Versatile Amphibian

I think 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: Nintendo, RIM under siege, cyber crimes cost Huawei, Amazon gains ground online and in India and why we should be more like Han Solo. New business models A brilliant blog on the continuing travails of Nintendo. Wii took them on a different path to Microsoft and Sony, but have only temporarily halted long term inability to compete in hardware. http://www.asymco.com/2012/03/26/staying-satiated-and-smart/ And as if things weren’t bad enough, Sony’s next generation PS3, codenamed “Orbis” is rumoured to be coming next year. http://kotaku.com/5896996/the-next-playstation-is-called-orbis-sources-say-here-are-the-details Housing prices in tech hotspots are rising fast. We see the same thing in the trendier areas of London, where tech companies are landing , buying office...

My latest State of the Media Democracy B-Side covers an emotive and controversial issue – that of cord cutting. For those of you not familiar with the term, cord cutting refers to customers cancelling their pay-TV subscriptions and replacing them with free or paid-for on-demand services. As the chart below shows, the proportion of respondents subscribing to pay-TV services actually went up in all markets in 2011. This is despite the fact that in 2010 a relatively large number of respondents (about a quarter in France and Japan) said that they were intending to dispense with their subscriptions in favour of free or paid-for streamed alternatives. So why didn’t they? The answer is two-fold, I think. Firstly the number of people with the equipment to actually cut the cord is fairly limited as a proportion of the total. Most consumers with connected-ready TVs and Blu-ray players haven’t actually connected them because they lack the requisite (and expensive) Wi-fi dongle and the TV is too f...

I think 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: outsource consolidation leads to stifled yawns, China quashes salt rumours, fibre gets faster and why the iPhone won’t get any bigger. New business models Another hacking story, this time aimed at the BBC’s ability to feed satellite news into Iran. Although somewhat effective, the attack has been foiled, but given the Iranian regime’s weak electronic warfare capabilities versus the rest of the world, you can but imagine how effective an analogous Chinese or Russian effort would have been. http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/03/14/us-iran-bbc-idUKBRE82D00820120314 Perhaps this was therefore a good market in which to sell an encryption company – News Corp just offloaded NDS for $5Bn – I expect that money will find its way into another large content acquisition. For ...

My latest State of the Media Democracy B-Side covers gaming, which is mentioned in the report in a couple of areas, but definitely deserves a deeper dive. Having been an avid gamer since the days of the NES , it’s good to see that traditional gaming on consoles remains strong – nearly half of households now have one and 15% have connected it to the Internet. Console ownership has increased by about 20% year-on-year, which is pretty impressive given the less than perfect economic conditions and the considerable cost of the devices and their games. Purchasing through the console was surprisingly prevalent with 28% of people who had their console Internet connected saying that they purchased something through it at least once a month in 2011. Consoles are the simplest way for many households to connect their TV to the Internet, so people’s willingness to buy through them is a positive sign for the wider on-demand content industry. Only 3% bought or hired a movie in 2011 on the console th...

Deloitte’s 6th annual State of the Media Democracy report was released today. There is so much data in the survey that to discuss it all would take a novel, so over the next couple of days I’ll try to provide some insights and perspectives into subjects that didn’t make the cut. A Media Democracy B-Side , if you will. First up, eReaders, via media favourites and device ownership. Deloitte's UK consumer survey shows that professional media, be it on TV, in print or on the radio, is as popular as ever. 50% of respondents said that TV was their favourite type of media and despite falling circulations, 40% rated newspapers in their top 3 (although only 6% placed it #1). TV and print adverts were also rated as massively more impactful than online and social equivalents and after search are the principal way in which consumers discover websites. A desire to access content from traditional channels on non-traditional formats may be driving uptake of consumer technology. We estimate that ...

A new piece of analysis I’ve just completed on total telecoms investments in Africa from 2009 to 2011. What it shows is the extreme concentration of investment in the top 3 markets – 55% of the investment that went into Africa in 2009 to 2011 went into Nigeria, South Africa or Egypt. On a per person basis, it’s no surprise that residents of richer economies do better than average. That said, I remain bearish about Kenya’s long term prospects as a digital leader in Africa. Interference from government and regulator, coupled with slowing national investment in public sector IT has led to the country becoming a less attractive destination for FDI. Since it lacks its own telecoms powerhouse (Safaricom being largely foreign owned), Kenya risks falling behind regional competitors. Zimbabwe may well be one of those competitors. Chinese investment in a number of local players has boosted infrastructure capabilities and provides a basis for long term growth of the sector. Provided governmental ...

