photo: Peter

I received an email from a friend yesterday. She is currently taking a year out and taking on some voluntary work to promote peace in the middle east. It’s such a fantastic thing to do in my opinion and I have a lot of respect for her for doing it!

However, it seems like even she can’t avoid the credit crunch which is impacting us all at home. I’ve written about the fall in the value of the Pound before on this blog. £1 would buy you $2.05 at the start of the year, now it would buy you about $1.50.

And that’s really, really bad news for anybody who has income denominated in Pounds and costs denominated in dollars. If the gap year cost $8,000 at the start of the year, that would have worked out around £4,000. That cost has now increased to over £5,300. That’s a huge shortfall in funding and now she thinks she might have to cut the gap year short which would be a real shame. My prediction is that we’ll see a bounce in the value of the British Pound soon but obviously the exchange rate is very volatile. That’s a big problem: the cost of everything (accommodation, food, etc.) in terms of your home currency can change dramatically from day to day.

The volatility of exchange rates poses extra risks both importers and exporters. Somebody (or some company) buying products in dollars and selling them in pounds will have seen their costs rise by 33% in just the past few months. That could easily make the difference between a healthy profit and a huge loss.

Reducing or hedging the risk

photo: michale

So let’s set the scene. I’m an importer of widgets from the US. I import $1 million of widgets per month. The exchange rate is $2 to £1. So my imports cost me £500,000.

However, I believe the pound is overvalued. I reckon the UK is going to go into recession soon and the pound is going to be a lot weaker. I go to my bank manager and I ask him to guarantee an exchange rate for the next year. Obviously, my bank manager probably won’t guarantee me a rate of $2 per £1 for a whole year. The reason for that is simple: if the pound does indeed get weaker, he’ll lose out. A more realistic rate he might offer is $1.8 per £1. Providing the pound stays at the $2 level, my bank manager would have made a cut of $0.20 per £1; giving my bank a profit of $100,000.

I’m now paying £550,000 for my currency. That’s more than the £500,000 it would have cost me without the agreement, so essentially I’m paying £50,000 for the service of being able to “lock in” my exchange rate for a year. But because I believe the pound will fall in value, I don’t mind. If I could predicted a fall to $1.5 per £1, I would have known my costs would rise to £660,000. So I predict that agreeing a rate for my currency in advance would save me £110,000, in addition to giving a more stable cashflow.

What I’ve just described is an “exchange rate derivative” (or a future). The activity is known as hedging.

Hedge Funds

In amidst the credit crisis, hedging has a bad name and reputation. Imagine my company is publicly floated on the stock market at the price of £2 per share. However, a hedge fund believes that my company is overvalued or expects sales to be poor in the next quarter. The hedge fund makes an agreement with somebody (e.g. a bank) that it will sell shares in my company at the price of £1.80 in one years time. So my bank manager is sitting there and thinking: great! I’m getting a £2 share for the price of £1.80… a profit of 20p instantly! If shares in my company then fell to £1.50, the hedge fund makes a profit of 30p by offloading something worth £1.50 for £1.80.

photo: Alex // Berlin _ as+photography

But here is the moral issue. A hedge fund is making a profit out of the fact that my company is doing badly. In fact, the worse my profits are and the more people I have to make redundant, the more money the hedge fund will make. Isn’t this profiting from somebody elses misery?

I hope the similarities between the currency hedge and the company hedge are fairly obvious. Hedge funds make a profit out of the fact that my widget company performs badly. My widget company makes a profit out of the fact that the British economy is doing badly.

But whilst there may be a debate to be had over the morals of short selling, it isn’t in doubt that hedging can serve a positive purpose. My friend, who no longer has enough money to complete the gap year she had been planning for a long time, could have avoided being in the situation she is currently in by hedging the Pound. She would have had the knowledge that whatever happened to the British economy and the British Pound, her costs would always be the same. If the Pound fell, she would have made a profit. If the Pound later rose, she would have paid well over the odds for her gap year. But at least the cost of the gap year would be fully known and the risks from currency fluctuates eliminated.

photo: law_keven

BBC News reports that the EU is set to introduce a upper cap on the cost of sending texts or accessing data from July 2009 whilst roaming within the EU.

The rules put a retail price cap of 11 euro cents (9p) on texts sent while roaming - a substantial cut on the European average of 29 euro cents (24p). The ministers backed a cap of 1 euro per megabyte (83p) on the price of downloading data - though this applies only to the charges operators levy on each other.

