New York Times

Just two months after starting a flame war of sorts over whether it would acquire or go into competition with companies that were just “filling holes” in its service, Twitter is finally moving to fill one of the biggest holes the social network has had since it launched: the lack of a built-in link shortener. A post on the Twitter blog explains how the company has been shortening links in direct messages since March, in part to provide more security against phishing attempts — and will soon roll out the use of the t.co link shortener as a “wrapper” for all links.

The term “wrapper” means that every link that passes through Twitter will be shortened via the t.co system — and not just long links, but even links that have already been shortened by some other method, such as a competing service like Bit.ly or a white-label version such as the New York Times custom shortener. These links will still appear to users in the same way, but they will be shortened via t.co as they make their way through the Twitter system. When it comes to long links, Twitter hasn’t decided yet what they will look like exactly, as staffer Sean Garrett explains in the blog post:

A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.

Garrett also explained that t.co links will be a maximum of 20 characters, so once the feature is rolled out to all users, links added to tweets will only use up 20 characters, regardless of their actual size.

The immediate response from many observers was to see the new feature as a Bit.ly killer, and it is clearly competition for that service, which was one of a number of link shorteners that sprang up to fill the void when Twitter first launched. But Bit.ly has moved on from its reliance on Twitter, as Betaworks founder John Borthwick described in a recent blog post. In any case, it’s clear that the real point of Twitter’s new feature isn’t to kill Bit.ly or any other service, but to accumulate data about the links that are shared on the network. As the Twitter blog post describes it:

Routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users. We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.

As Bit.ly understood long before Twitter did (or before Twitter did anything about it), the data underlying the links that are shared by users is far more important than the simple act of shortening a link. The analytical data that could emerge from seeing everything that is shared in tens of millions of tweets every day could produce an incredibly valuable storehouse of information about what stories or websites or content is getting the most activity, in real time. It’s about time the service started paying attention to it.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Max Klingensmith

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WWDC Connection Problems Cause Demo Fail —

WWDC Connection Problems Cause Demo Fail is a post from Chris Pirillo

During Steve Jobs’ keynote speech at WWDC yesterday, he experienced several technical difficulties. At one point, he attempted to open the New York Times app only to have Safari refuse. The Apple CEO remained calm and cracked jokes about this “never happening.” Some time later, it was revealed that there were more than 570 Wi-Fi base stations operating in the massive room. With every person present connecting to the Internet in some fashion, the presentation couldn’t proceed as planned.

Jobs asked everyone to close laptops and turn off phones and other devices so that they could see the demonstrations he had planned. The audience clapped their approval and some began powering down. Steve told participants that they should police each other and make sure everyone in the room complied. It’s quite clear that many kept right on blogging/tweeting/recording from all of the live feeds still running on the Internet at the time.

CNET captured this video which shows the connection failure drama in its entirety. Many jabs have been taken at Apple and Jobs for this little gaffe. I caution all of you who are jeering to think about any and every conference you have attended. Are you telling me that you have never experienced a glitch like this? It happens all of the time. No conference center (or network) can control things beautifully 100% of the time.

Steve handled the situation with humor and by keeping his cool. I’ve seen other presenters fall apart at the seams over far less.

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How is it that a leading newspaper with a global reach doesn’t get it. I mean here we have the New York Times competing with all the other big brand papers to establish a foothold on the Web and yet when an iPad app uses their publicly available RSS feed they get all pissed off and have it yanked from the Apple app store.

Not only that but they sent Apple the take-down notice on the same day that the app got high praise from no other than Steve Jobs during the WWDC conference keynote speech. I am of course talking about the Pulse RSS reader app that everyone who has used it has nothing but good things to say about it.

This action of course has lead to the take-down being the hot topic of discussion in the tech blogosphere this morning with just about everyone wonder what the hell is up with the New York Times.

From Kara Swisher at Boomtown

Kothari said that the pair plan to contact Apple in the morning and take steps to remove Times material from the feeds.

It is not immediately clear why they need to, since Pulse draws from publicly available Times RSS feeds, as do many other apps, and does no scraping.

