DD. Here is an interesting article from World Telemedia magazine, just out. The article is not available on the web, so I scanned it for you from the print magazine.
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Content is no good unless you can find it. Paul Dunone finds some new ways to discover content.
World Telemedia magazine, Spring 2006 issue
One of the key things about content is finding it. There is also the issue of how to make different media work together to give the richest experience for the user. Well from France comes an interesting development.
How would you like to be reading the sports pages of the daily paper and then get to see that Robbie Fowler winning goal? Well, soon you will be able to - well if you read Le Figaro while sipping an espresso while eating a croque madame in a Parisian cafe you will.
French company Abaxia has come up with a system that uses a sort of advanced barcode reader to scan specially designed barcodes with a mobile phone camera and use that input to automatically connected the user to the content site and show them stuff.
The idea is that you put the barcode next to whatever it is you want to del iver extra content around and users, who have downloaded a simple application to the handset, just point their camera at it and the process automatically sorts itself out - you don't even have to click the camera, says Christian Favre, COO and executive VP of business development at Abaxia.
The key areas that the company is looking to get this going in are videos and video on demand services, sports and media and tie up with anything that can be sold to a phone.
The example of augmenting the content of Le Figaro with mobile is an interesting one. It certainly is an untried area where the reading of the paper and the using of the mobile phone are combined in to one truly multi-media activity: whether anyone will want to do it or not is another matter.
What is particularly interesting about it is teen magazine Cosmo Girl in the US has already identified the publication, the web and the mobile as three legs of the great media tripod and has, for same months, being working on ways of combining the reading experience with online and mobile services, each designed to augment the others and each tailored to how the reader uses these three very different, but interconnected services.
The main thrust seems to be to link advertorials in the magazine
with free mobile content downloads, but increasingly the publishers are using the mobile element to mount voting campaigns and the like for products, services or personalities that are then published online and/or in the magazine. One particular favourite was using mobile to rate certain cosmetic products then run a feature on what the readers' favourites were.
The key thing here is that it builds loyalty and bur in to the products by the readers, which is invaluable in 50 many ways.
These new developments in content discovery - and I use term
carefully, because I feel these fall outside the usual areas of discovery as they are sort of pushed on the user through other media - are an interesting development. They change how people read the paper. They change what you look upon as mobile content; They also change how people interact with a brand. They also seem to only offer free stuff at the moment, but I am sure that ante proven all that will change.
Another area of content discovery that is taking off is that of local search. A sort of combination of location based services and mobile search, local search offers users the chance to wirelessly search a massive data base run by M:Spatial that gives the m access to content suited to either where they are, or where they are going to be. Say you are going to travel from London to Leeds tomorrow and you want to find a curry house to eat in tomorrow night? You get the picture.
