Forrester Magazine

As you may have heard, Forrester is introducing a new print magazine in an era when many feel print is dead. Forrester Magazine's new editor is Jimmy Guterman and will be a quarterly with no advertising. CEOs apparently still love print when they're on the road.....

I attended a small press dinner last night at San Francisco's Town Hall hosted by the Forrester team. George Colony was there as well as my pal Karyl Levinson, Forrester's PR star.

Jimmy just flew in from PC Forum, where he handed a copy of Forrester's new magazine to Jeff Bezos. He added 'and without the distraction of a Blackberry in hand......'

George gave each table an interesting assignment over dinner: collectively come up with your digital world winners and losers. There were consistent thumbs up for Comcast and Yahoo and thumbs down for Sony. Apple also got a few plugs for its relationships with Hollywood.

Dell a possible loser? Some people thought so. Other losers included IBM, Satellite Radio and Google. (George reminds us however that its hard to see Google as a loser since Larry and Sergey have $1b in their pockets).

There was also some interesting back and forth between Kara Swisher and Tom Foremski on whether consumers truly have more choice. Kara felt that the consumer was in 'deep charge' of the experience, kinda like ordering a Dell computer. We can customize what we want and what we don't want, i.e., pay to not receive ads, etc. Tom really felt that the consumer doesn't have 'enough choice. "If I want video on demand, where are my choices?" says Tom.

Jimmy pipes in and throws in feedback from a News Corp. rep who claims we now have more choice for 'entertainment' than ever before. Tivo was also part of the discussion and our table agreed that Samsung was another player to be watched.

Other thoughts: Moving forward, portals will be mentioned in the same breath as network TV and VoIP will take off. I couldn't resist throwing Teleo out there since not everyone in the room knew about its new service yet.

George ends the evening by asking everyone whether we think Forrester Magazine is a good idea. Not one negative response from the room.