simondelliott

Will Starbucks plays a central role in the green revolution?

I was thinking about our futuristic green and sustainable world. Where to cut out carbon emissions on the way to work, we all telecommute instead.
Ovcourse there are many tools that we can use to communicate better, social networks, collaboration tools and all that jazz.

However you cannot get away from our genetics, over a million years evolution has made its so that when we sit down with a real live person, we start to communicate .. and guess what we do it really well, and we have a genetic and real need to do this.

So in this brave new world how can we work and communicate without traveling?

The answer is simple, have local places where people can get together, and work in a comfortable secure way, with access to a massive internet pipe, and is within walking (or bicyceling distance) of your home.

Hold on! someone has already invented this its called starbucks.

How to size an online community

Following the success of my thoughts on online comunities Ive decided to coint my own unit of mesure.

The Internt Gram or ig is a measure of the information in a website, discussion board or onlien community.

You can read all about it in my page on the subject here How big is an online community.

order vs chaos & who will win the recession

Imagine two hypothetical companies,

Spick & Span
This company is organized to the maximum efficiency
Their data is in the most normalized form (no one piece of data is repeated)
Their process are perfectly efficient and no task is ever repeated.
They do have redundancy in their system but this again is perfectly sized.
Their people are hardworking, intelligent and enjoy their jobs.

Splat&O’Messy
This company is not organized in any way nothing is written down
There are no job titles, roles and responsibilities or appraisals.
Their data is literally strewn around the office.
Loads of tasks are repeated, there are teams that are entire duplicates.
Their people are hardworking, intelligent and enjoy their jobs.

If you place these two companies in a stable environment then Spick and Span will naturally be the most profitable where as Splat and O’Messy could make loads more profit if they were organized, but they are all so busy they never get round to it.
Now imagine moving these two companies into an unstable environment. Suddenly Splat and O’Messy comes into its own, its own instability allows it to react faster than Spick and Span, also because information and resource is strewn around the whole company, vast parts can be cut off or become inaccessible and it can still function.

Companies are made up of lots of different types of people, during stability the organizers (project manager types) bubble up and start to run the company. On your P&L this will look great, but you must be aware that every process they implement or orgchart they publish is a nail in the coffin of your agility. You must balance this type of person with the type of person who is not well rounded, and who sometimes goes against the flow.

In short, a little mess is a good thing,

PONG is more than just a game … its a way of life

Have you ever wanted to learn a new programming language?
Have you ever had to introduce a student to programming?
Have you ever had to teach a team how to code for a new platform?

Well if you have you will know that all these are difficult jobs, most seasoned professionals will have done them many many times.

Its difficult to learn these things straight from books, infact to get the real experience you neeed to professionally make software quickly when you dont have the skills inplace its downright impossible.

I have a standard approach … and too keep it all fun it involves pong
.

When Im setting up a team using a programming language that they dont know, I ask them to make pong, without using copy and paste.
Pong is a simplistic game that involves very few computing tricks. However it is also very challenging for the platform. You dont need a functional spec before you start codeing as everyone knows pong.

The ball has to travel quite quickly.
The bats have move slowly enough to make it a challenge
The AI of the computer opponent can not be too good.

If they can make a good imitation of the game on the platform then you know that have a good grasp of the programming language. It teaches them how to structure the code, the repository, the build procedure and also how to get the most from the platform. You would be surprised just how many platforms Ive worked on that simply cannot run a good pong game.

If you love pong / programming and working in a team then join my Facebook pong group

Your not playing solitaire on your own

During 2008 humankind spent 9 billion man hours playing windows solitaire, or you could think of this as 5 panama canals. But, solitaire is not just a toy, way back it was instrumental in teaching us how to use a mouse, and to welcome windows into our businesses and homes, a job that it is still doing today.

Modern innovative companies are using this pattern to not only educate their customers but to directly generate value.
The movement is called serious games and uses the internet to bring players together either in an application as simple as google image labeler or in a MMORG such as Americas Army.