Also included in the rules is a mechanism that will allow for connections to be cut if a data bill hits 50 euros (£41).

What this means is that if you use your mobile phone on your next summer holiday in any of the EU27 states, texting and downloading data should be cheaper. Just last year, the EU capped the price of roaming phone calls to 34p/min for making a call and 17p/min to recieve a call.

Now, usually I’d be all for anything which cuts the cost of mobile telephony but I’m really not sure whether this is good news for the consumer. Since the EU introduced a cap on roaming call costs, my mobile phone company (O2) changed the way they charged calls so that they were rounded up to a whole minute. So you get charged 25p if you reach somebodys answerphone and hang up after 2 seconds. And whilst it would cost me 34p/min to use my phone in France, it still costs me 40p/min to call somebody on another phone network. That’s slightly silly.

photo: koolkao

Similarly, the price cap on texts seems to be a bit silly. The EU proposes a maximum price of 9p per text. In the UK, the typical price for a text on PAYG is 10p and 12p on contract. In other words, the EU are going to make it cheaper for me to use my phone abroad than at home. It is true that sending a text message costs more than getting data from the Hubble Space Telescope but surely the legislation should also cover the cost of domestic text messages.

(As an aside, heavy PAYG texters should make sure they are on the O2 Online tariff or the Orange Dolphin tariff. Both offer free texts by the tonne when you top up.)

Similarly, the EU want to set a cap of 83p per MB for data. I agree that the £3/MB currently charged on domestic data is too much but common sense would again dictate that domestic data shouldn’t cost more than international data.

If you’re going abroad, carefully check the price of roaming before you leave. For example, an O2 price loophole means it costs 49p to send a text but only 25p to send a MMS message when abroad (outside the EU). Seeing as MMS messages can contain both pictures and text, you can save money by sending a MMS message even if you don’t send a picture.

photo: wili_hybrid

New Scientist reports this week that a new tool developed at HP Labs could potentially predict the popularity of a web page in 30 days time. Essentially they say that by looking at the rate at which a web page picks up views in the first few days can predict the subsequent popularity of the page 90% of the time. It doesn’t seem too radical an idea - after all the pages which are more popular in the first few days are likely to get bookmarked more, linked to more, higher place on Google, etc.

The research focused around the sites Digg and YouTube so it would be interesting to see how it could be applied to other sites. You can download the paper online at arXiv.org.

On a similar note, I’ve found that I’ve been able to get some incredibly stunning useful information from the popularity of webpages on my site. For example, one of my posts about MSN Messenger downtime gets a lot of hits whenever MSN Messenger goes down. When the number of visitors for that page is significantly above normal, I know that MSN is actually down. If the number of visitors is normal, it’s typically just an issue with my connection or my local server. In fact, I’ve found this method much more reliable than using Microsoft’s own service status page for the Messenger service. Similarly, I found a huge spike in the number of visitors to my post on the possibility of VAT cuts straight after the recent pre-budget report. If only there was a way of exposing these statistics in a useful way!

photo: CarbonNYC

Everybody who lives in the UK should read about the “exceptional” pre-budget report this year. There are some big tax changes which probably affect you. To sum it up, there is a new 45% band of income tax; VAT is falling to 15% for 13 months; excise duties on alcohol, tobacco and petrol are rising.

I wrote about the possibility of VAT cuts two weeks ago. Given VAT is falling from 17.5% to 15%, we should see a fall in the price of goods by 2% from Monday, assuming that the full VAT cut is passed on. In my previous article, I discussed whether retailers are likely to absorb the VAT cuts as extra profit, pass it on as-is or perhaps even cut prices by even more than 2%.

Worth keeping an eye on anyway and not making any big purchases of electronics or gadgets quite yet until we see how retailers are going to react.

For full details, see the government’s full pre-budget report, “Facing global challenges: Supporting people through difficult times”.

Although Jogli crawls the web for music, the vast majority of content comes from YouTube. That has both blessings and shortcomings: Because it piggybacks on YouTube, Jogli doesn’t have to pay royalties or individually sign agreements with media companies. This means Jogli can offer more music. The downside is that some videos are “broken” (no longer exist), of a poor quality or misindexed.

