Posts Tagged ‘Jordan’

Non-Latin Web Domains

Friday, October 30th, 2009

“By the middle of next year, Internet surfers will be allowed to use Web addresses written completely in Chinese, Arabic, Korean, and other languages using non-Latin alphabets,” The New York Times reports. “In an action billed as one of the biggest changes in the Web’s history, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—or Icann—voted Friday during its annual meeting, held in Seoul, to allow such scripts in Internet addresses.”

Smeal’s John Jordan weighs in on the business implications and historical significance of this decision:

The expansion of the Internet domain name system from 37 Latin characters (26 letters, 10 digits, and a hyphen) to include character-based languages is a landmark event for the globalization of communications. More than 100,000 characters will eventually be added, so at one level the decision by Icann to accept the technical challenge (particularly, but not exclusively, at the level of the root name servers) is noteworthy. From a business standpoint, the decision marks a recognition of the growing importance of such character-based languages as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Billions more people will be able to connect to the Internet using their native language and keyboards.

The decision raises a variety of fascinating questions. Given the rapid adoption of mobile Internet in the developing world, how will the availability of domain names in numerous character sets affect the design of smartphones for these markets? Given that Chinese relies on about 6,000 characters, for example, a RIM Blackberry-style keyboard would be difficult or impossible to implement.  On the marketing front, how will global brands adapt to the wider availability of non-Latin representation online? How will native-language Internet naming affect literacy efforts and measurements? How will a vastly multiplied character set affect security efforts?

At another level, the action is a splendid piece of historical timing: The first Internet message was sent 40 years ago this week, and the Netscape Navigator browser launched 15 years ago this month.  Predicting where the international, mobile Internet will be in even five years is impossible; coping with change of this magnitude at this speed is unprecedented in human experience.

Tags: Globalization, Jordan, Technology
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Social Technology Limits

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Nokia recently launched an online forum called IdeasProject, which is ”an entirely new way to connect with some of the most visionary and influential thought leaders in communications technology and their disruptive ideas.” The site features video clips, articles, podcasts, and other media that address issues and forecast coming trends in communications technology.

One of the most recent “big thinkers” to be featured is Smeal’s John Jordan, executive director of the Center for Digital Transformation. In the video below, Jordan explains how the value of Web sites like Facebook and eBay depends on the number of users that they have. As the number of users increases, so does the usefulness of the site—to a certain point.

You can view four additional video clips from Jordan on his Ideas Project Web page. Even more clips are available on YouTube.

Tags: Jordan, Technology
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Sun Setting on Sun-Times?

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

The Sun-Times Media Group, publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times and several regional newspapers, today announced that it’s the latest newspaper publisher to file for bankruptcy. The Tribune Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, and Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer, also recently filed for bankruptcy. In addition, two major newspapers in Denver and Seattle were recently shuttered by their publishers.

In the latest edition of his e-newsletter Early Indications, Smeal’s John Jordan explains how the digitization of news has led to the downfall of the newspaper industry. He says that many facets of the newspaper have been “separated out by standalone Web businesses, each taking some segment of the readership and unbalancing the [newspaper's] former cross-subsidies.”

More from Jordan:

Sports readers can go to the league sites (with heavy video footage), television spinouts from Fox/ESPN/CNN+Sports Illustrated, fan-driven blogs and/or message board efforts, or to any number of sites updating them on favorite cricket, soccer, or other international sports the metro dailies can barely cover, if at all.  News is still primarily gathered by the usual suspects, but commented on, linked to, and re-aggregated by everyone from Google News to bloggers to ideology-driven destination sites.  Daily A-Z stock charts aren’t a particularly helpful way to watch the financial world, opening the door to broad distribution of previously professional-grade charting, archiving, and analytics; less professional message boards, blogs, and other mechanisms spread the wisdom (or lack thereof) of crowds.

The papers’ extremely profitable classified ads were hit hard by multiple competitors. eBay then later Craigslist took over the realm of random objects, Monster and others (including the hiring firms directly) redefined the help-wanted field, and Edmunds and Cars.com along with eBay Motors improved on the car-buying experience by improving information availability and transparency.  Match.com and eHarmony improved on the user experience and inventory levels of the personal ads, while real estate agents alone and in their trade association aggregated and augmented millions of property ads with photos, maps, and video walk-throughs.

In the end, most any page of a 1990s-era newspaper was challenged by an online outlet.  With the readership in decline, both ad and subscription revenue spiraled downward, and the splintered nature of the competition made coordinated response impossible.

Tags: Jordan
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U.S. Economy Sheds 651,000 Jobs in February

Monday, March 9th, 2009

The national unemployment rate rose in February to 8.1 percent, the highest it has been since 1983. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the United States has lost 4.4 million jobs.

“And economists expect that unemployment will continue to rise for the rest of the year and into early 2010, with the unemployment rate reaching 9 to 10 percent by the time a recovery begins,” The New York Times reports. “But even then, with so many job losses centered in manufacturing, economists say that many positions devoured during this recession will not be coming back.”

Smeal’s John Jordan, executive director of the Center for Digital Transformation, writing in the January edition of his newsletter Early Indications, also ponders, “Where will all the new jobs come from?”

Jordan writes:

Mass hirings are infrequent even in the best of times: “GM adds 4,000 new machinists” wasn’t something one saw in the news, regardless of the era. Jobs get added far more slowly and in more dispersed fashion than they get cut, especially when some firms are measuring severance in the tens of thousands. Part of the policy challenge is the asymmetry between the big cuts and the reality that small, growing firms add jobs by the handful or dozen.

… The rapid shift of the U.S. economy to a services-driven structure with a massive trade imbalance presents the Obama recovery team with many new challenges. Government employment is already high, and will be limited by falling tax revenues. The M&A activity of the previous decade has generated some very large organizations that, along with Detroit’s Big Three, are shedding jobs at a rapid rate. Even though a “knowledge economy” sounds intuitively appealing, at some point U.S. manufacturing will need to be redefined for employment and trade to behave more sustainably.

Tags: Economic Crisis, Economy, Jordan, Unemployment
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