Ideas
Business Pitch: How to profit from Taiwan’s digital TV deficit
Having left journalism to take up business development with one of Asia’s more successful serial entrepreneurs, I’m always on the lookout for new business opportunities.
This idea strikes me as quite complex to accomplish alone, but too compelling to drop.
For that reason, I wrote it up and now share the idea here online in the hopes of feedback or - who knows - potential partners. What do you think?
Executive Summary:
Taiwan companies export most of the world’s large flatscreen televisions, but Taiwanese buy relatively few.
Why? Taiwan television is bad. Really bad.
Hampered by regulations, cable companies in Taiwan have no incentive to invest in compelling content or develop new distribution models.
Stuck in the 1990s, Taiwan suffers one of the world’s biggest digital TV deficits.
Taiwan’s digital TV deficit is so great that it may actually offer a business opportunity.
For my full idea, please read below the fold.
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Old Media’s Effect on Reputation and Action
Blog writing has a different effect on people from printed media, Martin Varsavsky observes in a post.
I agree.
Martin finds postings in blogs like TechCrunch or GigaOm about him or his company - Fon - will bring traffic to his websites. When an article is written about him or his company in a publication like The New York Times or Forbes, however, the reputational effect is much greater (judging by people speaking to him about the article), but blog traffic hardly changes.
In addition to Martin’s Old Media Reputation Effect, I would add:
1- Old Media Action Effect
In launching a laser customization service in Paris, TagMyPod, my brother-in-law discovered a corrollary rule:
When someone blogs about TagMyPod, site traffic can increase dramatically, but sales often remain slow.
When a newspaper or magazine writes about his service, however, people start coming into the shop with ripped out clippings in hand.
2- The Old Media Search Defect
A related topic is the continued inability of Old Media to adapt to Internet search.
If I Google “Martin Varsavsky”, for example, I did not get a single link among the first 100 going to an article from a newspaper or traditional publication. (Most people don’t look beyond the first 20 results of a Google search.)
When I Google my own name - a byline that over the course of a decade appeared on more than a thousand articles in The New York Times and International Herald Tribune - I find only 4 links to articles in those publications among Google’s top 100 results.
When will traditional media figure out the importance of Google?
Not for a while, I hope. It helps traffic to my blog!
Steve Jobs on the frustrations of focus
A quote on the difficulty of focus from a recent feature in Fortune Magazine on Steve Jobs struck a chord with me.
Jobs’ frustration with focus resonates with this journalist entering business. Why? Because journalism rewards voracious dilettantism, while business rewards monomaniacal focus.
Jobs’ words below on focus were not available on the online version for some reason:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all.
It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.
I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.
The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90 percent of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it.
Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size. So we decided not to get into it.
If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod.
Note: I like his point, but find the example is a little disingenuous. The iPod focussed on functions that were already available on phones, but did them better.
IFRAsearch - vertical search about newspaper industry
Reiner Mittelbach, CEO of the newspaper industry organization Ifra has been promoting Ifrasearch a recently launched vertical search for newspapers.
IFRA - motto: Empowering the news publishing industry - has created the search engine to allow newspaper-focussed people to look at trends, strategies and issues.
UPDATE: I just found another recently launched news industry vertical search engine called Mediageeks, put together by Howard Owens.
Liveblogging IFRA’s Publish Asia 2008 in Macau
Will be dropping by IFRA’s Publish Asia 2008 conference in Macau over the next couple days and will liveblog on merit. Anyone else headed there?
UPDATE: Further blogging on the conference by Mari Pascual who is posting to the IFRA Magazine Multiblog.
Best blog hosting service to sidestep China’s Great Firewall?
Which is the best hosting service for a China-focussed blog?
Wordpress.com, blogger.com and other free services can be blocked by the Great Firewall, so I need advice on where to host my blog. (It is currently parked with a very generous friend.)Should I use Dreamhost? A US-based service?
A Hong Kong-based service?My readership is divided between the US, China and Europe (in that order) so want to serve both as well as possible.
All thoughts welcome!
For anyone looking into Great Firewall issues, there is a nice piece by James Fallows that ran in the Atlantic. Along with this follow-up James Fallows Q and A.
This posting on the China Hosting Blog includes 6 tips to how avoid your blog getting blocked in China. (The company that runs the blog, SinoHosting.net, promised to move your blog to a new IP address within 30mn if it gets blocked. Presumably they reserve the right to decide whether they will help unblock your or not.)
