Note 4, LG G3, and Vega Iron 2 will all be waterproof, says Korean media, G3 arriving in May

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How Independent Media Around The World Can Flourish

Independent media has historically faced an uphill slog. Before the Internet, organizations had to deal with printing costs and very limited distribution networks. Web 2.0 gave them new outlets, but did not necessarily help publications grow readership or attract sponsors.

As smartphone penetration rates around the world increase, however, and platforms like videos become more accessible for creators and viewers alike, independent publications now have fresh opportunities to change the news industry.

Marcus Brauchli and Sasa Vucinic are two media veterans who believe in the potential of independent publications around the world. Brauchli’s background includes top editing positions at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, while Vucinic helped launch the non-profit Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) and is also the founder and CEO of Indie Voices, a crowdfunding site for media projects around the world. I spoke to them last week at the Taipei offices of The News Lens, where they are angel investors as well as advisors.

The two plan to find more independent media organizations throughout the world that combine strong perspectives with solid business models.

Though they don’t plan to focus exclusively on digital publications or startups, Brauchli and Vucinic are especially keen on media companies that have figured out how to use technology to scale up quickly without having to sacrifice their editorial integrity and are willing to find new ways to engage with readers.

As investors, the two say they want to provide capital “without editorial strings attached.”

“Our intention is to create the absolutely ideal media investor that no one should be afraid of,” says Brauchli. “Our intention is to invest in media companies that are interested in high quality news, that are not manipulated, that do not belong to any specific political parties, that belong only to themselves and their own sound thinking.”

Disrupting traditional media around the world

Another of Vucinic and Brauchli’s goals is to help independent media organizations around the world connect and learn from one another.

“It’s a great time for independent media because technology reduces the entry barrier,” says Vucinic. “It makes it a phenomenal time for media in general. It’s David versus Goliath, and David is always a little smarter, more nimble, more fast.”

“It’s the classic disruptive play,” Brauchli adds. “The media has tended to be big, expensive, with all kinds of legacy costs, and the opportunity afforded by technology is to come in–inexpensive, fast, agile, and independent–and present an alternative approach to an audience that is maybe tired of the old style and are looking for new voices that are independent and truthful to help them understand the world.”

He points to Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp as a “transaction that to some degree suggests the nature of the global technology media market, which is that what works in one place may also drive change in another place.”

“There’s a great opportunity for us to spend time in developing markets and understand what people are doing there, because there are people in the U.S. who may at times be myopic about the importance and centrality of the U.S. in the evolution of media,” says Brauchli.

“There are smart, creative, innovative people everywhere around the world, and they are constantly coming up with fresh ideas and perspectives.”

Using tech to create new outlets

The News Lens launched just last summer, but has quickly developed a reputation as a trusted source for information in Taiwan’s crowded media landscape.

Co-founded by Joey Chung and Mario Yang, the site uses multiple channels and organic marketing through social media to build readership without sacrificing the quality of their content, which combines news aggregation and original analysis.

For example, The News Lens, which launched with a mobile-optimized site, recently started producing videos with 90-second news summaries that play on screens in high-traffic areas like shopping centers and will eventually be shown on TV networks, too.

The company also recently struck a deal with one of Taiwan’s largest taxi groups to play videos on in-car monitors and is even talking with 7-Eleven about placing news snippets on their coffee cups. The latter idea is particularly savvy because Taiwan has the world’s highest concentration of convenience stores and 7-Eleven is the leading chain.

“When we look at media companies, we are looking at people who understand the importance and centrality of mobile, social, and video, and who are open to whatever technological possibilities might emerge,” says Brauchli. “Because the truth is, most new players can leapfrog the newer, existing legacy players.”

Long-term sustainability

Vucinic and Brauchli say another area where independent media organizations have the potential to innovate is monetization. For example, online publications can explore a freemium model that targets their core readership and allows them develop without having to worry about adjusting their editorial policy to suit corporate owners or advertisers.

While the two look for companies that are commercially-focused and have the potential to be profitable, they don’t demand short-term financial results.

“Reliable, high-quality information creates a good business in the long term. We are not interested in a quick buck or quick investment,” says Vucinic.

Ultimately, the most important thing for any media company to figure out is how to adapt to the demands of their growing readership while maintaining a strong and consistent editorial vision.

“Anyone who is doing news today has to have a very focused sense of who they are serving,” says Brauchli. “You need to know who your audience is or they don’t know who you are.”

Image by Flickr user Andy Beatty under a CC BY 2.0 license.

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Beats Music Acquires Music Marketing And Monetization Company Topspin Media

Beats Music, the streaming music service recently launched by the similarly-named headphone company, just announced that it has acquired Topspin Media.