I caught up with the Jogli CEO David Schwartz. I asked him about Jogli, the future of music on the web and the mobile and how he believes Jogli differs from other similar sites.

First of all, could you tell us a little bit about Jogli?

Jogli is a search engine for music. It scans the internet for existing music and music video clips, and then indexes the music in order to enable an easy and efficient search. As a result, users have access to huge free inventory of music.

Users can search and listen to any desired album (out of 12 million albums!), music video clips, individual tracks, and other users’ playlists. They can also view the lyrics, artists’ bios, image galleries, etc.

The story behind Jogli It’s basically fulfilling a personal dream – I wanted to make my dream of going to a web site or a music shop and get all the music I like for free - true. I believe that Jogli does to music what Google did to the internet – you want a web site, you go to Google, search for it – and there it is. Well, it’s the same with music now – you go to Jogli, you search for the music you want – and there it is – just click and play.

“All the music in the world is going to be available for free on any mobile platform in less then a year.”

Are the days of people going out to buy CDs or paying for a song on iTunes are behind us? What, do you feel, is the best way of giving people access to music whilst ensuring artists are properly compensated for their work?

Well, as for buying CDs – yes, that’s ancient history these days. iTunes and other on line music shops – well, at my humble opinion, they will die soon enough. My belief is that as all the music is going to be available for free on the web (99% of it is available already!) and music search engines, like Jogli, will allow immediate access to it.

While it’s easy to tell how people are going to access music, it’s a bit harder to predict how artists are going to make money of it, and how the music industry is going to look.

My personal guess is:

1. Web sites that broadcast music (like YouTube) will share with artists their revenues on advertisements.
2. It’s going to be the end of traditional music labels, radio stations and other conservative music institutions
3. We are going to see much more young, revolutionary and independent music out there. As artists will no longer need mediators like labels, and will be able to access their audience directly through the web (we already see it happening in MySpace, YouTube and Jogli)
4. We are going to see less “super mega stars” like Madonna, as the web is less centralistic then traditional industries.

We’ve seen people streaming Pandora internet radio to their iPhones. Nokia has launched their “Comes With Music” phones where customers have access to free music downloads for 12 months. How do you think the convergence between music and mobile will develop in the future and how will music websites such as Jogli be a part of this?

All the music in the world is going to be available for free on any mobile platform in less then a year. We in Jogli are already working on extending our web sites to Nokia devices, iPhone and Android. Think about it - your phone, which is also you portable music player, is going to allow you access to millions of albums and hundred of millions of songs! Just click and play! – Its amazing!

“Jogli allows people to listen to whole albums, play personal “MTV” channels though its radio feature, gives access to the whole lyrics”

Do you feel the music industry has been receptive to working with startups and smaller music websites? How does a small company compete in the world of large record and media companies making million dollar deals?

Well, traditional music industry knows it’s a matter of life and death for them – they have to get a foot in the web door. As a result, the “traditional industry” became very involved. Just a few examples – partnerships with YouTube, the purchase of last.fm and the eagerness to invest money in Jogli (we got several investment propositions from the traditional music industry).

Yet- the current financial crisis may change all that…

With Jogli’s content coming primarily from Google’s YouTube service, how do you feel Jogli provides additional “value added” in this area?

Music experience is far more then listening to one song (which YouTube does great). Jogli allows people to listen to whole albums, play personal “MTV” channels though its radio feature, gives access to the whole lyrics – and much more. We provide a full and exciting music experience.

By the way – Youtube helped us and supported us amazingly. And we are grateful. These guys are cool.

How does Jogli deal with YouTube content which is mistagged, mislabelled or of a poor quality?

We have algorithms designed to find the best option for each song. This algorithm uses not only textual meta data (such as file name, description, number of views, etc.) but also the actual file, its quality and its size.

Naturally, we don’t have 100% success (though we are not so far!). When you encounter bad quality or wrong result you can click “get alternatives for this song”, then you will get a list of options to choose from. We are aggregating these choices to improve the results.

“We intend to…provide the largest offering of music and give our users the best music experience existing.”

What do you feel differentiates Jogli from the rest of the crowd - the music websites such as Deezer, MySpace and Last.fm?

First of all – Jogli has much more music – 12 million albums and 500 million songs, secondly- the experience we offer is more cool – as we offer much more then the music only.

What direction do you see Jogli going in, in the future?

