If a 10 year old child walked into a cinema and wanted to watch an 18 certified film, they wouldn't be able to buy the ticket. If a 10 year old child walked into a video rental shop (remember those?) and wanted to rent an 18 certified film, they wouldn't be served.
So I was pretty surprised recently when I discovered that I had been playing Battlefield 3, accidentally using my 10 year old son's XBox account. My son plays on the XBox much more than I do, and leaves his account signed in when he switches the console off.
I guess that in the (10 year old style!) excitement of receiving Battlefield 3 through the post one day, I switched on the XBox and started playing without checking which account was logged in.
Back to the original point, my XBox knows that my son is a minor because his age is part of his profile and Xbox doesn't allow him to accept new terms and conditions - it always asks for me to log in. So why does it allow him to play an 18 rated game?
In reality, it's easier for the XBox to block someone by age than the cinema or video shop, but in reality I suspect games sales would plummet. That's no defence to the games companies though.
And finally for the record, my son isn't allowed to play Battlefield or Call of Duty whatsoever...
Personalised advertising is getting a bit of a bashing in the news recently. The whole question over privacy is being questioned; that it’s an advantage purely for advertisers and no one else.
The critics have got it all wrong. It’s the public, whether they are a mobile, web or TV viewers, are the real beneficiaries.
Firstly, let’s take a look at what personalised advertising really means. When a person buys a car magazine, do they want to see adverts inside of:
Nappies
Washing powder
Cars
That’s an example of personalisation based on personas, or group of people. No one, that I’m aware of, would argue that nappy or washing powder manufacturers would want to advertise in a car magazine. I don’t understand why it’s any different on a website.
Now let’s move forward to personalised network advertising. This technology is based on how users move around a number of websites, who all use the same servers for their large adverts. Say a user visits a football club website regularly, and then they go to another website such as a news portal. They then see some adverts for their favourite team’s new home kit.
This is still based on personas because it assumes some trends indicate certain behaviour (in this example, a user visits a football club website regularly so they probably support that team). This is an advantage for both the advertiser (no point spending marketing money on loads of advertising banners aimed at everybody and anybody) and also the consumer – they see relevant ads.
The next step is individually targeted, truly personalised content. It’s what many supermarkets do, based on your commonly purchased items. It’s takes into account some trends, but mainly the specific individual.
Take the car example above. A user sees an advert on a website for a car. They end up buying the car (probably not based purely on the advert!) Personalisation will then stop the user from seeing worthless, same ads for the car and may replace them with insurance companies that specialise in that car market, and maybe even the demographics of the user.
This is an advantage of personalised advertising. It’s what shop keepers have been doing for centuries – understanding customers who walk into the shop (browse their website) and make targeted recommendations.
So the latest social network, in fact the best social network since Facebook, is now Pinterest. Barely a day goes by without a top headline story from the likes of LinkedIn and Mashable promoting the increasing take up of Pinterest.
I’ve been using Pinterest for a few weeks now. Since then it’s been interesting to see more people joining and following my ‘boards’. It’s principally the same group of early adopters who keep signing up to the latest new social websites in search of the next big Facebook.
Pinterest is a super-simple concept. If you see something interesting on the web, you ‘Pin’ that content to Pinterest, which inserts a good looking graphic from the interesting page on to a virtual cork board.
In the past, this type of site was called a bookmarking site and would have competed with Digg, Delicious and a thousand other startups which have been acquired by the big .coms (and then spun out again).
Pinterest seems to make bookmarking interesting again through a few simple new concepts:
Grouping ‘Pins’ together as interest groups
Keeping it simply to Pin items to Pinterest
Adopting the ‘following’ principle of social networks
It’s the user interface that’s the knock out factor. There are some key aspects of the site that sets Pinterest apart from other sites, and we’ll start seeing the usability features on other sites.
One of these features is how the site horizontally scales so well. At home I have a large widescreen monitor. I can easily fit a browser window next to a Word window, and Skype or Yammer around those. Looking at Facebook when a browser window is maximised looks ridiculous – a thin sliver of content among a wide, white page. However Pinterest constantly fills the entire screen, adding more content as the browser window expands vertically and horizontally.
There’s no doubting that Pinterest has been growing very, very quickly. The site is still very fast at loading and rendering, despite most of it’s content being graphics.
I don’t think Pinterest is the killer app for bookmarks.
