Mary Meeker. Photo Credit: Jasveer10 [CC BY-SA 4.0] from Wikimedia Commons

Slide 186 is simple enough: global shipments of smartphones by year, from 2007 until last year. It’s the decade when everything changed, when our computers were replaced by devices many times smaller, and when everything became mobile. The key thing from that chart is that it’s s-shaped, meaning it starts out slow, rises precipitously, before levelling out. In short: We bought no more smartphones in 2017 than we did in 2016. The S-curve was discovered by Richard Foster in 1985 and made famous by Clayton Christensen, who invented the term ‘disruptive innovation.’

The key thing here is that we’re are at that levelling out part. That’s when both Foster and Christensen predict disruptive things happen. Foster called discontinuities, Christensen called it disruption, but it amounts to the same thing: other companies, peddling other technologies, products, innovations or platforms, are poised to steal a march on the incumbents and leave them by the side of the road. But what?

Well. If much of the past decade has been driven by smartphones, and it has, then we’re near the end of the smartphone era. It’s been an interesting ride since 2007/8, but shipments tailed off in 2016, and my interest in what the new Galaxy or iPhone might be able to do tailed off about then too. That means uncertain times, as incumbents search for new technologies, new efficiencies to ward off newcomers, and the newcomers experiment with a disruption that works. I believe the future will have to be beyond smartphones, to the point where we don’t need to interact with them at all and will stop treating them (and fetishising them) as prized objects. That, of course, is some way off. But it will come.

For now though, there are some interesting opportunities, especially for the makers of content.

The first one is this: Apple won the hardware value war, but has probably lost the peace. Consider the following, all taken from Meeker’s data:

• Other operating systems than iOS and Android have disappeared for the first time (slide 6). The platforms are now clear: Android will not be forked and owned by any hardware maker. (When did you last hear of Tizen in a phone?) Nor will any other challenger survive. There is absolutely no point in trying to build a new operating system for the phone. For other devices, maybe.
• Google’s Android has maintained market dominance: three-quarters of all smartphones shipped last year ran Android. You would think that as the average selling price of phones increases, high-end Android devices would succumb to the more flashy iPhones. Why not finally get that iPhone you’ve been dreaming of. But people don’t. Why? It’s probably because Apple phones are still significantly more expensive, meaning that the shift would usually be to one of the older, cheaper, discontinued, sometimes refurbished, models. (A significant chunk of iPhone users are those on older devices.) In status-conscious places like China, that’s not an acceptable switch. Better a new model of a lesser brand, now that those brands are pretty nice looking: think Huawei, Xiaomi, Samsung. Bottom line: as phones go into a replacement cycle, more and more high-end rollers are going to be on Android.

So. What does this mean for media and content producers? I believe it represents an opportunity. As the market for hardware slows — fewer people buying new phones, more people taking longer to replace their old ones — more money is freed up to be spent elsewhere in the ecosystem: on software and services, in-app subscriptions, purchases etc. Apple has traditionally benefited more from this — iOS users spend more in app stores and in-app purchases than Android users (per download a user spends $1.5, as opposed to about 30 cents per downloaded app for Android users, according to my calculation of App Annie data for Q1 2018.) But this gap is narrowing: consumer spend on Google Play grew 25% that quarter, against 20% on the iOS store.In other words: Despite the obvious growing affluence of many Android users, the operating system is still ignored by several key media constituencies — the most obvious of which is podcasts, which are still mostly the domain of iOS users, because Google has been late to make it a core feature of Android. That is changing, offering a window of opportunity. Any effort in focusing on Android is likely to have benefits, because as an OS it clearly isn’t going anywhere, and despite the fragmentation within Android, there’s still huge markets to win over. Don’t ignore the Droid!

This is part of a bigger picture, a larger shift for the main players as markets get saturated. All the big tech players are competing increasingly on the same field. While part of it is what I would call equipment (hardware and software) most of it is going to be over what you use that equipment for. As Ms Meeker points out:

• Amazon is (also) becoming an ad platform, sponsoring products on its websites and apps
• Google is (also) becoming a commerce platform (via Google Home ordering)

You might add to that

• Netflix, Google, Amazon, Apple are all creating content.

Everyone is trying to do everything because they can’t afford not to.

All recognise that the future lies not in hardware, or software, or even platforms, but in stacking the shelves of those platforms. This is not, per se, about e-commerce, but in being the place where people live within which that e-commerce — that buying, subscribing, consuming — takes place. The most obvious example of this is the voice-assistant — Google’s Home or Amazon’s Alexa. These are spies in the house of love: devices that become part of the family, learning your wishes and habits obediently and trying to anticipate them.

It’s artificial intelligence geared towards understanding, anticipating and satisfying your inner selves.

For makers and purveyors of content, the challenge is going to be to understand this shifting playing field. Somehow you need to elbow your way into one of these channels and provide a service that fits their model. Obvious targets would be to ensure you have a ‘skill’ on Alexa’s platform, where users can easily activate your news service over others. But deeper thinking may yield other opportunities — spelling games for kids that leverage your content, etc. I’ll talk more about these opportunities in a future column, and would love to hear your ideas and experiences.

No other company is even close to Google. The survey saw Facebook take second place, having captured 13 percent of worldwide mobile ad revenue in the two years since it began running mobile ads. That means that these two companies alone capture just shy of 70 percent of all mobile ad revenue.

In countries like Bangladesh, Senegal, South Africa, Ghana and Indonesia, a report last year by mobile browser maker Opera found for a majority of internet users in those countries that mobile is the only way people access the internet. Smartphones and simpler mobile phones with internet access might be the primary way that your audience is accessing your website, which is something easily confirmed by looking at your digital statistics packages.

Also statistics show that mobile audiences are younger audiences, and this is just another example of how digital platforms allow you to reach different demographics, rather than simply shifting your current audiences.

