Bad Idea: Where do you start if you’re designing a corporate logo?

Ruth Kedar: The most important thing is to listen to the people who are behind the company. Then try to understand who they are, where they’re coming from, what they’re trying to achieve, and what kind of problem they’re trying to solve. And understand what the audience is.

You know in Alice Through the Looking Glass, she says ‘I need to see what I say to know what I think’? In many ways it’s my role to get them to talk to see what it is they’re saying, it gets them to articulate what the idea is.

Then take all of that and translate it into a visual representation, until you come up with something that people can really stand behind, that echoes their voice and makes it louder and brighter. If they are not thrilled with it, it doesn’t matter that I’ve created the most balanced, incredibly harmonious and beautiful imagery – the difference between art and design is that design is a utilitarian enterprise, solving a particular problem.

BI: From a layman’s perspective, it seems like the simplest logos are often the most effective. How do you create something that’s simple and yet transmits a complex message?

RK: The company and the people behind it, and the customer – they do not all need to see exactly the same thing in a logo, but if every single one of them is able to see that his perspective is being articulated in it, then that’s great. If you take this symbol, you’ve given birth to this thing, and very much like Moses, you put it on the stream and it takes it where it goes. So then you’re not controlling it any more, but if every single person who encounters it is able to see something in it that touches them deeply, and in a positive way, and it withstands the trials of time, the geographic, the generations, then it’s successful.

So you shouldn’t limit yourself to something so concrete and so recognisable, or tied into a fad or a particular time or connotation – in doing that you’re limiting the vision. If you look at the Apple logo, there are a lot of ideas that go beyond the fact that this is a fruit. There’s the connotation of the Garden of Eden, the interaction between nature and man, taking the first step, taking the bite of something much bigger.

You need to draw a visceral reaction from people, and these reactions are based on their whole experience as a human being in every kind of role they’ve ever had, as children, as friends, as parents, as lovers, as consumers, as travellers.

BI: So how did the Google logo come about?

RK: I met with people that had an amazing vision, that had an idea of where Google was going to be in ten years. With the product they were bringing forth, the interaction between the consumers and the product, how they viewed themselves as a company, and the culture within the company – they really did not want to be anything like we had seen before.

We were not going to be upper-case. And this was the time of Yahoo and Netscape – wacky fonts, which represented being anti-establishment, but because everyone was doing wacky fonts, it became the norm. I tried to find a font that was still serif, which was unusual at the time, but that wasn’t thick and bold, that had an elegance to it.

They were really into childhood, all the aspects of childhood we still feel ourselves no matter how old we get: curiosity, playfulness, optimism, adventurousness, impishness. I was thinking about Legos, and putting things together, and the colour palette, and rainbows. While we were talking and developing, we went around and around, and ended up with something that resembled some of the original things that Larry [Page, Google's co-founder] was playing with at the very beginning, but with more complexity drawn into it.

BI: The Google logo hasn’t changed for many years now – why do you think that is?

RK: It still looks very different from anything out there – with the typefaces and letterforms that were chosen, each is still unique, and allows for the doodles to be created. Again a big no-no – you shouldn’t touch the logo, and yet here is a platform that you can play with, and it’s so recognisable you can take huge chunks out of it and still see it. I think one of the great successes is the fact that when you say the word Google, you see the logo in front of you.

I’ve done other things which I think are stronger in terms of aesthetic and purity of design, but this is a good example of the company, the product and the visual identification working so well together that they have been able to grow and develop into completely different areas and still work. The flexibility and adaptability fits the Google culture. There’s something in the logo that transcends the original intent; it’s a vessel that expands, it’s a flower that blooms and grows.

There are some concerns around the fact they have so much power and they’re branching into so many different areas. It’s interesting that the fact that they still carry on with a very playful and childlike logo – in some ways it makes it easier to interact with the huge conglomerate they have become. It makes them non-sinister and non-threatening.

BI: How has the internet changed the landscape of logo design?

RK: The way that corporations have presented themselves to the public has changed quite a bit. Everyone has information at their fingertips, and consumers have a lot to say. We’re definitely a more consumer-driven society. So companies can no longer afford to be behind these big walls, in castles with big moats around them. It’s not just a matter of what representation you put forward for your board of directors or your shareholders, but really what kind of image do you want to convey to your consumer. That should bring a lot of humility: you need to understand it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve raised or how much prestige you have, but how can you really get your customers to trust your product.

This is also the age in which you the individual can have a huge reach from your home, in your pajamas in your loft apartment, you can reach anybody anywhere. How do you make your presence felt, convey who you are and what you’re bringing forth?

Ultimately, you always have to remember that a logotype really gets tied in with the product. If the product is not good, a good logo is not going to save it.

All this has only added credence to the increasingly popular notion that, as a company, Microsoft has become unwieldy and slow to react to industry shifts. Although it remains one of the most profitable businesses in the world (largely thanks to a 10-year-old operating system consumers and businesses remain wary of ditching), its association with ‘me-too’ business strategies and uninspired products has left it lagging when it comes to popular mindshare. But the Xbox 360, and to a lesser extent the Zune, have been successful (if unprofitable) experiments into using smaller, manoeuvrable, more focused teams to drive the direction of the company. Both the 360’s online service Live and the recent Zune HD are industry leading in terms of innovation and, in stark contrast to Microsoft’s current mobile offerings, represent thoughtful, consumer-focused products.

The announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series on Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona therefore represented a pivotal moment not just in Microsoft’s mobile strategy, but in their direction as a company. Like the Zune and Xbox 360, this new operating system marks an explicit move from the software-only focus that has brought them so much success in the PC space, and onto a trajectory that encompasses the kind of holistic control most readily associated with Apple. Gone is the loose and broad licensing of 6.x, replaced by strict hardware spec minimums, a consistent look and feel, and prerequisite button layouts. Microsoft also delared partnerships with a whole plethora of manufacturers including Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC, HP, LG and Samsung. Most significantly though, like Google’s recent move to play a more centralised role in the design and distribution of their Android-toting Nexus One handset, there is a distinct sense that Microsoft is for the first time positioning itself firmly at the centre of the mobile Windows experience.

This strategy is a pretty big gamble for Microsoft. As a business that has made the lion’s share of its cash through a hands-off attitude to development and licensing, Win Phone 7 is an ideological change that puts the company in the firing line for all aspects of the customer experience. It is also a clear statement of intent that Microsoft is ready to go toe-to-toe with Apple and Google at a game those companies have, over the last year particularly, made their own.

Refreshingly, the aesthetic and functionality of Microsoft’s new software seems to reflect the bold nature of this gamble. Windows Phone 7 Series is a canvas of Tron-like block colour and lines. Riffing on its contentious Zune HD operating system, the look Microsoft has chosen is startling, slick and entirely their own. The design undeniably stands out in a market otherwise saturated by iPhone-cloning visual tropes and utilitarian icon lists. There’s a lot of large text, gestural input and consistent interface metaphors which will initially be unfamiliar to most users. But at the very least, the new mobile division seems to have its philosophy right – as Joe Belfiore repeated several times during Microsoft’s MWC press event, ‘the phone is not a PC.’

But time will tell whether Microsoft are simply too late to this heavily populated and ruthless game. With users increasingly entreched within ecosystems that offer apps galore, there is now a financial concern in a phone beyond merely the remaining months left on a carrier contract. One thing is clear though, Windows Phone 7 Series represents the work of a new Microsoft, a Microsoft that is finally as relevant and interesting as its upstart competition.

The real news here is nicely summed up by Google’s snappy new store URL (www.google.com/phone). For the first time in its brief history, the company synonymous with web-software has suddenly started making hardware. Although Taiwan’s HTC actually manufactured the handset, Android’s Head Product Manager Erick Tseng has reiterated on a number of occasions that Google had a guiding hand in the phone’s look and specification. This is – to all intents and purposes – the Google Phone.

Yet, while there are promises that more phones will be added to Google’s store as time progresses, the company’s overall mobile strategy remains a little confused. Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG and several other heavy hitters of the mobile world are all part of Google’s ‘Open Handset Alliance’, yet they sell their phones through their own stores and through subsidised deals with cellular carriers across the world. Google’s store apparently sits alongside this and attempts to consolidate a set of iconic, ‘halo’ phones in the face of Android’s comparatively disparate image.

Because let there be no bones about this, this decision is at least partially motivated by Apple’s centralised and increasingly aggressive position within the consumer electronics and web space. The iPhone’s success was further confirmed on Monday in an earnings call that boasted a 100% year-on-year sales increase. On Wednesday, Apple announced the iPad, another piece of hardware that has realigned our expectations of what a mobile device can be. Whether the iPad can deliver on its promises is yet to be seen, but Apple’s brazen creation of an entirely new category is proof of the company’s irrepressible confidence when it comes to all things mobile.

Less widely reported but perhaps even more important, last month Apple purchased the prominent mobile advertising company Quattro and were quoted (during Monday’s earnings call) as stating ‘we expect to offer developers a great opportunity for mobile advertising.’ With the rise and rise of mobile technology, mobile advertising is pretty much set to emerge as the next major battleground, as handsets become ever more versatile and ubiquitous. And with the iPhone, the iPad and an explicit statement of intent related to advertising roll-out, Apple are poised to attack both Google’s most lucrative revenue stream and its new-found love for hardware. This after they denied Google’s free phone call service Voice a place in the App Store.

Google have since created a Google Voice Web App and browser access to the service, thus enabling, presumably to Apple’s fury, a service that appears to be optimised for iPhone use. If Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s conspicuous resignation from the Apple board of directors wasn’t enough of a hint, these companies are readying themselves for all-out war.

The Nexus One therefore represents a counter-attack on Google’s part. Both brands have heavy “mindshare” amongst consumers and both are increasingly plunging multiple fingers into one another’s pies. All this marks good times for the consumer. More competition inevitably means a better user experience somewhere down the road. But if Google fully position themselves behind smart phones, as their high profile store appears to suggest they will, 2010 could be the year when battle truly commences.

The reviewer opts to use the application’s ‘famous people finder’, a service that purports to plot the known position of celebrities on a video feed of the surrounding area. The reviewer stares at the world through his phone screen, led by the circular icons that fill the emulated field of vision. After a number of failed location attempts in the city of Amsterdam, the camera zooms towards a window. We are presented with the unmistakable face of Brad Pitt wearing a pair of sunglasses and an exasperated expression. As he shakes his head and makes a retreat up some stairs, the reviewer and cameraman whoop and laugh. It’s an infectious and unexpected moment, but it also hints at the unforeseen social impact of this kind of technology. The amazement lies not in the fact that hunting down Brad Pitt is possible, but that it exists as a feature in a mobile phone application that is easy to use and cheap to obtain.

