Versatile Amphibian

I came across this video of a home made touch screen interface for the home: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vOvDFxn76g . I'm sure it's very bespoke and not easy to replicate elsewhere (not to mention a little bit geeky), but it also demonstrates to me what is possible with today's processor, screen and networking technology.

So I'm a bit undecided about the whole "cablegate" thing. In concept, I should be ecstatic, this is a wholesale example of the democratisation of information. However, I find myself somewhat shocked at the naivity of Julian Assange and his cronies. The publishing of so many secret documents is the action of an anarchist, not a democrat. Why? Because there is no apparatus in place for the public to act upon such information. All it serves as is a tabloid insight into the machinations of a governmental system that keeps information secret to enable international diplomacy to function. I read with horror the exposure of China's willingness to discuss a unified Korea - in a stroke making such a thing impossible in our lifetime. What was the benefit of this to humanity? I think that there's an important lesson in this for social network engineers within companies. Free exchange of information is only useful when it is done within the boundaries of a strategy and with a...

I've talked to several large US technology companies over the last couple of months about their product and go-to-market strategies in Europe. The common theme running through these discussions has been how to maximise the effectiveness of their regional operations. This is a complex question to answer as it covers all aspects of the business, from broad brush strategy down to staff incentivisation. It's also very possible that there's no best practice that applies to all companies in a sector. What struck me, however, is that there's a dearth of methodologies for establishing the correct strategy for subsidiary businesses. To that end, I've started developing such a methodology. The first component in my view is defining the dimensions that promote or restrict freedom of action for a subsidiary company. These aren't hugely different from the dimensions of any business at the macro level - I see them as freedom to act on: Brand and marketing strategy Portfolio s...

Jeff Zucker has been getting some press for saying NBCU are unlikely to go into Apple's scheme to rent popular TV shows for 99c an episode ( link ). Personally I think he's right to keep out of it. Why? I'm increasingly of the opinion that even premium TV is somewhat commoditised. How much would you pay for your favourite show? And how much for your 10th favourite or your 20th? Besides live, I think the answer would be pretty much the same for 1, 10, 20... And therein lies the issue. NBCU makes a lot of money selling its channels into the bouquet packages of cable networks. If it enables customers to buy a la carte then it risks the cable networks reducing the price they will pay for those bouquets. And that would be bad, because even if Apple TV really takes off and gets massive penetration in the home, replacing the lost bouquet, NBCU's revenues would become rather variable. A la carte is fine if you're guaranteed to have success after success, but it seems unlike...

Linda Jensen had some interesting things to say at IBC about HBO's strategy in Central Europe, which I thought were worth noting down. HBO's biggest CEE markets are Romania and Poland. Initially they just brought US content over into Europe, but now they’re making country specific versions of US formats e.g. In Deriva – a Romanian version of ‘In Treatment’. This corresponds to the strategy of many premium content producers – use great local content as a hook into imported fare An interesting characteristic of the business is that they have certain freedom to develop their own technology and product lines. They're launching HBO Go shortly – a broadband OTT product developed in-house, before the joint venture was bought out by HBO. This seems to fit with Linda's world view on content: “a subscribe once, use anywhere” model that is day and date independent and her view is that Europe is underdeveloped vs. US in online: eSell thru’: $580M US vs. $67M EU Online VOD: $100M US...

I found this Intel press release on the use of smartphones for personal monitoring interesting as it tallies with some work we've been doing recently on application stores. The concept is that handsets can do far more than simply tell you where you are and what's around you, they can also take measurements from your body and determine your health, mood and general wellbeing. This is nothing new, of course. I understand that Apple has a number of patents that relate to extended sensing of device users. What the article misses (and perhaps Intel have too) is that handsets are already well capable of making these measurements today. A few weeks ago the istethoscope application was the top selling app on iTunes - demonstrating the growing understanding of how to exploit smartphones for health and wellbeing. Heartbeat monitoring is a basic diagnosis tool, but has many uses in personal monitoring - level of exertion being the most obvious example. Smartphones have taken off big tim...

