{"id":533555,"date":"2010-04-19T04:10:09","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T08:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"tag:contentnext.com,2010-04-19:article\/419-pearsons-secret-startups-we-cant-be-right-first-time"},"modified":"2010-04-19T04:10:09","modified_gmt":"2010-04-19T08:10:09","slug":"pearsons-secret-startups-we-cant-be-right-first-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/533555","title":{"rendered":"Pearson’s Secret Startups: ‘We Can’t Be Right First Time’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Genevieve
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When we first showed a video of Penguin Books’ iPad concepts<\/a> last month, observers got pretty excited<\/a> about the possibilities. Now, we are told, the first “book” – if you can call it that – Penguin will release<\/strong> from the line-up will be a title about little puppy Spot<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At a group briefing together with Penguin UK’s digital MD Anna Rafferty, parent Pearson’s digital strategy director Genevieve Shore explained that her commercial approach to tablets, like many<\/em> digital forms, can be deliberately iterative<\/strong>…<\/p>\n

“The interesting thing about pricing on iPad is,” Shore said, “I’m trying to get everybody over the idea that we’ll be right first time<\/strong>. With static<\/em> content, we spend a lot of time thinking about the right price, and then have to stick with that price. The beauty of these<\/em> platforms is, we can change<\/em> it.\n<\/p>\n

“It allows us to think about extension<\/em> services – it’s not about trying to jam a service in to a small device.”<\/p>\n

Speaking about mobile, Shore said: “It’s sort of a phony war. Once you dig down beneath wallpapers and ringtones, the myth of mobile content revenue has been exposed<\/strong> over the last couple of years. But I really think this is going to be the year we’ll see that change.”<\/p>\n

More broadly, she said: “We are very focused on M&A digitally<\/strong>. We’re definitely looking to make investments in external startups.” Pearson (NYSE: PSO<\/a>) has previously partnered with the LiveMocha<\/a> language learning startup and formed a Mobiledu<\/a> JV with Nokia (NYSE: NOK<\/a>) to deliver e-learning to Chinese mobile phones.<\/p>\n

Now Pearson has been forming “internal startups” recently<\/strong>, Shore said. “Traditionally, we’ve been allowed to develop things with longer lead times, over 24 months. We’ve got a number of startups in play which you’ll hear about over the next couple of years<\/strong>, where we take people out of their normal jobs and let them work in a more classic startup environment.”<\/p>\n

But Shore wouldn’t detail the “NewCos” further. Pearson recently became a founder sponsor of TechHub<\/a>, the Silicon Roundabout, London, co-working environment for digital entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n

Pearson took \u00a31.7 billion revenue from digital products<\/strong> in 2009 – that’s 31 percent of group income and growing 19 percent a year. It claims 35 million children playing its games daily, while Penguin is turning its Spinebreakers<\/a> teen bookreaders’ community in to a “full social network”. “It’s about future-proofing our business because we don’t want to stop our readers from reading,” Rafferty said.<\/p>\n

We write frequently on how Pearson’s Financial Times is faring in these regards. “Too many people are talking about surviving<\/em> and we think they should be talking about thriving<\/em><\/strong>,” FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw said. “If you are a producer of text content and you have a new channel available, there ought to be an advantage to your business – there should be a very bright future. We can create a bigger, better more profitable FT than we’ve ever had before on the internet. The odd model with somthing to prove is actually the free<\/em> model.”\n<\/p>\n

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When we first showed a video of Penguin Books’ iPad concepts last month, observers got pretty excited about the possibilities. Now, we are told, the first “book” – if you can call it that – Penguin will release from the line-up will be a title about little puppy Spot. At a group briefing together with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":705,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-533555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/705"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}