Google has bought start-up Jambool and with it Jambool’s online social payment service ‘Social Gold’, which allows developers to build payments directly into games and apps.
According to recent reports across media sites, including paidContent, the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog and TechCrunch, the platform, which enables companies to manage their own virtual currencies, will form part of “the backbone” of Google’s plans to harness the power of social media.
Predictions are already being made about the potential of Rupert Murdoch’s reported plans to produce a national newspaper available only on the iPad, as we discussed last month.
Over on Tech Crunch Paul Carr doesn’t mince his words, insisting that the concept is “doomed”. It is not about marketing the value of the contents but a simply money-making exercise he says, which is not a long term solution.
Of course the idea is doomed – that much should go without saying. Like so many of Murdoch’s recent forays into paid-for online news, it reflects less a bold strategy to convince a new generation of readers that good journalism is worth paying for and more the 79-year News Corp proprietor’s desperation to keep the cash flow coming until the company’s profitability becomes someone else’s problem.
But what’s remarkable about this current escapade is that Murdoch is actually proposing to sell a product that people have previously failed to even give away for free.
The LA Times, who also ran an editorial on the plans this weekend, added that News Corp is just another news organisation “scrambling to prop up their bottom lines with new sources of revenue”.
The initiative, which would directly compete with the New York Times, USA Today and other national publications, is the latest attempt by a major media organization to harness sexy new devices to reach readers who increasingly consume their news on the go. The development underscores how the iPad is transforming the reading habits of consumers much like the iPod changed how people listen to music.
We spotted this yesterday, and Sarah Lacy has sparked a bit of a reaction – at time of writing, it had received 188 comments.
Lacy never went to journalism school like her friend:
“Fast-forward and my friend no longer works in journalism. Meanwhile, I’m not only gainfully employed, but have managed to make more money every year the industry has declined all around me.”
She ends: “(…) in any time of volatility, there’s huge room for opportunity. But you’re not going to learn how to exploit it in a stuffy classroom taught by people who got there by working at newspapers.”
At this week’s Demo Conference renowned Wall Street Journal technology columnist Kara Swisher attacked Tech Crunch’s founder Michael Arrington: ‘being lectured in journalism ethics by Michael Arrington is like getting parenting tips from Britney Spears’.