Initially, the opportunity to earn revenue from mobile advertising seemed even less than internet advertising, which has seen rates plummet over the past few years. However, as we have seen with the desktop internet, major players have been earning vast sums of money. The challenge for news organisations is that they haven’t enjoyed the same dominance in digital that they enjoyed in print and still in enjoy in broadcasting.

The major internet players are already aggressively growing their mobile advertising revenue and news organisations cannot afford to wait to pursue their own mobile revenue strategies.

Building a staged strategy

The first step is to make sure that you are doing your best to serve mobile audiences. Fortunately, making your sites mobile friendly is now easier than ever with mobile themes and plug-ins for popular platforms such as WordPress and many development frameworks that allow you to create mobile and tablet editions for your sites.

In terms of monetising mobile audiences, while eMarketer looked at global mobile advertising revenue, most news organisations do not operate globally and must instead focus on their local or regional market. You will want to first evaluate where both your consumers and your advertising markets are in terms of mobile adoption. If your consumers have already flocked to mobile but your advertisers are still reluctant, initially, you’ll need a low-cost solution but one that scales as the opportunity grows.

Start with mobile ad networks  – Just as ad networks can help you get a start in paying for the costs of your initial internet efforts, there are mobile ad networks specifically designed to help you begin monetising your mobile audience. mobiThinking has an up-to-date guide to ad networks and a guide on how to choose an ad network, including a list of ad networks by region and country. One key thing they note is that no one mobile network is dominant.

Just as with your traditional internet advertising, you’ll want to develop premium advertising options as quickly as possible. Ad networks can help you with that and as the digital advertising network matures it is rapidly developing premium options and strategies across all forms of digital advertising including mobile.

When you’re developing your mobile site, you’ll want to make sure that you can easily integrate ad networks and standard mobile ad formats.

Explore local advertising opportunities – For local media, there are unique opportunities. Google has found that about 50 percent of all mobile search is local, and that means that often your audience is looking for nearby businesses or services. Local media already have the sales relationships with local businesses, and this can be a great competitive advantage. You’ll want to explore what options mobile allows for targeted local advertising.

With the rapid rise of mobile, advertisers and marketers see a huge opportunity, which means that there is a lot of money pouring into innovation in this space. For instance, in Malaysia, telecommunications provider Maxis has launched a mobile deals service targeted at 15 shopping destinations that will send subscribers to their myDeal service offers when they are shopping. The service doesn’t require an internet connection but instead relies on determining the location of the customer based on mobile phone masts (cell towers). The deals are delivered by SMS.

Tablets offer unique revenue opportunities – When thinking about mobile content and revenue strategies, it is also important to consider tablets, especially phablets – large screen smartphones – such as Samsung Galaxy Note or Asus FonePad. These devices are competitively priced when compared to smartphones and an absolute steal with compared with laptops or large-screen tablets. For emerging markets, this is the perfect option for someone who doesn’t want or simply doesn’t want to pay for both a smartphone and a laptop.

Tablets or phablets open up all kinds of opportunities if they are popular in your market. For one, numerous studies show that tablet owners engage with content almost as heavily as print readers. That’s definitely something to remember when pitching to advertisers.

Of course, advertising in not the only source of revenue to consider. As we noted in our April Digital Briefing, Folha in Brazil introduced a paid-content strategy that charged for tablet and mobile app access. In most markets, tablets are initially bought by affluent members of your audience, and this type of strategy allows you to add a new revenue stream from those who can afford to pay for your content. Note that less than six months after Folha started charging for their tablet and mobile apps, they also added a metered paywall for their website.

Launch a mobile division – As your mobile market grows and the commercial opportunity will support it, larger organisations should consider launching a mobile division to create mobile products and generate mobile sales. The Media Briefing in the UK recently profiled how Norwegian publisher VG has done just that and is on track to dramatically increase the group’s mobile revenue. Norway is a very advanced digital market, but in major emerging markets, mobile use may quickly catch up with developed markets in ways that the traditional internet won’t for years to come.

This staged strategy will help you grow are your market and your organisation develops. However, no matter the size of your organisation or the state of your mobile market, it is an opportunity that news organisations cannot choose to ignore. The major internet players are moving aggressively to dominate in mobile just as they have with the desktop internet, and news organisations must make sure that they do not wait until Google and Facebook come to dominate your mobile market.

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

It is not surprising that internet use continues to grow and that emerging markets are largely driving this growth. However, dig a little deeper into famed internet analyst Mary Meeker’s latest annual report on the state of the internet, and you’ll find several important insights for news organisations as they navigate the digital transition.

Internet tipping point in major emerging markets

While some say that Meeker is merely restating conventional wisdom, if you look closely at the data she provides, she is doing more than stating the obvious.

It is widely understood that emerging markets are powering continued global growth in internet use. However, some of this growth is coming from unlikely countries, such as a 205 percent year-over-year internet growth in Iran, 58 percent growth in Indonesia, 57 percent growth in Argentina and 39 percent growth in Colombia.

Of course, high growth figures can simply indicate growth from a low base, but the other thing you notice in the International Telecommunications Union data that Meeker highlights is that the majority – or nearly a majority – of the population in major emerging markets now have access to the internet.  Now, 49 percent of the Russian population have access to the internet. In Turkey, 47 percent of the population have access and 45 percent of the population of Brazil now have internet access. The explosive growth in internet access in Argentina, now means that 68 percent of the population has internet access.

We don’t have a sense of the speed of these internet connections, but the fact still stands that in many emerging markets significant parts of the population now have access to the internet.

In another recently released report, US computer networking giant Cisco said that by 2017 half of the world would have internet access. To put that in context, in 2012 only 32 percent of the world’s population was connected. The report also predicted that the average broadband speed would more than triple from 2012 to 2017.

The key take-away is that in many emerging markets, internet access is reaching a tipping point, and this will lead to a tipping point in digital media access.

Mobile and tablet growth is booming

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

Mobile internet access continues to grow, now accounting for 15 percent of all global internet traffic. If the current trend continues, mobile internet traffic will soon rise to 30 percent of all global traffic.

