Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com CEO Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators, RESTful services, gossip protocols, eventual consistency, data sharding, anti-entropy, Byzantine quorum, erasure coding, vector clocks … walk into certain Amazon meetings, and you may momentarily think you’ve stumbled into a computer science lecture…more

By Megan Garber Some of the most exciting work taking place in The New York Times building is being done on the 28th floor, in the paper’s Research and Development Lab. The group serves essentially as a skunkworks project for a news institution that stands to benefit, financially and otherwise, from creative thinking; as Michael Zimbalist, the Times’ [...]

by MARK SUSTER on MARCH 30, 2011 I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement” as espoused by Steve Blank &Eric Ries. The part of the movement that resonates the most with me (in my words) is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is [...]

By Andrew Phelps Can a single app please both casual news readers and news junkies? That’s the question I found myself asking upon rereading that report from a couple weeks ago on iPad users’ reactions to The Daily. The report was put together by knowDigital, a division of market-research firm Coleman Insights, which asked more than 40 iPad owners [...]

Apr 7, 2011 So, it looks like an intriguing deal. Ford Motors’ Lincoln is subsidizing 100,000 new NYT digital subscriptions. Well, it is an intriguing deal, but it’s more nuanced than it seems, and in that nuance, we see some of the next models for how the digital circulation business and the digital ad business [...]

By Ken Doctor Here’s how newspapers sell what they do to would-be readers. You can get the whole paper, now sometimes including digital access. We’ll sell you Sunday only, or the weekend, or 7-day, but you have to take our whole paper. That’s what we sell; that’s our one-size-fits-all product. It fit your grandparents and your parents, [...]

by Damon KiesowPublished Apr. 11, 2011 Updated Apr. 12, 2011 Microsoft’s new Bing iPad app, released Thursday, does more than search — it begins to remake the newspaper experience in digital form. The app is not being marketed as a news platform, but journalists should consider it one because it offers a great local information utility for the [...]

Joe Mullin @joemullin Apr 8, 2011 The Limewire file-sharing service was shut down last year, and the only thing left now is to figure out how much money the now-illegal service owes the record labels that first sued it back in 2006. The judge overseeing the case made two key rulings this week that strongly [...]

By Ken Doctor Don’t call them pageviews— call them pages read. Don’t call them unique visitors — call them readers. Welcome to The Washington Post’s new foray into understanding — and acting on — how readers actually consume digital news. I wouldn’t quite call it a revolution. But it’s a firing shot in an effort to bring a modicum [...]

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO Hulu LLC’s subscription video service will surpass one million subscribers in 2011, chief executive Jason Kilar said in a blog post Monday. Mr. Kilar also reiterated that the company is on track to approach $500 million in revenue in 2011, up from $263 million in 2010. Its first-quarter revenue grew 90% from [...]

By Jim O’Sullivan Thursday, March 31, 2011 Reports of the demise of newspapers may be greatly exaggerated. According to a new Harvard study, the denizens of the digital age — 18-to-29-year-olds — would prefer to get most of their political news about the next presidential campaign from — believe it or not — major national newspapers….more [...]

By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG Last October, suspense writer Jonathon King launched “Midnight Guardians,” the sixth novel in his Max Freeman crime series. Unlike the previous five titles, this one didn’t have a major publisher or a cash advance. Instead, “Midnight Guardians,” available at Amazon.com for $14.99 as a digital text and $23.08 as a print-on-demand paperback, [...]

March 31, 2011 1:15 am by Richard Waters The details of Paul Allen’s testy personal relationship with Bill Gates have been the most eye-catching part of his forthcoming memoir. But it is the Microsoft co-founder’s damning critique of the company’s current problems that could well prove more telling. In a draft of the forthcoming book, [...]

Only Apple Knows Who’s Subscribing, but They’re Paying for Digital Content By: Nat Ives Published: March 29, 2011 Popular Science magazine sold the 10,000th subscription to its iPad edition sometime on Sunday, nearly six weeks after accepting Apple’s terms for selling subs on its tablet. That’s a speck compared to the title’s nearly 1.2 million print subscriptions, [...]

By Salamander Davoudi Published: March 29 2011 The Times and The Sunday Times had a combined total of 79,000 monthly digital subscribers at the end of February, up almost 60 per cent over the past four months, according to unaudited figures released by News International. The total was up from 50,000 last November and included subscribers [...]

by Helen Lambourne A regional publisher which has scrapped the printing of most of its weekly freesheets and transformed them into e-editions says it has seen a 50pc increase in web traffic in three months.…more

Staci D. Kramer Mar 27, 2011 By now, we were supposed to have clarity about how The New York Times will use a meter to create a digital subscription revenue stream. After all, the plan went into effect in Canada March 17 and is supposed to start rolling out in the United States and globally Monday [...]