In fact, Pulse is little more than a really well-designed RSS reader, which is what the Times said it was in its write-up. You add feeds to it and it visualizes them in a way that’s easy to get through.

From Charlie Sorrel at Wired

Pulse takes the plain text from the NYT RSS feed and displays it. If you choose to read further, it opens the actual NYT page in a new browser window which, like every other in-app browser, uses Safari’s webkit engine to display it. The person reading it is therefore getting the exact same content as they would if reading in Safari.

Clearly the NYT doesn’t understand the purpose of RSS.

From Mathew Ingram at GigaOM

It’s not clear why the New York Times decided to target the Pulse app, however, apart from the fact that it is (or was, until it was pulled) one of the most popular paid apps on the iPad. There are dozens of applications and services that do fundamentally the same thing as the news-reading app does, by pulling in the RSS feeds of media sites such as the New York Times — and many of them are paid applications, just as Pulse is. There are also many websites, including Yahoo and Google’s customized homepages, that allow users to embed RSS feeds from other sites.

The argument being put forward by the NYT lawyers boils down to a section of their Terms of Service when it comes to the newspaper’s RSS feeds

The Pulse News Reader app makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.

Well I hate to break the news to the NYT’s obviously overpaid legal counsel but this is how just about every RSS reader out there operates. Are they now going to start going after Google Reader or my favorite reader, FeedDemon, after all I paid for the licence to use it (or at least to remove the ad) which is no different that me buying Pulse from the App Store.

The funniest part of this whole thing – one of New York Times’ own bloggers gave Pulse high praise

Pulse is a stylish and easy-to-use news aggregator. Users select which news sources to follow and the latest articles are presented in a grid of texts and photos. Users can finger-swipe back and forth across various articles from a single news source, or up and down through up to 20 news sources.

This is definitely one case where the lawyers should have been lead back to their cage and told to shut up.

image courtesy of alphonsolabs.com

Monday morning, Steve Jobs was highlighting the Pulse reader application for iPad during his WWDC 2010 keynote, but that afternoon a complaint from The New York Times prompted Apple to pull the software from the App Store.

Yesterday's New York Times has a two-page feature, Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price . It's a sign of the growing awareness and concern about how our network-centric lives are not only affecting our work but also our personal lives, and even our bodies — you might say, our souls.

The Times article looks at one wired family to make the point that all these gadgets negatively affect us. "Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave" the story reads. "They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information."

This is the same argument made by Nicholas Carr in his recent article for Wired and his new book, The Shallows, released yesterday. It's interesting to learn from Carr that neuroscientists can now illuminate some of what happens in our heads when we go online. But then again, their concerns are not fundamentally different from the worries expressed about the Internet over the past fifteen years.

The Internet is bad for our brains, the argument goes. It's bad for our relationships, our families and maybe (if it stops us thinking creatively or deeply) it's even bad for our careers.

As a pathological gadget and Internet user, I'm not going to join the chorus and argue that network and screen time impoverish our minds, our friendships and our communities. Maybe they do, but so what? Networks aren't going anywhere, nor is our time online likely to decrease. In fact, there's every indication that our time online is going to keep expanding.

What we need are practical strategies for how to reduce the negative impact of the net on our brains, and to magnify its positive effects. The Times article notes one study that showed Internet users "showed greater brain activity than nonusers, suggesting they were growing their neural circuitry," and another study of video gamers showed that games "can improve reaction and the ability to pick out details amid clutter."

I haven't got an MRI machine handy, so I can't document the impact of my net-taming practices at the neural level, but here are some strategies I can recommend for those who want to mitigate the personal and social impact of multitasking, and amplify the benefits:

