Wattpad: Brilliant insight? Luckly? Or...what?

It should be stating the obvious that there has been a tight connection between technology and the media. It goes back to Gutenberg and his moveable type, starting the process of replacing scribes; the steam driven rotary press lowering the costs and thus expanding the reach of the media; motion pictures, to radio and then television broadcasting then satellites further lowering the cost of distribution and now the Internet, disinter-mediating both downstream (from creator to user) and upstream content flows.

Social networking is really about the confluence of upstream and downstream communication: It's not just about others telling us something but us being able to respond in near real time--or much later. Unlike the telephone, the process is in documentary form. That is, it is archival.

All this is preamble to yet another innovative media model that has been technology enabled. I am referring to the new story telling platforms, of which Wattpad may be the most popular. With this, writing of fiction, heretofore thought of as perhaps the most solitary form of writing is being transformed into an activity nearly the opposite. An article in the New York Times earlier this year indicated that fiction writing can become social, informal and intimate, "with the results not only consumed but often composed on the fly."

Wattspad claims to have 2 million writers producing 100,000 pieces of material a day for 20 million readers around the world. While some pessimists are already lamenting that this will be the end of the novel, Charles Melcher, a publishing consultant contends that the novel is "simply evolving."

It's only deep in the article that the author tells us about the founding and evolution of Wattpad:

Wattpad might seem an overnight success, but it struggled for years to break through. Mr. Lau and Ivan Yuen were Canadian tech entrepreneurs interested in mobile reading. They released an app in 2006, but this was before the Kindle and the iPhone, and it struggled to gain momentum. Adding 17,000 public domain books did not do much. But then writers began to post original works, and the site caught the mobile wave.

What is your take-away from this story--about the business as opposed to the future of the novel? What is--or could be--its business model?

Why don't we see Japanese brand cell phones here?

There are numerous instances where having the most technologically advanced product is not necessarily advisable. And if that product is also out of step with prevailing standards, more trouble may lay ahead.

There is the common wisdom assumption that “if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” But Japanese mobile phone manufacturers, so successful in many endeavors, have found that their formula doesn't always work, as pointed out in a 2009 article in The New York Times. Its observations remain true today.

Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, NEC-- all successful manufacturers of consumer products worldwide, have had very little success in mobile phones outside their home market

“ ‘Japan is years ahead in any innovation. But it hasn’t been able to get business out of it,’ said Gerhard Fasol, president of the Tokyo-based IT consulting firm, Eurotechnology Japan.

“Indeed, Japanese makers thought they had positioned themselves to dominate the age of digital data. But Japanese cell phone makers were a little too clever. The industry turned increasingly inward. In the 1990s, they set a standard for the second-generation network that was rejected everywhere else.

Someone has dubbed the plight of Japanese cell phone industry the Galápagos syndrome. Why? Japan’s cell phones are like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on those isolated islands — fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins.

You might think the lack of global success by the big name players would suggest an opportunity for entrepreneurs to fill that role. I regularly point out to students that the elephants are often too far from the ground to see what is obvious to the ants. Why haven’t we seen advanced hardware designs for mobile phones achieve greater success outside Japan?

Is the Market Ready for Video Tweets?

Do we need a video version of Twitter? Start-up Vsnap hopes so. It is described as an app for users to share video messages of 60 seconds or less.

The company was founded only last May by Claudia Santoro and David McLaughlin and is launching this week.  McLaughlin is a serial entrepreneur, having sold his previous start-up to PayPal. He comes from a film background, having written and directed On Broadway, an independent film that included cameos from Will Arnett and Amy Poehler.

Whether the market wants or needs personal videos ("Here's me in front of the Statue of Liberty") is the unknown. But then, who would have guessed that 140-character "blog" posts would catch on? Nor does Vsnap have a business model yet. It is clearly the case of where the technology--having video cameras on every SmartPhone and SmartPhones are in 43% of the pockets of American adults (13 and older)--has created a possible opportunity that was just not there even two or three years ago.

Inkling Targets E-book Publishing

New technologies create new opportunities, even in the staid old world of book publishing. The start-up Inkling grew out of the observation of how clumsy and inefficient it had been to produce a book, even one which was destined for a digital format. But it has gone further, by easing the way to adding multimedia to books being produced for the iPad. The founder describes it as an “infrastructure for producing digital content at scale.” The business model is to make the software available at no charge but to require the e-book be available through Inkling’s own online store and to the  take the same 30% that iTunes takes of book sales. However, the author or publisher is also free to make the book available elsewhere as well.

Does this sound like a winner?

Ad Manager's Job Leads to Founding a Magazine

The idea for a new media venture -- or any venture--very often grows out of the opportunity noticed in the course of other work. And not every new media start-up these days has to be a dot com. Boston Spirit is a 20,000 circulation magazine--mostly home delivered subscriptions--for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities in New England. In an interview in the Boston Globe, David Zimmerman, the straight founder and publisher of Boston Spirit, explains that he got the idea for the magazine when he was director of advertising for travel and wedding magazines. "I got the idea that, boy, if somebody ever did a a magazine like Boston Magazine--only entirely for the gay community--it would seem to be something that would work and be successful."

Apparently he was right.

Welcome to the Compaine's Entrepreneurship Blog

Welcome to the this blog. It is a  forum for posting links to articles, thoughts and analysis on just about any subject relevant to entrepreneurship: funding, opportunities, risk, success cases, failure stories and so on.

On writing posts for a blog, you could check out this from a site called Problogger. The same source also writes about optimum length for a post, though not everything in this and elsewhere are always relevant in our context, such as SEO (blog-speak for Search Engine Optimization). Do keep your posts limited to one thought or topic. If you want to discuss two topics, use two posts. Keep in mind that your audience is not me so much as the colleagues in the class.