e-Government

e-Government is a really good idea and there are many initiatives underway to make it happen (see Government 2.0). In some respects the U.S. Government has been a model for using the Internet. The IRS e-file program, for example, has been very successful with nearly 99 million individuals filing their federal income tax returns electronically during 2010. Of the 141.5 million returns filed so far this year, almost 70 percent were filed electronically. There are other parts of the government that just don’t seem to get the idea of “electronic”. When I joined the Medicare program a year ago, I signed up for the Easy Pay program where the monthly Medicare premium is deducted automatically from my checking account. I have now changed my bank and so it was necessary to update various parties that either put money in or take money out of my account electronically. Except for Medicare, I was able to update them all online and have the changes take effect within a few days. Medicare said it was easy to change Easy Pay. Just complete an Authorization Agreement for Preauthorized Payments (Standard Form 5510). No problem. Where do I get that form online? Not available online. The authorization agreement may be obtained by calling 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227). Upon request, 1-800-MEDICARE will mail a Medicare Easy Pay Packet directly to the beneficiary. The Medicare Easy Pay Packet includes a Medicare Easy Pay brochure, an Authorization Agreement for Preauthorized Payments, instructions for completing the authorization form, and a pre-addressed return envelope. All Authorization Agreements must be signed by the account holder and returned in the pre-addressed envelope to the address specified. Processing of the authorization form may take between 30 and 60 days. I called two weeks ago and still have not received the “packet”. Of bigger concern is that somebody thinks this is ok. Electric utilitiy companies have not always been known as model e-businesses, yet the three that I deal with all have an online application that takes just a minute or two to enter a new routing code and account number. Three to six minutes versus 30 to 60 days is not a small difference. Think of the cost of creating, printing, stuffing, mailing, and processing the contents of the Medicare “packet” compared to the electric company’s few mouse clicks. Think of how many employees have to touch the contents of the package. I am not making a political statement, but it is quite obvious that reducing the cost of government by hundreds of billions or perhaps trillions should not be difficult.

Meanwhile, the post office continues to operate 5,000 or so offices that are unprofitable and deliver mail six days per week. They have seen a huge drop in mail because of Internet applications such as e-file, e-billing, Quicken BillPay, electric and telecommunications companies taking credit cards and sending e-statements, etc. Unforutnately for the post office, they haven’t seen the worst of the dropoff. Netflix now offers unlimited streaming for $7.99 per month. They spend $700 million per year with the post office distributing DVDs. The holloywood producers are fighting a losing battle to protect their old models. The $700 million revenue stream to the post office will go to zero. And then along comes Zumbox.  There is still a lot of mail that gets sent, not invoices, but notices of privacy policies, service updates, account information, etc. Billions of pieces of mail. This mail will soon be going to the cloud — to Zumbox. To get a Zumbox account you sign up and provide your email address and your snailmail address. Zumbox goes to AT&T, Charles Schwab, Comcast, JC Penney, and the rest and gives them the addresses of people who have signed up for Zumbox. The companies then send all their mail to those members to the members mailbox at Zumbox. As a Zumbox user, you just login to the Zumbox website and check your mail. The mailers save a bunch of money, we save time from retrieving, opening, and throwing away the paper mail. Unfortunately, the post office revenue decline accelerates. It will not be too long before the post office will not have any mail to deliver.

