Versatile Amphibian

I know this is old news and I know that it's geeky, but these videos of Google's robot car are awesome! How the mainstream auto industry can claim that we're 25 years from a commercial self-driving car is beyond me. The benefits in terms of road safety and fuel efficiency are too great to pass up for uninformed or pre-meditated concerns about handing over control of a fast moving lump of metal to a computer. After all, most new cars are "drive-by-wire" - a computer is already between you and the major controls, you're just not aware of it! Doubtless the cost of laser radar and the computer systems will be substantial, but I wonder whether they're much worse than the battery packs and charging gear of an electric car. Given the hideous compromises in environmental impact and convenience of the latter, perhaps governments should be promoting self-driving rather than "zero-emissions" as a way of reducing carbon emissions? Probably too far fetched - ...

For reference, the text of a speech I did for an internal meeting. 5 minutes on the effect of the Internet on business models: "From the 2011 vantage point it is clear that the Internet has had a profound effect on the fortunes of every business, government, NGO and individual in the developed world. And its reach is ever extending: to the deserts of the Sahara, to a billion consumers in China and a billion more in India, not to mention the further billion in the rest of developing Asia, Latin America and Africa. But it’s not that colossal expansion of scale of influence and the consequent opportunities and challenges for us and our clients that I think we should focus on today, but the even more profound expansion of scope that will accompany the next stage of the Internet’s evolution. When I think about the effect of the Internet on business models, I see three aspects: · Polarisation (of success and failure) · Acceleration (of decisions) · Diversification (of models) The reboun...

The cross over of online and real world continues apace - the UK's National Trust has just announced a real world version of Farmville (although without drugs or bananas) to be played out on the unfortunate residents of a farm in Cambridge. Very Web 3.0...

Short post, to highlight a great application of open source: school text books. Long a source of massive profits for publishers, primary and secondary school texts have been available on an open source basis from the CK-12 Foundation , Wikibooks and MIT for a number of years now, but with mass acceptance of e-readers and tablet computers now on the horizon, open source texts are becoming a viable option for schools. What's it worth? Well, 7M children are in education in the UK at any one time - say the average state school spends £25 a year per pupil on texts, that's £175M per year. Clearly there's a capital charge for the computing devices, but I question how long schools will be buying conventional PCs for anyway - surely the PC is as troubled in the education sector as it is in the home and, increasingly, in the workplace. One for the Government to consider in its spending review, I think. Incidentally, the business case for " Sound and Vision " in the Nether...

I notice that Everything Everywhere has once again posted disappointing results. Seems to me that the UK's least differentiated operator needs to find a proposition and find one fast if it's to maintain it's position as the largest UK mobile Telco (by subscribers, if nothing else). Not easy in one of the World's most competitive Telco markets, but it strikes me that the answer might lie in the group's rather awkward name. How long will it be, I wonder, before a consumer can buy an allowance of minutes, data and VAS that are portable between devices? I know it goes against the grain - embedded after 25 years of habit - of one contract, one SIM, however, with that lovely new network that EE are in the process of (re)building and LTE on the horizon, perhaps now is the time... ...or perhaps it's just self interest. One way or another EE needs to find some traction, because Management can only go on about operational savings for so long.

Verizon announced yesterday that it will launch an end to end digital video service that enables content creators and digital retailers to outsource the entire digital supply chain to them. This is the first such move by Telcos to get a cut of the maturing market in digital content delivery and differentiate themselves from the pure CDN players. By providing a large scale "utility" service for this increasingly non-differentiating part of the value chain, Verizon should be able to dramatically reduce the cost of streaming video and potentially further accelerate the demise of traditional TV (if one believes that the latter's demise is inevitable). I can't say much more as I've been involved in the launch of this service, other than I'm looking forward to seeing whether the market is ready for end-to-end delivery to be fully commoditised. Time will tell.

Just for fun, I decided to classify all the emails I received in 2 weeks of holiday, rather than delete them all. Interesting that even having been out of the office for a week, I was consistently receiving 30-40 emails a day. Not surprising that email is becoming a useless tool...