Versatile Amphibian

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 (now: last) week: Samsung overtakes Nokia, Facebook & Netflix results disappoint while Apple and Amazon delight, Cameron mines asteroids ; MIT weaves a building. New business models In case you were under a rock this week, one of the biggest stories was Samsung overtaking Nokia as the world’s largest mobile handset manufacturer. My only caveat on this story is that I’m not a massive fan of Strategy Analytics’ data – it tends to have a slight slant, particularly as they’re the only people Samsung give data to. Still, the writing’s clearly on the wall for Nokia... http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/samsung-overtakes-nokia-as-worlds-largest-phone-maker-27-04-2012/ ...and all’s not well internally – here, Nokia’s Windows strategy receives a good kicking...

In geekier moments, it entertains me that mobile telecoms towers – one of the dullest parts of the TMT world - are also one of the hottest areas in telecoms rights now. Nowhere is this more true than in Africa, which regular readers will know is the market I find most interesting. This post focuses on the opportunity in towers in Africa. Cellular towers are the building blocks of mobile telephone networks. Typically they consist of a pylon on a leased site (“passive” network components), to which is attached the base station and antenna (“active” network components). In a country like the UK the average network has about 14,000 of these location, many of which are shared. In India, Airtel alone has over 70,000 towers, whereas in Africa networks even in the largest countries like Nigeria make do with a few thousand apiece. The latter fact hints at why towers are hot property and why the three largest infrastructure companies are involved in a land grab for these assets. Tower sharin...

Following my previous analysis on the attractiveness of buying and selling telecoms incumbents, this post looks at smaller African telecoms groups and their potential for acquisition by the larger players in the market. I classify African telecoms players into 4 tiers: Tier 1 are the largest international and regional players, each with over 50Mn African customers. There are four companies in this category: France Telecom, MTN, Vodafone (including its majority-owned subsidiaries Vodacom and Safaricom) and Bharti Airtel. The Tier 1’s have huge financial clout and have are aggressively acquisitive. Tier 2 are smaller international players with significant African investments or large regional players with presence in a few locations. Maroc Telecom, Etisalat and Vimpelcom are the most notable examples of these entities. Tier 3 are regional groups, sometimes owned outside the continent by small investors. Globacom, Comium, LAP Green, Millicom, Telkom South Africa and Lintel fall into...

In light of MTN and Maroc Telecoms’ (unsurprising) revelations that they are looking for acquisition targets on the continent, I thought it worth looking at their potential targets. First up, the classical entry point into markets – incumbents. The privatisation of incumbents and the liberalisation of telecoms markets is one of the greatest achievements of the European Union and has reaped great dividends in the strength of European telecoms companies on a global scale and in the availability of high quality services to citizens. It’s a model that all other countries should look to and seek to replicate. Africa is probably the polar opposite of this situation. As the figure shows, African governments have been almost criminally inept at privatising their state owned telecoms companies. In some cases, this has been simple greed – the example of NetOne in Zimbabwe being a prime example – in others, corruption and incompetence have led to numerous failed processes. Nitel, which now lo...

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: how engaged are millennials, how effective is customer engagement, how we’re heading for another bubble, how annoyed are Anonymous and how to play Mario on the coffee table Business models   A fascinating look into the organisational structure... or unstructure... of Valve, the developer behind Half Life, Steam and many other groundbreaking pieces of code. http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/   40% of customer experience initiatives have unproven ROI. It doesn’t surprise me, to be honest. I imagine that online and social initiatives are even less proven. Doesn’t mean don’t do them, just means you need to think how to measure them. http://www.satmetrix.com/customer-experience-indu...

Media Asset Management (MAM) was a much talked about subject at NAB and to a lesser extent so was analytics, with Adobe in particular showing off some neat visualisations of content performance based on their “Pass” technology. Something that still stood out for me, however, was the manifest lack of any visions for how the broadcaster of the future will merge these different data sets to create value. For posterity, here are my thoughts on the subject. The need Broadcasters need to be efficient. This is, sadly, a fact. No one in the industry can afford to be as (relatively) profligate as a dotcom or a big FMCG. To enable increased operational efficiency, broadcasters also need to start understanding a lot more about their customers. More than just the basic CRM data that a pay provider collects or the (basically bunk) data from entities like BARB, which collect small samples of user-reported data and extrapolate to wide audiences. They need this information to provide better reporting ...

So, day 2 of NAB is over and as everyone's jet lag faded, so the show began to liven up. Having looked at cameras yesterday, I spent today focused on production workflows and in particular the cloud. It's worth saying that thinking about production workflows is a worthwhile exercise. About $600Mn is spent on production worldwide in a given year. Technology and related services is a good 10% of that. In that context, most major, developed market broadcasters have already “done” file based workflow over the last five years, reaping the benefits of improved efficiency, particularly in multiplatform distribution. The end of tape is finally in sight in these organisations. With those big ticket projects finished for the time being, it was notable that several of the technology vendors that have historically made good money from them are now looking for service-based models, typically in partnership with more service-oriented companies. As it’s 2012, these models tend to involved the...

