“Duedil is a new business information company that offers free financial information sourced from UK’s Companies House (Public Sector Information). It is so confident in the quality of its data, that it offers a £5 payment if one finds any discrepancies in its financials, no questions asked. The company was launched in April 2011 by Damian Kimmelman, owner of “We Are VI Ltd” and co-founder of Mackin Gaming. Duedil claims in its website to have the largest database of free company financials in the world! That is a tall order for an upstart that is only several months in operation. Duedil aggregates data from all over the web and bring this to users along-side information which it pays for. It says the information will correspond directly with the information found at Companies House delivering company financial statements, going back 10 years, with company histories, name changes, litigations, director lists, family graphs & more. According to Duedil, it is funded by Passion Capital, who is predominantly funded by the UK government. Other investors are some of the people behind Skype, LastFM, Yahoo!, AOL & QXL/Tradus, and was chosen as a Microsoft Bizspark company.”

This service is well worth a look. For one thing, the data presentation is good enough to seriously challenge the sector players, and for another the information collection is also hugely competitive. But the irony comes in the thought that a freemium model could be used to take a Trojan Horse right into the middle of the commercial credit rating encampment. Industry professionals rightly point out that Duedil would have to support a great deal of advertising to support such a service long term. But what if that is not the point at all. Instead, a cogent strategy here would concentrate on getting very high free usage levels, and all the time stretch those staid competitors by adding more and more Open Web derived content into the mix, so that the comparison was not with publicly available “official” content, but with the Duedil selection above and beyond that. Then, when you have the attention of the audience, you can begin to charge subscriptions for higher level activities: in-greater-depth analysis, time-elapsed reporting on watch lists, custom service applications for automated purchasing systems, social media-style buying clubs based on shared content with user groups etc. And when you get that second level market locked in, then you will be able to sell plenty of service advertising on the still-free core site.

The creators of DueDil have grasped a key point that the established market has long since conveniently forgotten. The market is all about the collection of commoditized data from the web, and there really is no defensible barrier to entry in that business. Insofar as credit scoring and the development of formulae for rating credit worthiness are concerned, the established industry is on safer ground, but as we used to say on the farm in my youth, if you try to sell potatoes with the dirt on them, you get rich for a while until people realize that clean potatoes cost no more, and are better value. Attempts to sell on openly available content as if it was an “answer” fits this case, and this is the bluff that DueDil calls. Soon, as in every other sector in every information market that I know, the players here those who seek survival will be heading up the value chain. Analytics, the application of Big Data principles and practice, the widespread integration of workflow modelling with third party strategic alliances – all of these are part of the future of a sector which we still call Credit and Business Information, but which we will increasingly come to see as whole web monitoring for business and personal performance.

And as that happens, so will consolidation become more interesting. Choicepoint and Lexis may have been an early sign. Both in the enterprize software solutions field and in the major B2B holdings there must be potential interest in those of the big sector players who add real value. But lets emphasize “value” again – DueDil have demonstrated that the value from pure data collection is negligible, and consolidators, especially if they are deeply into advanced taxonomic search and linked data, may find that smaller regional players in the existing industry have little to add. In the next play, much of their data will look as insignificant as the large and once much vaunted databases of the directory publishers do now.

In short, DueDil is a mouse that roared, and while the elephant of Big Credit is still in the room, he is trying to stand on the curtain rail!

(Declare an interest – I am currently chairman of BIIA – a powerhouse of industry discussion in Asia Pacific!)

This year’s invite required a fee, so I anticipated less people, and thought the move to the Old Billingsgate conference venue probably meant that less sponsorship than in the first two years had diminished the budget. How wrong could one be? Marco produced a two day show, in a larger venue, with 1180 attendees paying over £300 each, and greater sponsorship. Some 97 people and companies spoke and sat on panels. Sessions ran right through breaks and meals when necessary, and outside of the auditorium there was as much chatter around the six or so booths of an incipient exhibition as there was in the conference hall. So the whole British investment community was represented? Well, broadly, but alongside their European peers. For a meeting held in London, this was as European as they come. One subject of debate centred on the idea that Europe now has an equivalence in start-up and development terms to Silicon Valley – but then we all disagreed on whether that was best represented by London’s 800 companies in the Silicon Roundabout at Old Street, or by the powerhouse of software development that is moving things in Berlin, or by the design talent and entrepreneurial drive of Barcelona. I took a straw poll in one group and Berlin won, but, then, there were a huge number of German players on display.

