broadstuff

Interesting essay by Rolf Dobelli on the behavioural issues with news, especially in the light of the "future of quality news" angst I heard at the Financial Times conference this week. Essentially he argues that News is to the mind what sugar is to the body, and that our human conditioning to react to Scary! Now! is the opposite of what the world needs now, but news is sugar for our cave-brains, feeding us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. He argues that unlike reading books and long, deep magazine articles (which requires thinking), we can "swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, like bright-colored candies for the mind." He argues that the following are the main problems (I have summarised for you short-attention spanned news junkies....):

No 1 – News misleads us systematically
News reports do not represent the real world. Our brains are wired to pay attention to visible, large, scandalous, sensational, shocking, people-related, story-formatted, fast changing, loud, graphic onslaughts of stimuli. Our brains have limited attention to spend on more subtle pieces of intelligence that are small, abstract, ambivalent, complex, slow to develop and quiet, much less silent. News organizations systematically exploit this bias. News media outlets, by and large, focus on the highly visible. They display whatever information they can convey with gripping stories and lurid pictures, and they systematically ignore the subtle and insidious, even if that material is more important. News grabs our attention; that’s how its business model works. Even if the advertising model didn’t exist, we would still soak up news pieces because they are easy to digest and superficially quite tasty.


No 2 – News is irrelevant
Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career, your business – compared to what you would have known if you hadn’t swallowed that morsel of news. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to the forces that really matter in your life. At its best, it is entertaining, but it is still irrelevant.


No 3 – News limits understanding
News has no explanatory power. News items are little bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. News organizations pride themselves on correctly reporting the facts, but the facts that they prize are just epiphenomena of deeper causes. Both news organizations and news consumers mistake knowing a litany of facts for understanding the world. It’s not “news facts” that are important, but the threads that connect them. What we really want is
to understand the underlying processes, how things happen..... ....[But this is] complex, non-linear and hard for our (and the journalists’) brains to digest. Why do news organizations go for the light stuff, the anecdotes, scandals, people-stories and pictures? The answer is simple: because they are cheap to produce.


No 4 – News is toxic to your body
News constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocordicoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocordicoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. News consumers risk impairing their physical health. The other potential side effects of news include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitization.


No 5 – News massively increases cognitive errors
News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. We automatically, systematically filter out evidence that contradicts our preconceptions in favor of evidence that confirms our beliefs. In the words of Warren Buffett: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” That is the confirmation bias. News consumption, especially customized news intake, exacerbates this human flaw. The result is that we walk around in a cloud of seemingly confirming data – even when our theories about the world and ourselves may be wrong. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. News not only feeds the confirmation bias, it exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that “make sense” – even if they don’t correspond to reality. And news organizations are happy to deliver those fake stories.

No 6 – News inhibits thinking
Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News items are like free-floating radicals that interfere with clear thinking. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. This is not about stealing time (see reason 8 ). This is about the inability to think clearly because you have opened yourself up to the disruptive factoid stream.
News makes us shallow thinkers.


No 7 – News changes the structure of your brain
News works like a drug. As stories develop, we naturally want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary story lines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore.
Why is news addictive? Once you get into the habit of checking the news, you are driven to check it even more often. Your attention is set on fast-breaking events, so you hunger for more data about them. This has to do with a process called “long-term potentiation” (LTP) and the reward circuits in your brain.

No 8 – News is costly
News wastes time. It exacts exorbitant costs. News taxes productivity three ways.

- First, count the consumption-time that news demands. That’s the time you actually waste reading, listening to or watching the news.
- Second, tally up the refocusing time – or switching cost. That’s the time you waste trying to get back to what you were doing before the news interrupted you. You have to collect your thoughts. What were you about to do? Every time you disrupt your work to check the news, reorienting yourself wastes more time.
- Third, news distracts us even hours after we’ve digested today’s hot items. News stories and images may pop into your mind hours, sometimes days later, constantly interrupting your train of thought. Why would you want to do that to yourself?

No 9 – News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement
Reputation affects how people cooperate in society. In our ancestral past, a person’s reputation was directly linked to his or her achievements. You saw that your fellow tribe member killed a tiger single handedly and you spread word of his bravery. With the advent of mass-produced news, the strange concept of “fame” entered our society. Fame is misleading because generally people become famous for reasons that have little relevance to our lives. The media grants fame to movie stars and news anchors for scant reason. News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement. The tragedy is that pop notoriety crowds out the achievements of those who make more substantive contributions.


No 10 – News is produced by journalists
Good professional journalists take time with their stories, authenticate their facts and try to think things through. But like any profession, journalism has some incompetent, unfair practitioners who don’t have the time – or the capacity – for deep analysis. You might not be able to tell the difference between a polished professional report and a rushed, glib, paid-by-the-piece article by a writer with an ax to grind. It all looks like news. My estimate: fewer than 10% of the news stories are original. Less than 1% are truly investigative. And only once every 50 years do journalists uncover a Watergate


No 11 – Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always
Sometimes, reported facts are simply mistaken. With reduced editorial budgets at major publications, fact checking may be an endangered step in the news process. The New Yorker magazine is legendary for its fact checking. The story goes that when an article mentioned the Empire State Building, someone from the fact-checking department would go out and visually verify that, in fact, the building was still standing. I don’t know if the story is true, but it highlights a point. Today, the fact checker is an endangered species at most news companies (though still alive and well at The New Yorker). Many news stories include predictions, but accurately predicting anything in a complex world is impossible. Overwhelming evidence indicates that forecasts by journalists and by experts in finance, social development, global conflicts and technology are almost always completely wrong. So, why consume that junk?


No 12 – News is manipulative
Our evolutionary past has equipped us with a good bullshit detector for face-to-face interactions. We automatically use many clues to detect manipulation, clues that go beyond the verbal message and include gesture, facial expression, and signs of nervousness such as sweaty palms, blushing and body odor. Living in small bands of people, we almost always knew the background of the messenger. Information always came with a rich set of meta-data. Today, even conscientious readers find that distinguishing even-handed news stories from ones that have a private agenda is difficult and energy consuming. Why go through that?
Stories are selected or slanted to please advertisers (advertising bias) or the owners of the media (corporate bias), and each media outlet has a tendency to report what everyone else is reporting, and to avoid stories that will offend anyone (mainstream bias).