I still use Delicious, mainly because I’ve been using it for several years and have hundreds of bookmarks, but also because most of my links are stored because the content was interesting, not just a graphic on a page.
And I still use Flickr for all my images because BT gave me a Pro account with my broadband package and it stores the graphics in such high resolution.
If I see an interesting graphic on a page, such as an infographic, I typically put it on Twitter and if I need to find it again, I’ll search my tweets.
As for Pinterest, I’m not that sure where it fits in. Most of the boards seem to centre around fashion and food. So maybe Pinterest will end up as a niche site for these industries. Until the next big social network comes along.
On Sunday I popped into my local butcher (they haven’t all been put out of business by hypermarkets) and tried paying using my contactless debit card. At first, the guy behind the till didn’t want me to use contactless because he didn’t think his till could handle it, but I tried and he was amazed how fast the transaction was finished.
We work very closely with one of the big European payments companies, and had been discussing contactless with them last week, and so I told the sales assistant in the butcher that his transaction fees cost less using contactless than chip and PIN. He said that he’d tell his boss.
Here are some of the key points from the presentation, together with his view of the future, and I’ve added some of my comments as well.
Boots are the second biggest retailer in the UK with 2,600 stores
At the moment a third of transactions use a card
Only 30 stores have contactless - a joint investment with MasterCard
Less than 2% of card transactions are contactless
In terms of the value proposition for the retailer, given a choice between rolling out more self-checkouts and contactless, the former will always win because contactless has far less value to the consumer.
That said, their analysis is that first time customers who try using contactless it will continue to reuse it.
Julian asked how many people in the room have used a contactless card. Around a third put up their hands, which is well above the national average. Julian pointed out that watching consumers use a self-checkout, many people still aren't sure how to insert their card into a card reader properly let alone ‘educate’ them to use another physical method of payment.
One of the issues in Boots’ case is that there’s no business case to offer contactless. Cash is still the cheapest cost at 0.5p per transaction (many of the costs of cash are both subsidised by the banks, and many of the ‘costs of cash’ are fixed).
Also, contactless transactions cost less for a retailer, but the retailers are wary of the payment companies who have usually increased costs once a new technology rollout hits tipping point. This happened with chip and PIN, and retailers expect the same to happen from contactless.
·Visa are going to be helping Boots with a wider rollout across London due to the Olympics.
The longer term
One of the key issues at the moment is that there is no customer demand for contactless. However, retailers can see that there is a demand for using a mobile phone for payments.
We all have more and more cards in our wallets for payment and loyalty schemes. Both of these will move into a smartphone apps, with numerous retailers already leading the way, and PayPal and Google Checkout leading the way with their payment apps.
Julian discussed a great consumer experience all based on a mobile, with coupons, a store loyalty card, payment and electronic receipts, and probably no need for a till at the end of the shopping trip. However there are very few customers who want to shop this way at the moment.
It was a really interesting presentation, and if you’re in the banking or retailer value chain, you should probably get in contact with Julian as he was very open with his analysis and data points (some of which I can’t publish here).
My take on contactless payments is that it will move to mobile, but it will become more complicated for consumers. My debit and credit cards have never run out of battery before – what happens when you want to buy something but have no battery in your phone. In fact, my cards are designed to be much more rugged than my phone – not only do they not require any power at all, they’re also waterproof and shock proof. And therefore they will stick around for a long time.
I don't necessarily agree with all these predictions, but they are certainly make you stop and think about what real world objects will be replaced in the near future.
For the record, I think there it's not a case of making these object extinct, it's a case of killing off the majority of them.
I watched the SOPA protests closely last week with complete amazement.
In summary, SOPA is a proposed anti-piracy law in the US which would help prohibit illegal content on websites by imposing harsh penalties on sites that host it.
Protests were held by some of the highest traffic websites on the Internet including Google and Wikipedia and were reported by the TV news.
Remember that Google own YouTube, which allegedly hosts many videos of illegal TV broadcasts (broadcasters and content owners can upload it to YouTube if they wish).
That’s one aspect of SOPA. Another aspect is that many websites that show illegal content use advertising as a source of revenue. SOPA wants networks which provide this advertising to become liable for where they are used.
If you took the Google search algorithm and posted it online, Google would take you to court and try to shut down any sites that host the illegal content. Yet Google refuses to be held accountable for the thousands of allegedly illegal videos it hosts on YouTube. These videos are illegal because they are TV recordings and violate copyright. Either Google does, or does not respect copyright.