With apologies for the time lag (work has been particularly crazy recently), here's the second summary of my conversations from IBC. This time the interviewee was Spencer Stephens, SVP of Technical Services for Sony Pictures Entertainment and the topic was Google TV and DECE . Stephens believes that there are two key game changers for IP - connected TVs and the move from physical to digital content 'lockers'. With regard to the first, Google TV is a game changer. Stephens wasn't a fan of Apple TV as it's just an add-on to the TV, unlike Google, which is a hybrid of TV and the Internet and enjoys some of the benefits of both. It integrates EPG, DVR, purchased content and so on. Personally, my concern with Google TV is that it disintermediates broadcasters by focusing on content brands. Consumers are more likely to search for 'Top Gear' than for 'BBC 2'. Branded channels are a way round this, but I feel that they immediately restrict the value of Googl...

I've spent the last few days at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam, so my next couple of posts will cover some of the more interesting takeaways from interviews and stand visits I carried out at the event. First up, my notes from a talk by Matt Rennie, Commercial Director of Seesaw , the UK online video site that came out of the wreckage of Project Kangaroo . First up, some numbers: Since its launch in February, Seesaw has averaged about 3M unique visitors a week, from a current UK online video market of 10M-11M visitors It currently has 3,500 hours of ad-funded and 1,500 hours of paid-for content available for streaming Seesaw appears to be addititive to other online portals. 78% of their users are unique vs. 4OD and 96% are unique vs. Demand5 Next, some key factors that have made Seesaw a success: It is based on robust and scaleable technology - a result of large investment by the Kangaroo partners and latterly by new owner, Arqiva The user experience is fanta...

One of my core beliefs is that participation in a market is the key to understanding it. Outsourcing is fine by me, so long as the outsourcer is close at hand as letting skills and business migrate offshore is a sure way of creating a tragedy of the commons for the 21st Century. You could summarise this world view as a strong preference for local research, development and manufacturing. With this in mind, I thought it was worth sharing an initiative I've been following for some time: Local Motors . In essence, the business democratises the manufacture of cars. Concept creation, detailed design and manufacture are all achieved through contribution and voting in the first instance, small local enterprise in the later stages. I'll leave the detail to their excellent website and forum, but it's worth pointing out that at the time of writing, Local Motors have succeeded in constructing 108 cars for around $50,000 each. I'd be interested in seeing their financials, or whether...

I just read this story about Ian Livingstone's comment that bidding for Digital Dividend spectrum was not high on BT's agenda. I find this astonishing! Fibre rollout is all very well, but in my opinion BT desperately needs to find some engine for growth in its business. With its fixed network assets it would be perfectly positioned to deploy an LTE network rapidly and efficiently, not to mention bundle mobile services into its fixed packages. Selling Cellnet was a necessary evil back in the day, but to pass up an opportunity to re-enter the market seems madness. With Orange and T-Mobile now merged and Three a pauper, there is spectrum waiting to be acquired at a price that is surely far, far below that achieved in 3G (if the pattern seen to date in Europe continues). I do hope this is a bit of casual game theory from Mister Livingstone as a non-LTE capable BT Retail should be easy prey for the mobile telcos and Virgin.

With apologies for the shameless self-promotion, my latest paper has just been published ( link ). It reflects on what we've learnt about the best organisational structures for TMT organisations as they emerge from the downturn and look to grow in future. Any comments/ opinions/ experiences greatly appreciated!

In my thoughts on the threat of mobile VOIP a couple of months ago, there were a couple of capabilities that I thought were blocking widespread adoption and hence reducing the threat to operators. Now both of those blockers are showing signs of moving away. First, the iPhone 4 launched, bringing multitasking to millions of consumers and hence enabling VOIP applications to run in the background, enabling permenant presence. Second - and vitally - the Library of Congress has made it legal for iPhone (and therefore all) smartphone applications to crack the devices core capabilities ( link ). Now it is simple for VOIP application providers to enable users to utilise cellular data connections and increase the persistance of their presence as they move around. Neither of these are mass market capabilities yet, but even so, if I were a mobile Telco they'd represent flashing warning beacons!

