memonicOfficial Blog

Much has been written about the future of newspapers. Here my humble contribution:

1. In a complex world people turn to trusted sources of information for news, analysis and comment, e.g. newspapers.
2. The unique value of a newspaper is its editorial staff (1).
3. The core competence of an editorial team is separating the relevant from the chaff and provide context. Simply put: Making sense of the world afar and close.
4. The result of journalistic work – articles, analysis and comment – is independent of the carrier medium (i.e. print, digital, spoken word, moving images).
5. An editorial team must cover a wide range of subjects to get to the heart of things and be able to provide context. Expert editorial teams on specific subjects complement a broad reporting approach.
6. A reader is interested only in a subset of topics covered; the limiting factors being time and interests. Corollary 1: A reader wants to select her topics of interest. Corollary 2: An ideal news offering is a collection of topics a reader chooses to follow. (2)
7. The reader expects each topic to be a continuously updated feed with factual reporting, analysis and comment.
8. The reader decides through which carrier medium or combination thereof she wants to receive her information.
9. The digital world is not something fundamentally new; the digital world only exacerbates this trend: In the digital world where news is abundant, the key factor is attention (Contrary to the physical world where scarcity is the limiting factor – 3).
10. There will always be people willing to pay for attention. Either pay someone for organizing a limited amount of available attention or someone pays for access to attention.

Obviously we’re working hard to make this vision happen here at Memonic. Stay tuned.

Notes:

(1) It is total nonsense to differentiate between a print and a online editorial team. It’s one news reporting organization regardless of output channel.

(2) A reader’s preferred subset is most likely not corresponding to the traditional sectioning of a newspaper in Politics (World, Home), Business, Arts, etc. Example: Reporting on the Euro crisis could be found in newspapers such as the NZZ, SZ, FAZ, Spiegel, NYT in the politics, business and feuilleton sections. The topic of interest though is euro crisis.  So why not simply offering exactly that: A follow-a-topic function allowing a reader to find everything relevant on say the euro crisis under that heading. And so it goes for every topic.

(3) In a sea of (digital) abundance it’s the attention that counts, as Michael Goldhaberpointed out in 1997. That is, in a sea of abundant ‘information’ on any event, with you having only so much attention to devote, you most likely turn to a trusted source of information for reporting and contextualization.

Raphael Cohen is a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Geneva*. He most recently released his new book “Winning Opportunities“.

The book provides a step-by-step process to help you identify an opportunity, analyze it and convince the suitable decision-makers to give you the necessary resources and support. And all that without writing a proper business plan, claims Raphael. Instead he introduces his Innovation by Opportunity model of innovation, a process specifically designed to foster innovation processes driven by employees in larger organizations and corporations. It centers on how to set up the intrapreneurial process properly. From my own experience I only can confirm this. Innovation and entrepreneurship have a difficult stand in most large organizations. Instead of a focus on the opportunity most new ideas and undertakings are calculated off the board by countless versions of Excel based business plans.

Raphael’s book is a refreshing take on this topic. And an innovative one, too. You can download the book for free at the ”Winning Opportunities” website. You may pay what you want for the book once you read the book, be this nothing or 5 million.

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Disclosure: For a number of years I teach a segment on Virtual Organizations in the MBA Course run by Raphael.

Let’s combine the simple web clipping of Memonic with an eBook Reader like the Amazon Kindle. With Memonic you quickly collect information online, you read it later on your Kindle. Very useful for example for researching a trip online, and then reading the details on your Kindle once you are on the road.

Here is how it works, step-by-step. Should only take a few minutes the first time you set it up and only seconds the next time you’ll do it.

As you might know, your Kindle device has an email address. You can send messages with attachments, say PDF documents to your Kindle. The Kindle device will get the documents the next time it connects to the Amazon mothership ;-)

Prepare your Kindle

Go to kindle.com and log in with your account.

1. Click on “Manage My Kindle”
2. Click “Edit Info”
3. Set your own @kindle.com address if it’s not already there. Note this address, we’ll need it in a second.

To protect your device from spam, Amazon only accepts messages from email addresses you approve.

1. Enter your primary email address, the one your email client uses to send mails
2. Click “Add Address”

Convert your Set or Group into a PDF

Head over to your Memonic Collection and select the set or group that you’d like to export to your Kindle. (Or if you’re new to Memonic, get yourself a free account and start clipping ;-) )

1. Click the Option Arrow next to the Set or Group
2. Select Print

Memonic will present you a printable view of all the Items in your set or group. Next you’ll want to convert that into a PDF file.

• On Apple OSX, click the PDF button on the Print menu and safe it to your drive.
• Windows, to my knowledge, does not have PDF function built in. You can use the free Bullzip PDF Printer or a similar utility to get the job done.
• I’m not spelling it out for Linux, but to my knowledge most distro’s will have a print to file option as well

Make sure you’ll give the PDF file a good name, as this will become the document title on your Kindle

Send the PDF to your Kindle

This step is as simple as it gets.

• Compose a new mail message with your favorite mail client,
• Attach the PDF file
• Give it a meaningful subject
• No message body required

Send the message to your Kindle mail address. Connect the Kindle to a WiFi network. Your document will appear on the device within a minute or two.

Note: Please send the message to @free.kindle.com address if you want to avoid any charges from Amazon. If you send your document to @kindle.com your document might be delivered over the mobile phone network, and Amazon might charge your for that. It’s my understanding that if you use @free.kindle.com your Kindle will only get the document if your connected to a WiFi, and that should always be free. But please, don’t take my word for it and consult the Amazon Kindle website for all the details.

Read it ;-)

That’s it. Your set or group is now readable on your Kindle. If you use a different eBook Reader the same concept will work as long as it supports reading PDF documents.

We’ll plan to make all this easier for you soon, by adding a one-click “Send to my Kindle” function. But until we’ve done that, we hope you’ll find this little tutorial useful. Let me know what you think.

Now, if I only could convince Keren to lend me her fancy new black Kindle for my trip to Ghana next month ;-)