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

Mobile internet growth isn’t a recent phenomenon, but Morgan Stanley data showed that smartphone subscribers will grow 31 percent this year. The percentage of smartphones as a part of the total mobile subscriptions varies widely from market to market. Indonesia and Russia only have low double-digit smartphone use as a part of mobile subscriptions, 11 and 12 percent respectively. However, other emerging markets already have much higher smartphone use. For instance, Malaysia, at 35 percent, has a higher level of smartphone use as a percentage of total mobile subscriptions than Germany or Italy, at 29 and 23 percent.

However, the shift to mobile is about much more than the increased use of smartphones. Tablets, most of them based on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, have remade the digital landscape in a short time. Android and iOS, whether on smartphones or tablets, have ended Microsoft’s dominance in terms of personal computing.

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

iPad sales grew three times faster than the iPhone, Meeker said, and while that might seem more relevant to wealthy, developed markets, dramatically less expensive tablets based on Android are being developed for emerging markets. Acer has been developing a $99 tablet for the Indian market.

Of course, the line between smartphones and tablets is beginning to blur as so-called phablets win over consumers who don’t want to have multiple devices. Phablets are large screen smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy Note or the Asus Fonepad, with its 7-inch screen. Analysts say that phablets are set to sell well not only in the Asian giants of China and India but also in the social-media capitals of Indonesia and Malaysia.

For news organisations, the growth of tablets and large-screen smartphones means that in the future it is more likely that your readers will be using a tablet or large smartphone rather than a traditional computer to read your stories, listen to your audio or view your video.

Publishers and broadcasters will want to make sure that their digital content is optimised for these platforms.

Is mobile growth translating into mobile revenue?

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

Last year, Meeker highlighted how advertising on mobile lagged far behind the amount of time that people spent with their mobile devices. However, as she showed this year, not all of the time that people spend with their mobile devices is spent consuming content. In fact, of the 150 times a day that smartphone owners reach for their handsets each day, news, alerts and the web account for only 10 times they check their phones. Attention is very fragmented on mobile devices.

Meeker still sees a tremendous opportunity for mobile advertising. In the US, people spend 12 percent of their time consuming media on a mobile device but only 3 percent of advertising is spent on mobile.

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

This year, she pointed to Facebook’s success in offsetting declining advertising revenue from its desktop users with rising revenue from mobile advertising. This shows both that it is possible to earn revenue from mobile audiences and that the social network will present fierce competition to news organisations for mobile advertising.

The report highlights not only how the digital transition is accelerating in many major emerging markets, it also shows while the future holds incredible promise for mobile media, opportunities already exist. News organisations must now think about mobile when they think of digital.

In April, security researchers uncovered two separate digital attacks targeting Tibetan and Uyghur activists and their Android smartphones. The first Android attack would be familiar to most internet users. Victims were sent email messages about a human rights conference, and their smartphones were compromised once they opened an attachment. The second attack went one step further, distributing a fake version of the KakaoTalk instant-messaging application popular in the region,  according to McAfee mobile malware researcher Carlos Castillo.

With the attacks by the Syrian Electronic Army, they mostly have stolen Twitter and WordPress logins from news organisations and posted messages meant to discredit the news groups to create mischief, such as when they posted to an Associated Press Twitter account that US President Barack Obama had been assassinated. That tweet caused a frightening, but very brief, drop in the US stock market.

These smartphone attacks threaten much more than your credibility. Security researchers at the University of Toronto found that the fake KakaoTalk application captured the “the user’s contacts, call history, SMS messages and cellular network configuration”. This information was written to an encrypted file and uploaded to a remote site that looked like a rather innocuous site hosted by Chinese search engine Baidu. The phone could also be triggered via a special SMS message hidden to the user to divulge information about the location of the phone. This attack was extremely sophisticated.

But the malware could do even more, with some features not currently in use but possibly being prepared for future versions of the malicious software. For instance, it requests the GPS location, access to the Bluetooth radio and even the phone sleep state. If the GPS location was reported, the attacker could physically track the owner of the phone. If two phones were compromised, the attacker would know where targets were and possibly even when they met.

Have you left your wifi on?

I recently attended a Hacks/Hackers event in London. It’s a global effort to bring together journalists (sometimes called ‘hacks’) and developers and technologists (the hackers). In this instance, ‘hacker’ is not being used to mean people who break into computers, but rather in the positive sense to mean a technically capable person.

The talks included a demonstration by Daniel Cuthbert, the chief operating officer of security firm Sensepost, in which he showed off how a fake wifi hotspot running on a Nokia N900 could collect a wealth of information from those in the room.

The software pretended to be a hotspot that your smartphone, tablet or other wifi-enabled device had connected to before, such as a hotspot at Starbucks. If you had connected to the hotspot before, your device would automatically get an address and connect to the rogue hotspot. Using a piece of software the company had developed called Snoopy, Cuthbert was then able to harvest all kinds of information. As a proof of concept, Cuthbert showed Google Streetview images of where some of the attendees lived as well as Facebook pages and contacts.

It was a sobering demonstration, and had he been willing to throw caution and respect for the law to the wind, he could have found out much more.

How to protect yourself and your contacts

Be aware – The first step in digital security is awareness. As we’ve seen with other digital security issues, most of the attacks do not involve complicated technical knowledge but rather rely on simple and sophisticated ways of tricking you out of your information. The first Android attack would looked very similar to a host of phishing attacks that most people are familiar with in terms of trying to trick you into downloading an infected attachment or link. The biggest challenge for you, your editors, your journalists and other staff is that it is very easy to create fake emails that appear to come from someone you know.

Don’t leave wifi on – These cases also highlight new types of increasingly sophisticated technical attacks against mobile devices. How to protect yourself against rogue hotspots? Cuthbert advised journalists to turn off the wifi on their smartphones when you aren’t using it. Besides being more secure, this will use less power and give you longer battery life.