I hear a lot of talk in the market about the challenge of format proliferation in streaming video delivery. The thinking goes that the number of devices that can stream video - phones, TVs, set top boxes - is growing and so content distributors must transcode into an increasing number of formats to service them. This creates a mare's nest of connections and formats to service consumer demand. I wonder whether we should also consider another world, where devices increase in processing power and application platforms become standardised across categories of devices (e.g. Android on TVs). In this world, distribution becomes a trial of bandwidth at the edge and possibly also in the core and the devices shoulder the burden of making viewing a rich experience. A similar thing happened when the mobile web was young. Operators spent tens of millions on hardware and software to enable web pages to be viewed on phones. It didn't take long, however, for phones to gain the processing power...

Reading an article on Microsoft putting Office into the cloud brought ' Directions on Microsoft ' to my attention. I'm very used to the idea of analysis firms pointed at particular market segments, but had never encountered one aimed at a particular company. The more I thought about it, the more this made sense to me. It occurs that the market of today is akin to science at the turn of the 20th Century. There is so much to discover in so many fields that the traditional 'expert' commentators on a field cannot hope to see everything, let alone consider the resulting implications. This effect is becoming more marked as (particularly technology) companies continue their acquisition sprees, bringing many more divisions and products into their portfolios. Perhaps just as gentlemen astronomers provided great insights into the cosmos, small, pointed analysis firms can help us make sense of the hyper-dynamic, information-saturated market of the twenty-teens. Something else ...

I've just read the Pew Research Center's annual survey on cloud computing . As ever, it contains plenty of thought-provoking commentary from experts. One that really caught my attention was this quote from Nokia's Davis Fields: "It's 2010 and I could already basically use only cloud-based applications on my computer. Local storage is already increasingly irrelevant – I have my all my photos stored on Flickr, my address book is in my Gmail and I've got all my emails stored there as well. Apple will likely move iTunes online in the next few years, and streaming movies from Netflix will eliminate the need to download movie files. I use Microsoft Office and Photoshop out of familiarity as my main two desktop apps, but good alternatives already exist online. I predict most people will do their work on ‘screens connected to the web,’ There won't be any sort of ‘computer’ anymore." Now, I agree with the sentiment that every screen will be connected to the web...

It struck me earlier today that the nascent market in unscheduled, IP-delivered TV is a bit atypical for a capital-intensive new product. There are literally hundreds of different products that do the same thing. Each broadcaster has gone down their own path at great expense, and has been joined by aggregators and a few relatively small tech' players (Brightcove, ThePlatform and the ill-fated Maven Networks, to name three). There is limited standardisation in technology or approach. I've talked to broadcasters, tech companies and Telcos - the future could be big, heavy infrastructure or a customer-centric interface with simple underpinnings. Even though the codecs are based on similar principles, they seem unique in flavour to each platform. The only thing they agree on is that 'on-demand' will one day be a larger proportion of viewing than linear. Incidentally, this is the only thing I'm convinced isn't true! This has confused me for a while. Until today, when ...

I attended a live video stream of the Future in Review conference on Wednesday. Although the format was unusual (even with a cinema screen and surround sound), several comments made by the speakers caught peeked my interest. During a conversation on the network implications of cloud services, it occured to me that the storage and processing of vast amounts of data in a central location is going to lead to significant latency problems. This in itself isn't great insight. Neither is the fact that network management is going to lead to distribution of content and processing around the edge of the network, based on statistical analysis of likely usage. I started wondering, however, whether that distribution is going to lead to 'systems' of usage, similar to the weather systems in the Earth's atmosphere. The Brownian motion of particles in the atmosphere is in some ways analagous to the 'motion' of packets in IP networks, with rate shaping and the variable speed of ...

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...

I've been doing some more thinking about what the mobile industry could learn from the automotive. See what you think: The parallel between personal communication and personal transportation Although outwardly very different, mobile telephones and automobiles actually offer a similar consumer proposition, in that they provide a means of obtaining services, doing business and, most importantly, maintaining social contact. Both are a personal choice, as the vast range of styles available in each market demonstrates; moreover, both started out as niche, expensive fancies and have matured into mass market items. If automobiles and handsets are analogous, then there are also clear parallels between the mobile network and the network of fuel stations that support car travel. Both networks are spread out to provide coverage over a wide area and both have economics that vary significantly from location to location. One could even suggest that the recent interest in wi-fi bypass to increase...

