Jul

17

Hectic Diversions

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

These are meant to be the dog days of summer. Lazy interludes when half the media-eating world was so distracted by sun, sand and sea that a prime minister could assassinate a few long-serving colleagues or a presidential hopeful could explore prospects in autumn primaries without the full flood of critical commentary that you might expect in the hard light of western winter. But this is the Digital Age. It is remorseless and quite without shadow or shade. And having spent this week in bed throwing off a minor illness I am now as full of news and commentary as I am of medicine. The effect is overwhelming. Because I now know everything I realise I know nothing at all. I can’t wait to get back to normal-half-informed but deeply opinionated!

But from the ashes of the week I draw out three stories that seem to me at least to express some of what we are about at present. Rupert Murdoch’s attempt on Time Warner must clearly be one. The Elsevier deal with DCL to add value to the Scopus archive was another. And the court case in which Reed as Lexis and Thomson Reuters as Westlaw claimed that their appropriation of legal briefs filed by US litigators constituted “fair use” was the third. And what is the picture drawn here? It shows, in my view, a still content-dominated world where major players still think that the more you have the more powerful you are, where grabbing and re-using third party data can help to bolster failing content positions (even if you have to use the tools of the enemy to do so!), and where upgrading value becomes a necessity in a world where metadata is the currency of users who cannot afford the time to view content. Just like me with all this News.

So what do I think is really going on? Investors and Big Players are now deeply confused. The old maxim – “if in doubt make it bigger” – still seems to make sense, but can you trust Mr M, who seems to have dumped his slow growth media assets into Bad Bank (aka News) and is now readying another wonderful adventure in consolidation in which banks, analysts and advisors will earn prodigiously as well. But the game is not about Archive alone, surely? It’s about distribution and it’s about innovation and it’s about funding, and, step forward Netflix, most of the evidence seems to show that smaller, aggressively competitive players do these things better than media giants. Perhaps the best argument for Twentieth Century Time Warner may be that you will have to be that big to buy Netflix in an OK Corral shoot out with Google.

So then transfer the “commoditization of archive” argument over to Elsevier’s Scopus. In my view, developing Scopus was one of the bravest publishing decisions in STM in the last half century. It is a benchmark for quality and consistency, but as the abstracting pushed back prior to the 1996 start date, so citations were not broken up and separately tagged as they would be today. Redressing the past with a current standard approach using a DCL automated solution seems to be what the current deal accomplishes, and pretty vital it is too if today’s researchers are not to miss something through assuming that tags would be in place to show them. In the age when Scopus was built we had begun to assume that not all researchers would need the full text of articles all the time: we are beginning to see now that researchers do not always have time to check the abstract. This means that the metadata must be as high quality and consistent as possible. One day archive will not be for full text or abstract reading purposes but for audit and authentication purposes. Has anyone in Mr Murdoch’s team run an analysis of the valuations available on a video archive where the revenue model is “by the drink” but you have to keep updating the metadata to maintain the access expectations of users? Especially those who normally use illegal streamed content anyway!

I once had a client, havering about the costs and implications of going XML, who asked me to stop pestering him and come back when the ultimate value add had taken place, so he could adopt that. Sadly we will never reach that point, but in the Age of Data a very significant value has been added by associating third party data with our own. And we now have the platforms like MarkLogic and the semantic analysis to make this work. Law has always been a front runner, having text susceptible to taxonomic treatment and a superfluity of documentation to be searched. Fortunes were made here in the 1990s. Until the 2007 recession it looked as if this would always be a litigator research led market. We now know that law can decline in recession. And, ironically, we also know that those who have zealously protected their “ownership” of public documentation in the past are having to defend their right to use it in the present. West, before Thomson, famously sued Lexis for reproducing punctuation in state law reports added by West editors. Now we have the delightful picture of both companies defending themselves against lawyers by resort to fair use, long regarding as the librarian’s defence against them. But the point is not the irony: it is that no archive is ever quite big enough or quite tagged enough to satisfy users whose expectations, created by us, are simple. Answers and Solutions. Are you ready for this, Mr Murdoch? Delivered to my smartphone, please!