Those of us who filled the hot and airless evening sessions of the late nineties would have recognized the flavour in the room: this was First Monday or Last Friday or whatever they were called playing out on a large scale. It was important to be there and to be seen, and just as important as doing deals was promoting the investor’s image as the right player for an outstanding opportunity, while desperate developers asserted that they did not really need the money – unless of course someone wanted to help them go faster, further and right past their competition. Outside the doors last week, equity markets were lurching like a trawler in a gale, and two governments in Europe fell while we enthused about opportunity. And that is the essence of Marco’s magic: he has persuaded us to suspend judgement for a moment and observe how, even in difficult times, a group of mostly consumer-facing network service are achieving really interesting growth rates, how audience transfer to these services remains rapid, how the smartphone challenge is now at last being met with some worthy service responses. And while he does this it is noticeable that very few services from the traditional vendor community are making much headway (interesting to see both Axel Springer and Schibsted looking so mundane in this company) and that there are relatively less pan-European services than I would have expected from the first two events.

If there was an exception to that rule it was perhaps HomeAway, which predates its US owners in the UK and is the secret giant of holiday bookings (larger than TripAdvisor at 4.5 million bookings per month), or Softonics, or eHarmony (re-inventing relationship management). Or even ZooPlus, selling unconscionable amounts of dogfood despite depression. But in some ways the most impressive players were the niche operators. It is a moot question whether indeed these service companies scale globally. Groupon was on the platform talking about rediscovering local internet, and this is surely true if we are to get beyond the whole business of classifieds – looking at this meeting like a very flat place to be – and re-ignite geographical community with service offers and hyper-local interest. The man from FourSquare clearly had aspirations to do this, but they always seem to get overtaken by what I suspect are the less lasting joys of finding out that your friends are all drinking in the pub you are just passing. But then the focus shifted again: here is good Sverre Munck of Schibsted, who I thought once would create the first real digital newspapers, rightly saying we should watch the Indonesians, and see how a society behaves when its primary link to the Internet is Smartphone, without any precursor experience of other technologies. And did I hear someone say that online recruitment is now a 27 billion dollar business globally? There were some good niche examples on display here. And there was also a splendid man from Lehavi who used his brain, working through his computer, to move his toy remote car around. And Tony Castells of Barcelona produced great incidental music of his own composition to fill the breaks that Marco was so anxious to deny us.

In short this was a very diverting conference. But less is more, and greater variety of investment fields (where was music, or personal finance, or sport, let alone business!) will be welcome as it develops further. It could be that the advertising model is not the entire answer, though you would have thought it was the ultimate in business model development here. More on hybrid models, and less on old-fashioned classifieds. And a final recognition that old media are not going to cut it here. But keep tapping the vein of frenzy that makes this such a fascinating area for so many investors – and keep giving them a place to meet and talk and, as in that first rush of internet blood to the head in the late 90s, to stimulate and force each other to compete.

And from a couple of answers to my enquiries there does seem to be a change from when I last looked at this a year ago. One obvious point of enquiry was Comdex, famously bought by UBM for a dollar, and revived as a virtual event. The news is that in its second year this show increased its exhibitors significantly, and now seems to be attracting well over 5000 paying customers, making it an exhibition worth attending. Elsewhere, it would be my surmise that Globalspec, having launched a great number of events last year, are now doing a sort of culling operation, retaining and building what works and scrapping the rest.

If virtual eventing is to emerge as an art form, then it is important that shows should be cheap to initiate and that there should be a sort of rough hewn hierarchy of development values in play. This seems to be happening, as shows get upgraded from virtual conferencing to “catalogue exhibitions” and then on to virtual reality full-on, with a genuine effort being made to replicate the communications of the exhibition hall. Conferences superficially seem easier, but simply watching a live videocast and tweeting may not be the most interesting interaction we have ever had. Few have moved to live broadcast full interactivity, yet it is surely only a turn of the network wheel away. Wait for colleagues to say “I was in a really interesting conference in Tokyo on the train coming into Waterloo this morning..”

So lets look around and see the variety of models now at work. All of these happen to be in UBM (a lesson in the results of listening closely to David Levin!) but they are not untypical of the range of activities happening elsewhere. Of course, you would expect the technology events to be on the move here, but they are certainly not the vanguard. Black Hat is interesting: this security technology meeting has opted for variable packages for online users depending on whether they attend on the day, or look at it retrospectively. So if you go to Uplink, in this case, for live streaming video, you get 2 tracks of 20 supplier briefings, two keynotes and the interactive service which allows you to ask questions and enter into dialogue. If you use the on demand service you get two keynotes and the best two presentations from each track. And if you visit Interop online, you simply get a video library to search and download.

