KerryJ's Neotenous Tech

Archive for the ‘E-business’ Category

Roger McNamee starts his video off asking “What if you knew major new technology cycle was beginning in the next couple of years?”

A tech investor, he then poses six hypotheses with which he’s been working for the past 10 months:

1. Windows is dying – their market share is plummeting. Smart phones have taken Windows from 96% of internet connected devices to under 50%. He reckons they’ll be under 30% in 18 months. 
2. Index search – which accounted for 90% of all search volume - peaked 4 years ago. Index – and the web – has become full of garbage. We’re all looking for other ways for what we want to find – Facebook, Twitter, Trip Advisor, Apps . Like MS, Google can respond in plenty of ways – but it cannot take back its dominant position in index search on the internet. Google commoditised search results – they are the only branding on your search results page. Indexed search isn’t going away – but its going to become just another tool instead of the dominant. Especially on smart phones. Google’s recovery will be in something than search.
3. Apps beat the wide open web. Apple provides info that is branded, specific and copyright protected v. the wild open web. 
4.  HTML 5 changes it all. The new battle will be between the App store and highly differentiated content. HTML 5 is, he feels, is a profound change. It provides embedded interactivity and opens up a new canvas. Suddenly, a differentiated, compelling, monetisable product is available to all – and the commoditisers like Google are going to have to find new business models.
5. Tablets win big. If you don’t own an iPad, you can’t understand the most important things going on right now. Feels other players not making the same impact. Apple’s gross margins exceed the retail price of every Android phone.
6. Social is a side show. Facebook is the new Windows. Twitter, Yelp, Skype, Linked In are building successful platforms but are going to be much smaller. The rest are going to have to follow the Zynga model and be subordinate to Facebook. Going to do a social start up? Build it on Facebook. But social is a feature, not a main focus.

The future will be different.

McNamee’s rock band did live casts via Twitter, did live casting over YouTube, then broadcast via his own satellite network using HTML 5. His band web site is being upgraded to HTML 5 and that means you can view all their videos. He says it costs practically nothing to do this.

Every Tweet is an app. Every advertisement is a store – create demand and satisfy it in the same place. Saves time, increases engagement. Going from a web of elevators to a control panel model. WOW.

Ah Dilbert! You illustrate so much about what is ridiculous and this strip is a jewel.  Any educator who has been urged to integrate social media into their coursework, any communicator or marketer who has been pressured to “get us into this social media stuff” will relate to this:

In writing a blog post this morning to synthesise my thoughts and feelings on an incredible week that saw Australia placed on a watch list of potentially repressive regimes by Reporters without borders, I debated which blog to publish it on — my work blog or this, my personal professional blog. I started my work blog because I wanted to write about the projects in which I am involved in at work. That others I work with blog about my projects fired me up. I wanted to instigate conversations. I kept my personal blog for more nuts and bolts, off topic and opinion pieces. But that line is starting to blur for me and is leaving me in a quandry. I won’t give up this blog or let it go dormant because I own the IP to all that I write here. That is not the case with the company blog. I think that my company blog is higher profile because the RSS feed appears on the company web page. Even though I get washed out of the stream fairly quickly by more prolific bloggers, I’ll bet I get traffic from that (as my stats are not hooked up on my company blog, I don’t know for sure.). And while respected aggregators like Stephen Downes have commented on posts I’ve made on my work blog — he’s never commented on blog posts from this one. So in the end, I thought I’d publish this morning’s post to the higher profile blog, even though I lose control of ownership on the content so that I could generate the discussion I wanted to start. But lately I’ve been looking at how I think about social media – including blogs and twittering. I was asked to write up my thoughts on policies around it for the organisation so that everyone had guidelines. And it strikes me that how organisations vs. individuals use these tools is changing the landscape for me.

Do I need to blog as an individual in two places? I don’t think so.