The companies were already connected — as Beats Music CEO Ian Rogers notes in a blog post, he was CEO of Topspin before leaving to run Beats Music last year.

They also announced a partnership in February, where Topspin’s ArtistLink platform allows musicians to sell merchandise and tickets to Beats Music subscribers.

“The acquisition brings a team of talented people who have spent years working on building and fine-tuning the artist-to-fan connection into the Beats Music experience,” Rogers writes. “Topspin

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Media Temple Launches Managed WordPress Hosting Service

Love it or hate it, but there’s no denying that WordPress continues to be the de facto solution for building content-driven websites. Besides WordPress.com, a number of dedicated WordPress hosting solutions like WP Engine have cropped up over the years, and today, Media Temple is joining the fray by launching its own.

The company is pricing its hosting solution at a very competitive $29/month for up to three WordPress installs. Additional WP instances will cost $9 per month. There are no bandwidth limits at this rate and users should be able to handle millions of pageviews per month at this price.

Dante Baker, Media Temple’s product manager for this project, tells me that the managed WordPress hosting will offer a one-click setup for developers and designers who don’t want to have to deal with setting up servers and dealing with performance and scaling issues. Just like similar services, it will offer automated updates and one-click backups. 

One feature he is especially proud of is that Media Temple’s solution offers a staging environment for testing new sites and sharing it with clients. Making the site go live is as easy as clicking the aptly named “go live” button.

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SugarSync for Android gets more offline features, full-resolution media uploads

Cloud storage service SugarSync has updated its Android app with quite a few nifty features. For starters, the application now allows any file to be saved to your device or SD card card -- a feature that will come in handy when you don't have a connection. You can also rename folders/files and export them to other apps, while some optimization on the tablet side will make SugarSync for Android look better on larger screens. Most importantly, perhaps, the new version uploads pictures and videos at their full resolution -- and we know how meaningful this is for some of you.

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Via: Android Police

Source: Google Play

Tags: Android, Cloud Storage, CloudStorage, mobilepostcross, Offline, SugarSync Next: The next mobile imaging war won't be waged over megapixels .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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Instapaper update for iOS lets you send media to your Kindle and TV

Instapaper's already broad device support has just grown a little bit broader. The service's updated iOS app lets you send articles to Kindle for reading on one of Amazon's devices, and you can push videos to your big-screen TV through AirPlay. Even if you're happy with catching up from your iPad or iPhone, you may also like a new option to auto-renew your Instapaper subscription. It's not the most life-changing Instapaper update we've seen. Stay tuned, though -- the developers promise that their next release will be the biggest since Betaworks acquired the app last year.

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Via: The Next Web

Source: App Store, Instapaper Blog

Tags: airplay, app, betaworks, instapaper, ios, ipad, iphone, kindle, mobilepostcross, reading, smartphone, tablet Next: Google Trends is now, finally, a screen saver
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Virgin Media pushes its fiber broadband top speed to 152Mbps

If, like Aaron Paul, you've got a Need for Speed, then Virgin Media's latest news is probably up your alley. The company has announced that it's pushing its top fiber broadband speed up from a 120Mbps all the way up to 152Mbps over the next 12 months. At the same time, Virgin has also announced that it'll be reducing the amount of traffic management during peak times. That way, you'll be able to enjoy the benefits of that supercharged connection, even when everyone else is on their PS4 or bingeing on Netflix.

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Source: Virgin, ISPReview

Tags: 152Mbps, Broadband, Fiber, UK, virgin, virginmedia Next: Popular Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox files for bankruptcy protection .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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The Secrets To Snapchat’s Success: Connectivity, Easy Media Creation, And Ephemerality

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has been known to be pretty surreptitious when it comes to sharing secrets about how the company works, but today he provided a little more transparency around its mission and how it thinks about the communications that users send through the app.

At the AXS Partner Summit, he gave a fascinating keynote speech (which you can read here), breaking down the things that make Snapchat work, most notably how the concepts of Internet everywhere, fast and easy media creation, and ephemerality combine to power the app. The speech was presented to media execs perhaps as a way to help them understand Snapchat’s appeal, and the new ways that people are using it to communicate with each other.

To start, Spiegel noted that he thought it was strange that people refer to this period as the “post-PC era.” If anything, he argues, the proliferation of smart phones that began with the launch of the iPhone means that we’ve entered an age in which our computing devices are more personal than ever before.

And so he believes we’re in the age of the “More-Personal Computer.”

So what can we do with that? Pervasive connectivity, the ability to quickly create media, and an increased interest in ephemerality, combined together is, in a sense, what makes Snapchat Snapchat. But the combination of those elements also means that today’s users are sharing and communicating in different ways than they ever have before.