Use virtual private networking – I use a global wifi service, Boingo, which has a very inexpensive global plan for mobile devices, including tablets. Boingo provides a virtual private networking, VPN, service, which will encrypt data that travels over their hotspots. This won’t prevent the kind of attacks that Cuthbert demonstrated, but using VPN is one step you can take to protect yourself when using a hotspot.

Pay attention when installing software – Make sure that you don’t install data that asks for too much access to your information. If it is a mapping app, it is reasonable to expect the app to want to know your location, but what about a chat or messaging app? Does it really need to know your location? The key difference between the legitimate KakaoTalk app and the rogue one was the level of access it wanted to the handset. Do not simply automatically accept all of the data terms for apps. If it wants too much access to your phone and your data, don’t install it.

Encrypt your Android phone’s data – You can also encrypt the data on your Android phone. The feature has been available since version  2.3.4, known more commonly as Gingerbread. The process is relatively straightforward, but you’ll want to make sure to remember your PIN because otherwise you might lock yourself out of your own data. Encrypting the data on your phone might make it a bit slower because the phone has to decrypt the data on your phone. On newer phones with multi-core chips, encryption will add little if any delay to common functions.

Again, security researchers cannot stress often enough that all of the technical precautions available to you are pointless if you don’t take common sense precautions when opening attachments or clicking on links in emails. You are the first line of defence, and awareness and common sense precautions can prevent you and your news organisation from becoming the next victim in this rising wave of digital attacks.

Last year alone mobile data traffic almost doubled, and the volume of mobile data traffic was 61 times larger in 2012 than it was five years earlier, according to a report by US networking company Cisco.

The report is packed with similarly staggering figures that highlight the growth of mobile data, including a prediction that by the end of this year, the number of mobile connected devices will exceed the world’s population.

The report provides not just these-attention grabbing global figures, but also regional and in some cases national figures that will help publishers and editors at news organisations make decisions about how to reach their rapidly expanding mobile audiences.

Explosive growth in the next five years

The report, The Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Forecast (PDF) , gives a sense of just how rapid the growth in mobile data will be over the next five years. It draws on a number of sources including Informa Telecoms and Media, Strategy Analytics, Infonetics, Ovum, Gartner, IDC, Dell’Oro, Synergy, ACG Research, Nielsen, comScore, Arbitron Mobile, Maravedis and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The global figures predict global data usage in 2017 with growth rates so fast that the figures truly are mind boggling:

• Mobile data traffic will grow almost three times faster than fixed line traffic.
• By 2017, global mobile data volume will increase by 771 times from what it was just 10 years before. This means in 2017 mobile data traffic will be the “equivalent of 2,789 million DVDs each month or 30,742 million text messages each second”.
• Data use from Android devices is now higher than that of iPhones.

Diving into the details of the report, there are a few things that are important to note: Cisco includes not only data over traditional mobile networks but also data using WiFi. In fact, the amount of data over WiFi is dramatically higher than that over mobile networks.

Also, the global figures themselves already seem staggering, but when you focus on specific regions or countries, the predictions of growth seem even more astonishing. Some highlights from the the report include:

• Africa and the Middle East will see incredible growth in mobile data between 2007 and 2017, with mobile data traffic growing 3405 times in that decade, the report predicts. By 2017, there will be almost 850 m mobile users in the region, up from 661 m in 2012.
• From Central and Eastern Europe including Russia, mobile data speeds more than tripled last year to 551 kbps.
• “In Latin America, 67.7 million devices were added to the mobile network in 2012,” the report says. However, that is just half of Africa, where 144.7 m devices were added to the network.
• In the Asia-Pacific region, which includes Asian giants India and China, some 385.5 m devices were added to the network, just in 2012.
• For all the talk about smartphones, basic handsets still make up the vast majority of devices on the network, accounting for 82 percent.

The value in this report for news organisations outside of North America and Western Europe is this richness of regional and even major country data. To see highlights for your region, Cisco has created a website that allows you to find the statistics by region as well as by major countries in the regions. I will say this: the major countries in each region do tend to skew the data for these types of reports when it comes to digital media usage.

What does this mean for news organisations?

As a company that sells networking equipment, it’s in Cisco’s interest to make these numbers look large, but the multiple sources of data that Cisco uses are credible. The company estimates that, if anything, its estimates have erred on the conservative side by 2 to 10 percent.

The bigger question is why this information is relevant to news organisations. We all know that the mobile revolution has arrived, and it is sweeping across the globe. Publishers and editors need to know how to respond to the ways their audiences are using mobile devices by understanding:

• What devices are they using? How many are using smartphones? How many are using basic phones?
• Are tablet users a significant part of your audience?
• Are they using WiFi, 3G or 4G?

For example, in Africa, parts of Asia and Latin America, digital means mobile. As we noted last year, in countries like Egypt, Bangladesh, Senegal and Brazil, the majority of internet users are mobile-only internet users.

This will mean that not only will publishers need to understand how to deliver their content to these mobile audiences, but they also will need to develop revenue models that will support this expansion of mobile. Monetising mobile audiences is a key strategic goal for many digital media companies, and, while early in its development, there are mobile advertising strategies such as better targeting – both of the customer and the customer’s location – that are proving successful. In addition to advertising, mobile audiences are more willing to pay for apps and information. Mobile payment systems also make it easier for users to purchase things using mobile devices, opening up opportunities not only for paid content but also m-commerce.

Cisco’s report shows that mobile use has exploded past the elite, early-adopter phase and is rapidly moving into the mainstream. It’s another platform, with its own unique challenges, but also its own unique opportunities. Almost regardless of where you are in the world, if you don’t have a mobile strategy, you’ll want to develop one this year.

Digital security should be a concern for all journalists regardless of whether you’re working in print, broadcast or online because we all rely on email and other digital tools. We’ve already covered some of the basic digital security tips for journalists, but Stuart Thomas, a senior reporter for the South African tech and media site Memeburn, takes it to the next level with some more advanced ways to keep you and your sources safe from cyber-snooping from Nico Sell, the co-founder of the famous DEF CON hacking conference.