Tags: e-billing, e-file, irs, medicare, post office, zumbox

The Great Pay Wall of Slovakia

The first time I visited Slovakia, it was part of the former Communist nation. At the border crossing there were soldiers with machine guns. They rifled through our luggage and put a large mirror under the car to see if were attempting to bring something bad into the country. The country joined the European Union in 2004 and today, according to Business Week,  it is considered to be a high-income advanced economy with one of the fastest growth rates in the European Union A Bloomberg Businessweek story a few days ago described how a Bratislava company is organizing a national pay wall and has signed up the country’s top publications (See Online Media: The Great Pay Wall of Slovakia – BusinessWeek). This seems like a really good idea to me. U.S. publishers should pay attention. I am not suggesting a national paywall, by any means. But how about a business publications paywall, or maybe one for news, or for sports? The publsihers are fighting with Apple, Amazon, and others trying to preserve their models of the past. (I was really pleased to see Netflix stand up to Starz and not cave to the old model). The Slovakia model has subscribers paying roughly $4 per month (or $40 per year) to gain access to nine different publications. Publishers want us to pay $5 per copy for each of their magazines. Not going to happen. How about $5 per month for access to Businessweek, Forbes, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Smart Money, and the Harvard Business Review? I think millions would go for it. Nobody will read all the content of all these publications. Some will read all of one of them, others will read a little of each. The publishers will have to face the music at some point (no pun intended) or they will be disintermediated completely. I pay for WSJ and BW because I read them both cover to cover, but I won’t pay for the New York Times. I read the key stories they publish through the NYT blogs. The NYT gets no money from me. However, if there was a news paywall and for $5 per month I could have access to all the major news sources I would consider it. The NYT would get a slice of the $5 based on how many pageviews they got out of the total for the paywall offering. Another way for the NYT to get money from me would be for them to include their business section as part of the business publication paywall. The Slovakians are onto a really good approach. It takes cooperation from competing entities but I don’t see anything other than greed standing in the way. A tech company in Bratislava called Piano set up the infrastructure and promised nine publishers that they would not have to make any capital investment. Piano’s chief executive officer said it took a year of meetings to persuade the nine publications to get on board. Piano takes a 30% commission and the 70% gets split among the nine publishers proportionate to readership. I don’t know how they handled mobile devices, but clearly they should be included as part of the offering. Publishers, network operators, and platform providers including Apple et al want a share of the pie. Whatever they can work out is fine but from a consumer point of view, I think most of us would agree that what we want is simple. Pay once and read anytime, anywhere, on anything for an affordable fee for substantial content.

Tags: bratislava, media, paywall, publishers, slovakia

Book Stores

With the exception of one washout, this has been a great summer for motorcycling. Yesterday, it was a trike ride down to Bethlehem, PA taking only back roads to get there. It was about 75 miles from the lake. We saw a lot of downed trees and wires along the way. We parked the trike in the historic area of Main Street and had a nice lunch outdoors at Mamma Nina Foccacheria and then visited some of the shops. The most interesting was Seasons Olive Oil & Vinegar Taproom, which carries a large collection of exclusive, fresh extra virgin olive oils and traditional balsamic vinegars – all on tap from stainless steel Italian “fustis” for sipping before you buy.

The largest shop on Main Street is the Moravian Book Shop, the oldest continuously running bookseller in the world, founded in 1745. I don’t know what percentage of their sales comes from books, but the store offers a wide variety of distinctive merchandise. The failure of Borders leaves Barnes & Noble as the only national bookstore chain in the U.S. and it is racing to grow its e-book business with the Nook, while overall book sales continue to decline. Although printed book sales are continuing a long-term negative trend, they are not headed to zero. With unit volumes going down, printed books will surely rise in price. Some people will go to Blurb and print their own books. Many people will continue to go to book stores–maybe not the megastores like B&N–but to stores like the Moravian Book Shop where there is an entire room full of books for children and tables and displays throughout with printed books of all kinds. Then there is the Cocoon Coffee House in Hawley, PA. Many people go there for WiFi, panini, salad, and a glass of wine, but others go to buy a book. It is not exactly a book store–more of a cooperative arrangement with local libraries who may have some books to turnover. Books will be around for a long time. Libraries are not going away any time soon either. See WorldCat.

Tags: barnes & noble, bethlehem, book stores, books, cocoon, e-books, foccacheria, hawley, Mamma Nina, moravian, nook

WorldCat

It is a privilege to be able to participate and contribute to various boards.  It is also a way to learn new things, meet interesting people, and gain new perspectives. That has certainly been the case since I joined the board of OCLC. Fifteen years ago some pundits — myself not included — were saying that libraries were history — as in toast — they were not long for the emerging digital world. Been to a local or college library lately? They are full of people and many are expanding their facilities. Library use has doubled over the past decade. What happened to the digital “vision”? It turns out that the digital and physical can get along together quite well.

The month after I graduated from Lehigh University in 1967, OCLC — Online Computer Library Center, Inc. –  was founded  in Dublin, Ohio as a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purpose of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs for libraries. More than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories around the world use OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library materials. Each of these five verbs has special and profound meaning to a very large number of librarians and library visitors.