In the very near future we are going to launch a widget that will allow anyone to place any albums or playlists in their web pages and blogs. Then – expand to mobile.

For the long term - Our mission is to be the best and most popular music web site in the world - no less. We intend to accomplish this by remaining 100% free, provide the largest offering of music and give our users the best music experience existing.

Finally, what are you listening to at the moment?

Bob Marley - Legend (-;

A huge thank you to David for taking the time to speak to Cow’s Blog. On behalf of our entire community, I’d like to wish David all the best of luck with Jogli. I am sure we are all very interested in seeing which direction Jogli goes in!

I’d love to know how you listen to music and how you think the way that we interact with music will change over the coming years. Drop us a comment or an email!

photo: mezone

Last month I experimented with self-publishing a book through Lulu.com. Lulu is a self publishing company meaning anybody can create content and have their book printed on-demand and sold through Lulu. You sell your book through the Lulu marketplace and Lulu takes a 20% commission on your earnings from the book. For an extra fee, you can have an ISBN number for your book and have it listed on Amazon.

In my own experiment, the book that we published was a school yearbook - full colour, 48 full colour 8.25″ x 10.75″ (21cm x 27.3cm) pages which was binded with a casewrap in hardcover. The publishing cost of the book came to £14.32 per unit

photo: gualtiero

What’s good about Lulu?

• The book looked really professional and really good.
• Lulu can reduce your risks, exposure and work as an author. You don’t have to handle billing or shipping yourself nor do you put yourself at a financial risk from unsold books.
• It is very rewarding to see something you’ve created printed professionally and looking absolutely fantastic!

What’s bad about Lulu?

• I feel the printing cost was fairly high; I am unsure whether Lulu takes a profit from this. But obviously if books are being printed and binded one-by-one on demand, you don’t get many economies of scale from mass production.
• At £3.75 P&P for one item, Lulu’s postage and packaging costs are very very high. I live in the UK and for some reason, my book was shipped via international air mail from the US. Obviously this makes Lulu less attractive for UK publishers.
• Lulu is slow. It took me a week to have my book printed and more than one week for it to land on my doorstep after being dispatched. So it took more than two weeks for a draft copy to even land on my doorstep. If I had spotted a mistake and wanted to rectify it, it would have been expensive to purchase a brand new copy of the book and would add another two week delay.
• It wasn’t easy designing a book which would look good and would conform to Lulu’s requirements. I felt that Lulu offered very limited templates and really left you to your own devices when you wanted borderless printing and needed to fiddle with bleeds and so on.
• You’ll have to do your own promotion for your book.

photo: Ryan McD

Using Word 2007

I created my book in Word 2007. Although this is obviously not the best desktop publishing programme available, it was what I had at my disposal. I used the Office 2007 Save as PDF addon to create the PDF file for Lulu. However, Lulu complained about the fact that certain fonts were not embedded in the PDF file: Office does not embed common fonts such as Arial in PDF because it assumes they exist. I found that if you configure the plugin to save in the PDF/A (ISO 19005-1) format gives pretty good results: the file is larger and you’ll lose transparencies and layers (bad idea in print PDF anyway) but Lulu will accept it. Be sure to download Lulu’s print ready PDFs to make sure it looks OK.

Conclusions

Self-publishing is very rewarding. Lulu makes it possible to do it fairly easily but you’ll have to be pretty good with Office and DTP to get anything more than a boring plain-looking book. Be sure to research into typography for print, margins and bleeds for your pages. Lulu certainly isn’t foolproof and is, in my opinion, fairly expensive but it does the job and it does it well.

The name is somewhat a misnomer. The label “Universal” implies that the programme converts between different types of documents; in fact the programme only allows you to export your documents as images. The advantage is you can “export” your documents from all kinds of obscure programmes such as CAD and DTP software which is overlooked by traditional conversion software. But the conversion is very much one way and data is lost.

“Export” rather than “convert” would be a much more appropiate way to describe the function of the software. This is particularly evident in the “Document to PDF” feature. Dedicated tools which are designed to work with PDF files (e.g. Adobe Acrobat and PrimoPDF) will convert your original documents that fonts, text and shapes are embedded in the PDF file. The resulting document is pieced together by the PDF reader. This is fantastic as the document remains accessible, the textual information is not lost and files are much smaller. However, with Universal Document Converter, the PDF is exported as a bunch of pixels leading to much larger and inaccessible files and grainy text

That said - Universal Document Converter is good at doing it’s core job - exporting your documents to image files. Though the Printer Properties dialog, users are able to configure various aspects such as paper size and file quality. It’s certainly a lot easier than haphazardly print screening everything. The ability to integrate it into your existing flow through the COM-interface is certainly nice and the software can be set up so that it is installed as a network printer.