MARCH 21, 2011 by Nicholas Carr “If you look at the history of the world, up until 1700 nothing much happened.” That’s what Karl Marx said to Friedrich Engels when the two first met, at a cafe in Paris, in 1844. No, I’m kidding. The guy who actually spoke those words is Hal Varian, Google’s [...]

By Ken Doctor Digital news business models are playing out on pool tables these days. Break the balls and you have no idea where they’re going or how they’ll impact each other. We’ve got paid content models of varying kinds. We’ve got the new combining “free world” of AOL/Huffington Post+ taking aim at the emerging paid world. [...]

By Tim Bradshaw, Digital Media Correspondent Published: March 23 2011 Digital media companies will soon find it easier to clear content rights for new online services, under recommendations from the Hargreaves review into intellectual property. The review is part of a wider package of proposals around IP in Wednesday’s Budget, including the creation of new diplomatic posts in [...]

by Erik Sass Huh?  The New York Times is clearly struggling with the whole social media angle of its new online pay-wall — or rather, trying to have its online cake and eat it too. On one hand, the NYT wants heavy users to pay for access to online content, shelling out $15 per month for [...]

Peter Preston The Observer, Sunday 20 March 2011 The New York Times’s model for online charging will no doubt be widely copied. But according to one analyst, print will still be providing 86% of UK newspapers’ revenues even in 2017. So, at long, long last, we have the paywall policy all Americannewspapers – and many [...]

by Lauren Indvik EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news site acquired by msnbc.com in August 2009, unveiled a new version Monday designed to encourage conversation and collaboration among neighbors. “We’re shifting from a one-way newsfeed to more of a community-empowered website,” says EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty. “Instead of going to the site to passively consume information, we’re going to [...]

Nick Thomas Forrester ResearchMar 22, 2011 I’m often asked to name companies with a successful paid digital content strategy. It’s harder than it should be to answer that question, especially in Europe. In news, the FT still heads a small field, along with some B2B publishers while, in music, despite some innovative companies, the digital revenues [...]

Citizenside, other websites collect and syndicate amateur videos to professional news groups By MAX COLCHESTER PARIS—French website Citizenside recently sold a grainy video of British fashion designer John Galliano conducting an anti-Semitic rant to news organizations around the world. Mr. Galliano lost his job, and Citizenside pocketed a six-figure bounty. This was just the latest scoop [...]

David Kaplan @davidaKaplanMar 18, 2011 11:15 AM ET Media buyers don’t expect the New York Times’ online ad revenue, which was up double digits last year, to take a hit from the company’s new digital subscription plans. Some even see a scenario where the NYT will be able to charge higher rates—if the newspaper hits the expected number of [...]

By Ben Fenton, Chief Media Correspondent Published: March 18 2011 RTL and ProSiebenSat.1 said on Friday they were considering legal action against the German cartel office after it blocked their plans to establish an online video-on-demand service. The Bundeskartellamt confirmed on Friday its initial opinion from last month that the venture planned by Germany’s two largest commercial broadcasters [...]

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York Published: March 17 2011 The New York Times has launched its long-awaited model for charging for news online, with a “metered” subscription approach that will charge more than some analysts had expected, but ensure that most readers never encounter the paywall. NYTimes.com will become the largest non-financial newspaper to charge at [...]

Rental giant is bidding on a series starring Kevin Spacey By Bill Cromwell  Mar 16, 2011 Netflix has already revolutionized the home video business, crushing all rivals while introducing an entirely new and now widely imitated model in content distribution via the postal service and later the internet. Now Netflix is now looking to revolutionize the content [...]

TOKYO – Dentsu Inc.  and Facebook, Inc. announced an agreement under which Dentsu will become the official representative of Facebook’s sales and marketing support to companies in Japan. Under this agreement, Dentsu, as Facebook’s official ad sales representative in the Japanese market, will provide consultation on effective Facebook Page (see Note 1) development, exclusively market [...]

By April Dembosky in San Francisco Published: March 14 2011 Facebook said it was entering the fast-growing “deal of the day” market, posing a challenge to online discount marketing pioneers Groupon and LivingSocial. The social network’s large audience and detailed database of user preferences positions it to be a fierce competitor in this market, which is [...]

By Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell of the Project for Excellence in Journalism By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010. After two dreadful years, most sectors of the industry saw revenue begin to recover. With some notable exceptions, cutbacks in newsrooms eased. And while still more talk than action, [...]

By Charlotte Clarke Published: March 14 2011 When I was at school, mobile phones and MP3 players were banned from the classroom. In no way were they considered to be an aid to education. The same went for downloads. If pupils were to download anything, it would be their favourite piece of music in their free [...]

by Erik Sass One of the big promises of the digital age was that journalism would be transformed by an army of amateur videographers – namely, all of us regular citizens – who might just happen to be nearby when something important goes down. And it’s true this kind of user-generate content has provided some pretty [...]

by Erik Sass Here’s one of those stats that makes you sit up and take notice: Facebook was identified as “the ‘primary source’” of evidence in divorce cases by fully two-thirds of divorce lawyers surveyed by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. This figure is especially incredible when you consider that Facebook didn’t even exist ten [...]