1. Ration your e-mail: E-mail is one of the chief sources of distraction since so many of us feel compelled to check for new messages throughout the day. Different friends have shared their strategies for keeping e-mail at bay, like scheduling a specific two-hour period to process e-mail each day, or checking for new messages only after emptying the inbox. I rely on Gmail filters to support my own system for maintaining an empty inbox and I find that the practice of processing my inbox to zero also helps me focus my e-mail checkins on the moments when I actually have time to respond.
2. Structure your monotasking: I'm used to working with a dozen programs and fifty windows open on my computer, and as per the practice reported by the Times, I'm switching windows constantly to follow links or check e-mail. So when I'm trying to write a report or do any kind of focused work, I break my multitasking habit by working on a computer that has very limited memory (so I can only have a couple of applications open at a time), or I restart my main computer and launch only a couple of applications. You could even create another account on your computer that has access to only Word or Excel, and no Internet connectivity, so you can force yourself to monotask.
3. Take a tech sabbath: The National Day of Unplugging married the Jewish practice of observing the sabbath with the growing need to get some distance from technology. Try taking one day with no screen time. That means no TV, no Blackberry, no Internet. If you find it creates a useful pause in your wired-up life, consider making it a weekly practice.
4. Find hope outside your inbox: Last year I started experimenting with ways to break my constant email and Twitter check-ins. I realized I was looking for that jolt of excitement, the possibility that some sort of good news would come my way with each check-in. When I started exploring other ways to get a little unexpected delight in my day — by talking to a stranger, or visiting a new part of town — I was able to reduce my reliance on the net as the bearer of good news.
5. Use your right brain/use your left brain: If you spend your computer time geeking out in Excel or checking Google Analytics, it's time to give your right brain a workout with a browse through Flickr or a film editing project in Final Cut. If you spend your computer time writing poetry or creating collages in Photoshop, it's time to give your left brain a workout with a game of Scrabble or some financial management with Mint.com. The more you vary your online diet with activities that draw on both hemispheres, the more you'll be tapping into the net's potential to grow your brain's circuitry.

If you had to sit through a meeting with me, and watch me take notes in Evernote, tweet, and chew my nails at the same time) you would find that these practices have hardly turned me into a picture of mellow monotasking. But I take some comfort in the fact that I'm still able to focus on a single task for up to 5 minutes at a time. Considering the amount of time I spend online, neuroscientists might call that a miracle.

Alexandra Samuel provides insight and resources for working with social media on her blog at alexandrasamuel.com <http://alexandrasamuel.com> and on Twitter as awsamuel. She is the Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University, and the co-founder of Social Signal, a Vancouver-based social media agency.

The New York Times, like many newspapers, has been trying to find an online business model that works, including experimenting with iPhone and iPad apps, as well as a pay wall that’s expected to launch soon. Now, the newspaper company appears to be sending its lawyers after news aggregators that use its RSS feeds in commercial applications. According to a report from All Things Digital, the Pulse newsreader application for the iPad was pulled from the Apple store after a legal threat from the NYT over unauthorized use of the company’s RSS feeds. According to the email notice that Apple sent the developers of the app, the senior counsel for the newspaper said:

The Pulse News Reader app makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.

The newspaper’s lawyer also noted in his email that the Pulse app includes the New York Times feed when a user downloads the app, and that the newspaper’s feed is “prominently featured in the screen shots used to sell the app on iTunes.”

Ironically, the removal of the app came on the same day that Pulse was praised by Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his keynote presentation at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference. The app was even written about positively by the New York Times itself, in a blog post that highlighted how easy Pulse was to use for browsing multiple news sources, and how the fact that it was a paid app should give media organizations hope that readers might pay for content on the iPad and other such devices.

It’s not clear why the New York Times decided to target the Pulse app, however, apart from the fact that it is (or was, until it was pulled) one of the most popular paid apps on the iPad. There are dozens of applications and services that do fundamentally the same thing as the news-reading app does, by pulling in the RSS feeds of media sites such as the New York Times — and many of them are paid applications, just as Pulse is. There are also many websites, including Yahoo and Google’s customized homepages, that allow users to embed RSS feeds from other sites.

What may have contributed to the complaint is that Pulse also has a view that shows the newspaper’s website inside a Pulse frame. Although there is no obvious advertising in the app, such framing of a site’s content has led to legal challenges against news aggregators in the past, including a high-profile case launched in 1997 by the Washington Post, CNN, Reuters and a number of other media entities against a site called TotalNews, which embedded news content from other outlets inside a frame.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): What We Can Learn From The Guardian’s New Open Platform

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user bloomsberries

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It’s amazing what an on-stage Steve Jobs mention will do.

