Week 48: MagZone

What we have done:
We have worked on the film and the final presentation this last week. We shot the film material and have been editing the last few days. The film is now almost finished and we also started on the presentation slides and content.

What we will do: 
We will finalize the film and the presentation. As we have agreed upon a concept for the presentation and the structure, we will distribute the workload among us and finish the slides and other things we need to prepare for the presentation.

Problems encountered: 
We experienced some difficulties with the camera equipment as the microphone was not suited for our purpose and we're not really satisfied with the image quality, but couldn't do much about it. But other than that the last week worked out fine.

Week 47: MagZone

What we have done:
We've spent the last week with working on the final draft for our chapter of the book and working on the film for the final presentation. The chapter is now done and handed in to Hanna including the picture files we want to include in the text part. After all it was quite some work getting the final version done, but we're now satisfied with the result. We incorporated a lot of the feedback we got from one group and hope the feedback we gave two groups helped them with their texts too.
For the film we finished the script and created a short shot list of things we want to capture with the camera. We found our actress for the film and booked the camera for shooting next week.

What we will do:
Now that the text is done we can start concentrating on the final presentation. Next week we will shoot and hopefully also edit the film for the presentation. Until then we will be working on props for the film and other things we need like screenshots of the application and building the "MagZone terminal". Parallel to that we will start working on the structure and layout of the final presentation.

Problems encountered:
Editing and curating the text took longer than expected and it's not always easy to find common ground on some parts of the text. But by meeting and discussing a lot about the text and parts of it we managed pretty good to get it finished in time.

Week 46: MagZone

What we have done:

We spent most of the time after preparing for the mid crit with writing the report for our idea. We talked about the feedback we got received at the mid crit and how we could deal with some of the issues in terms of concept and on what we should emphasize on for the final presentation to be convincing.

We're now almost done with writing and will have around a week to edit the text and do the finishing touches. We used Osterwalder's business model canvas to create a picture of the business model for MagZone that will be explained further in the report.

Other than the report we've been focusing on the film we want to make for the presentation. We worked on a script and a shot list of things we want to include in the film. The overall structure and idea is done so we started looking for a camera at KTH that we can use for the shooting.

For the idea we're still trying to get feedback from industry officials and also reached out professionals in mobile app development. Their feedback so far has been very positive towards the idea and they helped us identify possible issues with the solution.

What we will do: 

The next week we will be working on the final report and create the images that we want to include in our chapter in the book. Furthermore, we would like to start shooting the movie as soon as possible, but that largely depends on the equipment and the cast. Additionally we will start to outline the final presentation and adapt the content we have so far and create new content for the presentation.

Problems encountered: 

We have a really nice idea for the film that we want to shoot, but there could be problems in terms of proper equipment and casting for our main role. We're still searching for a woman that wants to participate in our movie and explain the service in front of the camera.

Changes in the project: 

There have not been major changes in the project, we're just spending quite some time on the details of the idea and those are the only areas where we've changed something in some aspects.

Week 44: MagZone

What we have done. 

Within the last week we narrowed down our ideas and started working on our final idea that we want to pursue for the rest of the project. This idea revolves around a digital newsstand in cafés, aiports and other venues where people can lend digital magazines for usage within the venue. With this idea we interview several magazine readers and asked them about our idea, if they would use it and what issues could arise. This enabled us to get early consumer insights that we incorporated to develop the idea further.

We also started on structuring the report for our project and divided up tasks among us. Furthermore, we have set up a survey that we started sending out yesterday to get a broader picture of interest in the solution and some issues like possible venues for the system directly from the consumers.

What we will do.
- Prepare the mid-crit presentation

- Work on our idea and develop it further
- Get in touch with relevant people from the industry to ask them about the solution
- Start working on the report and possible parts of the final presentation

Problems encountered. 

Setting up the survey so the participants could put themselves into the situation of using the system. Due to the fact that the “solution” is not available today, and we have a future scenario where almost everyone have a device they can read magazines on, It could be hard for the participants in the survey to answer how they would have act if... We solved this with a short description of the product and the future habits of magazine reading.

Changes in the project.

Last time we had two different ideas to work on. Now we have narrowed it down to one single idea, because it’s not as complex as the other idea, but provides similar possibilities to increase the revenue. We also don’t think we will have time to focus on two different 

Week 43: New revenue opportunities for digital magazines

Group name
New revenue opportunities for digital magazines.

What we have done
We spent the last weeks mainly with brainstorming and desk research to develop our scenario and the idea that we want to work on. During these extensive brainstorming sessions we identified several domains where we can discover the future revenue sources. The two principal revenue sources for magazines are: consumer revenue and advertising revenue. To be more detailed, we separated different kinds of revenue sources on the consumer side. As a result, principal domains “Advertising”, “Copy sales” and “Subscription sales” have been identified. Because another group is focusing entirely on the future of advertising, we’ve decided to focus more on upping the revenue through paid content. We tried to develop a concept of how the different revenue sources are connected and which forces drive them (see picture below):



One way of upping that revenue is to increase the price of the magazines, another is to increase the amount of customers using the product. To be able to increase the price without harming the relationship with the customers you really need a product the customer is willing to pay extra for. We assume that a more thorough study of ways to increase readership is a better study topic, as it has more space for creativity rather than standard calculations. Independent price changes are not an effective method of regulating the number of readers without strategy changes.

This far we’ve come up with two solutions about how to increase the volume of readers. Cafés, airports and other public “places” often provide magazines and newspapers to customers to make their time more pleasant and attract more people. Our idea is to translate this into digital magazines with a solution around technologies like “near field communication”. The second idea is about social recommendations and discounts. The readers should want to participate in increasing the volume of each issue, because then they will get it cheaper.

What we will do
Next week we are going to interview a Russian-American expert about magazines. He is a member of global WAN-IFRA board and the head of digital media lab at Russia's largest news agency. We will also work on finding a company who changed their strategy in digital content and who actually succeeded. To understand what has been done in the past can help us understand what is going to happen in the future.

We have a lot of work with our solutions but as soon we have our ideas ready we will send out a survey to the magazine users to check what they are thinking of our solutions and what they really want. Our project will probably lead to more than one solution due to the broad subject. Even though we will focus more on the revenue from paid content we cannot ignore the fact that advertising is a big part of today's magazines. Therefore we will also look into this category and ways to raise the revenue through changes there.

Furthermore, we want to look into other ways to boost readers' spending: mainly by offering supplementary digital services, but also through events and merchandise.

Problems encountered
A big issue for us is to not step on other groups toes when coming up with new ideas. We find it really hard to come up with a totally new revenue source and if we use the existing ones our solution would probably be developments in either the product, the distribution or the business model. Changes in these areas could certainly increase the revenue, our problem is that other groups already are looking at the future in these areas.

Another problem is that we find it difficult to come up with “the radical change” in technology or behavior connected to finding new revenue sources. The revenue model for magazines has always been pretty simple and even though there are new sources of revenue like events, the two main sources have been the consumer through sales and advertising for the last decades. We will have to work a bit more on crystallizing the radical change in our scenario.

Changes in the project
There have not been major changes in the project, but more effort has been put into narrowing down the ideas we’ve had so far.