Peter Bennett

Peter Bennett develops iPhone apps and advises companies on mobile strategy through his company Hablantia.com. He was a founder of a publishing business that grew rapidly and profitably, but didn't quite live to see its 10th birthday. In previous incarnations he has worked for the BBC in corporate strategy, and has written management reports on technology issues for the FT.

Why don't they get it?

Tech predictions focusing only on technology miss a key component: people.

If you comment on new technology, you should get to know as many of the quirks and biases of human behavior as you can. That's because you're modeling people first and technology second.

Mobile apps and the quiet handling of data

There's considerable difference in how PC software and mobile apps handle data.

PC-based applications often have to get clearance from users before they can gather and transmit data. Mobile apps, however, follow a different path.

Expectation of Fair Pricing, Not Free

At Dear Author, a post stating that not all content should be expected to be free; rather it must be provided, free or not, in a realistic understanding of consumer needs and expectations, which might mean changing the way you do business. What content providers must realize is that a changing business model wherein revenues are no longer captured in…

The Economic Realities of Digital-Only Newspapers

Alan Mutter has an incisive analysis explaining why an all-digital strategy would be unacceptably painful for the majority of established newspapers: Because newspapers on average derive approximately 90% of their sales from print advertising, the only ink-on-paper newspapers that can afford to attempt digital-only publishing are the ones that are irreversibly losing money. Moving to digital publishing is the…

New York Times Settles Linking Suit

In what many of us thought was a slightly bizarre case, the New York Times Co. has settled with GateHouse Media in a suit attempting to cease the automated aggregation of Gatehouse content on Boston.com's affiliated properties (Boston.com is owned by the Times Co.). It is not clear why the settlement was reached, since precedence was on the side…

Palm's webOS Represents Major Shift for Syncing and Data

In an article covering the Palm Pre mobile device, Ars Technica makes a very important point about how devices utilize network connectivity, and what the assumptions are underlying their models of data storage and access: Users just make changes to their data (contacts, calendar, mail, etc.), and Palm's webOS handles committing those changes to whatever canonical data source it…

Google Doesn't Have Answers for Newspapers

Fortune Magazine has an interesting interview with Eric Schmidt about Google's relationship with newspapers: Maybe their time [newspapers'] has just come and gone? No. They don't have a problem of demand for their product, the news. People love the news. They love reading, discussing it, adding to it, annotating it. The Internet has made the news more accessible. There's…

New Tech Mixes Book Experience with Sensors

A new form of hybrid book is coming on the market — and the inventor consults with Apple. From the Guardian UK: Lyndsay Williams — who has already developed the PC sound card, SmartQuill, and SenseCam — is now working on SenseBooks, and the first of a series will be published next year. SenseBooks are a hybrid of paper…

History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts

A Computerworld blog post from Mike Elgan looks at recent mobile announcements from book publishers. From the perspective of technology, watching book publishers slowly grapple with the tentative migration of books to mobile platforms is painful. Interestingly, the comments attached to the piece are almost all more conservative. The music industry was holding on to physical CD sales so tightly…

800 Newspapers Coming to Iliad E-Reader

iRex Technologies scores scores of newspapers for its new iLiad e-reader. From E-Reads: Digitally delivered news is gaining momentum and as we turn the corner to 2009 it's gotten a rocket boost from the Dutch firm iRex Technologies, which announced it has made a deal with NewspaperDirect to deliver 800 newspapers on iRex's Digital Reader 1000 … The iRex/NewspaperDirect…