Despite sounding like the product of a sci-fi author’s spiralling imagination, ‘augmented reality’, or AR, is a fairly straightforward technology that has been around for a while; the name refers to the merging of a live video feed with computer generated imagery. This process might not seem so revolutionary: it has taken place for many years in televised football matches, where a graphic of the game’s score overlays a feed of the action. However, modern augmented reality takes this to another level of saturation, and operates on the premise that computer-generated graphics enhance a camera’s version of what we can see, providing us with a more useful, data-rich picture of the world around us. 

Despite many mobile phones having the technical capacity to run augmented reality applications, it is the sheer ubiquity of the iPhone and the unprecedented popularity of Apple’s App Store that have made such innovation in the field of AR apps possible, and pushed it to the top of tech newsfeeds. With the release of the iPhone 3GS, AR could be on the cusp of mainstream popularity, and could soon become as everyday a technology as touch screens and GPS.

Recent implementations of AR, from the Brad Pitt-chasing Layar to the amenity-review service Yelp, represent the latest in tangible, useful convergences of the real world and the Internet. Many of these applications run with the ‘Google in 3D’ idea, offering local information but negating the need to search by presenting location-specific data that changes as the user moves, pivots and rotates.

One of the most interesting and startling application concepts to appear in recent weeks has been Augmented ID by The Astonishing Tribe.  In the promo YouTube video released by the company, we see augmented reality technology used to create a kind of visual profile of people. As the phone points at an individual, their face is circled by a group of icons, mainly social network widgets and contact information, which realign along with their movements.

The service proposes to offer an immediate, one-click exchange of information by identifying the individual and then presenting their personal details as orbiting graphics. Developer Dan Gärdenfors sees a strong future for implementations of this kind of technology: “we believe that AR will become widely adopted when it works smoothly and allows ‘real life search’ without introducing layers of abstractions. By this we mean that information should be presented in a ‘zero click’ UI [user interface] where one does not have to switch applications or type URLs to access information about things one encounters in real life.”

Although Gärdenfors’ work revolves around the construction of this uniquely fluid user interface architecture, the ‘people search’ concept his company presents is one that has caught the collective imagination of the Internet community.

This seamless convergence of reality and social network information appears to be the next logical step forward for a world of access-anywhere Facebook and Twitter clients: placing virtual spaces amongst the artifacts and objects of real life, and giving them the illusion of physicality.

Within the processes of AR, our virtual and physical projections of personal identity are bound together: our Facebook Statuses or LastFM profiles become badges that we ‘wear’, gateways by which online persona meets real-life exterior. In Gärdenfors’ words: ‘What is very important in Augmented ID is the idea of taking control over the way other people can look at you.  You “dress up” virtually, showing the information that you think is suitable for the context you are in.’

Of course, as with the incident of celebrity stalking made possible by Layar, the growth of augmented reality brings with it concerns related to both privacy and malicious use. But, as with social networking tools already in existence, Augmented ID’s concept revolves around user control. Being immediately identified and associated with our passions and interests is compelling on a human level: put simply, most of us want to be seen as we want to present ourselves and found by those that know us.

Check back for more blogs by Phil on the rapidly developing smartphone app scene. 

As the editorial captain of Wired magazine, Conde Nast’s future-tech Bible, Anderson professes to behaving “like a complete fascist” towards his small corps of twenty-something staffers. Such totalitarian affectations are, of course, par in the U.S. magazine world, where successful editors are expected to cultivate an autocratic celebrity persona in the Simon Cowell mould: one part Elton John to two parts Lope de Aguirre. In most cases, the peacock plumage masks a deficiency of talent, but not so with Anderson, whose editorial chops are undisputed: Wired has won a series of National Magazine awards recognising its grabby design and editorial, and has an enviable national profile that defies its circulation figures.

Internationally though, it’s through his moonlighting gig as a ‘Big Idea’ authorial guru that Anderson is becoming best known. His 2006 book The Long Tail explained the economic miracle of Amazon.com, illustrating how a company could make more money selling niche products than mass products via the Internet, where shelf space is theoretically infinite. It catapulted him into an A-list of bestselling pop-theorists with Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman, and led to lucrative gigs on the business conference circuit: he currently delivers around 50 speeches a year at £20,000-£30,000 a pop.

In his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Anderson takes this idea even further, arguing that the near-zero ‘marginal costs’ of digital distribution – caused by the exponential decrease in the cost of computer processing power, hard drive storage and bandwidth – have created a new marketplace, where free pricing is practically a force of economic gravity. As Google, the poster child of the ‘free’ movement, has disrupted the conventional ad-funded media business model, so the digital economics of ‘bits’ is disrupting other industries in the ‘atom economy’, and Anderson argues that “every industry is either going to have to become free or compete with free” in the future.

“I didn’t invent this, I’m not predicting or projecting,” he says, with typically crisp enunciation. “I’m just looking at the data, and the data says in a world where inputs fall in price, price will fall. That economic model is just the law of physics, and the business models built around that are going to change dramatically.”

Many critics, including his fellow pop-theorist Gladwell in The New Yorker, disagreed with Anderson’s counter-intuition, with some of the more smart aleck pundits snickering that his evangelism for all things free hadn’t prevented his publisher from slapping a hefty RRP on the hardcover at Barnes and Noble (Anderson has pointed out that he did freely distribute digital and audiobook editions). 