By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco Published: March 10 2011 I rediscovered my old AOL e-mail account this week and was taken down e-memory lane as the famous “You’ve Got Mail!” message boomed from the PC speaker as I signed in. After years of neglect and only spam in my inbox, it was like a voice [...]

By APARAJITA SAHA-BUBNA The Wall Street Journal has added 200,000 paying subscribers who access the newspaper via mobile devices such as Apple Inc.’s iPad and Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle. Les Hinton, head of the newspaper’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co., which is owned by News Corp., said Thursday that about 150,000 of the new subscribers were added in the last [...]

By Richard J. Tofel Editor’s Note: Richard J. Tofel is general manager at ProPublica, a Wall Street Journal veteran, and author of a number of books, most recently Eight Weeks in Washington, 1861: Abraham Lincoln and the Hazards of Transition. Here he looks toward a future when search engine optimization has been rendered obsolete by advancing technology — [...]

By DAVID POGUE - Published: March 9, 2011 “An utter disappointment and abysmal failure” (Orange County Design Blog). “Consumers seem genuinely baffled by why they might need it” (Businessweek). “Nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks” (Bloomberg). “Insanely great it is not” (MarketWatch). “My god, am I underwhelmed” (Gizmodo). [...]

CP&B Now Using the Research to Develop Tablet Ad Formats By: Nat Ives Published: March 09, 2011 Readers have more trouble focusing on magazines’ iPad editions than publishers initially predicted, according to the latest study in a growing effort to figure out tablet computers. “We thought that of course there’s a lot of activity going on on [...]

By Richard Waters Published: March 9 2011 For media companies, when and how to tap into the new mobile and social platforms on the web is as much a question of timing and technological tactics as of business strategy. But make no mistake: as the platforms quickly evolve, most companies have little choice but to engage [...]

MONDAY, MARCH 7, 2011 FreePressMedia and Yahoo! are teaming up to give local advertisers new access to customers via online advertising campaigns targeted at local consumers on BurlingtonFreePress.com and Yahoo! websites. FreePressMedia, which includes the Burlington Free Press and BurlingtonFreePress.com, immediately will begin offering Yahoo! digital inventory as part of its local advertising solutions, President [...]

By Tim Bradshaw Published: March 8 2011 Spotify is this week celebrating signing up its millionth subscriber – but only quietly. Staff at the digital music service’s offices in London have not been treated to a big party, slap-up feast or cracked open the champagne. Spotify says there will be a few pats on backs, then it’s [...]

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER And STEVEN RUSSOLILLO Warner Bros. will begin offering select movies through Facebook, a move that will enable the social-networking giant to compete in the online movie-rental market. The new offering—which was made by Warner Brothers without explicit assistance from Facebook—puts Facebook Inc. in greater competition with Netflix Inc. and other tech companies vying [...]

The New York Times (NYT) primarily operates in the newspaper business, with ownership of The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Boston Globe, and About.com. It competes for online advertising dollars with hybrid publications like News Corp’s (NWS) The Wall Street Journal as well as internet-based outlets like Yahoo (YHOO), Google (GOOG) and AOL (AOL)…more

Folks are watching but revenues remain stagnant By Diego Vasquez  Mar 8, 2011 There’s no denying that mobile video viewing took off in 2010, with more people than ever before using their phones to watch video, according to Nielsen. But the dollars seem to be lagging the eyeballs. A new report from analysis firm SNL [...]

By SCOTT MORRISON Internet telephony service Skype plans to start rolling out ads to consumer users this week in a bid to develop a new revenue stream ahead of the company’s anticipated public offering. Skype’s IPO could be one of the biggest in the technology sector since Google Inc. raised $1.67 billion in 2004, but while hundreds [...]

The Dutch broadband market grew by 0.9 percent during the fourth quarter of 2010, to reach 6.26 million connections on 31 December 2010 according to Telecompaper’s quarterly update on the Dutch broadband market…more

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York Published: March 6 2011 23:04 Tesco is pushing music companies to accept minimal upfront payments for the compact discs they ship to the UK retailer, in a renegotiation that will test how record labels’ bargaining power has diminished in line with shoppers’ interest in CDs. Instead of paying £7 or [...]

By CHARLES FORELLE BRUSSELS—European Union antitrust authorities raided several publishers in Europe Tuesday, searching for evidence that they had acted illegally to keep prices high in the nascent electronic-book market. The EU’s interest dovetails with ongoing investigations by authorities in the U.K., California and Texas into the arrangements that publishers make to sell digital books…more