If content is king, then its queen is making money.

So says Scott Kessler of Standard and Poor’s Equity Research. Suddenly it seems that everybody is talking about the merger between online sales and off line content. Most agree that the old media still has the best content, but the computer is now so central to people’s lives, that the money is moving online.

The biggest driver is undoubtedly Google which wants to diversify away from its reliance on a single revenue stream – online advertising. It’s partnering with newspapers and now it’s looking at radio too.

Scott Kessler writes:

In our opinion, the faster traditional media firms work toward partnerships focused on making money from content, the sooner they will be able to reap the benefits.

It’s helpful to Exbiblio that analysts are starting to think aloud in this way. The more people start to talk about an idea, the more easy it becomes to sell a concept. Exbiblio is offering a way for traditional media firms to plug into online methods of making revenue – and it’s starting to look as if that’s going to be a good message to be putting out in 2007.

by Jeremy Faludi

This week’s episode of green design for Exbiblio is about metal. They recently decided to change plans about how the first release of the oPen will be made–instead of the whole body being recycled injection-molded plastic, most of the body will be an aluminum extrusion with holes machined into it for the screen and buttons, and there’ll just be plastic bits on the ends, much like an iPod Nano. The reasons for this had to do with schedule and design flexibility–we have a very tight schedule to make, and need to get to production as soon as possible, but still have not nailed down all of the design considerations. Using an extrusion with machined holes gives us a great deal of flexibility, as machining can be reprogrammed at any time to cut different holes, and extrusions are fast and easy to get into production–easier than injection-molding.

Using aluminum instead of plastic does increase the device’s environmental impact, in three ways: first, aluminum is more energy-intensive to produce than plastic; second, it’s more energy-intensive to manufacture with and requires harder tooling; third, having the case be made out of multiple different materials makes it harder to recycle because it needs to be more carefully disassembled and sorted. With a device this small, we need disassembly time to be extremely short, otherwise it won’t be worth anyone’s while to recycle it, because the amount of plastic and metal you get for the amount of time spent is small. I’ll talk more about design for disassembly in a later post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Google – by far the biggest broker of advertising on the net – is expanding its Adsense program into print, heralding the merger of online / offline advertising.

Adsense allows advertisers place small ads which crop up on the side of Google searches. Website owners can also place Google’s code on their sites and receive Adsense ads which fit the context of their content. The more popular key-words cost more per click. It’s also possible to advertise on specific sites that are members of the Google Adsense program. For advertisers large and small it’s very easy just to write a few lines of copy and become an international advertiser.

Next month Google will start a trial with 100 newspapers. The New York Times quotes Google on the commercial logic:

Tom Phillips, who runs Google’s print operations, said the company was attracted by the $48 billion spent every year in the United States on newspaper advertising. Google, nonetheless, is trying to position itself as a friend of the newspapers.

“Print adds value the Internet doesn’t have,” he said. Mr. Phillips, the former publisher of Spy Magazine, was hired by Google earlier this year. “It is a different browse-able reading medium.”

Exbiblio’s vision foresees a time when it will be possible to integrate an online / offline service like this even further, so that readers equipped with a portable scanner will be able carry out the equivalent of a “click through” from print to online. This would make the paper experience even more like advertising on the net.

The Australian Newspaper, The Age, predicts that the next stage of the Internet – when the physical world gets hooked in – will be much bigger than the first:

What we are seeing with the Supranet, or extended internet, or the connected world, or whatever we call it, will change the world much more in the next 20 years than previous technologies have in the past 20.

Many companies are working with barcodes and Radio Frequency Identification tags, which were originally developed by espionage agencies, but which can now track products and presumably how we use them. There’s a good list of companies operating in these spaces at The Pondering Primate which tracks these developments with great dedication.

Exbiblio’s vision is also one where the physical world can plug into the Internet via its scanning oPen which one day might be incorporated into a mobile phone (naturally any tracking will have to be done with the consent of the user). It’s good sometimes to remind yourself that you are not treading a lonely path – even though it might feel that way sometimes. You are in the company of others. Some might be head-on competitors, but there is also such a thing as coopertition, where together a group of pioneers form a trend, and create critical mass behind an idea. You can’t, of course, own the whole landscape of your dreams or vision for the future – that would be hubris.