To be successful in 21st century organizations not only have to open their eyes to the possibilities that gameing offers to their bottom line but they will also need to open their firewalls and actively create a culture where games, crowdsourcing and virtual collaboration.

If you want to find out more …
David Edery and Ethan Mollick from Microsoft and MIT have written a new book Channing the game its a good read and there is a good audio interview with them here changing the game.

Thoughts on thought leadership

Thought leadership is good because …

1. The “thoughts” that are published are valuable to your company, as they will make you Faster, more efficient or introduce new products
2. The “thoughts” that are published are valuable to other companies, who will see benefits in deploying your thoughts, you will therefore have their respect.
3. The “thoughts” that are published are valuable to individuals as it increases their profile and therefore sense of self worth

Thought leadership is about

1. Having good thoughts
2. Having good publishing
3. Having an effective publishing feedback loop

If you want to get into thought leadership

1. You must create a distribution channel
2. You must create an editorial team that is empowered to publish
3. You must create a community of thought leaders

If  you want to beat your competitors

1. You must accept that this will not happen over night it will take at least a year
2. You must find a way to allow the editorial team to freedom to make technical changes to their site and to have skills and resource available (i.e. you must beat their media organisation)
3. You must encourage controversial views and livley debate under your brand (thought leaders ideas are not the same as every one else’s, so dont over govern them).

If you achieve this

1. You will notice the diference in sales and marketing, leads will come from diferent directions
2. You will have better staff retention
3. New opportunities will be presented to you far further down the sales process,

A good management strategy is … there go my people, I must follow them. Your organisation probably already has some great thought leaders, you can nurture their media and editorial talents and help them to better publicise their thoughts.

The media value chain explained

Modern technology, blogging, digital cameras and the 21st century have had a profound effect on the media industry. However the basic business of media has essentially remained unchanged.
One of the biggest changes we have seen in media is who the content creators are. Shakespeare once said “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” and at no time is this more meaningful than now. Anyone who has a digital camera, microphone and access to the internet can easily and cheaply create content. This new force is competing with professional content creation facilities and organizations.
A conservative estimate on the number of blog posts and contributions to the Internet per day is 3 million per day, and is growing at an incredible rate. The traditional concept of content owner ship is changing. Content is increasingly becoming owned by individuals rather than companies or corporations.
Professional content producers are changing their habits too they are increasingly forced to collaborate with individual or informal organisations. However the tools and resources that they have access to are becoming very advanced and intelligent. Content aggregation companies are finding that the amount of content to select from is increasing exponentially however quality is dropping.
The distribution link in the media value chain has seen and is experiencing the most change. The technical architecture of the Internet has encouraged a separation of content production and aggregation from the provider of the distribution infrastructure.
New gadgets, better screens and the ubiquitous availability of the internet has seen an overall increase in media consumption. A notable consumption increase was the when the MP3 player allowed media companies to derive revenue from media consumption during travel time, which was previously a stage where print media was the only player.

The Content Creation link in the media value chain is where the content originates. The content creators are the musicians, artists, actors, web designers, games developers, coders, photographers, journalists, authors and critics.

As this group is so vast it is difficult to clearly identify the products and companies that they use however here is some of the key tools and services that are used by the more professional members.

Apple Mac
Apple have traditionally marketed their products at this group, hence the apple focus on highly visual user interface and easy to use design.

Adobe
The recent acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe consolidates their desktop media creation product suite.

Sony
The range of digital cameras has for a long time been the industry standard, however they are facing tough competition from new manufacturers who are providing high quality equipment at a lower cost.

Yamaha
This company provides a vast range of music focused content production equipment that range from beginner to expert.

There are also a number of new on line forum style services that provide tools and support for content creators. These are becoming increasingly more important.

Content ownership has not traditionally been in the hands of the content creator, and has normally been in the hands of a studio or commercial content organization. Modern technology has caused this step be come separated from both the content creator and the content publisher. The success of devices such as the “buffalo terra station” are testament to this

The content owner has a number of different needs, mainly licence and rights management and storage.

These have traditionally been handled by using a physical archive and product catalogue however there are new online products such as getty images and 3d02, that facilitate this.

