and it's patronizing to continue to skirt what is becoming increasingly obvious: the IDSA has served a valuable role in the evolution of design as a professional discipline, and has helped advance the field to a point where the IDSA is now essentially irrelevant. Design has outgrown “Industrial Design”, and a professional organization cannot exist only in the form of self-maintenance.

I'll explain, as I realize this may come across as both pretentious and self-righteous (and I intend it to be neither).

The discipline of industrial design has had a long history of form giving, and the creation of objects and artifacts that relate to the incidental parts of life. Industrial designers make stuff, and the making of stuff is a commodity - a profession differentiated only by cost. That is, there are a huge amount of capable industrial design firms in the world (and increasingly in Asia), and these firms are only differentiated by the cost of their services. A commodity market affords only limited growth and only limited market share, and can never truly sustain itself in any meaningful manner.

The other major capability industrial designers are able to bring to a project is their understanding of, and abilities with, materials and manufacturing/development processes. This is advancing in the opposite direction of a commodity - it's becoming increasingly specialized, increasingly intellectual, and incredibly complicated. The complexity associated with new material introductions and advances has such deep tacit knowledge, and such strong connections to fundamental issues of chemistry, that it can't continue to be "owned" by designers - it needs to be managed and coordinated by scientists (which was the implicit point of Dr. Andrew Dent from Material Connexion, in his excellent keynote presentation at this very conference; I feel the irony was lost on much of the audience, unfortunately). In this way, while material sciences will absolutely not become commodities, they also will soon be out of the grasps of designers.

In addition to these changes in skillset, there is a trend towards the inclusion of digital components, controls and networked services in products that have traditionally been isolated, single artifacts. These less tangible aspects of the products need to be designed, too, and so the designer who was typically responsible for developing a form and function for an item must now concern themselves with systems, services and more complicated - and arguably, more intellectual - facets of design. The major corporations that are embracing design as a true innovation catalyst realize that differentiation requires specific attention to the design of these systems and the utilization of networked services.

And so we’ve reached a point in the history of technological culture where the IDSA has served its purpose, and is now obviously struggling to define what to do next. This is evident in a program filled with discussions of rendering techniques and in an exhibitor hall full of plastics and injection molding vendors; it’s obvious in powerpoint presentations that struggle with basic concepts of human behavior and interaction, and in hallway conversation of designers who aren’t sure how they can ensure they have a job in the “new economy” of the future.

Steve Portigal summed up my feelings nicely, in a blunt - but absolutely dead on - way. "The IDSA is the recording industry or car industry of professional societies". He's referencing a long history of positive contribution, but an increasing lack of relevance, and a desire to hold on to how things used to be - a feeling of tradition, and a celebration of an industry. IDSA, like GM, is struggling to evolve, but with many of the same leaders at the helm and with many of the same traditional viewpoints of how design should be.

Yet there's no shame in celebrating the past and simultaneously building a new, and very different future. The organizational body of IDSA is not the appropriate organization for shepherding the massive change required in industry and education, and that's OK, as they've already done the hard work of laying the groundwork upon which this massive change will come. I look to other professional organizations to lead the way, and I hope those who built the IDSA – and the field of mass-produced artifacts – can look happily at the fruits of their labor, and allow the organization to proudly retire.

Several colleagues of mine are in London this week to unveil the special TEDGlobal issue of our design mind magazine in a very special TED Salon on Monday, with the title "More Substance of Things Not Seen." The event will be co-hosted by frog design and TED, and moderated by Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind, and Bruno Giussani, European director of TED.

It comes in handy for the frog delegation that this is also the first week of the magnanimous London Design Festival, an eclectic assembly of design-related programs, exhibitions, and parties all over town. ... Read more

My last post about "reverse switching" from an iPhone back to a BlackBerry generated a lot of great comments that I believe warrant a short follow-up (much shorter than the original post, I promise). I can't address all the comments, but here are a few thoughts.

For the record, in my post, I'm describing 3.1 software on an iPhone 3G.

Yes, the 3GS actually speed some things up, such as the camera; however, in my view, the iPhone's speed issue is not one of CPU horsepower, but because of its fundamental interface architecture. As I say in the article, the paned, step-by-step interface is "easy," but it puts a limit on how fast it can be used, simply because of the number of steps it requires to perform a task. Apple can speed the CPU all it wants, and it will only make a marginal difference to the key usability index of time on task (the amount of time it takes to start and complete an activity).

(As an aside, on the topic of doing great user interface with a low performance device, here's an old post I wrote about the UI design of the Palm. Palm beat the experience provided by Windows Mobile phones of the day, even though its CPU, memory, and screen were far inferior.)

