Digital Britain: Preliminary Report

On 17 October 2008, Lord Carter, the minister for communications, technology and broadcasting, began work on a report dubbed “Digital Britain”. The idea was to create an action plan that would secure the UK’s place ‘at the head’ of the new media age.  There is more about this action plan here and here.

Released today, the interim report outlines 22 specific actions, and in so doing commits the government too.  These are based on a range of topics including: Universal Connectivity, Original UK Content, Digital Content, Digital Radio, Digital TV, Mobile Wireless, and Next Generation Networks.

The Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, outlines the report’s interim findings here (why are the parlimentary benches so empty?) and the BBC editorial team reports on some of the key points taken from the report here.

It seems feedback is mixed with the announcement of Broadband ‘in every home by 2012′ being called a ‘damp squib’ no less.  Potentially a tad party political perhaps, but IT industry analyst firm Ovum said the report was well-intended but “severely lacking in the detail.”  Ouch.

As the final version is due in June, one can only assume this will be even meatier – but for the keenest digerati the complete interim report is here (open’s 2MB .pdf) in its 81 page glory.  Enjoy.

Filed under: Business, Computing, Media, Online, WIFI, digital, technology, wi-fi , BBC, Broadband Britain, Digital Britain, Interim Report, Ovum

A***MUST READ***Resource for UK Technology research and analysis

There is a new resource for UK technology news and views that you should not miss if you are a marketer working in the UK Software and Services market, or indeed if your company operates in the UK.  It is provided by esteemed analysts Richard Holway and Anthony Miller.

TechMarketView’s flagship product is UKHotViews, a source of informed opinion and comment on the events, issues and players that really matter.

The feed is here or you can subscribe to get a daily email by clicking here.  Just head to the top right and inserting your email address.

This is one of those rare resources that you should read every day, without fail.

Filed under: Analyst, Business, Computer, Computing, IT, News, Research, Strategy, technology , Analyst, Anthony Miller, AR, IT, IT services, News and Views, Research, Richard Holway, Software, technology, UK, UK Hot Views

10 reasons why online advertising spend will dip in the UK recession

10 reasons why online advertising will dip in the UK recession:

1. There is a very small (but growing) percentage of conscientious people who don’t want to waste the advertiser’s money on a bad PPC click-through.  And so, as times get tougher, and because everything is tracked, some statistical trends will show a downward shift.
2. There is a percentage of people who do want to waste the advertiser’s money on a bad click-through.  And because everything is tracked, stats are up on poor quality click through’s.
3. Online advertisements are still too impersonal.  And this will become even more apparent in a ressesion.  If you read a magazine with an advert, or if you see an advert in a store, you can be mad at the shop assistant or the publisher.  If you click on a bad web ad, you have only yourself to blame — and by default that is never fun.  And rarely repeated.
4. Online PPC ads like “iPod Touch, just £20″ work.  But an ad like “SAAS.  Bespoke BPM Development testing professional” doesn’t.  The largest volume of investment in PPC advertising is in the long tail, and the adverts down in the long tail are broken.  Badly.  Ineffective advertisers with be the first to cut the budgets or shut down their experiments.
5. When up against it in a recession, human beings often ’stretch’ the truth.  The problem is, misleading and aversive adverts don’t perform well, especially online and especially during difficult times – when consumers become more defensive, critical and wary.
6. There’s no way “ad supported” ventures can pay for as many things as they were supposed to pay for any more.  Now this is being realised, there is going to be a pileup of ventures hitting the wall- taking their ad budgets with them.
7. When online ad revenues fall, there is major potential for a media driven ‘death spiral’.  A well communicated idea, story or worldview behind the short term argument “online advertising is dying” will easily transcend more relevant medium or long term spend trends.
8. Online advertising is horribly inefficient (becoming less so) but cheap (becoming less so).  And cutting spend is easy-peasy.  Your mum could do it.  Human beings are programmed to make these easy decisions quickly and painlessly.
9. ‘The End of Online Advertising as we know it’ will be auto-translated into ‘The End of Online Advertising’ in the consciousness of unknowing or immature advertising buyers.  The product of this will be FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) in the consciousness of a big proportion of online advertising buyers in the long tail.
10. Behavioural targeting will be trumpeted as a saviour in an era when existing online advertising will be promoted as ‘in transistion’.  The result will be a drop in spending whilst behavioural advertising is researched and evaluated.

