Take a look at this "new in 2007" product.
http://www.geckoandfly.com/
Now imagine that product with a super small wifi receiver embedded in that "tabloid sized" literally paper-thin LCD that you can bend and fold!
If you imagined correctly you saw what could be a great way to replaces "newsprint" as the MOD of newspapers, that would put newspapers in the digital mix. Magazines too could take advantage of this. Subcribers would receive a LCD paper when they subscribed, that would update its content with each publication.
New issues could be sent as easily as we send a text msg.
Such an advance would bring the price down of these gadgets tremendously pretty quickly, and make doing that inexpensive.
The benefits once if it were to be implemented successfully would soon be obvious.
- No more newsprint costs
- No more magazine postal fees
- No more delivery expenses
- Home subscribers would get wifi to the newsLCD for their paid subscription
- Street sales umm, put your 50 cents in the stand and you get your personal newsLCD updated instantly, Perhaps it could be sold like kindal by Amazon. However, since the motive would be to sell the newspaper/magazine it wouldn't have to cost hundreds, but be more in line with the price of a subscription.
- Newspapers could once again become "cutting edge, up to the minute" reporters of the news, even beat the internet for a change, because reporters could instantly update their stories via wifi, and breaking stories could hit the streets as they happen all made possible by a wifi equipped Paper thin News LCD (no longer newspapers).
- Once in place, the ability to stream video - just like a cell phone - could mean another way to leverage this technology into a completely new revenue stream.
- This could give newspapers their sense of identity back, by creating a 'dedicated product" with a "format" distinct from a laptop and computer strictly meant for getting the news.
- It would help return a sense of individuality to dailies now lost in news aggregate sites. and through that a return newspapers and print media a sense of importance unique to itself, clearly tying the news people now think comes from Google to its real, hard working source.
Of course that's just a mock up, but as a geek in every sense of the word, making this happen isn't that hard, especially since the savings to the bottom line is tremendous.
Why nothing like this is on the horizon, nor anything else like it I'd assume is due to the utter lack of "tech group savvy" among upper management of the newspaper industry (Murdoch excepted LOL).
