Sidecut Reports Launches, to Save Tech Journalism
Make no little plans, the man said. So why just launch another research outlet? Instead, we decided to tackle the problem of diminishing long-form tech journalism with our new idea, called Sidecut Reports.
While this blog has been live since the start of the year, today marks the “official” release of our inaugural report, titled Xohm Or Go Home: Why 2008 Is WiMax’s Breakout Year in the U.S. — Or Else! It’s available for immediate purchase and download by clicking the blue button to the right.
To better explain our goals, we also issued a couple of press releases today, one about the company and one about the WiMax report. In terms of Sidecut the company, this statement gives you the general idea of what we’re up to:
Led by longtime industry journalist Paul Kapustka, Sidecut Reports represents the future of technology journalism, providing business professionals in a wide range of disciplines with deep background, up-to-the minute information, and decision-making analysis on pertinent topics that goes far beyond blogs at a price far less than that charged by traditional analyst operations.
That price is $149.95, and it gets you a whole lot of targeted information on a specific topic that you may have wanted to know more about, but didn’t have the time to find on your own. At Sidecut, our goal is to do the digging, reporting and analysis to give you the information you need to make intelligent business and investing decisions. In the case of our first report, here is some of what you get for your small investment:
The report begins with the latest news on the planned launch of Sprint’s “Xohm” WiMax network and then adds in a technical backgrounder on WiMax itself before exploring the technical and business reasons behind WiMax’s opportunities and challenges, concluding with several predictions for WiMax’s fate in 2008. Prepared in an easy-to-read style accessible to those who may not have completely understood WiMax before, the report is also free of any vendor influence, making it much different than analyst reports that may have been tailored to suit sponsor interests, or may be too deep in technical minutae to be understood by a wider audience.
Sure, we’re having a little fun with the “saving tech journalism” idea but you will be hard-pressed to find any mainstream tech publishers letting their reporters do long, in-depth pieces anymore. You’ll also come up empty-handed if you are looking for long analytical input from most tech blogs; they simply don’t have the time to do the deep digging it requires to produce something like our WiMax report, which is 23 PDF pages long, and also free of any vendor influence.
Over the next week or so, I’ll have some more blog posts explaining why I picked WiMax as the topic for our inaugural report — basically it’s because the technology itself (true mobile wireless broadband) interested me from a geek level, which made digging into the business and market nuances a fun and informative ride. The complexities of the world of WiMax — including the parameters set by available spectrum, the marketing might of an interested player like Intel, and the potential competition from the big telcos — confirmed all my thoughts behind Sidecut, in that it takes something of our reports’ length to fully explore and understand all angles of these kinds of topics. If your business, investment decisions or startup plans have a possibility of embracing the true mobile broadband promise of WiMax, spending $149.95 on our report is an incredible value for the “return on investment” our information and analysis will provide.
