Oct
27
If it’s Monday morning and you’re hunting around for your next big business idea, look for an industry that’s undergoing radical change for big opportunities.
There is some buzz in the blogsphere about the future of journalism students and the future of news jobs. Read these articles and for a moment put yourself in the shoes of a journalism student about to graduate or a 12 year journalism ‘veteran’. Scary isn’t it?
There are many very big and very rich traditional media incumbents who would very much like to talk to you if you solve some of their problems. Digg has supposedly “changed the face of traditional media” and gets over 100 million page impressions per month, but think about how much pure garbage gets ranked as #1 on Digg. It’s geek porn.
Here’s some interesting data from the 57th Annual World Newspaper Congress:
A report at the gathering indicated that China tops total newspaper circulation, with more than 85 million copies of papers sold every day, followed by India with 72 million—China and India are the two most populous countries in the world—followed by Japan with 70 million and the United States with 55 million.
There are massive opportunities in the India, Chinese and Japanese markets. Japan reads more newspapers than the USA and there are more Japanese bloggers than English bloggers - according to Technorati.
I don’t speak Japanese and I’ll bet neither do you. But internationalizing an app isn’t hard. I have more Japanese and Chinese users using LineBuzz than I do English, by far. And I worked closely with a few very friendly Chinese bloggers to help internationalize my app and debug it.
…and with the falling $$, International markets are looking a lot more interesting these days.
