A debate is raging online at the moment over the future of the internet and whether ‘the Web is dead’.

An (American) illustration of this is:

“You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web.”  Wired.com

The gist of the debate is that the % of total internet data traffic that is for websites is steadily falling. At the same time, the rise of smart phones, tablet computers, E Book readers, digital media etc, means that more and more people are using ‘apps’ that access the internet, without you having to actually look at a website.

For example, ITunes is a software on your PC. You use it to search online stores and download music and podcasts. You need an internet connection, but not a web browser. All the twitter client software are another example. So are Skype, chat software, multi player online gaming and peer to peer file transfers.

So is almost anything that runs on my phone. Accessing Facebook through the phone’s web browser is awkward. Using the Facebook app is much easier.

The reason for such a passionate debate is that this move represents a fundamental shift from open to closed. The web is ‘open’. Anyone can start a website, and write what they want on it. they can link to other people and they can be searched for in Google. Anyone can go online and find this website, and link to it.

Platforms like Facebook or ITunes are ‘closed’. They both have terms of service. You need to fill forms and agree to their conditions before you can interact with them. Apple has the final right of approval over anything that goes on ITunes, and they reject lots of stuff all the time.

Morgan Stanley is estimating that within 5 years, more people will access the internet from mobile devices than from computers. The lack of a regular mouse, keyboard, and nice big screen all make web browsing a bit painful, so it’s likely that most of this internet access will be through applications.

In western countries, I can attribute much of this debate to rich geeks who live from iPod to ipad to Kindle to iphone. In India, however, I have a different take on this.

Most Indians, at present, do not use the internet at all. Of those that do, the richest have their own computers/smartphones, and the rest use internet cafes.

Now, look at the history of phones in India. Many Indians, especially in rural areas, have simply skipped landline phones and taken up mobile phones instead. Cheap but functional mobile phones, with cheap call packages, and now cheap data packages.

The nature of the phone is starting to change. Local phone makers like Karbonn, or Micromax are selling budget smart phones at a fraction of the cost of the high end gadgets we currently think of as smartphones (iphones etc). Typically these phones have a few built in apps, email, web, music, camera etc and a larger, colour screen. Gradually, these sort of features will become cheaper, and more common, until they become standard.

For internet access, these smart phones offer many advantages over a regular computer and internet connection, especially in rural areas. Vastly cheaper, relatively unaffected by power cuts, or home cabling problems, portable, multifunctional (music, camera, phone, sms).

Are cheap smart phones the future of mass internet access in India?

Currently somewhere between 50 and 80 million Indians have Internet access, with about half of these people using the internet from home or work. The rest are in cyber cafes or ‘other’ access points.

Compare this to mobile phones. Currently India has just over 500 million phones in use, and this number is growing monthly. India is tipped to be the largest mobile marketing in the world by 2013 with 1.159 billion subscribers.

Of the current users however, If even 1/4 of these users switched to a smart phone (here I am talking about a phone with data access, and a large enough screen to make for a reasonable online experience), then India could double its online population. Considering that mobile connections are growing so much faster than home internet connections, maybe this is a realistic outlook.

Perhaps businesses should be looking and planning more aggressively in this direction. Most corporate websites are pretty useless even on a high-end smartphone. Corporate Facebook pages work much better, thanks to the Facebook app. Not many companies have yet created mobile versions of their websites, and for those that have, the information available is generally pretty limited.

Many companies could create simple apps that could be easily incorporated onto low-end phones but could allow easy service delivery, such as bill payment, mobile banking, ticket booking (trains, planes, taxis), live timetables, news, exam results, film and TV reviews, or branded games.

There is huge potential for entertainment companies to  deliver content through native apps that are built into these cheap phones, and special data packages can be created to allow free downloads, that are subsidised through advertising or branded content.

