TLTR

There are many websites that aggregate news and other cultural stuff from around the globe and either feed it to you in magazine format or give you bite-sized bits or headlines and let you then click through to the original source to read the full text and look at the pretty pictures.  An example of the latter would be skimfeed.com, which sells itself, principally, as a tech news aggregator but covers other stuff too.  There are around 600 links on the Skimfeed homepage divided by source, of which there are, perhaps, 60. TF doesn’t know how many times a day/week the selection is refreshed but that’s still a ton of stuff. Source names you will know include The Guardian, BBC and Wired but there are plenty that will represent discovery to the uninitiated.  For longer form articles there’s Byliner ($9.99 a month) and what the blokes who started Twitter did next – Medium, which differs from Byliner in that all content is original and not aggregated from elsewhere and it’s free.  Neither Byliner nor medium are news sites as such but some of their articles, inevitably, feed off the news. At the trashier end of the spectrum even BuzzFeed.com is introducing longer form articles for those in need of more than female celebs with no make-up and hunks in trunks.

Each day Tech Fogey receives Media Post’s Mobile Marketing Daily and the CEA’s – the US-based Consumer Electronics Association – CEA Smart Brief.  It’s a supposedly manageable quantity of tech news aimed at, who? Industry nobs, perhaps, journalists certainly but mostly bloggers and other opinion formers.  If you read everything it’d take all day.  Like reading a newspaper.  Well, not The Sun, obviously, which was designed to be read, digested and expelled during a tea break but a posh paper like The Times.

With general interest media, we cherry-pick.  No one is going to be intrigued enough by every article in a newspaper to read the whole lot but when you’re a tech writer and you subscribe to news feeds about only technology, you sort-of feel obliged to plough through every link and every snippet and every long-winded puff piece about the latest phone that’s every-so-slightly-different from the last phone just in case you miss something but more often in case you miss something that, when seen as a whole alongside other stories, suggests a trend.

Tech Fogey isn’t a news site.  We could pretend to be.  God knows there’s enough mouthpieces out there convinced they have something really important to say. Right now, all news on whichever medium – TV, radio, online, print – is an aggregation of a constant avalanche from more sources – both on and off-line – than a sane person could count.  Much of it is crap and some is fiction (recently The Times thought a story they’d picked up from a French website about Qatar starting a football super league to include most of Europe’s top teams was true.  It was a spoof.  They were embarrassed), but obviously the real news is buried in there somewhere.

This is just as true with technology and consumer electronics.  Last week Facebook launched ‘Home’ for androidAn operating system for mobile devices developed by GoogleStarted life as a mere search engine; now hell bent on world domination. More PhDs work for Google than any other single organisation and they're determined to know everything about everyone. For some reason Google thinks this inside info will help them and their chums sell us more stuff.. It is now the principal competition to AppleFruit, record label, world dominator in the slick boy's toys department's iOS (i operating system). It has gone through several versions, all of which have been given wacky nicknames. The latest is known as Ice Cream Sandwich. Those Google geeks are sooo hilarious! mobile devices.  Apparently it’s ‘more than an appFrom Wikipedia: A mobile application (or mobile app) is a software application designed to run on smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile devices. They are usually available through application distribution platforms, which are typically operated by the owner of the mobile operating system, such as the Apple App Store, Google Play, Windows Phone Store and BlackBerryOld fruit. Smartphone, most often with qwerty keypad that can only be operated by those with the fingers of an anorexic pixie. Mostly a business device that's good for emails but not much else. A misser of many boats. App World. Some apps are free, while others must be bought. Usually, they are downloaded from the platform to a target device, such as an iPhoneCostly but beautiful smartphone made by Apple. The standard by which all other smartphones are judged., BlackBerry, Android phone or Windows Phone, but sometimes they can be downloaded to laptops or desktops. For apps with a price, generally a percentage, 20-30%, goes to the distribution provider (such as iTunes), and the rest goes to the producer of the app. The term "app" has become popular, and in 2010 was listed as "Word of the Year" by the American Dialect Society. In 2009, technology columnist David Pogue said that newer smartphones could be nicknamed "app phones" to distinguish them from earlier less-sophisticated smartphones’.  If you have a Facebook account and it rules your life then having Facebook as your default homepage on your smartphoneOpposite of dumbphone. Device with which which to do pretty much anything except make telephone calls. The best smartphone handsets, such as the Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy, are expensive (the iPhone 5 starts at £529) and to get a 'free' phone you have to commit to a 2 year contract. As we know, new phones come crashing onto the market all the time, so today's state-of-the-art handset will be seriously old hat long before that contract expires. might make sense.  Otherwise no one gives a shit.  Pasty-faced tech-dweebs were plonked in front of cameras to speculate, pre-launch, as to what this rival to the second coming might be.  You could have cut the tension with a trowel.

