News & Views

He wouldn't say that, would he?

Cengage Publishing is one of the major players in digital publishing, with over 30% of their annual revenue coming from electronic sales. In an interview last week, CEO Ron Dunn stated "our objective is to be a digital-first company"
( "Cengage backs textbooks and ebooks", Financial Times, 28 September 2011). Then he continued "I'd never in a hundred years try to learn organic chemistry on a Kindle."

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The Trainline - show you trust your customers

A little example of customer support reveals what companies think about their customers. In the case of The Trainline, their website and customer support suggests a pretty low opinion. They don't reveal charges until the end of the e-commerce process, and their customer support is uncomprehending. Any online e-commerce site is based on a relationship of trust with the customer, and while it is easy to design a site with hidden charges, the breach of trust that can result is difficult to repair.

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Apple: an object lesson in exploiting a market for content

Apple has announced ( "Apple demands 30% slice of subscriptions sold via apps", FT 16 February 2011) any subscription-based content available for the iPad must also be sold via the Apple App Store. This means Apple will earn 30% commission from all sales via the App Store.

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How much is a website user worth?

News of The Huffington Post’s sale to AOL for $315m was interesting for the details it revealed of The Post’s advertising revenue. The Financial Times revealed that HuffPost (let’s be nice to it and call it by its cuddly friendly name) has some 25 million unique users per month, and has a total advertising revenue last year of $30m. Assuming those monthly unique users are the regular visitors to the site, my arithmetic tells me that each unique user is worth $1.20 per year.

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How free is Ordance Survey data?

Many people will be aware of the launch of "OS OpenData" in April 2010. However, this does not mean that all the Ordnance Survey data is now available free of charge.

Only selected datasets were released at that time. The most popular map series for print publication (the 1:25,000 scale maps) were not included, nor were postcode sector boundaries. The result is therefore a compromise - not quite all that The Guardian had campaigned for (in its "Free Our Data" campaign).

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