No 13 – News makes us passive
News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. This sets readers up to have a fatalistic outlook on the world. Compare this with our ancestral past, where you could act upon practically every bit of news. Our evolutionary past prepared us to act on information, but the daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It saps our energy. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitized, sarcastic and fatalistic.


14 – News gives us the illusion of caring
Kathleen Norris (even if I don’t share most of her ideas) said it best: “We may want to believe that we are still concerned, as our eyes drift from a news anchor announcing the latest atrocity to the NBA scores and stock market quotes streaming across the bottom of the screen. But the ceaseless bombardment of image and verbiage makes us impervious to caring.”


No 15 – News kills creativity
Things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. They are oblivious to much that has been tried before. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas.

He notes that The public relations (PR) industry is as large as the news reporting industry – the best proof that journalists and news organizations can be manipulated, or at least influenced or swayed, and also writes that "I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a whole bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs."

So What to do - how do you wean yourself off News? Dobrell suggests the best approach is Do Without, go without news, go cold turkey. However he relents a bit, and suggests a methadone method:

If you want to keep the illusion of “not missing anything important”, I suggest you glance through the summary page of the Economist once a week. Don’t spend more than five minutes on it.
Read magazines and books which explain the world – Science, Nature, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly. Go for magazines that connect the dots and don’t shy away from presenting the complexities of life – or from purely entertaining you. The world is complicated, and we can do nothing about it. So, you must read longish and deep articles and books that represent its complexity. Try reading a book a week. Better two or three. History is good. Biology. Psychology. That way you’ll learn to understand the underlying mechanisms of the world. Go deep instead of broad. Enjoy material that truly interests you. Have fun reading.

And as with all changes of diet, the first week is the hardest, but persevere:

Deciding not to check the news while you are thinking, writing or reading takes discipline. You are fighting your brain’s built-in tendency. Initially, you will feel out of touch or even socially isolated. Every day you will be tempted to check your favorite news Web site. Go 30 days without news. After 30 days, you will have a more relaxed attitude toward the news. You will find that you have more time, more concentration and a better understanding of the world.

And the Good News?

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is relevant in any society. We need more hard-core journalists digging into meaningful stories. We need reporting that polices our society and uncovers the truth. The best example is Watergate. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Often, reporting is not time sensitive. Long journal articles and in-depth books are fine forums for investigative journalism – and now that you’ve gone cold turkey on the news, you’ll have time to read them.

I must say this resonates quite a bit with my experience (and practice) - I hardly bother with "daily" news unless something major (like the once - in - a century events in the Arab world) is happening, and have drastically curtailed the blogs and real time stuff I read, and focussing on the more strategic writers. I think it isn't practical to totally cut it off though, so I tend to scan Twitter a few times a day (typically over a caffeine-filled beverage) and Techmeme and Hacker News likewise, as they are efficient aggregators of news with (some) less bias than curated news. I do find blogging about something forces me to focus on my thoughts about it, rather than just consuming it.

The irony though is that a blog like this probably counts as a "News" blog - but I hope that, by always trying to get to the "why" and the underlying the trends/threads/twists of the things I write about, is more than a simple news-mash regurgitation

Fifth up on Wednesday at the Financial Times Digital Media & Broadcasting conference was "The Real time Challenges of Media" with a panel discussion featuring:

- Marc Landsberg, Chief Executive Officer, MRM Worldwide
- Ian Rosarius, Managing Director- TV and Content, BT
- Kevin Walsh, Chief Technology Officer, Oracle Asia Research And Development Centers

One of the more realistic discussions of The Cloud that I have heard in a conference (probably because it wasn't a Cloud conference) - some notes:

- Cloud is an "Old New Thing" - it has failed before (think thin Client, Network Computer) for the same reasons it may still fail now
- It's still far harder than anyone thinks to orchestarte processes across multiple cloud platforms
- Main benefit is not OPEX economics but CAPEX - you don't have to build to peak load [Not tortally true in my experience, Amazon still wants us to predict our unpredictable peaks]
- There is as yet no demonstrable "consumer utility" over existing "good enoughs"
- However, the Cloud is forcing rational industry behavour by driving adoption of de jure and de facto standards
- Panel felt the Cliud's main role will be to enhance the capability of the relatively "dumber" mobile devices - smartphones, tablets - than the PC/laptop ecosystem

On the evolution of Web TV, which is a specific instance of The Cloud

- TVs and other simple black box devices will take over the role currently done by complex devices (STBs, PCs)
- However it is still very early days with standards, how EPGs work etc - it is like TV in the 1950's
- What will win is the ability to provide a seamless experience - the techniology will exist long before a decent experience (Chasm description)
- There will be a period of consumer confusion, that smarter players will use to gain consumer confidence
- There is a major battle emerging about who owns the (user) data in the value chain - everyone wants it
- There will probably have to be far more work done on people's privacy, and who conyrols the data - trusted providers may well have a market benefit

The irony is that history tells you that apple are the past masters at creating the first Seamless Exoerience in media vale chain after value chain (PC, Music, Smartphone, tablet...DTV next?)

Last discussion was on good old Net Neutrailty, the point was made very clearly by BT that the current UK backbone was sized in the early noughties for low end DSL speeds not broadcast scale High Definition video to a nation, the investment to upgrade to mass big bandwidth now will be huge, and the consumer cannot bear the entire cost. Content providers who use up massive amounts of the network capacity and want real time transport will have to pay more than users with small bandwitdh, low real time synch needs [As has happened with every other utility in history].

There has been quite a lot of hoo-ha about the role of the Intenet / Social Media in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, with Pro-Apostles calling them "Twitter" or "Facebook" or "Internet" Revolutions, and Pro-Agnostics taking strong issue. The nuanced truth, as always, is in the middle but never generates the same copy and linkbait. To try and get some of the nuance into the open, therefore, I looked at the media production and delivery supply chain, and how it worked, as we would for any market analysis. To really understand it we also have to look at events leading up to, and during the actual on-the-streets activity. A caveat - this was done over an hour or so over a cup of coffee, so is very much a first cut, but even so I think it gives some insights.

