May

16

Up and About in Amsterdam and London

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

It is about seven years ago now that I crowded into a meeting room in San Mateo, California, and was introduced to the entire staff of MarkLogic. I was in the midst of a negotiation just up the road in Burlingame to sell my company to Outsell, but I had been energised by a conversation with Dave Kellogg, the very charismatic CEO of the young MarkLogic, to pay them a visit. “Stand over here”, said Kellogg, “and tell us where Europe is”. Presuming that he meant European publishing, rather than the Alps and the Pyrenees, I began a halting description of a market in slow digital transition, but was soon overtaken by other voices. Apparently, MarkLogic was the latest thing in database technology, and apparently the primitive nature of the market I had been apologetically describing, was pure opportunity lurking in the shadows and waiting to be turned into the stardust of a new age of media management. I drove away feeling that we might have gone an adjective too far in our enthusiasm but that something here had to be watched. This week I found out what that was.

Since that meeting I have had a long and pleasurable association with the company, and last week its annual user show arrived in a Europe it now knows intimately, with MarkLogic World 2015 conferences in Amsterdam and London. Alongside these events a dinner for publishing people took place, and I was able to attend and speak at both. With revenues last year marching past the $100m marker, and with a further funding round completed last week producing a further $100m in investment from backers that included Sequoia and Wellington, this is another emerging Silicon Valley force to be reckoned with in software. You would need a conference facility to speak to its 400 plus staff, and it is currently just discovering where AsiaPacific is – in media terms. And while publishing was a very proper starter market, the company is deeply embedded in government computing (Obamacare), broadcasting (the BBC Sports Olympic coverage was a breakthrough moment for a database that could allow 13 million viewers that ability to configure their own personalised view of the content), financial services and in all those accidental publishing places where entities who never thought of themselves as media now find that in a network context that is exactly what they are.

I am not the right person to expound on NoSQL databases, though I get a stronger sense each year that I am looking at the next Oracle, now directed by the equally charismatic Gary Bloom, a business leader whose own experiences were shaped in the Oracle that now faces this competitive pressure. Nor should I be writing about semantic analysis, triple stores or the vital importance of being able to work with structured and unstructured data in the same context. But I do now see clearly what happens as a result, and the transformation these technologies are creating in the lives of the people around those dinner tables. Job titles here become meaningless. These hard-working people were various designated as CTO, CIO, Chief Data Officer, Data Architect, Chief Product Manager, Business Development Manager and many more combinations of these. But they were around those tables because of a shift in power that has taken place throughout the media, and I slowly realised how little we have taken that shift into account and what it means for creativity in our businesses.

In the dim and distant past, in Old Publishing, editorial direction was the root of creativity. We spoke of “flair” and “hunch” as components in the business of selectivity. Then, we had Marketing, and we spoke of “fieldwork” and “research” as the drivers of creative decision making about how to formulate our products and develop our offerings. Many of us have now moved to the next stage as well, but it could be argued that we are in some respects still living in the Marketing-driven world. In very crude terms I could argue that the Editorial world was driven by format – books, magazines, newspapers. The Marketing phase was driven by content – trying to assemble content ever more carefully to meet the perceived needs of customers. The current drive, although it began in the search for ways of speeding up new product development, is towards Solutions, producing answers to real problems expressed by users, but creatively organising those solutions so that they produce measurable customer benefit, aka Value, often expressed in terms of productivity or cost saving.

And who in our information business is organising this new creativity? Not the editorial department, who are now just a part of process, if they exist at all. Not the Marketing department, who are solely occupied in presenting the results of what we produce to the customers we are trying to reach. The real creatives in information companies are those responsive to the unrecognised force derived from living in a networked society: in a networked economy the service requirement derives from the all-powerful user. All those job titles listed above, from CTO to Data Architect, are increasingly being turned inside out, and ceasing to be functions of internal systems development. Instead they are becoming the way in which we respond to what markets need, design solutions that make sense to end users, and create wealth.

If this is the case then some will feel that the creative role of the Data Architect is grossly under-recognised. I would agree, though the power in these roles, derived at once from a networked economy and from the rapid proliferation of intelligent ways of organising data like MarkLogic, is shown both in the scramble to recruit talent in this field and by the growing influence it has on budgets and expenditure. And this also raises a worry. If these people are the creative cadre of the future, are information businesses exposing them sufficiently to their customers. And given that customers never entirely told the truth in the long history of market research (a bit like political opinion polling?) do the designers of our solutions get enough observation time inside the customer context to discern where value may lie? We have the project development strategies (Agile et al) and we have the tools and structures, but do we have the evidence upon which to make decisions that will add value in contexts where our customers expect ever more customized responses from us?

