That is all. Hopefully it’ll be stuck in all your heads now, as it’s been in mine for the last 9 hours or so.
Monthly Archives: May 2011
A week with the Blackberry Torch
I’d previously mentioned that my brother-in-law was trialling a Blackberry Torch after the best part of two years on an iPhone 3GS.
How did it go? Well, after a week with the Blackberry – he took it back to the shop. There were a multitude of reasons from BIL, but first and foremost amongst them was the multiple-clicks-to-do-anything nature of the BB platform, something that was unsurprisingly frustrating to an erstwhile iPhone user. Three clicks to check the weather, too much use of the Blackberry buttons, etc.
Whilst he liked the email, industrial design and feel of the phone etc., the performance and interface marked its demise out. After using an iPhone, it seemed that little about the BB interface was intuitive.
Which makes sense I guess – indicative excerpt from the Gizmodo review captures it:
The distillation of this grand mishmash of observations and scenarios is this: BlackBerry isn’t good enough anymore if you’re comparing it to other smartphones. What does it do better than the rest? That’s the fundamental question. And the answer is that for most people, in most situations, compared to Android and iPhone, not a whole lot.
It also brings to mind what is possibly one of the most sensational pieces of review-contempt I’ve ever read, courtesy of Infoworld, on Blackberry’s new tablet – which, I gather, like the Groslch adverts, is ‘not ready yet’:
After spending a couple days with the final product, it’s clear that the PlayBook is a useless device whose development is unfinished.
And that’s just the opening paragraph – they don’t really cut loose until they start talking about the idea of tethering the Playbook to a Blackberry for data usage!
Next up – BIL’s trying the HTC Sensation – a beautiful piece of Android hardware with an interface I’m sure he’ll find far more familiar and usable. We’ll see what happens!
Fiskars weedpuller review
After having it demonstrated by Amanda’s cousin Tomas in Denmark, having my mother-in-law educate me on the perils of Dandelions and on reaching the end of my tether with regards to a few very specific weeds in the garden, I invested in the Finnish-designed Fiskars weedpuller.
The device operates by extruding four sharpened stainless steel teeth into the ground. You lower it over where you imagine the root of the problem to be (pun intended), apply pressure, and as you lean back on the handy foot press the teeth clamp over the root of the weed and pulls it out of the ground, alongside a small, manageable clump of turf and soil. There’s a satisfyingly clunky ‘reload’ mechanism which throws the weed off the end of the weedpuller.
Doing our entire garden – which is relatively clear of dandelions, but has a few other weed issues – took about an hour and a half and resulted in a wheelbarrow load of weeds. I’d estimate that in about two thirds of cases I got the whole root up, which I thought was a good result. Hopefully as an iterated process in the future it’ll be pretty quick and painless – and more eco-friendly than weed poison alternatives.
The small holes dotting the garden may or may not need filling with compost and replanting with fresh grass seed at some point, which I guess is the only negative – but then, this would be significantly worse if you were trowelling weeds out of the ground by hand! I need a backpack mounted metal-detector shaped compost deployer to save my lower back from the patching work…
Weed or plant? A new game…
This is a picture of a weed. Or possibly the leaf of a Lapland potato I brought back from Finland for planting. I have no idea.
My plan is to leave it for a bit until there is more discernible growth and to try to make a less than completely arbitrary judgement then. That’s when I read of LeafSnap – Leaf recognition software developed by Columbia University in the US. You take a picture of a leaf and it pattern matches against a database to tell you what it is. Could this make the difference?
Reviews of the app are not good on the Appstore. “Only works on US trees,” “Primitive pattern matching that returns dozens of matches”… and then there’s the fact that it only makes claim to cope with tree leaves.
But it’s a start. Technology will find a way to help my garden grow…
The right here, right now generation
After my blog post on VAT on eBooks and reading Lucy’s comment on Facebook about the government being keen on Kindles for schools… I paused to think about Emily’s use of technology. My parents have had decades to get used to the idea that I’m more technologically proficient than them, but I’m still coming to terms with the fact that my hand-wavy daughter that will giggle for minutes at a bouncing pink rabbit will, in all likelihood, supersede me for technology proficiency – and (if there was a chance Amanda would allow it, which she won’t) grow up reading eBooks.
The economics of eBooks, VAT issue notwithstanding, makes them ludicrously compelling for schools. Textbooks are expensive, in tediously short supply, subject to loss, damage, graffiti and the like. Desk-embedded eBook readers? Well, a little more resilient, one would hope – infinitely cheaper in long-term materials… and a whole new world of opportunity for the education system.
30 years ago, I grew up in a world of scheduled TV programming (my sister and I would argue over watching Transformers vs. My LIttle Pony), of chunky textbooks and even chunkier files when I got to secondary school; where it was a novelty that I typed my essays and at a time when touchscreens were a ludicrously expensive, almost magical novelty. And the Internet? Well, there wasn’t much of that around for a while.
