Versatile Amphibian

After a busy 2012, the Amphibian is reclining on a beach in Vietnam, drinking cocktails out of a coconut. Normal service will resume on January 7th.

I’m of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye. This week: Spotify for everything, social advertising only sort of works but everyone loves it, Apple returns to the US, Windows get sticky for Microsoft. US planned to nuke Moon in ‘50’s. Digital media This is a well researched article on whether a “Spotify for books” service could work. I’m undecided. I think that a subset of readers will find this a valuable service, but in the early days the subscription charge will have to be set high in order to create sustainable value. http://paidcontent.org/2012/12/05/can-a-spotify-for-books-really-work/ Meanwhile, the real Spotify has just passed the 5 million paying subscribers mark. That’s pretty impressive and suggests that annual revenue will be somewhere around $250M in the calendar year 2012. http...

A few months ago I prepared an abstract for a paper on the effects of mobile technology on the economy. Since the requirement for the full paper has gone away, I thought I'd share as this summarises several previous posts I've done on the subject. Hope it's useful! Mobile is often referred to as revolutionary.  I agree, but not, perhaps for the reasons most regularly cited.  I’m not down on mobile technology. Smart devices have enabled greater scale and scope of communications between individuals, greater consumption of content, greater variety in that content. Five years ago, applications were the preserve of suits with laptops. Now they are a mega-industry in the making. A new media untarnished by the false dawn of the dotcom era. Androids are cool for the first time since Star Wars. Mobile has enabled all of this and still found time to revolutionise banking in Africa, catalyse the growth of the largest company in history and overthrow half a dozen regimes. Not b...

I’m of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye – a late posting this week as I was on holiday. Lucky me! This week: Apple and Amazon beat Microsoft on Black Friday, Volvo goes self-drive but Cambridge warns of robogeddon Digital media ITN launch a citizen journalism on Youtube. Perhaps one of the aforementioned citizens can post a story about why ITN would do that. http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/itn-production-s-citizen-journalism-youtube-channel-launches/s2/a551300/ Technology Jawbone were one of the first companies to launch a wristband activity monitoring product. Seems like they’re still learning. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671325/jawbone-up-20-ambitious-beautiful-and-still-fatally-flawed#1 Tiresome tech wannabe Will.i.am launches an add on gadget that turns the iPhone into a c...

My predictions for 2013’s TMT trends have so far covered wearable computing , 4G and self-driving cars . In this fourth installment I’ll look at the emergence of truly digital business models in the book market. What it is: the speed at which ebooks have come to prominence as a viable alternative to print seems to have taken the publishing industry somewhat by surprise. So far the business model by which these digital books have been sold has been a carbon copy of the physical book market: titles are priced and sold individually, often for the same or a higher price than the physical version. But many of the models that have driven the growth – and death – of other media in digital markets are also feasible for print. And it’s these that I expect to come to prominence next year. My prediction: 2013 will mark the largest shake up in the business model and structure of the trade (aka consumer) book market since the paperback book.  The number of large publishers ...

In my first posts about 2013’s trends I covered wearable computing and 4G in the UK . In this third instalment I’ll look at the self-driving car, a long predicted technology that is finally ready for the limelight. What are they: pretty simple to describe! A self-driving car doesn’t need a human driver to get from A to B. The driver tells it where to go and the car does the rest, navigating, dodging other road users, swearing at bad driving and doing burn outs at traffic lights. My prediction: cars that self drive under certain circumstances will go on sale in 2013, starting with Mercedes’ flagship S Class and Audi’s A8 executive saloon, both of which are already announced. These first generation self-drivers can operate autonomously on the motorway, but not in urban areas or back roads. Second generation self-drivers, able to operate anywhere, are probably for 2018 or 2019’s models. Why I think this: Plenty of cars on sale in the UK today have elements of self-driving techn...

I’m of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye. A short update this week - I blame Thanksgiving, even though I live in London. This week: More social/ Gaza news, Nokia leaves Windows (a bit), Steve hopes MS is becoming cool again, Apple UFO delayed Digital media After Penguin House, Harper Collins and Simon Schuster are in merger talks. Publisher consolidation is inevitable as innovation finally enters the book market via digital. http://paidcontent.org/2012/11/20/harpercollins-simon-schuster-reportedly-in-preliminary-merger-talks/ The Gaza conflict is another step in the digitisation of warfare, but it’s a two edged sword: the IDF has had to tell citizens not to tweet where rockets land to prevent social media being used for targeting by Hamas. http://www.fastcompany.com/3003212/israeli-military-citi...