If you’ve been following the media news lately, you probably heard about the new “Ultraviolet” program that is under development. In essence, a large group of media companies (supposedly 58) , including NBC, Comcast, Lion Gates, Universal, Sony Pictures, and Microsoft, are working on a single version of copy protection for digital content that would allow you to manage the content online and access it from multiple devices.

Amit Khanna, the chairman of Reliance Entertainment, calls this “Round Casting”. He gives the example that you can drive in your car listening to music. As soon as you get out of your car, the same music should start playing on your iPod. To continue his example, when you reach your desk, the same music should then play from your computer. There is a good chance that all this music is being streamed straight on the net, rather than being stored on each device.

There are a couple of different ways that the Ultraviolet system could pan out:

1. You pay monthly subscriptions to access lots of stuff. All the companies involved pool together their content and you can access it all on any device. I’m sure there would be levels of access, with basic and premium subscriptions. This path means that we never actually buy media, we just access it.

2. We still buy songs/movies etc, but they are optimized to work across multiple devices easily, and if you delete them, it is easy to download the same content again. This also gives the option of sharing your purchases with friends, exactly as if you are loaning them a book or CD. Your friend accesses your media from your online library, and while it is checked out to them, you can’t access it.

Another concept that Amit Khanna has spoken about is the idea of creating different versions of the same content, designed for different devises. Right now there are film companies that are offering edited down versions of their films for viewing on a mobile phone. What if those mobile phone versions had actually been planned right from the script/production stage? Small screens require more close up shots for example. A film could be storyboarded and then shot for multiple devices. If I watch a film on my phone and love it, then I might choose to also get the larger screen version for my TV, much as successful films today release Director’s Cuts on DVD that differ from the original.

Ebooks are starting to approach a tipping point of sorts. Well not in India, but internationally. US eBook sales last year crossed US$300 million. Dozens of established, and new, electronics firms are bring out all sorts of readers. Several US colleges are experimenting with proving students with readers on which to carry all their textbooks and reading materials.

The results from the college tests have been mixed. Students loved them for reading in advance of class, but during class, or even intensive study, the readers were too slow and unwieldy to be used for quickly jumping though books, taking notes, and following multiple books at once.

These issues are really just user-interface problems however, and will all be ironed out in time. I don’t know anyone who has owned and used an eBook reader, who says they would give up all the convenience and features to return to the feel of ‘real’ paper books.

Here’s the one thing that bugs me however. The pricing of ebooks. As an example, i was looking on Amazon for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

The kindle ebook edition was for $11.99

The hardcover was $11.92

How does the ebook, come to cost more than the hardcover?

Think of everything that goes into the sale of a hardcover book: the paper, the printing costs, the binding costs, the transportation costs. Even the cost of damaged or otherwise unsold copies that end up as trash.

Then think of that ebook. none of those costs. (I’m ignoring retailer margins in all this)

Now i know, that pricing really has nothing to do with costs. And, that they can sell their ebook for as much or as little as they feel like. But to me, it somehow feels unfair. Especially given that you might not actually own the ebook, just have a licence to read it, that can always be revoked.

Buying a cd single used to cost, what? around $5. For a main track and a couple of remixes. Now on iTunes you can get the track for $0.99. I know the market conditions are completely different in everyway (ubiquity of mp3 players embedded in almost every bit of entertainment/communications technology, lack of proprietary formatting meaning that people will just copy it if it costs too much) but this sort of pricing still seems fair.

I think for now I’m happy to wait until both the readers, and the books, become cheaper

Newspapers around the world are dying. Fast. There are now multiple websites that focus on documenting this, including http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/ and http://graphicdesignr.net/papercuts/ .

Developing and populous countries are the obvious exception. From 1999 – 2004, while newspaper circulation shrunk across the USA, Europe and Japan, China’s circulation grew by 35.69% and India’s by 23.21%. In the same time period, newspaper ad revenue grew by 87% and 36% in China and India, respectively, according to AP.