It must be noted that the content owner and the content creator are increasingly the same person or company. This can be seen in the provision of products that facilitate both content creation and storage (sites such as eblogger).

The distribution and aggregation link in the value chain is the professional production of high quality content and the also the recycling, repackaging and re-branding of either user generated content or stock content.

This link is fulfilled by the studios, the web design and software companies, the TV production companies, games manufacturers, film companies and record labels.

Again on a world wide scale this is a vast group, with large notable organizations providing some exciting and high quality products. There are also millions of other smaller companies who perform the same role.

All of these organizations feed a whole ecosystem of different industries. Some examples of these are the professional production tool hire companies, event venues, filming locations and studios, moderators, event organisers, agencies, vehicle hire and recording studios.

Consumers will be most familiar with the brands that are within the distribution link in the value chain. These are brands such a UPC, Sky, the BBC or iTunes.

The providers of this link in the chain can roughly be divided into four groups

Internet Service Providers – These are the companies such as UPC, KPN and BT who sell bandwidth to consumers. Some of these organizations also have content delivery platforms.

Telecommunications companies – The traditional telephony provider is now behind a device that is capable of delivering high quality audio and normally also has a good screen. This has transformed this type of provider into a content delivery platform.

Broadcasters – These organizations acquire content, reassemble it into a linear stream and distribute it via radio frequency or satellite or cable. They sometimes make content and sometimes are also funded via the government. Some broadcasters provide devices that allow the consumer to view content and allow the broadcaster to derive revenue from the consumer.

Again this is a huge sector, that in turn feeds a whole ecosystem of providers, some of the companies that operate in this sector are so large that they can achieve a cost reduction by owning studios, networks, device manufacturers and infrastructure.

After deriving revenue directly from the consumer the players in this part of the value chain can also derive revenue from advertising sales. This gives rise to a whole raft of advertising companies, consumer behaviour monitoring and retailing companies.

Some of the type of companies that sell into this sector are
Satellite providers – Eutelsat, globcos
Call centre providers – Accenture, StarTek, NuComm
Network providers – UPC, Global crossing, BT, AT&T
Device manufacturers – Thompson, Pace, Apple, Nokia, Seimens, Samsung
Advertising platform providers – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo
Web technology and other high tech providers – Sun, Microsoft, Google
DRM and encryption providers – Microsoft, NDS, Nagra
Government

The media industry is all about you … the consumer. Every TV show, radio channel, book, magazine, computer game and web site has been market to you probably by a professional organization that derives revenue from you or from a provider within this delivery chain. It is also important to note that products you buy are also marketed to you via the same channels.

In addition to charges to the distribution companies that are a number of other companies who derive a revenue directly from the consumer. These are

Device manufacturers such as Nintendo, Apple, Nokia, Phillips, Sony. All of which provide an ever increasing range of products targeted at fulling your media consumption. Products that do this well and have effective DRM will normally hide the cost of the device in the media consumption however products that use open standards tend to be higher cost and place greater emphasis on style and usability.

Device accessories is also another lucrative source of revenue for many companies. As computing becomes ubiquitous and more and more mundane objects become intelligent you will see media consumption devices and fashion merging.

Payment brokerage is an important part of the consumer offering. Small content creators and content aggregators would prefer to derive revenue directly from the consumer without the cost of distribution. The payment brokerage (such as pay pal) offers the consumer protection, and offers the content producer a quick way to monetize their content.

Media Industry trends 2009 and beyond !

Ive made a few predictions for 2009 and would love to hear what you think.

In 1993 there were 50 large US media companies. Acquisition and merger have consolidated this number down to just 6 very very very large media organizations (such as Time warner, news corp, disney, viacom, and so on).

All of these organizations are heavily investing in web technology and Internet media distribution. We can expect to see of these companies merge with an online provider.

Google revenue is derivative from advertising placed on or around media consumption and is a revenue share with the content owner or distributor. However this is a limiting revenue source; we can expect to see Google acquiring content or content companies thus allowing them to derive 100% of the revenue.