Before the Revolution:

The above value chain was all fully connected, (we can assume some filtering of sites was done by the Governments) so the messeges and mediums were in full flow, and undoubtedly were being used to organise revolution. Looking at where the New Media had an impact, its worth looking at the areas:


(i) Content production

As we noted, people have been able to create seditious content for centuries, thus it is unlikely that the Net per se helped here, its more likely that user owned devices - PCs, Videocameras, phones, cameras etc were the more imortant element in content creation. What the Internet probably did help with was rapid transmission of the text/graphic form ideas (rather than the lower bandwidth of voice), both within Egypt and with outsiders. Fahmy puts it well:

Through this, an even greater underlying principle emerged: Social media is built and designed to support social movements. The social media framework itself is a powerful underlying force that allows the momentum of movements to surge uncontrollably and organically. A revolution, a movement, or any major social cause nourishes on unity, “people power,” advocacy, connectivity, grassroots mobilization, free expression and shared aspirations… all of which are inherently embedded within the social media skeleton and system. (Best example lies within Facebook). It is almost as if social media perfectly fits as a layer within a movement’s structure.

(ii) Aggregation

This is probably where the 'Net was most productive, creating fora for idease and planning to be aggregated and co-ordinated. Modern social media is more atttractive (graphics, multiple functions etc) is no more efficient than the old, but by dint of attracting very large user groups was arguably very effective. Fahmy again:

If anyone wants to challenge a status quo, energize and mobilize their network towards a cause…

- Where do you think they will go first?
- What will help them gather supporters and resources faster and more efficiently?
- What will allow them to connect, notify, and engage their base?
- What will help them easily organize events, rallies and get donations?
- What will help them recruit other activists and get their voices across?

Wael Ghonim notes a similar story (quoted on CNN):

I’m talking on behalf of Egypt. This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook. This revolution started in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet…. The reason why is the Internet will help you fight a media war, which is something the Egyptian government regime played very well in 1970, 1980, 1990, and when the Internet came along they couldn’t play it. I plan to write a book called Revolution 2.0… that will highlight the role of social media.

Its worth pointing out that the the "intelligentsia" is historically at its most effective during this phase of a revolution, so the low % of 'Net connected population is not a major disadvantage


(iii) Distribution

As can be seen, the Internet has a fairly low penetration within Egypt compared to Mobile or TV, so we would hypothesize that more people were touched by the latter. However, it is perfectly believble that there was a 2-phase supply chain, with the 'Net being used by organisers/intellectuals to generate the initial revolutionary content and co-ordinate on a macro-scale, and the other media used to co-ordinate at a local scale.


(iv) Customer Equipment

Distribution channels are all very well, but if no-one can receive it it is irrelevant. Satellite TV distribution is lower than Aerial TV, but people do tend to group around satellite TV to watch Al-Jazeera. Penetration of PCs is higher than Internet itself (though PC's, with the ability to desktop-publish, probably had an impact on non-elecronic distribution too). Radio and good old printing presses are probably unsung media in this revolution


During the Revolution

I would argue that during the actual on-street activity, most of the "why" content was already produced (ie the ideas were largely known), the issue was more around "how/who/where" ie tactical aggregation (especially co-ordination) and distribution of data about the ongoing situation - Twiter user @alta1989261 on the Twitter 140 blog:

Twitter is a very important tool for protesters, as evidenced by the fact it and Facebook were repeatedly blocked in Egypt as the protests flared up. We use it to campaign and spread the word about protests/stands–hashtags are invaluable in that respect, and to share news quickly and efficiently, with our own 140-char commentary on them, and subsequently have conversations with random people/complete strangers. But most importantly, it allows us to share on the ground info like police brutality, things to watch out for, activists getting arrested, etc.

As most customer equipment was stand-alone (like the smartphones used for the above example) and owned by the users, it was fully functioning (imagine if all the devices were "dumb" and run via a cloud and/or or could have all their data locked like a Kindle can do). The main change during the revolution was that the Egyptian government shut off large tranches of the Comm Distribution system (so I'm not clear on how long/how the twittering went on for) - as the New York Times notes:

As in many authoritarian countries, Egypt’s Internet must connect to the outside world through a tiny number of international portals that are tightly in the grip of the government. In a lightning strike, technicians first cut off nearly all international traffic through those portals.

In theory, the domestic Internet should have survived that strike. But the cutoff also revealed how dependent Egypt’s internal networks are on moment-to-moment information from systems that exist only outside the country — including e-mail servers at companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo; data centers in the United States; and the Internet directories called domain name servers, which can be physically located anywhere from Australia to Germany.

The government’s attack left Egypt not only cut off from the outside world, but also with its internal systems in a sort of comatose state: servers, cables and fiber-optic lines were largely up and running, but too confused or crippled to carry information save a dribble of local e-mail traffic and domestic Web sites whose Internet circuitry somehow remained accessible.

In fact the ability of a Government to turn off the internet has got a lot of people around the world, who thought the 'Net was very robust, quite worried. It still worked here and there, but it was clearly largely crippled.

Also, the foreign owned mobile operators in Egypt proved to be effectively state controlled and rapidly closed themselves down (as we saw with various Cloud services in the Wikileaks affaire)

If you look at the loss of the distribution system vs say the 1980's Russian revolution (where comms was via carefully hidden Samizdata methods), or the !980s/1990s South African and Velvet revolutions (mainly pre internet) then clearly the big difference here was the Net, and (in 2011) Social media. However, in Egypt the 'Net was fairly effectively shut down, but the Egyptians still had their revolution, so its hard to argue it had any real impact. Looking back it is also clear that even with the huge restrictions of Samizdata, the Russians were perfectly able to run a revolution - as were the Czechs, Poles, South Africans etc with mobile phones and old fashioned fly-printing and word of mouth. Going back in history to the first Russian revolution (1917) and beyond to the various nationalist movements in the 1800's and the French Revolution of the 1790's, it is clear that if people want to have a revolution, they will have one!.

