Posts Tagged ‘ Mobile ’

Phone Wars

June 7, 2013
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Phone Wars

So you think radio is a competitive business? Apple is in a war with Samsung, and it’s a bloody one.  Sure, it’s about volume (in radio parlance, ratings), but it’s even more about the cool factor.  And in that dimension, Apple has a challenge on its hands with the Galaxy S4 handsets. This is a similar challenge that radio stations face every day – how to “own” a hill and how to communicate leadership. Radio often chooses a positioning statement (“Favorites of the ‘80s, ‘90s, & Today”) along with the superlative...

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Rev Rev Revenue

June 6, 2013
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Rev Rev Revenue

On the heels of Paul’s excellent post yesterday about mobile revenue – specifically from the local angle – comes today’s entry about media ad spending.  Last week, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers’ killer analyst, Mary Meeker, presented her always amazing Internet Trends 2013 report. It’s 117 of the most remarkable slides you’ll see that synopsizes what’s happening in the digital space and it will impact your business. But for those of us with shorter attention spans, just stop at slide #5: And that sums up the state of the revenue...

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Crossing The Streams

June 5, 2013
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Crossing The Streams

jacAPPS President Paul Jacobs has seen and learned a lot since the launch of the company back in 2008.  The company’s 800 apps that have been developed for brands worldwide serve as digital Petri dishes for learning about the mobile space and how consumers are adapting to faster, more feature-filled smartphones.  In today’s post, he take a hard look at key issues facing radio in its efforts to ‘go mobile.’” At jacAPPS, one of the most frequently asked questions from clients is, “How do we monetize our mobile apps?”...

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Fail Fast

May 29, 2013
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Fail Fast

In an insightful interview by the Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg with Bob Bowman, MLB’s head of Advance Media, there are great lessons about how traditional entertainment businesses are navigating the digital space – especially mobile. First, there’s an experimental aspect to what MLB has accomplished, led by the vision of MLB Commissioner Bud Selig who championed the idea of a digital division for his league.  Here’s Bowman’s quote on vision and leadership: “We started at a time when Internet was up and down, and no one knew it...

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Here’s the Scoop

April 30, 2013
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Here’s the Scoop

As radio looks back on the past four years of living in a world rapidly filling up with smartphones and apps, there are more questions than answers. Are listeners using our app? Can we monetize it? How important is the stream to our station’s success and how will it be measured? What other features can listeners use that would build our brand, enhance our content, and optimize the mobile experience? These are all good questions and depending on the brand, the company, and the local staff, some are easier to...

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A Better Idea

April 10, 2013
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A Better Idea

It is hard to believe that in some circles, there’s a raging debate…about all the wrong things. Are digital futurists falsely predicting the doom of radio? Are automakers conspiring to eliminate AM/FM radio from their “center stacks?” Do we really need to be streaming? Are young people abandoning radio in favor of new media technologies? And on it goes. In radio, these are issues akin to gun control, immigration, and the budget deficit – too complicated to take on in this space. But for one of them – the...

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Dogfood Your Station

March 27, 2013
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Dogfood Your Station

There’s a computer software term known as “dogfooding” that is something that every radio station in America that streams ought to engage in – now. The phrase, “eat your own dogfood,” refers to an activity that radio’s programmers, managers, and digital staffers rarely engage in. Here’s a real-life example of “dogfooding” that I found fascinating:  Recently Facebook shut off its website to its own employees. Why?  Because it forced them to use the Facebook mobile app when engaging on their own platform.  And that process is how you truly...

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The Final Four

March 22, 2013
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The Final Four

I have heard comments from a number of people – in person, in email, and on Twitter – that it’s time to stop this discussion about the “connected car” and get back to business. Actually, now that that conversation about the demise of AM/FM in cars is behind us, it’s precisely the time to START talking about the “connected car” and what it means to radio. Aside from the dustup at Convergence and its aftermath, this is a major issue for broadcast radio.  In fact, some might logically contend that...

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Gone Mobile

March 15, 2013
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Gone Mobile

Thanks to NBC News, photos from the street leading up to St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican give us a picture book lesson about how the mobile age has changed people, events, culture, and the world in just a few short years. Here’s a photo going back to 2005, as people crowded the area watching Pope John Paul III’s body being carried into the Basilica. Now fast-forward to a couple of days ago as Pope Francis made his first appearance on the Vatican balcony. As writer Carlo Dellaverson points...

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The Car of Tomorrow…Today

March 5, 2013
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The Car of Tomorrow…Today

You have to love all those crazy predictions about the future – especially the ones that never happened.  Robots cleaning our homes and flying cars should have been here by now, right? And yet, technology has never been more remarkable.  It seems like almost every day there’s a new announcement about how the intersection of media and technology just became even more compelling.  When you consider that back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, you could go years without a significant new development in the radio world, now they seem to show...

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