I was honoured to be invited to speak at the Asian Publishing Convention again this year. Held in Ho Chi Minh City during 8-9 July and with over 200 delegates from more than 19 countries it was a superb opportunity to network with publishing professionals.

I think a key takeaway from the the event is better understanding of how market pressures are forcing change within the publishing industry and what types of steps these media owners will have to take to remain relevant and engaging in an increasingly digital landscape. 

I presented 3 topics during the conference:

• Measuring online activities: what and how
• How technology platforms are changing newspaper and magazine publishing
• How to choose and improve your content management system

As with media owners across the world, Asia is finding it hard to adapt from a traditional single medium newsroom to a newsroom that encompasses all the latest digital technology. Unfortunately in not adopting early they risk alienating themselves and forcing their subscribers to look elsewhere for content, this leads to a loss in loyalty, something that is very difficult to regain.

Ryerson, Waterlook and the University of Toronto are in talks to form a new graduate school of digital media in Toronto, Canada. This is great news and certainly something that I would like to see happening in other areas throughout the world.

Digital media certainly isn’t the easiest area in which to recruit talent, and often the people involved in the recruiting process aren’t entirely aware of who is suitable for the position in any case. This is an unfortunate fact of being involved in an industry that is constantly evolving.

While it certainly isn’t possible to successfully put together a complete digital media curriculum and expect that it can provide the education outcomes required for those entering the workforce, it is encouraging to see that universities are working together to address some of the issues and find a common dialogue with employers and the industry to assist where possible.

This is a positive step forward and should hopefully begin to bridge the gap for those companies still struggling with adopting digital media channels.

In a press release during January this year the NAA reasserted the continued growth of online newspaper properties. Up over 60% in the past 3 years.

“Newspaper Web Sites Average More Than 67 Million Visitors Each Month in 2008; Web Audience Grows 8.6 Percent in Last Year’s Fourth Quarter”

There is a small glimmer of hope for those media companies that have yet to adopt digital media, after having print advertising budgets shrink for the 10th straight quarter, perhaps these companies will finally look to the web as an opportunity for growth. During 2008, over US$5B was stripped from newspaper advertising budgets and given the current financial instability it wouldn’t be a surprise to see the speed of this decline increase throughout 2009/10.

For those media companies who have already adopted digital media and made it an integral part of their business this serves as an affirmation that their investments and continued support of digital channels and a digital business model can/will bring them important new revenue streams.

Now is a great time for news and media companies worldwide to adopt digital media channels and look for innovative ways to increase revenue and provide value to both their readers and advertisers. For so long advertising in print media has been an unknown quantity, it worked, it got advertisements in front of readers, but lacked a transparency and measurability that has become paramount for marketers and ad buyers in the middle of a financial crisis.

I look forward to seeing how media companies manage 2009.

Back in late November TechCrunch ran a story on the continuation of the newspaper industry “death spiral” noting that industry advertising had been down for 10 straight quarters with over a $5 billion shrink occuring in the first 3 quarters of 2008. 

Whilst the numbers for the 4Q08 haven’t been released yet by the NAA it is fairly safe to assume they are not going to paint a pretty picture. 

In Asia however, it is a slightly different story, with print advertising continuing to grow quarter on quarter up until now. 1Q09 is expected to be flat but whether or not this will mark a turning point in the growth of print media in this region has yet to be seen. It is often considered that Asian news and media companies are a good 4 to 5 years behind the trends displayed in the US and Europe, which is certainly true in an online sense. 

3 months ago I wouldn’t have been all that surprised to see print advertising in Asia rebound, but with the deepening economic crisis globally it will be extremely hard for marketers to continue to invest in essentially unmeasurable print campaigns. This marks an opportunity for early adopters in the Asian region to take an initiative and through education of marketers use this as an opportunity to seize additional revenue and market share online. 

Only time will tell, but my recommendation to my Asian clients is to start thinking about strategies to educate your marketing clients and convince them to look at investing a larger percentage of their budgets this year into online properties.

