An open letter to John Fallon, Chief Executive of Pearson Plc
Dear John
For the nth time, congratulations on the sale of FT to Nikkei for £825m ($1,288m).
Everybody says £844m, but you and I know that with FT Group’s £19m in the bank, the funds you have got from Japan are a tad lower at £825m. Still that is a bucketload of money. And with The Economist Group’s 50% …
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.
As you would all know by now, Pearson sold the FT Group yesterday to Nikkei for US$1.3b. The FT Group includes FT, some magazines such as Banker, Investor’s Chronicle, a 50% stake in Russian Biz Paper Vedomosti, an-EIU type co called Medley Global Advisors etc.
The valuation, at ~35X the adjusted operating income of $37m (on rev of $559m for 2014) is amongst …
My recent post for INMA’s Tech Trends blog looks at attempts to build an annotation layer to the web, led by the likes of Genius, Declara, Hypothesis etc. Annotation services can be enormously useful to readers, in providing context and meaning around an article or even a phrase in the article. But there is also a risk that annotation services could strip out all that intelligence, gathered from multiple websites, …
In my third post for INMA’s Tech Trends blog, I revisit my past skepticism around the hard paywall. My past assumptions around the superiority of the metered model, rested on its ability to extract subs rev from loyalists, while protecting page views and visits, thereby enabling monetization through ads. But in a world where news consumption is rapidly moving to mobile, typically much harder to monetize for news publishers, and …
I am presently in the Bay Area on a longish work assignment. Lots of interesting conversations, and many opportunities to gather insights abound. I do hope to share some of learnings and observations from my meetings in my next few posts.
During a recent dinner meeting with a leading Valley / Tech luminary, an interesting comment arose. This was during the end of the evening, while we were sampling some …
My second post, for INMA’s Tech Trends blog, is on BlockChains and how Publishers could take advantage of it. In the post, I state that increasingly, the internet, or the WorldWideWeb as we know it,, will become one of many internets with competing webs such as Mobile, Deep Web, BlockChain etc. We are thus moving from the era of a Consumption Web to many Transaction Webs. The transaction web isn’t …
Recently, I was invited by INMA.org – the leading newspaper / news media trade blog – to join their roster of bloggers. My blog on INMA, titled Tech Trends, looks at the technology, products and innovations emerging out of Silicon Valley, and evaluates the implications and resulting opportunities for legacy media firms.
My first post, published earlier this month, was on Apple Watch, and how news media companies could …
It is been nearly four years since that infamous Stanford MOOC, Introducing AI, that saw over 160,000 students signing up, was offered. Since then we have seen a tremendous amount of buzz around MOOCs and digital courses. Initially the buzz was all positive – NYT even called 2012 the year of the MOOC – and then it seemed MOOCs could do nothing right, as the world discovered their low …
The impact of technology and the internet on higher education, specifically on how they have enabled an unbundling of the constituent parts of the university, has been chronicled to death. This unbundling, and the consequent disruption it has entailed through the rise of MOOCs, sharing services such as Chegg, and employment marketplaces such as Campus Job has been detailed extensively.
In my previous post, I took a look at …
Is there a structured way to look at opportunities in Higher Ed? Say, if a startup wants to enter Higher Ed, how could it systematically identify all possible opportunities and thereby map out all potential business models in this space?
Historically, there were 3 clear spaces or opportunity areas in Higher Ed space. First, there was the University. Initially there was just the non-profit research-led university, which morphed into …