Tech notes
Aug 31 2006 By Herb Kim, The Journal
I was Stateside earlier this summer and was lucky enough to return the day before the terror scare hit the UK.
My parents threw a first birthday party for my one-year-old daughter and we attended a wedding on the Princeton University campus.
We also journeyed to Woodstock, Vermont and Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is on the end of Cape Cod. Amazingly, we met another couple from Newcastle staying at our hotel.
However, while Vermont has wonderful scenery, people and food, it has terrible mobile phone coverage. I won't even start with the extortionate pricing for roaming charges in the US, but I find it even harder to believe that I can get coverage in the whole of Vanuatu - a country I had never heard of before - but cannot get a signal over the bulk of New England.
The US has always been behind Europe in terms of cellphone, as they call them, coverage and I'm afraid this situation remains. And, oh yes, nobody sends text messages either. I frighten my mother by sending her text messages, so foreign is her text message alert tone.
On the other hand, the US continues to be ahead of Europe in terms of exploiting the internet. One of the trends we've been tracking at Codeworks has been "the democratisation of media". What we're witnessing is that, as the cost of producing high quality video collapses, increasing numbers of amateurs are adopting professional tools and making very high quality content.
The production and success of the Blair Witch Project was an early harbinger of this trend and we're seeing this continuing with the success of new services like YouTube.com and Grouper.com. And, with Sony's purchase of Grouper for $65m, the democratisation of media is starting to yield some very big commercial opportunities.
Even small businesses are using these trends to help themselves get big fast. In only eight years, Wine Library has gone from being a small New York wine shop to becoming the largest independent US wine retailer, with annual sales of $45m. How have they done it? Via its weekly `TV show' reviewing wines - a huge hit among amateur wine buyers.
It's yet another example of a simple but powerful innovation helping businesses create and deliver more value to customers. Here, companies such as 21st Century Media are part of this trend.
They help their clients exploit inexpensive video productions to communicate their messages much more effectively than via print or still imagery.
I'm looking forward to and very excited by the prospect of seeing more and more companies democratise media for themselves in new and innovative ways.
Herb Kim is chief executive officer of Codeworks, the North-East's centre of excellence for digital technology
