Martin Hofmann

a personal blog about technology, communications and other stuff that interests me

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IT World Canada swallows IT Business Group

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[Cross-posted from the High Road Blog]

IT World Canada just announced that it has acquired IT Business Group from Transcontinental. That means ComputerWorld Canada and Computing Canada will be part of the same family. For how long? IT World Canada confirmed seven lay-offs in the press release but added there would be “no additional personnel changes as a result of the purchase”. No details yet on the future of all the publications and digital brands. IT World Canada’s president Andrew White made the following comment:

“Over the coming weeks, we will be finalizing the integration of the companies, and reviewing the product portfolios for future synergies. In the meantime, we will maintain all existing properties and work with our clients to ensure a smooth transition over the coming weeks and months.”

The acquisition will strengthen IT World Canada’s position in the market (I am especially interested to see what kind of digital strategy the combined powerhouse will embark on). Depending on the extent of the “future synergies”, it may also leave the Canadian IT community with less opportunity to get business technology news from different media sources. This begs the question: will we see another media company (or blogging network) step up?

Maybe one of the large American technology business sites will consider creating a Canadian site to get a share of the local online advertising dollars. Red Herring announced some kind of Canadian presence a while ago. CNET already operates international sites in Asia, Australia and several European countries. It has all the technology infrasctructure in place. Why not hire a few journalists and add Canada to the portfolio (again)?

Maybe other Canadian media properties, like Canoe or Globetechnology.com, will look at beefing up both enterprise-focused content and Canadian stories in their technology sections?

Or will we see even more independent bloggers and news sites pop up in Canada? Former National Post tech reporter Mark Evans is blogging away with his two tech blogs and a podcast series (together with Kevin Restivo). On the telecom/VoIP side, we have people like Alec Saunders and Jon Arnold covering the community. And there are many more.

IT World Canada is positioning itself for long-term success as an important voice in Canada’s thriving technology community. With more editorial staff it has the chance to provide even more breadth and depth in coverage. But there is room for more voices – corporate or independent.

Read the press release here.

Off Topic: Go see Johnny Clegg

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If you happen to be in Sherbrooke today or in Montreal tomorrow, go see Johnny Clegg in concert. I went to his show in Toronto on Tuesday and was blown away (again). I first saw him live in 1994 and was incredibly impressed by his music and his live performance. I don’t think many people can sing or play guitar, and at the same time do a zulu dance – together with the band. 

In my dreams I see Johnny Clegg hosting a new reality show: “Zulu dancing with the stars”. A bunch of famous cooler-than-you rock bands would have to learn to lighten up and integrate some really cool African dance moves into their boring stage performances. It would make for better TV and, afterwards, better concerts.

Anyway, Johnny Clegg is still brilliant. And South Africa should pay him as a cultural ambassador.

More Johnny Clegg info here and here. Crappy cell phone pictures below:

The blind camera: Taking somebody else’s photos

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The networked camera has no objective. No lense, no zoom. It’s just a black box with a button and some electronics inside. “Buttons is a camera that actually shoots other’s photos, taking the notion of the networked camera to the extreme.” Sascha Pohflepp, a student of visual communication at the Berlin University of the Arts,  has created it:

Photography has become a networked process. It no longer ends with pasting prints into an album. Instead, making them public through services like Flickr is rapidly becoming one of the main ways how we treat our visual memories. The photographic process extends from preserving a moment to an act of telecommunication, with numerous implications on how we perceive reality, how we make our memories and how we create a narrative from it.

If you liked Michael Wesch’s video (“Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us”) that has been posted all over the blogosphere recently, you might also enjoy the concept of Between Blinks & Buttons. You can watch a video here.

A library of SMS messages

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A team of researchers from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, and GWT-TUD GmbH, an affiliated company, is building a library of SMS messages. They are hoping to collect 100,000 messages with several million words by April.

Instead of testing mobile applications and devices in an artificial environment with artificial data, the researchers want to collect, analyze and use real text messages to help make technology more “natural, intuitive and human”.

On its German-language website textforscher.de (German for “text researchers”) the team is looking for people who want to earn 10 Euros for an hour of entering sample text messages. The money can also be donated to charity.

High Road’s new look

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(cross-posted from the new High Road blog on the new highroad.com)

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We’ve updated our website and refreshed our brand. We used our tenth anniversary to not only celebrate but also make changes to our corporate look and feel.

We loved our old logo with the road-that-leads-to-the-mountain. It’s been with us ever since High Road was founded back in the days when a website launch still created excitement and media started to think they might want to look into this thing they called “Cyberland” (“Extra! Readers talk back!”).

A lot has changed since then. High Road has grown from two to more than 70 people. We’re still doing technology and digital lifestyle PR but now we are doing it in six divisions and four offices.

We’ve been to the mountain and back many times. But we still love the hike, and we always strive to find new and better ways to get up there. And that’s what we wanted to focus on with our “refreshed” brand.

We searched for people who could help us with that, and found the team of Evoke Solutions (branding and design) – or as I like to call them: Knights of the White Space – and The Working Group (website planning and development).

Together, we came up with a new logo, a new corporate identity, and a new website. We hope you like the result.

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(I will keep blogging here, too. But I can now also be found on the High Road Communications corporate blog.)

Jon Arnold and Marc Robins team up

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Jon Arnold (blog), Canada’s independent voice on IP communications, has entered into a partnership with Marc Robins (blog) that “includes the two firms joining forces to provide an array of marketing, communications, strategy consulting and market research services to their growing roster of IP communications technology vendors and service providers.”  They are also planning to launch a new joint electronic newsletter. This will be good. More in the press release.

World’s oldest current newspaper now only available online

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“Post och Inrikes Tidningar” (PoIT), the world’s oldest current newspaper has discontinued its print edition as of January 1, 2007 and is now an Internet-only edition at PoIT.org. Established in 1645 as the official newspaper of Sweden’s national government, it had lost a lot of readers in recent years, according to Der Spiegel (in German).

Near the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish Queen Christina and Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna wanted to use PoIT to explain to its people “what all the money was spent on”. Over the centuries it turned from an outlet for the government’s official view into a full blown newspaper with reports on epidemics, the exchange rate for Swedish currency, weather reports, poetry and novels, and then was mostly focused on being “the country’s official notification body for announcements like bankruptcy declarations or auctions” (from the Wikipedia entry). The last print edition on December 29, 2006, was published with a circulation of only about 1,500.

Rather than viewing it as another proof point for the decline of print media, I’d say in this case the glass is half full. The Internet is a godsend for these types of official notification publications: the official function works just as well online. But it costs less public money.

(Disclaimer: I don’t speak Swedish; my only sources were Spiegel Online and Wikipedia)