Odds and Sods

At the beginning of 2010 we looked at the World of 2019, outlining a number of main trends we watch. Here is an update for 2011:

1. Bandwidth will carry on expanding

No change here. If anything this is growing, I predict that in about 2 months the mainstream Sundays will start running stories of households with 2 DSL lines to get the bandwidth they need (in the UK that is, other countries can plumb 24 Mbit/sec reliably into homes)


2. Talking to each other will remain the Killer App

No change here. The main shift in 2010 is from talking via voice on mobile devices to email and txt as smartphone penetration rises (it is faster and more easly searchable)


3. Our "Social Networks" evolve onto whatever the best platform of the moment is

2010 saw the rise and rise of Facebook, we predict that 2011 will be the zenith.


4. All useful technology and applications commoditise over a 3-5 year cycle.....

See above....


5. .....but People are Still People. The more things change, the more they stay the same

If a service helps hatching, matching or despatching better than what is here, now, it will succeed. All others will win on the ability to generate sufficient....


6. Hype (and dodgy economic theories) spring eternal in the human breast

Ecclesiastes Law states that there will be a new inflationary bubble in something, and cometh the hour, cometh the man (or woman) to pimp it. A new generation of Tech Wonderfulness will thus be declared this year, that is of course quite unlike anything before, and it will of course herald in a New Economic Paradigm which (oddly enough) will promise to allow you to get richer with less effort, and that people who don't "get it" will of course be labelled as crusty old farts. Groupon was this year's cause celebre, promising that the old economics of coupon sales can somehow be overcome by The Web. We predict that in 12 months time they will be sold or sad.


7. There is a Google or two in every Decade

We wrote last year:

"Re Google in particular, we think that their search algorithms are going to be increasingly less useful over the decade - in a way a self inflicted goal, as by adding value to links means an entire parasitic SEO ecosystem has emerged. Given that Google funds itself entirely on its link economics, but subsidises many other ambitions, this is going to make its activities in other arenas harder over time."

....

Others that are interesting are around the disruption of very big industries today - the growth of online video (Hulu), the disruption of Olde Print Media (Huffington Post, Techmeme) and the emerging Non-bank Banks (unless they get regulated sooner). Also the change to digital in the basic Telco layers implies the emergence of "Soft" Telcos (Telecoms companies that own no direct assets) - Skype is the first wave."

New Search, Online Video, Online print media, non-bank banks and digital Telcos (witness the impact of Skype's failure in December for impact). We'd keep with those......


8. Planet Mobile will always overestimate benefits and underestimate time to get them
Enter Mary Meeker to this fray in 2010..... but our view remaisn the same. Overpriced, overhyped, and over-forecasted unto eternity. The one thing that is a game changer is the tablet (iPad et al), all our research tells us that this "fifth screen" is a behaviour changer for media consumption - but not for creation. More later, as they say....


9. Privacy (and a related issue, Trust) will become a bigger and bigger factors.

2010 saw Wikileaks, the very educational overreaction by USA Inc (legal due process is for wimps...), and craven caving in by Silicon Valley Inc. This won't go away either. We predict that 2011 is the year Google and Facebook both get hoist on serious privacy petards, the mass market is becoming more aware of what they are up to now.


10. How Green was my Valley again?

We wrote last year:

"Anything that makes more efficient use of existing energy assets (renewable or un) is probably a real win. There is also so much money and interested vested in the whole Carbon Trading arena that no doubt many maths PhDs' time will be spent adapting systems from the financial industries to game this one."

I am hopeful over this - a lot of the Greenscam has disappeared up its own underperformance, big VC's are taking a big hit, the BRICS world are telling it like it is, we expect a lot more practical outcomes here, now.


11. Enterprise 2.0 will be rebadged with a Three Letter Acronym by 2011.
We were wrong - it was rebadged as "Social Enterprise" and "Cloud Commerce", but it's still largely vapourware still, the plunge into the hype cycle's slough of despond has been staved off another year by rebadging. If the Wikileaks affaire taught us anything though, it was "don't give your key services to someone else to host"


12. Government 2.0 will be a slow train coming
Some carriages have yet to leave the station. If anything the Wikileaks affaire has ceded ammunition to those who would delay this (that and the "most voted for" resolutions in the UK was to make grumpy newspaper columnist Jeremy Clarkson the Prime Minister, and to get rid of Gordon Brown. Probably both very good ideas, but not what those running the Government - 2.0 or no - want to hear)


13. The Internet of (Moving) Things

The amount of fighting being done by drones is one of the main unremarked, yet remarkable - and scary - trends in 2010, This won't go away. Guessing 2013 for the first OECD protests partly policed by drones. (pdate - saw this very interesting application of cameras and prediction software....)

