I remember when I was a kid growing up in the really rather green and leafy suburbs of Auckland (New Zealand). There was always this lure of wonder and secrecy offered by the walled gardens of some of the local residents. I imagined a wonderful array of magical fruits ready to be plucked from the branches owned by some eccentric recluse. Not to mention the stock piles of tennis, cricket and rugby balls that I had personally seen/aided in flying over into the never regions of this strange barricaded land... But I wonder, if I had known what lay beyond, that what was hidden by those tall hedgerows, that the gardens had nothing more to offer than the very open and playground endowed park no more than fifty meters away, would I still have been interested? At the end of last week, The Times Online (owned by media Baron Rupert Murdoch) decided to implement phase two of the introduction of their pay wall. Phase two is where they actually ask you to front up for your news consumption. Phase One, well that was a few weeks prior and involved a pay wall, without the pay bit. All you had to do was register. The change in traffic/eyes on pages from phase one? a drop of 60%. The predicted drop after readers have to pay (phase two)? A further 10%. That leaves a potential/predicted/hoped for user base of 30%. The Times Online says if they can maintain a 10% online, paid for readership (only a third of what they predict) then they will be quids in. I’m not so sure. In Chris Anderson’s “Free” he talks about the “Freemium” model where the 5% of those willing to pay for extra content or added features support the 95% of those who are not. But does this work when you reverse the current standard practice? Giving it away for free and changing to a model where people are charged for no real (subjective opinion, granted) added benefit to the viewer. Not to mention, that with the exception of but a few (The FT springs to mind), this content is still widely available, for free and online. One thing to note though, this is not actually a “freemium” model... There is no teaser, there is a home page with some titles and some images. But that’s all you get on the back of your free perusal. This is now just a premium model. Something that I think might struggle to gain traction on an internet rife with free alternatives. Even the FT allows a certain number of free views. Dangle the worm and you have potential to catch a fish. Dangle the hook and...? I would also question, with the now limited eyes on “paper”, is The Times Online still offering the same level of exposure to advertisers that their free counterparts can and are? Will the (potential) 30% supplement the potential loss of big money advertisers? What would be the use of posters on the inside of the walled gardens? I am by no means suggesting that the Times should merely give away their content. I am all for making money. With the modern media consumption rapidly moving away from paper (Murdoch vs. Jobs(iPad)/Schmidt(Google)) they can no longer support free online content on the back of paper offline content sales. But here in lies my gripe. Why not link the two? As it stands, the Times have no link between paper, online or phone application. You pay for one, you don’t get the other. In my humble opinion, you link the above and you make for a much stronger case for paid-for-content. Why can’t I buy a paper on the way into work read the front page, sport and a few of the comic strips, and then be allowed access to cheekily read online content during work...? My overall opinion on the whole is that I just wouldn’t like to be first. When people realise that what’s in the walled garden is pretty similar to whats in the public park and that public park is supported by many a free folly, maybe they’ll move on. But you never know. I have been wrong before and to be fair, I’m not offering much of an alternative.

The rumour mill surrounding Apple is a miraculous thing. In recent years Apple has developed a reputation for keeping the ship leak free and creating a media frenzy without so much as a whiff of a press conference. This year however, things went a little off script. Now call me cynical but for a company that is renowned for tight security leading up to a product launch, this time around hasn’t gone so swimmingly. Not one, not two, not even three new iPhone “4G” prototypes have gone “walkabouts” in bars and the like, but four have. Which is odd for a company rumoured to take their security so seriously that they make their product teams work with the new “toys” under black sheets. We now, within limits, pretty much know what is coming our way from 1 Infinite Loop (Apple’s home). 5MP Camera, Dual cameras, increased speed, etc etc. But is this perhaps a new marketing ploy? Is there a chance that with the release of the new HTC “Desire” (among others) Apple felt the need to let people know what was on its way. Maybe, with the now raging, and slightly odd battle between Apple and Adobe, Apple just wanted to reaffirm the allegiance of its army of evangelical users. Or, maybe they truly did just go missing... Any which way, in the next few days we’ll know exactly what’s coming, and from the master magician of sales him self, Steve Jobs. So what happens to the current band of merry iPhones? They still go toe-to-toe with many of the current smart phones. There are millions of apps, millions of users and as an iPhone user myself, I think life would be a little less full without the world at my finger tips in that glossy way that only Apple seems to deliver... But as with all current smart phones, the thing that limits the user base to a select few (ok so few might be the wrong term but in the grand scheme of things it’s true) is the pricing range. The luxury of owning an iPhone, N95 (or whatever the number is these days), Blackberry or even the more open Android based cohort of phones, still comes with a hefty price tag. They ain’t cheap. Could the release of the new iPhone signal the establishment of a stepped range in Apple’s hand-held communication range? Apple has done it with the iPod. Remember when the iPod mini was released in 2005? It was marketed to those that couldn’t afford the iPod (now iPod Classic) and became so successful it is now in it’s umpteenth iteration. The iPod, with the ability to market to the masses and the elite alike (not to mention a beautiful blending of form and function) spelled the end for the Walkman (admit it Sony, you lost that battle). So what happens if the entry price level for Apple’s smart phone family comes down to the level of 2G phones? The kind of phones that are just that, phones. Admittedly the example of Apple dominating the digital personal music players market differs from their mobile phone market. Why? Well because with the ever increasing cheapness of storage, Apple’s profit margins can remain the same even with a lowering of cost to the end user. Not so with the large touch screen displays of the iPhone family. They are coming down in cost, but nowhere near the same rate as that of storage. So for the price point to significantly drop, Apple would be forced to lower their profit margin... Not something they’ve made a habit of doing in the past. There is also the question of Apple’s reluctance to “cheapen” the brand. If you make something obtainable and everybody has one... It loses its desirability. When I now think of the iPod, I think of it as being almost ubiquitous. I would bank on nearly every household on my street having at least one locked behind their doors. Nobody really cares about them anymore. They have almost become the dreaded “commodity”. So what happens if Apple do decide to diversify? Well the likes of Nokia need not worry about the coming 4G offering, the thing that would keep me up at night would be that which is already among us. Something that most are familiar with and most have thought about getting... The iPad will, and is succeeding over other tablet devices because the user base was already there. There is a stepped involvement suitable to a diverse range of budgets and people generally want that thing that every everyone else wants and owning it makes us feel like we’re members of an exclusive clique. Roll on the iPhone “family” and I would suggest, Nokia, Apple may be about to attack your core market.