Archive for the ‘Emerging technology’ Category
HTML5 vs. Apps – who will be the winner?
March 25th, 2013
My favourite business intelligence site, strangely which goes by the name of Business Intelligence has just released a report on HTM 5.0 and mobile apps – and it makes for some interesting reading.
Aside from the BI assertion that HTML5 is a new technology – it’s been around in different, evolving forms since way back – as of December 2012, it is a W3C Candidate Recommendation, which means it is pretty cool and robust.
Its core aims have been to improve the tag language that drives the Web by supporting all new social objects, previously called multimedia, “while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.)”
The potential of HMTL5 is also indicated by the fact that the guys running the web – W3C – are positioning the “Five-Tag” evolution as one that subsumes not only HTML 4, but also XHTML 1 and DOM Level 2 HTML. HTML5 is the future of the web.
HTML5, for me, has always been a no-brainer. A universal standard that will play on any browser, launched on any device is my idea of web heaven.
To be clear, it enables developers to build rich web-based apps that run on any device through a standard web browser. That’s power, right there.
Business Intelligence asks a good question; will mature HMTL5 render native platform-dependent apps obsolete?
The logical answer should be an unqualified “Yes” – but the world (wide web) moves in mysterious ways.
This view is given some strength by the BI report, which thinks the same way that I do on this question. You can download the full report by signing up for a free trial. Full disclosure – BI is not a client but definitely worth a read.
The key points from the BI report are:
- Distribution: Native apps are distributed through app stores and markets controlled by the owners of the platforms. HTML5 is distributed through the rules of the open web: the link economy.
- Monetisation: Native apps come with one-click purchase options built into mobile platforms. HTML5 apps will tend to be monetized more through advertising, because payments will be less user-friendly.
- Platform power and network effects: Developers have to conform with Apple’s rules. Apple’s market share, meanwhile, creates network effects and lock-in. If and when developers can build excellent iPhone and iPad functionality on the web using HTML5, developers can cut Apple out of the loop. This will reduce the network effects of Apple’s platform.
- Functionality: Right now, native apps can do a lot more than HTML5 apps. HTML5 apps will get better, but not as fast as some HTML5 advocates think.
The report analyses:
- What HTML5 is, giving an overview of how it is a technology done by committee.
- Why the HTML5-vs-Apps debate matters, breaking down its impact on distribution, monetisation, platform power and network effects, and functionality.
- The pluses and minuses of HTML5 vs. native apps, comparing each by cost, user experience, features, distribution, and monetization.
- How and when HTML5 will take over, laying out how it has all the hallmarks of a disruptive technology.
- The success of an HTML5 pioneer, The Financial Times.
- What an HTML5 future will look like, with the promise of richer and more interactive experiences.
However, BI has just published further insights that show U.S. mobile consumers prefer apps as their internet portal of choice for.
Time spent in 2012, minutes spent per month in mobile apps was 4.6 times that of the mobile web, up from a multiple of 2.7 in March 2011.
Between March 2011 and August 2012, consumer time spent in mobile apps grew 200 per cent compared to 75 per cent growth for the mobile web.
BI believes that the reason for the disparity is straightforward: The biggest time buckets on mobile are best accessed through apps and games, the most popular mobile activity by time spent, are almost exclusively accessed through apps.
Social networking, the second most popular activity, is likewise an app-driven phenomenon.
The mobile web is not as conducive to browsing as the desktop web. The screen is smaller, the interface clunkier, the overall experience less optimized for casual surfing and serendipity. Mobile web browsers are most effective with intent: You get in, you get what you need, and you get out.
We’d just say that there is an urgent need for developers to optimise the sites they build for mobile. It’s not difficult, just time-consuming but with a proper understanding of the power of HTML5, the mobile landscape can be transformed.
Welcome to the world of extreme-scale analytics – it’s a RIOT
February 11th, 2013
If there was any doubt that big data is foremost in the minds of people who work at the strategic level , Ryan Gallagher has just broken a great extreme-scale analytics story on the Guardian website.
Raytheon, the world’s fifth largest defence contractor, has developed extreme-scale analytics software that tracks people on social media. It’s called Riot (Rapid Information Overlay Technology).
According to Ryan’s report, Riot can display on a spider diagram the associations and relationships between individuals online by looking at who they have communicated with over Twitter.
It can also mine data from Facebook and sift GPS location information from Foursquare. The data can be used to display, in graph form, the top 10 places visited by tracked individuals and the times at which they visited them.
Raytheon says it has not sold the software to any clients but concedes that the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing “trillions of entities” from cyberspace.
We’re in Ryan’s debt for breaking this story about the desire of those in power to monitor and control.
He says that Riot makes it possible to gain an entire snapshot of a person’s life – their friends, the places they visit charted on a map. It takes only a few clicks.