Great and highly detailed advice sent to me from Alex Bowman who is based in China and has clearly studied the issue:
I am not employed by any telecom companies, so none of this is insider information.The most important factor is probably the type of site you’re hosting and as you say your readership.
US Advantage: Fast for US and because of the variety and amount of connections to Europe fast for there too. Trans-pacific is a bit slower, adding around 300ms latency. For a basic HTML page this is not a problem (a couple of seconds), for a simple database-driven blog not really much of an issue (10 seconds), but something like a complex portal or community site, one serving lots of maps, flash or many large graphics the loading speed may switch many off (30 seconds+ loading time).
Hong Kong’s advantages: Fast for mainland China and Asia in general. This fastness for mainland China depends on the section of the Great Firewall you’re going through - it seems some of the machines that filter are faster than others. Worria.com is the fastest budget host for HK to mainland China connections at the moment, but this varies monthly. IDC is not bad. Hong Kong is outside the People’s Firewall, meaning it carries the same mainland-specific disadvantage as hosting anywhere else in the world - it is possible that it will be blocked.
The reason many, if not most, sites are blocked inside China (excluding well known news organisations, political groups or pornography sites) is because the computer they’re hosted on is blocked, not the site itself. China tends to impose blocks on IP addresses (the physical address of a computer, not the domain name) - this affects many because while they’re site has done nothing ‘wrong’ in the eyes of the law or the government it still gets blocked. The reason for this is budget hosts put a few, sometimes 20, sometimes 100s of sites on the same machine (and therefore the same IP address) - if one does something wrong, like host some porn or spam other websites, the IP address takes the blame and all the sites on that IP get blocked. If this happens it is possible to test if it’s an IP address or URL block and ask your host to change IP address, or even give you a private one that is yours alone.
Avoid shared blog providers like Blogspot, Wordpress.com, etc. They are blocked.
Avoid Feedburner, while their basic RSS service (counting subscribers and no more) is fine, their email and track-click functionality are blocked (email is not blocked if the server, like gmail.com is outside China, but an email server inside China like sina.com would often block these emails). english.feedsky.com is an alternative that should work in both the West and the East. Or just feed the RSS directly, some people are obsessive about it, some are not.
The one issue which caused a lot of problems last year was a cable cut caused by an earthquake off Taiwan. Most Internet communication is done by cable, at that time China and much of Asia was cut off from the rest of the world, much like Iran has been cut off by the recent cable cuts/turn offs in the Middle East/Mediterranean. More trans-Pacific cables are being completed at the moment, reducing the likelihood of this happening again.I have non-complex sites on Dreamhost which do not have a problem and the speed is acceptable from the mainland. They’re cheap, support is fine, and fully featured.
Technorati Tags: Blog Hosting, Blogging, China, Dreamhost, Fons Tuinstra, Google, Great Firewall, Internet, James Fallows, Mediatemple, Worria, wordpress.com, GFW, Wordpress.com, Worria
Pixel Media’s Kevin Huang on 3 trends for China’s Internet advertising in 2008
Kevin Huang, founder of Hong Kong-based Internet advertising company Pixel Media, predicts three Internet trends for China in 2008:
Trend 1- Complacency by China’s established media
Buoyed by great ad sales from the Olympics, China’s traditional media companies will fail to develop their online media properties. These companies will, however, wake up with a hangover and realize their mistake when the party ends next year, so get ready to sell that Facebook clone to the People’s Daily in 2009!
Trend 2- Growth of the Internet in all ways
Surfers: China’s long march to become the world’s largest online population will move ahead this year. Currently around 210 million people online now (compared with 225 million in the US), Huang predicts 500 million users within five years.
Advertising: Huang predicts China’s online adspend - a topic discussed at length on this blog - will grow to US$1 billion this year. For scale, this compares to US$1.4 billion spent on all advertising combined in Hong Kong.
Continued concentration: Huang sees little shift from the 60 percent of market share of advertising for five sites: Sina, Sohu, QQ, Netease and Alibaba.
Trend 3- Consolidation of the clones
Even China cannot sustain 20 YouTube clones and five Facebook clones. (Huang reckons China has room to sustain two YouTube clones and one Facebook clone). Consolidation will come both through failure and international companies acquiring China sites. Foreign buyers beware, there are quite a failed foreign investments strewn along China’s information highway.
Technorati Tags: Kevin Huang, China, advertising, Pixel Media Asia, Internet trends
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