But I found two areas where different models and pace of development were in play. Airline maintenance costs and technology is clearly one. I surmize that you may have to sleep a long time between sessions, so visiting this in bed may be essential. However, I was really taken with www.retailinvestorsconference.com. This is a neat partnership between Betterinvesting (National Association of Investors Corp, www.betterinvesting.org) with  MUNCmedia and UBM’s PR Newswire. The target is private investors, and particularly those who do not use advisors or stockbrokers. They do a one day virtual meeting a month. On 3 November you could have heard a presentation by the Nasdaq – quoted China Precision Steel Corp. As part of the deal, the video and presentation collateral get distributed by PR Newswire. However, attendees on the day (I wonder if they give their avatars blue rinses!) have a terrific range of interactive choices. They can go to the auditorium and hear the session (EST timings get Florida as well as the North East). Or they can go to the Exhibit Hall and visit the presenter’s booth, make contact with staff and ask further questions. Finally, there is the Lounge, with the opportunity to talk to other investors and see what experiences they have had. The organizers appear to be doing one day a month, and up to 8 sessions per day. This is like having a trade show with 96 exhibitors and speakers – and a huge growth opportunity within the other 353 days of the year.

So a wide range of business and presentation models, but now I feel that this movement is rumbling towards real marketplaces. The App and tablet combination will be important in making theses shows work, and making their interfaces seamless. Ambitious management in tough times are trying to make a little technology go a long way, and charge for the virtual as if it were real, Some of the pricing packages will slow market development, and some of the attempted bundles are too ambitious as well. My feeling is that this opportunity is larger – and cheaper – than many believe.

And, finally, there is one opportunity here which is being seriously neglected. Virtual events throw off data like dandruff. Skilled developers will know everything about user profiles – who is interested in what, what key questions were asked, what ongoing interest survived the meeting etc. This can be anonymized and re-used, subjected to analysis on behalf of individual clients, and served up to help newcomers to profile themselves  when they first use the service. It adds value and serves to offset the effect on pricing of relatively lower cost bases. But above all, it  brings the  events companies to the important threshold of becoming B2B data companies, and if they fail that challenge then they will fail the full opportunity that becomes available when these new businesses mature. Lets postpone the rush to judgement. The jury is still out and the odds must be stacked in favour of a huge advancement in the age-old business of introducing buyers to sellers happening here.

And I never won the competition. My candidate for volcanic disruption and extinction was always advertising and PR agencies. According to Sir Martin Sorrell, who should know, these have now disappeared entirely, but I suspect that this is because he has renamed his world-leading enterprizes “data and marketing agencies”. But two events brought all of this to mind. In the first place I saw a headline which said, on October 6, “PR Newswire and Ektron Strike Up One-of-a-kind Strategic Alliance”, and then I had the pleasure of listening to and questioning David Levin, CEO of UBM, at the Outsell Signature Event in Phoenix last week. (Pause for Plug and statement of interest: I work part-time for Outsell, I moderated parts of this meeting, I know of nowhere else in the industry where you can speak with CEOs in depth under Chatham House rules – I cannot tell you what they said – but for sheer depth and understanding talking to Scott Key (IHS), Y S Chi (Elsevier) and David Levin is a bargain at any price, though here it was surrounded by case studies in change from another 13 CEOs and senior executives. Miss it at your Peril – it will be in Europe next year! Obviously I am not going to quote the views of David Levin, and no information market disruptor is ever wise to predict the demise of a part of his customer base while they are still buying services, but I left the room more and more convinced that the “strategy and monitoring” role of these agencies is beginning to shift, even if the creative role stays in place.

So what is this interesting strategic alliance at PRN all about? For me, it is simply another stage in the coupling of PR releases with media response measurement with market response measurement. The Press Release of yesteryear, that single page of grey, effusive but cautious text with the typical note for editors on the participants has given way to documents built around demos and video presentations, with multiple media input, intended to ring bells not only amongst media commentators, but to awaken financial analysts and gain general- to-specialist network user reaction. The destination of much of this stuff is social networks and You Tube. The idea is to launch the communication and then track it, and then track the ripples of activity that circle out from it, in blogs and tweets, and then to be able to take part in, redirect, respond, learn from the feedback loop. Increasingly this seems to be what marketing departments do, and increasingly they can do it for themselves (countless book publishers – yes, even them! – use a simple  package to launch a seperate web presence for every book published, using as tools the Superdu components, which any marketing assistant can handle). So, PR Newswire, as the largest distributor of “press releases” (www.prnewswire.com), now moves into media monitoring by plugging its PR Newswire Sync application into Ektron’s widely used corporate marketing web management platform (www.ektron.com). The vital part of all of this is the PR Newswire Listening Dashboard, which enables a primary analysis and social media monitoring tool. This reminds me of something I have been watching for a long time – the evolution of the old Durrants media monitoring outfit into Gorkana (http://www.gorkana.com/group/#index), where the emphasis is on the analysis. Whether we are talking CRM (corporate relationship management) or product launch, it seems to me that more of the game is now managed inside the corporate marketing function, more analysis can be done there with these tools, and more strategy can be created there than ever before. No wonder Sir Martin and his merry men are building the world’s largest data dump of consumer buying decisions, to get “predictive insight” into likely purchasing outcomes: they must add value now by the shovel load, since a whole sector of their traditional skills has been peeled off and re-installed as workflow on the desktop of the most lowly (and low paid) marketing department operative. One of Ektron’s largest customers is the UK National Health Service!

