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!

Nov

13

Hyperlocal: Lost in the Data Mix?

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

On my good days I scan the screen for the re-invention of local news in a personalized framework, which is how I have defined “hyperlocal” for some years now. On the bad ones, I search for news of Ashley Highfield, erstwhile creator of the BBC web customization service, iPlayer, and now running Johnston Press. If he cannot re-invent the press, then who can? Or maybe there is another Johann Carolus in somewhere like Strasbourg, just about to do digitally what his namesake did in 1605, and develop the first news sheet. Yet Mr Carolus put the news to work for local businessmen (seventeenth century Germany was as yet oblivious of the bogus distinction of B2B from B2C), and it thus occurs to me that I may be looking in the wrong place for the renaissance of local news.

These thoughts were triggered by a piece in the New York Times (November 10) which did look as if it was going to tackle my “hyperlocal” anxieties.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/technology/gathering-more-data-faster-to-produce-more-up-to-date-information.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=2&adxnnlx=1384288878-xYaeMfcYZuVjg950SS64xg&pagewanted=print) This piece, entitled Big Data’s Little Brother”, is in fact a story about data analytics, featuring Premise , a service which collects and analyses photos of market stalls around the globe in order to compile inflation and availability data for food supply and cost analysis, and Clear Story data, which does custom predictive analysis from the data available on the web and/or supplied by clients. Indeed this works with my own observations: SaaS in data analytics is becoming a boom industry, with players like RecordedFutures.com now creating multi-faceted analysis from cyber intelligence to competitive positioning. And these tools can only get smarter, which leads me to believe that we may have to re-create “news” for people who will have commercial reasons to pay before we can personalize news for the general reader/citizen at large.

So what are these data- driven, analytical insight organs going to look like? Well, for a start, we shall have to redefine the word “news”. The services that grab the attention now do not use the news to report something so much as to predict something. When Takadu.com is deployed by a water utility company, it is putting together analysis around sensor, image, staff and public reporting on water leaks. Since 25-30% of global water supplies are NRW water – non-revenue contributing, a glorious term for leaks – this is as vital to the utility as it is to the globe, but the important matter may not be the leak itself, but the trend, the order of repair, and the potential future impact. While it is hard to appreciate FoodGenius.com, which helps food processors develop ever more nutritional disasters for our consumption, it reads 300,000 menus daily to find the trend and create the prediction – lambs’ kidneys in guacamole will be big in 2014 – and will be available everywhere. And moving swiftly to a subject that makes me feel less emotional, companies like Molecular Connections can use the analytics on one side of their business for advanced drug discovery processes, finding and analysing news from the future, while using their technology to give meaning to archival news, as they have done with Nature, the pre-eminent science journal.

None of this is News as we know it, and part of me now accepts the idea that the networked society will never quite want News as newspapers once knew it. Things like the Huffington Post are hybrids, the results of miscegenation, not a new evolutionary track. Things like Buzzfeed are entertainments, brilliant if you want to contemplate the life and works of Rob Ford, Torontonian mayor/buffoon/jester, reduced to 22 captioned images, but only customizable in the “more like that” sense. Nothing here speaks to me about the use of the one thing we have in plenty – data – to inform us of the patterns of our lives and the way that they may change in future.

And we know so much. Isotrak.com reckon they are saving their haulier clients £150 m per annum on areas like building patterns of more efficient driving. This links to my interest, already expressed here, in lower motor insurance costs as your car speaks to your insurer via your smartphone and reports your performance. While recording your journey on Wayze, and noting car accidents and traffic congestion as a result. So maybe these services of the future have active advertising – not just “buy our service to save money” – but lets do it and save it now! And maybe the “news” is about you – in society, against the backdrop of the performance of others, all living anxiously in a rated, graded world. After long years when news tycoons and advertising gurus fought to create “My” service environments and telling us all how to behave, it would be poetic justice if we ended up making them for ourselves, and letting the data modelling tell us how to behave.

Which is what I think we will do. Soon the tools will become available to view all the niche networks that we join in the post-Facebook world in a single viewer which allows us one view of our separate networks for family, for college friends, for business and professional associates, sports aficionados etc. Here we will pull in more data – is anyone getting better wholesale prices for his home- produced electricity than I am? And analysis. And prediction. And we will move the dial from the congested relief road to who is standing for office who wants to do something about it. And before we know it we are back to wondering how any group of well-adjusted people elected Rob Ford, or Boris Johnson, or any other mayor, and then we want commentary and analysis to explain these things. Here “journalism” is by definition self-employed.

But in the meanwhile, the deconstruction of news has to be total before we can begin to reconstruct the flows of data and information which will make a digital economy in a networked society perform and function. So it is probably just as well we have the guys we have in charge of our press. From power-broking to phone hacking , they are doing a grand job of destroying public trust in the world of paper and preparing us all for the digital yet to come. So good, in fact, that rather than put them on trial we should give them an award!

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