Mar

22

Crowds, Voices and no Ties

Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

Two days were enough this week to encompass an industry in the making and in transition. Many participants at the London Web Summit on Monday, as well as at the IXXUS Future of Publishing meeting on Tuesday, would describe themselves as being in the Information Industry (aka media, publishing, information services and solutions etc). I went to both, and as I staggered home on Tuesday night I could only reflect that this is not one industry but a hundred, and the cultural differences between the pieces are now profound. In fact, this industry is a Lilleputian version of the whole world around it, which sounds the way it should sound. But doing the breadth in two days? Very frightening.

For a start there were 1000 delegates in the Old Brewery in Chiswell Street on Monday. Our ebullient hosts, Paddy Cosgrave  and Mike Butcher (TechCrunch), compered it with the energy of a variety show in the Edwardian music halls. And they had a band that provided a 10 bar intro/exit for every speaker. It had something of everything, and, at King Paddy’s command, no ties were allowed (Yes, this is the sort of thing you do have to tell the English). And like a variety show (vaudeville) it was good in parts and not in other parts. The panels, despite some good appearances, were often   so hurried and poorly moderated that it was hard to extract meaning at all. And the audience was very mixed – investors networked less easily here with a vast crowd of start-up hopefuls than they did at last year’s similarly sized NOAH show, but the same messgae was available. The energy is back in the London market, just as it is in Berlin and Barcelona, but London is the place to get the finance and finger the future. My Investor of the Day award goes to Niklas Zennstrom of Atomica: despite the questions from his moderator he came across as someone who had learnt real lessons from Skype and Joost, and knew how to listen to the next crazy and apply the right degree of enthusism, tolerance and sophisticated discouragement. And my Thinker of the Day would have to be J P Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com. His observation that we would at last overcome the entrapment of the Qwerty keyboard, and that the future of work was only understandable if we saw it as as massively integrated multi player videogame was delightful, as was his insistence that knowledge work on the network was “bursty” – so we invented the need for meetings to fill the gaps between activities.

Also high quality was the discussion on the future of money. We had two credit card -based services ranged against two chip-based money transfer services. I give the latter my vote, but questions like cost-free money transfer, the death of cash and the removal of some of the key roles of banks played very well, as did the notion that with digital money comes the end of money-handling privacy. Gareth Williams did a great job of persuading us that the Edinburgh – based, Scottish Equity Partners-backed online travel service SkyScanner would break into the Expedia /Kayak marketplace, but in truth its revenues of £2.5-3.0 m per month on a lead gen/referral business model, from 20 million unique monthly users, shows that it is well on the way. Offices in Singapore and now Hong Kong emphasize where the growth is, and 7 million apps testify to the mobile nature of the challenge. But is Google waiting to pounce on all of this?

So what else did I learn? That YAiA stands for “Yet another iPad App”. That 50% of Turkish shopping for consumer goods is now online. That Google only has 20% of the Russian search market, and Facebook is only the fourth most popular online service. That FAB has 3 million members (50% social network, 40% mobile) and sold 111,111 products last month on the way to revenues of $110m this year. So some of the players in the hall were definably big already. But you could not say that of Nick D’Aloisio, aged 16, funded to the tune of £350k , and launching his service (www.summly.com) to provide artificial intelligence support to people doing research online who needed to summarize what they had read. When he said that he was going to take two years off to do his A level school exams, there was a palpable sigh of relief from the 20 year old entrepreneurs in the audience.

It didn’t matter to me , proudly sporting the only grey beard in the room. But I have to admit that I felt relief amongst my peers in the IXXUS event, held in sunshine on the Kensington roof garden, which is improably furnished with ducks and flamingos (live). An audience of technocrats from all of the leading information services players  were looking at the issues surrounding what seems to me the key question of the hour – how do we effectively re-platform in ways that add to our asset value, increase our ability to act fast to change our service dimensions in times of torrential market change and still stay within a broad avenue of standards now established and extending from XML  right through to RDF and SPARQL. We can now discuss these things in London – they are of the present and I was delighted to hear John Powell of Alfresco (a real ornament to the Open Source model) and the IXXUS team under Steve Odart providing practical advice and guidance to real and urgent questions from the audience. Three years ago I would not have been allowed vocabulary like “ontologies” or “triples” in a publishing context: today this is coinage of the conversation and I rejoice in it.

And one last observation. Go to a conference of 1000 web developers and investors and what happens: from breakfast to dinner I never arrived at a boxed food table in time to find a box left to consume. Good for your figure, you may observe. Yes, but I made up for it the next day. They may have their drawbacks but publishers do know how to eat, and IXXUs responded to their proclivities very well indeed.