Some people will say that this is reskilling an industry that had very few skills to start with. Other, kinder, souls will point to the continuing need for creativity, and I can see re-intermediation happening already. Typical would be Jeremy Swinfen Green’s Amberlight Agency (www.amber-light.co.uk). Meeting Jeremy recently for the first time in 15 years (as a young digital ad-man he helped me carry the argument for AdHunter (later launched as Fish4) in a Cotswold country house hotel before a very dubious Northcliffe board) I began to see, through his practise as a very busy Human-Computer Interface (HCI) advisor where this fragmentation of skills was taking us. Anyone for a game of Under the Volcano? I am still gong to choose advertising and PR for the lava and hot ash…!

Towards the end of his piece Mr Gannon quotes Michael Geist as saying “The truth is that you can compete with free if you provide value” and this simple  statement has been giving me pause for thought as I walk the beach on my morning constitutional. What is it about this simple statement that has proved, in the last 30 years, so very hard to understand in the pre-internet content industry? We have, after all, a superb communications pipeline at our disposal, and it efficiently allows us to source all pre-existing media content through that pipeline. Those who do not wish to communicate in this way would be wise to withhold their content entirely from the network, since if they do not then one of two things will happen: they will be marginalized by competitors or, if the content has interest or relevancy, “outed” into the open web and illicitly re-used for free.

So “content” for its own sake is not a valid business model anymore? I think this is true now and will become much more obvious as time goes on. This is why putting firewalls around things only creates a temporary windbreak, not a permanent end to the forest fire. The valid business model is now service, and if we pitch the service solution correctly then we get adhesive customers, renewable revenue flows, and distance ourselves from that commoditization of content that increasingly afflicts the content value model. In fact, we should struggle to make our content available as widely as possible, implanted in our customer’s web environment, and maintained as a constant reminder of the tiered service value we can add. Tiers of service which begin with the App, and move forwards through customization and personalization of content to customization of analysis and focus. And that ziggurat of value is a climb where we cannot slacken for a moment, since competition will be fierce, and where we can never quite glimpse the summit, since value requirements will change over time.

Quite soon in this process much of the underlying content which we are so busily trying to protect will become a shadow presence, referenced and referred to but seldom read as such. Its presence will be taken for granted and content derived from the network process itself will assert its importance. As we move to this point it will appear absurd to be worrying about the underlying ownership status. I was reminded of this when looking at Amazon’s social reading initiatives, which seem to have edged into the market earlier this year without much public comment. This development (https://kindle.amazon.com/) competes with Amazon’s own Shelfari acquisition, and sites like Goodreads or Library Thing. If you were a publisher of general consumer books, surely this is the value point at which your acquisition policy would be focussed? And once you had readers who recorded all of their purchases and shared them with others on your site, including your books as well as your rivals, and you opened up the site to allow users to make comments on what they are reading, add footnotes, review, argue and correct, and then (as Amazon has done) you connected all this to Twitter and FaceBook, or in education to emerging social spaces around rentals like Chegg, then you are beginning to climb that value chain.

And then comes monetization. Some service values will be select, minority interests with strong membership and therefore subscription characteristics. Others will be populist, sponsored or maintained through online advertizing. The value we will seek to protect here is the service value, usually a function of underlying software and the way it works on content. And between visits to the patent courts to try to secure the unsecurable for 15 years, we will keep enhancing, changing, building the customer experience and competing through our ability to analyse the user experience and improve it.

Publishers used to do that last bit very well. They could do it again if they would relax around the content and follow the game. At the moment who do you see emerging on top? Amazon or one of their major publisher suppliers? No comment on that from my end of the beach, but you can always see who is winning by their willingness to be reasonable and offer concessions to the flagging pack following them.

