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People Technology PR Web/Tech

VNU buys The Inquirer

How things go full circle. Mike Magee has sold The Inquirer to VNU. Guy Kewney has already blogged regarding his possible role as a catalyst for the deal.

Guy Kewney’s Role in Inquirer purchase

This is an interesting story for a number of reasons. Mike founded The Register with John Lettice and Drew Cullen before falling out with them in 2001 (although many rumours emerged as to the real reason for the bust up, I don’t think anyone other than the participants really know what went on there). He left and set up The Inquirer shortly afterwards – I know a few people at the time weren’t sure whether Mike would be able to replicate the success of The Reg – but he ploughed his own furrow and getting a media giant like VNU to buy it must be viewed as somewhat of a coup.

What remains to be seen is to what extent The Inquirer will retain its unique editorial style now that it is under the VNU wing. The Inquirer (like the Reg) has never been one to pull its punches. Take for example Intel’s Guide To The European Press – whoever was Intel’s PR at the time must have wanted the ground to open up and swallow them.

Of course the terms of the deal are undisclosed. What next we ask ourselves? The Register being bought by IDG?

All the best to Mike on his return to Broadwick Street. At least now the distance from the office to the Star and Garter and Blue Posts can be measure in feet rather than miles.

Categories
Current Affairs Technology PR Web/Tech

Web 2.0 in today’s FT and Guardian

Interesting that both the Guardian (Jack Schofield) and the FT (Chris Nuttall) today carry big features on Web 2.0 – and both carry similar style box out glossaries.

Both contain similiar comments eg nobody has really defined exactly what Web 2.0 really is, the threat to Microsoft, etc.

Were Jack and Chris at the same press briefing? Or is this simply a zeitgeist co-incidence?

Categories
Technology PR

Lack of opinions in opinion articles

Mark Ballard of CRN has send round an amusing, but pertinent email with regard to submissions for the magazine’s Opinion column – he is bemoaning the fact that most of the pieces they receive really aren’t any use – mainly because they fail to have the one thing that would-be Opinion column authors  ought to have – namely Opinions (there is a clue there somewhere).

Mark’s full rant on the subject below:

Regurgitated corporate rhetoric. There’s this message that’s drafted in the
corner office of some corporate campus outside of San Francisco. It’s
communicted down the official channels and faithfully reproduced in the
minds of country lieutenants and their subordinates in turn.

I appreciate that if you sit these people down and ask them about hubs and
switches or whatever it is they sell, much of what they say will follow the
company line, and quite rightly so. So do the press releases, the channel
marketing communications, the conference speaches… there are plenty of
avenues by which these messages get across. The CRN comment page is not one
of them.

I’m afraid too many of the Viewpoint articles we have in the bank are so
dry and unimaginative, the content so predictable, the language so tortured
that it is impossible to read them without your eyes glazing over.

Your average company director does usually feel passionate about the
business in which he is working. But I’m afraid that passion isn’t coming
across in the articles we are receiving. Granted the subject matter can
appear a little dry, but the copy doesn’t have to be: there are passionate
debates to be had about the technology as well as the business.

It appears the passion and the true opinion is being checked by the
pressure of writing an ‘article’ so that the result is too often something
like an encyclopedia entry. The voice of the writer is also usually lost
under a confusion of hackneyed marketing terms and empty industry-speak.

Categories
Technology PR

Apologies for the radio silence

It was been far too long since I last posted here. Combination of squeezing a holiday abroad (the last before arrival of Smith Junior in December) and all of our clients having major product launches in the last 4 weeks has conspired to leave little time for blogging.

Suffice to say I’m making a concerted effort to keep this more up to date.

Categories
Technology PR

How do freelance journalists make a living?

Following a number of conversations in the last few weeks, a rather bleak picture appears to be emerging for freelance journalists writing about technology in the UK.

The following is a summation of the consensus that appears to be emerging about the marketplace.

– dwindling editorial commissioning budgets coupled with reduced editorial pagination

As print advertising expenditure contracts ever further, editorial space reduces accordingly. With less editorial space to fill, freelance budgets reduce too.

– low payment for editorial writing

Any freelance journalist who can command UKP300 per thousand words is doing well. Rates at the nationals are very low. As one journalist told me, you do it because of the cache and it looks good on the CV – but you certainly don’t do it for the money.

Even the most prolific of freelances would need to be generating at least 7 or 8 one thousand word articles each and every month to earn the average wage. A casual survey reveals that only handful of journalists are in this league.

So how do you make a living as a freelance journalist? There a number of answers:

– have a spouse or partner who has a proper job earning proper money
– have alternative sources of income: this ranges from PR ghost writing (it pays better than real journalism) to in one case, part time gardening.

All of the above has knock on implications for traditional media relations. Freelancers are clearly only interested in talking to companies or attending press meetings if they feel they are going to get a paid commission out of it. In the US, the concept of the “background” briefing is far more prevalent ie meetings to gain information that won’t necessarily result in immediate coverage. It is a harder thing to push here – not just with freelancers, but staff journalists too who equally have to justify their time in terms of output.

Of course, it isn’t all doom and gloom. ZDNet for example appears to expanding with more staff journalists and rising freelance budgets – but I suspect this is a bright exception in a murky pool.

As reported previously, the job of PR in the tech sector can only get tougher. As will freelance journalism.