Filed under: Advertising, Business, Computing, Conversion, Ideas and Riffs, Media, Strategy, Web, digital, ideas, marketing, technology , budgets, marketing, Online Advertising, recession

Please help

Sport Relief

(I should apologise for bringing you here by illicit categorisation and tagging, but I won’t. You might have wasted just 10 seconds. Hopefully you will make the choice to change someone’s world in less than a minute).

Filed under: 2.0, ACL, Adobe, Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Analyst, Analytics, Apple, Awards, BBC, Blog, Blogging, Blogroll, Books, Branding, Business, Buzz, CBS, CIM, CRM, Charity, Colour, Computer, Computing, Conversational marketing, Conversion, Cool, Corbis, Customer service, Data, Deloitte, Design, Direct Email, Direct Mail, EMI, Email, Entertainment, Entrepreneur, Events, Experiential, Facebook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Forrester, Fun, Gartner, Google, IBM, IODA, IT, IT Planning, Ideas and Riffs, Illusion, Imagery, Influence, Infrared, Job, Keywords, Knee, MIT, Mac, Measurement, Media, Microsoft, Mobile, Music, News, Online, Online Video, Open Social, PC, PR, Planning, Power 150, Printing, Public Relations, Punchstock, Quotes, RSS, Religion, Remarkable, Research, SEO, SEO / SEM, SPARQL, SQL, Salmon, Scene7, Search, Search Engine Optimisation, Second Chance Tuesday, Second Life, Semantic Web, Sinclair, Social Graphs, Social Media, Social Networking, Software, Sony BMG, Spam, Spectrum, Strategy, Surgery, Survival, TV, Tattoo, The Orchard, Tim Berners-Lee, Twitter, Usability, User Generated Content, Viral, Viral Coefficient, Virtual Worlds, WIFI, WIKI, WOM, Warner Music Group, Web, Web2.0, White Paper, Wired.com, Wordpress, Xerox, Xuuk, Yahoo!, YouTube, ZX, blogs, bob, copywriting, digital, dotcoms, garfield, iStock, ideas, illustration, last.fm, marketing, ogilvy, permission, photography, podcast, sport, startups, stock photography, technology, trust, venture capital, verge, web 2.0, webmasters, wi-fi, word of mouth , 2008, Advertising, Age 5-14, Animals, Anime, Announcements, Answered, Art, Articles, Barack, Basketball, Bible, Big, Big Questions, Blog, Blogging, blogs, Books, Business, Charity, Children, China, Christianity, Church, clinton, Club, Comedy, Commentary, Community, Crime, Culture, Current Events, Daily, Democrats, Design, Economics, Economy, Education, Election 2008, Elections, Eliot Spitzer, English, Entertainment, Environment, Events, Faith, Family, Fashion, Fiction, Film, Food, Friends, Fun, Funny, Games, God, Government, Health, Hillary, Hip-hop, History, Home, Humor, ideas, India, inspiration, internet, Iraq, Islam, Jesus, John McCain, Journal, Kids, Leadership, Life, Links, Love, marketing, Marriage, Me, Media, Misc, Miscellaneous, Money, Movies, Music, Musings, My Life, Nature, News, Obama, Opinion, Parenting, penguin, People, Personal, Philosophy, photography, photos, Physics, Pictures, Poems, Poetry, Political, Politics, Pop culture, Prayer, Projects, Psychology, Questions, Quotes, Race, Ramblings, Random, Rants, Recipes, Reflections, Relationships, Religion, Research, Review, Reviews, School, Science, Sewing, Sex, Shopping, Society, Software, Spiritual, Spirituality, Sports, Stories, Stuff, technology, television, The Page, Theology, Thoughts, Travel, trends, TV, Unanswered, United states, Update, USA, video, Videos, web 2.0, Welcome, Women, work, World, Writing, YouTube

Twitter on paper

I have mentioned Lee and Sachi LeFever’s WIKI and RSS video’s before.