Those who watch the Big Bang Theory will know the innate snobbery aimed at Howard Wolowitz, who only has an MSc in Engineering, rather than a PhD. It would appear, however, that he may have the last laugh - the Economist:

PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree.

Bazinga!

It was just a few short years ago that Time magazine hailed YOU! (that is, US!) as "Persons of the Year" in celebration of the New New Thing - the move to User Generated Content.

How Time and times change. This year, Mark Zuckerberg was named Person of the Year.

Marvellous, I hear you say - who could deserve it more. Well, actually..... Julian Assange apparently.

You see, time also had a Readers Choice for Person of the Year, and Mr Assange won that. That's right, WE! (that is, YOU!) chose Juilian, but the Editorial team at Time chose Mark, despite their Readers' Voices (Mark Zuckerberg came 10th in the Readers votes by the way, Lady Gaga came 3rd)

Perish the thought that this was a manage of convenience - this is truly Democracy* in action

Can't help thinking they've been a bit short sighted here though. Mark Zuckerberg is "changing the world", Julian Assange has already changed it. By this I mean that Facebook is the "best of breed" currently of an evolving continuum, wheras Wikileaks has started a change like - as Clay Shirky puts it - the printing press being wrested away from the mediaeval Catholic church.

(An afterthought....the more I think about this, Time is merely showing why the mainstream media is increasingly being bypassed - they clearly did not have the bottle to go with the People's Choice because of the repercussions, and this lack of mainstream media nerve is pretty much why Wikileaks exists)

*True Democracy - ie what Actually Happens - is defined as asking a large number of people to vote, ignoring them, and doing what you want to do for your own ends. (See: Gulf War, Part II)

Update - the wags are in full force - one of the benefits of the rest of YOU being on the 'Net is the scurrilous humour - favourites so far:

(i) Zuck won because he is responsible for the leak of more private information than Assange.

(ii) Zuckerberg is the best "Oh Shit! We can't put Assange on the cover" candidate

(iii) WIKILEAKS exposes informatio­n from government­s and corporatio­ns to private individual­s.

(iv) The funniest - one of the judges apparently was a certain Meghan McCain (apparently Senator John McCain's daughter). She appears to be functionally illiterate.....)

FACEBOOK exposes informatio­n from private individual­s to government­s and corporatio­ns.

And the winner is …

Any more you lot out there saw?

The thing that is most interesting about the whole Wikileaks affaire is how it continues to shine a light on what people say vs what they do. Favourite of the day - Amazon, who threw Wikileaks off their servers last week because of the illegal content, is allowing people to sell the leaks this week as a "for Kindle" product. The difference? This way, Amazon makes money - Peter Kafka explains the Amazon logic.

Sorry about the confusion. But of course it’s OK for us to sell books about Wikileaks that contain Wikileaks data we don’t want to host ourselves. There’s a big difference between a data dump and writing that incorporates and comments on that data. See, for instance, the New York Times and every other news outlet that has written about WikiLeaks while using information supplied by Wikileaks. We sell the Times and other periodicals that report on the topic, and we’re going to sell this book, too.

Ah, the price of a high moral stance.... and given that there has been no Letter from Liebermann this time, one can assume that what he was so terribly upset about was not teh leaks, but that they were free - thats just so goddamn Unamerican

Kafka-esque indeed

What I love about the mainstream media is its ability to generate millions of square feet of text and as many minutes of audio/video opinion, with not one badly needed fact in thet haystack of opinion.

I decided to do the blog-packet maths on Tuition fees, to add a fact or two to all the hot air.....

There are about £2.5m students in the UK today, of which about 350k are foreign and so pay, leaving 2.15 who are eligible to pay.

Let us assume c 25% are Postgrads (those buggers can pay) and that leaves us with c 1.5m

Paying for 1.5m students at £9,000 per annum is £13.5 billion.

To put this into context:

- There are about 25 million households in the UK, this is a spend of c £540 per household.

- UK GDP is about £1.5 trillion, i.e. it is about 0.75% of that.

- The Government's total spending p.a is c £650bn, ie the University funding amounts to about 2% of that.

