Versatile Amphibian

As 2015 winds to a close I've been reflecting on what I've learned this year. For succinctness, I'll keep this post just to 'learned about the Digital Economy'. Enjoy, and thanks for reading in 2015! This is taking ages... I've been amazed by the slow pace of change to digital economy cultures amongst organisations in all sectors. Having been thinking about this for years I take for granted that ideas like Lean Startup are the norm in management, but it seems not. I realise that I've been unrealistic. These kinds of massive changes take decades and I suspect I'll be advising on this phase for much of the next ten years of my career. The fundamental lessons are the same in every industry. This year, my team and I have worked in a huge range of industries, from government departments to construction machinery, snake bites to sportswear, groceries to car manufacturer, appliances to social media, and in most cases we've come in as generalists. And t...

One of the techniques we've been playing with this year is The Digital Nightmare Competitor, a framework for stretching the thinking of executives in a business by showing them how their industry could look strategically, operationally and economically in a digital world. I recently did such an exercise for a studio client and thought I'd share a nightmare I particularly like. Think of it as a Grinch-like Christmas present :)... November 5th  2026, London In late trading, shares in Wintermute , the apex media business of the 2020's hit a record high, valuing the business at more than $400Bn. This success marks a remarkable rise to prominence for an organisation barely a decade old. Classical disruption started with the customer From its launch in late 2016, Project Wintermute targeted people turned off by the complex media distribution and rights landscape of the mid-2010’s. By offering a single monthly subscription to unlimited premium digital conten...

As promised in a previous post about information symmetry , I’ve now completed my first-draft framework for assessing the success of digital economies.  Digital education was quite a tough ask as it’s a broad ranging subject. I think it condenses into three topics, though: Higher education , because we’re in an age of discovery and people need to be both intellectually inquisitive and able to learn. My view is that a properly thought out higher education system which emphasises self-study is fundamental to the success of nations. I have major issues with the idea that those who wish to learn should have to pay for that learning excessively as it encourages competition based on perceived rather than real outcomes (why go to a college where it’s harder to get a good grade?)… but I accept that I’m a throwback in this regard and that commercial undergraduate education is here to stay. I don’t care about what subjects are being studied either – it’s simplistic to suggest...

For narcissistic reasons I recently looked back on the most popular posts from 5 years of blogging and discovered that amongst the top 3 was this one on the relative sizes and evolution of social networks. Back in 2012 I was trying to make a point about the decline and slight return of MySpace. Looking around has made me realise that consolidated views of active users in this market are actually quite thin on the ground. So here's my read on the performance of key social networks from 2006 to 2015. Although no one has matched the breakout performance of Facebook in 2007, there are murmurs of hockey sticks from Snapchat and Instagram. Poor old Twitter failed to kick on from 2012, despite looking a bit sticky. Too slow to become a photo stream and too transient to be a publisher, Twitter has struggled a bit for direction in the intervening three years, scoring successes only through Vine. I hope this brief recap is useful. Rest assured that I remain vigilant for hints of canine...

In previous posts I've written about presentations on the trajectories of digital economies in Africa and Norway . Both of these were based on an unfinished framework I've been developing that tries to describe the success factors for national economies in the Early Digital Economy. I won't recap this framework in detail as its described in the posts linked above, but at the highest level it breaks the success factors into four categories: Pervasive access to computing Information symmetry Innovative AND entrepreneurial culture Digital skills and education In order to complete the framework and starting building a broader data set to test it I've now populated one of the two missing sections, information symmetry . This topic breaks into 4: Unfiltered access to information, enabling people to have open conversations and access (if not a preference for) content from every potential point of view. This is vital for true innovation as a fear of repercussions ...

I'm on my way back from Oslo, where I presented a keynote on the Digital Economy at the DND IT-lederkonferansen 2015 conference. Rather than do a standard Eight Traits presentation I decided to build on the work on success factors for digital economies that I prepared for SATNAC last month. You can find the presentation here . The structure of my argument was as follows: Norway was one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Industrial Economy. Before 1770 GDP per capita was on the same level as Mexico or Portugal; now it is more than twice that of the latter and three times the former. (I had to show 2003 numbers on the chart as doing 2015 made it look crazy!) But now the system is changing away from automation of physical processes into automation of mental ones. This will cause great disruption as it will polarise the productivity and hence the success of companies and countries. So how well set up is Norway? Success for digital economies is driven by four main factors: ac...