Here’s a list of businesses that Exbiblio would surely like to join – The Green 50 – as chosen by Inc.com.

Inc.com runs through some of the issues: High oil prices, global warming, the sense that chemicals cause real harm and the earth’s resources are indeed finite. It concludes:

These are not so much charitable causes to embrace as they are problems that entrepreneurs can solve. Wall Street and Silicon Valley certainly understand this: Venture capital firms invested $958 million in renewable energy companies in the first half of 2006 alone.

Exbiblio is committed to Green Design, but it hasn’t got a product that will ‘save the planet’. Instead, it’s going down the charitable route with its Compendia Foundation. I am told that if Exbiblio fulfills its ambitions, there will be a significant amount of capital available for Compendia and the environment. It’s certainly a different approach to Green Business from that chosen by most of the Green 50 – but Exbiblio is never one to take the obvious or easy path, and I have to say that it is one of the things that motivates people at Exbiblio in their daily work on the oPen and its associated software.

Although it is based in Seattle, Exbiblio is legally a Dutch company. Compendia, the non-for-profit fund associated with Exbiblio, is also based in the Netherlands. This set-up obviously involves some extra complications and expenses, but the founders believe that the values and the social system of the Netherlands are more closely aligned with Exbiblio’s than the those of the USA. I have even heard long term plans for the headquarters and bulk of Exbiblio’s employees to be located in Holland. By the way, although Exbiblio is a start-up, it has a lot of “vision” about how what it’s going to look like when it is a big company.

As it has happens, there has been a big discussion raging on Slashdot along similar lines. If a US citizen wants to go and find a better place to live, should they move to the Netherlands? You will find a variety of views and perspectives on the Dutch immigration and taxation systems.

Exbiblio aims to add a digital dimension to print. As you read a book with your oPen scanner in your hand, you will be able to capture lines of text that you want to remember. Later on, these will be loaded onto your computer where you can do digital things with them – like emailing or blogging them. Perhaps one day people will embed links into books so that you can go to an audio-video experience on the net.

But does this take some of the pleasure out of reading? A much discussed blog post by Nostrich describes the difference between the experience of reading a book and reading something online:

Traditionally, reading a book – or any printed word, for that matter – is a rather involved process. As you read, you are listening to the words in your mind. The book remains static in your hands; on your lap; on the desk; forcing you to move your eyes to each consecutive word. Knowing the arduous process the book has been through – editing, proof-reading, typesetting, etc. – instills a sense of trust in the words before you; someone put a hell of a lot of work into making this book, just for you. The cost of books also instills pride of ownership.

But now, with the popularity increase of digital media, all this goes out the window. I don’t own the words I read online, I’m merely a guest; it’s impersonal. When reading words published online, my eyes remain static as each line scrolls past my eyes. Online publications are ephemeral.

It would be a shame if the experience of reading a book became filled up with digital clutter of the ephemeral kind. In many ways reading a book in an antidote to our addiction to the always-on Internet. It’s a much calmer mental experience.

Exbiblio would argue that the oPen is mainly an off-line tool that only connects later on to the digital world. But future generations of portable scanners might well be integrated into mobile phones. There’s already a mouse that will read colored bar codes.

It’s pretty much inevitable that the habits we pick up while reading online will start to invade traditional literature. It’s happening already and language is constantly evolving. Over here in Europe we are ahead of America as we send SMS text messages back and forth many times a day with phrases like “C U 2morrow”, a trend which hasn’t caught on quite so much in the States. Many Britains under 30 do not use capital letters in emails. It will be very hard for even the most traditional authors to ignore the digital dynamics of language.

One of the tasks I enjoy here at Exbiblio is making “propaganda films” for company lunches. When the software team accomplishes something fun, I sometimes scrap together screen captures, video, and appropriate music into a presentation.

They are pretty fun, and I hope we can show a few of them on the blog someday.