No, the piece that got to me was a report by that doyen of Fleet Street rectitude, Roy Greenslade, in his Guardian blog. He quotes David Lis, at Aviva Investors, as saying in the Sunday Times that “Its imperative that there is consolidation within the regional newspaper space. It simply has to happen.” We must listen to Mr Lis with respect: his company apparently own 10% of Trinity Mirror, whose shares have fallen two-thirds in value this year, prior to that buy back rumour. One wonders what his position is on the buyback, or indeed on the dividend (axed two years ago and unlikely to return), or the advertising trend at Trinity Mirror (down 11.1% on the half year) And he wants to buy more of that? Nothing braver has been said in any walk of life since Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich promising “Peace in our Time”!

Is it not yet apparent that the managers of the major regional press interests have done everything that capable and reasonable men can to save the ship? We have now had a decade of staff cutting, regional print centres to raise productivity and reduce costs, regional editorial services producing look-alike products in the towns and cities of Britain, and exodus from locality to create a minimum service level on the narrowest editorial presence, churning out doctored agency text designed to keep the ads apart on the page – until all of a sudden there were no ads. And the flight to the web, in the jealous editorial hands of the existing print papers, proved to be a real failure either to create something new and local or to extend the hallowed brands of the print world into web presence. Having once almost succeeded and then failed to persuade Trinity to buy Thomson Directories, and having seen them developing directories in Scotland in more recent years, I hoped that a penny had dropped, and that they were about to embark on a complete local advertising strategy online, something we often anxiously talked about years ago when Fish4 was being created with their support. But, no. Courage and convictios fell at the final hurdle.

So why, Mr Lis, are you persuaded that putting together one cost-pared declining business with another with the same problems makes any sense at all? There are few more cost savings to make. Advertisers will seek greater discounts across more newsprint. There are no competitive positions to close out – these papers are all local monopolies anyway. The trick that your company needs to perform is to invent the equivalent service values of the once popular local press in an online and mobile context. You need to do it, despite the disadvantage of starting in print, with these factors in mind:

1. The newspaper was always a partnership with the community – but newspapermen forgot that.

2. You cannot press a format onto a geography and call it a community.

3. Format is created by need and formalized by experience. Formats that outgrow needs have to be re-invented, bottom up.

So can you recreate the newspaper? No, but you can certainly create answers in digital media for issues of local and hyper-local communication, trade and exchange. Will they look like newspaper websites? Not at all – news is only important when other needs, which may include targeted news, are satisfied. Can you create environments that link whole communities? Of course, given time, but in some places it will be the schools, in others local businesses, in some sports, in others issues outcry (like high speed trains in Bucks) that will create the initial focus. Once the flame is going, feed it with tools and apps, manage it for the community and monetize it through eCommerce and sponsorship. And make it mobile from the first instance.

Meanwhile, readers of my letter to the CEO of Guardian Media Group will have recognized what is happening there. Apax and GMG declared a “special dividend” for EMAP, taking out a £100m benefit from a debt restructuring deal, presumably so that GMG can plug the hole in its finances arising from this years’ losses. They will not need reminding that even family silver can run out, and plugging losses does not secure a sustainable future.

So lets discuss, in the spirit of Fox News, something that merits some consideration. During the time from when Rupert bought and then closed MySpace, huge changes took place. These were partly to do with the emergence of the Facebook hegemony, partly because of emerging valuations for that service, LinkedIn and Twitter, partly because the succession in fashion terms seems slow to hit its stride (though I am still betting on FourSquare). But they were more to do with the emergence of a new culture around networked relations with other people, which has driven us all into discussions of social marketing, exploiting natural communities, building loyalty through networking customers, and finding out much more about user behaviours. In the information industry we have seen these issues as extensions of our CRM, with the apparent aspiration that in the Salesforce world of tomorrow we shall be able to assemble everything we need to know about the user in some Cloud-based solution platform and feed our relationships with customers in a wholly personalised way.

But what if this is not so? Since the dawn of the Web users have been stronger in marketing relationships than vendors, despite belief by vendors that they can use real world techniques  to establish virtual world advantages. We pay lip service to the idea that advertising may be affected, even replaced, by user recommendation, then spend longer periods of time arguing why it will never happen. Because, viscerally, we do not want it to happen.