Apr

26

Not Virtual, Just Reality

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Many people seem to have fallen victim to what I want to call TES (Tech Expectation Syndrome). They get lost in the ocean swells between over-hyped pre-exploitation excitement, and gradual market development under a different guise is a different context. Looking back through my file of words that seem to have disappointed at the top of the typical Gartner expectation spike and are now safely on the plateau of exploitation, I find things like VADs and VANs (now our digital networks), GIS (now a part of every activity known to man since geolocation became the bedrock of mobile telephony), AI (now becoming the M2M nexus of the working world, and so terrifying that even Stephen Hawking cannot exorcise it) …and, of course, VR, the wonderfully exciting 3D environment that we fell in love with, and then decided that headsets were not for us, and that this would only work for dedicated gamers.

And if forgetfulness about how much unexploited technology is available to our new product and service development cycles is one of our sins in the publishing and media marketplaces, let me add another while the Sunday afternoon mood of self-flagellation is upon me. After sustained efforts of re-invention, we keep falling back on PSP (product simulation psychosis). We put extra stuff, more video, longer text, archival support and other elements into the digital “version” and then promote it and sell it just as if it were analogous to the print “version”. We know these things are growing apart but we seem reluctant to acknowledge the difference. No where has this been more marked than in the newspaper industry, which strictly speaking we should now stop calling the newspaper industry. If we called it “news media” we might get closer to seeing how differentiation is taking place, and mark the points at which the digital service elements are going out on a track that print can never follow, and creating information in formats which will become the hallmark of communication. They are the defining moments in the separation of print and digital, and we should point to them whenever some senior executive says (so many do, I am afraid) “There will always be a market for print” or “digital is neat but what are its real advantages for which I would pay extra”.

They still say these things and there have been moments when I have thought the entire news industry would go the way of Yellow Pages, despite Vox, Buzzfeed, Fast Company (and that stubbornly non-innovative digital analogue of print, the Huffington Post). And then last week I saw surprizing green shoots of change, and not from the new digital news industry, but from those good souls who have huffed and puffed up and down the the peaks of inflated expectations a time or two, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The latter have been celebrating Nasdaq’s birthday in fine style. They have taken my pathetic wave metaphors in a different context into a graphers delight, a 3D journey around the index from its inception (http://graphics.wsj.com/3d-nasdaq/). Use it on your mobile, walk round the room with it, or (get this!) get the WSJ headset and really appreciate it. This is not just a beautiful birthday card – you are looking at the way graphical information will be read, or, rather experienced, as the years go on. Here we move away from anything which can be “printed”, and once this style of activity does become the way in which we experience and record change, then only the network can deliver it.

But I would have to reserve special praise for what the New York Times did last week on an architectural review of the new Whitney Museum building (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/19/arts/artsspecial/new-whitney-museum.html). This is a delight to the eye. Once you have seen this you will never want to read a review of a new building which does not include this type of 3D analytical effect. It enhances every readers’ appreciation of the points Michael Kimmelman is making, yet this is VR lite, needing no headset and simply deploying great VR graphics to display the planes and vistas of a new building in a moving dynamic. And until they start moving you think you are just encountering another illustration in text. This answers the question – what would you pay extra for – because it adds a new dimension to understanding which could only have come from this environment.

We have noted here before the way in which old businesses can survive, despite and sometimes because, they are family businesses with a history of transition. A few months ago the Holtzbrinck family cashed their “get out of newspaper jail” card with Springer; both DMGT and Hearst have made huge strides in diminishing the effects of blighted newspaper advertising cycles by becoming experts in B2B data businesses, to the point where these assets begin to dominate all others. But if the Sulzburgers and the Murdochs are to escape then it will probably have to be re-invention that does it, and until last week there seemed to be few signs that this was likely to happen. But here, rather than playing games with the paywall business model, or buying related digital businesses that are not well understood corporately, both of these traditional market players showed early signs of trying to understand how technology could be deployed to add new value for the user. These are late conversions on the road to digital Damascus, but perhaps even more welcome as a result.

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