With cyber-security issues, it is worth sorting through common sense precautions for day-to-day security in the article and those precautions that you’ll only need in circumstances when you think your security is under threat, so I’ll break down Sell’s recommendations into what I think you will need to stay safe everyday and those techniques that you’ll need if you have heightened security concerns. At the end, security is all about assessing your risk and balancing the risks you’re willing to take with the efforts you will need to maintain your security. Safeguarding your security takes some effort, but it’s important not to wait until you fear for your safety to take precautions.

Common sense, everyday precautions

We’ll start by looking at the security precautions every journalist needs to worry about.

1. Keep an eye on your apps – One bit of everyday security that you’ll want to practice is to be very careful when downloading tablet or smartphone apps that want access to your contacts. Last year, one study of the Android platform in Germany found that of 13,500 apps, 8 percent did not protect bank accounts or social media logins. Security firm Bit9 went even further saying that 100,000 Android apps engaged in “suspicious” or “questionable” activity, such as tracking the location of a device, accessing contacts or even “harvesting the contents of e-mail messages”, according to a report in Bloomberg.

Of course, apps running on Google’s Android are not the only privacy and security threats. Last year, Twitter admitted that its “Find Friends” feature on its Apple iOS app stored users’ contacts on their servers.

It’s this kind of activity that you’ll want to watch out for. iOS 6, the newest version of the Apple mobile operating system allows you to set privacy settings for each application. Apps now require permission to access private data such as your location, contacts, calendar, reminders and photos.  If that seems like a lot of work, fortunately there are some apps that will help you monitor the kind of information that your apps are able to access. Tech site Lifehacker recommends Ben the Bodyguard, a paid app, or the free Private Data app.

2.  Beware of public wifi – In 2008 while I was on assignment covering the US elections, a thief was able to make $1,800 worth of purchases using my PayPal account, and I’m almost certain that the thieves stole my password while I was using a public hotspot. I expect it was a compromised router that might have had a security flaw introduced by its installers. The entire ordeal was a monumental hassle that took time and attention away from doing my job. Fortunately, PayPal provided excellent support in resolving the situation and also making sure it didn’t happen again.

In my case, it was just a run-of-the-mill thief, but similar techniques can be used by repressive states or hackers who deal in black market security information such as journalists’ details.

Sell recommends encrypting all of your instant messages and making sure that you’re connecting securely to important accounts such as email or bank accounts. I go one step further and use VPN – virtual private networking – when I’m connecting to wifi. I use Boingo mobile, which allows me to connect to 600,000 hotspots around the world, and when connecting to a hotspot, it gives me the option to use a VPN connection to add another layer of security.

3. If you’re not using it, turn it off – You don’t need to turn off your device, but do turn off things like Bluetooth, file sharing and even wifi, if you’re not using it. This s good not only for security, but it can also save power, which can be important if you won’t be able to charge your devices regularly.

4. Create a password strategy – I’m still shocked at the simple passwords that people use. The most common mistake is to use a word or a name as a password. The first thing that an attacker will do when trying to break into your computer or smartphone will be to try guess your password using dictionary attacks, checking your password against common words and names.

I personally use a simple formula of letters and three numbers. The last three numbers relate to letters in the web address of the site that I’m using. For instance, if I were to use M4th351 for the formula, then the last three letters of the password would be the third, fifth and first letters of the account. So, for a Google account it would be M4th351olg. However, on Yahoo, the password would be M4th351hoy. The passwords are different for each site, but I only have to remember the formula. I change the formula often, and I use a different formula for sites that need an extra level of security, such as banking sites, than passwords for media sites, where I’m not as concerned about my security.

Sell also reminds you not to use security questions, questions you are asked to provide for banking security or to recover your password, where the answers might be gained from social media sites. It’s really important not to post so much information on social media sites that an attacker can easily steal your identity.

Higher risk, higher security

Sell also had some other recommendations that you might not need every day, but if you are working in a high-risk area or have reason to believe someone is targeting you, you might want to consider these measures as well.

1. Learn about encryption – I personally think that it is worthwhile for all journalists to learn about encryption, how to digitally scramble your instant messages and your emails to make it impossible for others to read them. Email is only as secure as a postcard. Anyone intercepting your message can read it unless you encrypt it. However, from a practical standpoint, encryption still requires effort that both sender and receiver aren’t always willing to take.

If you suddenly find that you need encryption, it is better to know how to use it instead of having to move quickly to start using it. In the future, we’ll have a guide to encrypted communications. If you want to start researching now, I’d suggest reading up on PGP security for your email and also learning about mobile apps such as Silent Circle.

2. Beware of public USB charging stations – This is a suggestion from Sell, and while I think there is definitely a threat here, I’m just not sure how big it is. He’s right. Plugging your smartphone into a public USB charging station could open up your device to being read, and I can think of some places in the world where this would definitely be an easy way to steal your personal data, but I remain to be convinced that this is a widespread threat.

That being said, I would agree with Sell, for a number of reasons, that it’s a good idea to carry around a mobile charger. If you’re on assignment and your smartphone is running flat, it will keep you working longer.

I’m sure that many of you will have had to develop digital security strategies. What are some of the steps that you’ve taken to keep you and your sources safe?

Digital technology is radically remaking media, and while many people focus on the changes brought to the newspapers, publishing and music industries, digital technology is bringing about one of the most fundamental transformations in the history of television. First, digital technology radically expanded multi-channel television via cable and satellite. Now live streaming and video on demand via mobile, tablets, internet and smart TV platforms looks set to radically reshape viewing habits by giving consumers unprecedented choice of when, where and how they will view TV. If you want to see a glimpse of the future of TV, you only have to look at how the BBC delivered what they called the “first proper digital Olympics” and how consumers responded.