And yet it may be the least of what is likely to happen, and if we seek evolution rather than revolution then we need to put our heads into some emerging user positions. An important one of these is VRM (Vendor relationship management), in which individual users decide how to hold and store critical information about themselves (not their descriptors – age, sex etc – but their performance as buyers and sellers, readers and browsers, etc). What will happen when statistically significant groups of people get far enough down the road to Data Literacy (probably the most important untaught subject in our education systems) to practise what one leading practitioner and media influencer in this sector, Adriana Lukas  (http://www.mediainfluencer.net/), calls “Self-Hacking” and others term QS (Quantified Self). We are told on the Web that ”markets are conversations”. Well, they are also relationships and transactions, and if users are able to hold and use aggregate knowledge of their web footprint then they have a considerable weapon in the battle to persuade vendors that free users are better than captive ones, and that each of us is likely to be the best advertiser of what we ourselves want.

What are the signs of progress towards this new world of “ambient intimacy”? Have a look first at the joint Harvard – Berkman Center programme around Doc Searls’ work on Project VRM (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm) and the EmanciPay work program. This has deep roots, and recalls Searl’s pronouncement in the Cluetrain Manifesto:

And if you think this is just a one-off research-funded effort, have a look at Diaspora’s alpha (http://blog.joindiaspora.com/what-is-diaspora.html) or at TrustFabric (www.trustfabric.org). As Facebook begins to slowly lose growth and start marginal decline, there may be space for a new/old view of networked relationships. Of course this is an issue intimately related to privacy (see what Mozilla propose in their Drumbeat environment with privacy icons :https://drumbeat.org/en-US/projects/privacy-icons/. And then look at MyCube (www.mycube.com), and, if you think that personal datamanagement does not relate to what the real world does , see what the Guardian does in its datastore environment (http://www.guardian.co.uk/data) to sort and re-aggregate diverse datastreams.

Still too distant to grasp? Buyosphere (http://buyosphere.com) paints a picture of semantic web based shopping in beta, and Zaarly (www.zaarly.com) is a first attempt at doing community cross-selling in geolocational contexts. This is the beginning of a new, post-Facebook world, and must be grasped now if we are to migrate towards it. Happy travels!

Dear Andrew,  Congratulations on surviving Year 1, and please do not be affronted by this letter of advice. You and I have never met, and I have no conflicts of interest with GMG, but I do have a great sense of engagement, and want the good that the Guardian accomplishes in the world to go on in some form or other in our digitally networked world. When I was a boy The Guardian was a voice in Manchester, then the UK and now globally. Sustaining it using the conventional business models of failed newspaper publishing is not going to work so we are going to have to think more laterally. Since you are a not-for-profit Trust-owned institution the issue is not one of returns to investors, it is simply one of survival . But sustainable survival is vital, and that, I shall argue, means creating a new mix of old business models.

Lets look first at the exemplars of survival in our own times. Two stick out immediately. DMGT have created a B2B empire around data which, alongside their interests in Euromoney and events, surpasses the newspaper side of the group in both revenues and margins. This is the story of 15 years of activity, with the man who painstakingly collected and backed the data acquisitions in areas like environmental checking and property now running the whole group. This “solution” repairs group results to a great extent, but it does not extinguish the slow leak of market and margin at Northcliffe (unlike GMG, they stayed regional when they should have sold) or Associated. Even the discovery of global success for the Mail as a celeb voyeur vehicle digitally does not do that. You have wonderful global usership too, and you can’t seem to monetize it either.

The other critical exemplar is Hearst. Here they are playing two games at once. Diversification is represented by Hearst Business, now a world leader in healthcare and medical diagnostic information (including the UK’s NHS). Moving within the value chain is represented by the iCrossing acquisition, which allows them greater control of ad markets, and, now that they have bought Hachette Fillepatchi’s US interests, gives them greater inventory in which to deal. So here is a huge endorsement of the “old” magazine model – provided that you are bigger in a diminishing market and can exercise greater control/derive margins from the syndication of advertising. But I am really sorry, Andrew: neither of these models offers a solution to you.

What, short of re-inventing the newspaper, does? Lets look at some strengths and weaknesses. It is surely useful, though it must appear troublesome at times, that you have an asset like EMAP and an asset like Trader Media. On the latter we will have to bow to your expertise, since you were instrumental in creating it in its current form. The last financing deal with your partners, Apax, seems like a good way in a bad year to liberate some cash, but this asset remains your landbank, the place where you turn in a rainy day for a cash injection. But like all these things, when your need is great TMG’s value will be low, and every move has to be agreed with your co-investor. When both of you are agreed, ie now, then exit beckons. I would take it.

Which leaves EMAP, a troubled asset if ever there was one. The ability to sell this successfully now is, in my view, nearly nil. You will be forced to put in new management and restructure, close more and more print and try to rationaize a portfolio vehicle in markets where the focus has gone digital and vertical. In EMAP’s main verticals it does not have a complete workflow solution (areas like construction and automotive), while elsewhere only in fashion does it have standalone digital environments. This is a break up, the lateral thinking starts here, and somehow you have to persuade your friends at Apax, whatever the complications of their fund structures, that this is the case.