At $69 for a single user license, Universal Document Converter can be a tad expensive. If you’re looking for a tool to write PDFs, my advice would be to stay clear. Universal Document Converter will do the job for you, but in a way which I do not find satisfactory. Universal Document Converter does do a good job of exporting your CAD/DTP/Powerpoints as image files and provides all kinds of options such as compression, quality and pallet choice. If you’ve got a lot of documents to convert to images and you’d like to automate the process, Universal Document Converter could be for you.

This review is an advertising feature. fCoder provided me with a full version of Universal Document Creator for this review.

photo: Phillip

There has been a lot of discussion in the UK lately about a possible cut in Value Added Tax from 17.5% to 12.5%. I’m not sure how likely it is that this will happen - the radio news seems to believe it is inevitable but many other news organisations seem to disagree.

A cut in VAT from 17.5% to 12.5% could lead to big discounts on every item sold in the UK. The savings can be fairly substantial - £26 off an iPhone PAYG or £72 on a £1,000 plasma TV. However, it would depend on how and whether those cuts were passed onto the consumer.

Retailers could leave prices unchanged. Imagining a £100 product, £17.50 would have previously gone towards the UK government. After the VAT cuts, the government would only take a cut of £12.50 leaving the retailer with an extra profit of £5 per unit.

photo: Cosmic Kitty

Retailers can increase their turnover at a time where their costs may be rising but they cannot afford to raise prices for fear of losing customers. But perhaps with retailers knowing that Christmas is coming up, people would buy their product without an additional discount. Hence there would be no need to pass on the VAT cut.

Retailers could pass on part or all of the VAT cut. If the entire VAT cut was passed onto the consumer, the £100 product would now cost £92.81. The retailer makes the exact same amount of money they did before; but its great news for the consumer as consumers save a lot of money. In a time when peoples disposable income levels are falling, this increase in demand could ensure retailers get the sales they need.

Retailers could discount prices by even more. The retailer may want to cut the price of the product from £100 to £90. However, that might not be too attractive to them - it represents a loss of £10 for every product sold. However, given that the government is absorbing so much of the price cut themselves this may make it a lot more attractive for retailers to cut their prices.

photo: Olaf

So how does this affect you? I personally believe that if Mr Darling did cut VAT, it would take several weeks, even months for that to filter through to the prices that we pay at the shop every day. Companies have price promises to honour; companies have catalogues which cannot be reprinted immediately, etc. And with Christmas coming up, consumer spending should hopefully pick up anyway. So we would be unlikely to see any big price cuts this year.

However, New Year 2009 could be a bumper one for new year sales. If Christmas sales figures aren’t as high as retailers expect, I believe retailers could offer much bigger discounts than in past years.

If there are some big purchases you were planning to make, it may well be worth waiting until after the pre-budget report and possibly the new year.

photo: patrick dentler

The day of the US presidential election is approaching. There is an expected turnout of 80%. Both parties have worked very hard to register as many new voters as possible and companies such as MTV and Starbucks have been encouraging people to register to vote.

Starbucks is offering a free cup of coffee to those who vote on November 4th. How could this distort the results of the election?

Well, It seems pretty logical that the people who feel strongly about whether they are Republican or Democrat or have a strong preference for either Obama or McCain are the people who would vote anyway, regardless of incentives such as free coffee. So this promotion probably wouldn’t affect whether they would vote.

Swing and undecided voters, on the other hand, may not vote without an additional incentive such as free coffee. If, say, undecided voters mostly lean towards Obama - the incentive of free coffee at Starbucks would benefit Obama in the polls by encouraging the undecided voters to go to the polling station and to vote for him.

photo: aubrey arenas

It would certainly be an interesting research to see whether this promotion or other incentives may distort the results of the election. The “Starbucks Stores per Capita” differs immensely between each of the states. The District of Columbia for example has 1.18 Starbucks for every 10,000 people - nearly 22 times as many Starbucks stores per capita to Arkansas which has 0.054 Starbucks for 10,000 people. Swing state Virginia has the 11th highest “Starbucks per Capita” of the states. If the Starbucks promotion does have an effect on swing voter turnout, we would expect the biggest effects to be in a) the states with the highest concentration of Starbucks and b) cities (which are of course more liberal than small town America) where people are more likely to have a Starbucks nearby.

