Aug
6
Open a Fab Lab and Re-Invent the Newspaper
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
First of all, a (very) old, (very) bad joke. The great Roy Thomson is sitting in an aircraft at Bangkok en route to Australia. “Get me the Bangkok Times”, he snaps to an aide. The young assistant returns in due course and gives the press tycoon his newspaper. “What did it cost us?”, the great man enquires. “10p”, replies the slightly surprized executive. “Cheap at the price if we got the properties as well” growled the newspaper acquisition legend. But this story comes to mind yet again from my 1960s publishing days not just because the price of a newspaper title is falling so rapidly, but because Roy Thomson was the last of a breed: he bought newspapers without any intention of imposing his views on the world, but simply – indeed, “purely” – to make money. Since his time, and I do not exempt Rupert Murdoch from this, newspaper proprietors have bought in to change the world, exercise power, develop a personal following or compensate for something missing elsewhere in life. And this week, as the Boston Globe goes for a pittance to an industrialist and now the Washington Post goes to Jeff Bezos for a mere $250 million we are back on the track created by the Chicago Herald Tribune: very expensive power jewellery for very rich people.
None of this will save a newspaper or make it more relevant to now-lost audiences. Jeff Bezos is an outstanding businessman who has created a singularly powerful ecommerce environment, but he may not have the answer to news in the network. Bob Woodward says on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “This isn’t Rupert Murdoch buying The Wall Street Journal, this is somebody who believes in the values that the Post has been prominent in practicing, and so I don’t see any downside,”
(http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/washington-post-sale-jeff-bezos-bob-woodward-rupert-murdoch-95226.html#ixzz2bDFk8ntc”), but for all we know at present, Politico, where I saw this story, is the true successor of political news and comment in newspapers. Jeff Bezos will be an experimenter and a catalyst for change, if we can go by his record, but while we wait it may be more interesting to see how the remaining assets of the Graham family fall. For example, will Kaplan go, and which Pearson competitor will try to offset flagging textbook fortunes by buying it (although even Kaplan is looking a bit past its best).
What would be good is a way of putting together the thinking of the best minds and begin to test and re-iterate models of engagement for networked populations. OK, we have done this before and the answer was Twitter – but I do not despair. The best thing that Jeff Bezos has bought may be a brand that he can transfer elsewhere for credibility and profit. All predecessors in the re-invention stakes have started from the idea that you take content first formulated from print and then re-condition it for online audiences. He doesn’t – or does not have to – think like that. And he will look at the Guardian, with 50 million online users, the voice of global liberalism in English, the place where everyone from Assange to Snowden comes to leak, and he will wonder why such a mighty distribution empire produces such pitiful revenues. And he will, as an online storekeeper, know which buttons to press to get revenues moving, since he survived the derision of the world for having no business model at Amazon – until his business model, once found, brought the consumer book industry to its knees and may yet point to its exit.
The keynote here is experimentation and re-iteration. All of us who work in the network must work this way now. Even in domestic terms, as I realised this morning when my wife said “I think we really need to have a 3D printer”. As is wise, I agreed, and then sought to justify my agreement by looking at the things that we might do in a small village in the Chilterns with such a device. And within moments I had found it! The largest number of installations of 3D printers and allied additive manufacturing technologies in Europe and the US is in so-called Fab Labs, many of them housed in libraries. My nearest Fab Lab, one of around 150 created in the past 5 years, is at Manchester, some 200 miles away. Here is its rationale: “Fab Labs – digital fabrication laboratories – were set up to inspire people and entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into new products and prototypes by giving them access to a range of advanced digital manufacturing technology.
The idea was conceived by renowned inventor and scientist Professor Neil Gershenfeld at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His idea was a simple one: to provide the environment, skills, advanced materials and technology to make things cheaply and quickly anywhere in the world, and to make this available on a local basis to entrepreneurs, students, artists, small businesses and, in fact, anyone who wants to create something new or bespoke.” (www.fablabmanchester.org) And here is something about their impact:
“A global network of over 150 Fab Labs now exists, connecting people, communities and businesses across the world and enabling them to collaborate, problem solve and brainstorm ideas.
Shepherds in Norway have used their Fab Lab to create a system for tracking sheep using their mobile phones, while in Ghana, people have made an innovative truck refrigeration system powered by the vehicle’s own exhaust gases.
In Afghanistan, people are fashioning customised prosthetic limbs, while in South Africa a government and business backed project is creating simple internet connected computers that hook up to televisions and cost just ten dollars each.”