In the digital world the foot print of the Guardian looks viewed from my seat, like this: strong UK community environments amongst educationalists and teachers, social services and policy, government workers and the media industry. All of those, with the exception of UK civil servants, have natural extensions into global markets. GMG has started down the track of investing these communities with content (though all have been hit hard by recession). Given its strong branding in these areas, surely it makes sense to push forward with networked services for these communities , and services that have a real impact on their workflow and working lives. Have you noticed how TES Connect (the former Murdoch Times Educational Supplement, affected like you by the collapse of teacher recruitment advertising in the UK) has developed a very successful service helping teachers to exchange lesson plans and learning resources? Where are your equivalents of these in education (you may have to use that TMG cash to buy TES!), or in social services or in media? Unless you are digitally plugged into the network lives of your principal groups of users, and unless you offer yourselves as the branded, trusted means of them communicating with each other, I fear that you will lose your grip on them. Unfortunately I cannot tell you what the next “newspaper “will look like, but I can tell you that it will be invented by users themselves in these networked communities.

So how can you speed up that verticalization of the Guardian? Raid the EMAP cookie store. EMAP owns BETT, the leading educational technology fair in Europe, it owns Local Government Chronicle which is the only other thing that many of your local government readers use, it owns a raft of media properties including BRAD (and you could even sell CAP to TMG and add value through investing the used car value chain). Some of this will not fit and will have to go, but other properties will increase the speed with which you can deepen and concentrate Guardian Professional and really make an impact on the working lives of your major readership/classifieds groups. In other words, the strategy is “use the brand and authority, and the accident of acquisition, to move from B2C to B2B to a service environment that has news, opinions and networks at its heart as it goes global”.

Andrew, if you are still awake, two more things trouble me. Please do not go the paywall route: for my money the FT have the game to emulate, and as you turn into a service environment that model will be easier to adopt, while your news and commentary can remain free. Secondly, while David Astor’s Observer was the vehicle of my political awakening (Suez, 1956) you have inherited a very pale imitation. It will all have to go into the Weekend Guardian (but do make sure that Peter Preston keeps writing – an important sanity check for all of us!).

All my very best wishes for a very successful second year – you really do have to succeed.  David

And this is a futuristic conversation in another sense, and perhaps I should now make an alarming confession. I do not own an iPad. I can defend this and increasingly often have to do so, by saying that “I never buy before 6.0″ (makes one sound smugly superior instead of poor and outdated) or, even more often “I am waiting for the HTC Flyer”! This usually throws the inquisitor off the scent – either he does not recognize the Taiwanese industry wunderkind, whose smartphone is so readily promoted by Google at present, or he has heard of the Flyer, due to launch later this year, and can debate with me on the merits of  having a 420 gramme machine (same weight as a paperback, half the weight of an iPad), on which you can draw or write as well as use touch screen access. By this time I have covered my tracks on the ownership issue, and we part agreeing on how clunky the iPad really is. Until next Wednesday, that is, when Apple unveil iPad 2.0 and the pressure mounts again for me to come aboard.

I have been having some excellent debates in recent weeks about this unrefereed scrummage which is technology innovation, and its impact on the rapidly moving world of  business and professional information. At the moment so many of our preconceptions are built around the consumer uses of the tablet world and around the access advantages that the devices provide in business and elsewhere for travellers, that we are not yet tuned into the impact that this mobile computing power could have on our workflow activities and the integration of still separate elements of our intranet and extranet worlds. In my view, carrying your connectivity on a Tablet will place renewed pressure on improvements in voice-text transliteration, and at last begin to move machine language translation from the esoteric to the standard. Words spoken will need to be stored and subject to textual analysis, as well as being copied to third parties. Documents exchanged will need to exist multi-lingually where necessary. And nothing will be stored that cannot also be heard. All of this will ready the tablet to its eventual role, as portended by the laptop releasing us from the desk, as the complete personal assistant – the PDA  comes to fruition at long last. Then I will discard my Blackberry, throw out the Netbook that loyally travels thousands of miles with me and embrace the Future. But, since you ask, I am currently at Pause, and not yet Engage.