One thing’s for sure, the world seems to dangle like slobbering puppies on Mark Zuckerberg’s every utterance; billionaire as messianic sayer.  Zuckerberg doesn’t say much, so when he does decide to spout you’d better be listening.  The same is true of Messrs Brin and Page at Google and was of Steve Jobs whose product launches became events of paradoxical personality cult worship for reasons that remain unfathomable at Fogey Central.  Given that he tucked his sweater into his jeans you might imagine Jobs to have been a Fogey pin-up but, sartorially apathetic as we are, his was still a tuck too far.

But back to the news and the sources thereof. Here’s a few nuggets of info from one day of last week’s CEA Smart Brief and Mobile Marketing Daily:

In MMD, Steve Smith lauded the effect the now three-year-old iPad has had on TV viewing habits:

“I do want to carve out one slice of the tablet revolution for special note — TV. The portabil-izing of the TV experience principally by the tablet is going to be a milestone in the medium’s history. Yesterday, ABC announced that its Player app, which launched along with the iPad, has passed the 10 million download mark. While the company is less revealing about overall daily usage and such, it does boast that in all it has served 200 million episodes across all iOS and Android and Windows 8 devices. ABC just recently also launched the player onto Kindlee-reader developed by Amazon. The top-of-the-range Kindle Fire is a touchscreen tablet, not unlike an iPad, that costs significantly less than an iPad. Despite all the column inches devoted to e-readers and how they will take over the book business and destroy the demand for printed books, they are still nasty devices when compared with the aesthetic gorgeousness of a hardbacked book. Fire as well.”

You can read the whole thing here (fear not, it’s short).

The use of second-screens (iPad, smartphone, laptop) while watching TV is becoming increasingly common and has been much written about.  Want to know what music is playing during an episode of Mad Men?  ShazamFrom Wikipedia: Shazam is a mobile phone based music identification service. Shazam uses a mobile phone's built-in microphone to gather a brief sample of music being played. An acoustic fingerprint is created based on the sample, and is compared against a central database for a match. If a match is found, information such as the artist, song title, and album are relayed back to the user. it with your smartphone.  Shazam is even working on a ‘point and shop’ app that will do for clothes what its current app does for music.  Or was that an April Fool?   What car was Don Draper driving in that last scene?  Where can I buy one?  Betty’s earrings would look great on my wife, where can I get a pair?  It goes on and on.  Watching TV ceases being passive and becomes one humungous shopportunity.  In a perfect world this would mean the end to ad breaks and all the hectoring drivel that goes with them but it could also mean product placement – the shoe-horning of branded products into TV and movies – becomes the biggest money-maker in adland.  It’s pretty big already.  Skyfall used product placement to rake in $45 million, so covering a third of its production budget.  Watch HBO’s ‘Girls’ and it’s no accident that, impoverished as she supposedly is, Hannah is failing to write her novel on a slinky, expensive Macbook.  In 2010, Apple products featured in a third of the top 33 films of the year.

There’s a huge essay to written about product placement and second screen viewing habits and that’s just one aspect of the second screen phenomenon that wasn’t discussed in the one story about watching TV on tablets that flopped into our in-box this week.

Here are some more ‘stories’ from one edition of Mobile Marketing Daily.  To make life easier we’ve just cut and pasted the headlines.