Everyone has been buzzing today after Pulse, the awesome news aggregator was pulled from Apple’s App Store after the New York Times apparently complained about their use of content. But what’s really odd about this is that just 24 hours ago, Pulse was highlighted on stage by no less than the Apple CEO himself as a great new app for the iPad. Jobs and those running the App Store seemed to be on a completely different page. Not anymore.

Pulse has already made a triumphant return to the store, their Twitter account confirms. You can find the $3.99 app once again here.

Pulse Back in the App Store —

MG Siegler:

Pulse has already made a triumphant return to the store, their Twitter account confirms. So what happened? Did Jobs himself step into the fray and get the NYT to ease up? […] When asked how the app returned so quickly, co-creator Akshay Kothari wrote back: “We’re trying to figure that out ourselves. Keep you posted.”

Why Did The NYT Get The Pulse News Reader Yanked From iTunes? —

Is the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) trying to shut down news reader apps that rely on RSS or is it just trying to smack down one in particular? An infringement letter (included in full below) from the New York Times to Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) got the flashy Pulse News Reader pulled from the Apple App Store Monday mere hours after it got a shout out from Steve Jobs during his WWDC keynote, as Kara reported. On the surface, the complaint doesn’t seem to match the NYT’s early-adopter attitude towards RSS that started with an agreement between Martin Nisenholtz and developer Dave Winer in 2002. But the NYT’s counsel says the commercial use—Pulse is $3.99 a download—and the the framing of NYTimes.com and Boston.com within the app violates the sites’ Terms of Service. In the complaint, Samson notes “the app is delivered with the NYTimes.com RSS feed preloaded, which is prominently featured in the screen shots used to sell the app on iTunes.” The NYT does not provide full-story feeds, usually headlines and links.

I asked Nisenholtz by e-mail this morning if this signaled a new policy towards news readers, CC’d to spokesman Robert Christie. The first response was to send me the complaint. When I asked if any commercial news reader app, software or browser-based version is at risk, even if the user is the one who picks the feeds, and what this means beyond Pulse, Christie replied:

“The Terms of Use on our RSS feeds makes it clear that the RSS feeds are available for non-commercial use only. By charging for an app ($3.99) that gives users access to our RSS feeds, they are violating that provision of the Terms of Use. Furthermore, when a user clicks on a story in the News Pulse Reader, it takes them to the nytimes.com site, which is framed within the News Pulse Reader app browser, as opposed to taking them directly to our site. (Since our RSS is not full text, once a user of any of our RSS feeds views the RSS headline/summary of any of our articles, a user can click a button in the app labeled ‘Web’ & this opens our web site up but keeps the user within the App.) This is a violation of the nytimes.com Terms of Use. Finally, they are using the Times name/content to promote their app, particularly because the Times RSS feed comes preloaded on the App and we are featured in their demonstration video: http://www.alphonsolabs.com/video.”

“We want to be clear that we are willing to work with Pulse, but only under our Terms of Use.”

I asked again if this has implications beyond Pulse—it’s hard to see how it couldn’t—and will update with any response.

Akshay Kothari, one of the two Stanford students who developed Pulse, told Kara they would be removing the NYTfrom Pulse, which got a rave review from the NYT’s own Brad Stone last week.

———————————————

Letter to the Apple AppStore from NYTCo Senior Counsel Richard Samson

Hello-

I am writing again, on behalf of The Boston Globe, Boston.com and The New York Times Company, about the infringing iPad app, “Pulse News Reader” produced by Alphonso Labs Inc. (please see pertinent details, link and screenshots below).

The infringing app is available on the iTunes store here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pulse-news-reader/id371088673?mt=8

The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.

I note that the app is delivered with the NYTimes.com RSS feed preloaded, which is prominently featured in the screen shots used to sell the app on iTunes.

