The 15 remarkable things that appeared on Enrico Lanfranchi's radar
Enrico Lanfranchi comes from a long experience in digital publishing where he conceived and edited pioneering and avant-garde products. Today he is one of the greatest connoisseurs of the experience and evolution of new media in publishing. His list of the most significant events of the month can be a radar with which to navigate within a media sector that is in a phase of radical transformation full of difficulties, uncertainties, but also of opportunities both for those who already have consolidated positions on the market and for those approaching it with the idea of staying there. Below is the hit parade of these two very hot summer months of 2015.
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1. Telecom Italia, through Telecom Italia Digital Solutions, has acquired the company Alfabook (from the Hoplo Group)
The operation allows the Telecom Italia Group to make use of the skills acquired by Alfabook through the proprietary website Schoolbook.it. In fact, Telecom Italia's new Digital School Kit offer includes the Scuolabook Network platform, which allows the integration and production of editorial content also in SGC (Self Generated Content) logic. The Scuolabook Network digital teaching solution was also adopted as part of the Scuola Expo Project, created in partnership with Telecom Italia. The collaboration with Alfabook is completed with the TIMYoungCollege offer, aimed at students, which includes a bonus for the purchase of school books and manuals in digital format.
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2. Economic exploitation and payment of royalties on editorial and journalistic information by the large digital giants
In 2015 for video media:
Netflix (viewing movies and TV series from the web) will pay about 3 billion dollars in taxes and licenses to the television and film industry;
Hulu (cable and web television network) will pay 192 million license for the series alone South Park;
Spotify will give 70 percent of its revenue to the music labels that own the rights to the catalog of songs.
For the non-film and television publishing industry:
Facebook has managed to sign FREE, no-royalty deals with The New York Times, Buzzfeed, and The Atlantic to publish their articles through its new Instant Articles feature.
The same kind of free deal was signed by Apple News, Snapchat Discover and from a new and upcoming feature of Google.
Publishers used digital information as “a kind of experiment, advancing because others did” and because they “couldn't afford not to advance”, acting more and more hastily because they didn't understand the technology. The end result was catastrophic, slaughterhouse; an ultimate scenario where new digital publishers are a fraction of their analog size.” In the world of video media “the licensees of sporting events, television programmes, films and even songs. Sports, television and film have had to change their arrangements very little, disavowing the idea that this content could be provided for free.”
It should be emphasized that Apple has initiated the creation of its own journalistic editorial staff for the creation and direct exploitation of information, replacing the publishers.
The sheet | Linkiesta
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3. Kindle Textbook Creator (Beta)
Amazon has released a tool to convert a pdf or Microsfot Word file into a file that can be read on the Kindle family of e-readers and mobile applications. It is a tool designed above all for textbooks that have graphic and layout complexities that cannot be reproduced with the standard mobi and epub formats.
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4. The Fire burned out: failure of the Amazon smartphone with 4 cameras
According to the "Wall Street Journal", Amazon is giving up on continuing the project related to the creation and development of the Fire smartphone with 4 cameras, launched in July 2014: the poor commercial results have prompted the closure of the search sector.
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5. At Pepoli digital and self-produced books Crowdfunding takes care of financing them
Claudia Balbi in the "Corriere della Sera" (Bologna) reports the project of Archilabò, a social cooperative engaged in teaching children with Dsa, for the Carlo Pepoli middle schools: the publication of digital textbooks created in the classroom by children ( via iPad or computer) with the supervision of professors. Each paragraph is written from lesson to lesson until, over the course of the school year, a book is created which will then be put online and distributed free of charge. The first ebook that will be created will be on Geography, under the guidance of prof. Gabriele Benassi and will be inspired by the principles of Life Long Learning. Seventy-seven private entities made donations on Telecom's online crowdfunding platform "WithYouWeDo", raising 35.353 euros.
Corriere della Sera
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6. Mobile marketing in Italian companies
The 2015 Report of the School of Management Observatory of the Milan Polytechnic analyzes the sectors with the best performances and the most effective strategies in the use of mobile phones and smartphones. In 2014 there was a great growth in the market: in Italy more than 15 million people connect to the Internet from smartphones, and if we also consider tablets, the figure reaches 16,4 million. Italians spend more time surfing from smartphones than from PCs (90 minutes against 70). Among young people up to the age of 24, this rises to two hours a day of navigation from a smartphone, now also used in the purchasing process.
Among companies, the evolution towards mobile is different according to the sectors: excellent strategic degree in physical stores with the strengthening of the point of sale, of the relationship with customers. The food industry is still lagging behind: in large-scale consumption the situation is heterogeneous but awareness of mobile as a channel for identifying customers and getting to know the consumer is growing. The approach is strategically advanced in financial companies and in the automotive sector. Among Media & Entertainment companies, mobile is considered strategic for direct sales, customer acquisition, knowledge and loyalty, but work is still being done on user experience and the offer of services.
