April 16, 2001 – Content is king, even in the wireless realm, but a new study shows that not enough is being done to get that information published electronically.

According to A.T. Kearney, a subsidiary of EDS, the "lack of efficient publishing capabilities" for digital content costs organizations $750 billion annually in time lost by workers looking for information they need to do their jobs.

The study bases its conclusion on findings that knowledge workers "waste between 15 and 25 percent of their time engaged in non-productive publishing activities."

Sponsored by Adobe Systems, EDS, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia and Mayfield, a VC firm, the study was made to determine the "potential impact of network publishing" and identify ways the industry can "capitalize on the market opportunity."

Advances in network publishing hardware and software have laid the foundation for a "boom market" that could reach $250 billion by 2004 – and represent one-fifth of worldwide IT spending, according to A.T. Kearney.

Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president, Nokia, said the Finnish phone giant considers "network publishing as the key driver for the growth of its mobile devices and wireless platforms."

Eyeing the market potential, Robin Vasan, General Partner at Mayfield, said his company is "focusing our investments on companies that will extend network publishing into the wireless world."

Among the study's findings:

– New media companies will be among the first movers in the network publishing market, due in part to an already-dominant Internet presence and their ability to distribute content among different media streams.

– Partnerships, multi-platform standards and new technological developments in compression and digital rights management "will be among the critical success factors that will expand the network publishing market."

– Software vendors – particularly content management and caching companies – will be critical to the development of the publishing market.

Growth of the market will in large part depend on collaborative relationship between all participants in the network publishing value chain – content, service and software providers, and device manufacturers, said A.T. Kearney CEO Dietmar Ostermann. "The landscape of the digital economy is going to be shaped by ecosystems."

Ostermann suggests that in this model, "networks of companies will collaborate in new ways to accelerate new technology developments and the adoption of new business models."