Versatile Amphibian

Let me get this out here right now: there are some awesome TVs  at CES this year. Never has the industry been bigger and bolder. Slim, sexy, 4K affairs drip from every surface of the megabooths at Sony, LG, Panasonic and others. But one OEM is the boss man of TV bling. You want OLED? You want SUHD and QUANTUM DOTS ? You want 170"? Samsung's got that, yo! "The World's Largest 170" TV" screams the advert for TVZilla, which looms on one entire wall of a darkened, reverential space in their city block-sized temple to screens. The colour from all of those independently-lit pixels is so bright that it leaves afterimages when you break the trance and look away. It's a monster; a poster giant for the industry's latest acronym: HDR. HDR, for the uninitiated (read: well adjusted) is all about luminosity. It stands for High Dynamic Range and basically means that the pixels on the screen are able to stretch from true black (i.e. the absence of brightnes...

Car technology has grown in importance at CES in the nearly 10 years since Ford became the first automotive company to exhibit here. Much of the talk in the lead up to the show was about the pace of change towards self-driving or autonomous vehicles. Needless to say that this was an important topic for most of the manufacturers I visited, but it was far from the central focus. Here’s my summary of what I saw and chatted about with Ford, Mercedes Benz, Audi, Toyota, Fiat, Hyundai, Kia and VW. Let’s start with the elephant in the exhibit hall: Autonomous vehicles The word on the street (see what I did there?) in the run up to the show was that there would be big announcements about self-driving technology. This didn’t really materialise, although Ford did suggest that they were hoping to get a ‘Level 4’ self-driving car on the roads for public consumption around 2020. ‘Level 4’, for those of you who are not doyennes of World of Jargon, means that the driver should not be re...

While I'm always cautious about announcing goals in advance of their completion ( because it makes them less likely to be achieved ), I've got a really exciting research agenda on the cards in 2016 and I therefore thought I'd share it to get some advance ideas and insights. So without further ado, here's the three Rumsfeldian 'known-knowns' for 2016. Eight Traits of a Digital Business - perhaps no surprise because I've talked about it a lot during 2015, my first business book, on the characteristics of successful (and unsuccessful) organisations in the Digital Economy is out in February. I'm super-excited about it as the response so far has been positive and I've finally finished editing several hundred references! More on this closer to the time... Productivity Benefits of Digital Cultures - a one year study I've been doing with Julian Birkinshaw at the London Business School, along with a number of colleagues. I think we've finall...

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...