Feb

27

Beyond the Death of Email

Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, privacy, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

I am not sure that I go as far as “Email is where knowledge goes to Die” (http://ipadcto.com/2011/02/28/email-is-where-knowledge-goes-to-die/) but I certainly respond to the current levels of discontent over web-based email, and the comScore survey  on data, comparing 2011 and 2012 and released this month, produces some evidence of dramatic declines is usage:

 

 

And we all think that we know the reasons. We see the rise of social media and MMS/SMS as equivalents to what happened to the letter form in the mid to late 1990s. In retrospect what happened then seems to have been compressed into a very short time. One minute I was a regular desk worker, with a dictation machine and a secretary, and the right to spend a week deliberating before responding to an idea or an invitation. In an instant all that morphed into a world where response had to be, at most, within the day, though communication could be shorter and less formal. Much wider groups could be co-opted into the ongoing discussion. I now needed to become a two fingered keyboarder. And changing skills meant changing etiquette. I had just asked whether I needed to have two email addresses – one for public and one for private correspondence – when the roof fell in and everyone reached everyone with everything everywhere – including  sending so much unwanted advertising matter in one form or another that it was easy to predict that this alone would bring email systems groaning to a halt.

Now email itself is the ancient regime. There is an interpretive temptation as a result to think that events are repeating themselves and that we are all going evolve into a social network + texting communications environment. Certainly articles proclaiming the “Death of Email” have gone incautiously down that track, though the real trends may be a little harder to forecast. To discover them we may need to be  more critical in our analysis of what is missing from our email world, and what corporates as well as individuals want to get from their communications. What is happening to email at least permits us to make alternative predictions along these lines:

* Corporate email, internal and private and housed inside enterprize operating systems, makes a comeback. External clients and associates can be co-oped into these circles, temporarily or permanently.

* Corporate users at last discover why they created a corporate Wiki, which has been standing all unused for five years.

* Social media applications like LinkedIn or Yammer (micro-blogging for corporate users: www.yammer.com) will handle a great deal of outbound corporate messaging as web-based email continues to decline, and orkers seek to diminish the time-wasting capacity of email.

* The largest increase in communications will be M2M (machine to machine), as sensors drop below $10 each and all of our gadgets start reporting that they need servicing, or fuel, or that they are too hot or cold, or we are almost out of milk.

* Amongst consumers, Facebook and IM take up the slack, as even less formal and even shorter communication modes become essential.

* Voice drives many of these applications, either via voicemail or through voice to text service environments.

* Most personal communications will be mobile  device originated and received.

Within two years, if comScore is correct, those of us who have to send a seventeen year old a text and a voice mail asking him to read his email will be ceasing to bother with the longform communication at all, and in five years email will be an important, but minority, expression of the need to communicate. Looking back, we shall say that we went in this direction in order to realize a need for privacy, but that was only a part of the question. In fact, email overwhelmed us. It became the excuse not to work, instead of a part of work itself. And as soon as it became the focus of unsolicited advertising, its days were inevitably numbered. Far from the future being inexorably web-based, we now perceive that many functions that we rely upon will retreat to the internet or the mobile network: interpersonal communications will lead the way.

So is this really another “death of advertising” piece in disguise? As online advertising share of market continues to grow, and as online sales show impressive annual growth it would seem perverse to take this line. Yet privacy, in currently proposed legislation on both sides of the Atlantic, seems like a political crowd pleaser. And behind it lies another urge, which is not just to control and defend one’s own information, but to be able to trade that information  to the highest bidder in return for perceived or sought after privileges. Seeing the founder of Paoga (www.paoga.com) across a crowded room last week reminds me that there have been visionary attempts to do that for some time, so this email decline triggers their powerful emergence. We then create a permissive society of a different type, where we have allowed a marketeer whose goods we seek to message us in return for discounts, coupons or other advantages, and in a context where that privilege can be removed rather more decisively than the current rigmarole unleashed on email users when they hit “unsubscribe”.  Social marketing takes up the pace from wasteful and intrusive email blanket bombing. For a time we get back into balance – though no doubt we soon overbalance again in new and unpredictable ways.

Yammer is now used in 100,000 US corporations. Emails are still not admissable in much litigation in UK courts. The speed of change is now so fast that we  do not get to fully move into something before we begin move out of it. And, alas, as soon as we migrate our communications elsewhere, Mr Murdoch will probably employ someone to find a new way of hacking into them. Eventually, we shall reach Venusian mind transfer (aka thought driven computing) and StarTrek will return to high fashion. In five years we will describe email with the same nostalgia now reserved for letter post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

« go back — keep looking »