Their series of short explanatory videos (The Common Craft Show) fight complexity – with simple videos in plain language. They call their format “paperworks”. I think they are simply great.

Their latest video is all about Twitter – and again is worth watching.

Use Twitter?  Follow me here.  Be warned I am new to this!

Filed under: 2.0, Computing, Media, Online Video, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, User Generated Content, Web2.0, YouTube, illustration, marketing, technology, web 2.0 , Common Craft, Lee LeFever, paperworks, Sachi LeFever, Twitter, YouTube

Social Networks and a Golden Ratio

It’s bugged me for a while, and low and behold Seth Godin sums it up again. First. And that’s two posts in a row from me, with a Godin influence! Damn it that guy is good.

Anyway, Seth says “One of the mantras of networking (and the many social networking sites that people are flocking to) is that it matters who you know. The goal of having a thousand or more friends online is that you’re well known. Connected. A click away. I wonder if there’s a more useful measure: who trusts you?”

I really think that Godin is spot on. The plethora of social network sites will each raise the bar in 2008, particularly those supporting business professionals. Those that do a remarkable job will win and those that don’t will be bought – ironically for their members.

You see the way I see it, is that all the social networking sites want today is users, more users, more eyeballs, and more traffic. Their offerings are geared around this fact…….it’s an ethos based around getting users to create as many new users as possible.

That is why they create stuff like this:

And as a result, members of these sites are caught up in a fake narrative, “the larger the quantity of friends or contacts or watch lists you have – the more influence or connected you are.” Offcourse this can be right. But it’s not a rule. And it’s not the whole truth. I think continuous improvement of Social Networks will bear fruit.

It is pretty obvious Trust would be a great dimension for social networks to embrace. So would Influence or Buzz (or both). And when elements like this are developed I believe Social Networks will be onto something very significant indeed.

I hope when this concept is implemented however, it is more scientific (for example) than LinkedIn’s current ‘recommendations’, which is just a partial attempt to add intrinsic value; and is actually pretty valueless.

No, I am thinking Social Networks need some kind of ‘Golden Ratio’ that is both complex (like the actual Golden Ratio) that can be translated into something very simple and easily understood for network or community members. For instance if you park the equation elements of the Golden Ratio to one side for a moment, some very simple manifestations occur: like the distance from outstretched fingertip to fingertip equalling your height, or the length of your forearm equalling your foot size.

Suddenly it would be much easier to understand the value of connections, visualise them, interpret them and apply them appropriately. I’d really love some kind of ’sphere of Influence’ or Trust ‘rating’ to be applied to Social Networks.

Suddenly Digg, Technorati, Open Social and LinkedIn and Facebook bring on whole new dimensions – particularly for business users.

How would you like Social Networking sites to unfold or mature?

Filed under: 2.0, Business, Computing, Facebook, Influence, Media, Open Social, Social Graphs, Social Media, Social Networking, Web2.0, ideas, marketing, technology, trust, web 2.0 , Digg, Facebook, Godin, Golden Ratio, Influence, LinkedIn, Social Newtorking, Technorati, trust

Agenda Setters 2007

Silicon.com has come up trumps with its Agenda Setters for 2007.  Take a look at the List and see who’s on it.  Alternatively take a peek at the break downs by Business Leaders,  Technologists, Entrepreneurs, and Media Movers.And for the real trend followers there is the Achievers 2000-07 trackback (which charts the top performers over the last 7 years) and a review of the Panel who was sitting in judgement.

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Extra Stuff from Silicon.com

The world’s 50 most innovative companies BusinessWeek

The world’s 100 most powerful women Forbes.com

Chron 500 – The San Francisco Bay Area’s top public companies San Francisco Chronicle

100 fastest growing tech companies Business 2.0

Filed under: Analyst, Awards, B2B, BBC, Business, Computing, Entrepreneur, IT, Influence, Measurement, Research, Web, Web2.0, marketing, startups, web 2.0 , , Agenda Setters, Business Leaders, Entrepreneurs, innovation, Media Movers, Silicon.com, Technologists

and if you know your history…..