Watch the Raytheon Riot video for more understanding. The dark genie is out of the bottle. Heaven help us all: Raytheon Riot video
Data goldmine – but what’s the quality and do we care?
January 28th, 2013
The data goldmine is open for business but what’s the quality and do we care?
A new market report indicates that the global “big data†market and is expected to reach $48.3 billion by 2018, a compound growth rate annually (CAGR) of 40.5% from 2012 to 2018.
It was worth $6.3 billion in 2012 and North America is expected to maintain its lead in terms of revenues for the next five year, with about 54.5% share of the global big data market revenue, followed by Europe.
But, whatever the size, it what’s you do with it that counts. Quality is measured – and companies need to get the finest advice available to mankind when they are trying to manage their data mountains.
Significantly, the report suggests that a shortage of skilled personnel and efficient use of big data tools is limiting the growth of the big data market.
While the trend is towards depersonalised mega-big data, the impossibility of making any sense of that data is clear.
Any company holding big bags of data needs to know that the dollar signs on the front are indicative, not exact.
Companies need to find the best people who can check, churn and interpret that data to bring the dollar signs into focus.
Big data being generated second-by-second across the key markets – banking, healthcare, retail and education –  is creating the need for an efficient tool to manage this  Basic components of big data include software and services, hardware, and storage.
The report shows that the software and services segment held the largest share, more than 50% of the total big data market in 2012.
The storage segment is expected to be the fastest growing segment at a CAGR of 45.3% from 2012 to 2018, driven largely by the exponential increase in the amount of data across different sectors.
The financial services sector is one of the major contributors to the big data market, and held nearly 20% of the market in 2012.
The media and entertainment sector has a small market share currently but is expected grow at a CAGR of 41.4% from 2012 to 2018. This growth will primarily be due to the amount of data generated through games, images, videos and so on.
The key for us is that this information has been captured by database toolmakers but they may not be the best professionals to make the most of it.
Data analysis, with a twist that adds enormous value, is in the gift of a very few professionals right now. Every company with big data mountains should seek them out.
Retailers have survived the first digital coming, but what’s next?
January 25th, 2013
(This post was originally published on Mob76 Outlook as a guest post)
HMV’s recent demise was hardly a surprise. The writing has been on the wall for so long that it’s been painted over and graffitied many times since.
If we rewind ten years to 2003, the conversation around retail was focused on the importance of the web , and although not all major retailers had made the move to reinvent their web presence, it was on the agenda.
In many cases this move took some time to happen and latecomers lost market share and revenue opportunities… but those up against the online leaders such as Amazon (launched 1995) and Play.com (launched 1998) lost much more. They eventually lost a business.
To read the full post please click here Mob76 Outlook
2012 a year in social network numbers
December 21st, 2012
As we quickly approach 2013, many people are in reflective mood as they look to round-off their year with a 2012 summary post.
I’m going to keep it simple and avoid the fluff by hitting you with some of the statistics that evidence the ever-widening reach of social networks.
So sit back and spend a few minutes taking the numbers in while we rejoice in the fact that the world didn’t end today, at least not yet:
- 25 percent of users on Facebook don’t bother with any kind of privacy control. (source: AllTwitter)
- Monthly active Facebook users now total nearly 850 million. (source: Jeff Bullas)
- 488 million users regularly use Facebook mobile. (source: All Facebook)
- More than 1 million websites have integrated with Facebook in various ways. (source: Uberly)
- 77 percent of B2C companies and 43 percent of B2B companies acquired customers from Facebook. (source: Business2Community)
- 56 percent of customer tweets to companies are being ignored. (sources: AllTwitter)
- 32 percent of all Internet users are using Twitter. (source: Marketing Land)
- Twitter is projected to make a total of $540 million in advertising revenue by 2014. (source:Web Analytics World)
- In 2012, 1 million accounts are added to Twitter everyday. (source: Infographics Labs)
- 34 percent of marketers have generated leads using Twitter. (source: Digital Buzz Blog)
- Instagram was one of the largest acquisitions of a venture capital-backed consumer Web company since Zappos was bought by Amazon for $1.22B in 2009. (source: Factbrowser)
- According to Followgram’s research, 37 percent of Instagram users have never uploaded a single photo and only 5 percent of users have more than 50 pictures. (source: Siliconrepublic)
- It took just 10 months for Instagram to reach the milestone of 150m pictures uploaded. (source: Siliconrepublic)
- 80 percent of Pinterest users are women, while 50 percent of all Pinterest users have children. (source: Search Engine Journal)
- The average Pinterest user spends 98 minutes per month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook. (source: Arik Hanson)
- The Google +1 button is used 5 billion times per day. (source: AllTwitter)
- Google+ pages appear in search results for 30 percent of brand term searches for brands with G+ pages, up from 5 percent in February 2012. (source: Bright Edge)
- 48 percent of fortune global 100 companies are now on Google+. (source: Burson-Marsteller)
- Google+ cost $585 million and took 500 employees to build. (source: Social Media Delivered)
- Google+ is expected to attract 400 million users by the end of 2012. (source: Remcolandia)
Source – Huffington Post
Fast mobile connectivity is, finally, shaping up nicely in the UK
November 16th, 2012
Astonishing news today about fast mobile connectivity – 3 UK, says it will deliver dual-carrier HSPA to half of the UK population by year-end and 80 per cent by next April.