About 10 days ago my team and I published an analysis of the creative challenges for UK TV. Our concerns were that the creative basis of our TV economy was being damaged, despite an environment of increasing revenues, driven by TV's role in reinforcing the telecoms market through triple and quad-play bundling. What we found was troubling. Although revenues are indeed up by 10% since 2012, our share of global TV revenues has fallen and that the entire of the revenue increase can be accounted for by sports rights. As we showed in our 2013 Royal Television Society report , sports rights spending flows straight through the industry into the rights bodies, clubs and players, rather than into new skills, ideas and creative formats. And the worst is yet to come: the new Champions League and Premier League rights deals add more than a billion pounds a year onto the rights budget, so unless revenues increase new funding sources will be required if net spending on new creative content is t...

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.

Since I'm stuck on a Eurostar crawling through western France I thought I'd use the downtime to share this table I've made on the differences between Industrial and Digital companies across the main business functions. A strange insight into how my mind works... but hopeful a useful summary!

On Monday I was privileged enough to present a keynote at the SATNAC conference in South Africa, the slides for which can be found here . The presentation is a little less conceptual than my usual... in that there are significantly fewer pictures of cats off the internet. The thrust of my argument was as follows: Part 1 - setup We are in the early throes of a shift to a new economic system This means redefinition of the roles of individuals in society, businesses and governments in their lives Conceptually, some commentators believe that this new system will enable African countries to leapfrog over their developed world counterparts because they don't have the infrastructure, business model and cultural encumbrances of the Industrial Economy To examine whether that is true, we need to look at the ingredients for success at a macro (national or perhaps mega-corp level), which I'd describe as: Pervasive access to computing (because this is the general purpose technolo...

I had the chance to return to a topic that was very close to my heart for many years: that of the development of foundations for a digital economy in Africa. I'll drop a transcript of my keynote at SATNAC here in the next day or so, but for now, here's two high level figures on the investment over the last 5 years.  I'm planning to restart blogs on this topic (and in general) once I've completed my latest book, on the traits of a digital business, later in the year. In the interim, here's two figures: total investment in telecoms infrastructure, including international, core, MAN and access for all African countries, split by region. My summary of the figures is that although investment has been huge in African countries, on a per capita basis very few countries are even on par with the global average investment. Given where they're coming from, this means that African countries are effectively falling behind in terms of the foundational infrastructure th...

This is just a simple post to relay some thoughts I had on the ways in which digital publisher models will evolve over the next couple of years. I presented them at event this week and they seemed to resonate with the audience of publisher leaders. Comments much appreciated: Consumption trends: Mobile users interact c.3.5x more with services than regular online users, so we should expect massively greater consumption as the mass market becomes familiar Aggregation is now happening at the handset, rather than on a service UX/ UI becoming increasingly faddy, mirroring social and mobile gaming trends Short form video playing an increasingly important role, disrupting much of the low-quality TV audience… …short term upsurge in vlogging may turn into a longer trend if grey vloggers capture an older audience Social media is fragmenting and the role of advertisers is increasingly seen to be negative News encompasses a much broader range of topics… but many of them are highly pers...

One of the key findings from our Media Consumer Survey this year was the increasing lack of interest (and outright hostility towards) social media advertising. This is not really much of a surprise. While people have become more sophisticated in their use of social, splitting general narcissism (Facebook), professional narcissism (Linkedin) and photographic narcissism (Instagram) from sidesplitting banter (Whatsapp), advertisers have persisted with the blunt instrument of display advertising (see below). For the record, I have a long term girlfriend and don't currently operate a retail store... ...but perhaps Facebook is telling me something? In any case, only 9 percent of people responding to Media Consumer Survey told us that they ever clicked adverts on social media. Furthermore, our focus groups suggested that the main reason that people are migrating to platforms like Snapchat (7 second narcissism) is because they can't be spied on or marketed to by advertisers. Th...