 

After two weeks flirting in the warmth of Africa’s shadow in Fuerteventura’s mid-Atlantic location, normal service resumes here at the RawStylus blog.

After plowing through a mountain of email, and general catching up, I read this in the UK Financial Times and felt that no serious blog that discusses marketing in the context of high technology could be complete without a link and comment.

Some Fifty years ago this month, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts formed Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that was to perfect the manufacturing process for silicon chips and invent the integrated circuit.  If you have not heard of the ‘treacherous eight’ read on.  These guys founded Silicon Valley.

Yes, stuff like the net, social networking, mashups and email are rightly heralded today – and will have a huge impact on our industry – but the perfection of the manufacturing process for silicon chips and the integrated circuit has been greater than them all put together (for now).

Filed under: Business, Computer, Computing, Design, Fairchild Semiconductor, IT, News, Strategy, startups , , Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Times, manufacturing process, silicon chips

Web 2.0 – Why we got here and whats next

Alexander van Elsas points us to a Marketingfacts post highlighting a brilliant presentation by Rolf Skyberg, the disruptive innovator at eBay.

Skyberg discusses the evolution of the Internet by placing it into a historical context; the result a unique perspective.

At 477 slides you could be inclined to give this a miss.

Don’t.

You’ll fly through this.

And no doubt this will capture attention in the same way that The Machine is Us/ing Us has.

Filed under: 2.0, Business, Computer, Computing, Data, Online, Social Media, Strategy

Mr. and Mrs. Average

See how you compare with the UK’s IT and Business Decision makers in these Silicon.com surveys.

Do you think a business blog can be a good way for companies to communicate with their customers?
View Results

What is the biggest expenses claim you’ve ever made?
View Results

When you are on holiday, how often do you check your work email?
View Results

How long have you been with your current mobile phone provider?
View Results

How do you interact most often with your boss?
View Results

How many emails on average do you get in your inbox per day?
View Results

How would you describe your normal stress level at work?
View Results

Who is in charge of IT risk management within your organisation?
View Results

Would you be happy to go through biometric security checks in airports?
View Results

Have you ever visited a virtual world?
View Results

How much time in the office do you spend using social networking sites each week?
View Results

By 2015, your working week will be…
View Results

How often do you work from home?
View Results

Are you worried about potential health risks associated with using wi-fi?
View Results

Filed under: Blog, Blogging, Business, Computer, Computing, Direct Email, Email, IT, Measurement, Mobile, Research, Social Media, Virtual Worlds, WIFI, blogs, marketing, wi-fi

Aug. 7, 1991: Ladies and Gentlemen, the World Wide Web

Perhaps it is time to pause and think today. This is from Wired:

This day in History……1991: The world wide web becomes publicly available on the internet for the first time.

The web has changed a lot since Tim Berners-Lee posted, on this day in 1991, the first web pages summarising his World Wide Web project, a method of storing knowledge using hypertext documents.

In the months leading up to his post, Berners-Lee had developed everything necessary to make the web a reality, including the first browser and server.

His historic post appeared on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, ending a journey that began back in 1980, when Berners-Lee was at CERN, an international particle physics lab located near Geneva, Switzerland. There, working with collaborator Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee began the ‘Enquire’ project, the forerunner to what would become the web.

The project, which made hypertext a chief communications component for the first time, was intended to facilitate the sharing of information among researchers across the broader internet.

Today’s web is far more powerful and sophisticated than the research tool developed by Berners-Lee and Cailliau but continues operating on basically the same principles they established a quarter of a century ago.

Tim Berners-Lee, an inventor of the internet, sits outside his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000. Photo: Ed Quinn / Corbis

Filed under: 2.0, Business, Computer, Computing, MIT, Online, Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Web, Web2.0, web 2.0

You may say I’m a dreamer

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try.
No hell below us,
above us only sky.

Imagine all the people
living for today.

Imagine there’s no countries.
It isn’t hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for
and no religion, too.

Imagine all the people
living life in peace.

You may say I’m a dreamer.
But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us
and the world will be as one.

Imagine no possessions.
I wonder if you can.

No need for greed or hunger,
a brotherhood of man.

Imagine all the people
sharing all the world.