I read that university places (anecdotally) "have doubled" in the last 10 years, ie the increase over what was apparently affordable for 40-odd years is about 1% of our GDP. Now, ask yourselves this - in an increasingly knowledge driven world, do you believe we willl need (a) more or (b) less education, and thus do you believe we will get (a) more or (b) less people educated if we charge the sort of prices that only about 5% of the households can afford to spend today on education (ie the % of kids in public school, which charges those sorts of amounts).

Incidentally, if you want a few more cynical statistics....

- Last year the UK banks paid bonusses of £40bn, ie about 3 years worth of tuition fees. This year they will do so again....

- The taxpayer loaned the banks about £1.35 trillion to bail them out, so about 0.75% of that returned every year (let's call it "interest") would pay for tuition fees.

- 100% of those voting to charge this generation for tuition fees had a free university education themselves.

- In 1944, a war-bankrupted UK decided all education would be free till 15.

In other words this is not an economic choice, it is a political choice, HMG clearly feels the funds are better spent elsewhere (like bailing out Ireland's banks - £ 4 - 7bn perhaps? ).

And by their choices shall ye know them......

(Update - quite a spirited discussion on Twitter over this article, so a few extras:

1. The reason for these charges is to make up for the money lost owing to the decision to cut state funding of university tuition fees by c 80% as opposed to the 20% average cuts overall.

2. Personally, I believe that students should pay something towards tertiary education, the current rate of £3k per annum seems "about right" and an inflation based increase would be fine. But this increase gives the UK the most expensive fees in the western world (excluding the private US colleges) which is - in my opinion - bad for "UK Plc" strategically

3. I would argue that if this goes ahead, the payments should be tax deductable as a payment of £9k NET of tax is at least £12k gross )

Trying to work out quite what is going on is Senator Joe Liebermann (Free Man if I translate correctly*...) and Co's mind - Threat Level:

Senator Joseph Lieberman and other lawmakers on Thursday introduced legislation that would make it a federal crime for anyone to publish the name of a U.S. intelligence source, in a direct swipe at the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks.

“The recent dissemination by Wikileaks of thousands of State Department cables and other documents is just the latest example of how our national security interests, the interests of our allies, and the safety of government employees and countless other individuals are jeopardized by the illegal release of classified and sensitive information,” said Lieberman in a written statement.

“This legislation will help hold people criminally accountable who endanger these sources of information that are vital to protecting our national security interests,” he continued.

The so-called SHIELD Act (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination) would amend a section of the Espionage Act that already forbids publishing classified information on U.S. cryptographic secrets or overseas communications intelligence — i.e., wiretapping. The bill would extend that prohibition to information on HUMINT, human intelligence, making it a crime to publish information “concerning the identity of a classified source or informant of an element of the intelligence community of the United States,” or “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government” if such publication is prejudicial to U.S. interests.

To an extent this is what made me grumpy with Wikileaks - by them going over the top on "freeing your data" all they have done is released the rabid fundamentalists of The Establishment and polarised the whole privacy debate. In other words, "moderate" people like us wind up either having to defend a way too open view of privacy (everything is open, always, regardless of impact) or a too closed one (Liebermann et al). Enter opportunists and idealists of both stripes, exeunt rational thought.

Well, a pox on both their houses!

But if there is barricade to man today, it is this one - to resist those who would restrict freedom to publish all sorts of embarassing things (to the Great and Good) in the name of "not in the public interest" when it very much is. There has been a massive abuse of "scary people" legislation by Western governments since 9/11 to restrict public freedoms hard-won over 100+ years of protests. Liebermann and Co remind me too much of those who throughout the ages have sought to "burn the books" of seditious thought. It's nearly always a marker for the start of a fairly nasty period of crackdown and oppression, so better to get on the barricades sooner than later. Now it's the Internet they want to burn (we don't see quite the same blazing ire being directed at the Olde Media publishing the same stuff, nor do we see them exactly rushing to defend Wikileaks despite making money from the data) and so far the US Internet Bourgeosie (Amazon et al) have rolled over and taken it.

For example, the diagram we have above is not illegal - it is a list of the leaks and what they impact. It is metadata, yet yesterday Liebermann et al strong-armed a US hoster, Tableau Software, to remove it. We feel this is wrong - the metadata is not illegal and this sort of abuse needs to be stood up to.

But ultimately these people are public servants, working (in theory) for their own taxpayers. Thus, to act so high handed before knowing the will of the peole they (allegedly) serve seems a tad premature. Whatever happened to the "I hate what you say, but I will defend your right to say it" ethos? Or even "Innocent until proven guilty (in Court)". They know they haven't a leg to stand on in court, which is why this sort of behaviour (and the DDoS attacks) are being resorted to.