As some point out, there are things that can be done with a jailbroken phone that address specific issues. However, I'm using a work-issued phone, so I'm not going to jailbreak a phone that doesn't belong to me. Besides, jailbreaking is something that only a tiny percentage of users will risk doing, or even know about. You may say I'm a BlackBerry power user (I don't really think I am; there are people who know way more about it than I do), but things like knowing one's way around the menu are way less geeky than jailbreaking. ... Read more

I am now a reverse switcher--I switched from a BlackBerry to an iPhone about six months ago, and now am switching back again. Why? Basically it comes down to the fact that the iPhone is really good at the stuff I do 10 percent of the time, but pretty poor at the stuff I do 90 percent of the time.

This is not to bash the iPhone. It has been a transformative device in the wireless industry and forced everyone else to up their game. It has shuffled the power structure among device makers, service providers, developers, and the broader ecosystem. But such a sophisticated device is a very personal choice, and people have very different priorities for something they use and carry around with them almost every waking hour. My phone is provided by and for work, and I primarily use it for work purposes, and for that I find a BlackBerry much, much more efficient.

Now after having a BlackBerry Bold for a week, I realize how much I was fighting with the iPhone the whole time trying to get it to do what I wanted, at the speed I wanted.

iPhone upsides

There are definitely some things the iPhone does extremely well: 

• Maps: The best out there. Invaluable for me, and I'll miss these, though the latest rev of Google Maps on the Bold does all the same things. It just misses that last bit of visual flair.
• OmniFocus: I'm not really a big app buyer, but this GTD-based task manager is the one app that I use every day. I will lose it on the Bold, and I will miss it. (I'll continue to use it on my Mac.)
• Photos: I love how conveniently I'm able to synch my Aperture photo library with the iPhone, and the experience of showing photos on the screen. It's not something I do that often, but it is very handy when I want it. (I'm mystified why it's relatively laborious to get photos off the iPhone and into Aperture, though, requiring a manual import process as though it were any other SD card.) The imminent Desktop Manager for the BlackBerry promises similar photo (and music) syncing.
• Facebook: The iPhone Facebook app is mostly very good (though often hard to get a refresh), and the new version looks to be even better. But the current FB app on the Bold works very well, is actually faster than the iPhone one, does everything I need, and I find more intuitive to navigate.
• Safari: It's the best mobile browser, and while it has its downsides in general it works very well. But I don't do much mobile Web browsing, it's just not that much fun--still slow and inconvenient, and only worthwhile when there's nothing else to do or you're in a pinch. In truth, it's often more pleasant to look at mobile-specific versions of Web sites like NY Times and Southwest, than it is to try and look at the real page. They load faster, require less scrolling, strip out the advertising, etc. In fact, looking at NY Times mobile is faster than using the NY Times iPhone app (though it doesn't allow caching, but I was never organized enough to cache ahead of time anyway).

iPhone downsides

Now for the things I dislike about the iPhone:

General Usability

• Typing is what I do more than anything else on the iPhone, and it's the thing that causes me the most frustration. It's my No. 1 reason for switching. If I could get on with the touch screen, I would probably keep it. But I just don't like the touch screen. I am literally 3 times faster typing on the Bold, which has an excellent keyboard. No matter how much I "just trust" the iPhone, the number of typos and deletions I have to do is just unacceptable. Yes, it's all well and good to have smart predictive typing, but it keeps doing "fir" instead of "for," "sane" instead of "same," and so on. The horizontal keyboard helps, but then you only get a few lines of text to actually look at, and it's slow to switch when you rotate the device, and sometimes seems to get stuck in horizontal mode after I flip it back to vertical.
• Apple's insistence on the "simple" paned interface is indeed easier to get started with than the Bold, which has more of a learning curve. But unlike the big Mac OS, which has all manner of shortcuts, there are none in the iPhone. You have to follow the tortured route from one app or function to another without shortcuts. This is my second biggest complaint. By contrast the BlackBerry UI is incredibly fast to use once you learn it, as you do a desktop OS. The lengthy menus and the amount of customization possible are intimidating at first, but you quickly realize they contain everything you could conceivably want in any context. The two convenience keys make it instantaneous to get to your most-used apps.
• Fingerprints, earwax and general grime on the iPhone screen; it's constantly dirty and this both mars visibility as well as touch gestures.
• It's tricky to hold to your ear for more than a couple of minutes--too thin at the edge, and slippery. The Bold is bigger in width and thickness (a bit too big, IMO), but it is very secure to hold. It's not quite as well built as the iPhone, however.
• Poor battery life--it requires charging every 1.5 days for me, with 3G on most of the time, no Wi-Fi, and only a few calls a day. Having said that, I'm not doing much better with the Bold so far, so we'll see how it does once I settle into a more normal pattern of usage.
• iPhone camera is very slow to activate (often 7 or 8 seconds for the animated iris to open). It often jogs when I press the poorly placed onscreen button (causing blur) and my finger often gets in the way of the lens. There's no flash, no white balance or exposure control, basic photographic features that have existed in other phones for years.
• It's not that good of an iPod: Using it while it's locked is a pain. Using it in a pocket is a pain. No way to switch off coverflow (as on the Nano)
• No expandability. No card slots to add memory, you have to buy a whole new phone. With the Bold I can add 8 or 16GB micro SD cards for a remarkably low price.