Google is also investing in cable TV and mobile operating systems possibly as frameworks for them to hang advertising business. Interestingly Microsoft are giving up their content provider aspirations and are adopting Google like advertising business model.

The sony book reader is the must have Christmas gift of 2008 (possibly a little overpriced in the UK) . This new media device will open up a new platform for the sale of electronic books. Sony’s and Waterstones hope is that this will be to books what itunes is to music.

Broadcast and post-production automation is high on everyone’s agenda. This goes hand in hand with the exploitation of the back catalog and provides a new high tech market for production and broadcast companies. This is offset by the production cost dropping massively with new cheap cameras and open source software leading to an exponential increase in the amount of content.

Think Bandwidth! Bandwidth! Bandwidth! all this content and content consumption is driving demand on bandwidth up and up and up.

Is Interactive TV dead? the answer is no. far from it.
It just that’s its not on TV its on the iPlayer or VOD instead. And guess what … all the old iTV patents are still applicable. Acquisition of a failing iTV company that owns patent in this area is now being seen as an investment for the future.

Advertising is the engine of the media industry, so with the users being able to fast forward, skip and generally avoid the adverts where is the revenue going to come from? A short term solution is advertising pretending to be content, either in the form of product placement or in the form or well made watch able adverts.

The amount of community generated content has exploded, and this explosion has only just begun. In the near future we can expect to see every piece of human art, cometary and information in video, audio and written form. The number of undiscovered but talented directors, artists and actors is vast. These people will find that youtube is the simplest route to their audience.

The evil overlord of the media industry is the “Minimum Guaranteed Return” if you buy content from a studio, then they will set you a MGR that you have to meet when reselling the content to the public. These MGR’s are falling (mainly due to the change in audience behavior). This will make a big difference to the VOD offering of the content aggregator.

Home shopping channels are dying if not dead, people that have the internet … don’t home shop.

The days of the closed platform are over, mobile operators, cable TV companies games console companies are working how they can open their platform and still derive revenue.

The media market in China is now opening up. It is not uncommon for a TV Show to have 100 million viewers! figures that are unheard of in Europe and USA. Traditional mass media companies that are trying to avoid the change to new media are venturing into this new market.

Whats important for a Media buisiness in 2009

In the past 3 years the cost of storage and distribution of media content has nose dived. This change has overturned the traditional approach to media marketing based on the pareto principle where 80% of your sales is from 20% of your catalogue; and has replaced it with the long tail approach.

Content owners that fail to recognize this are in big BIG trouble.

The back catalog is no longer an expensive burden requiring highly trained film archivists and specialists. It is instead a rich mine, full of hidden gems, and precious artifacts. But as the market becomes saturated the window of opportunity for the exploitation of this catalog … is closing, content owners need to digitize, index and sell their content while the price is still high.

The diversity of content is ever increasing. Lectures, animations, talks and TV programs are being distributed on nearly every conceivable subject can be consumed ondemand and online. Subsequently new amateur and semi professional content brands are appearing, often with massive following. Media aggregation based companies are keen to own and exploit these new brands.

Is is a safe prediction that the daily news papers will be dropping their print versions soon, and as this is this is as a reaction to social change rather than a driver it is also very unlikely that we will be seeing a repeat of the Wapping dispute.

The music industry is the pensioner of the media world, its nicely tucked up in its woollen blanket watching the world go by from the bay windows of its retirement home, it occasionally gets out of its chair and shakes its rhythm stick at a metaphorical youngster, for example associating music purchase with another retail purchase, or threatening to sue illegal down loaders or even putting on a big stadium gig. Music exec’s have to face up to the fact they must change their delivery format. Last.fm is an example of where they are going.

Note that apples recent announcement that they are going to remove DRM is a massive leap forward (especially if yo like live music)

There have been many developments to enable media consumption on the cell phone. Nearly all of these initiatives are in failure mode, however the media distribution organizations and hardware manufactures are only increasing their efforts. There is a very high reward for the company that unlocks this potential market.

Just beware … in no other sector is Sturgeon’s revelation more relevant than media .