So, this is Broadstuff on the barricades. Will more of you join.....

Update - rumours are abounding on the Internet that the next tranche of leaks was about the banking system, and that is driving the higher degree of crackdown from the US Authorities. Totally unsubstantiated, but interesting....

Update 2: Online interview with assange in the Grauniad - he made two fascinating comments - "We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction"



*More accurately Nice or Dear Man

Global Warming promoters have about 3 years left to make hay while their (scary, hot) sun shines. After that, the fashionable-scary-environmental-saga will revert to Global Cooling:

New study by American solar experts identifies a sharp fall in sunspot activity since 2007 that fits the hallmarks of a soon arriving ice age.

Solar scientists, not to be confused with climate scientists, study the most important heat engine driving our planet’s temperatures-the sun.

Matthew Penn and William Livingston, solar astronomers with the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, have been following a marked decrease in sunspot activity recently. Reputable studies link a prolonged drop in sunspot activity to a cooling epoch or even a potential new ice age as more sunspots correlate with more global warming, while fewer sunspots are proven to match episodes of long-term cooling.

Since the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 the talk has been about global warming. But 22 years on the evidence has grown to raise fears of a catastrophic climate switch in the opposite direction. We look at the evidence that is raising some very serious questions in the scientific community.

This follows on from a New Scientist article earlier this year - do 2 swallows a summer (winter) make?

I do recall that in the 1970's Cooling was the vogue way that we were all going to die, then warming had its high water (drought?) mark with Climategate, and now its back to cooling. Better still, this has got nothing to do with polluting the Earth, more to do with sunspots. In fact, a nice hazy layer of smog is better at keeping us warm.

One day we will all thank the Chinese and Americans for profligate energy use to save us

We also await with eager antipation seeing how the warming industry's leading lights turn their products, beliefs and policies around to get on the Cooling bandwagon, and what absurdities will be claimed in its name....

....was rather brought home to me this year by a visit to the Delville Wood memorial on the Somme, to the South African troops killed in World War One. I lost two grand-uncles in that war, and an uncle in the next one. Seeing their names - and the ages they died at - in the rolls brings it home very sharply.

Om Malik calling Google's biggest problem, ie that it is no longer a growth stock and thus attractive to "the talent" as it is harder to Get Things Done:

I don’t think rivals (including upstarts) have the ability to stop Google’s financial steamroller. It will continue to be a dominant force in search and online advertising for years to come. But if it doesn’t reign in its talent problem, the company will have a long-term crisis on its hands. It was exodus of talent and inability to get things done that has brought giants of the past, Yahoo for example, to their knees.

For the longest time Google has been the beacon for the smartest and most talented people in the world, especially from an engineering perspective. If these super-smart people start getting frustrated by their inability to get anything done, then they are going to follow Rasmussen to somewhere else where they can find a more receptive and nurturing environment.

In the end that is the single biggest problem for Google.

Never mind the receptive and nurturin stock options that are a far better call at Facebook, 2 years pe-IPO

Hate to say "we predicted this" - but we did....in October 2006 after the GooTube Gambit wnen we wrote:

This is their Netscape Moment, when it becomes clear they are not really in the vanguard for the next wave.

Heres why:

(i) They clearly no longer “get it” - they have developed N new businesses in the past few years , few of which have really taken off, while all around them a new wave of creativity has started apace.

(ii) I don’t know how much was spent on Google Video, but even with all their king’s horses and men, they couldn’t get it together and a bunch of guys came from nowhere and stole the show.

(iii) They have already IPO’d and it is now (very) clear that the cool stuff (and increasingly the wealth) is being created elsewhere - how to retain the creative talent will be an increasing issue…

(iv) …especially as the thundering herd of the rest of VC community now tries to back every Bubble 2.0 company going. A million flowers will bloom, many will wither but some will flourish…

(v) …and Google can’t buy them all. Its share of mind and money must be diluted.

Hm.....probably a bit harsh re "not getting it"...thats not quite true, it becomes harder to "implement it" - its more that its just harder as previous Googletoes have to be stepped on to make new things happen

Some things are just, like, so predictable. Four years later there are now N++ new businesses tried and failed, bought and failed etc etc. Google is now a fully fledged Big Corporation, with all that it entails.

One of the greats , an inspiration to every awkward kid wanting to study science rather than the more popular stuff.