Connected vehicles are a big theme again this year at Mobile World Congress, with many operators and OEMs rolling out their automotive partners on their stands. Since all of them are secretly just trying to keep up with the Joneses, I thought it might be entertaining to engage in a game of AutoTelco Top Trumps... Typically in this game a Ford Focus would score pretty low down the pecking order. In this case, however, Ford score big points for actually making theirs. Plus, they brought an electric one and that has enormous torque. And a mediocre app. So there. Next up AT&T, who, being wealthy Americans brought not one, not two, but three VeeHicles to the Congress. Their all American Cadillac CTS and electric ETS were rendered anonymous by a mighty Audi S7. 'It's not electric' said the demonstrator, 'it's plugged in to save the battery'. Bonus points to AT&T for surrounding the ETS with Virtual Reality headsets: another must have stand item in 2015. China ...

Ford is one of the many auto companies creating innovation centres that develop digital experiences around what are very industrial economy (and very disrupted products). They have three and their stand at Mobile World Congress showcased some of the fruits of their endeavours. Most conventional is an all electric Ford Focus that can sync with a mobile app, which gives the user a modicum of personalisation over the vehicle. You've seen it before. Ford's isn't the best. It isn't the worst. Blah. Then there's an electric bicycle designed with Dahon. This is supposed to be a range extension product that enables commuters to make a choice of methods of commuting based on traffic conditions, weather, lifestyle etc... There's a pointless app for the cycles lights, turn signals etc... Clearly none of them have ever ridden a bike as poking at tiny buttons while in the saddle is a bit of a dangerous idea! Finally and most interesting is a project being run out of their Pa...

It would be fair to say that I significantly overestimated Google's ability to kickstart a successful market for connected eyewear in 2014. I was therefore fascinated to see how Sony, that long dormant tech giant, would do with their belated take on the category. After all they remain imaging experts. Smarteyeglass Attach, developed by former Sony Ericsson engineers in Sweden, does what it says on the tin. It turns a normal set of spectacles into a smart set that can display data into the user's eye line by way of a tiny screen. It isn't a particularly elegent device, being nearly 3 times the size of Glass, but it's nothing like as cumbersome as the initial advertising videos suggest. For occasional use it'd be fine. Sony had two demos, one of a game of tennis, the other cycling. The latter was the more obviously useful. A map with directions, speed and direction data are displayed dynamically as the demo rolls through.  Although you do have to look quite far to the...

I've been watching Microsoft win real interest in 2015. They've got tech journos salivating with clever augmented reality technology, made Windows free, brought office to iOS and Android and launched a major ad campaign based on the superiority of the Cortana virtual assistant.  But one thing that's gone under the radar is the launch of the Lumia 435, a new smartphone targeting first time smartphone users and upgraders in less wealthy segments. In the UK is retails at just £70 without a contract. I  spent some time with the device at MWC and was very impressed with the experience.  Physically the demo units all sported rather garish luminous plastic backs and have a screen about the size of that in the original iPhone. It's thick and rather sharp edged next to the zeitgeist devices of today, but is still a fun, coherent package. The OS is Windows - for those of you haven't used the mobile version of this OS, that means scrolling down through tiles of various sizes r...

Late last year I worked with a client who was trying to decide what course to take with a digital commerce business they'd acquired. Without going into too many details, the business unit was effectively competing in a two player market across three or four digital channels. One of those is direct sales through eBay, which generated considerable revenues but produced very poor  margins due to highly competitive pricing and the complexity of running a large catalogue on eBay.  My recommendation was to cease trading this channel for two reasons: To simplify the business' operations so that the management could focus on gaining control in areas that are likely to be more critical to future success (read: direct, branded channels) If we cede control of an unprofitable, non-strategic but relatively large revenue channel to the competitor then it may well distract them from our renewed focus on the areas we think are really crucial for long-term victory I realised later th...