Today, the magic is everywhere, almost mundane (although I still pause to wonder at it). What this means for a kid’s need for instant gratification, I shudder to think (I guess patience will need to be trained in elsewhere).
I’m kind of keeping up with the kids at the moment (although I don’t believe in BBM and I’m not as obsessive about Twitter or Foursquare as many), but I have a feeling my days as the tech supremo of the household are numbered.
Moore’s law, suffering
In the 90s, as a PC-gaming geek, I bemoaned Moore’s law; Intel’s founder’s dictum that the processing power of computers would double every two years or so (technically, the dictum might be that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double, but the former sounds more comprehensible and comes to much the same thing).
Why did I care? Because every new piece of software required a faster computer, and that meant, when I was trying to play Dune 2 on an ageing Amstrad PC2286 (clocked at a staggering 12 megahertz, costing the best part of £2k) that I had to do some considerable Macgyvery hackery to free enough system resources to allow the game to load – and it dragged agonisingly slowly when I’d built too many Harkonnen Devastator tanks (we didn’t have the money or inclination to upgrade every two years, certainly not so I could game more).
Today, over 40 years on from the original prediction, material and manufacturing limits are slowing the pace at which hardware becomes defunct. That is to say – the processes by which CPUs are created are reaching the point where we simply will not be able to make the processing elements any smaller, and so Moore’s law is slowing. Intel’s website explains, and gives us this handy graph:
By 2020, Moore’s law will not apply to traditional CPU development. So one of two things will happen; first, companies will continue to shift multiple cores onto CPUs (dual, quad-, octo-core machines already exist) to allow for even more parallel processing. Second; we will move onto a new substrate for computer processing – potentially optical based computing or some such. I don’t think the technology for the latter is quite ready yet.
But the net impact for me, as a consumer and Deputy CIO for my company – lack of processing power no longer fuels hardware refresh in the way that it once did. A server I put in three years ago is showing no significant signs of performance degradation and the only real point of concern I have is that a hard drive will fail. Cost of replacement hard drive? A couple of hundred quid, if that. Cost of new server? In the thousands.
Of course, ideologically speaking, I’m looking to outsource all of this stuff (personally and professionally) to the cloud. But the UK’s internet infrastructure isn’t quite there yet – and neither are the services. But they move 10% closer every 6-12 months…*
* Yes, this is nonsense. I need to come up with some better laws.
Why do we pay VAT on eBooks but not on print books?
There’s no VAT charged on books – it’s one of a number of exempt products and services that the HMRC sets to be zero rated (For the full list – click here).
…but there is on eBooks. I’ve been searching for an answer as to why (and indeed, why print books are zero rated). I can only assume that – as books broadly speaking ‘better’ or are needed for civilized society, a view was taken that they should be zero rated and that’s been maintained over the years.
As to why eBooks aren’t zero rated? The suggestions I’ve read online indicate that legislators haven’t quite caught up with the concept. Would they be taxing a digital download/service, or a ‘book’ in the traditional sense? In the case of Kindle, you aren’t buying the book but the right to access it from Amazon – so how is that classified by the bean counters?
Irrespective of the logistics of it and whether they should be zero rated or not, this is why the pricing on eBooks is so broken. It is almost inevitably cheaper for me to buy a hardback on Amazon than the Kindle equivalent (given Amazon’s extensive discounting of new mass-market hardback novels). Frustrating, but I’m still paying the digital tax – the convenience of e-reading – not to mention the enormous amounts of shelf space it’ll save me in the long run – is immense.
The future of human/machine interaction
I’ve been thinking about this one for a while as well. We all know the scene from minority report…
This has been held up as the way in which people will interact with machines, and – indeed – some people have been working to make it a reality.
But is this the way that people will interact with technology in the future? A big part of me thinks no – too much work! Sci-fi tells lots of different stories, and one of the main things people imagine is voice control.
My own feeling falls down a few different paths. I should flag that my agency has clients involved in a few of these fields – Logitech on the more traditional machine interaction side and Nuance on the voice recognition side – but these views are my own and uninformed by discussions with those guys.
1. Traditional man/machine interaction isn’t going away for a while. Mice and keyboards are very effective at getting through many of the tasks we’ve made for ourselves and are very well entrenched.
2. Voice is going to continue to develop. Whilst voice control has always had its fans and its critics, there will be two key things that both limit it and send it on its way. The limitation – is accuracy. In the near to mid term it’s unlikely to reach the 90+% accuracy levels you get when typing. The driving force – is the need for hands free. There are always going to be contexts in which hands-free control over a machine will be important, more so as mobile computing entrenches itself in modern society. So whether its in an industrial context, in a car or on a mobile device there are platforms on which voice would be an optimum control mechanism.