• Facebook Home Rolls Out For Android
• eBay Rebrands Shopping.com To Build Ad Network
• JumptapEstablished in 2005, Jumptap, Inc. is the leading mobile audience targeting platform. Reaching 171 million mobile users in the U.S. and 269 million mobile users worldwide, Jumptap uses its extensive technology portfolio, as well as industry-first partnerships with more than 20 third-party data providers, to understand mobile audiences better than any other ad platform and provide intelligent targeting with scale. Through its large network of premium publishers and apps, constant campaign optimization and real-time bidding capabilities, Jumptap delivers the best ROI for advertisers and highest yield for publishers and developers. Jumptap has pioneered mobile advertising privacy standards and is committed to unlocking mobile opportunities for all parties through its ongoing industry research, such as its monthly MobileSTAT report. Visit http://www.jumptap.com/blog for more information; join our Facebook community, follow us on Twitter at @Jumptap and check out our latest ads at the Jumptap Ad Gallery. Grows Reach With RTBReal Time Bidding - "RTB, which allows brands to bid for individual online users’ ad impressions in real time, is reaping encouraging results for advertisers and, in the UK, it is forecast to account for 15-20% of display ad spend this year, up 3% from 2010 (source/ comScore)." If you're not in the advertising game, this will be of no consequence whatsoever. Platform
• Publishers Clearing House Ups Sweepstakes Appeal, Via Facebook Superfans
• Disney/ABC App Downloaded 10 Million Times
• Kia Taps PopSugarAccording to the 'about' section at popsugar.com... "POPSUGAR is where content and commerce collide.POPSUGAR delivers the biggest moments, the hottest trends and the best tips in entertainment, fashion, beauty, fitness, and food, and the ability to shop for it all, in one place. Founded in 2006 by Lisa and Brian Sugar, POPSUGAR is funded by Sequoia Capital and Institutional Venture Partners and has offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and London. POPSUGAR has over 20M users and growing. For Sorento
• 64% With Four Screens Likely To Use Social Media, TV
• Facebook’s New Mobile Software Raises Privacy Questions
• Beyond Retargeting: The Power Of Predictive Targeting

TF isn’t expecting any of this to mean much to a typical consumer, partly because that’s not who it’s aimed at.  Some of it makes a scintilla of sense to us but to discover whether it really is important in any real or imagined way we have to read and research.  Who or what is PopSugar?  What is ‘sweepstakes appeal?’ Who/what are Facebook Superfans and why are they important?  What is Jumptap?  What’s an RTB platform?  If our dictionary plug in is working properly just hover your pointer over the word or phrase and an explanation should appear.

According to MMD the following topics are most-read (we think that counts as ‘trending’) on their site:

1. Local Mobile Advertising Expected To Rocket To $9 billion by 2017

2. Path Sued For Sending Text Spam

3. eBay Rebrands Shopping.com To Build Ad Network

4. Live Video Viewing Tops VOD

5. U.S. Mobile Ad Market To Grow 77% To $7.3 billion

…and these are the stories that fit that same bill globally (well, if the globe is roughly the shape and size of the continental USA):

• Mobile Users “Glued” To Devices
• In Mobile, Target, Walmart and Best Buy Score
• Is Facebook “Home” A Privacy Killer?
• Baidu Develops Google-Like Glasses
• ESPN Shows Fast Mobile Growth
• BlackBerry Shutting Down BBM Music
• Why Retailers Should Move to Their Own Mobile Apps
• MLB Hiring Qualcom to Improve Mobile in Stadiums
• Fashion Brand Launches Website Leading to Mobile Commerce
• Luxury Retailers Use Wi-Fi to Enhance Mobile Shopper Experience

And all this is the output for one day…

MMD  is for the mobile marketing industry. Media Post has news feeds on its site that cover many other aspects of marketing.  Its remit is to provide insight and info to specific commercial sectors.  Read only this sort of news feed and it’s easy to assume all anyone cares about is, for example,  mobile phonery and the effect it has on the human condition.  We know, you probably don’t care about all this crap and we’re not saying you should but mobile comms is now the focus of almost everything in terms of technological innovation.  Someone has to pay and that someone will be you, whether you like it or not.  And the way you will pay is via being targeted by hucksters wanting to flog you something – anything.  Anyone who can cut down the odds against you buying something will have laid their own golden egg and will become very rich indeed.  Obviously there is a finite pile of disposable income out there which makes the scrum to grab some of it more feverishly competitive by the day.  And there’s no harm in mere punters knowing what’s coming their way and how it’s likely to come.  We are all, as a whole and as individuals, the focus of this marketing shit-storm after all.

Moving on, here are the headlines according to the CEA Smart Brief for 3^rd April:

• Google said to ready new Nexus tablet for summer
• Study: HDTV sets are in three-quarters of U.S. households
• Report: Apple to put new iPhone into gear this quarter
• LG will release Firefox-based smartphones this year
• Plug-in lets developers test mobile apps, deploy to the cloud
• Surge in mobile devices benefits online radio, social networks
• Best Buy calls off placing Geek Squad agents at 29 Target stores
• Kobo restarts direct sales of devices
• Microsoft begins discounting Windows RT tablets

Even though the CEA represents many brands across all consumer electronics platforms, of the nine stories above, seven are to do with mobile communications – smartphones, tablets, apps.  Read a few lines beyond each of these headlines and it could be surmised that:

• The Google Nexus tablets are already the most serious opposition to the iPad. Apple could/should introduce a cheaper iPad to compete.  Why pay a premium for Apple when most commentators think the Nexus tablets are just as good and half the price?