What part of brilliant is this not?! If 3 can do this, then we can be sure that we will, finally, after watching paint dry for ten years, have the network speed we need to do business and pleasure.
According to Mobile Business Briefing 3 has advised that its Ultrafast network is already live in 50 of the UK’s biggest cities and towns, covering 39 per cent of the population.
3 says it will launch LTE next year using two chunks (2×15 MHz) of 1800 MHz spectrum it is buying  from EE, which will double capacity on its network. Ofcom has approved the transaction but the completion of deal is a few months away.
3 says it is the country’s fastest-growing operator, adding 1.04 million customers over the past year to 8.8 million and acquiring 301,000 customers in the last quarter alone.
3 UK CEO Dave Dyson was quoted as saying: “These network improvements are designed to maintain our position as the fastest growing UK mobile operator,†said “Our Ultrafast network is giving more people in more places access to an even faster mobile internet experience.”
The operator says its growth plans are being backed up by an 800-strong recruitment drive that will add nearly 400 sales and service roles at its Glasgow office and 400 across its high street retail stores and Maidenhead office.
At the same time, the operator has shared some really useful info about its customer behaviours with Go Mo News.
Good news to end the working week.
Content 4.0 – what we will pay for [infographic]
November 5th, 2012
I spotted this excellent infographic on what content we would pay for and thought it might be useful and relevant to you.
Business Insider (not a client) produced the infographic (click on the image for full size) believes that “Media” no longer encompasses merely content, but also commerce, payments, and platforms. It says that in a post-cash, networked, and mobile-enabled society, there are new business models work for digital publishers and digital companies.
Business Insider‘s New York city event  on November 27-28th - IGNITION: Future Of Digital – is a two-day conference that will explore the successful and emerging business models of digital media.
It has lined up a truly impressive speaker list and I think it would be well worth following. More details here
The themes of the New York event chime with our ideas at Liberate Media. We believe that sharing useful, timely and relevant content is now the most important element of any PR campaign. It has a clear and measurable value for brands.
While we work in the Earned Media world, where free content is used to build brand authority, reputation and trust, we can also see the rise of content forms, provided by savvy publishers that people will pay for, particularly on mobile devices.
For example, we’ve seen the recent launch in the UK of 12ahead, led by editor Andy McCormick, a young veteran of the digital marketing sector.
12ahead provides quality information that is not easily found anywhere else on the web and has a subscription business model. Early signs are that people are more than willing to pay for this information.
The new title, which I hope thrives (they’re not a client), is part of Content 4.0.
Content 4.0, says Business Insider, is the rise of “Awesome to Many”, where technological advance and maturity of online culture combine to give content providers the opportunity to charge for these assets again.
I think that the Content 4.0 proposition is very strong and is still in process as an idea. But I agree that the online commercial landscape has changed fundamentally over the past few years.
The driver for that was Steve Jobs. Through iTunes, he made buying content online cool again. He then enabled this facility through the iPhone so mobile handsets became purchasing devices.
When buying through mobile becomes cool, the economics of the internet are transformed. We owe Steve Jobs a great debt.
We all love stories – and the narrative form is changing rapidly
November 1st, 2012
We all love stories, from the toddler joy of listening to our parents reading to us to an unexpected conversation in a pub.
We’ve learned to enjoy stories through mediums other than live speech – the book, magazine, film, TV show.
But maybe this is changing and we are moving back to a new form of oral transmission. At least that’s the argument put forward this week by Aleks Krotoski.
She is running an excellent series on BBC Radio 4 – Digital Human – which is well worth a catch-up if you haven’t followed it yet. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nl671
Aleks Krotoski is one of the leading thinkers in the new generation of young broadcasters who focus on the cultural changes being driven by global networks and new technologies. This is her second Digital Human series.
This week, Aleks investigated the way that we tell stories in the digital age. Aleks talked to information specialists – author AS Byatt, Alison Norrington (one of the world’s leading proponents of transmedia stories), and Tom Pettitt (author of The Gutenberg Parenthesis) among others, to try to understand what a ‘story’ is for, before querying how modern online storytelling bears a striking resemblance to oral traditions of mediaeval times.
Many of the stories we tell, according to Aleks, currently do not make the most of what the digital world has to offer.