The iPhone represents an interesting paradox that often comes up in usability testing: the UIs that are perceived as the best to use are not always the fastest. However, over time, people's opinions often change from their first impressions as the things that didn't seem that big of a deal at first, and which perhaps aided initial ease of use, now become barriers. At this point, enjoyment drops off dramatically. That's what happened with me. I was ready to throw the iPhone against the wall a few times because of how slow I found it to use, even as I appreciated its visual loveliness.

E-mail

• Shuttling back and forth to look at each e-mail account separately drives me batty. If I'm in my work e-mail account and want to see if my personal e-mail has anything new, it takes four clicks. And then four clicks to get back again to my work account. It takes no clicks in Blackberry to do the same thing because it unifies all e-mail accounts (and texts and IMs) into a single "feed."
• I have to unlock the iPhone to see if I've got a new e-mail, and remember the e-mail unread count from my last time looking at it (for each account). This often takes 30 seconds of constant interaction or more--not a big deal, it may seem, but it pulls my focus away from whatever else I was doing more than it should. The notification light on the Bold tells me at a glance when new mail (or SMS or voice mail) has arrived, saving me the trouble of picking it up to check.
• The iPhone Sent e-mail folder doesn't get populated in real time, and if I want to find a recent message I sent, I have to wait for it to download from the server. This can take several minutes if it's been a while since I looked at my Sent folder. On the BlackBerry, sent e-mails are included inline with received messages, making them easy to go back to.
• iPhone has no customization of font sizes for e-mails (message list, or within a message). With such a large and high-res screen, why can I only see less than five messages at a time if I have the message preview on with two lines? (Reduce message preview to one line and it goes up to...six messages visible! And still only eight if I turn off preview entirely.) That's just a ridiculous waste of space, and means I have to do a lot of scrolling. On the Bold I've got it set so I can see 13 messages at once.
• No auto-text/shortcuts to speed up repetitive message elements (e.g., On the Bold, I have created a shortcut sig and typing it at the end of an e-mail will fill out a signature as needed. On the iPhone you can only have one signature, and it's applied every time or never. And the Bold will let me create any other number of text shortcuts--mtg for meeting, fdi for frog design, inc. and so on). I was stunned when I got the iPhone that it couldn't do this, searching in vain for a way to accomplish it. (Third-party apps exist to do it in an extremely hacked way.)

Calendar

• Entering new appointments takes way too many steps due to the iPhone's modal-paned UI approach. On the Bold, it takes two button presses beyond the typing of the event name; I can be in and out of creating an appointment in a few seconds. Also the BlackBerry does simple things like allow a default setting for meeting reminders, where on the iPhone I have to select that every single time (I always want one). The numeric keypad on the BlackBerry makes entering times and dates much faster than the iPhone's gimmicky and finicky slot-machine style tumblers.
• No week view. This is my most frequently used view after day view, and not having it is a real pain for planning purposes. The iPhone's month view is next to useless.
• No snooze for meeting reminders, a huge miss
• Can't jump to a specific date in the distant future, have to tediously scroll or switch to and from month view. Why can't I swipe sideways on a day to skip to the next day, like with everything else on the phone? On the Bold, press G (go to date) and enter the date, done.
• Where in the day new appointments get inserted seems random. Sometimes late in the day or where an appointment is already placed, or even will default to a time in the past! With all the CPU power, you'd think it would at least just look for the next open slot. And why can't I double tap an hour in the day and activate a new appointment at that time?
• Can't send comments along with appointment acceptance/decline notices--a frequently needed ability to add nuance to the person who requested the meeting. 