Jun

4

Identity is the New Money

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

Everyone in my world knows that I am as old as Methuselah, except Waitrose . As I pass around the store zapping the barcode on my groceries , I know that the wine and beer , when I reach the pay station , will trigger a call for a human staff member to visually categorize my grey beard as ” licensed to drink alcohol ” . This petulant annoyance at a petty delay resurfaced in my mind while reading Dave Birch’s excellent new book , ” Identity is the New Money ” ( London Publishing Partnership ” Perspectives ” series , 2014 ISBN 978-1-907994-12-8 ) . This should be in the travel bag of every information marketplace manager this summer . It is the very best restatement I have seen of the arguments supporting the idea that the credit card is about to diminish in influence , and that as soon as it has been replaced by identity resting upon the smartphone mobile wallet , cash will rapidly follow it too . And that mobile wallet , an API generating activity , not an app , is fundamentally about our identity management and the way we express our identity . Birch’s thesis now has real credibility , and he is able to illustrate it with case studies from around the globe . His new world bears no resemblance to the things that he used to talk learnedly to me about 20 years ago . Then we speculated ( or he speculated and I listened !) about Mondex and its ilk . A whole generation of software never flowered – until the Smartphone , key change agent here as elsewhere , came along .

The classic of them all is now M-PESA , the cash-and-cardless system which has been so successful in Kenya . Run by the mobile phone operator Safaricom ( part owned by Vodaphone who are also the operators elsewhere in East Africa ) this has become the lifeline money transfer system for much of the region , a way of creating country-city transfers that branch banking could not effectively accomplish , and a way of establishing identity , and with it trust , where it was difficult , outside of village society , to establish it before . But , as Dave Birch makes clear , there will be losers as well as winners . The Mobile Wallet could well take banking out of payments – leaving banks simply as a part of the lending cycle ( and not the most lively there , either , if his comments on Zopa and its rivals are borne out in time) . And then what happens to credit rating in the transactional data slipstream of mobile wallet transactions . Our record will , so to speak , speak for itself . I have argued for a long time that the “big” data risk to credit rating is much greater than the opportunity – it exposes the low value-add of much of the current marketplace – but here I can see a real possibility that rating could become a mobile wallet application very easily indeed . He finds much to admire in PayPal’s increasing incursions into physical commerce , and joyfully lays into the idea that Bitcoin is the answer because of its anonymity . Indeed , like cash it has a degree of anonymity , but this comes about because the log of exchange only indicates ownership to an encrypted key . Anyway , cash seems to me more corrupt than not ( though I had to smile at his stories of adult services vendors in the US using Amazon gift cards as currency with complete anonymity – what a brave investigator this man is !) His insight however on the future of cash is surely sound – we will replace it with thousands of exchangeable objects that are useful or desirable to each individual : ” Here in London we already have the Brixton e-pound . The Local Exchange Trading Systems ( LETS) from physical communities and the platinum pieces and Facebook credits from virtual communities will surge and merge , forming a panoply of private currencies that will make trade more efficient . Why save dollars for your retirement when you can save kilowatt-hours or calories ?”

Even a selective and space – constrained discussion of the book demonstrates that there is much here for anyone who aspires to trade on the network – even if you are trading data or information . What is harder to convey is that this short book is densely packed with argument ; written , praise be , in English of a straightforward and intelligible sort ; has every technical concept explained , and has a breezy and enjoyable good humour that typifies the author himself . Small wonder that he is one of our most revered Telco and payment systems consultants . I can also add that when cash and the credit card follow the cheque into the network twilight , we shall not be publishing books like this at all, and it is no surprize to see how much of this came from Dave’s blog ( http://tomorrowstransactions.com ). And now I have to go – the car is on a parking meter and , having already used the parking app ( universal now in a London where meters are diminishing – since no one has cash enough) to increase my time allowance remotely I have now exhausted that allowance as well as my readers .

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