Journalism as a career has been under stress for a few years. With the rise of bloggers and cutbacks to traditional media, there are fewer and fewer journalists out there pounding the pavement for a story.  And now science has jumped in to reduce the numbers even further, if New Scientist reports are anything to go by.

At the moment, finance reporters often trawl through mountains of company filings to find out information about different corporations. But a new company, MarketBrief is levering new technology to take the hours of research and the journalistic write-up out of the equation.

In the USA, company statements are published in a format called XBRL or eXtensible Business Reporting Language. MarketBrief’s software creates articles by extracting key facts from the XBRL data and slotting them into predefined sentences.  It scans about 100,000 pages of filings per day, creating about 1000 articles from the information – with nary a human in sight.

At the moment, this is not great prose, but it serves the need of having real time information available in easily read chunks.

This is great news for investors, but another nail in the coffin of traditional journalists. This is definitely an industry undergoing a major shake-up & it will be interesting to see what happens in years to come.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Yesterday I had the privilege of speaking to a conference of TAFE teachers who teach business to students across Queensland.  They had asked for my view of the Gen Z’s – and what was different about them. Now I am not a social demographer (just an interested business observer), but here is a bit of what I shared.

The eldest are about 14 at the moment. This generation can best be described as technology on Ritalin. For these kids being connected 24/7 is the only way to live.

By Grade 4 or 5 they have built their first websites and projects are always done in something like Publisher or Movie Maker and handed in on USB. Forget the old-fashioned cardboard projects – these days it is all electronic and interactive. By Grade 7 they have built their first computer games.

From this age they are playing on social network sites such as Club Penguin or Habbo. By Grade 7 most have graduated to their own Facebook/MySpace and MSN accounts and pretty much 99% have their own mobile phones. At least 20% of Grade 5 and 6 kids have mobiles.

They value speed over accuracy (which explains their spelling!). Most don’t know of life without broadband or wireless internet. They bring I-pods to class and teachers allow students to listen to their iPods when they are studying, quietly reading their textbooks or when they are doing something like art.

On a demographic basis, the median age of first time mums to Gen Zs was 33. Families are smaller.

The challenge is that this group is also the smallest number in terms of the size of the generations due to the decreasing birth rate, so this will have implications for jobs, homes & schools. People will compete for their attention (and don’t they already know it).

They are opinionated, passionate environmentalists and have no boundaries in terms of privacy or distance. Teachers are expected to give their class their email address for contact and kids will regularly send through jokes and other fascinating trivia at all hours of the day.

The world is very small to them. If you don’t have at least 100 friends (most of whom you have never met) on Facebook, you are loser. They chat with people all around the world – as long as their interests are the same, they are deemed a friend.

This is also the Ritalin generation with significant numbers of kids taking some form of medication for ADHD. We are seeing increasing violence with younger kids, with regular reports of kids as young as Grade 1 wagging school.

Gen Z loves love interaction – while they are watching TV they are on MSN, texting or some other form of social media.

These kids are tech savvy, opinionated and have a worldview. This has impacts in terms of how we teach them, interact with them and hire them.

So, what will you be teaching Generation Z’s? Discretion (the net is forever), how to respond to online real time feedback, & managing international online businesses (with the odd bit of unravelling multi-tasking thrown in for good measure).

What do you think about Gen Zs? Are they really that different than Gen Y’s?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

One of my favourite new words is Lekking (thanks Cosmos Magazine for sharing this one). It first came from the Swedish att leka meaning “to play” and originally was used to describe male behaviour when females are around in the animal kingdom.  It can be as simple as peacock displays or as complex as male cichlid fish that build underwater cities in the sand to grab the eye of a passing female cichlids.

But lekking is not just limited to animals. The University of NSW in Sydney showed that human males also form leks – with power-dressing and verbal insults as a way of showing off.

The funniest study was one published in Human Nature that showed men also lek with their mobile phones – they display them in public places (even if they don’t intend to use them). The more men in a group, the more mobile phones were pulled out for display. Women tend to keep them in their handbags and only use them when needed, blokes on the other hand put them on display and then constantly fiddle with them even when not in use (read a full version of the article reported in the NY Times here).

As I read about this study in an airport during peak early morning business meeting transit time I of course looked around … and lo and behold – males with their mobiles out on display as far as the eye could see. Take a look for yourself  in the next group of blokes if you don’t believe me – check out how many of them display their mobiles – it is lekking in action.

So two things stood out for me – first lekking is just a darn good word and we need to use it more. And second – how little gadgets can quickly become adopted to satisfy our core animal instincts. Wonder if the mobile phone companies will consciously adapt their newest lines to make them more obvious?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

Readers of this blog know I love technology – the more techno toys the better!  I was stoked when I could play my Powerpoint presentations from my mobile phone – just plug it into one of the baby projectors you can get these days and I was off and presenting. But what if I could do away with the baby projector altogether?

Well … the next generation of mobile phones look like they will be carrying in-built projectors – so you can run your presentation on a handy wall. New Scientist

At present phones like the Samsung Anycall Show phone carry a low resolution chip, but there have been advances in the past few months which means high resolution projections are not too far away.

How can you use this for your business? Imagine your sales team being able to run professional presentations on the fly. What about constantly changing “specials of the day” in your store. Business meetings could take on a whole new look at restaurants and coffee shops.

Like much of the new technology there is a downside. New Scientist raised some interesting ethical challenges with this technology. In the hands of teenagers we could see some “interesting” videos being displayed on the walls of trains and buses.  Given human error is also likely for mistaken projection of private information such as bank details. It is questionable whether current legislation is tight enough to cover for these sort of situations and I would recommend all businesses review their policy manuals to cover these new developments.

And you thought mobile ring tones were annoying … imagine what is likely to happen with mobile phone projectors until we learn to self regulate. For me I say bring it on!

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Recently when I talked about the 20 year web anniversary, some people wanted to know what would be next … so I went to check out TED. TED stands for technology, entertainment and design, and while originally a conference where leaders in thought would meet annually, it now hosts TedTalks, where the best and brightest speak and share their ideas. It is worth getting the RSS feed of their blog to stay across some brilliant information.

http://blog.ted.com/

Here is a fascinating February 2009 presentation by Patti Maes on an amazing human interface under development. Watching it gave me lots of clues as to possible direction of technology – where information on the net becomes an integral part of your everyday decision making. It is worth watching and then thinking about the implications for your business and the words you use on the net.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriters