Nov
10
Watching the Future Take Flight
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Search, social media, STM | Leave a Comment
Lets start with the Flight. At the end of last week came that rare luxury and respite – the NOAH show! For two whole days, since 2009, the investment community have been able to lounge in Old Billingsgate and make up their minds about what is likely, what is imminent and what wont happen in eCommerce and Internet services. On three stages and in front of some 600 investment outfits, over 500 early growth players say “its me you were really looking for”. The cases, the comparitive performance, and the real knowledge on display is hugely heartening. Something tells me that London as the start-up centre of Europe is now a bit off the top of the curve. NOAH advisors, who run this show, have opened a Berlin show and intend one as well for Tel Aviv next year, and if I were them then I would also be looking at Barcelona when the current crisis subsides. But location is not the most important thing here. Innovation in services cultures in a networked society goes viral – and comes out of a global market to start with, as the Dallas, Texas, based founder of Bumble demonstrated as she appeared on stage with her Russian tech partner, Badoo. They were interviewed by the founding partner of NOAH, and its Master of Ceremonies, Marco Rodzynek, in a session. That reminded me that behind the apparent strength of seemingly impregnable network market leadership like Facebook there always looms a lither, smarter competitor who grows very quickly, and who must be emulated or acquired if seemingly impregnable positions are to be maintained.
Then if you waited till the end of Marco’s Show you got to fly. Featured there were Volocopter and Lillium, a full week before NASA and Uber announced their deal, adverting the glories of investing in autonomous air taxis. Lillium, a vertical take off jet solution, can land on a tennis court and can take you 300 km at 300 km per hour. Volcopter, as its name suggests, is driven by a ring of small rotors, is also battery driven but shorter in range. Both are German, both do huge information-based navigation work, and Lillium has been extensively experimented with in urban conditions in Dubai. Although they were a surprizing find in this context, for those of us who lead a screen based existence, they were a welcome reminder of the real world significance of all the data crunching going on around us. And as I rode home comfortably on German owned Chiltern Railways, I reflected on leaders in my country prepared to invest $75 billion on a new railway line, not yet begun, which will, when it opens in 2033, clip a life and job saving 22 minutes off the train schedule between London and Birmingham. Mercifully I shall not be here to see it – I shall be in the air taxi!
Another visionary with a loaded gun full of ideas at NOAH was Ali Parsa, the founder of Babylon healthcare. Within days of the show he had announced another big leap forward in supporting Britain’s overworked healthcare system with voice and video medical practice extensions, allowing computer supported diagnostics for those who cannot or need not get a consultation in person. as this gets better and better, and has more intelligent systems support, it offers the only real hope we have of getting the NHS back on track as a national free-at-the-point-of-use system. And as the network gets better the diagnostic session will improve, and the analytics will deliver more insight. Listening computers will be able to prompt the doctor with more questions, and produce a range of answers and probabilities, and a treatment schedule for the doctor to consider and turn into prescriptions, patient notes and records for the regular GP. By using this for minor ailments the system may survive – if we do not use it outside of London then it certainly won’t, but it does point again, in a tiny country like Britain, towards a need for equality in what is rapidly becoming a human rights issue – access at home to superfast broadband. We should be giving every citizen regardless of where they live at least 40 megabits of upload and download. The fact that we are not (yet the South Koreans are) was graphically demonstrated by the village in Devon who, on 5th November, the traditional Bonfire Night , burnt in effigy not Guy Fawkes, but a British Telecom Superfast Broadband van. Not much diagnostics down there, then, and not even a high speed train in 15 years time to take them to the next NHS bottleneck much quicker. The future is here, as William Gibson so wisely said, but its not very evenly spread.
Much more to say about journals and funders and scholarly communication next week. After the Great Debate at the Stationers company this week, we all decided that regulation under Brexit was only going to get worse, and as we thought of data regulation and copyright we felt better off where we were than where we might be going. And I am chairing the session on “whose Research is it Anyway” at London Information International on December 5-6. More warming than mulled wine, I assure you!
