Dec

30

From BRICS to MINTs

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

This is the season of the year for predictions. You will find little of that here. I feel like a fortunate seer in that none of my predictions have actually failed. I feel like a disappointed seer in that very few ever happened within the timeline of prediction, and indeed a few are still out there, ready to come screaming into focus on the “I told you so” arc of probability, in order to demonstrate once again that if you just forget the timing, everything you can envisage does eventually happen. And I don’t like predictions that follow the “whatever was beginning to happen last year will go on happening next year”, since I regard this as the province of newspapers with holiday space to fill. In its turn technology prediction is a mug’s game, and ever since I heard Alan Kay say that “everything that will be launched in the next 15 years has already been invented” I have resolved to steer clear.

Which only leaves us markets to talk about, and since they are ever-present prediction becomes a matter of when they come into focus rather than anything else. When we invented BRICS (and that last capital S is important if we are recognizing South Africa, as we should be) we were really saying, five years ago, that the long age of US global economic imperium was drawing to a close. A host of new nations was about to challenge that supremacy, and while the US was not minded to give it up easily, as demonstrated last year by its role in leading the global market once more out of cyclical downturn, economists now have a clear handle on when, in the next few years, China will resume its historic role of global market leadership, which it last held in the fourteenth century (think paper, gunpowder, printing and language).

This poses vital questions for information marketplaces. The Information Revolution has been led from the US both in terms of technology and in terms of services and languages. China seems well-equipped in the latter area, with players like Alibaba and Baidu, and the ability to use English very effectively – or buy its use. However, both India and Korea show more promise as the next hub of Silicon Valley proportions. And of course the US will not go away, though it may find it easier to go protectionist and isolationist in some aspects, living off its huge and wealthy internal marketplace, and no longer allowing itself to be the place where all information market prospects have to be proved. In many ways we are already seeing this, since success in the US no longer means automatic global market success. But if this is the outcome then it leaves the rest of the world with an issue – where do I go for growth if not to the USA?

Well, there is a very specific information markets answer to that. There is still huge and dynamic growth in BRICS. And beyond that, look at every country where half the population is under 25, and coming up to half of those are smartphone users. Markets where the smartphone is already the most important network connector and bridge to cloud-based computing, because there is no infrastructure around small populations of laptops or tablets that performs the role that we have identified in Europe, Russia, and the US for embedded network connectivity. These new fast-growth markets will teach us a great deal about cloud-working which we will bring back to the old world. For reasons best known to the economists, the first of these markets to show have been christened MINTs – Malaysia (or should that be Mexico? Or are Mexico and Canada too much part of a Greater US economy?), Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey. If it were not for sanctions, Iran would head this list. And note that we do not have Korea, the best networked country I have ever visited (10 Mbit broadband on a railway platform in Busan!) on either of these lists.

The ITU statistics tell the story (http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2013-e.pdf),although they are now a year old. But if half of the world’s population is under 25, and if only 25% globally have smartphones at the moment, then we are looking at one of the most exciting growth prospects that any industry has ever seen in global history. It may astound some that 40% of the world’s population is now online, but it seems to me vital to concentrate both on the services we supply them with now, and the way those services draw more of the remaining 60% online as well. And as we look at that 2.7 billion online total, it is as well to remember that in a global population of 7 Billion, the planet supports 6.7 billion mobile/cellular subscriptions. As we go along, each of the cultures that come into play will add something distinctive and exciting to our knowledge of the way in which information services and solutions work to change society.

Finally, what about the Old World? Well, as I have indicated, much of the market that we are discussing was created in the US, and will continue to flourish there. And do not write off Europe. Just imagine what it would be like, in ten years time, if politicians had cast aside the petty nationalisms and regionalisms that bedevil progress today, and a really integrated marketplace was emerging. A trading entity from Ireland to the Ukraine that thrived from being the world’s largest free trade zone, which was utilizing new memberships amongst poorer Eastern Europe to drive growth and using the technology – Europe is the most online region of the world – to regenerate itself. Stranger things have happened – though not much stranger. I admit! Meanwhile, pour another libation, accept my very best wishes for every success in 2014 and venture out into those newly MINTed global marketplaces!