This morning, I have been mostly reading about: social search. A couple of links for you: Advertising Age and Google . The premise (for the time poor) is that your friends' opinions on topics you've searched for should be returned on your Google (or Yahoo, or Bing) search results so you can see what your 'tribe' think of what you're looking for. It's a nice idea and gives the search engine a nice rich seam of personal data to mine for future gain. That gain, however, seems difficult to quantify for the advertiser. Precisely how Toyota (for example) should design, market and support its products differently because of social search is unclear. In my view, social search will further amplify the strengths and weaknessed of particular product lines, hence polarising success and failure and leaving little middle ground for mediocre, but acceptable merchandise and services. I suspect that we will be seeing some interesting effects of this type of service in the next ...

I read an amusing article in Forbes last week about Symbian, the world's most common and least interesting mobile phone OS ( link ). The journalist's contention is that by ' crowdsourcing ' (a repulsive management term that makes me flinch every time I hear it) Symbian produces an engaging and multifaceted product. My opinion is the opposite. To me, the wisdom of the crowd is a con that excuses lazy or untalented product designers from their responsibilities. The great leaps forward in human understanding have almost all come from the inspiration of a few individuals, not from some loosely democratic design-by-committee. Even giant technological feats like the Manhattan Project were driven by a core group of smart people who had the vision and ability to see and accomplish their goal. To take a more relavent example: Apple's design team consists of a small group, working out of California. Sure, they have great understanding of the needs of the crowd, but they certa...

I'll be clear up front, I'm not convinced that the iTablet actually exists - Apple are very good at mis-information and the online community sometimes needs to curb its enthusiasm! Anyway, here's my "Christmas list" for iTablet functionality: 1. At least 6 hours of battery life/ 1 week of standby 2. Integrated HSDPA and wifi 3. Reasonably priced books on iTunes! 4. Some mechanism to attach a keyboard and use it like a netbook 5. A decent GPU (iPhone games were my guilty pleasure in 2009!) Not much to ask, is it? I think I'll be okay on 1,2 and 5. I think 4 is pushing it, as it'd cannibalise Macbook (Air) sales. #3 remains to be seen. My view is that books have far less replay value than movies - I wonder whether a "books as a service" model similar to LoveFilm would be more likely to succeed than a straight up iTunes music model. I've forgotten how many times I've passed a paperback book onto a friend. The same simply isn't possible ...

A colleague and I have been thinking about some of the developments in mobile and have come up with an idea about the structure the mobile industry seems to be heading towards and the strategic issues that could result from the journey towards it. Conceptual at the moment, but it might be interesting, so I thought I'd share: We started with the premise that consumers have become ever more handset-centric, particularly post-iPhone. Operators have therefore moved from subsidising the expensive handset to enable consumers to access their service, to financing their access to devices; We wonder whether this leads to a different view on the operating structure of mobile Telcos. The long anticipated netco/ servco model may be an intermediate state, but perhaps a more apt analogue of the operator’s future model is that of an automobile manufacturer; Why do we say this? Well, the modern auto manufacturer is as more of an assembler of components into a product than a vertically integrated ...

I thought the news that Reliance Mediaworks is to acquire iLab was worth sharing. The business case for this kind of acquisition feels very strong and it may turn out to be a shrewd move on Reliance's part. In the short term there's the obvious benefits of linking the growing Indian-language production industry back to its biggest market. In thr future, however, the expansion of digital production capability worldwide and the growth in the extend of broadband infrastructure in India could lead to a lucrative business outsourcing metadata tagging, rough editing and the like, taking advantage of the low cost of file transfer in the digital production environment. Interestingly, this is something we suggested for the Digital Production Partnership (PDF), in 2008, hence I'll be watching its success or otherwise with interest.