Anderson was subjected to more justifiable criticism, however, when the literary journal Virginia Quarterly Review accused him of plagiarising passages of Free direct from Wikipedia without attribution. Responding rapidly, he owned up to failing to cite long passages taken from the online encyclopedia in the advance proof, and explained that pressures to meet publishing deadlines had led to his failure to conduct “write-throughs” of text written by Wikipedians, in which he would have rewritten their entries using different word choices. It was a shaky defense, especially from someone with such a lofty editorial reputation, and many blog commenters took Anderson to task for what they considered, at best, sloppy practise and at worst literary fraud, plain and simple (Anderson later defended himself against the plagiarism charge, telling a reporter in a televised CNN interview, “We live in a remix age…”).

Viewed in retrospect it’s understandable – although not entirely excusable – that Anderson cut corners writing the book, as his resources appear to have been thinly spread at the time. Apart from the editorial duties at Wired, there were conference speeches and travel, the research and writing work for a 75,000 word manuscript, and also commitments to his startup companies BookTour, an author appearance calendar website, and DIY Drones, a remotely operated aircraft community site – and all this at a time when he was bringing up a young family and also suffering from Lyme disease.

It would be a shame if the Wikipedia scandal were to overshadow the ideas set forward in Free, which are genuinely provocative in challenging our inherent distrust of the concept of ‘free’ itself, or what Anderson characterises as ‘twentieth century free’.  Anderson cites two pioneering examples of this hundred year old marketing gimmick in Jell-O’s free distribution of gelatin recipe books to promote a novel dessert product and King Gillette’s bundling of free razors with packets of gum and marshmallows, in order to stimulate demand for disposable razor blades. In both cases, ‘freebie’ products were used as a lure to bait customers into spending more than they intended.

The popularity and subsequent public awareness of the practise has shaped common, sceptical attitudes towards ‘free’ that endure to this day – further proof that, as the economist Milton Friedman liked to say, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” But, Anderson contends, that was then.

“We have a complicated relationship with free: we’re drawn to it, but we’re also repelled by it,” he says. “But twenty-first century free is different from twentieth century free. If your supermarket has a sign that says ‘free beer tomorrow’ you should be suspicious that tomorrow will never come, but when Google says, ‘Gmail is free’, I don’t think you need to be suspicious. In the atoms economy -we understand there must be real costs, and those costs must be paid directly – so there can’t be a free lunch. But in the digital economy the costs are manageable, and there can be a free lunch. Someone is paying, but it’s not you.”

And it’s not just in the digital world: in the ‘atoms economy’ many companies have taken a page from digital ‘twenty-first century free’ and reinvented their industries by offering loss leader products and services to profit from indirect revenue streams – what is known as a ‘cross subsidy’. In analysing this topic, Free isolates a popular new business trend; in aviation, Ryanair has rapidly grown into the largest largest airline in Europe by selling its flights for next to nothing. How? A healthy margin is made via ancillary revenues: charging for baggage, check-in fees, credit card handling fees, shares of car rentals, hotel bookings, and so on. Anderson lists other companies who are making money by giving away TV set top recorders, stocks, directory phone assistance, CDs, secondhand goods – even a general store of free products (respectively: Comcast, E*Trade, GOOG-411, Prince and The Mail on Sunday, Freecycle, and Japan’s SampleLab). A particular Anderson favourite is the Portuguese media company Controlinveste, who gave away a 60-piece silverware set, day by day, with the purchase of a newspaper. The boost in revenue from newsstand and advertising sales far exceeded the cost of the Chinese-made cutlery, and the company made a healthy profit.

“Essentially, they found a way to put advertising on spoons,” he says, triumphantly. However, mindful that advertising is no safe bet in a recession, Anderson proposes the most interesting businesses today employ a ‘freemium’ template: that is, free products that upsell premium services. This is the model used with varying degrees of success by online applications like Flickr, Skype, Spotify, Vimeo and others, marrying the reach benefits of digital free with the direct profit of paid.

“The old model for business was ‘make something people will pay for’. The new model is ‘make something people will want and something they’ll pay for’,” he says.

As Free notes, some of the most interesting new applications of the ‘freemium’ model can be found in the video games industry, particularly in free-to-play online multiplayer games, where virtual goods and subscription features generate huge revenues. Originally developed by New Horizon Interactive, the Club Penguin website hosts a ‘massively multiplayer online game’ (MMOG) that became a playground craze in the U.S. after its launch in 2005. By late 2007, there were 700,000 subscribers paying for ‘igloo upgrades’ on the Club Penguin site, and New Horizon Interactive was purchased by Disney in a deal that would be worth a total of US $700 million.

Many modern applications of the tiered pricing model are highly imaginative, and none more so than Radiohead’s 2007 ‘honesty box’ experiment. Fans of the Oxford band were invited to pay what they perceived their new album In Rainbows to be worth before downloading it from Inrainbows.com. According to Anderson, In Rainbows sold more than 3 million copies via direct downloads, CD’s, a deluxe CD/vinyl box set and mp3 sales via digital retailers, and the album proved the band’s biggest commercial success, with 100,000 sales of the £40 box set and 1.2 million tickets sold for a subsequent tour.

But it’s hard to deny that for every music industry innovator like Radiohead, there are ten independent record labels that have ceased trading, and few can convincingly make a case for the digital revolution leaving the music industry in a healthier condition. While few consumers will shed a tear at the decline of large record companies, in an increasingly fragmented market a small number of highly commercial acts – and the companies backing them – disproportionately harvest the income from emerging revenue streams. The Sony-owned entertainment company Syco is currently demonstrating this in the UK with its X-Factor TV show, which has leveraged its commercial worth to the ITV network into an unprecedented dominance of the national music charts.