Compared to this record of innovation, surely re-inventing what the newspaper means in the network would be easy? And once we are fully functional as the first Village Fab Lab in Britain we may have a go at that too!
Jul
30
Revit: BIM brings it all Together
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
It was at the hog roast on Saturday afternoon, and I had just bitten appreciably into wonderful Berkshire Tamworth and crackling (a superb achievement in itself – an anthem to a great pig). The father of my hostess said “With BIM in its present state, I as a small architectural office in a country town can work on far larger projects: in fact we are just opening a virtual office in the West End of London”. In an information industry which perpetually recites the mantra about the integration of software with content as data to create solutions it is important to have a reminder every now and then that this is for real and drives men’s lives. The conversation drove me back to see what the industry leaders were doing, to see how Autodesk had defended its AutoCAD territory with Revit, and to see whether there are now any appreciable results worth measuring. And then to think about the changes of the past five years in the context of those years having embraced the worst construction industry downturn in the last century. If the technology can scale in these conditions then it can scale anywhere at any time.
In January this year a McGraw-Hill report indicated that BIM usage had grown from 17% of the US construction market to 70% in 2012. And what are the drivers here? Simply that it has become a requirement for many of those commissioning major building projects that not only does the construction process need an operational model, but that owners need to inherit at completion the final data plot, with the consequent ability to backtrack, find what decisions were made and why and consider them in light of further development or maintenance requirements. Another driver was Green Buildings: how could anyone be sure of the green decisions made unless they were fully documented and attached to the plan? According to Revit, still firmly in place as market leader, there are four distinguishing areas that make the processes involved in the unified content solution flow (architectural design: MEP – mechanical, electrical, plumbing: structural engineering and construction) work at higher levels of efficiency:
* Parametric components – dropping in “intelligent” building design components to increase accuracy
* Bidirectional associativity – all design changes are reflected automatically throughout the model
* Worksharing – all players in the workflow can have access at the same time
* Construction modelling – getting better insight into constructability
It seems to me that there are important lessons here for those of us who talk airily about “workflow and process – and the integration of content into it”. For a start, things can change almost overnight – five years is a very short time. Secondly, the McGraw-Hill survey shows consistent gains in terms of margins for BIM procedures users over their more traditional colleagues. Then, these developments will change the shape of the industries to which they are applied, leading to cross-industry collaboration in some sectors, and cost effective outsourcing in others. So for the vendor of data and content, the nature of the customer can be expected to change. It may also be a factor that recession accelerates change, forcing those who must remain competitive to do so earlier than they might have done in markets where work was easier to get.
Undoubtedly too the three change pressures that have afflicted all industries play a lead role here. All the partners in this workflow model are anxious for increased productivity – and that is probably expressed here by the loss of clerical roles. Everyone must have better decision-making – and that is expressed here by an ability to try the options and select the best. And very powerfully this workflow speaks to the need for compliance with standards, local and national regulation, industry benchmarks and other requirements. It is also noteworthy that this is a “long” workflow, stretching from project conception to the completed building, and then living on as a building management tool. Five years ago we tended to speak in B2B about single process workflow – helping the user to do better procurement, for example. Here we are talking in much more comprehensive terms – and if it were necessary to credit check suppliers then that would be modularized in the process, not left outside of it.
The implications of all of this are huge for formerly passive data suppliers to particular industry functions A glance at McGraw-Hill Construction and Reed Construction illustrates some of the issues. McGraw-Hill got away to a fast start with its Construction Network, really aimed at the Bechtel-Haliburton end of the industry, and at global markets. Reed Construction’s data holdings were aimed at costing and leads, and much of their workflow activity, like the recently launched cūbus + Demand View (29 July 2013) (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/7/prweb10950816.htm). This is the smartest development so far in comparative leads intelligence, and makes McGraw’s Dodge Network express look like a messaging service. The UK government is ready to roll (2011 pronouncement: “The Government Construction Strategy was published by the Cabinet office on 31 May 2011. The report announced the Governments intention to require: collaborative 3D BIM (with all project and asset information, documentation and data being electronic) on its projects by 2016.” But while Revit and its lesser rivals are obvious in the market place, neither UBM or EMAP, who hold most of the data resources, seem hot to trot. In fact Barbour, once a market leader, makes no mention that I can find of BIM. This then raises the open question: will the big players in content and data here buy into the software business, or partner with Revit. And do the smaller ones get bought by the software players – or simply get by-passed . The implications of workflow, as demonstrated in this seminal marketplace, get sharper in focus every day.
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