Thus if you compare Egypt and what has gone before, it seems fairly clear that closing of the 'Net during the actual on-street activity was probably fairly ineffective. There was data coming out (the most effective being YouTube video) from the small amount of systems still up, but the heavy lifting in Egypt at the critical time was via distribution systems that were harder to shut off (as it was since the 1980's), ie other foreign people's broadcasting systems - specifically Satellite TV (Al Jazeera, take a bow) and (probably, but much less glamorously) radio. This was also true in Russia, South Africa etc. and of course if you go pre-internet, the number of revolutions that got on quite happily without any electronic mediation of any sort is vast.

Another impact of the events spreading to the West via the various media was that it made it harder for Western governments to behave with Realpolitik and prop up their old friends, as it was clear that their own citizens by and large supported the Egyptian revolutionaries (I noted this in my notes on the silence from Davos and thereafter when the events in Egypt broke out). However this was not purely a Social Media thing - TV and Newsprint were as much a part of this phase, though getting videos and liveblogs out via Internet helped create content for these stories. But I would argue in this case the heavy lifting was by Satellite TV, especially in the English language.


After the Revolution

I was interested in the excoriation of Malcolm Gladwell when he pointed out the Weak Links of Social Media don't make revolutions. To my mind he is merely repeating (in another way) what many observers through the centuries have noted, ie that regime change without significant high risk commitment (ie bloodshed) is fairly unusual. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but at some point you need the sword..... (Eastern Europe being an interesting exception, but the governments there had largely given up already). To my mind what is provable is that Social Media is a more efficient way of building up the latent will of a group will to move from a "weak link" to a "strong link" mode by making them realise there are vast numbers of like minded people (by dint of reaching more people, much faster). But it not the spark to action, that is elsewhere and is usually an heroic act (setting yourself on fire), the creation of a martyr via state violence, or committed organisers getting people on the streets - ie strong links.

Some argue that state violence is less possible today as modern media makes it clearer what atrocities are being committed. I would argue that Tiananmen Square and lately Iran showed the opposite - a modern regime is quite capable of behaving brutally, no matter how many distressing videos on YouTube or green avatars on Twitter. History tells you that Regimes change by and large when the army fails to shoot its own citizens, at that point the Regime no longer has a sword. (History also tells you that the replacement is very often people with swords that the army promotes, at least for a while, but that is for a future post). I strongly suspect Egypt's reluctance is also more because of realpolitik (ie US subsidies, trade links) - which China and Iran do not need as much - or it could be that the Egyptian state is just far more subtle, or divided, or just a more ethical society (looking at their behaviour during the revolution I can believe the latter, most of the high value looting seems to have been state sponsored robbing of the coffers and Egyptian Museum).

Of course, strictly speaking the Egyptian revolution is not complete, in effect there is a military coup with promise of future democratic options. If the intentions are benign I would expect to see no more censorship of people expressing themselves via media, if it were not I would expect to see censorship and increased filtering.

I also suspect that the reason that Western "Pro Social Media in Revolution" pundits see the 'Net as such a large factor (apart from self interest) is that they were largely interacting with the 'Net enabled Egyptian educated class, rather than all the locals interacting at a local level on local (non english speaking) media. The medium may be the message, but make sure you are looking at all the media. This was probably even more so in the US, as I understand they could not easily get Al-Jazeera TV so were largely watching it unfold on Social Media. In fact I note with interest that Wael Ghonim, who has been channeled as the voice of the Internet Revolution, has been at great pains to point out that a lot of factors were driving the revolution. There are dissenting voices in Egypt about media usage, but they are not getting amplified, especially in the US:

“I think it’s been incredibly condescending to diminish, if you will, what was an incredibly popular revolution the likes of which the Arab world has not seen, perhaps the whole world has not seen, and just to say that it was a Facebook event or a Twitter event.” — Parvez Sharma, filmmaker and writer

I will go into more detail in a subseqent post about the real causes and modes of a revolution, using the same research techniques we do for market analysis (I believe the new word for this approach is cliodynamics), but what I think we would conclude as an initial hypothesis is that the Internet, and moer specifically Social Media is:

- a good way to create and aggregate "Seditous Content" before the actual "Street Phase" of a revolution, however, the reasons for dissatisfaction have to exist already
- a way of building up "weak ties" into a point where "strong ties" may be possible. However, it does not (yet) seem to promote the spark of actual open revolt
- is probably overstated by Westen proponents as a force in Egypt as (i) penetration is low, (ii) western (especially US) observers are getting a disproportionate amount of their data via this source and (iii) there is quite a bit of self interest in advancing the cause (and opposing it, for that matter) so claims tend to be over-optimisitc
- not as useful once people are on the streets as before
- is more prone to shutdown as most 'Net distribution assets are "in country" than "out country" and can be blocked - Foreign assets like satellites, or unjammable assets like paper, word of mouth, etc are more reliable. Rely on teh 'Net at your peril
- is a useful component of the data fed back to Western peoples, to rapidly dissuade their governments from propping up the Old Regimes

In other words, I would argue from this analysis that the 'Net is just another layer of the comms systems, and is a tool of, rather than a cause of, any revolutionary movement. It is more efficient and effective than what has gone before to connect and aggregate, but less useful once the people hit the streets, so ultimately it is definiely not the "killer app" that allows a revolution to occur.

What I think it has done is shifted the balance of media power to citizen, from State. I would however argue that its gone back to a level of c 70 years ago, before (largely state controlled) broadcast mass media emerged. In say the 1920's politics was a far more local issue, carried in town halls and on the stumps - you saw your opponenst up close and personal - and I would argue that modern 'Net media is a return to that era. But that era was unable to stop the march of Stalinism and Fascism, because - as I will argue subsequently - far larger forces are at play than the means of communication.

Update on that last comment about shifting the balance - it appears even in Egypt, the state was starting to use social media - TechCrunch:

Alyouka also notes how the Egyptian authorities themselves were trying to use Twitter to spread propaganda and misinformation in a “painfully awkward” manner (the fake accounts are always easy to spot, aren’t they?). The tell-tale signs: always repeating the same Tweets, word-for-word, over different accounts about how bad the protests were for the country or praising Mubarak with few followers and very few tweets per account.

So there will be an arms race, clearly....

Today Nokia and Microsoft announced a JV to retake the Smartphone market - Nokia:

While the specific details of the deal are being worked out, here’s a quick summary of what we are working towards:

- Nokia will adopt Windows Phone as its primary smartphone strategy, innovating on top of the platform in areas such as imaging, where Nokia is a market leader.

- Nokia will help drive and define the future of Windows Phone. Nokia will contribute its expertise on hardware design, language support, and help bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments and geographies.

- Nokia and Microsoft will closely collaborate on development, joint marketing initiatives and a shared development roadmap to align on the future evolution of mobile products.

- Bing will power Nokia’s search services across Nokia devices and services, giving customers access to Bing’s next generation search capabilities. Microsoft adCenter will provide search advertising services on Nokia’s line of devices and services.

- Nokia Maps will be a core part of Microsoft’s mapping services. For example, Maps would be integrated with Microsoft’s Bing search engine and adCenter advertising platform to form a unique local search and advertising experience.

- Nokia’s extensive operator billing agreements will make it easier for consumers to purchase Nokia Windows Phone services in countries where credit-card use is low.

- Microsoft development tools will be used to create applications to run on Nokia Windows Phones, allowing developers to easily leverage the ecosystem’s global reach.

- Microsoft will continue to invest in the development of Windows Phone and cloud services so customers can do more with their phone, across their work and personal lives.

- Nokia’s content and application store will be integrated with Microsoft Marketplace for a more compelling consumer experience.

So far so good, now here is the harder bit:

We each bring incredible assets to the table. Nokia’s history of innovation in the hardware space, global hardware scale, strong history of intellectual property creation and navigation assets are second to none. Microsoft is a leader in software and services; the company’s incredible expertise in platform creation forms the opportunity for its billions of customers and millions of partners to get more out of their devices.

The reason the JV is happening is that the assets being brought to the table are not so much incredible but non-credible. The two companies have completeley dropped the ball in mobile over the last 5 years, from positions of strength, due to a combination of world class arrogance, incompetence and intransigence. The question is, can they remove the cultures that made this happen? The next paragraph makes you wonder:

Together, we have some of the world’s most admired brands, including Windows, Office, Bing, Xbox Live, NAVTEQ and Nokia. We also have a shared understanding of what it takes to build and sustain a mobile ecosystem, which includes the entire experience from the device to the software to the applications, services and the marketplace.

That shared undestanding of what it takes to build an ecosystem is a chimera in the smart mobile world, they have both been comprehensively outdone by Apple and then Android (Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, more ...). They are right when they say that ecosystems need to be at scale and execution is key:

Ecosystems thrive when they reach scale, when they are fueled by energy and innovation and when they provide benefits and value to each person or company who participates. This is what we are creating; this is our vision; this is the work we are driving from this day forward.

There are other mobile ecosystems. We will disrupt them.

There will be challenges. We will overcome them.

Success requires speed. We will be swift.

My Broadsight colleague Dave Short has a rule of thumb, that Nimbleness = 1 / Size squared - ie double the company size, you get 1/4 of the nimbleness. In other words, Nokia and Microsoft doubling up is likely to reduce, not increase speed.

As to disrupting the market there is an irony here for Microsoft, as they disrupted the PC market in a similar way - find a sluggish giant that has missed a step (IBM) and use its assets (brand, sales channel) to capture a market (Microcomputers, or PC's ase we now call them) with their* new operating system (MS-DOS) and snaffle the market from Apple. Only thing is this time, Google has already aggregated the very fragmented non-Apple market under an O/S - ie Android. The lesson last time was that once there was a major mass market OS, all the other later entrants failed and had to adopt MS-DOS. This was partly because of the dominant OS effect by then, but was more due to the applications Ecosystem that MS-DOS and Apple already had. Android is now the MS-DOs in this industry, so it's highly likely that the New MSFT/Nokia play will struggle in the market.

But for Microsoft, there is an added pressure to consider in mobile. When it was all dumbphones, it was no threat to the Microsoft core user base. Even smartphones are no real threat, more a market missed - but tablets are the real threat, as a good tablet OS will be a major competitor for laptops and PCs.

The saving grace is the huge market share Nokia potentially can upsell to, but they will have to move very fast, every month people are opting fior iPhones and Android phones, and the whole market cycles around in about 2 years and we are well into the Smartphone upgrade cycle.....and if Dave's formula is right, that Nimbleness ain't going to happen. Rosabeth Moss Kanter once wrote "Can Giants learn to Dance" where she argues it is possible, my view on the book was it was more the triumph of hope over evidence. Or, as Telecom TV's ever-sharp mobile device fundi Lelia Makki (@leilamakki) puts it, she is:

"hopeful but not holding my breath."

Me neither - in fact, it seems more a desperate "last dance at the disco" tie-up. I'd bet on Nokia/Microsoft phones running Android in 2 years time (in fact I'd bet more on Kinect protecting MSFT's PC/Laptop assets)

Update - infomation on the new Nokia structure - looks like one small newly created division is responsible for this whole smartphone turnaround, but key assets - R&D, dealmaking, sales channels, even finance - are owned elsewhere in the company. This won't dance, never mind fly, as it will be mired in the peanut butter of the existing Big Battalions. They need to create a proper Joint Venture or Spinout with real independence. And time is fleeting, as yet there is no Nokia/Microsoft smartphone or tablet, they need one sooner rather than later.

Update 2 - Ian Betteridge makes a good point:

You can see that Nokia doesn’t comprehend what went wrong by the fact that it’s got the right to customise everything on Windows Phone, something no other licensee has. That Microsoft has allowed Nokia to insert this clause shows that it doesn’t understand the success of iPhone (and the failings of Android).

Good point - what killed Planet Mobile was the Operating System Tower of Babel - it made apps writing extremely uneconomic and using them extremely frustrating.

Update 3 - interesting theory - Microsoft has set up a Puppet Government in Nokia (the $0 acquisition)

* Ignoring the nip and truck they did with the original PC-DOS of course.....