The crown jewel of OCLC is WorldCat – the world’s most comprehensive database of resources held in libraries, connecting millions of users to the collections and services of thousands of libraries around the globe. This week marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of WorldCat. On August 26, 1971, the OCLC Online Union Catalog and Shared Cataloging system (now known as WorldCat) began operation. That first day, from a single terminal connected to a mainframe computer, catalogers at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, cataloged 133 books online. Today, WorldCat comprises more than 240 million records representing more than 1.7 billion items in OCLC member libraries worldwide. WorldCat.org lets you search not just the collections of libraries in your community but thousands more around the world.

“We congratulate the thousands of librarians and catalogers around the world who have helped to build WorldCat over the past 40 years keystroke by keystroke, record by record,” said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO.  Jay said that Fred Kilgour, the founding director of OCLC, had a vision to improve access to information through library cooperation, and the vision is every bit as vital today as it was in 1971. WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information that is being continuously enhanced by OCLC libraries around the world. Each record in the WorldCat database contains a bibliographic description of a single item or work and a list of institutions that hold the item. The institutions share these records, using them to create local catalogs, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work. With budget pressures at all levels, the OCLC cataloging, resource sharing services, and library management systems are critical tools to assist librarians to improve productivity, save money, and improve access to the collections of their libraries.

WorldCat records span more than 5,000 years of recorded knowledge, from about 3400 B.C. to the present. The unique collection of information encompasses records in a variety of formats—books, e-books, DVDs, digital resources, serials, sound recordings, musical scores, maps, visual materials, mixed materials and computer files. Like the knowledge it describes, WorldCat grows steadily. Library members add seven records to the WorldCat database every seven seconds. Take a minute and visit worldcat.org and enter the title of your favoirte book to see the breadth and depth of this great resource.

OCLC Homepage
WorldCat

Tags: board of directors, board of trustees, jay jordan, kilgour, libraries, library, oclc, web management services, worldcat

Amazon, Boxee, Cloud

The pace of announcements from the media and technology industries will certainly be fast throughout the rest of the year. A couple of important developments this week were things that I had expected, and was very happy to see. First, was Boxee’s announcement (Boxee Blog » Boxee for iPad and more goodies) of their new app for the iPad. I have been following Boxee for years — see story from June 2010. I don’t know for sure they will be successful in the long run, but I really like what they are doing. Boxee is trying to become the TV Guide for video from the Internet. The free iPad app gives you a good view of this — just flip through many video choices and enjoy. As you would expect, a lot of their content is from YouTube, but not all of it. You can also watch video from Vimeo, Netflix’s Watch Instantly library, VUDU’s new Hollywood blockbusters, or critically acclaimed and foreign films from MUBI. There’s something for everyone. Boxee’s philosophy is to offer whatever content you want on a Boxee device connected to your TV, or with the Boxee app on your iPad, and I am sure other apps to come. Boxee provides a single interface to all the video on the Internet, regardless of who it is from. What they are doing is an important step to breaking free from the TV-Cable model of the past.

The other exciting development of the last few days is the announcement by Amazon of the Kindle Cloud Reader (see Amazon, Skirting Apple, Announces Cloud for Books – WSJ.com). The philosophy is similar — more choice for the customer, not trying to lock you in to a proprietary model from the past. Amazon believes you should be able to buy a book once, and then read it everywhere. Up until now, “everywhere” meant on your Kindle, the Kindle app on the iPhone or iPad. You could read a book on the PC or Mac with the Kindle app but that is not quite the same as the handheld devices. The breakthrough with the Kindle Cloud Reader is that it enables your Chrome or Safari browser (on any device) to look and act like a Kindle. That means that on any piece of hardware that supports one of those browsers (and no doubt more browsers to come), you can have instant access to your Kindle library and continue reading even when you are offline.

The breakthrough was achieved by Amazon developing a software version of the Kindle using HTML5, the new and evloving standard for how Web applications are developed. People like “apps” on the iPad and other devices because they are responsive and have a nice look and feel to them. They don’t feel like you are browsing a Web site; they feel like they are doing something locally on your device very specific to the “app”. If you are using Kayak to find flights or OpenTable to make a reservation, or eBay to check your auctions, these apps seem very natural. With HTML5, anyone will be able to build a Web app that is just as natural as an “app app”. The subtle and profound aspect of this is that now you can go to Amazon.com, buy a book, and read it on your Kindle Cloud Reader on your iPad. That means you don’t have to go through anyone’s app store — you just go to the Web. Apple will surely not like this since they take a 30% commission when you go through their store. Amazon will like it a lot! So will the rest of the world. HTML5 is the biggest change in the Web since the 1990′s and it will reeult in better apps and more choice for all of us.

