December 2012

Tribune Company will exit the mire of its four-year bankruptcy within weeks, but thousands of former employees and shareholders likely will remain stuck in litigation with the company's creditors for years. The Chicago-based media conglomerate will implement a bankruptcy reorganization plan that partially pays off creditors but also lets some of those IOU-holders revive litigation to squeeze the employees and shareholders for additional repayment. About 50 cases filed in state and federal courts nationwide have been consolidated in New York but were on hold during the past two years, pending Tribune's emergence. Chief among the creditors' targets are former Tribune executives, directors and advisers, including current Tribune Chairman Sam Zell and former CEO Dennis FitzSimons, who led Tribune through a 2007 leveraged buyout that saddled the company with $13 billion in debt. But also caught in the dragnet are rank-and-file employees who sold stock or collected deferred compensation in the LBO and even elderly investors who long ago bought Tribune stock. “It's screwy,” says Gloria Trudman, a 78-year-old Northbrook woman and former Tribune shareholder who wrote to the federal judge in New York handling the consolidated cases after receiving what she called a “book” explaining the lawsuit against her.

Striking it rich on mobile is hardly a sure bet. Here are four stumbling blocks standing in the way:

1. Advertising. The biggest challenge for mobile developers? Properly monetizing their work. Union Square Ventures principal Fred Wilson recently reiterated his support for a free tier with a premium upgrade. In theory, doing so maximizes an app's potential exposure. That leaves advertising as one possible revenue stream. But even companies like Facebook , which offers main app for free, have publicly grappled with how to present relevant ads on screens as small as three or four inches without taking away with the user experience.
2. Penetration. Although overall mobile will eclipse the desktop, there's still a long way to go. Of the 5 billion mobile users around the world, just 1 billion of them are using smartphones. The rest are using simpler feature phones. In countries like China and the U.S., smartphone growth is expected to grow rapidly 50% year-over-year, but smartphones remain a tougher sell in many third-world countries where the cost can be prohibitive.
3. Fragmentation. For larger companies like Facebook or eBay, investing in mobile across myriad devices is obviously less of an issue financially, but for many startups, which often debut with hundreds of thousands -- and in rarer cases, millions -- of dollars in initial funding, resources remain limited. This often means being selective about which platforms to support initially. But within those platforms, development can be a problem, particularly as devices become even more diverse. An app may run smoothly on one Google Android device for example, but not work at all on another.
4. App discovery. In the early days of Apple's iPhone, success seemed relatively easy. Spend a few weeks or months coding a fun or useful app for users to "snack" on, and that app could be the next "Angry Birds." Now, it's harder. Much harder. Both iOS and Android apps number around 700,000 each. (Heck, even Windows Phone claims 120,000.) Even with Apple and Google's best efforts to highlight apps in their virtual storefronts, some start-up developers we've spoken to admit it's more challenging than ever to get noticed.

One of the next hot areas of digital investment is connected health management. The number of apps that help empowered patients take charge of their own conditions is growing, and investors are piling in. But that growth is uneven. Whilst the sector is taking off in the United States, Europe acknowledges “barriers” remain. So the European Commission has drawn up an “action plan” to improve prospects.

That plan aims, by 2020, to:

• specify the structure of patient record data that can be exchanged across borders
• improved patients’ digital health literacy
• develop a mobile health green paper by 2014
• improved the market conditions for e-health entrepreneurs.

Add “potentially life-threatening” to the list of shortcomings accumulating around Apple’s new iOS mapping application. Police in Victoria, Australia, issued a warning discouraging travelers from relying on Apple’s new iOS 6 Maps app to navigate the region. The reason: In the past few weeks, six motorists have ended up stranded deep in a national park, after following the apps directions to the city of Mildura.