On a grander scale, Google’s revolutionary free-centric business model, which is heavily reliant on selling search advertising against indexed Internet content, has been accused of contributing to the ‘demonitisation’ of entire industries – from news media to software and telecoms. Thanks to the “network effects” that take hold in digital markets, Internet brands combining a clear niche in their specific field with mass distribution strategies that harness the power of ‘free’ tend to dominate global market share, creating virtual monopolies that can be extremely difficult for competitors to challenge. Google CEO Eric Schmidt describes this approach to achieving mass adoptions as the “max strategy.”

For those who work in industries that have been disrupted by such technological and business innovation though, the ultimate cost is unemployment – a process that can be traumatic. What happens to workers when expensive people businesses become inexpensive software businesses? And is this process really so beneficial for a nation and its communities? Anderson addresses this topic in Free, but never wholly convincingly.

“You either move upstream or you don’t,” he says. “It’s really simple: 10 years ago, I had a travel agent, a stockbroker and a personal tax accountant. They’re all software now, they’re all free. So what happened to my travel agent, stockbroker and my tax accountant? Well, some of them are driving cabs, and some of them moved upstream: my stockbroker became a financial advisor, my personal tax accountant became a corporate tax accountant. They moved upstream to where specialised skills were required – and they got paid more for it, by the way. It’s exactly what you saw with the coal miners in Wales. What happened to them?”

The answer is that the majority (or rather their progeny) work in taxpayer funded local council jobs, while many do not work at all. In 2008, approximately 25% of the potential working population of Wales was economically inactive, with close to 30% working in the public sector. It is not a picture of economic health.

“Well it’s a lost generation,” says Anderson. “For most of them, there’s really nowhere to go upstream. If you’re a coal miner, you can’t be a gold miner… That’s hopefully not the case for most industries. But this is not new; the hot type pressmen, the guys who shoveled coal into boats – all these people have been displaced, and it happens time and time again; software is just the second wave of outsourcing. The first time your job was replaced, it was by an Indian, and then his job was replaced by software.

“There is no simple answer to what happens to the displaced. Some land on their feet and find a better job. Some don’t.”

As the questions come to an end, Anderson droops in his chair and massages his temples with both hands. He ushers me out of the Wired office, past posters of magazine covers that trail lead features about secret Wall Street formulas, groundbreaking technological innovations and the like, and I can’t help but reflect on the throwaway line about coalminers and goldminers: perhaps now he travels business, Anderson doesn’t meet many of the twenty-first century ‘coal miners’ for whom his economically upturned future is a source of profound anxiety? He is an extremely bright man but can seem emotionally detached at times. 

I can’t help but wonder whether his rosy view of the world – where digital economics spreads the wealth around, entrepreneurial innovation trumps state incompetence, and the economically displaced saunter “upstream” into better paid jobs – will have dark consequences. It’s easy to imagine a future following such trends where dying ‘demonitised’ industries are not adequately replaced, millions are dispossessed of a stable income, economic inequality accelerates towards a form of globalised plutocracy and violent social upheaval follows. Some might argue this is an unavoidable staging post in the post-industrial evolution of capitalist nations (Karl Marx might sympathise). But while the democratisation of information in the digital age can be intoxicating, the rise of hegemonic forces like Google and the fragmentation of an economic base that once provided jobs on a mass scale suggests the Internet’s promise of individual empowerment and untrammelled opportunity is chimeric.

Anderson appears uninterested in exploring the juicier political implications of his economic theories, presumably because it might make his business and tech industry clients uncomfortable. Optimism is never in short supply amongst those who identify with Silicon Valley’s ethos of pro-active evolution, after all. Nevertheless, while Anderson must be applauded for bringing the story of our collective drift to digital economics into the public sphere, until he convincingly addresses the wider political and societal problems that will be created by this outcome, his enthusiastic claim that ‘free is the best price’ should be qualified with an acknowledgment that it is not necessarily one without a cost.

Illustration: Jim O’Raw

Photograph: Joi @ flickr 

When you open Wave for the first time, even the most hardened don’t-read-the-instructions tech head will be running for the safety of the introduction video; this is a complex interface that requires the same amount of neural dot-joining that the iPhone’s touchscreen does when you use it for the first time. And Google doesn’t make it easy on you – while their low key video tutors organise decidedly un-rock’n'roll barbecues and chuck U-rated Sudoku banter around, they still expect you to know what a UI is. The message from Wave is clear – this is for the big boys of 21st-century online interaction, and if you don’t like it, you can go play on Twitter with the other babies.                                

As most of your pals are likely not on Wave yet, or have been scared away by its learning curve, the simple things – interacting on a private wave with a handful of acquaintances – aren’t being done on a broad scale. Instead, for most people it’s straight into the deep end, interacting with anyone who happens to be knocking around on a “public wave” (one that anyone can contribute to). The charming tone you get when you enter a public wave is of excited, chattering children, rather than wary and polite adults.

So what are they talking about? As noted by Bad Idea contributor Chris Baraniuk on his Stuff Happening Now blog, text-based role-playing games are an inevitable early presence when you consider the average profile of those desperate for a Google Wave invite; but there’s everything here, from dubstep mixtapes to cigar appreciation to “beautiful men” (read: disturbing pics of Arnie with his shirt off).

Despite – or perhaps because of – the sophisticated and intricate interface, people are coming up with decidedly primitive games that involve simple clickers and counters; meanwhile my favourite wave is ‘CRAZY PARTY WAVE Y’ALL’, which is a giant gangshow of nonsense performed by people becoming aware of the awesome (but as yet only somewhat fathomable) power of Wave. It’s a joyful, timesucking mess of rainbow fonts, Daft Punk videos and stoned slang that gives a glimpse of what Wave will probably descend into on a massive scale.