Finally, some updating of previous efforts here. In the first instance it is always good to remind ourselves of past worlds and where we came from, and the trading statement of Yell, the yellow pages publisher who named itself after its online service but never really invested in it does that splendidly.  Pre-tax profits in the nine months to December were halved and revenue was 11.8 % off target. In its UK businesses print revenue went down 22.3% and online went up 1.8 %. Recovery is proving worse than recession. Like much of the newspaper world, this advertising sector is now dead wood, in my view. While it remains interesting to see who can recreate in digital services the hyperlocal environments that once gave rise to local newspaper publishing, the heirs to  classified advertising directories are now fully entrenched in network marketplaces. Time to write the history here.

And can the same be said of consumer book publishers? Not quite yet, perhaps, but since I wrote about Ms Amanda Hocking (26 year old care assistant from Minnesota with 4 paranormal romances in the USA Today bestseller list last month), other evidence of successful self-publishing comes to light. This time it is British thriller writer Stephen Leather. Although an established conventionally published author, his latest novellas were rejected by Hodder and Stoughton (Hachette) as being too short. So he published them, like Ms Hocking, on Amazon. One, a gritty everyday tale of a serial killer in New York, has topped the Amazon bestseller download list for 7 weeks, and his other works have been at the top, he estimates, for 90% of the past 3 months.  He claims in interviews to sell 2000 books a day, and to be earning £11,000 a month from this activity, but this is not what interests me most. Like Ms Hocking, his works are short, and sell for $0.99 /£0.70. I smell a trend – short enough and cheap enough to read on the train!  I don’t commute and don’t have an iPad, but I do see that survival as a publisher may mean moving one’s focus to where the buyers are going. Or is that just old-fashioned consultancy talk!

First, some definition of terms. In the hotel lobby this evening I noticed device proliferation like never before. PC (concierge), laptops, iPad, smartphones, other tablets and PDAs. Clearly all can access the same content via the Web, but not have the same experience of it. I, for example, cannot access the Six Nations Rugby because my screen size is wrong in one source (and where the size is right, the vendor cannot sell me the content because of territorial rights – my credit card is registered in the wrong country). The rights question is one for another day: my issue this evening is how to free content from the device display limitation.

And in thinking through the problem my thoughts go back all the time to the article by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff in Wired (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1) on the death of the Web and the ascendancy of the Internet. So we might say that these issues will be resolved on the internet by an App which the user downloads. This will interface with his content sources and optimize them for the device which is being used to access them. The appearance and treatment of content therefore becomes a part of the design interface of the internet, and nothing to do with the source publisher, who will “create” in a context that is a lowest common denominator allowing for the widest range of optimization. The Bland leading the Bland, perhaps, and certainly something which becomes more complex as we introduce more images, graphics, video and audio alongside text in increasingly multiple media services. Still, this is the user workflow approach, with the App allowing users to control their access mode.

If this world prevails, some of my publisher friends will run screaming into the street tearing their hair (though few of them have much of that). They want to re-assert the primacy of the Web, because they want to continue to control the customer in every way that they can. Already threatened by Apple, Amazon and Kobo, and only partly disarmed by the hope that Google Editions may prove an ally after all, many publishers see loss of control of the delivered appearance of their products as an ultimate separation from end users. They would want to have editionizing software that ran with the product, allowing you to see it differently according to the device you are using, but, within your licence, always able to ensure that what you were looking at was optimized to the device you were using to read it on. In this way the publisher of origin would be able to charge for the added value of multiple device usage as well as keep control of the licences conferred on end users.

This may not be an enduring problem, since the network will one day resolve it as an access condition. But in the meanwhile there are choices. And as it happens, we have what citizens here call a “bake-off” between the two opposing camps. In the red corner on my right, please meet Flipboard Pages (http://flipboard.com), who will take any page of published media you encounter on Twitter or Facebook, and reconfigure it to read properly on your access device. This is an App, and this is the beginnings of a workflow solution.

And in the Blue corner, on my left, meet newly launched TreeSaver (http://treesaver.net), a JavaScript solution for the publishing community to allow multiple device viewing of the same content in very different device contexts. It adjusts automatically to the context, and the portfolio of exemplars on its website work very impressively. This is the Web solution and represents the ways in which the content creation community will try to fight back. Add this, publishers will say, and it will justify higher prices for subscription or one-off products. Buy from us, the intermediaries will say, and you can have Grandson of Flipboard as standard on all our products and services.

As I say, this may not last forever, but, in every field of content, the next 24 months will see decisive battles on the business models of content marketplaces. Do Apple et al get to restructure the business or not? And if not, do the originating agencies retain control of the appearance as part of the battle to retain a direct connection with the consumer? What did not appear to be real issues six months ago are now front and centre. How can you keep your hair when all around you are losing their heads. And is this issue the Dog that Didn’t Bark in the Night?