I blog to have conversations and to get my thinking down somewhere where I can easily access it. I’m not chasing stats. So what if Stephen Downes only ever comments on my education.au blog posts — if I want to be noticed, I’ll get off my bum and do more to move my blog out into the world. Should I keep my company blog to have a voice in what I’m doing for work? I’m leaning toward yes on that because I want to share the mindset and experiences behind what I do for and with my organisation. The question is –would readers want to subscribe to that? Just as I only read blogs that inspire, amuse or educate me — would someone want to subscribe to the blog of a woman who was just talking about the work she does? I suppose if it were relevant to their interests the answer would be yes. And what about my Twittering? I’m sometimes silly, sometimes talking about work. Should I keep my personal Twitter account for silliness and have another or create a joint company Twitter account to advise of outages, answer client tech questions and promote events? I’m starting to think yes. While I don’t openly complain about my place of work on my Twitter account — I express opinions that aren’t in line with the company’s stakeholders’ trains of thought. So by using Twitter to communicate about work issues — am I now a representative of the company on Twitter? It’s hard to write a disclaimer AND express an opinion in 140 characters or less. And what about my video sharing accounts? Long ago I realised that I can’t post videos with company logos on them to the same site I post machinima with dance music tracks and videos of my cat. So I set up company accounts for that. Slide sharing? My SlideShare account is about my presentations — no cat content or dance music there, so that was easy. LinkedIn is about me as a professional so that was easy. GMail is also all about me. But when I comment on blogs – what signature do I use and when? Do I use my “official” signature with my company name and title and contact details? Sometimes I do. Especially when commenting on the company dollar. For more radical sites and opinion pieces, I use my personal signature. But I’m always KerryJ — so does it matter WHICH signature I use? Or do I have an over-inflated sense of my own importance? Hmmm. The more I look into a an online communications plan for our organisation, the more I realise I need to write one for myself. How do you handle yourselves? Do you draw an online divide between your professional self and your private self? Do people who whinge about work on their personal accounts deserve to be fired if they are easily traced back to their place of work? Should people using professional accounts use the 2-drink rule after hours?

“I’m not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world.” Colin Jacobs, chair of the online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, as quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, 24 October 2008. Nope, this isn’t a post about China or a dictatorship (at least, not an official one) that’s the subject of this blog post.  It’s the Australian government’s short on detail long on self-righteous rhetoric approach to “protecting our children”. I don’t know why suddenly everyone is shocked.  Internet filtering at the ISP level has reared its ugly head on both sides of the Australian Parliament.  The latest effort was in March 2006 when then-Labour-leader Kim Beazley pounded his fist in righteous indignation “for the sake of the children”. Of course that led to the then Howard-government’s disastrous filter for every home mail-out that then year 10 student Tom Wood cracked in less time than it takes to watch an episode of that soft-core porn TV fav “Big Brother”. In January, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy resurrected the cause and attempted to stifle debate on the issues, as I blogged in the post “Disagree and you are an anti-Australian pervert.” Things seemed to go quiet until April with the government introducing amendments to the Telecommunications act that would reportedly “force all telecommunications providers to facilitate lawful data interception across fixed and mobile telephone systems, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Instant Messaging (IM) and chat room discussions” Now it’s on again — time to educate yourself and choose a side. This Thursday 30 October, the Hon. Stephen Conroy will be intereviewed on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) radio national’s Media Report program – 8:30am AEDT, repeated 8pm.  His interview will immediately be followed by one with respected futurist, educator and programmer Mark Pesce. Hopefully the audio and transcript will be up on the Media Report site not long after. If you’d like to do some homework in advance, WA Greens Senator Scott Ludlam’s web site provides a transcript of a conversation he had with Mr. Conroy in an estimates hearing — http://scott-ludlam.greensmps.org.au/content/transcript/cybersafety-net-filtering Read up, listen in and take a stance.  Mr. Conroy says it’s early days yet – so we all have time to feed into this debate. Finally, despite the fact I am not a Greens supporter, I have to say how blown away I was by Senator Ludlam’s blog and the Green’s site.  It’s the antithesis of Senator Conroy’s deadly boring web 1.0 pixel ghetto and proves who is in touch with how the internet is used and who gets “briefings”.

I can only guess that this is a money-saving move from the bean counters at Walmart — if it is, they’ll soon have fewer beans to jiggle around… Walmart has decided to pull the plug on their music DRM server — so anyone who bought music prior to February 2008 has a couple of days left until they can NO LONGER PLAY THEIR BOUGHT AND PAID FOR MP3s. In a letter (that I did not receive) to those trusting suckers who did the right thing and paid for their music, Walmart suggests we burn our MP3s to CD.  But we CAN’T BURN THEM AS MP3s.  Oh no.  We have to burn them as traditional music CDs.  Ones we WON’T BE ABLE TO RIP BACK. ATTENTION CLUELESS WALMARTIANS: I haven’t played a music CD in 3 years and guess what??? My MP3 player (my mobile phone) DOESN’T HAVE A CD PLAYER. Here’s the thing: give me the option to replace what I’ve purchased with the new non-DRM format or CHEERFULLY REFUND MY BLOODY MONEY. Technology has moved on from CDs. I will move on from buying music from you and hope that millions of others follow suit if you don’t make this right.