Push Opportunity: “Push as the new Premium”
Posted by Dave
It's no secret that the newspaper business is hurting these days - subscription rates and readership of "dead tree" newspapers have been on the decline since the mid-1990s, and some companies are rethinking the decision to provide free online versions of their content. As the population ages and society becomes more-connected, people continue to find and rely on new ways to keep informed, and new delivery channels. While my parents subscribed to our local newspaper for decades, my wife and I have never had a daily paper delivered to our home.
If there's one thing technology such as web delivery and smart phones should catalyze, it's the development of novel business models around content delivery, monetization and specialization. News can already be more customized than ever, whether along topical, geographic or other special-interest lines. It can be delivered via more channels, and the rise of smartphones, eBook readers and MIDs has only expanded the means by which we consume journalistic content. At the same time, all this choice and connectivity has come with a steep price - news outlets still need to pay to keep the lights on, and in recent years it's gotten much harder to charge for the value they generate.
There's a key differentiator that smartphones, and their near-ubiquitous connectivity, can offer: push notifications. (How'd you guess?!) Just as web browsers supplanted newsprint for those in search of digital delivery, push notifications can offer a more real-time alternative. In 1995, your local newspaper could bring you breaking news the morning after it happened. In 2000, they published it to their web site, and you found out if you happened to point your browser there. 2005 brought the rise of RSS feeds, letting software take care of all that repetitive polling for you - but feeds are still a little too geeky for mainstream. Today, however, mobile apps and push technology offer a disruptive opportunity to actually reverse the pattern of consumption.
So, newspapers of the world - do we have your attention? Turning off your online editions, choking back your feeds or continuing to rely on banner ad revenue are not the ways to stay relevant in today's digital marketplace. Offering real-time, pushed news that's tailored to users' unique interests and gets them informed before other news outlets can? That just might set you apart.
[Image: Sanja Gjenero, used under license]
Push Opportunity: The Tour de France
Posted by Dave
A huge opportunity for mobile push technology is in professional sports - there are few other topics where real-time updates mean so much to so many. After I bought my first Android phone last November, I searched for apps that could provide real-time coverage of the Winter Olympics: there weren't any. The few apps in the Android Market that promised coverage of the Games were disappointing. They either used battery- and bandwidth-hogging polling techniques (we're looking at you, SportsTap!), or just encapsulated browser-based data with no notifications. Not long after, Deacon got its start during the run-up to the NHL playoffs. March Madness came and went, as did the Boston Marathon, the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, and (in a few days) the 2010 World Cup.
Tomorrow, the 2010 Tour de France will kick off in Rotterdam - and the Android Market remains disappointingly devoid of apps that can push real-time updates to eager fans. While the Tour does offer an official iPhone app, they're missing out on a substantial customer group - one that represents possibly the fastest-growing smartphone platform with a 160,000 handset-a-day activation rate. Third-party app developers are missing a significant opportunity too - with no "official" app in contention, independent developers' chances of offering the must-have app for following the Tour are much greater.
This is a call to Android developers that goes beyond Deacon: The Android ecosystem needs push apps! So far, the vast majority of Android handsets don't run Froyo - and while Cloud-to-Device Messaging from Google isn't a long way off, the opportunity to deliver push-based apps now using Deacon, Xtify, Urban Airship or whatever framework you choose is ripe for the picking!
(Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