A news report from Channel NewsAsia mentioned today that airline Qantas has suffered yet another drama with their fleet. 

The revered status Qantas has within the industry and it’s unblemished safety record seem to be a little threatened by it’s current string of failures.

• Today, A330 shuts down engine and aborts flight due to oil warning light
• Last week, two Qantas jumbos are damaged when they collided on the ground at a maintenance base
• In October, a computer glitch caused a Qantas plane to do a 200-metre mid-air nosedive, injuring more than 70 people, with some suffering broken bones.
• In August, a Qantas Boeing 747-300 from Melbourne was grounded in New Zealand after a engine shut down on approach to Auckland. 
• In August, a hydraulic leak forced a Boeing 767 to return to Sydney for an emergency landing. 
• In July, an Adelaide-Melbourne flight returned to Adelaide when a wheel bay door failed to close.
• In July, a Qantas Boeing 747-400 made an emergency landing in Manila after a mid-air blast caused by an exploding oxygen bottle punched a hole in the fuselage.

The above is just a snapshot of issues suffered by the airline from July 2008 until now.

In the past 4 years I have rarely flown Qantas domestically and never for international travel, opting for Singapore Airlines/Star Alliance instead. Who do you fly?

I don’t know how many people follow the work from the The Barbarian Group, but they produce some pretty amazing things, including Magnetosphere, a visualizer for iTunes which has been rebuild and shipped as one of the new visualizers in the latest versions of iTunes. 

Not surprisingly these extremely cool people have built some other extremely cool things, including a little OS X app called Plainview. 

Plainview fills a very specific need allowing web based developers and designers to showcase, present and demo their work within the medium it is designed to be used. The best description comes from the Barbarian site:

We Barbarians give a lot of presentations. A lot of speeches. A lot of Dog and Pony shows. People want to see our work. And the work we do is on the Internet. And, until now, we really had two options for showing our Internet work: we could capture it all to Quicktime, and throw it into Powerpoint or Keynote, so we could present in a nice full-screen mode that looked professional, or we could try to show it in the browser, and have all that ugly chrome distracting people from our beautiful sites. Both of these options had their pros and cons – full-screen looks sweet, but you lose the interactivity of the site, everything has to be canned. And showing things in a browser lets you show the site’s interactivity, but, again, that ugly chrome.

So now we have a third option. Fire up your full-screen browser and let your audience focus on the work.

You can find more information and download a copy from here. 

So if you happen to be on a Mac go and grab a copy of Plainview and give it a go, it might just make that next client meeting a lot easier.

In my browsing yesterday I came across two little gems for OS X. 

Anti-RSI

This little wonder of an application visually reminds you to take breaks throughout the course of the work day to avoid repetitive strain injury. This is a must for developers or any one who spends long hours each day sitting in front of a monitor. 

Complete with customisable time periods and micro-breaks this small app should assist you in taking breaks and avoiding injury or burnout. 

Download from: http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/antirsi/

Isolator

The small application has a simple purpose, to help you concentrate. When you are working in an application and don’t want to be distracted by all the other clutter and noise on your computer turn on Isolator from the menu bar and watch your desktop and other applications disappear. 

This app is great for removing distractions without having to turn off other applications. There is no longer a need to close your email client, it will just disappear when you turn on Isolator. 

Download from: http://willmore.eu/software/isolator/

Matt Bowen of 37signals has a short, and extremely interesting post on the Signal vs Noise blog regarding the hiring of self-managing employees. 

I think this is a most important distinction to make when you are looking at potentially hiring new staff. Over the past 12 months at Quiqcorp we have had a number of new staff join our team and the ones who are capable of managing their own time and working consistently without constant guidance have performed much better in their roles and continue to impress with their attitudes toward work. 

It is certainly important in early-stage start up companies to hire the most appropriate people for the job, and it is important to realise that these people aren’t always the most technically qualified, uber geeks you find. A self-managing, self-starting employee who can manage their time, set their own goals and work of their own accord without guidance is a godsend to any time-poor start-up founder (of which most are). 