Phone

• On the iPhone, dialing specific contacts is rather tedious if they are not saved in favorites. On the Bold I just start typing their name and it finds the number and dials it. I found a third-party app for the iPhone that does something similar (thought not as well), but it's bizarre that with all this CPU and screen that Apple hasn't rethought this daily activity.
• Muting the phone while on a conference call is a multistep process that requires looking at the screen. The Bold requires just a button push on the top and can be done blind. Safer while driving, where muting/unmuting needs to be done frequently when on a headset. The Bold also has a nice note-taking feature while on a call, and I can e-mail notes to myself or others afterward.

I'm clearly in the minority with my gripes. Most people seem to love their iPhones. Like I said, I'm not trying to bash the iPhone and say no one else should like it; this is a very personal choice. But at least for the time being, the Bold is a much better match for my needs.

Jeff Jarvis, who’s admirably trying to prevent the news industry from becoming the next music industry, recently wrote an interesting blog post in which he heralded “hyper-distribution” as a valuable new business model for news organizations. Responding to some industry pundits who propose embracing shrinking audiences as an effective means of consolidation and audience loyalty, Jarvis argued:

“Since when did it become OK for media people to shrink their audiences? Since they gave up on the ad model, that’s when. But I am not ready to surrender to the idea that advertising, which has supported mass media since its creation, is over. Yes, ad rates are lower; welcome to competition. That’s all the more reason why publishers must attract larger audiences publics – make it up on volume – as well as more targeted and valuable communities.”

To grow audiences through hyper-distribution, Jarvis proposes that news outlets utilize readers as distributors and embrace the very hyper-fragmented forces of the social web that might pose the most existential threat to them: reverse-syndication, “embeddable paper” formats, APIs, specialization, and engagement on social networks.

These are viable concepts (and some of them are already used, i.e. by the New York Times, the Silicon Insider, and others) but, if you were to be cynical, you could also view them as belated means of catching up to a new media reality in which the traditional notion of an advertising- funded news market is no longer valid. While hyper-distribution may provide formats for the post-article era, it still clings to the idealistic assumption that the world needs professional news organizations. But what if it doesn’t? What if the student who famously told the New York Times a year ago, “If the news is that important, it will find me,” doesn’t really consider news media to be trusted sources of news anymore, no matter how good they are in deploying social distribution channels to push them to him? What, in fact, if news brands don’t really matter anymore to Gen Y – as sources of news, trusted or not?

Arguably, CNN has lost some cachet through its #CNNfail debacle during the Iranian election (and similar defining news moments that seem to have shifted the intertwined powers of authority and attention to Twitter, i.e. the Hudson River plane crash and so on), and already, individual experts manage to establish themselves as the nimbler news aggregators on Twitter, cultivating individual audiences (of followers). What if the new news brand is @name? Or newsrooms, dispersed online, that converge amateurs, professionals, and experts? Google’s Marissa Mayer has hinted at what this scenario might look like: "hyperpersonal news streams," in which stories break like (Google) “Waves” and become the publication of collaborative processes rather than finished articles – constant iterations instead of interpretations.

Hyper-distribution may indeed overestimate the demand for trusted commercial news providers. As long as NPR, BBC, and other public services provide first-hand news coverage for free, chances are that the blogo-and Twittersphere will self-aggregate and hyper-distribute news without the mediation of commercial hyper-distributors. For them, innovating their distribution formats to catch up with social media may not be enough – they may want to innovate the very meaning of news. Rather than trying to generate incremental value against over-supply, they could generate disruptive value by creating a new kind of demand – pursuing a “reconstructionist” approach and yielding the type of “value innovation” that is commonly labeled under the sticky metaphor Blue Ocean Strategy.

And yet, two of the venerable US news weeklies, Time and, recently, Newsweek, are pursuing a third way out of the industry misery. They are neither adapting to the new rules of competition in a ‘red ocean’ nor are they creating a ‘blue ocean’ – instead, they are carving out a blue ocean within the red ocean, so to speak, by increasing their publications’ exclusivity. Both are deliberately reducing circulation to create a more loyal and targeted readership, and shifting their positioning from mere news engine to high-end background reportage and political commentary; and both are diametrically opposed to Jarvis’ hyper-distribution paradigm. Newsweek, 76 years old, is determined to shrink its circulation from 2.7 million to little more than half of that. Time’s circulation, which 20 years ago was close to five million, is now at 3.4 million.

Interestingly, it is another renowned weekly that presents the exception from this trend, and boasts surging circulation and ad revenue numbers: The Economist. According to the Publishers Information Bureau, the magazine’s revenues increased last year by a whopping 25 percent, whereas Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively. With its US circulation nearing 800,000, The Economist may ultimately even overtake Newsweek in the States. Given that this growth trajectory has been consistent in the past few years, what is it that makes The Economist thrive while others are drowning in red ink? Michael Hirschorn, in a recent article in The Atlantic, opines that “The real value of The Economist lies in its smart analysis of everything it deems worth knowing – and smart packaging, which may be the last truly unique attribute in the digital age.”