I hereby declare, under penalty of perjury, that the information contained in this notification is accurate to the best of our knowledge and that I am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyrights and trademarks of The Boston Globe, Boston.com and The New York Times Company. We hereby demand that you immediately and permanently remove this app from the iTunes site.

Please let me know if you need any further information or have any questions. I can be reached directly at this Email or at the phone number below.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Richard Samson

Richard Samson
Senior Counsel
The New York Times Company
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York 10018

* NYTimes.com Terms of Service, paragraph 2.2:  “The Service and its Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S. and international copyright laws. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce (except as provided in Section 2.3 of these Terms of Service), create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Service (including software) in whole or in part.”
* Boston.com Terms of Service, paragraph 2.2: “The Service and its Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S.and international copyright laws. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce (except as provided in Section 2.3 of this Agreement), create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Service (including software) in whole or in part.”

The poor fumbling New York Times.

Everything about their world is flipped upside down.

Yes, they still have to write news stories, but the way they source them is changing, and slowly they are adjusting to the new way of doing things.

They used to use the cost of distribution as a way of adding a surcharge to cover the cost of reporting. Because they owned the means of distribution, and had a lot of people buying their information product, they could charge others to use their system.

They can't do that anymore, because: 1. They let Silicon Valley own the distribution in the new news environment. 2. The Californians are willing to sell access to that system real cheap to the people who used to pay the Times to distribute their stuff.

In hindsight, the Times could have and should have been the new distribution system, but they would have had to be nimble to do that, and been willing to accept the feeling of jumping out of a plane with no parachute. They let people in California do that instead because they were willing to deal with insecurity. What a silly reason to cede an empire.

Now here's the good news for the Times. There's still time!

The electronic system isn't finished upheaving. There are still planes taking off that you can jump out of but as before there are no parachutes. You could hit the ground. Hard.

Some small number of people at the Times get that. I know because I said these things to them two weeks ago, about 150 of them, and they didn't stomp out of the room, and they did't argue with me. In fact, some of the people told me they were psyched to do what I asked them to do. That's a new deal.

Now, some of the people who weren't in the room are the ones who think that they need to get people like the two young Stanford grad students to not publish a $5 aggregator. Look, if the Times is depending on stopping those two kids for its future, then the Times has no future. They have to make money, but they aren't going to make it by charging a few cents for every article. They must know that won't work.

They must re-establish their eminence in news.

News is what they do, not newspapers.

You give away most of what you do, and charge for the really good stuff. The stuff that people will line up to pay lots of money for. You need to get people excited about news the way Steve Jobs gets them excited about gadgets.

Or even better, find new businesses you can go into that depend on people coming to you for authoritative information about that business. It's how I got people to buy web development software from me. You can make a lot more money that way than by charging a few cents to read an article. It's a case of penny-wise pound-foolish. The Times is aiming to sell out too cheap. Use your franchise to build something truly big and very new that will make you rich.

Pulse News Reader -- a news aggregating app for the iPad -- got itself the ultimate stamp of approval yesterday by being featured in Steve Jobs' keynote speech. A few hours later, however, Apple had removed the application from its App Store, following a complaint by the New York Times that it was infringing on its rights. Although Pulse collates publicly available RSS feeds, the fact it costs $4 a pop is being interpreted as a "commercial use" of those feeds, and therefore a violation of the New York Times and Boston Globe's Terms of Use. Its makers have said they'll be getting in touch with Apple and stripping out the offending content, but it's certainly a head scratcher of a decision by the news company. We wonder if this signals the start of a crusade against all paid RSS readers or if Pulse has something peculiarly intolerable about it. Visit the source link to read the complaint in full.

Continue reading iPad Pulse Reader app goes from keynote hero to App Store zero thanks to NYT

iPad Pulse Reader app goes from keynote hero to App Store zero thanks to NYT originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Jun 2010 07:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  All Things Digital  | Email this | Comments

Kara Swisher has a story this morning about an RSS aggregator for the iPad that was first praised in a Steve Jobs keynote and then, later the same day, booted from Apple's store.

