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. Just to warn you, this week I’ve been feeling particularly sarcastic. This week: the week of fear: cord cutting rife, consoles dead, apps will kill films, Galaxy smashes iPhone, China hacks Coke, LeBron kills NBA videogames & scientists laser paper FOR FUN! Digital media Panic! Cord cutting is rife again. Or perhaps not. http://allthingsd.com/20121107/cord-keeping-pay-tv-shrinks-for-the-quarter-stays-steady-for-the-year/#comment-703163289 An interesting use of images from Instagram to create an NBC news microsite on the US elections. This kind of thing certainly won’t replace mainstream news broadcasting, but it does add colour around the main HD editorial. Powered by Chute, by the way, which is an interesting little technology that enables social medi...

October was a $900m month for African telecoms investment, with mobile and backhaul infrastructure benefiting most from a sudden upsurge in activity. The biggest news on the continent was probably Vodacom, MTN and 8ta taking LTE live in South Africa. Third player, Cell C have also promised LTE before the end of 2012. As I mentioned in a previous post, LTE is slowly entering African markets although take-up will remain very constrained by the cost of end use devices for the foreseeable future. I also worry about the risk of returning to a communications infrastructure that it not compatible between countries. Chinese standards for LTE – proposed in a number of countries – won’t interoperate with the versions found in Japan, Korea and the West. Since it is business users that are most likely to use LTE in the early days, I worry that this will act as a small brake on intra-continental trade. There were two big stories in Kenya, where Safaricom is spending $161.7m to install 1,800km...

I've been doing a bit of analysis on smart device shipments and thought I'd share. My thesis is that the true impact of smartphones and tablets are in the supply chain effects of a billion unit computing device category. Smart devices aren't quite going to make it that far in 2012 - my estimate is that 700m smartphone and 125m tablet units will ship this calendar year - but it seems likely that with falling prices and ever-growing consumer acceptance they'll make it to a billion total in 2013. What this means is that the components of smart devices - processors, DRAM, screens, interfaces, cameras, GPS, Wi-Fi and cellular base bands - are all dirt cheap. Pennies or a few dollars for serviceable kit. That's massively reduced the cost of creating new categories of computing. Small businesses can once again engineer cutting edge products merely by virtue of their insight and ability to innovate. A fabbing plant and hundred-million dollar research budget are no lon...

The market went tower mad (or should that be "mast crazy"?) in October, with large sales of cellular towers in the USA , Brazil , Cameroon and Cote d'Ivoire . Nearly $3b was spent on assets that the buyers - generally infrastructure or private equity funds - thinking they will represent an excellent long term investment as the market goes increasingly mobile.* One thing I noticed in analysing the amounts being paid was that once again African operators sold off their assets on the cheap. The chart shows valuations of tower infrastructure globally for the last three years. The orange dots are African. Even if you remove the inflating effects of the USA from the data, it's clear that African countries underperform in asset sales. And these aren't wartorn countries ruled by tinpot dictators. Both Cameroon and Cote d'Ivoire are reasonably stable growth economies with 20m citizens. I suppose we should thank market capitalism for asset owners seeking an early...

I’ve had a busy week, so this is a small – but perfectly formed - collection of articles on the technology and media industries that have caught my eye. This week: Uniqlo reinvents alarm clock, Torygraph charges foreign Officers for access, EE launches UK LTE, Apple scandal as iPad secretly faster than... er... iPad Digital Media Social media sites continue to fragment – just launched is Mepedia a linkedin for those poor, stuggling millenials. Bless ‘em. http://www.fastcompany.com/3002455/mepedia-linkedin-desperately-unemployed-generation Apps are a growing part of branding, but most companies still make them joyless, semi-functional mini websites. Not Uniqlo. Their alarm clock app is bang on brand and on trend for the target market. Which I guess is... er... me? http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671109/uniqlos-smartphone-alarm-app-is-as-sleek-as-japanese-pants Disney got Star Wars for $4Bn. Here’s what it’ll make them back. http://www.statisticbrain.com/star-wars-total-franchise-...

This week I’m going to go counter-trend and say nothing about Surface or the tiny iPad or the sleek new Macs. You’ve all heard enough about those things and I can’t add much. Instead, this post is a collection of the less well publicised articles that have caught my eye. This week: CMOs slam mobile, Mayer prepares for Yahoo! future, Penguin House emerges from shadows, future of wearables and connected cars in focus Digital media CMOs aren’t happy with the results they’re seeing from mobile advertising. Not a surprise to me – the techniques of mobile advertising are not well established at the moment, so trial and error is inevitable. http://www.digiday.com/brands/brands-struggle-in-mobile/ Some Olympic Games sponsors saw a lift in brand awareness. I hope it was worth it! http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/topics/branding/some-olympics-sponsors-enjoyed-lift-in-brand-awareness-esteem-24181/ It is a little silly that ebooks are counted as software and therefore attract VAT in the...

I'm hearing a great deal about the current e-lending review that Ed Vaizey has kicked off and, since it's topical, I thought I'd offer some opinions. Commercial players in the book value chain - the government contends - are constraining the growth of that market and thereby making the library less relevant. I can’t help feeling that MPs are missing the point. First, some numbers. Public libraries in the UK cost the tax payer just under £1.2b in 2011. Amazingly, just £70m (6.5%) of that total was spent on books – less than was spent staff (more than half the total), “support services” (somehow discrete from staff: 14%) and premises (13%). Although funding declined a little in the downturn, it has been stable for the last couple of years and all the forecasts I’ve seen have it pegged to inflation here on in. The ebook market, on the other hand, is going gangbusters. Our latest numbers (October 2012) put ereader penetration of the adult penetration at 20%. The last offici...