Smart packaging of course means smart branding. The Economist has successfully branded itself as the de-facto print magazine for the global elite. “The secret to The Economist’s success is not its brilliance, or its hauteur, or its typeface,” Hirschorn contends, “The writing in Time and Newsweek may be every bit as smart, as assured, as the writing in The Economist. But neither one feels like the only magazine you need to read. You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must – or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must – subscribe to The Economist.”

Similar value is associated with Tyler Brule’s Monocle, a “briefing on world affairs,” as the monthly describes itself, delightfully packaged and suavely combined with fashion features, frequent traveler tips, and stylish gizmos – plus, online, a truly earnest old school radio podcast. The Economist and Monocle are both examples of the power of niche positioning, as Michael Hirschorn points out: “In the digital age, razor-sharp clarity and definition are the keys to success. Knowing what and who you are, and conveying that idea to an audience, is the only way to break through to readers ADD’ed out on an infinitude of choices. General-interest is out; niche is in. The irony, as restaurateurs and club-owners and sneaker companies and Facebook and Martha Stewart know – and as The Economist demonstrates, week in and week out – is that niche is sometimes the smartest way to take over the world.”

“News doesn’t build a brand anymore,” says serial German Web entrepreneur Alexander Görlach, who is poised to fill a niche with his new online magazine The European, which will launch at the end of September. Görlach believes that “To date, online formats have been designed as extensions of print outlet. But [in Germany], there is no autonomous online news brand that focuses exclusively on commentary and opinion.” The European will give experts and authors a voice, and cherish a culture of debate without violating the principles of the web by offering text-heavy articles. “Strong opinions. Journalism for the Web. No perks,” the tagline provides cues for what to expect. For US audiences, this formula may sound familiar: When Görlach promises rich multimedia programming and a departure from conventional section structures, one can’t help think that the Huffington Post is coming to Germany. In any event, The European, targeting 25-60 year old web users who earn more than 2,500 Euro per month, is one to watch, especially with a classy title like this that indicates that the publisher seems to have a good hand with branding and a confident, somewhat ironic grasp on history: "The European" was also the name of a British weekly newspaper in the 90s, billed as “Europe’s first national newspaper,” as well as that of a privately circulated cultural and political magazine that was published in the 50s. Obviously, neither lasted long.

The main lesson to be learned from the success of The Economist and Monocle and (quite possibly) The European: Culture beats economies of scale. Hyper-distribution (and hyper-localization) might be a (controversial) option for newspapers; it is certainly not an option at all for distinct magazine titles. For them, creating artificial scarcity in a sea of abundance – the essence of branding – remains the main imperative. I’m not saying that all outlets in the high-end category – The Economist, Monocle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and others – can survive simply because of their strong brands, but they stand much better chances of maintaining loyal audiences because of it. Access to information is important, sure, and innovative distribution models are to be explored, too, but it all comes down to the power of branding, the power of your voice. Distinction saves you from extinction. What do you stand for? What do you know? What do you have to offer as a handle on the world, a firm point of view in a world that is increasingly complex and full of ambiguity?

If brand is so important, then why is BusinessWeek up for sale, a supposedly strong name? Well, maybe precisely because its brand has suffered. By pioneering a compelling, state-of-the-art web presence – one of the best among business publications – BusinessWeek may not have done itself a favor; rather, it inadvertently over-extended its brand and diluted its editorial voice. It has experimented a lot but not really carved out a new identity: Is it a business magazine, a news portal, a blog network, or a social network?

While BusinessWeek expanded into digital formats and gradually blurred the boundaries between its print and online offerings, The Economist succeeded by sticking to it guns. It was very late to the web game and in fact never really caught up to the latest trends (and fads) of online journalism. It did not embrace the principles of the “link economy” as BusinessWeek did so fervently, and if you ask anyone about The Economist, you will certainly hear that it’s a weekly print publication. That’s all. Similarly, German business monthly Brand Eins, an award-winning collection of philosophical essays and reportages on the people behind the numbers, has never really hidden its disdain for the web – and its print circulation keeps growing. Both Brand Eins and The Economist have never compromised their print brands, never open-sourced their content to anyone, and are now in the most enviable position to defy Jarvis’ calls for “hyper-distribution.”

Perhaps, the most innovative thing you can do if you’re a publisher these days is to ignore the action bias – and not innovate.