Tags: cloud, ipad, iPhone, Kindle, kindle cloud reader

Plus for Google

In a previous post, I provided a link to a set of steps that enabled running the Google + iPhone app on the iPad. It did in fact work, but when I next synced with iTunes, it caused problems. I uninstalled the app from the iPad, apologize if anyone had the same problem, and withdraw my recommendation. I found another native iPad app called Plus for Google that works on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. It works well. I am certain the native iPad from Google will be superior once it arrives, but in the meantime this one is very nice for browsing through Google Plus posts on the iPad.

Index to patrickWeb stories about Google +

Tags: google, google plus, ipad

Google Plus on iPad

The Google Plus app on the iPhone is very nice but there is not yet a native app for the iPad. There will be one soon, I am sure, but if you are like me and can’t wait, there is a way you can adapt the iPhone app to enable it to work on the iPad. It requires some steps but there is a tutorial on how to do it that I found in one of the tech blogs. You can find it here. I found some variations from the steps outlined, and it took awhile to figure it out. If you try it and have problems, let me know and I will be glad to help.

Meanwhile, Google Plus seems to be growing rapidly. Since my last report, I now have 189 people in my various circles and 145 people have me in their circles. As I mused at the last wriing, where does this lead? Everybody connected to everybody? I am not sure how many people will end up in my circles, but I will try to keep it meaningful. The 189 people are people I know, serve on boards with, have worked with, spoken with, or met at a conference. Many of the 145 people who have added me to their circles are people I have never heard of. I get emails every day from Google + with a picture of a person and notice that John Doe has added me to one or more of his circles. I look at the picture and am certain I have never seen this person in my life.

The people in your circles are visible to anyone who looks at your profile, but what circle or circles you have them in is not visible. I have noticed that some of the people who have added me to their circle have thousands of people in their circles. One was just short of 10,000. I don’t how many people I know, but it is not 10,000. I would call those “connections” not meaningful. Perhaps some people are looking for bragging rights–I have 10,000 people in my circles! Wow, how many people have you in their circle? Um, there is my mother and, and, um, thousands of others that I can’t recall right now.

So it looks like there will be a lot of people who will feel good at having thousands of people in their circles. So be it. What is more important is the meaningful circles, like your family circle, your bike club circle, your XYZ Corporation Board circle, etc. Those are circles you can really communicate with and know that only the members that you have elected to put in those circles will see what you post. You may still choose to post things for the public to read, like this story, but many of day to day postings will be much more private. That is what Facebook has not facilitated very well. You can segment things on FB, but it is not easy. Google has made it trivial. I continue to believe they are going to get a lot of converts.

One more thing. There is a transient circle called “Nearby”. If you allow Google to detect where you are, you can look at postings from “Nearby”. The posters are people, you may or may not know, who are “nearby” who are posting about the great meal they had at XYZ  Cafe or something about traffic flow, or whatever. This is fun to browse through just to see what people are talking about nearby. I like using the iPad to browse through Google + postings. I don’t spend all day at it–maybe 15 minutes. You can browse my all of your circles, look at the postings in just your family circle, or the board circle, or by those who happen to be nearby.

Tags: circle, circles, google, google plus, ipad, nearby

G+ Index

I have no crystal ball, but I see Google Plus as a breath of fresh air for privacy and having a big impact on Facebook. From the feedback I have been getting to some recent posts, it seems a number of readers feel the same way. For those who may have missed the earlier posts on the subject, I have placed an index of those and any future posts on the subject at patrickweb.com/g+. Here is the list of posts so far…

Freedom of Communication
Google + Facebook
Google+ Growth
Google + on iPad
Plus for Google

Tags: facebook, friends, google, google plus, social media, social networking, social networks

Amazon Throws Down the Gauntlet

Jim Milliot’s article, Amazon As Publisher, Publishers As E-tailers, opened with the key point that in the rapidly changing publishing industry, the once clear lines between the various parts of the business have become blurred. Last week’s announcements from Amazon and from Bookish–the soon-to-be launched online book platform backed by Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Hachette Book Group–is the start of a major transformation. Amazon’s launch of Montlake Romance brought the company deeper into the publishing business than ever before, while the launch of Bookish gives publishers their first destination site where titles from all publishers will be available for sale.

