What I've been reading this week

Here's a few stories that I've found interesting this week from across the digital world.

Digital media

Mobile advertising is clearly a market with much growth in it, particularly in developed markets. I wonder, however at what point this will merge with traditional online and which set of business models will win out.
http://www.rethink-wireless.com/2011/11/07/orange-venture-fund-mobile-digital-start-ups.htm

The headline is slightly misleading, as the volumes required to access the best discounts continue to rise, but the analysis is typically cogent and demonstrates the very small size of the content delivery market worldwide, despite all the hype that surrounds online video.
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2011/11/cdn-pricing-stable-in-q4-down-about-20-for-the-year.html

HTML 5 has really blossomed this year and Adobe’s announcement that Flash is to leave the mobile platform (albeit slowly) illustrates that fact. How long can Microsoft persist with Silverlight?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15648899

Breakthrough technology

I find it startling how willing people are to connect with total strangers, before we get to the implications for Facebook’s subscriber numbers of fake accounts. If you consider the classic Turing Test, then this script shows how social networks could enable more human-like interaction with machines. How about a Siri/ “Fakebook” mashup?
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/01/researchers-flood-facebook-with-bots-collect-250gb-of-user-data/

Both robotics and 3D-printing are due a massive 2012 as advances in both reduce cost and increase utility – I see these technologies as now being at the same developmental stage as computing was in 1980. All we need is the “PC” to arrive and make them mass-market... The spider goes to show how far and fast walking technologies have come in the last decade.
http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2011/november/high-tech-spider.html

This kind of molecular animation with electric fields is key to truly smart materials and I’m sure will revolutionise material science over the next quarter century. Sadly medical advances based on it will be a decade or more away thanks to the FDA.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/104347-one-molecule-nanocar-takes-a-test-drive

Business model evolution

GM blocks Saab transaction over IP fears. I think 2012 will be a year for this kind of story. Chinese state money has been used to strip IP from many bankrupt corporations over the last decade, which is fair enough and common practice in other industries, however when combined with the other activities and aims of the Chinese government is of deep concern to developed world businesses.
http://www.pistonheads.com/news/default.asp?storyId=24646

“Green-ness” of supply chains is a rather abstract concept at the best of times and Greenpeace fail to show the huge productivity upside (and therefore resource efficiency improvement) enabled by these company’s technologies, but the dynamics show how companies are moving to make their supply chains more sustainable for commercial reasons – lack of resource availability and increasing energy prices chief among them. The mass market, however, seems certain to remain uninterested.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/electronics/Guide-to-Greener-Electronics/

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

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.

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?

Versatile Amphibian

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