SEO Blog

Steve Jobs introduced the newest version of the iPhone to open Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier today. The iPhone 3G, will be released in 22 major countries on July 11. According to reports from the conference and on Apple’s website, the new iPhone will be twice as fast as the previous version and come at half the cost.

The most interesting thing, from a search marketer’s perspective, about the iPhone 3G hasn’t actually happened yet. With a far more powerful signal and much speedier data transfer rates, the iPhone 3G is poised to be the device that pushes a critical mass of North American consumers to regularly access the web via their mobile devices. At the same time, the absurdly exorbitant data-rates charged by North American mobile providers are coming down rapidly; faster in the US than in Canada.

Less expensive products and services plus faster, more reliable connectivity should equal greater user adoption rates. In other words, if the reality lives up to even half the hype, the advent of the iPhone 3G and its RIM built counterpart the 3G BlackBerry, might be disruptive enough to redefine our personal relationships with computing.

For the purveyors of print news, the news is bad. Fifteen years after the introduction of the commercial Internet era, the writing is on the wall and far less of it will be found in the pages. The Tribune Company, publisher of many of America’s finest newspapers, most notably the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, has decided to radically cut back on the size and scope of its daily print editions. CEO Sam Zell and COO Randy Michaels made the announcement in Chicago late last week citing rising publishing costs and rapidly declining revenues.

In the future, readers in Chicago and Los Angeles, along with smaller cities like Baltimore, Orlando and Hartford will receive much smaller newspapers written and produced by much smaller newsroom staffs. Instead of well researched and documented reports or stories of national or international importance, readers can expect to see more local coverage with a splash of color graphics, much like in USA Today.

The object is to save what’s left of a business model that would have been rewritten if print could compete with pixels. The bottom line is simple. The costs associated with a professional print publication are too high and opportunities to recover costs through advertising now too few for traditional newspapers to continue to operate as they once did. The birth of the Internet spells doom for the printed word.