Making money with mo' news

[Taro Toporific]

While it's old old news that only Japanese news companies are making on the Internet (abet only Keitai-based), but what's amazing is nobody is taping into the massive revenue stream from facilitating a moblogging News Site from a mainstream news organization. Sheesh.

Asahi's Wireless Magic Act
Japan Media Review / 2003-04-10
While most news sites around the world have yet to figure how to coax readers into paying for online news, Japan's No. 2 newspaper is making $200,000 a year selling subscriptions to its popular wireless Web site.

[GomiGirl]

"At this point, the mobile phone site is the most profitable part of our interactive business," says Hiromi Ohnishi, deputy manager of planning and development for?Asahi Shimbun's electric media and broadcasting division.

This is because they are just recycling their content using a profitable on-line business model. This is smart business.

On a similar note, CNN i-mode have just launched an i-appli (JAVA) version of their english news service. Still for the same monthly fee of Y300. It looks really neat and the i-appli is a very slick but their content still leaves much to be desired. This is because it is not done by CNN themselves but by a consultancy company. The original i-mode CNN had a broad range of world news including a good round up of East Asian News but when they swapped to the consultant they have limited the news to Top stories and US news only. The sport and entertainment news remained the same.

I unsubscribed after the change occured as there was no real relevence to my life in Japan. But I have recently subscribed again so I can have another place to read war news. But I will unsubscribe again very soon.

[Taro Toporific]

This is because they are just recycling their content using a profitable on-line business model. This is smart business....
On a similar note, CNN i-mode have just launched an i-appli (JAVA) version of their english news service. Still for the same monthly fee of Y300. It looks really neat and the i-appli is a very slick but their content still leaves much to be desired.

Let's slice and dice.
Without strict journalistic guidelines and human editing, repositioned content can be unreadable like trying to read the FG's iMode version on my funky-chunky 5-line screen of my 3 year old keitai.

[GomiGirl]

The CNN site runs their content through a compression engine that strips out links, graphics and white spaces. This does reduce the cost.

But without word wrapping and hyphenation, it is a real bitch to read English on a keitai.. fortunately on sites like mine the word wrapping is done based on the individual specs of the handset accessing the content.

I wish more sites used this technology..

[GomiGirl]

on my funky-chunky 5-line screen of my 3 year old keitai.

Methinks you need to upgrade Taro-sama!! There are some sensational phones on the market these days.