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by Daniel Ionescu, PCWorld  

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from the Today @ PC World blog at PCWorld.com.

Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy last month, is killing its digital cameras business and plans to focus on printing in an effort to save money.

At one time, Kodak—the pioneer of modern-day handheld film cameras that brought into popular culture the phrase “Kodak moment”—had more than 90 percent of the market share of film sales in the U.S. But the 131-year-old company struggled since the introduction of digital cameras.

Kodak announced Thursday it would now focus on profitable lines of business, such as online and retail-based photo printing, as well as desktop inkjet printing.

Kodak plans to phase out in the first half of 2012 its dedicated capture devices business, including digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames. Product warranties and technical support will continue for these devices, the company said.

In this move, Kodak hopes to save more than $100 million, but it would cost the company some $30 million to exit the business. Eastman Kodak Co. and its U.S. subsidiaries filed for bankruptcy protection in January and obtained a $950 million, 18-month debtor-in-possession line of credit from Citigroup to keep the company running.

Kodak will continue to operate its retail-based photo kiosks and digital dry lab systems, as well as consumer inkjet printers, camera accessories and batteries (the ones compatible with all camera brands). The company said it now plans to make charging units for smartphones and continue to operate Kodak apps on Facebook and Kodak Gallery, an online digital photo products service.

Pradeep Jotwani, president, consumer businesses, and Kodak’s chief marketing officer, said the announcement is the logical move given industry trends.

“For some time, Kodak’s strategy has been to improve margins in the capture device business by narrowing our participation in terms of product portfolio, geographies and retail outlets,” Jotwani said.

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Kodak axing digital cameras business

Greg Satell Digital Tonto: Why I still think the New York Times paywall is stupid Feb 8 at 16:24 | Greg SatellThe New York Times Company released the first results of its paywall last week and showed that it gained 390,000 digital subscribers between the Times and the International Herald Tribune.

That’s a lot more than people thought it would get and a testament to both the strength of the brand and how well the paywall was executed. So is the paywall a success? Many people are saying so, but I disagree.

I wrote before that I thought the paywall was a stupid idea and I still think so. While the subscription numbers are impressive, the business itself is worse off and falling further behind. Some, like Henry Blodget, think the answer is to simply fire more journalists. I believe the solution lies in the NY Times learning how to build a digital business.

The golden rule As I’ve written before, media has a golden rule: Marketers are willing to pay more for consumers than consumers are willing to pay for content. Of course, there are exceptions and some are important ones, but generally the rule stands.

What I don’t understand is why people think that for some reason it wouldn’t apply to the NY Times. It certainly isn’t a niche product, nor does it give any time sensitive information that isn’t widely available (although the Wall Street Journal does, which is why their paywall works). They have never made money on print and distribution, so “free” shouldn’t bother them.

The problem is clearly shown on this chart from Henry Blodget’s Silicon Alley Insider:

Clearly, the increase in subscription numbers has barely made a dent in their revenues. Moreover, the haven’t improved their product, so it’s hard to see how they will grow from here if they can’t win advertising or e-commerce dollars. (Mathew Ingram makes a similar point in a recent post).

Falling further behind The New York Times digital ad revenues didn’t fall last year, as some suspected, but actually increased by 10%, which helped mitigate their shrinking print revenue. Many are saying that’s a positive result, but I think not. That figure actually reflects the fact that the NY Times has fallen further behind.

While a 10% increase in revenues might be great for a newspaper business, it’s pretty crappy for digital, which grew at 23% last year. In reality, they didn’t pull ahead, but lagged the market by 13%. As online growth eventually slows, how will they ever become sustainably profitable by keeping the current course?

And that’s not all. The digital business they bought, About.com, did even worse. Due to a change in the Google algorithm About.com’s revenues dropped 67% which caused overall digital revenues for the entire enterprise to actually drop by 0.8%! Not exactly a digital juggernaut.

With results like these, how can anyone call the NY Times digital strategy (of which the paywall is the most prominent part) a success?

How to fix the New York Times By now it should be clear that the paywall is certainly no solution to the NY Times’ problems. Rather than trying to boost revenues temporarily to stem the tide, they need to learn how to effectively run a digital business, which has considerably different logic than a print business.

