Versatile Amphibian

Comscore just released their latest numbers for European Internet usage . Two things stood out for me. First, the UK has maintained its position as the most online and the most engaged European country. Despite the size of the base, the UK is also one of the fastest growing markets in terms of engagement. Of major developed countries only Sweden had a faster growth in engagement (14% YoY growth plays 9%); Russia and eastern European countries continue to grow strongly but from a very low base of online engagement. The average online audience member in the UK now spends one and a quarter hours a day online, which brings me to my second point. Although viewing fell very slightly this year (pre-Olympics, it must be said), live TV occupies an average of 4 hours and 1 minute a day of everyone's time. And 90% of this content was consumed live, despite more than 50% of the population now owning a DVR . So live TV, the medium that has been "dying" since the late '80...

As Ory Okolloh recently put it: if mobile phones are the computers for Africa, why do all the journalists who write about them do so on laptops? I wholeheartedly agree. The smartphone is a great handheld entertainment and communication platform, but it isn’t a good device for the creation of much more than a drunken text message. No, the truth is that that laptop computer - or some variation of it - is almost certainly the utility computing platform for a connected Africa. It can do pretty much everything a smartphone, TV, desktop or tablet can do, yet costs less than any one of those devices. It isn't perfect, but it is the best utility computing device available today. In my view the device challenge is not to identify the computer for Africa, but to create a supply chain that reduces unit costs to a point that is affordable to the middle class (in the first instance). So if the computer for Africa probably isn't a phone, why should it'd connection be designed for a ph...