The Indian newspaper industry is quite safe for the next decade at least. Growing population, increasing literacy, even a willingness to share a newspaper between multiple people which further increases the exposure for advertisers, coupled with poor computer literacy, low computer ownership, and limited internet availability, all adds up to a healthy printed news industry.

Distribution costs are currently quite low and many newspapers have no problem with giving their entire front page to advertisers, or even taking part ownership in advertisers in exchange for ad space, all of which increases ad revenue and decreases the need for subscription revenue. Hence 2-5 rupee newspaper prices.

Internationally, things are very different, and events there bear understanding in case the Indian scenario changes faster than expected. The quest for newspapers now, is how to monetize their online content?

Initially, as websites became popular, newspapers just replicated their printed content, online, for free, for the small number of people who wanted to read it there. This small number of time-conscious, tech-savvy, early adopters were probably quite easy to target for online advertising. The problem is that the number of online readers grew and grew.

As the number of readers grew, news aggregator sites became popular. These sites collect news from everywhere, paying nothing, and combine news from many sources on one page, adding their own advertising for revenue. This is great for the reader, but doesn’t help the advertiser much. Even when visitors do stop by your actual webpage, measurement is difficult. In India, multiple people might use in internet computer to access a news site, but it will appear to be a single viewer returning multiple times. Advertisers now want to know how ‘engaged’ the viewer is. Not just what did they click and how long did they read for, but what else they did on the site.

Many newspapers are grappling with the concept of ‘pay walls’ – only displaying their articles to paying readers. The dilemma they face is that if they try to make readers pay, what if they all go somewhere else?

According to a Pew study, the behaviour of American internet users is as follows:

Pretty dire outlook for paid online news, it seems.

There has already been plenty of buzz about this little freeware gem, but i am reminded almost daily how useful it is, and most people that i mention it to, haven’t heard about it.

Basically, if you have gmail, this replaces the ads on the side of your screen with information about the person sending you the email. The information is gleaned from their social media pages, so you normally get a photo, their current and maybe previous job titles, company, city, maybe a note about who they are… other bits and pieces. There are also links to their social media sites – linkedin, twitter etc.

http://rapportive.com/

Such a simple idea, and so effective.

Enjoy

From Marketing Charts and ComScore:

People accessing Facebook from a mobile phone:

Jan 09 – 11.8 million. Jan 10 – 25.1 million. 112% growth

People accessing Twitter from a mobile phone:

Jan 09 – 1.05 million. Jan 10 – 4.7 million. 347% growth

Percentage of phone users accessing social media from a mobile phone:

Jan 09 – 16.5%. Jan 10 – 11.1%.

Percentage of mobile social networking activity by age range:

13-to-17-year-olds – 7%
18-to-24-year-olds – 16%
25-to-34-year-olds – 34%
35-to-54-year-olds – 36%
ages 55 and up – 7%

This one is just looking at Americans:

American’s viewed 32.4 billion online videos in January 2010. That’s about an average of 105 videos for every person in the country!

Great compilation of free website tools for anyone who is working on a website, whether personal or business.

I find that so often in India, websites suffer from one of the following:

- someone has let a designer loose on the site, resulting in a heavy flashy site with no consideration for search engine optimisation.

- No one has performed any sort of usability testing. Outside India, any company I have worked with, even small organizations, has done some sort of testing before putting a website online. This can just be sending a link to a small group of customers and asking for their feedback, or visiting them at their offices and asking them to use the site while you watch. Within India, the structure and design of a site are often a management decision, perhaps made by just one manager based on what they ‘feel’ is best.

- As companies have grown in the booming economy, their websites have sprawled. New pages and sections have been added without anyone stepping back to look at the overall site.

This set of tools can help you get an idea of your site, from the readers viewpoint. You can see how fast your site loads, simulate how the readers eys will move over your page, survey your site visitors and test out different page designs. And thats just for starters!

Enjoy the tools here at grokdotcom.