Apparently the NY Times played a role. "Apple informed the [authors] that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store, after it received a written notice that '[the Times] believes your application named Pulse News Reader infringes The New York Times Company's rights.'"

Swisher says: "Pulse is little more than a really well-designed RSS reader."

I'm both close to the Times and to RSS, so I'd love to get to the bottom of the concern here. Swisher believes the app is doing nothing out of the ordinary with information available in the Times' publicly-available feeds.

This is a case where the readers of Scripting News may be able to help sort this out. Do you have a copy of the Pulse app? If so, can you make any sense out of this situation? Please advise.

New York Times Gets Pulse Removed From App Store —

Very weird: the Times objected to a feed reader — which had just been mentioned by Jobs during the keynote as an example of a great iPad app — including the Times’s RSS feeds in its default subscriptions.

Chinese Wages to Push Up Cost of iPhone & More —

Arguably, electronics makers choose Chinese companies to make and assemble their products for one reason above all the others. It's cheap. But recent actions in the Chinese labor market may qualify the country's status, at least to the point of raising the prices on those products, including the iPhone.

All Things D mentioned the Hon Hai company's bump in employee wages after the rash of suicides at their Foxconn plant, but they also noted that after is not the same as because. China's wage inflation is more systemic. The New York Times's David Barboza agrees.

Sponsor

"Coastal factories are raising salaries, local governments are hiking minimum wage standards and if China allows its currency, the renminbi, to appreciate against the U.S. dollar later this year, as many economists are predicting, the cost of manufacturing in China will almost certainly rise."

Marketwatch reports increases of 5% in Hunan province to 27% in Ningxia. Morgan Stanley estimates a country-wide increase of 17% average. Chinese rationale seems to be a simple desire to stimulate domestic spending and retain increasingly itinerant workers.

Writ large, this is surely not a negative move. Foxconn's suicides are only one small part of the picture of international electronics workers. As Tom Foremski wrote in his ZDNet blog, labor is an element that can be, and therefore more often than not is, driven downward at nearly every opportunity.

"What is common across the electronics industry is a relentless focus on reducing manufacturing costs, and the largest manufacturing cost is labor; which is why employees are pushed to work faster, while maintaining high quality work, and at the lowest wages acceptable."

Even with an average increase in labor costs of nearly 20%, China will surely remain competitive. But these increases are unlikely to be absorbed by companies, like Apple, who use Chinese factories for much of their production. They will be passed on to the customers. Is an iPhone a luxury or a tool? Either way, the iPhone 4, reflecting these labor increases, might spike in price from $199 to about $235. A deal-breaker? Probably not. But it will have an effect.

Discuss

We get the feeling that there will be lots more details on this whole announcement during Hewlett-Packard's forthcoming press event, but for now, all we know is that HP's next generation of web connected printers will have something that no other consumer printer has had before: an email address to call their own. As the need for printing declines with the broadening availability of cloud access, HP is having to rethink its strategy in the business. According to a report over at the New York Times, the answer lies in giving each new connected printer a dedicated email addy, which would enable users to fire off an image snapped on their smartphone and have it waiting for them when they get back home. We're also told that printing from Google Documents and Spreadsheets will be easy enough, and we wouldn't be shocked to see Picasa integration as well. We're guessing that the new devices will have a robust security suite that'll filter who can and can't dictate the print function via email (but then again, HP does enjoy moving ink), and considering that they'll be priced from $99 to $400, just about everyone will be able to buy in. Conveniently missing from the story? Any mention whatsoever of webOS. Bollocks.

HP teams with Google to give connected printers their own email address originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Jun 2010 05:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The New York Times has just unveiled its latest foray into digital media. Dubbed “The Scoop,” this free mobile app will be available only to iPhone users and useful only to residents or visitors of New York City and Brooklyn.

The app is, according to its page in the App Store, “a guide to New York City from the staff of The New York Times… We offer lists of our favorite restaurants, bars, events and experiences. You go out and have fun. Check off the places you’ve been, and share what you’ve done with your friends.”

Features include an updated list of the Times’ restaurant critic’s top 50 picks for dining out, the Dining Editor’s list of favorite bars, a weekly selection of events and other, Big Apple-flavored treats.