Here are some suggestions:

Stop Building Stupid Things: While a lot of people think that the NY Times got into trouble because they ignored the Internet, nothing can be further from the truth. Much like I previously wrote about Blockbuster, they are actually a technologically forward company.

The problem is that they build the wrong things, like an incredibly complex hierarchical tagging system for articles that was outdated almost as soon as they built it and their reference search feature, which allows you to double click on any word and get reference information. Impressive, but useless.

Integrate blogs: Another thing they can do is integrate blogs. Lots of people would love to write for the NY Times for free, why not let them? Huffington Post has made a lot of money that way. As I’ve written before, professional journalism and blogs are complimentary as much as they are competitive.

Leverage Inventory: Print media is about space. Electronic media is about inventory. That makes all the difference in the world and there are a number of ways inventory can be leveraged and optimized.

One of my favorites is to syndicate satellite brands that build communities in key verticals. The NY Times has deep content in a number of niche areas such as theatre, books and local New York politics. They can use this content to fuel separate brands that focus on those areas and augment it with community building features.

Incidentally, the Wall Street Journal does this very well with brands like All Things Digital, Market Watch and WSJwine.

Innovate: Creating satellite brands would also have another ancillary benefit – it would help them innovate. Probably their biggest problem is that its very difficult to innovate on their enormous scale (AOL and Yahoo! have similar problems). Having a stable of smaller brands will help them take more chances.

Most of all, they need a greater spirit of innovation. Instead of yearning for a lost age and wasting time with paywalls, they should be looking to the future. While they tell themselves that they the last great hope for quality journalism, the truth is that there is no worse betrayal to quality journalism than running a media business poorly.

Greg Satell is a U.S.-based independent media analyst. You can read his blog entries at http://www.digitaltonto.com.

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Digital Tonto: Why I still think the New York Times paywall is stupid

A competition has been launched to find better ways of exchanging information between copyright holders and end users, giving companies in the UK the chance to win up to £37,000, to bring their ideas to life.

The Digital Licensing Framework (DLF) contest is being run by IC tomorrow – an organisation set up by the government's Technology Strategy Board in 2010 to enable content owners and application developers to trial their ideas with UK consumers through its test bed.

The total prize money of £180,000, split between six winners, is partly supported by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) Innovation Infrastructure Challenge Fund.

Related Articles on Techworld

Applicants can enter the competition in one of three categories:

Specific sector: Applicants must design a prototype that shows understanding of the licensing landscape in either music, publishing or museums & galleries (one prize for each). The prototype should enable consumers to send licence enquires to rights holders and view licensing information in a meaningful and educational way. Aggregator: Applicants must design a prototype application or service that aggregates licensing information from multiple sectors or media types including music, publishing, images and others. Intermediary: Applicants must design a prototype service that provides an 'alternative' or 'enriched' source of licensing information from multiple rights holders, using existing metadata or content specialists (two prizes).

Pitches must be submitted online by 22 March. The six winners will be awarded contracts of up to £37,000 on 4 April, and will have two months to build their prototypes before trials take place using IC tomorrow’s digital platform in June and July. The trials will be attended by leading rights holders such as Bridgeman Art Library, EMI, Pearson, PRS for Music and Tate.

“Copyrighted content is often integral to innovative start-ups and media companies, yet there are a number of challenges when it comes to exchanging information between rights holders and rights users,” said Dr Nick Appleyard, head of digital at the Technology Strategy Board. “This competition will bring the industry’s finest entrepreneurs together to develop ways that streamline this process and support a new generation of commercial opportunities.”

The contest is open to any startup or company working in rights management, content metadata cataloguing and identification systems, content aggregation or distribution and rights management workflow solutions. For more information visit IC tomorrow's website here.

The news comes amid reports that more European countries are shying away from the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Both Poland and the Czech Republic have decided to delay ratification of the intellectual-property treaty, despite signing it on 26 January, and Cyprus, Estonia, The Netherlands, Germany and Slovakia are still refusing to sign.

So far 22 European Union member states have signed the treaty, which aims to strengthen copyright and intellectual-property rights enforcement, but opponents of the deal say it leaves the door open for countries to force Internet service providers to become the unofficial police of the Internet.