I think 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: dastardly Germans cloning web businesses, invisible hydrogen coming to your high street, twisted spectrum puts the mobile industry in a spin and the terrifying scale of EVERYTHING amazes New business models I quite like Ideo’s work; if nothing else, they offer a fresh perspective on tricky issues. In this short blog, they talk about new concepts for retail. I like the ideas, but in a land (the UK) of ridiculous high-street rents, it’s difficult to see many of them being practical. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665882/ideo-offers-4-strategies-for-reinventing-the-retail-experience This is a fascinating article about a German company that routinely copies and exploits the models of US online businesses. All totally above board, but a great reminder of why in the Inte...

So now we know. The iPad 2 is dead – long live the iPad! Amidst the disappointment that we didn’t get super-Siri, haptics, a button-free fascia or even just a “3”, the iPad launch actually taught us a lot about Apple’s future strategy and marks a new phase in the growing war between the West Coast tech superpowers. For the first time, Apple have not just produced a beautiful-looking “wow” device, they have also created a new baseline for technical specifications. The combination of A5X, quad core graphics, LTE and Retina display is a leap ahead of the competition and demonstrates how Apple’s spending power on talent and IP are giving them the ability to out-design the competition in silicon as well as in user experience. Google, Microsoft and now Amazon will have to respond, and fast. This all reminds me of the multidimensional competition between the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This too is a global conflict, fought indirectly through proxies, rather than face to face...

Ahead of Apple’s announcement of the next generation iPad, I thought I’d jot down what I expect (and don’t expect) from the new tablet. I’ll be keeping score :). Retina display What it means: a much sharper picture than the current iPad, great for HD movies and games and even sharper magazine and web browsing experiences. Likelihood: 100% - a safe bet as without this feature it isn’t worth refreshing the iPad 2, which is already the industry leader in the category by a colossal margin A 5+ MegaPixel camera on the back What it means: sharper pictures to go with your new Retina display Likelihood: 100% - it costs Apple nothing and enables a slightly better user experience Siri What it means: voice search comes to the iPad Likelihood: 100% - I expect this to be a major “buzz” feature at the launch A 5+ MegaPixel camera on the front What it means: a really sharp camera to enable high definition video conferencing using either Facetime or 3rd party apps. With iPad increasingly penetr...

I think 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 (last!) week – Daily, RIM blow their own trumpets, DSL trumps cable in the UK, why startup investing isn’t like Moneyball and how Africa is becoming a creative force in media Digital Media The headline here is that The Daily (of Murdoch ownership/ fame) is the highest grossing iPad app... currently and only in the US. Apple doesn’t release global or granular statistics, so who knows what this really means. http://blog.thedaily.com/post/18196083686/betcha-cant-guess-whats-currently-the App download volumes keep rising – to be expected given the vast number of devices sold every quarter – however per person this isn’t a big number. In reality, most people don’t download many applications and when we do, they’re the most popular ones. We’re herd animals, after all. http:/...

Lots of conversation but little action would be how I'd characterise the African telecoms investment landscape in February. $200Mn of fresh investments were announced, but although some big deals were mooted - particularly a sell off of tower assets by Etisalat - none materialised, leaving only Vodacom's mobile upgrades in Tanzania and Movicel's selection of Huawei and ZTE to build a small LTE network in Angola to prop up the numbers. Perhaps this shouldn't come as a surprise. Only $215Mn of investments were announced in the same month of 2011; suggesting that the $516Mn announced in February 2010 was a bit of an aberration.

One of the big themes at this year’s Mobile World Congress was the integration of multiple radio access standards into a single, seamless wireless connectivity system. Variously called “off-loading” and “small cell”, the idea is to provide mobile device users with seamless access to many different technologies simultaneously, providing a massive boost to quality of service. I visited many of the major vendors at MWC – what follows is a few words on the small cell market. Wi-Fi has been a growing part of the industry for a number of years, particularly in densely populated countries like the UK and cities like New York, however it has hitherto been a somewhat unsophisticated system, requiring separate authentication and lacking decent quality of service. All that has changed in the last year or so as technologies from the cellular industry, such as beam-forming and handover techniques have found their way into mainstream solutions. The objective is to create a system that aggregates mac...