The tip of the emerging iceberg may be Amazon’s announcement that it had acquired 47 Books from Award-Winning Mystery Author Ed McBain. Amazon Publishing has acquired the publication rights of 35 titles in the 87^th Precinct Series–including “The Con Man” and “The Mugger”–by author Ed McBain. Amazon’s approach is the publish once, and make available for reading in multiple formats — the McBain books will be published by another of Amazon’s genre imprints, the Thomas & Mercer, and will be available in print, digital and audio formats this Fall. A significant element of Amazon’s move is that this is the first time any of these books have been available in digital format.  I have to admit I am not familiar with Ed McBain or his books, but my nephew is. “McBain is a master of the mystery genre and we are thrilled to be able to repackage, publish and promote his unrivalled body of work,” said Philip Patrick, Head of Rights & Licensing, Amazon Publishing. Patrick said that one of the things Amazon Publishing can do is offer signature authors a “new life for great backlist titles.”

I am no expert in publishing by any means, but one thing I am quite certain of is that Amazon’s approach of giving customers the choice of where, when, and how they want to consume content is the right one. Many major companies act as though they control their customers; that they can decide what customers want and what they will pay. Amazon continues to gain market share in e-tailing because they have built their entire business around the concept of walking in the customer’s shoes. Ever hear of someone complaining about Amazon’s web site or customer service? This same philosophy will surely change the game of publishing. The gauntlet has been thrown down.

Tags: 87th precinct, amazon, mcbain, philip patrick, publishing

Freedom of Communication

Happy Birthday to all as we celebrate the birthday of our Nation. I am not sure who said it, but it is a great quotation, “The greatest lesson we can learn from the past. . . is that freedom is at the core of every successful nation in the world.” Freedom of speech is a key element from among the many freedoms that millions of people–unfortunately, not all people–enjoy. The Internet has added multiple channels of communication since the early days of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail). The first synchronous communication channel was Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and it was followed by instant messaging, various Web chat services, and Short Message Service (SMS), the text communication service component of mobile communication systems (cell phones). Enter social networks, or social media, and we have a whole new layer of channels. I think of this evolution as starting with the basic communications layer, the Internet. On top of the Internet we have a great application called the World Wide Web, and it gives us multi-media content sharing, e-commerce, e-learning, e-health, and many other applications. I think of social networking as a layer on top of the Web that gives us a way to blog, collaborate, share, hangout, chit, chat, chit chat, tweet, hire, be hired, network, find investors, make deals, find a date, get married, and much more.

Will Facebook dominate the new world of social media? Who knows? Perhaps. Perhaps not. At one point it looked like Myspace would dominate. It was the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006, but two years later it was overtaken by Facebook. Then the company was purchased by News Corporation for $580 million, and then on June 29, 2011, Myspace was sold to Specific Media for $35 million. The unstoppable got stopped. It could happen to Facebook too. The Internet has proven many times that no one company is too big to fail. Enter the Google Plus Project. I explained it this morning around the holiday breakfast table at the Lake. Some family members are tech savvy, some not. They all were shaking their heads in the affirmative as soon as I described Google Plus Circles. You can have a family circle, a boating circle, a friends circle, an acquaintance circle, a new mothers circle, a hospital board circle, etc. When you post something to the family circle, you know exactly who is going to be able to read it. This is the issue with Facebook–when you post something, you are likely not sure who is going to be able to read it. There are privacy controls but nobody seems to quite understand them. Let me cite LinkedIn to make the point. I have 304 “Connections” at LinkedIn. These are people I actually know. The 304 connections link me to 7,487,410 other people, not counting the 76,856 new people that were added to my network since June 27. If you are looking for a job, having friends of your friends’ friends know about you may be a good thing. When you are writing a personal reflection about something to share with your friends, do you really want the network effect? Perhaps not. With Google Plus, when you post something to your friends circle, you know exactly who is going to be able to read what you had to say. The war over social network market share is underway. Based on what I see so far, I would not rule out Google. If key influencers begin to shift allegiance, the momentum for Facebook could change very quickly.

The bottom line is that we should be thankful that we can communicate or not whenever we want. It is one of our greatest freedoms. Let us be mindful of the many millions of people who have no freedom to communicate. Stay tuned and have a nice 4th.

Epilogue: This story appears in the blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Tags: facebook, google, google plus, myspace, news corp, news corporation, social, social media, social networking, specific media, twitter