Meanwhile, equivalent digital copyright legislation in the United States – the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) – has also hit the rocks, following a mass protest from the likes of Wikipedia, Google and Reddit.

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Competition launched to make digital licensing more transparent

Daniel Atwood works with organizations in the social sector to craft meaningful experiences for customers and constituents, and to find innovative product, campaign and messaging ideas in unexpected places.

We live in a world where new digital products are solving problems daily -- from managing our finances to remembering the groceries. Often, they're solving problems we didn't know we had, like the need to connect several times a day in 140 characters or less. Occasionally, they're creating new problems (but that's a topic for another conversation).

[More from Mashable: Connected Cars: How to Accelerate Mainstream Adoption]

What we're just starting to see, and what is for many the most exciting trend in technology, is the emergence of digital products designed specifically to provide social services at scale. This isn't a rant about the death of the traditional non-profit, but a birth announcement. Non-profits (and other organizations aimed at making a social impact) are taking new approaches that look less like direct service and more like Google. These aren't just brochure websites. They're tools -- proprietary, unique and scalable. And this means there’s an increased need for talented digital product managers in the social sector.

Let’s take a quick look at where organizations have been focused for the past several years; we’ll call it Non-profit Digital Engagement 1.0.

[More from Mashable: Hands On With Google Chrome for Android]

In this phase, a handful of tools came to dominate our understanding of how non-profits could engage in the digital space. Specifically, these were tools that enabled people to email Congress, sign a petition, tell-a-friend, send a letter to the editor or make a donation. This toolset focused on two activities: fundraising and advocacy -- raising money and making noise. Those activities are important for most organizations, but they represent only a small slice of how non-profits actually aim to create change. And partly as a result, too many organizations were applying the same tools to engage people around wildly different problems.

So, what’s next? In short, less focus on tools that aim to engage more people with causes, and more focus on a new wave of customized digital tools that provide social services at scale to constituents.

Some examples:

Kiva: This is an early one, but one worth noting. Kiva created a digital platform to connect small-dollar funders with nascent social entrepreneurs. This let it scale its model in a way that would have been nearly impossible had it not put a significant focus on technology. Brighter Planet: Actually a for-profit company, Brighter Planet is a great example of using digital thinking to find new ways of adding value to social causes. It created the CM1 platform to calculate carbon impact and opened it up with APIs that allow others to plug in and do the same. MasterCard has signed on and will soon be providing carbon impact reports to its corporate clients based on its employees' travel habits. Brighter Planet has focused on a specific need, and it's offering a scalable solution for it. Google’s Haiti Person Finder: When an earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, Google teamed up with the State Department to rapidly create a tool that let people submit and search for information about missing loved ones. It has since deployed it several times for other disasters, including the 2010 earthquake in Chile and the 2011 earthquake and resulting tsunami in Japan.

These examples go beyond the traditional paradigm of raising more money and sending more emails to Congress. They are each providing a real service in a constituent-centric, scalable way that would have been impossible just a few years ago.

A corollary to this promising growth in digital services is that it’s going to require more money invested in work that is traditionally viewed as ‘overhead’ in the non-profit world; namely, the significant staff time, design and development costs associated with creating and maintaining great digital products. Donors will have to think differently about investing in these types of projects. And organizations that hope to undertake them will have to lead the way by educating and inspiring donors in new ways.

For those groups that do want to create and scale digital services like these, the key to success will be putting the right people with the right power in the right positions. There is still a dire need for campaigners and organizers -- no question about it. But as often happens in this still-evolving field, we’re seeing a new core role emerge naturally: the digital product manager. Product managers -- people who can envision, build and market digital tools that add real value -- will play an increasingly critical role. Good product managers thrive on strategic thinking, but are also obsessed with ensuring that the final detail is just right. They care as much about design as about sustainable coding. They are tireless, tenacious and patient.

As many have already noted, we can't solve all of our problems with technology. But technology has opened up new opportunities for organizations to create scalable, innovative services in the social sector. And we're just beginning to realize the implications of that shift.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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What Digital Non-Profits Can Learn From Companies Like Google