Not to continue beating a dead horse, or to steal Patrick’s thunder by continuing to rift on the fading glory that is the Newspaper, but there’s been a pretty interesting experiment that’s being going on across the pond that has the potential to change the way we access news online. I’m talking about The Times’ (of London) institution of a pay-for-content scheme, or paywall.

As of July 2, 2010 only The Times’ homepage is available to the public. Attempting to click through to any full story results in an automatic redirect to the registration screen shown above. Current costs are £1 for a daily pass or for a trial month’s worth of access, and could potentially go up over time. Continue Reading →

Q&A is our chance to get inside the head of some of our industry’s movers and shakers. In this installment, I interview Kyle Smitley, founder of environmentally-friendly childrens clothing company barley&birch. Her designs can be seen on the children of celebrity moms like Jessica Alba and Sheryl Crow.

PM: So in the interest of full disclosure…you’re a perfect interview for what you’re doing with b&b, but it doesn’t hurt that we’ve known each other for a long time. (Kyle and I are from the same small town in rural Ohio.) Do you want to sort of start out with the Reader’s Digest version of your background and what you’ve been up to in the time leading up to starting b&b?

KS: Well, I graduated from DePauw University with degrees in Philosophy and Environmental Geoscience and minors in Spanish and Chemistry. While there I was lucky enough to travel the world and work with a lot of great organizations helping others. After graduation, I took the LSAT while working in Washington D.C. and then got out to San Diego, where I surfed all day and dreamed up a business where I sold childrens clothing in order to fund the dozens of good causes with which I’d worked in Haiti and Central America.

The business was born as barley&birch and we opened our doors in February of 2009, in some of the darkest moments of the recession and right int he middle of my first year of law school. We had no money whatsoever, so we worked hard to get all the free press we could. I didn’t sleep for about 8 months of my life, I believe.

In November, I was named one of Inc. Magazines Top 30 Under 30, and by our first anniversary, we were selling in 30 retail stores, moving into larger office space, and revamping the website we’d quickly outgrown. We have funded 3 schools and a clinic in Haiti and El Salvador. We hope to see upwards of $1.5million in sales for 2010. We will be announcing a plethora of great partnerships and undertakings.

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As someone who has grown up using the internet, I always favor services that allow me to conduct business over the web. I do things like shop, pay bills, and bank online whenever possible. In addition to being convenient, I always feel a little better about not wasting paper and other resources required to facilitate these processes. So each year at this time, I’m always grateful for the ability to file my taxes online. And to do this, I’ve always used H&R Block…. that is until this year.
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At Manning, we spend a lot of time trying to help our clients understand and navigate the rapidly changing media environment. Often times, this means encouraging them to take advantage of the explosion of ‘social media’. (I’m so sick of this term) The internet allows businesses and organizations to communicate in ways never before possible and to interact directly with their users, customers, etc. The benefits of this should be obvious. But convincing a business to throw out generations of conventional wisdom in favor of new models of customer service, marketing and PR can be an uphill battle.

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My wife met a friend for dinner last night. She had a nice time catching up; until the check came. While trying to settle the bill, my wife realized that her wallet was missing, along with her ID, bank card and a couple of credit cards. Within an hour someone had picked up a nice new TV from a big box electronics retailer. This triggered frantic calls to a number of financial institutions. Sometime during the process of canceling the bank card a few hundred dollars (!) in merchandise was acquired from a drug store (that had to be liquor, right?)
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Companies gathering information from consumers on the Internet need to be upfront about how they will use that content. There is a shocking story in the Thursday March 26th New York Times about how one site, www.realage.com is really passing on consumer’s information to drug companies that turn around and market information about their products who might have a specific condition. The practice raises serious privacy issues in part because the site’s privacy policy does not specifically mention the firm’s relationship with drug companies, and consumers are sent information about drug treatment options before they may have even been diagnosed by a physician. It is certainly proper for companies to request information from consumers or customers. Those that are upfront about the use of information, and don’t sell it to third parties, will not maintain their integrity, they will earn their customer’s trust and business.

CBS Sports has enhanced their NCAA March Madness on Demand site by offering third party sites access to free applications that feed live scores and other information from games.

Additionally, the NCAA March Madness Developer site offers a selection of widgets that are more sophisticated than ever including applications dedicated to brackets, live scoring, and news on each of the Division I Men’s Basketball Programs. So, for example, we can feature this widget on our blog (just don’t tell our boss Doug, the die-hard hockey fan).

You can also provide a link to see games like Michigan vs. Clemson (Thursday at 6:10 p.m. CT) for free online in HD using Microsoft’s Silverlight player.  However, you’ll want to have Silverlight pre-installed, de-activate any pop-up blockers and in this case be a Wolverine fan.

CBS has said that they anticipate a 30% increase in ad revenue from their March Madness site this year reaching nearly $30 million.  Last year was the first that all games were available via the on demand site and revenue jumped 130%.

Once again the creative forces behind Monty Python’s Flying Circus proved themselves innovators.  Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars suing people for sharing their ground-breaking comedy online, they decided to beat them at their own game.  They created a Monty Python YouTube channel with high quality versions of their movie and TV work available for free!

And now for something completely different: their DVD sales on Amazon.com went up 23,000%!  That’s not a typo.  23,000%!  So the group has proven that instead of being bitter about new technology maybe it is better to always look on the bright side of life.