3. Touch. The ‘hot’ interface right now. As someone who owns and uses and iPad and and iPhone I can tell you that I am a convert; initial mediocre experiences on tediously inadequate Windows Mobile devices, unresponsive and stylus-driven, made me very sceptical indeed but the potential of this for innovative and interesting interaction with different applications is tremendous. But I can’t help but feel that the limitation here is the screen…
Which leads me to…
4. AR interaction. I have no idea how far this will go – at the moment augmented reality provides wonderful toys for marketers to play with and the potential for some retail novelty. But if you’ve read Charlie Stross‘ Halting State (as you know I have), you’ll have read of a world in which everyone wears AR enabled glasses, and can overlay ‘layers’ of Internet reality on the real world. So – an overlay of Google Maps on your current view of the street, complete with turn by turn navigation. An overlay of SquareMeal’s restaurant reviews. An overview of World of Warcraft’s avatars, if you are so inclined. An overlay of the police criminal database, giving you information on individuals, crime scenes, etc. Whilst that’s a fun extrapolation, I think there’s scope for more everyday applications, and – as ever – I have no doubt that marketers will be amongst the first to pick them up. Imagine an AR iPhone app, for example, that allowed you to view special offers on a poster, and interact with them to choose the one you wanted to download (app would recognise a QR code, or some such, download the relevant reality overlay from the Internet alongside an interaction protocol, and let you play!). Or imagine a gaming context – in which you could run around, laserquest style, interacting with phantoms like the one in the Lynx ad.
AR is exciting for much the same reason that the Wii was exciting – it involves every day people in an interactive experience – in the real world. There may be screens or bits of tech to support the interaction but over time they will fade into routine mundanity (is that a word? computer says no). Although I do think that perhaps Gmail’s new features might be taking the concept a bit further than it should go.
5. Direct neural interface. Still far away? I’ve not read anything in the mainstream media about this one. A lot of sci-fi features subvocalisation to intelligent digital agents (Peter F Hamilton (link) calls them ‘u-shadows’). I’ve never been sure what subvocalisation is (oh, that’s interesting, wonder what Nuance is doing there…), and over the years of meeting people, the workings of whose minds completely evades me, I’m cynical about the capacity of a machine to interpret the synaptic instructions of a broad subset of humanity. Not without the Cylons taking over, anyway.
One thing’s for sure – there’s a lot going on in this space and it’s massively exciting. Have I missed any particularly interesting ones? Always interested to read.
The European Digital Journalism Survey 2011
Updated: to include my boss’ take on the survey and its findings, via Vimeo embed, below.
The EDJS 2011 – “Clicks, Communities and Conversations†– was launched today by my agency, Brands2Life, in coordination with the Oriella PR Network – our partner network of independent agencies around the world. It examines the views of 478 journalists polled over the last few months.
Fronted by my esteemed colleague and Head of International @mistergrainger and our co-founder, @gilesfraser, we were joined by a panel made up of @kieranalger, @tphallett and @reutermarkjones to comment on the key findings of the study.
The headline trends:
The slump in advertising revenues is slowing. This year, barely 20 percent of the journalists surveyed expected their publications to see a fall in revenue. In 2010, however, 62 percent said this was the case, and in 2009 the figure was 66 per cent.
Those polled say that the popularity of online media is gradually eclipsing that of ‘offline’ publications. This year, the proportion of respondents who agreed their offline print or broadcast outlet had the biggest audience fell to 50 percent for the first time.
Social media are permeating the newsroom. Increasingly journalists are using digital channels such as blogs and Twitter to source and verify story leads.
You can read the study in full here and read SamKano’s take on the findings over on the Oriella blog, but I took a few notes and thought I’d share perspectives here too.
One of the things I found most interesting about the presentation and discussion was a conversation about the value of social media to newsrooms.
Reuters’ Mark Jones said: “I don’t think any serious professional journalist could do their job any more, without being on Twitter.†Talking about the Osama story (which Chris played his part in), Mark said: “One of the things that came out of this was that expert views came into the conversation very quickly. You didn’t have to wait for the TV broadcast or full form stories to get the analyst view. You could see the story being formed in front of your eyes on Twitter. That’s where news is going – and it has profound implications for what journalists and communicators do.”
By the same token, disintermediation in social media is an important development for journalists in sourcing expert views and validating stories. Mark continued: “When people are looking for comments from experts or company representatives, time is of the essence. Twitter supercharges this. In a straw poll of my colleagues – [the delays are] their number one complaint. The answer is in the media.†The challenge to PR execs is to do what’s necessary to research and be hyperconnected with their media contacts.