Users will be able to get recommendations for nearby venues based on their current location, and the app will integrate with Foursquare to allow for convenient checkins. It will also play nicely with SMS, email, Twitter and Facebook, natch.

We’d love to see an Android Market counterpart come along; while we hold our breath for that, we’d love to hear from our New York-based readers what they think of this app so far. If you’re not in NYC, do you wish your local paper would come up with an app like this?

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Tags: App, iphone, mobile app, new york times, NYC, nyt, the scoop

WOW: Check Out Google's Amazing New Approach To Products And Media Relations! —

I've been writing about Google for almost a decade now--first as a freelancer for newspapers and magazines, then for my own blog, and for the last three years for SAI.

Until very recently--an hour ago--the vast majority of this Google-writing had been informed by my own analysis, research, and opinions, rather than by a deep network of relationships within the company. 

And that was liberating, actually.

Unlike a mainstream media journalist, whose job security often depends on maintaining a good relationship with a company (lest the competition get the scoops), I was free to write exactly what I thought.  I also wasn't neutered by worrying about what my friends and sources thought about what I was saying (As the most media-savvy folks will be quick to tell you, knowing and liking someone makes a writer think twice about slugging them in print.)  I also had written about the industry for years as a Wall Street analyst, so I felt I had a solid foundation for what I was thinking.

My freedom to do my own thing, I should add, was aided and abetted by Google, which, until recently, refused to talk to anyone who worked for anything that could be described as a "blog."  So the New York Times, et al, got fed the Google "news," and I was free to rant and rave without worrying about what Google thought of me.

(This trade-off, by the way, is one of the most galling things about the mainstream media's holier-than-thou attitude toward the blogophere. The "access-and-information-for-control-over-coverage" trade is still alive and well in the MSM, and it can have a major impact on what you read.)

I always thought this approach of Google's was shortsighted: For several years now, the blogosphere and new media have been as influential as mainstream media, so if a company was going to expend any effort on media relations, it seemed worth at least spending some of it on new media.  But it also didn't seem worth begging and pleading to get Google to talk to me, especially because, in the interests of preserving my access, I might then have to think harder about the ramifications of what I was saying.

So, aside from a few perfunctory interactions with some Google PR folks over the years, my coverage has been untainted by relationships with the company. 

But now that has changed!

An hour or so ago, shortly after I published my latest rant about a perceived shortcoming of Gmail, I received not one, not two, but THREE personal notes from senior executives at the company.

I won't embarrass these Googlers by publishing the emails (See? It's working already!)  But the message of the notes was this:

We understand the frustration. We're committed to fixing it. We are listening. 

(Specifically, the Googlers said they were committed to eventually letting me opt out of the feature that annoys me about Gmail--the "Conversations" format--and offering a "normal email" option for folks like me.  That's great news, and it will keep me using Gmail.  But specific product changes aren't what's important here.)

The more important message of the notes--left unsaid--was that Google was changing.  It was changing the way it approached customers and the media and, by association, everything.  And that, in my opinion, is the really good news here.

Google has grown so big so fast that--at least until recently--its communications strategy has not kept up with people's changing perceptions of the company. Google isn't a scrappy underdog anymore. It's also not the untouchable infallible growth company that is disrupting a self-satisfied industry and making investors and employees billions. 

Google's the big dog now. The company everyone's shooting at.  And its awesome power (and occasional arrogance) has not gone unnoticed--on Wall Street, on Main Street, and in Washington DC. 

So a warmer, fuzzier, and more human approach to these things makes sense.  As does a more human-centric approach to product innovation.

(Meanwhile, I'll try not to let my newfound access ruin me...)

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See Also:

• No, Seriously, Google, This Gmail Thing Is Really Pissing Me Off
• Gmail: A Symbol Of Everything That Is Wrong With Google--And The Reason Apple Is A Far More Beloved Consumer Company
• What I Hate About Gmail...And How It Reveals Google's Achilles Heel(s)

As I walked in the headquarters of the Jawa Pos—the flagship newspaper of one of South East Asia’s largest print media empires—I was wondering just how screwed my profession is; globally I mean.