The BBC’s London 2012 Olympics coverage was not only properly digital, but properly multi-platform and properly comprehensive. The BBC described this as a four-screen strategy, reaching viewers via PC, mobile, tablet and internet-connected TV. The public broadcaster delivered nearly day-long coverage on five of its nine linear channels and every minute of every event, 2,500 hours of coverage, via live, HD streams via desktop computers, smartphones, tablets and internet protocol TV (IPTV) platforms. This was a thousand more hours of coverage than they provided for Beijing in 2008, and the 24 HD streams were six times more than they delivered four years ago. It was a monumental task that required months of testing before the games.

The BBC delivered a smartphone app built specifically for the games, and the broadcaster launched a new video player via its Sports website that allowed people to view and time shift 24 streams of video. Users could easily move back and forth through the live video stream to see previous events via clear navigation that broke the stream into events, highlighting the ones in which British athletes took part. It was more like visually navigating through the chapters of a DVD than the normal online video presentation that only provides the ability to rewind without a clear sense of key moments.

IPTV platforms have matured dramatically in the UK since the 2008 Beijing Olymics, the BBC used these platforms to ensure the widest distribution of its Olympics coverage. The BBC used its IPTV platform, iPlayer, to stream live coverage of its three network channels. Additionally, BBC delivered the same 24 live and catch-up video streams to internet connected TVs, such as Sony Smart TV, PlayStation 3, Virgin Media TiVo, through an (IPTV) service called “Red Button” that gave audiences more flexibility and interactivity as the Games happened. On free-to-air digital TV service, Freeview, the Red Button feature is used to access digital text services and also extra programme channels. After the Olympics, the BBC will be focusing on IPTV services on the Red Button service.

How consumers responded

The scale of delivery is something that very few broadcasters apart from the BBC could achieve. However, this monumental project provides us valuable insights into how consumers will consume video-on-demand services on new platforms.

British viewers definitely embraced the BBC’s multi-platform offering. Taking into account both website traffic and digital video streaming, “the BBC delivered 2.8 petabytes, with the peak traffic moment occurring when Bradley Wiggins won Gold and we shifted 700 Gb/s”, Cait O’Riordan, Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012, said.

In total, the BBC received 106m video requests across its digital platforms. This was more than three times the 32m online videos requested during the 2008 Games, and the most BBC has ever received. The majority of these online video requests, 62m, were for live-streams, while only 8m were for on-demand live streams and 35m were for short-form clips.

One challenge in designing the service was to allow viewers to not only time-shift within a video stream but also to quickly and easily move between streams of the various sports on offer. O’Riordan said.

Our aim was to put audiences in control of their Olympics experience, transforming the way they could navigate through the huge breadth of coverage using the extra features of the interactive video player.

The BBC found that users did indeed take advantage of this option. The corporation’s data clearly shows people moving across channels and platforms to check out a whole host of different events. Whether they were carrying high-profile or esoteric, little-supported events, all 24 of the streams were being used. According to the head of product, O’Riordan, every one of the streams saw at least 100,000 users – a considerable audience for narrowcast events – at some point during the two weeks of games.

O’Riordan also points out how in a four-screen world, consumption patterns shift noticeably through the day as they travel to work, are at work, are at home in front of the TV and then take a tablet to bed. She said:

• PC usage maxes out during the week at lunchtime and during mid-afternoon peak Team GB moments.
• Mobile takes over around 6pm as people leave the office but still want to keep up to date with the latest action
• Tablet usage reaches a peak at around 9pm: people using them as a second screen experience as they watch the Games on their TVs, and also as they continue to watch in bed.

Mobile and tablet accounted for 41 percent of IP video stream viewing during the games, the BBC said, and in the US, NBC said that the figure was 45 percent, showing the dramatic potential for mobile video viewing once the networks are in place to support this kind of activity.

It is also important to note that with all of this digital consumption, the Olympics was a huge draw for traditional TV viewers wanting to cheer on the home team. The BBC announced that a staggering 90% of the entire British population watched at least 15 minutes of its Olympics coverage either on linear TV or via the Red Button service.

The future: Coming to a screen near you

Being able to reach audiences with your programming no matter where they are or which device they are using holds huge opportunities for broadcasters. The BBC’s four-screen strategy for London 2012 shows a glimpse of the digital future, but it is a future that is coming to your market as IPTV platforms proliferate and mobile networks become faster and more robust. Broadcast markets around the world are making the switch from analogue to digital, whether that is free-to-air terrestrial services, digital satellite, IPTV or new mobile and tablet apps.

By 2015, the number of IPTV subscribers globally is expected to grow from 53 million in 2011 to 105.1 million, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.7%,  according to a new report “IPTV Global Forecast: 2011 to 2015 Report” by MRG Multimedia Research Group. The service revenue for the world IPTV market will grow at a CAGR of 20% to reach $45.3bn. The rise in revenue will be driven by dramatic IPTV growth emerging markets, such as Brazil and Russia, albeit from a low base. A 2011 report predicts that IPTV subscribers in Brazil will from 21,000 in 2011 to 1.5m by 2016, according to Pyramid Research.

This future may seem a long way off, but the BBC began to position itself for a digital video future more than a decade ago. In 2001, work began on its ground-breaking TV on-demand iPlayer platform which now spans online, smart TVs, and mobile devices. Whilst the BBC has the advantage of enormous resources and infrastructure, there are important steps that all broadcasters can take to prepare for the digital future.

What comes across loud and clear is that consumers will embrace choice when given the opportunity. Broadcasters and other content creators should remember this as they position themselves to take advantage of digital opportunities. The other lesson is that with multiple screens comes a range of new viewing patterns as video content can follow a viewer throughout the day. Prime time may mean something quite different depending on the device and delivery method. Successful broadcasters of the future will be ready to serve consumers when, where and how they want.

The overview is truly global, including not only giants from the US and Europe, but also stars from rapidly developing, emerging markets. Coming second only to Google is Chinese Mobile, that is also joined by Chinese internet giants Baidu and Tencent and Chinese gaming powerhouse Shanda Games. China is not the only emerging market represented in the list. South Africa’s Naspers also joins the list and, as paidContent has pointed out, Naspers is a “case study in how to expand digitally”.