Categories
Technology PR

Lewis PR – serious accusations on Spin Bunny

I noticed that the Spin Bunny story about Lewis PR – http://spin_bunny.typepad.com/spin_bunny/2005/08/gonging_gonging.html – seems to have generated a firestorm of comments about how the company has and does treat its employees. Some of the allegations made by apparently former employees are very serious.

I know people who have worked there, and I know it has a reputation for being a bit of a sweat shop – however, claims are being made that Chris Lewis is also removing comments being made on his own blog about these accusations.

As he’s normally quite forthright in his responses to other matters, I’m surprised he hasn’t decided to tackle these allegations head on.

A.

Categories
Technology PR

The kind of thing that makes PR worthwhile

A worthy accolade for one of our long standing clients.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contacts:

Andrew Smith
Object Marketing
Tel: (020) 8762 9292
E-mail: andrews@objectmarketing.com

HYPERION ESSBASE NAMED AS TOP TEN TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION OF THE DECADE BY
INFORMATION AGE MAGAZINE

LONDON, UK – 16th August, 2005 – Hyperion Essbase has been named as one of the 10 most influential technology innovations of the last 10 years by Information Age magazine in its August 2005 issue.

Hyperion Essbase was ranked in the top 10 along with Netscape, Blackberry, Google, virtualisation, Voice Over IP (VOIP), Linux, XML, the Pentium processor and ADSL.

Writing in Information Age’s 10th anniversary issue, editor Kenny MacIver said: “Hyperion Essbase was the multi-dimensional database technology that put online analytical processing on the business intelligence map. It has spurred the creation of scores of rival OLAP products – and billions of OLAP cubes.”

Mike Shelton, Managing Director, EMEA Northern Region says: “This is a fantastic accolade for Hyperion Essbase. Information Age is one of the most respected and influential magazines in the IT industry. The fact that Hyperion Essbase is seen as one of the most innovative technologies of the last 10 years is clear recognition of its importance and impact on end user organisations. Hyperion Essbase is ample demonstration of our ability to continue to deliver one of the very best Business Performance Management and Business Intelligence products available. With the introduction of Hyperion Essbase 7X last year, we made the most significant advancement in analytic technology since the company introduced the original Essbase in 1992. We’ve enabled our customers to leverage the legendary power of Essbase to perform both traditional financial analysis as well as line of business analysis, all in one product while maintaining our historical market leading advantage in query performance.”

Categories
Technology PR

Which tech PR agencies are going bust in the next 6 months?

Tim Dyson is teasing us all by predicting that a couple of very well known tech PR companies are likely to go bust in the next few months.

As Dyson says: “The firms won’t be small fry, they’ll be businesses that have been around a while and have taken steps to build up internationally. Their demise will be a result of two equal and opposite forces: a drive in one direction to go global while at the same time being driven in the other direction to be more local. These are tough pressures for medium sized businesses to take on at the best of times. The agencies I see being at risk are ones that became too dependent on one or two clients and equally a handful of their staff. If this mix changes even slightly in such businesses, the results are not pretty. Take a look at the big pieces of business in the tech PR market to move and then also at what staff moves have taken place and you might see what I mean. I won’t name names right now as I’d actually prefer it if these businesses stay alive but let’s put it this way, if they’re still alive in six months I’ll be shocked.”

So – shall we play the game of who is going to disappear?

Categories
Technology PR

Blockbuster – what were they thinking?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4137532.stm

This one really does make me wonder. Apparently Blockbuster has made a $57m (£31m) loss in the second quarter – mainly attributed to its decision to drop “late fees” for people failing to return videos on time.

For those with a long memory, this will come as no surprise.

In 1997, Wired magazine had a cover feature on Blockbuster and why it was well aware of the (then far off) possible impact the Internet might have on their business.

I forget the man quoted, but even then, they admitted that fully 75pc of their profits were as a result of late return fees. So why are they so surprised now?

I guess what’s hard to understand is that here is a company that seemed to be well aware of the threats to its business years ago – and yet seems to have played at King Canute – for example, why on earth did they pursue earlier this year in an expensive bid to buy smaller rental chain Hollywood Entertainment?

As Nicholas Negroponte would have noted all those years ago (more nostalgia), they have been in the business of shifting atoms not bits.

It just seems bizarre that somebody, somewhere along the line didn’t notice something awry in their strategy.

Categories
Technology PR

Made In China – Baidu.com

Remember the days when the phrase “Made in China” was synonymous with cheap and cheerful?

Not anymore. The Friday flotation of Chinese search engine Baidu has brought back the dot com boom days to the Nasdaq. The stock more than quadrupled by the end of play Friday, instantly creating the most valuable Internet company in China. The shares were priced at $27 but opened at $66 and then soared to $122.54.

And lets be honest, who had heard of Baidu until now?

The role call of mintedness:

Chief executive, 36-year-old Robin Li, now worth close to $1 billion, easily making him one of China’s richest entrepreneurs.

IDG, one of Baidu’s earliest investors, watched the stake it acquired for $1 million a few years ago jump to more than $150 million.

The 28 percent stake that Draper Fisher Jurvetson acquired over the last few years for about $12 million is now valued at close to $1 billion.

And why does this feel like 1999 all over again?

Because Baidu is a four-year-old company that had just $13 million in revenue last year and about $1.4 million in profit. The company is now valued at close to $4 billion. For “Internet”, substitute the world China – and no doubt any Chinese tech related venture over the next 6 – 12 months will get the same treatment….