Is the death of print a world-wide certainty or merely an American reality? After all a lot of “old economy” businesses are thriving in emerging markets thanks to Greenfield advantages and rising middle class economics. Spoiler alert: I walked out a few hours later not hugely convinced print is the future but willing to believe that in some places the death-blow of digital might be limited to a mere-crippling. How’s that for bullish?

Language difference and a preponderance of statues aside, the Jawa Pos felt like any other newsroom of a large daily. It was almost 9 pm and there was a still a buzzing, frenzied office full of people —some of whom had been there since 5 am, and some of whom would be there until midnight. I sat down with the chief editor, Leak Kustiya (below, second from right), and his deputy at a large, circular table in the middle of the newsroom—the hub of all the department spokes and the spot where the editors make their daily decisions. It could have been a scene out of an Indonesian version of “All the President’s Men.”

But when I asked how the paper was responding to the digital age, I was disappointed in the answer: We’re protecting print revenues as long as we can. Wow, I thought. Have you learned nothing from the West? Web revenues will never equal print revenues, per ad. But guess what? Future competitors don’t care. They are happy to build a business off of ads that are 20% of what you charge, because they are building a digital business without printing presses from the ground up. It’s New York Times v. TechCrunch all over again.

Or is it? Every local paper claims superior coverage of local news will save it, but that takes having a young, aggressive staff of reporters—and most of those people were the first to leave when newspapers started their inevitable decline in revenues and death in morale by a million small rounds of layoffs.  I came away from the Jawa Pos thinking they might have a shot largely because of one factor: Hiring practices. In fact, the US media—including blogs like TechCrunch—could learn something from them. The company’s network of more than 150 publications and television stations is designed to avoid the exact problem that plagues old-school media: An overpaid preponderance of senior staff that doesn’t do much.

The Jawa Pos will only hire someone if they are under 25 and you must retire when you hit 50—no matter what your seniority. And those slots are coveted positions. Some 400 people apply twice a year, and 100 get interviews. Fifteen are selected, and they enter a rigorous six month training period where they learn all aspects of the reporting trade and editors get plenty of time to see how they can work a beat, generate story ideas, break news and work under pressure. Typically only five get a permanent slot. The logic here, simply put, is that news is a young person’s business. It’s like American Idol for journalists. In some senses, it’s precisely the opposite of the unions most US newsrooms have.

With 15-years experience mostly in old media, I’ve personally enjoyed the spoils of seniority and years spent paying my dues, although not nearly as much as someone who has been in the business 30 or 40 years. And guess what? There are just some things I did for a story in my youth that come harder to me now.

Dinners three-to-four nights a week, endless 6 a.m. breakfasts with sources, trolling the halls at the largest trade show conferences for a quote or a tip these are all things that give an advantage to younger, hungrier reporters without spouses or families the same way a 20-something entrepreneur has energy and a fresh look on an industry that a grey-haired veteran can’t match. Hell, after spending 40-weeks on planes, lost on back-alley streets and dining on mini-bar Pringles around the world, I’m not even sure I’d sign up to write my current book-in-progress again.

Does experience and seniority have advantages in the work place? Of course. That’s why the Jawa Pos lets you work there until you are fifty.

Given how many other countries err on the side of being too protective of workers, the somewhat draconian, Logan’s Run approach was a surprise to me. But the Jawa Pos’s policy ensures that only the best reporters are allowed on staff because getting a job isn’t a simple as showing some clips or faking an interview and it ensures that despite clinging to a graying medium of print, the staff itself is always staying young, and hence, in touch with younger readers. It’ll be interesting to watch and see if that’s enough to beat a broader market certainty that print is dead and digital is the future. And if not? At the least the task of righting the ship will be left to younger blood.

It may sound cruel, but I’d argue it’s not nearly as cruel as daily papers going out of business en masse and taking good reporters and editors with them. Maybe the Jawa Pos should look more closely at the mistakes our profession made ten years ago, but this is one big fail safe against complacency already in place.