You can bet that Google has many serious developers beavering away at expanding the functionality of Wave, which is currently only in ‘preview’. But for the moment, basement-bound nerds are filling the gaps, making ‘bots’ that do certain things as you work within a wave. These range from the useful to the purely LOL-worthy – a Swedish Chef that writes ‘bork’ everywhere, or the Kanye West bot that interrupts each new post with an “Imma let you finish”, or a reminder of how George Bush doesn’t like black people. Again: where Google imagined barbecue organisation, the world responded with an endlessly self-publishing Rick Astley video.

But while the amateurs are honing the details, there are wider functionalities that one would hope are going to crop up in the final version, but which haven’t been announced yet. URLs for public waves to help the sharing of discussions? One-click tweeting? Plus or minus recommendations on individual posts?

And yet: isn’t there enough to take in already? Twitter’s beauty lies in its brevity feeding back into its search function, providing brief results; search the Wave for a single term and it’s lost in the haystack of everyone’s untethered ranting.

Indeed, on first glance Wave is the sort of technological tipping point that could feasibly send a whole generation into asceticism or monastic purity – a nightmare of cacophonous, meaningless chatter, rendered with Byzantine intricacy, and topped off with a nauseating Silicon Valley cuteness. If Twitter turned the dial of informational white noise up a notch, Wave whacks it to 11; similarly, if any technology was guaranteed to shock the elderly with their apparent redundancy, this is it.

Wave may yet change the way we interact, and seems especially ready for the next generation of touchscreens, but Google clearly has an optimistic view of people’s ability to adapt to new technology. It took a lot people years to get their heads round email; expect many, many more for Wave to truly make a difference to our daily lives.

Samsung are (probably wisely) steering clear of Apple and going after the low to mid-range smartphone market along with Nokia. Though they’re late to the smartphone game, Samsung could be well placed to mop up market share across the whole sector – the bottom end with their own phones, the top end with the chips they provide to Apple for the iPhone. They’ve also announced that as well as their own operating system, they’re going to be using Android a lot more and Windows a lot less – it’s the latest blow to Windows, who have been looking very sorry in the mobile sector for some time.

The other big mobile news today is that Google is acknowledging the sector all the more – their latest purchase is AdMob, whose network for delivering ads on web pages seems like a good fit for Google’s ever-heftier cash cow. As is now the norm, AdMob uses information about your ethnicity, gender and age to target appropriate advertising your way – though the privacy advocate that the FT spoke to didn’t seem too concerned about the company. 

The Wall Street Journal has a blog post about AdMob’s founder Omar Hamoui, who only started the company while still at business school in 2006. Some of the wisdom of his head of European operations, Russell Buckley, syncs rather nicely with this whole shift towards openness that iPhone and Android are predicating: “Far too many entrepreneurs get paranoid about protecting their idea to the point of paralysis. The value of most ideas is in the execution, not in what the concept actually is. To make it reality, you need to share it – actually, with as many people as possible, counter-intuitive though this might seem.” Meanwhile Jim Goetz, partner at Sequoia Capital who first invested in AdMob, says Hamoui succeeded because “he kept a maniacal focus on the independent developer… He ignored the carriers, he ignored the ‘walled garden.’” Proof that in the digital age, the loosened-up businessperson is likely to be the most successful.

Photo: Jeff Kubina

Murdoch began earlier this year by saying that the Sunday Times would start to have its own site, and have it hidden behind a paywall. Then he announced that all his newspaper sites would have to be paid for, and that the change would come next June. But now he’s admitted that it’s going to take longer than that, and that he’s currently consulting other newspaper owners about how to charge online. That’s pricked the ears of lawyers, who say that discussions over pricing could be illegal under competition law – though they could feasibly be discussing a joint venture over how to universalise charging for content. Could this be the big step forward for a Journalism Online-style venture? Might they even use Journalism Online itself?

Perhaps the most aggressive feature of all this is Murdoch now saying that the stories on his sites would be blocked from Google’s news search, once the paywalls come up. Will people shell out more to read stories at the Sun or the Times rather than other, still-free news sites? Undoubtedly fewer – but with online ad margins as they are, Murdoch can afford to lose sheer hit counts and still make more money from subscriptions. And if enough newspapers all sign up for paywalls, as these anti-trust murmurings seem to suggest, then the level of impact on Murdoch’s papers would be spread more evenly across the sector. Interesting though that the Guardian, in reporting this story, have reiterated their intentions to stay free.

Murdoch needs the extra money – as well as haemorrhaging it down an office-shaped well, MySpace is losing money it had planned to get off Google as part of its $900m advertising tie-up with the company. It’s not had the level of traffic it promised to Google, and now looks set to lose around $100m of the deal. The dismantling of Fox Interactive Media lost money too, but other areas of his empire, like TV and film, are back on the up again after a terrible couple of quarters; his cable stations’ profits went up by 41%, but there’s still a long way to go before its making the $1bn+ profits it was raking pre-recession, hence the eagerness to start charging online.

