News Corporation Buys Skiff

News Corporation has acquired Skiff, Hearst Corporation’s e-reading platform, designed to deliver premium journalism to tablets, smartphones, e- readers and netbooks. The Skiff platform is designed to deliver visually appealing layouts for newspaper and magazine content.

News Corp. also announced an investment in Journalism Online, the venture dedicated to enabling newspapers, magazines and online-only publishers of quality content to collect revenue from their online readers.

News Corp. apparently believes it will benefit from owning the Skiff e-reader platform, though it doesn't appear to be enamored with the Skiff hardware. News Corp. is purchasing the Skiff software platform, but the device will remain with Hearst.

The purchase, along with an investment in news paywall provider Journalism Online, appears to be part of the larger News Corp. effort to put online content behind pay walls.

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News Corp. to Block Google Indexing?

The Wall Street Journal is the salient exception to the rule that users will not pay for newspaper content online. It now appears we might find out whether the Wall Street Journal also is an exception to the rule that one wants leading search engines to find and index one's content.

News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal, apparently is planning to block Google from indexing content from the Wall Street Journal and other web sites, unless Google pays for the right to do so.

No matter what the outcome, this is a major test. Google obviously prefers not to pay rights holders for the right to crawl and index content. But the company gradually is finding it must, or would benefit from, do so in some cases. The ability to offer popular TV or movie content through YouTube is one example.

"Bulk Up or Sell" Key for Telcos, Media

The big global media and telecom companies face very similar business issues in some of their key lines of business. International calling rates are getting so competitive that only large players with scale will have the mass to make a go of it, says Stephan Beckert, Telegeography head of research.

Likewise, media comapnies such as like Vivendi, Time Warner and News Corp. are investing very heavily in gaming. In fact, some observers suspect that gaming will grow to be the biggest media business in time, and will and supplant older media to a significant degree. That is sort of the same position telephone companies find themselves facing with their core voice businesses.

Gaming is set to grow 40 percent in two years, many project. And bulk really confers advantages in game publishing, which has massive scale economics. A publisher that can guarantee over a million sales, with global distribution and quality marketing, has an immense advantage over a publisher that struggles to get to half a million sales.

Much the same sort of thing is happening in the U.S. competitive local exchange carrier industry as well, where scale has started to assume a key role as well. Basically, every executive has to decide whether to be a strategic seller or buyer.

MySpace Mobile Phone Coming....Sort Of

Social networking Web site MySpace is launching free, advertising-supported cell phone sites next week as part of a wider bid by parent News Corp. to attract advertising for mobile Web sites, according to the Associated Press.

Fox Interactive Media, which oversees News Corp.'s Internet properties, said it also plans to roll out versions of FoxSports.com, the gaming site IGN, AskMen and its local TV affiliates in the coming months that will work on cell phones that can access the Internet.

The company already offers subscription-based versions of MySpace through at&t and Helio wireless services. Those versions include special features integrated into specific handsets, such as uploading cell phone photos directly to a user's profile page.

The new version reportedly will work on all U.S. mobile carrier networks and will allow users to send and receive messages and friend requests, comment on pictures, post bulletins, update blogs, and find and search for friends.

So I suppose we now have to add "social networking in my pocket" to the expanding set of mobile device niches. Not a phone, though.