Versatile Amphibian

This week: PS4 aims to create gaming celebs, NASA connects moon, Nokia arrives at party 3 years late, electric bikes and self-assembly game consoles Business models An interview with one of the designers of the new Sony PS4, which is intended to ‘celebritize’ gamers. I like the idea and it’ll be a tiny benefit to a subset of gamers. Ultimately though, the PS4 will win or lose on the quality of its games. Simples. www.fastcompany.com/3020236/tech-forecast/building-a-console-from-the-ground-up-playstations-top-priority-was-to-make-ga Some useful data points about when people visit mobile websites versus desktop. Not ground breaking, but nice to have. http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/online/when-are-mobile-owners-visiting-retail-sites-37655/ Now this is interesting: Twitter is now a more important social network than Facebook amongst teenagers. http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/online/twitter-overtakes-facebook-as-teens-most-important-social-network-37352/ Facebook ad performan...

Digital’s a broad church and I think you need to read widely to get a sense of the changes it’s bringing. This week: Google wants your face, Internet advertising is doomed, Korean killer robots, hovering rockets & Wes’ new movie Traditional business models A sneak peek at Apple’s new headquarters. Berliner… http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24290808/apple-offers-sneak-peek-at-its-new-headquarters#! Apple also announced this week that it’s hired Burberry’s CEO to be their Head of Retail. Burberry have been notably successful in creating a unique luxury retail experience, so this move makes a lot of sense for Apple in my view. http://gigaom.com/2013/10/15/apple-poaches-burberry-ceo-ahrendts-to-be-its-new-retail-chief/ New business models Every self-respecting internet ad platform has the ability to self-serve, now FourSquare has one too. This might finally make the service useful outside of the USA. As an aside: although I rather like checking in, I don’...

I sat in on an interview with Danny Cohen at the RTS last night. The topic was the future of the BBC and there were a few nuggets on channels, iPlayer and the BBC online that I felt like sharing. Here goes: Channels still have relevance In general, channels are still important - people are launching them rather than shutting them down. The BBC will also be using iPlayer to create permanent channels for their big brands, like Radio 1 and pop-up channels for big events like Wimbledon, Glastonbury and the Proms. Program moves will continue to occur - for example Great British Bake Off is moving from BBC 2 to BBC 1 - even though it regularly hits a 7 million audience on the former, Danny believes that the shift to 1 will boost that audience even further. Even in a digital, multi-platform world the channel brand and EPG position is an important factor in people's decisions about what to watch. He gave the example of Andy Murray tennis matches, which sometimes start on 2 and move t...

Last week was a bit of a busy one, but I still had chance for a bit of reading. Here’s a brief roundup of stories from the TMT industry that caught my eye. This week: Google vs Facebook in Internet Risk, goodbye  Google TV, cars drive themselves (but not in Canada), kids break Murdoch’s tabs Traditional business models FT says that its print product will henceforth derive from the digital. I’m not so sure that’s really practical. There’s a big difference between the fast twitch, unlimited word count world of the web and the more structured, quality-first print product. There’ll be two newsrooms for a long time yet. http://gigaom.com/2013/10/09/financial-times-our-print-product-will-derive-from-the-web-offering-not-vice-versa/ BT bows to the inevitable and goes back into mobile. I think they’ll do well, since BT Retail has seemingly figured out how to do product marketing. Bad signs for O2 though, who now have the poorest spectrum asset in the UK and seem to be goin...

A number of people have asked for a transcript of my speech from this year's RTS Cambridge on the future of TV. Here's the edited highlights (because the visual gags just don't work in text ;) ) ---START--- What television is today is little changed from a decade ago; and, at the same time, TV is profoundly different:   A decade ago , the majority of TV sets sold were 25 inches or smaller. [i]   16 million homes received analogue TV signal. [ii]   Sixty per cent of the country only had five channels. [iii]   High Definition TV was yet to launch. Netflix was a US based company that used the post to distribute DVDs to its 1.5 million customers. [iv]   YouTube had not been founded.   Google – who’d buy Youtube for $1.65 billion in 2006 - had just broken the $1 billion revenue barrier, for the first time. [v] There were two million broadband households [vi] …   … but broadband speeds started at 128 Kbit/s , that’s one eighth of a ...

I was invited to speak at a DPA event on online video news this morning. Here's a synopsis of my session, which focused on the form online video news may take in the future. Video makes up about 60% of the traffic on the Internet. Outside of Asia, Youtube alone is nearly 20% of total traffic. TV viewing hours in Europe are holding steady at about four hours per day; in the UK about three quarters of consumers view the TV as their primary source of world news. So video remains at the core of the entertainment proposition in 2013; however it's worth reflecting that historically online and broadcast video have been profoundly different. TV is professionally produced, broadcast in high quality in a curated experience that consists of relatively small amounts of video. Online video, by contrast, is of generally low quality. It is produced by amateurs in massive volumes and is typically aggregated automatically on a small number of sites. This was the situation until Steve Jobs...

I’m presenting at WAN IFRA in Berlin tomorrow, which meant that I had a little time to listen in to some of the presentations going on around the event. Since it’s fair to say the news industry is still experimenting with digital, I thought some case studies might be interesting. I was particularly taken with the work of Espen Egil, from VG Norway, a newspaper group that’s been very innovative in its use of new digital formats. A few examples: One. The fire truck scandal A Norwegian district was campaigning to get a new fire truck as there’s was very old. VG turned this into a social campaign in which people submitted photos of their old fire trucks. VG put them onto an interactive map so that readers could compare different districts. 40% of districts had a profile in the first week and, of course, the fire departments started posting pictures of their shiny new trucks, so both ends of the spectrum were covered. Link: http://www.vg.no/spesial/2012/brannbiler/ Two. Kind...

I’m still easing myself back into my weekly blog after a long absence. To that end, here’s a brief roundup of stories from the TMT industry that caught my eye this week. This week: Deep web trembles as Feds shutter Silk Road, Google’s transformation into design leader, Facebook Wi Fi launches, 3D printers hit UK high street, cold brew in the home finally a reality Traditional business models I like that Apple outdoes Google as Executives pick of the most innovative companies – their design dictatorship is probably more attractive to the average CEO than Google’s chaotic approach. I’d love to see who made it into the long tail of the survey. Chances are that those are the true innovators. http://www.businessinsider.com/most-innovative-companies-in-the-world-2013-9 Twitter has announced its IPO, initially for a fairly modest $1Bn. Notable that it’s still loss making despite over 200 million users. Trouble with Twitter is that it will be much more difficult to generate lo...

I attended a really interesting panel discussion on smart cities at FutureFest. Here’s some takeaways: One. Big Business’ view of smart cities is not a popular one Big company’s (IBM and Cisco were name checked) attempts to create momentum around smart cities were lampooned by the experts. Someone described their ideas as attempts to create “panopticans”, designed to a central plan where ordered streets and facilities are monitored by all seeing computers. This is scary, probably impractical, but most importantly pretty boring. In my view the delights of cities are in the discovery of new nooks and crannies, the spontaneous sprouting of new businesses and sub-cultures as different groups mix. Central planning creates boring cities, like Dubai or Doha where culture has to be manufactured. I remember being told a story about an attempt to build a “soho” area in Dubai… where the rents would be much higher than surrounding areas because of the unique environment. Missing the point, I ...