Loved the "Wisdom of the Clouds" title, it's pinched from Paul Carr's piece on the issues that the Wikileaks affaire brought up - or rather, the way Cloud players rolled over when Sen Liebermann roughed them up and couldn't hand over user data fast enough (Twitter being the honourable exception).

It used to be that if the US government wanted access to documents or letters in my possession they’d have to subpoena me directly. As a foreign citizen there are all sorts of ways I could fight the request – and it was at least my choice whether to do so. As someone living in the US I also had the whole weight of the 4th Amendment on my side. Now, with everything in the cloud, the decision whether to hand over my personal information is almost entirely out of my hands. And unless, as happened with Twitter, the company storing my data decides to fight for openness on my behalf, there’s every possibility that I won’t even hear about the request until it’s too late. That’s just not how things should work in a free society.

We agree totally (see here) and its no accident that many of those most interested in telling YOU to open up run very closed shops themselves. Look at what they do, not what they say!

We would also argue that there is another, older reason to question wisdom of Clouds, and this is simply what happens if it goes away - all that data - gone. There are 3 aspects:

(i) Cloud not accessable from current location - this means potentually a whole lot of work you need to do can't be done. I am amazed at the increasing number of people who look at me as if I'm nuts when I say i use Thunderbird to actually store all my emails on my own hard drive(s), not just for backup but to work when connection is unavailable. It beggars belief that there are people who can't access their email locally, but there you go... the madding crowd and the Cloud and all that.

(ii) Cloud connection/service temporarily down - work stopper, especially if it is core data. Why would anyone take this risk. Clouds cannot be 99.99% reliable, and Murphy's Law clearly sates that the .001% will be at the most inconvenient time possible. No sane CIO would not have a backup strategy

(iii) Cloud service disappears - either it kocks you off (cf Wikileaks) or goes pop. In either case good luck getting your stuff back. At least with a hard disk crash you can try and sort it out yourself.

We have been worried for quite soem time about privacy implications of Cloud storage, especially on free services - though as the Wikileaks affaire proves. its not just free services that can play fast and loose.

Long term readers of this blog will know our recommendation is to go for hybrid services - use the cloud by all means , but keep a hot running local backup. This is borne by our experience over 20 years dealing with networked and hosted services. You cannot engineer these thinsg to be 100% reliable even at infinite cost. at affordable cost they will be a darn sight less fr quite a whiel. (I note the Cloud lobby can no longer claim that Cloud services are more economical)

Another thing we have been looking at is where can you put secure servers, ie ones that can't be pried into by powerful bodies. which countries would host such a service? (Encryption is not enough, as if the host country wants the data badly enough they can get it, and its no guarantee that your encryption can't be broken (or more likely, compromised by man-in-the-middle attacks) if the hoster is in cahoots with said snooping entity.

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....)

Salon puts it very well....

The WikiLeaks affair is highlighting the Internet's soft underbelly: the intermediaries on which we all rely to store our information and make it available. We are learning, to our dismay, that we cannot trust them. Combine that with increasing government intervention, we're also learning that the Internet is somewhat easier to censor than we'd assumed.

This should worry anyone who believes that we're going to move our data and online lives into the fabled "cloud" -- the diffused online array of hardware and services where, proponents say, we can do our online work, play and commerce without the need for storing data on our own personal computers. Trusting the cloud is becoming an act of faith, and it's time to question that faith.

And the situation should absolutely chill everyone who believes in free speech -- and especially the people who call themselves journalists. Sadly, however, too many of them have been cheering on people who want to make WikiLeaks disappear. Do they realize that it could be their own turn someday?

Given that the economic case for Cloud Computing seems to be floating ever further away, and its most punted current rationale is "risk reduction", Wikileaks shows The Cloud's promise of risk reduction is whispy at best and that there is only one way to reduce risk and that is have your own servers, preferably not in the US. And ideally have your own Internet as well....

The correct retort to any Cloud Apostle right now is probably somewhere between a snort of derision and a well placed boot on the seat of the trousers....

Broadsight's Paul Lancefield has been doing some musing on the future of the TV value chain:

Something big has happened in the TV business and the launch of Apple TV has just underlined it. That's not to say Apple designed this shift or even are the likely victor in the living room. They didn't and they aren't. But their device ecosystem, covering as it does TV, PC, Notebook, Phone and Tablet now proves the viability of this new much heralded model, but more than that, because we can see it in action, because we can play with all the constituent parts we can now begin to get a sense of what it will really mean and the world that is emerging is radically different from the world most of the major TV players are planning for.

Moving forwards we are going to see the massive and deliberate disaggregation of content presented via TV: Note, I'm saying "disaggregation" not "aggregation". I’m not, however, attributing this move towards disaggregation to the normally cited cause. It won’t be because there are multiple standards and technologies competing for your patronage in the Living room that this disaggregation will take place, rather we will see disaggregation by design.

AppleTV is one of the new breed of TV device offering so called "Over The Top" (OTT) content. What this means is it works exactly how most Internet users think it should work; you make a request for content, it get’s delivered. You don’t have to first subscribe to a TV Service as such and you don’t need an installer to come and install any specialist equipment in your home. The content delivered is network agnostic, with the caveat that your ISP connection has to give you sufficient bandwidth and implement TCP/IP (but which networks don’t - TCP/IP is now a given). You no longer need to be connected to Virgin cable or have a subscription to Sky to get HD TV. All you need is a fat-pipe, a TV capable device, 802.11n WiFi and a credit card.

For years the TV Service delivery industry has existed because if you wanted video to be piped to your goggle box, there was no alternative than to build a dedicated transmission network. Then, after the arrival of the Internet, unicast IP held out the promise that TV could be delivered along with the large number of other services we know and love on the Internet but, until recently, there simply wasn't enough capacity available to provide the kind of timely and quality service TV viewers demand. More recently however, services like Apple TV and Sky Player, have shown the specialist TV transmission business as we once knew it, is no longer essential. I’ve now rented some 15-20 HD films on Apple TV and all have started within 40 or so seconds and played from beginning to end without interruption.