Take the concept of “Internet Everywhere,” for instance. Once upon a time, people who shared photos or videos of themselves or places that they’ve been ended up taking a whole lot of media, sorting through it to determine what they’d want others to see, and then having to upload it later to the social networks, blogs, and other places that they’d share.

“Internet Everywhere means that our old conception of the world separated into an online and an offline space is no longer relevant. Traditional social media required that we live experiences in the offline world, record those experiences, and then post them online to recreate the experience and talk about it,” Spiegel said.

But constant connectivity means there’s no longer a disconnect between when media is taken and when it could be shared. Or, as Spiegel said, “We no longer have to capture the “real world” and recreate it online – we simply live and communicate at the same time.”

That also has enables its users to more immediately share self-portraits, which Spiegel calls “arguably the most popular form of self-expression.” Centuries ago, those self-portraits required untold hours and brush strokes, but in today’s day and age of fast and easy media creation, people can communicate through media, instead of around it.

“The selfie makes sense as the fundamental unit of communication on Snapchat because it marks the transition between digital media as self-expression and digital media as communication,” he said.

With that in place, the final piece — ephemerality — works to focus on the feeling that content brings to the user, not what it looks like. For Snapchat, that more closely resembles the way that conversations happen in real life, the way that people actually communicate with each other.

“That’s what Snapchat is all about. Talking through content not around it. With friends, not strangers. Identity tied to now, today. Room for growth, emotional risk, expression, mistakes, room for you,” he said.

The embrace of the Ephmeralnet comes in stark contrast to the previous generation of social networks, in which what people shared was forever tied to their online identities. Those communications are happening anonymously, or they happen in real-time and disappear.

For now, Snapchat is the most successful app in this new environment of pervasive connectivity and real-time communication. But we’ll no doubt continue to see more social networking and messaging apps use the same concepts.

You can check out the full text of the speech below:

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The Syrian Electronic Army Rings In The New Year By Hacking Skype’s Social Media Accounts

The Syrian Electronic Army is at it again. The group just hacked Skype’s blog and twitter accounts, spreading an anti-NSA, anti-Microsoft message in the process. “Don’t use Microsoft emails (hotmail,outlook), They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments”, says one posting. “Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army.. Stop Spying!”, says another.

Skype, the service itself, does not appear to be affected.

The group also gained control of Skype’s Facebook although that message has since been deleted. However, the postings were up for nearly 40 minutes.

As of publication, the activist group still seemingly has control of Skype’s blog and Twitter.

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Samsung's HomeSync media hub will play nice with non-Samsung Android devices

If ever a product needed to work harder to justify its price tag, it'd be Samsung's new $299 HomeSync box. Fortunately, the manufacturer seems to be self-aware enough to make some changes: the Android-powered storage, streaming and mirroring hub will soon offer full support for Jelly Bean phones and tablets even if they're outside of the Galaxy stable. This should allow an average household with numerous, diversely-branded devices to store and share their photos, music and videos using the HomeSync's 1TB "personal cloud," while also using their handsets as remote controls and as sources for mirroring via the box's HDMI input. As things stand, however, only a handful of non-Samsung phones, like the Sony Xperia Z and HTC One, are listed as compatible over at the Google Play store, and it could be a while before the HomeSync becomes truly brand-agnostic. In the meantime, there are plenty of other mobile-friendly NAS solutions around that are worth a look.

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Source: Samsung

Tags: android, hdmi, homesync, mirroring, mobilepostcross, nas, samsung, streaming Next: Facebook confirms autoplay video ads are coming to your News Feed
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Social Media Analytics Company Viralheat Names Jeff Revoy As Its New CEO

Viralheat is announcing that it has a new CEO: Jeff Revoy, whose recent roles include serving as former Chief Marketing and Product Officer at email marketing company iContact.

A company spokesperson suggested that it was time for a new CEO because Viralheat is shifting its focus from small and medium businesses to larger enterprises: “Jeff has a lot of experience helping companies like iContact transition into the Enterprise space and will help take Viralheat through its next phase of growth.”

They added that the previous CEO, co-founder Raj Kadam, will remain “100% active at the company,” working on sales and business development.

Revoy’s résumé includes multiple vice president roles at Yahoo, serving as chief revenue officer at ChooChee (which was, it seems, quietly acquired by T-Mobile, as we’d reported), and the aforementioned position at iContact (which was acquired by Vocus for $169 million).

Founded in 2009 and backed by mayfield Fund, Viralheat’s services include social media monitoring, analytics, publishing, sentiment analysis, and more, and it says it serves “thousands” of customers. In the press release announcing his hiring, Revoy praised Viralheat’s “easy-to-naviate monitoring and analytics tools that help large businesses succeed in a rapidly changing digital communications environment.”

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