You may say I’m a dreamer.
But I’m not the only one.

I hope someday you’ll join us
and the world will live as one.

Perfect in so many ways…..

And if you believe Hit Song Science or HSS for short, which was featured at London Calling this year, we can all be knocking songs out like Lennon in next to no time.

You see HSS is a software package that was developed through extensive mathematical research on other hit songs. And the result? Complex algorithms (1 million songs in the making) are used to compare your uploaded song with other hit songs similar to your song’s algorithms. A score is given in a scale of 1-10, and if your song scores 7.5 and above, then, according to HSS, it would be a hit. If your song scores below 7.5, then maybe not.

This is crazy in so many ways. And yet;

“….the technique, known as Hit Song Science (HSS), picked out the potential of the jazz singer Norah Jones months before she topped the US charts and won eight Grammy awards for her first album. Five major record companies have been so impressed that they are beginning trials of the software, New Scientist magazine reports today.” The London Times

What I hate about this is that songs are placed in clusters, a “universe” of songs. If your song happens to be among the “hit” cluster of similar sounding songs, then your song is considered worthy as a hit.

Hmmmm. In other words, if you have a song that is different to the rest, it is almost certainly not going to be flagged up as a potential hit. It seems being ‘remarkable’ in the HSS world is a bad thing?

And worse still, in HSS’s ideal world your future hits need to be nearly the same as a previous hit, just a tiny bit different.

The website says “Do you want to have your music reach new fans“, “Do you want to be able to know where to best place your music“, “Do you want to know the success potential of your songs within different markets, music lover´s niches, and choose the best channels and targets?“

If I was a musician I would take a leaf out of John Lennon’s book. I suspect he was motivated to write ‘Imagine’ (considered by many as the best song ever written) not by copying hits by other artists, but by his feelings – his feelings of pain when he looked at the world around him.

I suspect greedy record labels and the artists of the future would do well to try the same.

Filed under: Analytics, Computing, Data, Ideas and Riffs, Measurement, Music, Planning, Remarkable, ideas, marketing , Hit Song Science

New Interactive Campaign for Toshiba.

Toshiba choose Mason Zimbler for their latest notebook campaign across Europe.

Targeting business and consumers across EMEA, this highly integrated campaign includes a flash and CGI-generated microsite with six animated films all shot on green screen and mapped into an animated online world. This enabled the site to work across 18 different languages, throughout Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle-East and Africa. The campaign also includes on and offline ads, brochures, DM and in-store POS.

I think its great! What’s your view?

Filed under: 2.0, Branding, Computer, Computing, Design, Fun, Online, Online Video, Strategy, Web, Web2.0, illustration, marketing, web 2.0, webmasters

Three letter acronyms (TLAs)

I got an invite to a webinar today.  I get a lot of these.  Tech vendors LOVE their webinars.

I’ve read the title of the invite twice.  Twice.  Slooooooowly.

“TWO WORLDS COLLIDE:  Combining PPM and ALM, from the PMO Perspective” *

Now I’ve worked in technology marketing all my working life.  I get technology.

But the use of two, three, four letter acronyms is getting beyond a joke.  Either that or I am getting too old and need to be put out to pasture.

P.S.  The invite went into the deleted items before I could be bothered to read the title a third time.  And I am usually a patient lad. 

* Hint.  Drop the TLAs.  Prospective clients might actually be interested in what you do – if they can get through your complex messaging and hyperbole. 

Filed under: Advertising, B2B, Computing, Direct Email, Direct Mail, Events, IT, Ideas and Riffs, Strategy, copywriting, ideas, marketing

A great period of invention

From a A TECHNOLOGY ALERT from The Wall Street Journal……

“Bill Gates and Steve Jobs held a rare joint appearance at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif., talking about the current state of the technology industry and reminiscing about the early days of collaboration between Microsoft and Apple.

The longtime rivals said the industry is in one of the great periods of invention. Mr. Gates suggested the next “revolutionary” change to computing will come from new ways of inputing data, while both downplayed predictions that Internet services will do away with the need for advanced software on PCs.”

Interesting stuff…..

Filed under: 2.0, Computing, Microsoft, PR, Quotes, Strategy, marketing