[It] is best known for making savvy online investments in fast-growing emerging markets. Naspers owns or partly owns the shopping sites Allegro (eastern Europe), Ricardo and OLX (Latin America); the social networks Gadu-Gadu (eastern Europe), Mail.ru Group, vKontakte and Odnoklassniki (Russia); among others. It also owns a third of Chinese internet giant Tencent, from which it gets around a half of its internet revenue.

Take a look at the full list, as well as the individual entries. paidContent has a summary of its own takeaways from the list.  The first is the rise in digital revenue; the pc50 boasted $150bn in digital revenue. However, they point out that of these companies, digital still only makes up 16.5 percent of total revenue.

However, I think you need to dive a bit deeper into the data before you can pull out an average like that. In the list, you’ve got internet companies like Google, Baidu and Tencent. While Google earned 96 percent of its $36.4 bn  from digital revenue, there is almost $29 bn separating Google from second place, China Mobile.  There are a range of different companies in the list including search companies, social networks, telecommunications companies, advertising agencies, broadcasters and news groups making it a challenge to compare like-for-like.

Another takeaway that paidContent highlights is that a lot of digital advertising revenue is being captured by major agencies. This has been one of the major challenges for news organisations: in the shift to digital, other players are capturing significant slices of the digital advertising pie. Google and other search engines such as Yandex and Baidu capture a huge percentage of digital advertising. paidContent shows that major advertising agencies including the Publicis Groupe in France, British group WPP and Japanese groups Hakuhodo DY and Dentsu, a 200,000 employee giant of a company, have aggressively expanded into digital advertising services. For example, Dentsu is the official advertising partner for Facebook in Japan, and WPP went on a global buying spree last year, making 36 acquisitions including in Vietnam, Russia, China and Brazil.

Social media challenge more than Facebook

Here are some of our takeaways at the Knowledge Bridge.  US internet companies like Google, Groupon and Facebook get a lot of attention for their success, but, as paidContent’s list shows, major digital media companies are growing outside of the US. Chinese internet companies are moving outside of their home market. For example, Tencent opened up operations in Indonesia late last year and is already making waves in what it sees as a key market.  Earlier this summer, it launched a mobile messaging app, Qute, which works across both smartphones and low-end phones with internet access.  With little promotion, the app has already seen a million downloads.

As we pointed out earlier this year, Russia’s social media giants, Mail.ru and Odnoklassniki are both tapping into Russian-speaking audiences outside of their home country.

News organisations need to realise that in the competition for digital advertising revenue that they are not just competing against other news groups but also against search engines and social media services.

Diversify

The battle for advertising revenue is fierce in digital, but you only have look at Naspers to find a great example of generating digital revenue through investment and diversification. The newspaper group expanded into pay television in the 1980s, and it has made some incredibly savvy digital investments in emerging markets. It is worth looking at some of their investments and acquisitions, which include shopping sites, social networks, online gaming firms and even a social shopping firm, Multiply, which provides social media tools to help merchants promote their goods to potential customers.

Paid content

As paidContent points out, the list is split between those who charge and those who don’t. We’re starting to see a number of promising paid content developments, including the success of national paid content groups like Slovakia’s Piano Media and also metered paywalls, including the high-profile launch of one at the New York Times last year. Under a metered paywall model, readers get some content for free but either have to pay for certain types of content or are asked to subscribe once they have read more than a certain number pages.

Looking at the previous point, diversification, one area where paid content is thriving is business content. Business giant Bloomberg is number three on paidContent’s league table, and there are a number of other business data and information providers that have made the list. It is worth thinking about business news and information opportunities for possible revenue opportunities to pay for your critical accountability journalism.

Zimbabwe news business Alpha Media Holdings recently held what it described as Harare’s first ever hackathon, which brought together mobile, web and software developers in a fast-paced collaborative competition.

The competition saw 16 entries from 25 web, mobile and software developers working individually and in teams for 9 hours. To help give focus to the event, AMH – which publishes NewsDay, The Standard and the Zimbabwe Independent, and is an MDLF client – told participants that their applications should focus on one or more of the following:

1. Mobile applications to disseminate media content.
2. Crowdsourcing applications for the newsroom so that citizens could report news such as incidents of corruption or problems such as burst pipes.
3. Applications that compiled daily commodity prices for traders.

Prince Kaguda took top honours for his SMS and USSD-based (unstructured supplementary service data-based) news application, which allows users to subscribe to the news service for free, with financial support coming from advertising.

Participants were told that not only would winners take home some nice gadgets, including a Samsung Galaxy tablet and a Nokia smartphone, but that they would also be introduced to companies to pursue further development of their projects.

Kaguda told technology news website Techzim:

We’re going to incorporate the feedback we got from the judges and, with the assistance of the Alpha and Telecel, launch the news application.

The second place prize went to Shaun Benjamin, who tried to tick all of the boxes in terms of the criteria set out for the competition by creating a crowdsourced platform for collecting and distributing commodity prices. The final prize winner in third place was Tonderai Shamuyarira, who created an app that allows people to anonymously submit text or images for news reports.

Hackathons rising in popularity

Hackathons, also known as hack days or hackfests, are gaining in popularity as a way for developers to show off their skills, to build applications that address specific issues or to increase collaboration in organisations. In addition to this hackathon held last week in Zimbabwe, the Open Data & Democracy Initiative will host a 48-hour hackathon in Cape Town this weekend to encourage the development of applications to help make government more transparent and accountable.

For developers, it is a chance to show off their skills to fellow developers and also to potential employers or investors. For groups like the Open Data & Democracy Initiative, it allows them to promote development of certain types of apps.

For AMH, chairman Trevor Ncube said: “The purpose of the event is to identify people throughout the country interested in building applications to help Zimbabwe solve economic problems.”

The hackathon is just a start, and AMH wants to create a technology hub, a permanent place where developers and entrepreneurs  can collaborate on projects to take advantage of the mobile and technological boom sweeping the continent. Innovation centres and technology hubs have been popping up all over Africa in countries including Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa.