I’m exaggerating the effects of a free cup of coffee on the election results you say. Perhaps so. But research has shown it can be quite easy to “prime” people to affect who and what they vote for. For example, research found that people who used a church as their local polling station were less supportive of gay marriage.

Another piece of research looked at a 2000 ballot initiative in Arizona to increase spending on education:

The authors…divided the precincts between schools and non-schools, and found that voters who voted in a school had a marginal preference (3 points) for the initiative.

photo: HAMED MASOUMI

And when I spoke to some local activists for the Labour Party (UK) earlier this year, they suggested that the Gordon Brown calls an election before 2009. Not because they believe he is more likely to win: they believe that Gordon Brown losing the next general election is already a done deal. It’s because the local elections are also due to be held in 2009. And having the general election at the same time as the local one would mean Brown’s personal unpopularity would rub off onto the rest of the Labour party and their local councillors.

There are many subtle ways of affecting the results of an election. Could free Starbucks have a significant one?

photo: BraNewbs

As a webmaster and publisher, what exactly does the credit crunch and the dramatic falls in the value of the pound mean for you? (This article is primarily targeted at a UK audience).

I feel that this is a seldom discussed issue as very few publishers are fully aware of exchange rates and the impact on their ability to make money. In this article, I will discuss the consequences for British publishers of the dramatic falls of the value of the pound and the possible business opportunities here.

What’s happened?

I’m sure we’re all sick about hearing about the credit crunch… the global financial crisis. I’ve found myself avoiding the news because quite frankly I’ve had enough of hearing about our financial woes. As the chancellor of the UK has just admitted, it looks like the UK will be entering a recession. Economists say a country is in recession if its total economic output (a proxy for quality of life) falls for two successive quarters. Because of the bad news about the UK economy, investors have been rapidly moving money out of the Sterling. This has caused the value of Sterling to plunge. According to Google Finance, Sterling was sitting very close to 2 dollars to 1 pound a couple of months ago. It today plunged as low as 1.53 dollars to 1 pound. And analysts are predicting a further drop down towards 1.4 dollars per pound.

What does that mean?

photo: numberstumper

The weaker pound is good news for exporters, and bad news for importers. Web advertising is somewhat unique in that almost all advertising networks trade in dollars. So publishers export advertising to the rest of the world (they sell advertising in dollars) whilst advertisers import it from the rest of the world (they buy advertising in dollars).  Let me clarify:

A website publisher earning $10,000 per month would have recieved about £5,000 per month. If the value of the Sterling falls to 1.4 dollars, that income increases to £7,140 per month. That equates to £25,000 of extra income every year.

However, it’s bad news for advertisers. An advertiser spending $10,000 per month would have to shell out £7,140 per month instead of £5,000 - a price increase of almost 50%.

As the audience of this blog tends to include a large number of web developers, especially from the UK, this is good news for you. In fact, if you haven’t thought about monetising your blog or website, it’s well worth doing now.

It’s not necessarily good news though…

photo: pfala (injured)

The more eagle eyed readers will have noticed something. As it’s costing more for British advertisers to place adverts, they’ll place less of them and be willing to pay less money to advertise. So even if the exchange rate of the pound falls, the actual amount of income recieved might not actually go up as much as expected. Right? Kind of.

If your website caters for British audiences then it is likely the vast majority of your advertisers will be British companies. If you’re selling advertising to a British company, you’re not really exporting anything - only selling it to a domestic company, but using dollars.

If you cater for international audiences and companies, you’ll be a winner.

But what else about the financial crisis?

Well, regardless of exchange rates, companies are a lot less likely to advertise right now. Given we’re entering a recession, money is tight. Companies cannot be confident about how much money they really have available and whether consumers will respond to their advertising. Like for everybody else, the financial crisis is bad news for exporters too.

Whether the fall of Sterling is a long-term correction or just a short-term blip, I can’t say. But what’s important for us to all realise is that the game has totally changed. We need to rethink the way we all spend our money. But in the very short term, I believe there is a big opportunity in the market for British publishers.