Quality OTT content delivery demonstrates we have entered the promised land and you can now get HD video from any location to any device (albeit delayed for 20-60 seconds for buffering). For the last couple of years we have been living in an n2n world, which is like the p2p world we already know, only with added spice; In an n2n world any device can talk to any other device and handle and operate with any of the popular streamed media formats. But now even before we have had time to fully assimilate the implications of this step, we are moving into what I would like to call the n2nd world. And in this world - at least so far as TV is concerned - the constraints of Apple versus Android or Windows versus OSX or XBox Vs PS3 all become irrelevant. It is a world where anyone can play content out to any device, where the the display, the terminus for what we want to play-out, is no longer the device running the player application. We know this world is coming because iPhones and iPads can already stream out content wirelessly to Apple TV for display. Of course streaming from one device to another to display it is nothing new, devices with DLNA have been doing so for some time. But what is new is that this capability is now part of a unified ecosystem where all the parts of the chain have been designed to work together. Today I can go to a friends house and output the DRM protected video from my cloud data store, or my iTunes rented movie from my iPhone or iPad, to my friend’s Apple TV.

As sure as eggs are eggs, the component parts of this ecosystem will be replicated in the open standards world (though there is a surmountable gotcha I discuss at the end of this article) and adopted by all mobile device manufacturers. So in a short while it will be possible for anyone to throw video from the device they carry in their pocket onto a local display.

The big shift to OTT means the need for dedicated TV transmission systems will, over time, diminish to near zero. The people who put software on Set Top Boxes, the people who integrate back-end systems with those Set-Top-Boxes for playing out linear channel programming and Video on Demand and the people who integrate all the other stuff required to deliver service like billing systems EPG schedule data systems and the like, will have far less work to do. I don’t think the industry has yet fully caught on, but in the new n2n world, there is hardly any need for specialist TV technology people to exist as we know them. A fact particularly unfortunate for me because I have for some years earned a living as a consultant and Program Manager in the Digital TV space.

In the old world, if you owned content you needed a network and you didn’t think too hard about the fact an EPG was imposed on the pipe your content was delivered through because that’s how you got your content in front of the audience. The systems for doing these things were far too expensive and specialist for you to seek to deliver them yourself (though if you were big enough - like Disney - you might take the extra step of arranging your content to match your own wishes in your own channel). But in the n2nd world, the need for your content to be aggregated with other content just so it can be economically passed through a pipe, has been almost entirely eroded. In the n2n world, every element of the old TV pipe including the Set-Top-Box and the EPG, is now a commodity and is replaced by more generic technology already available in the field. Now a bedroom programmer, albeit one with sufficient financial resources to pay hosting fees and CDN caching fees, can deliver video to any device in the broadband n2n ecosystem and retain full ownership and distribution rights over the content.

The EPG of today looks as it does because of the past constraints of TV Service Transmission. If the world had never seen TV and then, all at once, someone invented the Internet, Google indexed search and n2nd technologies - after recovering from a heart attack at the excitement of it all - I’ll wager no one would then go on to invent an EPG as we find it today.

In a world of n2nd distribution current EPG design displays available TV content like Walmart stacks it’s shelves with groceries. Apple doesn't sell iMacs next to HP Notebooks at Walmart, so why would Warner Brother’s do the same with Harry Potter movies? Big blockbuster movies like, Transformers, James Bond and blockbuster TV series like The Sopranos, Band of Brothers, Hero's etc are each a franchise in and of themselves. And thanks to being rendered in the medium of the moving image the brand of the franchise is quickly and strongly established in the minds of their audience.

Brand is something to be built cherished and nurtured in the way an iMac in the Apple Store is presented like a tablet from the gods reverently placed on a shrine. Part of the reason cinemas survive in the world of large flatscreen personal TV's and Home Theatre technology is because going to the cinema is an all encompassing experience, and the experience starts with the sense of anticipation you feel as you walk through the doors. Control the space your content occupies and you control the experience and gain the opportunity to burn your brand franchise into the deepest levels of the viewer's psyche.

When you own a valuable brand, you try to shift it as far away from ‘commodity-land’ as you can manage. All the time you are a commodity you are competing on little other than price but when you are a TV brand, you are competing on promise, anticipation and excitement and these things flourish in the context of individuality (but not in the ‘supermarket shelf’ straightjacket of the EPG). So my prediction is content is going to become increasingly disaggregated. Content owners will increasingly present their wares from within their own content specific portals.

There will be limits to this process of disaggregation of course. Some content benefits very much from time-bound delivery as distinct from on-demand delivery (sports and news to name two) and there can be no doubt many returning tired from a day’s work will want a video magazine of news and entertainment to be prepared for them for when they slump in the couch. In the n2n world, owners of complimentary content co-operate and co-ordinate to deliver it as part of a unified TV magazine (here I am using the term magazine in the non-print material sense). Still there will be little incentive to present content on a ‘supermarket shelf’ alongside non-complimentary direct competitors, especially if you own the market leading brand. Co-operating with complementary content partners and developing your own portal (and so retaining control over the entirety of the customer experience) is the far more attractive option.

Areas to watch:

The EPG Model

As a counterpoint to my argument above, while we wait for the n2nd ecosystems to mature, there is still opportunity for a content aggregating device or OS which gets OTT video content efficiently onto the TV screen to have an significant impact. The current leading contenders are Apple TV and Google TV, though there are other devices worth looking out for, such as the Boxee and Roku STB’s.

Both Apple and GoogleTV, however, are excessively paternalistic and look too much to how things were done in the past whilst in Google’s case, simply throwing a bit of indexed search into the mix. It has not been build from the ground up to support how content owners will present their wares in the future. It is informed too much by the notion shows are self contained entities (which for now they are) and need to exist independent of their own hypermedia portals (which increasingly they do not). In the old world, developing a client TV content presentation solution was expensive. It involved integrating bespoke software (known an embedded system OS and a higher level TV centric addition that has become known as Middleware) and few vendors have ever managed to produce an integrated solution in less than nine months and each integrated solution would be specific to a physical network and so would only reach a small fraction of the total market for any give show. In the new n2nd world, where the n2nd TV Service pipeline has almost every element in place already, the delivery of a new TV show the added work to be done will be the delivery of a portal app for iOS or Android or the like and will be closer to 2 weeks. Abstraction technologies like Titanium allow web based hypermedia content to be delivered to native compiled applications for both iOS and Android are already available and massively reduce the effort required to get hypermedia and video content running together natively across multiple devices.