Dec

11

Miley Cyrus v Pope Francis

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

A good headline attracts attention. And I do have some, lame, excuse, since my headliners were both in the top 10 mentions on Facebook. As a commentator on these matters I am only deficient in two small details: I am not on Facebook and, ahem, I did have to look up Ms Cyrus. But in other respects I come by the subject matter honestly. Both parties here had their 2013 fame boosted by a “new publishing” combo of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Neither was reliant on “old publishing” in the form of TV, radio or even newspapers or books, and indeed old media spent the year covering what these individuals did in new media terms. And while old media compete for the attention scraps (and I am sure Mike Schatzkin is right when he says that once TV becomes a world of self-scheduled downloads it competes more effectively with the time slots currently held by reading) our thoughts should turn naturally to the complete disintermediation of access in the network.

Which mine did when I saw Cambridge Assessment announce a conference on “The School in the Cloud” for next February (http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/insights/schools-in-the-cloud/). In some ways we have already removed “teaching”: what school, teacher or publisher would not subscribe to the idea of the “learner-centric” world today? And quite right too. Yet we have scarcely begun to cope with the real social ramifications of everyone learning at their point of learning readiness. Teachers have not been repositioned as mentors and moderators, the mobile/multi-site nature of education using technology is not yet clear, we still expect everyone to reach the same levels of achievement at the same time, and we blame the teachers when results fail expectations. Arguably, we should put the resources online, create the programming that links resources into learning journeys, watch the outcomes and abandon formal assessment. But the world that moves lightning fast in some places grinds very slow in others. This week I at last saw an advertisement for a course which cheerfully announced its BYOD status (Bring Your Own Device). And while I was delighted the same day to see the announcement that McGraw Hill Education would produce all their content to IMS Interoperability standards, allowing users the ability to use it with true digital flexibility, I still wonder why we did not do this years ago: recalling a discussion at an ELIG meeting in Sestre Levante in the early years of this century when we all agreed on the necessity – but did nothing.

And in all these discussions we keep ignoring the powerful things that happen when someone educates themselves. Yesterday the death of Colin Wilson was announced, whose books “The Outsider” and “Religion and the Rebel” lit up my teenage years and sent me to university as an existentialist. My first visit to Paris was dominated by the need to haunt the Boul’ Mich for a sight of Sartre, Camus or de Beauvoir. Wilson was an entire autodidact, son of a shoe industry worker who left school at 14. There is something wonderful about knowledge gathered the way he gained his, and small wonder he expounded it with such enthusiasm, given that he had quarried it himself. And how sad it is that, now that both of my younger children are at university themselves, I can confess to my entire dissatisfaction with the way they were educated at both public and private schools. What do you recommend in terms of reading around the subject at A level? I asked the head of Classics. Not on my course he replied. All the pupil needs to know is the mark scheme. This is about Results. Reading around the subject? he repeated. Takes far too much time and any additional knowledge gained only confuses them. Well, Mr Gradgrind is now over 150 years old. Dickens’ brilliant creation should be left where he belongs and removed from current teaching/anti-learning practice. Do we want education as workflow (which, paradoxically, is what assessment has given us) – or as Discovery?

So the disintermediation of the teacher may bring some unexpected rewards. Along with the same process in most other professions. The shattering of the legal profession in the last downturn is typical. As we turn the Cloud into everyone’s back office, so we grow in realization that most back offices are all similar And once you get into workflow, you are moving away from reference and research – and reading around the subject. Legal services which began as support activities like PLC, acquired this year by Thomson Reuters, end up as a wholly new way of out-sourcing areas like corporate law. With operations like Axiom Law (http://www.axiomlaw.co.uk/) growing rapidly – and globally from the start – this type of disintermediation may be quicker. And, incidentally, they will need the same skill sets as current publishing/legal services. It is no accident that Axiom have appointed, it is said, a leading Lexis executive to run one of their regional businesses.

Current publishers will react in two ways. One will be to develop the software which enables learners to learn by creating journeys and relearning experiences, and link relevant content, their own and other people’s, to it. And the other will be to ensure that base level primary content is available in the system at all points. In this regard the science publisher’s who worked with CERN on SCOAP3, the largest physics archive ever assembled, which goes live on 1 January 2014, are to be congratulated. And so, incidentally, is Pope Francis, who beat Miley Cyrus by seven places to head up the Facebook league table (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/pope-francis-miley-cyrus-and-a-royal-baby-what-facebook-talked-about-in-2013-8994023.html). Now that’s a rare victory for the archaic tongue – pity I never managed to teach myself Latin successfully!

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