But there are examples of a new narrative form. The Slender Man, created by Victor Serge is a myth born and spread on the internet, and has gone global, far beyond the Anglophone countries. It is definitely worth checking out.
During the programme, AS Byatt said that stories are the essence of life and of time. They surround us and help us make sense of the world.
Tom Pettitt, who teaches English Literature at the University of Southern Denmark said that the current digital culture is in some ways reversing the Gutenberg revolution, returning the story to ‘the campfire’, picking up the oral tradition from where we left it in around 1600, with the introduction of movable type.
He believes that post-modern digital stories will resemble pre-modern stories.
Author Frank Rose echoed Professor Pettitt’s thoughts saying that the story is now freed from the constrictions of the book; it can be as long as you want; it can change and it can be split into two or more stories. It is also more than just text – you can use audio, video and images, for example, to narrate the tale. And it is interactive.
The power of narrative, or story-telling, should not be under-estimated. New forms of story-telling will only reinforce the focus on online content as a highly effective way to engage with others, whether new friends, colleagues, clients and customers.
Joined up mobile, the empty thrill of 4G and the fragile promise of 5G
October 10th, 2012
Business is suffering in the UK, and we are suffering because there is no visible joined up mobile strategy in this country … only the empty thrill of 4G and the fragile promise of 5G.
This is unacceptable.
It’s a given that connecting people and places has driven economic expansion in every country in the world, whether sustainable or not, so why do we not have a coherent and visible strategy for the deployment of fast mobile connectivity in the UK?
I was writing about fast broadband in 1989. I was one of the first people in the UK to test it in 1999-2000. It changed my life and the lives of my children. But why did it take so long?
I had a brick mobile handset and then a smaller version by 1995 but it took a decade or more before I was offered faster mobile connectivity.
Even now, seven years on, my mobile connection speed is a bad joke. I run regular speed tests (on speedtest.net) and these show me that the average download connection speed is 0.02Mbs and the upload speed around 0.01Mbs.
This means that it is impossible for me to conduct business on mobile in the content-rich way that I need.
I think that the mobile network providers boast multiple-megabit connectivity on 3G but this has never been my experience. or that of my sons and friends. It amounts to one stop short of a Big Lie.
Now, we have the joy of 4G, coming to one of 16 cities in the UK sometime over the next six months (or there about). I’ve already written about this so will say no more for now.
Then, just when we thought mobile news could not get any better, 5G is on the horizon.  Surrey University has been awarded £35 million from mobile operators, infrastructure providers and the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund to fund research into superfast mobile broadband.
We will see the first flutter of 5G in eight years’ time – 2020. I’ve just realised that I might not be around by the time this technology is deployed everywhere in the UK (my bet is 2030-ish).
We deserve better than this from the mobile network providers and the Government. If you want to build a British Tiger Economy, you have to deploy the fastest mobile connectivity. Without it, we are choking on our competitors’ dust.
The map image at the top of this post tells me everything I need to know about how far we are behind. Click and weep (the story is from 2008…)
Patience is an excellent quality especially with mobile 4G/LTE roll out in the UK
October 5th, 2012
Hot news! Eons after mobile 4G/LTE was proven as a technology, the Government and network providers are going to allow us to connect at an ordinary speed.
Lovely, nice, smashing. What gets my goat is that we should have had this ordinary fast mobile broadband at least five years ago.
How much business has been lost in those 60 weeks by the arrogance of the network providers and the total inability of the Government to push for change in the way we organise our connected lives?
I promise you that none of them have our interests at heart. I’ve worked in and around this business for long enough to know this.
I can hardly contain my excitement about the announcement that 4G/LTE will be coming to a city near you, all being well, by next April, maybe before. That’s 16 cities by the way. Whooah! Go Gov! Go Network Providers! You rock! Not.
Can you remember how long it took to roll out broadband connectivity to the whole of our islands? Yeah, right. It’s still in process.
So please don’t hold your breath while we wait for 4G/LTE connectivity … you might expire. And then you’d be a lost customer for the worst network providers in the world.
You think I’m angry about this? Def yes! I’m a patient man but there’s only so much bull you can take before you have to push back. And just before you push back, you realise that the Government knows jack all about mobile – and the network providers suck on this.
But you have to laugh. And I did when I saw the connection speed that 4G/LTE would provide. Watch and chuckle: 4G/LTE Amazing!
Best bit for me was the 3G speed achieved during the tests, which advised 2Mbps at times. I use mobile every day, all the time. And I have never, not once, been provided with that speed.
So I did my tests, conducted over the past three days and the results are as follows:
3G download speed (on 02) central Brighton: download – 0.2Mbps, 0.1Mbps, 0 Mbps.
As I said, don’t hold your breath.
For how much longer do we have to be patient before we push for the everywhere fast mobile connectivity that we deserve, and which drives UK business?