Matt sums it up best with his last paragraph:

You want someone who’s capable of building something from scratch and seeing it through. When you find these people, it frees up the rest of your team to work more and manage less. 

Aaron Irizarry has a very interesting post over at his blog entitled “If You Build it They Will Come“, a short article considering the benefits of Twitter to graphic designers around the world. 

“What I love about this is I met both guys by interacting on twitter. Through this I realized the power of building a community of designers that we can interact with for feedback on designs, help with a snipet of code or when we are stuck on a design. There are a lot of awesome people that I have met through twitter, and I am getting some awesome opportunity to colaborate, and have also learned quite a bit in the last few months simply by interacting.” 

I have to agree with this, and whilst I have a more development, and business focus than graphic design I find I have an increasing number of them on my list. It’s interesting to watch how quickly Twitter has grown into a network for quickly finding answers to common problems, seeking assistance or feedback or even recruiting and recommending people for contracting gigs. 

Coupled with Tweetdeck and it’s interface to search.twitter.com it is quick to setup custom searches for topics that interest you, find new and interesting people within your industry to connect with and to improve your networking skills. 

Twitter of course isn’t without it’s downsides, and whilst it used to be downtime, it is now more than ever working out how to manage the information overflow you experience with hundreds of friends and followers. As your network grows, so do the number of tweets with the potential to distract you from work. As with any distractions, moderation is key, whether you need to shut down your app or just minimize it while concentrating it’s important to make sure your new friends don’t impact negatively on your work. 

I certainly look forward to meeting with a number of new contacts from twitter in person at upcoming conferences.

eZ Systems, the company behind the eZ Publish product is continuing to grow internationally having recently opened their newest office in Japan earlier this month, an office in the United States earlier in 2008 and now announcing further expansion in Europe. 

In an article posted to the company news section of the eZ Systems website, plans for a new office in Paris during 2009 is mentioned as well as the continued explosive growth of enterprise clients throughout Western Europe.

This is great news for partners both within Europe and abroad, further reinforcing our sales efforts and providing valuable projects, references and leads for the continued growth of the ecosystem. 

Read the original article – Continuous Growth in Western Europe

The Startup Lawyer has posted some great information on legal documents you should consider when setting up your next tech startup. Definitely valuable information for all those entrepreneurial minds out there.

Make sure to cover yourself and have the appropriate legal contracts upfront, it’s not worth losing your company over something that you can easily avoid. 

Check out the post here. 

Couldn’t agree more with this excellent post over at the ZURB blog. Might have to grab a copy of the book.

Fail Fast or Quit?

We are moving ahead at Quiqcorp and have a number of positions available for development and sales staff looking for an exciting and challenging position working with eZ Publish and similar web technologies.

If you have a passion for web technologies, eZ Publish or like solving complex problems then I definitely want to have a chat with you. If instead you happen to be someone who likes wearing suits, cold calling leads and closing big ticket sales turns you on then we should chat further.

Work from our offices, telecommute or suggest another solution – I am open to good ideas.

During January I attended the Open Source Meets Business (OSMB) conference in Germany which happened to be on at the same place and time as the eZ Partner Conference, how convenient. During this time it was interesting to listen to Sam Ramji, the Director of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft talk about Microsoft’s strategy and new approach towards Open Source. It is interesting to see how it continues to unfold 6 months on….

We don’t want you to talk, Mr. Ballmer by ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn — We are past the point with Microsoft where open source needs to fear the Giant of Redmond. Despite Mr. Ballmer’s bluster, the company lacks the legal weaponry to destroy open source, with patents or anything else.

During the past two weeks I have been trialing the NakedPhone service offering from a company called THiNAiR in New Zealand. Among their wide range of services, their NakedPhone VoIP service looks to be a great fit for a very early and undeveloped VoIP market in New Zealand.

Despite a few initial hiccups in the configuration and some issues with the upstream providers terminating calls I am pleased with the service, with a very low latency and crystal clear audio.

We will be expanding our use of THiNAiR services over the coming weeks and I will review the service in more detail as we look at their Hosted PBX services and other VoIP services.