In my first post about predictions for 2013 I covered wearable computing. In this second instalment I’ll look at “4G” in the UK, another hot topic amongst my clients. Apologies to non-UK readers for the parochialism – perhaps there will be some useful context for your own market within this prediction. What is it: “4G” is a term used to described the next generation of mobile network. 4th Generation networks offer a number of user experience advantages over their predecessors, foremost of which are greater connection speeds and quicker responses. In the real world this means less time spent waiting for web pages and Internet-connected applications to load and respond and smoother video when using cellular networks. In the UK we already have a limited 4G service delivered by Everything Everywhere; however it will be summer 2013 before we see the long term networks come on stream from the other UK networks (EE will also ultimately move their network to mirror their competitors). Pre...

Lots in the press today about Ireland's 4G spectrum being allocated. No real surprises in the winners, who were drawn from the existing network operators, but the price they paid was pretty astounding. The "on target" value of the spectrum was about EUR677 using my market model. As the link shows, Ireland achieved EUR855, 21% over the expected amount. I suspect that recent turbulence in the ownership of telecoms companies in the country has rather inflated the bidding for what is an important asset but in a small country with limited head room for growth in its telecom market. Still, this bodes well for a good result for the UK when our equivalent assets are auctioned in 2013.

The final part of my impressions from Newsxchange 2012 is the text of my own speech at the conference, which was 1/3 of an Associated Press session on the future of news broadcasting. My piece covered the effects of proper technology on the creation and distribution of news. I don't do much work in the industry, so this was set up as a techie's impressions of the future. Innovation in capture devices like the panoramic ball camera and Google Glass have been enabled by massive growth in the sales of smartphones and tablets, which next year are set to be the first billion unit a year computing category. And when you have a billion smart devices shipping, you have the manufacturing capacity for billions of fast CPUs, billions of DRAM chips and billions of CMOS digital camera chips. And what's more, there are tens of thousands of people with the software and hardware design skills to bring those components together into an amazing computing exper...

I’m of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye. This week: Gaza conflict spreads to social, Pebble suffers growing pains, Apple to lose tablet dominance next year, attacks Google with giant reptile Digital media The most interesting bit of this fluff piece on how people use their mobile phones is the proportion of UK consumers that think the devices stop them truly relaxing. I can’t decide whether uptake of wearables would make relaxation easier as the connected experience fades into the background, or harder because connection is even more persistent. http://www.mobile-ent.biz//news/read/half-of-brits-would-rather-check-their-tablet-than-speak-to-partner/019844 Israel’s offensive in Gaza has led to a rather public slanging match on social media, with Twitter hosting the brunt of the fighting. A couple ...

Next up in my impressions from Newsxchange 2012, an interesting conversation between Erica Anderson (@ericaamerica, followers: 10,700), Head of News for Twitter and Rory Cellan-Jones (@BBCRoryCJ, followers: 42,000) the BBC’s technology correspondent and self-confessed Twitter-holic, about the use of Twitter in News Broadcasting. Erica is in charge of creating a mutually beneficial relationship between news organisations. She’s an former journalist for CBS News and citizen journalist for MTV. Since 2011 she’s been responsible for the health of Twitter’s relationship with news organisations, enabling them to use the platform to connect products, services and stories. Interesting initial revelation: there are no phones on the desk at Twitter. Erica came to Twitter having been on a personal journey to learn how journalists can learn about new tools and how to apply ethics to it in a much more connected world where there is a great deal of misinformation. Journalists need ...

I was lucky enough to be invited by the Associated Press to speak at the annual Newsxchange conference in Barcelona. As you’d expect for the premier gathering of the broadcast TV news industry, Newsxchange attracts some great speakers. I therefore thought I’d try and summarise some of the best sessions from the packed schedule. First up, my thoughts on a session entitled “Africa: defying stereotypes”. As you can imagine I was really looking forward to this session; however although I found it stimulating I was a little disappointed by some of the points of view put across by the panel of African news people and journalists. The primary contention of the session was that global news media persists in reporting Africa as a continent in strife. The compere, Yvonne Ndege from Al Jazeera said that this was not an accurate portrayal, throwing out the implausibly speculative stat that by 2100 (!) half of the world’s largest economies will be in Africa as evidence that “Africa” should be ...

As the end of the year approaches, many of my clients and Deloitte clients are thinking about what 2013 holds for the markets in which they operate. Predictions is something my colleague Paul Lee and his team do really well, so I won’t replicate their thinking. Instead, over the next month I’ll write down a few trends that I think will either gather or emerge in 2013. First up, wearable computing. What they are: Internet connected devices that are worn in place or instead of or in addition to conventional jewellery. Emerging categories include smart watches, personal health monitors, life blogging photo recorders and heads up displays. My prediction: each of the above products will be million unit+ per year categories in 2014, which means that they should be hundred-thousand unit categories in 2013. One or more of them will hit iPad 2 levels of distribution (10’s of millions) in 2015. Why I think this: smartphones are to mobile computing what laptops are to desktop – they’re a...