Quite apart from the money issues, Murdoch’s been involved in a couple of major power struggles over the last week too. First of all, the results of the Press Complaints Commission inquiry into that rather damning Guardian story alleging phone hacking by Sun journalists have come back, and they’re predictably toothless. The PCC has said there isn’t enough evidence to prove it; the Guardian points out that the PCC hasn’t been able to do any of its own original investigations and hasn’t spoken to the police or anyone at the heart of the scandal, and described it as “complacent”. So Murdoch is off the hook, but perhaps not for long – MPs are already promising that a Commons enquiry would be much more vigorous.

Murdoch has also been playing power games with Aussie PM Kevin Rudd. Murdoch, who owns two-thirds of Australia’s newspapers, slagged him as “delusional” and said he couldn’t take criticism; he then not very subtly pointed out that he just dropped his support of Gordon Brown, and that while he didn’t tell editors what to print/believe, he was responsible for hiring them. In other words: “You’re mine, Rudd!”

Yes, 279 US dollars. Amazon have only sort of launched it here, because you still have to buy it from the States, though Amazon big cheese Jeff Bezos is promising a “UK-centric Kindle experience” in the future. One of the main problems with deploying the Kindle over here is that it used a bespoke network called Whispernet as the medium for downloading books – the Kindle 2 International Edition is going to use 3G, which unlike Whispernet, is floating through the British ether. Already that discounts vast chunks of the UK population from downloading books on the go given the sketchiness of 3G coverage (especially with O2 and Vodafone), but obviously those folk can download via USB. Though that’s half the fun and convenience already gone.

Another sign of the half-arsedness of this launch is the fact that the aforementioned O2 and Vodafone haven’t had any contact with Amazon about providing infrastructure for the device, but maybe that’s because their 3G networks are so ropey – you’d expect AT&T, the provider of the Kindle’s network, to partner with 3 if it’s purely a matter of coverage. 

Bezos is promising “every book ever printed, in print or out of print”. Those in print will certainly make Amazon money, but those out of print? Amazon’s faffing around with 3G has meant that the likes of Google, coupled with the various reading apps for smartphones, have stolen the march on mobile reading of out-of-copyright material. Nevertheless, buying Kindle books is going to be like buying music off iTunes – it’s for people who don’t know how to get pirate copies and don’t particularly want to know, and who aren’t bothered about packaging, or the social prestige physical manifestations of culture bring. If you read blogs or tech writing, you’ll probably think that Amazon won’t be able to keep up with the Google – but the fact is most people will follow a strong brand and a simple product, and the Kindle is therefore a licence to print money. That’s even without the massive uptake that’s going to come from the academic, legal and medical markets when the endless hardback textbooks get cut down to size.

But it hasn’t got much time. It’s not just the Christmas market that Bezos is trying to nail by rushing this International Kindle out – it’s crucial to swallow up as much market share as possible before the Apple tablet drops. Apple, with the iPod, managed to create a new file type (AAC) that has become powerful enough for the likes of Sony to start equipping their flagship Walkman brand to allow their playback – will it attempt something similar with text files? Or has Amazon gained too much traction with their file type? For all of Steve Jobs’s “no-one reads any more” scent-destroying, Apple are clearly going to start selling books on their store, the question is in what form. The most likely scenario is that they adopt some fairly universal format like .epub, and consign Amazon to milking their existing Kindle users who are locked into their format. Therefore Bezos is desperate to get as many users on board as quickly as possible, hence this rather shaky-legged launch.

Photo: .LarryPage @ Flickr

He’s probably right when he says that people won’t pay for “common news”, but as we saw yesterday, that’s starting to become prevailing opinion anyway. It’s a jump to say that because of this, only advertising will work; people will use micropayments for specialised niche material, and subscriptions to get that common news packaged alongside lifestyle, opinion, analysis and good quality writing, from a brand they trust. And advertising will bump up revenues, but not be the core. That’s our take, anyway.

For now, Schmidt is staying away from making Google make the shift from information distributor to information creator: “We’re trying to avoid crossing the line between the infrastructure and technology that Google provides and the content that our partners provide. There is a line and we’re trying to stay on our side of it.”

He also refuses to be drawn on Google sharing search revenue with newspapers: “We’ve decided that the value we provide to the partners is the traffic. So we want to provide incredible numbers of users going to their sites, their content, which is why we urge them to make it deeper, stronger and use better tools and so forth…if we were to transfer money we would be taking money from something unrelated to newspapers and just paying them, which doesn’t seem like a good sustainable model for anybody”. Maybe that’s fair, but he also admits: “we depend on the production of very, very high-quality content”. Will Google deem the production of content financially valuable enough to try and preserve it, if new business models still prove unsustainable? Could make for some interesting manoeuvres.

While he says he won’t be buying anything else for a while, thanks to the fact that “corporations or institutions come with liabilities that we don’t want to take on”, he nevertheless expresses faith in his last liability-laden purchase YouTube, hinting at future “subscription models” being a way to monetise the meme-strewn cash vortex. Ah, so the people won’t pay for news, but they will pay for Keyboard Cat? Actually, maybe he’s right, even though that’s really quite depressing.

5. One of the major sponsors was paper manufacturers UPM, who also got their president and CEO, Jussi Pesonen, to address/lobby the audience about the issues facing the paper industry. Which was basically: keep buying paper, for the love of God. In logic so circuitous it might actually make sense, he argued for cutting down trees as the forests that replace them act as “carbon sinks”, sucking up the CO2 generated by other more evil industries (like those making e-readers presumably). He was followed by John Caris, from Dutch printers RSDB, who said of charging for content online: “Forget it… you have to use paper or you won’t survive”. I think that’s what he chants to himself so he can sleep at night.