Jul
20
On Classifying Markets and Competition
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, STM, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Half way through another year and safe in this foggy bolt hole in Nova Scotia, and time to reflect on what is becoming one of the most annoying aspects of the maturing digital age – we cannot seem to give up classifications derived from the pre-networked world. All around me I hear people describing what they do and who they target in entirely antediluvian terms – B2B, B2C, financial services, STM, pharma, agriculture, energy, environment etc etc as if these terms were at all useful in describing anything at all. I know, I do it myself. Speed and convenience sometimes seem to demand it. Grouping companies together as sectors or competitors seems to demand it. So, now, on the first day of annual leave, I want to issue myself – and my friends who may come across this – the following stern warning. These words and their Sector classification ilk may once have been descriptive. Then they were simply vague but convenient leftovers. Now they are dangerously misleading and it is becoming strategically important to find better and more accurate descriptors for segmentation developed and accepted in a networked age. What we are doing is as weird as all the information services and solutions companies walking around calling themselves “publishers”.
Look at the keywords at the top of this page and you will see that I am as caught in this trap as anyone. To mitigate the problem I have scattered in a few keywords like “workflow” or “search”, but I have not tackled the real job at all. Increasingly the network is becoming an expression of individual and corporate workflows. Content, as data, can be ingested into those workflows from public or private sources at any point. Data designed for one market use may find far greater utility in “sectors” not envisaged by the original developers. Integral to the use is the software which fashions the usability and activates the workflow: pure play content is not generally a solution but can be a problem looking for one. In recent months we have covered here solution-building software players who license in data from the largest suppliers to create custom solutions for major banks or investment houses. While Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg are competitors in the ancient world of desk-top terminals, in the wider market of data solutions they are both suppliers to these software players. Notional allies in trying to bid up the deal value and ensure copyright protection. Perhaps they may buy one of these agencies in the longer term, but if competition is about getting the attention of endures and supplying them direct then a great deal of rethinking needs to take place.
When in doubt I tend to return to legal information, where I cut my teeth in the early 1980s. There a whole generation of legal services companies has come, in the past decade, to provide a real challenge to Publishers and information providers. If the word “Publisher” denotes the passive availability of content which, if discovered by practitioners at the right time, can help to solve problems, then the whole concept is exhausted in these markets. The growing realisation of this forced the sale of PLC to Thomson and the development of practice law at Lexis, but this growing engagement with the daily workflow of the law office has not prevented the development of Axiom Law or its equivalents in the US or the UK. Again, there is only one way to compete, and a number of city law firms in London are growing software solutions businesses based on AI and machine learning. And again, the competitive focus has shifted, and will shift again, reshaping traditional players as they seek to reposition. The competing stresses are all along the line of networked communications within an information workflow chain. The essence is function – buying a house, doing a compliance audit, preventing money laundering etc and the participants could be from several traditional sectors and at each stage fresh data will be mixed into the solutioning process.
So, if this is true, why do so many of the people i speak to in recent months seem to want to use the word “platform” so defensively I hear content companies claiming that they have all their data on a platform as if that asserted a value, rather like a medieval castle. The much-abused platform word should, in my view express the accessibility of content, and its utility seen as a palette upon which content as data can be remixed to create solutions, using proprietory or commercially available software. All of the participants in the workflow chain are in one sense “publishers”, and they must all share common platform characteristics in order that each can participate in the process. It seems to me that it is likely that NoSQL-based environments will triumph here and that the greatest exchanges of data in the network will in fact be descriptive – metadata. As AI and machine learning get smarter, knowing where things are gets a higher value, and “platforms” will need automated on- and off-ramps, auto-licensing, and, in many instances, huge common platform characteristics that link major players.
There was a time when I served as Chairman of Fish 4, a development company hosted by EPS and then turned into a vehicle for the regional press and carrying the classified advertising of 800 local and regional newspapers. Its board members were the CEOs of the six largest players in that market. When asked one day who they thought their biggest competitors were, they smiled and pointed to each other. Five years later, when Rightmove and AutoTrader and Monster had eaten them up and spat them out, I realised we had learnt some valuable lessons about miss-classifying markets by looking backwards instead of forwards. We cannot afford to do the same again.
« go back — keep looking »