Neil Perkin

This Spiegel Online article rather stopped me in my tracks. Acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid is currently designing 11 projects across China including the quite beautiful Wangjing SOHO complex in Beijing. It seems that in the land where anything can be copied, architectural 'pirates' have cloned the design of the complex and construction teams are busy building a replica in faraway Chongqing.

Last month I wrote a post questioning why, in the context of exponential growth in the number of companies creating APIs across many sectors, so few publishers were opening up their data and content (at least in part) in this way. The question is applicable to just about every area of publishing that is making the transition from legacy print processes, practices and approaches to those more associated with digital.

Newspaper and magazine publishers (and other media owners) typically run their businesses based on segmented revenue streams such as circulation, advertising, promotions and so on. The revenue streams often report vertically, ensuring that the focus is on vertical strategies and execution first, and horizontal second. But could it be the right time for publishing businesses to refocus around a central guiding metric such as average revenue per user? Here's five reasons why that might be a good idea:

'One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Albert Einstein: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” I like to lean toward the latter, and I’m definitely drawn to other people who do the same.' Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn

I've been following John Battelle's thinking on the future of digital display. Earlier this year he wrote a long post on the so-called 'death of display', the rumours of which have been greatly exaggerated.

When I first started working in digital back in the time of the dot-com bubble, many people obsessed about so-called 'first mover advantage'. Within the context provided by the digital goldrush of the time, the thinking went that if you arrived first with your innovation, you could plant your flag and rapidly attain a lead over competitors that was unassailable.