To know more.
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7. The growth of private schools in developing countries
Referring to an article in the "Economist", De Mauro recognizes that private schools in the network BridgeInternationalAcademies, especially thanks to the use of good quality educational material in digital format on tablets, are growing significantly in developing countries and are performing an important public function. The strengths of these digital resources are the standardized character and the low cost.
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8. The smartphone will replace eReaders
The smartphone will supplant eReaders as an ebook reading tool. Sales of devices are down but ebook readers are on the rise: in 2013 they were 1,9 million (+18,9% on the previous year), according to data from the latest report by the Italian Publishers Association. The digital portion of the publishing market is also growing: +16% from 2012 to 2013. In this regard, Nielsen, while confirming the primacy of eReaders on the digital reading market, records that 54% of those who buy ebooks declare they have them read, at least once, from the phone. With larger screen sizes - a goal to which manufacturers are applying themselves - the smartphone has in fact a much greater reading potential than the tablet and can respond to the needs of a larger share of the market.
The print.
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9. ABA English course with film, vocabulary and grammar for iPhone
Learn English by ABA English is an app available on the App Store of the American & British Academy: its peculiarity is in the learning method, based on videos that reproduce real situations and dialogues from everyday life. A method, therefore, stimulating and at the same time flexible and adaptable to the most diverse needs.
When first viewed, the videos have Italian subtitles, exercises are then proposed to repeat the sentences and the comparison with the pronunciation of the protagonists, finally it is possible to replace one of the characters. As a last step there are the actual lessons: always starting from the dialogues of the film, grammatical-syntactic rules (linked, for example, to the verbs) or lexical reflections (linked to the words used) are focused. Each unit closes with a check.
The methodology of ABA English therefore allows you to learn English in the natural order and effortlessly, starting with oral comprehension and production and then moving on to written production and grammatical knowledge. The grammar is also proposed in video format and is explained by the ABA English teachers.
At the beginning of one's learning path, the person chooses a level, ranging from basic to very advanced. The first lesson, which includes a film and concludes with a test, is completely free and allows you to test the ABA English learning methodology. If you want to continue, you need to take out a small subscription that allows you to access exclusive content at affordable prices: in fact, it is possible to have an English teacher available for any clarification. A certificate is issued at the end of the course.
The app can be downloaded directly from the App Store. Learnl'English - ABAEnglish, course with film, vocabulary and grammar (AppStore Link).
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10. Publishing, "New York Times" record, digital subscribers over 1 million
The New York Times' transition to digital is paying off. The prestigious daily said it surpassed one million online subscribers for the first time on July 30. The 'pay wall' was officially launched on March 28, 2011. Online subscribers are joined by those who pay to receive the paper edition of the newspaper and who have free access to the website (there are 1,1 million). In reality, information sales strategies make it difficult to maintain margins in digital.
To know more.
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11. Google and Spanish publishers
The introduction, on January 1, 2015 in Spain, of the "Google Tax" for online news aggregators had disastrous results in the Iberian country, causing the total closure of aggregation sites as a reaction. Rather than pay a royalty to the publishers, the aggregators have in fact preferred to close the sites (Google News, Planeta Ludico, NiagaRank, InfoAliment and Multifriki have been closed).
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12. Are brands the new publishers?
In the Anglo-Saxon world we are witnessing editorial marketing phenomena by companies very distant from the cultural industry: Casper, a company that produces mattresses, has launched Van Winkle's, an online magazine dedicated to the culture of sleep, with an editorial cut halfway between lifestyle and scientific study, with a splash of technology here and there. The former director of the "New York Observer", Elizabeth Spiers, and other well-known American journalists lead the magazine. The creation and direct exploitation of information has also prompted Apple to create its own newsroom.
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13. Research by the Ovum institute on the future of publishing
"Digital dominates the scene, but for publishing in 2020 print will continue to be the main source of income": this is the title that summarizes the results of the analysis carried out by Charlotte Miller on the data contained in the 'Digital Consumer Publishing Forecast' , published by the Ovum Research Institute.
At the aggregate level, combining the earnings from newspapers, books and magazines in more than 50 markets worldwide, it is estimated that in 2020 only 24% of profits will come from digital, starting from the current 14%, with annual growth by 13% which will reach 74 billion dollars in 2020, starting from 41 in 2015.
The increase in profits deriving from digital should in turn concern books more than newspapers and magazines, as shown by the graphs reported on The media briefing.