The flip side to that question came up in discussion – does disintermediation threaten media, as it allows consumers direct access to news from the people making it, at the scene, et al? The panel didn’t come to a conclusion – though I have my views here – in that the role of the media needs to shift – less churnalism and more investigative reporting, less simple narrative and more dynamic storytelling, less straight reportage and more insightful analysis. Some of this relates to the Public Business agenda, in my view: ‘The People’ need to demand this sort of journalism, and allow publishers to fund it.
T3’s Kieran Alger made some interesting comments building on this – as a publication – T3 is working with brands on reciprocal promotion: “Today we have 20,000 followers on Twitter and 17,000 on Facebook. On any day they’ll deliver about 10,000 unique users or 20% of our overall traffic. We increasingly look to people running brands, Twitter feeds and so on to help out with that – asking PRs to help promote our stories to their followers. Big brands like Samsung, for example, have massive numbers of fans.â€
Talking about the plethora of social media venues and communities that media outlets run – and the fact that survey showed a reduction in the number of reporters whose media outlets run their own communities – there was an interesting discussion as to what the different public social media outlets do for media publications. Talking about the rise of Facebook, CBS Interactive’s Tony Hallett said: “It’s horses for courses – some forms of content work on different platforms. Facebook works well for a particular type of very loyal users. Traffic that media gets from social outlets is still small compared to Google, for example, but you do get a certain type of super-user – people that interact with you in a big way. [These users] make for a very fun environment.â€
Tony had given us another example of a passionate audience earlier in the discussion (making an entirely separate point): “On ZDNet, we have a subset of users that go crazy for photos of data centres – data centre porn… These are extremely secure, secretive environments, so we will take photography and video supplied to us – and are transparent about sourced material.” Which, whilst it makes the serious point that publishers are keen for more interactive comment, is amusing for the fact that it underlines the adage – that it takes all kinds.
For me, the overall takeaway is that the platforms and mechanics for engaging with media continue to shift, and professional communicators need to evolve their comms infrastructure – from the content they create to the way we pitch the media – to suit.
Also, spend more time on Twitter.
I’ll add my thanks to those of my colleagues for the fantastic discussion and encourage you to head over to the Oriella blog to join the digital debate.
Oriella Digital Journalism Study 2011 from Brands2Life on Vimeo.
Six skills today’s PR professional needs to have
One in a sporadic series of work-related posts. I’ve been thinking about some of these for a while, and a couple of them in particular sparked the idea for a post. What do you think? These are in no particular order…
1. Polymath tendencies. I think a good consultant is able to shift with the winds, being as interested in mechanical engineering one day as social anthropology or fiscal policy the next. Being able to understand the drivers behind major political, social, economic and technological trend is a key skill in helping clients meet the media agenda and too many people come into careers without even the curiosity to help them evolve to a state of general interestedness in the world. If you can step into the shoes of a psychologist, information architect, one of your client’s customers – whatever it may be – it will provide an additional lens through which you can see campaign ideas, and provide another basis of insight on which you can build your ideas.
2. Hyperconnectivity. By this I mean that you are able to connect yourself into different information and social streams with deft facility – coping with dialogues on multiple channels, and absorbing information at a quick pace. It’ll help you cope with the burgeoning requirement of enterprise to keep tabs and engage with social media conversation, it’ll support your ability to engage with hyperconnected media contacts, it’ll let you be on the edge of what’s happening.
3. Numeracy (and visual thinking). I’ve talked about data before, and the ridiculous accessibility of it – more than most people can understand or make use of. A PR’s job, in its simplest sense, is in crafting and communicating stories for and with its clients. Telling these stories increasingly requires a ludicrous amount of context and capturing this context in visual representations is a vital part of contemporary journalism and blogging. Everyone loves a good infographic – can you tell a story in pictures as readily as you can in words? Note that I don’t mean that you need to be a statistician, or a designer – just equipped enough to do some basic number crunching so that you can build the story – and think visually enough to brief a graphic designer to create what you want.
4. Literacy. I’ve met in equal number over the years – of PRs who treat the English language like an bat, crushing messages into as short a space as possible – and those that throw flowery turns of phrase into every other sentence. Good PR writing is jargon free, to the point, well-referenced, in context and over all else – concise.
5. Confidence. Whilst it may be possible to be a mild-mannered Clark Kent in the world of media (and I’m doubtful about that), PR calls for a strong temperament – you have to be able to consult (either into the business or to clients) which by definition may require taking a contrary view, you have to be able to deal with investigative journalists, you’ll probably have to deal with a crisis or two – all of this requires a steady hand and an occasionally loud voice. Not to mention confidence goes hand-in-hand with having no fear of the phone.
6. Ethics. It may be out of fashion for some, but at our agency – and in my own moral framework – it’s important to maintain certain boundaries. I’m not going to mention the obvious example here – if you’re in the industry you’ll know the current showcase example of dubious professional practice.
Have I missed any? Tell me in the comments.