Skip to main content

What I've been reading this week

Last week was a bit of a busy one, but I still had chance for a bit of reading. Here’s a brief roundup of stories from the TMT industry that caught my eye.

This week: Google vs Facebook in Internet Risk, goodbye Google TV, cars drive themselves (but not in Canada), kids break Murdoch’s tabs

Traditional business models

FT says that its print product will henceforth derive from the digital. I’m not so sure that’s really practical. There’s a big difference between the fast twitch, unlimited word count world of the web and the more structured, quality-first print product. There’ll be two newsrooms for a long time yet. http://gigaom.com/2013/10/09/financial-times-our-print-product-will-derive-from-the-web-offering-not-vice-versa/

BT bows to the inevitable and goes back into mobile. I think they’ll do well, since BT Retail has seemingly figured out how to do product marketing. Bad signs for O2 though, who now have the poorest spectrum asset in the UK and seem to be going backwards from a proposition perspective. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24480956

Goodbye Google TV. Sure this was the future two years ago? http://gigaom.com/2013/10/10/google-tv-rebranded-android-tv/

(In case you filed it under “bullshit”: http://www.theguardian.com/media/interactive/2011/aug/26/eric-schmidt-mactaggart-lecture-full-text)

You don’t need a PC to do real work… especially if it’s as bad as the one I have to suffer on a daily basis. http://www.citeworld.com/mobile/22542/mobile-productivity-fallacy

New business models

Great little graphic showing the most visited website by country. Note how popular Facebook is… although not in the major Internet geographies. http://d25i0vq4k5x7z4.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Age_of_Internet_Empires_final.png

Amazon has bought education startup tenmarks for an undisclosed sum. Given the giant retailers publishing aspirations, this makes a lot of sense. http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/10/heres-why-amazon-just-acquired-ed-tech-startup-tenmarks/

First deployments of Newscorp’s Amplify education tablet show that kids break them. A lot. Um – are we surprised by this? Perhaps some ruggedisation is required? http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2013/10/07/10-amplfiy-tablets-broke-first-month-one-north-carolina-school-district-reports/#.Uluh2NJeaSo

Study on brands’ social engagement shows that consumers want openness and honesty, not the ability to share brand-related stuff with each other. That was my supposition. Useful to have it confirmed! http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/traditional/only-1-in-10-consumers-feel-that-brands-are-doing-well-at-connecting-with-them-where-are-brands-failing-most-37199/

Technology

A nice summary of how optical sensors can be used for non-invasive monitoring of various chemicals in the human body. In combination with wearables, this would really enhance the potential of wearable technology. http://www.insideactivitytracking.com/computational-biology-tracking-the-biology-of-our-bodies/#lightbox/0/

Autonomous vehicles are the future, particularly in long range, low involvement applications like road trains. This article suggests that Canada needs to accelerate its progress in this area. http://www.thevaultmag.com/archives/5944

Toyota is the latest auto manufacturer to launch a practicable self-driving demonstrator. The key technology here is co-operative cruise control, which synchronises multiple vehicles’ speed. Since it’s speed differentials (often very big ones!) that result in accidents, cause traffic jams and consume fuel, multiple manufacturers working on an interoperable system would be hugely beneficial. I doubt they will. Perhaps the EU should make it mandatory for all cars to have a system fitted… http://www.slashgear.com/toyota-to-exhibit-automated-highway-driving-assist-system-next-week-11301001/

…we’d just need to convince people to trust the cars. Self-evident, really. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/10/us-autos-driverless-idUSBRE99902D20131010


Sprayable energy? I really hope this is some sort of fakery… http://sprayable.co/
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Impacts of a handset leasing model on mobile telcos

Following yesterday's post, here's some related thinking on the impacts on operators of handset leasing. Handset sales represent around 25% of operator revenues in a typical European market, but generate only around 5% of margin. It may therefore be the case that the scenario described would lead operators to a more profitable structural model than exists today. Oil companies are consistently and acceptably profitable, despite being (literally in some cases) the ‘dumb pipe’ that operators are so desperate to avoid becoming. One of the reasons for the oil majors sustained profitability is clear focus on their role in the value chain – to supply the fuel that enables transportation, relying primarily on location, then brand and finally product innovation to compete. BP or Shell do not need to subsidise the purchase of a car in order to drive consumption of fuel because consumers are ‘hooked’ on it (it gets them from place to place) and there are many credible car manufacturers an
9 comments
Read more

Value drivers for telecoms retail

I've been doing a really large number of driver trees recently - we've taken to using them on every project to get really into the guts of value creation for businesses and thus decide where to focus initiative development (How To Win, if you're keeping score). Anyhow, I had to pause for thought recently to work out how to represent the subscription aspect of telecoms retail for a client. Since it took me a minute, I thought I'd share... its lack of elegance suggests that its not quite right, although it was enough to demonstrate that there was a certain lack of coverage in the initiatives that my client was pursuing and thus spark a debate. Enjoy.
1 comment
Read more

Chief Strategy Officers II - Career Development

Here's a follow up to my earlier post on the starting point of Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) careers in the FTSE 100 and S&P 500 companies - a visualisation of two steps in their careers: their first employer or job and the job they had before they got their current position. Lots of work went into this... so any insights that you glean from the visualisation would be great to hear about :). The CSO is a crucial strategic role on the executive (!) and the owner of the tone and philosophy of decision making across much of the business, knowingly or unknowingly. Scrutiny of their experience in defining the process and language of strategic management is therefore appropriate not just amongst their executive peers, but in my view amongst shareholders. The days when being very smart and able to analyse large amounts of data were enough to be a CSO are basically gone... has the profession moved on enough to cope?
4 comments
Read more