How to host your own hackathon

News organisations including the BBC, the New York Times and the newspaper where I was an editor, The Guardian, all have held hackathons or hack days.

Why? For news organisations, it’s a great opportunity to break down the walls in your organisation. For editors and journalists who are not familiar with developing mobile and web applications, it gives them an opportunity to build up experience with the process. Editors and journalists learn what can be done in a short amount of time. The type of rapid development that is the hallmark of a hackathon parallels the demands of tight editorial deadlines, and developers get a sense of the urgency that breaking news requires.

At The Guardian, we also made a point 0f including external developers and digital thinkers to help inject new thinking, and as they developed, we also started to introduce commercial staff to the mix. This meant that we weren’t just being creative with the technology but also developing ideas on how we could earn valuable revenue through these innovations.

Hack days aren’t just a place for blue sky thinking. They can also deliver practical new projects. The first hack day at The Guardian gave rise to the very popular Data Blog and was pivotal in helping launch the paper’s data journalism efforts.

When planning your own hackathon:

• Include both staff and external developers and digital thinkers.
• Give the hackathon, for example, mobile, social or location services, to help focus participants.
• Think of practical ways to develop innovations created during your hackathon.

Whilst computers still dominate digital news use, mobile use now stands at around 25% across countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, while peaking in Denmark at 32%, according to a new survey of digital news use from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Tablets, which are much less widespread than web-enabled mobile phones, still account for a relatively small percentage of news consumption. Even in the country with the highest rate of tablet usage, Denmark, tablets only account for 13% of digital news access. While still a relatively small rate of digital news consumption, tablet use is set to grow quickly.

In the US, the Online Publishers Association predicts that tablet ownership in the US will reach 47% by next year. Much of that growth is driven by Amazon’s Kindle Fire. It took five years after the introduction of Apple’s iPhone for a majority of US consumers to own a smartphone, but tablet ownership is rocketing towards a majority a little more than two years since the sector-defining iPad was introduced, the OPA said.

The Reuters Institute study also found that smartphone and tablet news consumption represent not only a shift in platform but a much broader shift to new systems of engagement, one that may strengthen the position of newspapers. In the UK for example, smartphones have become the main source of online news for 27% of 25-34 year-olds and 22% of 16-24 year-olds, whereas 58% of British tablet users access news from their device every week, Reuters reports. And interestingly, these consumers prefer news from traditional newspapers like The Guardian and The Times to some of the non-traditional news sources that have strong positions online. Five of the top news brands on tablets in the UK come from newspaper groups compared to just two on computers.

Findings from the US confirm that mobile devices, particularly tablets, are becoming viable alternatives to traditional newspaper reading. A recent study from the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri shows that 56% of users of large media tablets like the Apple iPad spend one hour or more each day consuming news on their devices, often at home after 5:00 p.m. That was historically the place and prime time for reading evening newspapers or watching evening news broadcasts.

Especially interesting for news organizations is that mobile devices also are showing promising signs in terms of revenue generation, as Nic Newman, an editor of the Reuters Institute Digital Report, points out in an interview with The Media Briefing. Tablet users in both the UK and the US say the device provides a better experience for news than a computer, and they are therefore significantly more likely to pay for online news. The rebundling of news into apps makes it very easy for the 56% of all British tablet users who use news apps on their device as the main way of accessing online news to pay for the service. All it takes is a simple touch on a branded icon in the app stores. Of course, Apple’s Newsstand – an app dedicated to downloading digital magazines and newspapers – has made it much easier for traditional publishers to develop digital subscription models.

But mobile devices are not just altering online news consumption in developed markets. Smartphones, and to some degree tablets, are irreversibly changing the way users access the internet in emerging markets as well. Russians for example are very attracted to the new devices, especially in major cities. Analysis by Yandex shows that 56% of consumers own smartphones and 10% own tablets in Moscow. Other big cities like St. Petersburg show similar results. Russia is still behind Western Europe and the US in terms of mobile internet usage, but the user base is growing rapidly, increasing by 2.5% during the first two months of 2012. And user patterns are similar to those in the US, with for example 57% of all iPad usage in Russia taking place in the evening at home.

Even markets with internet penetrations as low as 1.1% have burgeoning smartphone markets that are changing the media habits and attitudes of consumers. Nielsen’s Southeast Asia Digital Consumer Report from 2011 shows that while computers continue to be the primary way to access the internet in the region, smartphones are on track to supplant them. In Indonesia for instance, more than three-quarters (78%) of consumers own internet-capable mobile devices compared to just 29% who own laptops or 31% with desktops. Tablets are just starting to make their mark in Southeast Asia, but they are likely to show rapid growth in several countries in the region in the year ahead, Nielsen reports. And while reading and sending emails is the most popular activity for users in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Thailand, reading news is the favourite digital activity in Indonesia and Vietnam.

This new consumer behaviour is clearly something news organizations all over the world can benefit from by building mobile services to drive news consumption, promotion and communication. Apps have now become enough of an integral part of daily life in developed markets as well as in emerging markets to offer some hope to traditional newspaper publishers struggling with new competition and falling profit margins, as the Reuters Institute report emphasises.

On the other hand, we should remain cautious in interpreting these figures – especially in emerging markets. It is still very early days for tablets in particular, which largely are in the hands of richer and better educated groups who are more likely to be prepared to pay for news. Also, it is essential to highlight that consumers and their preferences and needs differ from one market to the next, as Jasmeet Sing Sethi, senior specialist at Ericsson ConsumerLab, says in connection with a study on mobile developments in Russia, India and Brazil. In India for example, smartphone users are predominately focusing on personalisation – screensavers, images for wallpaper and themes – whereas social media applications are big in Brazil. And looking at Russia, you find a lot of productivity and performance types of applications including “navigation and maps, shopping comparisons, barcode scanners, translators, (and) dictionaries”, Ericsson Consumerlab reports.