Only at NAB will you hear a senior representative of a global technology company reply to a slight on the efficacy of his production workflow with the phrase “Well, Stallone’s using it on his new movie”. This exchange on Canon’s stand regarding their new EOS C500 movie camera was one of the more entertaining moments in what was otherwise a relatively subdued first day at the National Association of Broadcasters annual conference in Las Vegas. Canon’s new camera is a part of a major trend emerging at this year’s NAB, namely 4K – the successor to HD. In simple terms, 4K has roughly double the resolution of today’s HD – 3840x2160 pixels plays 1,920 x 1,080. What this means in real terms is stunning, photo realistic visuals on big TV panels, the largest of which are now so big that HD looks grainy. All three major camera makers – Sony, Panasonic and Canon - launched 4K units this year. Not being a cameraman they all seemed much the same; however market disruptor Red seemed to have attract...

I was lucky enough to be asked to facilitate the gaming panel at the London Business School’s Tech Media Summit on Friday. I say lucky, as the panellists were an excellent group with a lot of strong opinions about the future of the gaming industry. Since the discussion was so rich, I thought I’d share my three biggest takeaways from the session* HD gaming is the new console gaming... but it’s going to remain a (profitable) niche Basically, console gaming is here to stay, but it will remain a relatively niche activity, compared to casual games. I found it interesting that EA now refer to the console as “HD” gaming. This makes total sense. The way I like to think about the industry is analogous to the moving picture industries. Console games are like movies (PC games are like arthouse movies) and social games are more like TV shows. In more detail, although movies have the massive budgets and huge total audience draw, there are very few made in a year and they actually make up only a sm...

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, Indian semis and the Academic Spring build momentum, HTC, Yahoo lose it; how the iPad dominates online shopping and why blue is the future of Internet infrastructure Emerging markets India’s semiconductor consumption is expected to grow 20% this year, to over $9Bn. The appetite of newly-middle class consumers for tech’ is huge – most good tech’ products provide unmatched aspirational bang for the buck compared to more traditional products like cars. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/10/semiconductor_india_growth/ TV set top boxes are just one such product. Technicolor have shipped 5Mn of them to Tata Sky customers. A huge number and demonstrative of the enduring value of TV in a market that has become consumerist in the era of smart devices....

One story dominated this morning’s London newspapers – Facebook’s audacious/ inspired/ lunatic $1Bn acquisition of tiny start-up Instagram . It’s no surprise that this is front page news. Everything that Facebook does these days seems to be so. But behind the “wow, that’s a lot of money” stories there should be serious concern about Facebook’s strategy and long term viability. To me, this acquisition smacks more of desperation than inspiration. In my view Facebook stopped being a genuine innovator in about 2007 and has rested on its laurels ever since. That was fine until smart computing took off, enabling the mass market of consumers to aggregate several social feeds together in one place. Simultaneously, people’s usage of social networking began to mature. Rather than consolidating all of their activity into one place, they diversified based on needs. Now the (sizable) leading edge of consumers can have Facebook to stalk their friends, Twitter to stalk celebrities, Linkedin to look f...

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: 300Mn reasons to be nicer to my clients, Apple go at gaming, lots of Chinese tech and Akira’s bike rides again Business models Fascinating – a “modest” improvement in customer experience versus your peers is worth about $300Mn in annual revenue, according to this study. I need to be nicer to my clients! http://www.temkingroup.com/news/report-the-roi-of-customer-experience The UK coalition government is putting a cap of £100Mn on IT contracts and projects. A brilliant idea in my view as my experience suggests that any project that is too large for one person to direct is doomed to failure. http://www.guardian.co.uk/government-computing-network/2012/mar/30/100m-it-project-cap As if things aren’t bad enough for RIM, a big marketing event in the UK ended wi...

There was a time when the process of strategic management involved a smart Manager sitting down and really thinking about the direction to take his or her business. This was a time before personal computing, widespread data availability; before Michael Porter and the cult of the McKinsey Way. Since there was no way to do rigorous analysis outside of the rarefied academic labs of RAND, people contented themselves with the application of intellect, experience and context. This was called the “Cognitive School” of strategy. Of course things have changed since then. We have a better way, a way that, empowered by cheap computing and a flood of data from the Internet, enables the 21st Century strategist to test any hypothesis to death in a matter of days. Never has the Excel Wizard been more valuable than now. Now the market’s obsession with Big Data has led to a new wave of analytical tools hitting the streets. These, we’re told, will supplement weak human logic with the two towers of soft...

This State of the Media Democracy B-side covers online recommendation, an interesting subject that was mentioned only briefly in the main report. Social recommendation online remains very much a la mode. With the launch of pinterest, recommendation has kicked into a new gear since consumers can now create their own beautiful, curated shop front of products. The question for us was whether the mass market of consumers were willing to give and take recommendations and therefore give us a hint as to the long term success of the new wave of rich social sharing sites. Overall we found that people were more likely to take advice than give it. 62% of respondents had bought a product based on online recommendations and 68% had decided not to buy because of negative reviews. On the opposite side of the transaction, only a third of consumers had posted a review. Further analysis shows that the second statistic masks some interesting underlying trends. It turns out that smartphone users are abou...