• If consumers are buying more HDTVs what’s happening to all the old CRT TVs they’re replacing?  That’s one big mountain of junk TVs.

• Will the ‘new iPhone’ be a lower-cost handset that will plug the gap in Apple’s portfolio and appeal to consumers in developing markets?  Or will their strategy stay the same in the hope that public attitudes toward Apple remain likewise?

• Why is LG going with Firefox’s mobile OSOperating System. Windows, Apple's iOS and Linux, for example, are operating systems.?  Is it part of the fear that eventually Google will bias its Android OS more acutely toward its own Nexus devices, leaving other hardware manufacturers, such as LG and Samsung, to fight over other open source scraps?

• Talk of ‘The Cloud’ and apps that allow smartphones to access Internet radio lead to questions over available bandwidth.  Can mobile comms infrastructure cope with massive surges in traffic?

• And what about battery life in mobile devices?  More powerful batteries usually means more weight.  Where’s the sweet-spot between a smartphone or tablet that isn’t always out of juice but doesn’t induce RSI?

• If China is the only country with the natural resources and sufficiently low labour costs to mine and process the rare earth metals necessary for production of Lithium-ion batteries used in mobile phones and electric cars doesn’t that put them in a too-powerful bargaining position?  Can countries, such as the US, which have deposits of rare earth metals, mine and process them cheaply enough to not be reliant on China?  Who will take the risk to help the Bolivian government provide the infrastructure necessary to extract half the world’s Lithium that sits, relatively undisturbed, in Bolivia’s fabulously inaccessible Uyuni salt flats?

• Nobody’s buying Microsoft’s Surface tablet.  And the Microsoft/Nokia Lumia smartphones aren’t exactly flying off the shelves either. Trying times at Mountain View.  What the f**k can they do about it?

Questions, questions.

The geeks who make the tech toys so many of us now play with, likely started by thinking, ‘What if?’ or ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if…?’  Tech Fogey’s enquiry is more, ‘What happens next?’  We’re curious as to consequences and implications.  Eventually all the information we gather and try to filter and process morphs into a tech-stew, over-salted and with too many ingredients.  And having begun with the best of intentions we end up with a confusion that neither tastes nor looks particularly appealing.  Which is a pity, because inasmuch as we’re fond of our grub, we’re slightly enchanted by ever-so-clever gizmos.

By not-so-spooky coincidence, “The CEA and the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. have announced a technical “CRT Challenge” to identify financially viable, environmentally-conscious proposals for using recycled cathode ray tube (CRT) glass.”

“The CRT challenge is a crowd-sourced technical competition to find new uses for old CRT glass,” said Walter Alcorn, vice president of environmental affairs and industry sustainability, CEA. “The consumer electronics industry is fully committed to eCycling and this CRT challenge has the potential to uncover new, innovative electronics recycling.”

“CEA and ISRI will accept submissions for the CRT Challenge until June 30, 2013, at innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9933317. The winning solution will be chosen based on economic and environmental benefits, and CEA will award $10,000 to the winner.”

The cynic in us takes this to mean that the TV industries didn’t give a shit about the longer-term implications of badgering us all to switch from CRT TVs to flat screen plasma, LED or LCD TVs.  So much so that the strategy, only now being implemented, is to throw the solution open to the ‘crowd’ because the industry has no idea what to do with all those redundant TVs that are piled up in US scrap yards.  It’s a bit like the ‘plan’ for Iraq after getting rid of Saddam Hussein.  On the face of it, there wasn’t one but we barreled in there, guns blazing, anyway.  Maybe NATO could crowd-source a solution to that.

Anyway, we’ve waffled and digressed quite enough for one day.  Conclusions?  There’s lots of crap to wade through to get at the nub of real news.  So-called ‘trusted sources’ – whether individuals or publications – will become increasingly important.  Given that there’s soooo much noise-news it would all too easy to opt out entirely and that may be what many Fogies do.  It’s certainly tempting.  We also suspect that, if you aren’t welded, unconditionally and unquestioningly, to social media as an end in itself this deluge of ‘news’ and information might lead to subconscious self-enquiry about what’s really important and what deserves to have a shit given about it.  For all his online ubiquity and famous love of gadgets and gizmos, Stephen Fry doesn’t tweet about them that often.  Hardly at all in fact.  We should all be so discerning.

If you’ve got this far, it wasn’t TLTR.