For an analogous model to the one I am proposing will emerge, look at how printed magazines / newspaper vendors have responded to the emergence of the tablet computer. News International publish a monthly magazine called Eureka which can be downloaded as an entire app (e.g. the Magazine itself is an app). The app doesn’t present the magazine content in a traditional page 2 follows page 1 style at all. It is a true hypermeida reading experience. But importantly the reader doesn’t first download a magazine reader and use it to order the magazine, for Eureka the “reader” and magazine are one. The reader code is part and parcel of every magazine download and in terms of network and device resource usage is extremely “cheap.” We can expect to see a similar strategy for n2n and n2nd OTT video delivery.

Of course generic magazine “reader” apps exist, such as the excellent reader produced by Comixology and used by Marvel and DC comics, but even in this case the presentation of available purchase options is not unified across the two companies. You download both the Marvel version of the App and the DC version of the app.

In the short to medium term there will be a place for a TV centric operating system which looks after some of the content owners content navigation requirements, but this will reduce over time, especially with the emergence of n2nd solutions. Both Google TV and Apple TV are well positioned to morph into the required solution (Google TV already has an Apps solution and Apple TV, built as it is on iOS and utilising the same A4 processor as the iPad, could easily implement the iOS apps solution).


The Player Device / Display Device interface

Open solutions for streaming TV to a separate local display device. In the n2nd world you carry your downloaded content and streaming content subscription rights with you. Round at a friends house and want to watch the game on his HD TV? Simple,
pluck your phone out your pocket and stream to his / her TV.

But for this possibility to emerge as a general solution beyond just e.g. the Apple technology ecosystem, content owners must be able to trust the link between the player and the display device (the n and the d of n2nd). This is no small problem. Player devices already have DRM solutions, however content owners will need to know their content won’t easily leak out of the display device before they will be willing are to supply to a given technology ecosystem. The only way to ensure this is either to use a closed ecosystem like that provided by Apple, or to implement a trusted certification process for certifying players and display device solutions together with a centralised database serving up per-play entitlements. The current DLNA standard simply doesn’t address this need, so something new is required.


Hyper-live TV Magazine Content

The integration of time-bound content with unicast delivery hypermedia style navigation. TV magazine style show will have a start time, but if you start late, it will contain skippable segments and also the reverse, optional segments which will take you away from live transmission, only to return you to live minus the length of the optional segment when done.


Channel Surfing

OTT content is currently hobbled by a bad channel surfing experience. The need to channel surf however is likely to reduce as the navigation paradigm is replaced by a hybrid time-based hypermedia based. But even with this reduction, it is still a viewer unfriendly to have to wait 10-30 seconds for the stream to buffer before video can be displayed. However in 2011 Sky will be introducing adaptive encoding which will allow the much faster display of low resolution video when acquiring unicast streamed video. After an initial low fidelity video lock is obtained, the quality of the stream will be increased as more of it buffers.

Update - we post this in the morning, in the evening Microsoft announces it is getting into TV and it could blow up broadcasting...

Apple has released a new social network around music, called Ping! This post is not to bury it, nor even to praise it, but to understand why they have launched Yet Another Social Network, especially into the crowded space of Music and the resounding cries of "where is Last.fm now" et al....

Giga Om says that Ping! is The Future of Social Commerce:

My belief has only been affirmed by growth in the amount of data available. With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store – aka its shopping experience — is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it’s also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it’s made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought. I wouldn’t be least bit surprised if sales of music on the iTunes store rocket upwards, thanks to social discovery.

Our review of Lala strategy is over here by the way

From MySpace onwards "Social" music has failed to deliver the goods, for a whole host of reasons but primarily its not a big enough "Social Object" to capture enough attention for a full grown sustainable Social Net. Music is a subset of why and how we interact with people, not a reason (in fact, based on some of my friends' musical tastes its probably a reason to drop people....).

Now, GigaOm is sounding Ping's praises from the rafters, but whether they were paid to do it or not, I ain't buying it as the Future of Social Commerce. My hypothesis is that "Social" and "Commerce" are uneasy bedfellows at best.

But Apple are no fools, they will know all this. In fact, I would hypothesize that Apple does not need this to be a sustainable social network. All it needs is for a sufficiently large crew of volunteers to add sufficient folksonomic aggregation data around iTunes to ramp up its purchasing attractiveness some more.

No, the real play here is harnessing this to the iTunes store - this is all about selling more songs, not about being sociable. It's about getting a Folksonomy going - Folks do the heavy lifting (recommendations etc), Apple gets the economic benefit (aka the loot in extre spending). I await with eager anticipation the use of kickbacks to "influential" super-users.

Think Social Recommendation Engine, not Social Network.

And of course, getting some more behavioural data about YOU never hurts in the Social Network game...

Intel bought McAfee fo 60% over share price today - GigaOm:

Intel CEO Paul Otellini said in a statement: “In the past, energy-efficient performance and connectivity have defined computing requirements. Looking forward, security will join those as a third pillar of what people demand from all computing experiences.” The price Intel agreed to pay for McAfee — which had revenue of $2 billion in 2009 and has gross profit margins in the 80-percent range — is a 60-percent premium to its trading price prior to the announcement.

Quite - its all about The Cloud - but McAfee? And a 60% premium - $7.7bn for the thing, in cash - at exactly the time when many newer, cheaper (and dare I say better) security software companies are popping out the woodwork? Elsewhere its been justified as a deal "about mobile" but I don't get that either for the same reason as above.

I rather liked a comment on TechCrunch:

It’s simple really. McAfee’s software slows down your computer enough that you need a faster Intel CPU. Intel now has direct influence over the main driving factor behind people purchasing new PCs…

That is about the only way this makes any sort of sense to me at the moment. To be watched.....