4. What could have been an interesting presentation from Conde Nast International chairman Jonathan Newhouse, given the fall of Portfolio and the launch of Wired in Italy and the UK recently, turned out to be a cod-poetic treatise on how great print is. “I like the heft of a magazine, and the light glinting off its shiny pages… there is a pleasure in the tactile sensation of paper, and turning a world in your hands”. While he did then say that the internet was pretty cool (“Boredom is banished with a click of a key!”), he eventually ended with this rose-tinted, treacle-lined zinger: “Make a great magazine, with conviction and with emotion… love your readers… the future can be golden, and if you love magazines you can make it come true”. Ooh, I’m welling up!

3. Matt Brittin, Google’s UK MD, must have been a bit worried about opening day two, given the end of day one saw Jonathan Shephard, CEO of the organisers PPA, saying that content producers must “stand up to Google” and that there was “no axiomatic right for Google to build on the content of others”. So Brittin didn’t do like his CEO Eric Schmidt did, and royally piss off every journalist in the room by saying “Try to figure out what your consumer wants. If you piss off enough of them, you will not have any of them”. Instead he just said they weren’t a media company at all, and explained how great Product Search and AdSense are.

2. I’m sure Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, relished the opportunity to promote his big spaceship in front of a crowd of journalism professionals just as its test flights are underway, but if you could spot the synergy between him and the magazine world then you’ve got better eyesight than me. Aside from some tenuousness about keeping businesses compartmentalised but allowing innovations to travel between them, this was really just a nice break to look at some cool wing designs.

1. King of the PR-mongers wasn’t anyone speaking at the event, but a guy in the adjacent exhibition hall flogging some technology that used printed codes that linked to online content. This guy skipped the panel discussions to slide in the side door at the end of each one, and collar people leaving the stage. As an icebreaker when hectoring Gucci’s Nikolas Talonpoika, he offered to trace his family’s history; elsewhere he held people’s hands and stared into their eyes for up to 10 seconds before saying anything. Even PPA staff got pointless lectures on the brilliance of his company. He looked like he played tuba in a Finnish brass band. We salute you.

The Google/AP hoo-ha is over whether Google effectively steal from newspapers in using their content for free – Robert Thomson, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, stated colourfully that Google were “tapeworms in the intestines of the internet”. The row started earlier this month, at the Newspaper Association of America, where Eric Schmidt told newspapers they had dropped the ball in letting Google distribute content. Schmidt opened his NAA keynote address with the words: “Try to figure out what your consumer wants. If you piss off enough of them, you will not have any of them.” The AP responded with upturned noses and an “industry initiative to protect news content from misappropriation online”. By which they mean a demand for a share of the revenue Google picks up from their content.

AP president Dean Singleton bawled, a la Network’s Howard Beale: “We’re as mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!”, as the AP threatened Google (plus other search engines and aggregators) with legal action for using the work of news organisations without any “fair” revenue share. The claim is that Google are making money from news organisations: they summarise the content, index it, then use it to attract people to their site and therefore sell ads. The news organisations however, commission the work, pay for it, then get no return.

Earlier this week, Eric Scmidt was quoted as calmly advising the shrieking industry: “The best way to get out of this is to invent a new product. That’s the way Google thinks. Incumbents very seldom invent the future….The whole secret here is the ads are worth more if they’re more targeted, more personal, more precise.” As much as innovation is key, the ad model is proving to be a problem. Jeff Jarvis pointed out that newspapers have had 10 years to adjust; to think and develop accordingly, and they haven’t been radical enough. “When papers die,” he says, “there will be silence, confusion and chaos and a few bad guys will escape the watchful eye of journalism. The good news is this: into this crying need, this vacuum, entrepreneurs will rush.” It’s a bleak prospect this journo-pocalypse, but as another newspaper falters almost every week, it seems the reality is rushing ever forward.

What the AP resistance serves to highlight is Google’s unquestioned lordship over the internet - email, RSS feeds, maps, images, news. And Google is the best at these things; challenging Google is a bit like David and Goliath, only David hasn’t got any little rocks to chuck in Goliath’s eyes this time. The underlying question is whether Google can do without news organisations, or visa versa. In the unlikely event, Google could probably take a hit that big and survive, but I think it’s fair to say that in this climate, news organisations cannot do without Google, as Google brings hits, and hits brings ads, and ads are one of two largely unsuccessful revenue models currently clutched at by the industry, the second being charging for content.

Advertising is now bringing insufficient revenue for newspapers. It’s also harder to target and specialise ads with news content, and a report out this week shows that even MySpace and Facebook users are hacked off with endless adverts and app requests asking if they’d like to receive another tastefully designed ‘council estate gift’ or BFF digital charm necklace. And as we saw recently, the maths of charging for content, unless you’re the WSJ or FT and have unique content that you’ve been charging for since day one, simply doesn’t add up.

The Guardian appears to be the only UK newspaper innovating effectively with the development of its Open Platform API service, which Bad Idea reported on back in March, and Arianna Huffington at the Huffington Post, talks of seizing the oppurtunities that “disruptive innovation” provides, pointing to their traineeships for investigative journalists, among other things.

Apart from this there’s not much innovating going on in the industry, just a lot of griping about the state of things and fiddling about within the framework of two existing models. As for Google’s position in all this, Tim Luckhurst on the Guardian’s Comment is Free, says that “Google doesn’t understand journalism”. Of course they don’t, they understand the internet and making money from it, and equally, journalism doesn’t understand the internet and making money from it. The industry is being stubborn, and Google are being ruthless.