Google are rumoured to be bidding for the Premier League rights. It will be interesting to see if Google win the rights and then watch their lawyers report websites which contain illegal footage. Will Google remove these websites from the search results? Will Google remove their adsense and adwords accounts?
And the same applies to Wikipedia. Whilst I’m not suggesting that you actually do this, if you set up a website tomorrow and wrote a script to copy all of Wikipedia’s comments to your site, would you expect a legal letter from Wikipedia? Of course you would, because we understand copying content without permission is illegal from our school years onwards.
The value of content has been steadily fallen and the Internet has accelerated this. I don’t want people to copy my content illegally, and I respect the US for trying to help protect content.
It’s embarrassing when you forget a birthday, and it’s double embarrassing when you forget your own. On 16 January this blog turned two years’ old.
As has become custom - well, I did it last year so I'll do it again, here are some of the traffic stats.
Before I begin, thank you and all the visitors who have been coming to the site.
This is a comparison between the year up to 17 January 2010 and 2011:
18 Jan 2011 to 17 Jan 2012
18 Jan 2010 to 17 Jan 2011
Posts
100
133
Visitors
5,065
2,556
Page Views
7,675
3,723
So, whilst I apologise for not writing as many posts as last year, the ones I did write seem to be more interesting!
These figures don't include the RSS feed readers or search engines which keep crawling the site.
I said last year that my aims for 2011/2 were to double the traffic and have more people commenting. The table above shows the first objective was achieved. As for the number of comments, this is measure using the blog tool (Posterous).
My aims for next year is to keep growing the traffic by the same amount - here’s to over 7,500 visitors in the next year.
Once again, if you have any recommendations or articles you'd like to see, please let me know by adding a comment below or contacting me directly. As soon as I get requests I usually act upon them within a couple of days.
Two large companies with completely different views on innovation, Saab and Kodak, have filed for liquidation and protection in the last two months.
It’s wrong to compare these two companies against modern day technology companies who are so good at innovation, because technology companies are so young by comparison, and companies change rapidly once several ‘generations’ of employees leave the company.
Saab haven’t released a brand new model for several years, so whilst I feel sorry for the thousands of employees worldwide, its a case of lack of innovation leads to staleness. Even the most loyal customers eventually grow bored, such as my next door neighbour who bought a new Saab (in the same colour) every three years for the last few years, bought a beautiful Jaguar XF last October.
In 2010, Saab’s revenue was £2.3bn and Jaguar Land Rover’s was £6.5bn. Jaguar has since released several completely new models and gone from strength to strength. In Q2 2011, it’s revenue was £2.9bn - and that’s during a recession.
It’s easy to look at Kodak as an innovative company though. They invented the first hand held camera, the Brownie, in 1900, and they invented the first digital camera way back in 1975. Unfortunately these landmark inventions weren’t enough.
Companies needs to keep on innovating again and again, literally ad infinitum.
And innovation isn’t enough by itself. It's merely an ingredient amongst good timing and marketing.
To continue what I started in 2010 and 2011, here are my technology predictions for 2012:
1. The Olympics summer of proof-of-concepts
A huge amount of corporate investments will go into the Olympics, so we’ll see them spend their money on sponsorship and advertising more than product development. This will mean we’ll see a lot more cutting edge, proof of concepts (in adverts) rather than market-ready new product launches.
2. Social to level off, but will become a central hub for our activities.
Just like you currently open your browser to look at a number of websites, I expect your homepage will be a Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn page which will then keep you within the ‘walled garden’. Expect to see a close tie up between the social networks and a search engine (Google or Bing).
3. A big tech failure
Expect one of the big websites to collapse which has been too dependent on more and more VC funding rather than its own revenues. We’ll witness the collapse and realise that our own data has gone with it, and then we’ll realise how important that data really is.
4. Mobile payments
It’s been a long time coming, but 2012 will be the start of mobile payments. I don’t think consumers will be paying via our phone in 2012, but you’ll see the banks start the education process using advertising and proof of concepts to enable consumers to see that by the end of 2013 we won’t need a credit card any longer (except when the battery runs out).
5. 3D printers after the Olympics
If it weren’t for the Olympics, I think 2012 would have been the year of the 3D printer. You can already buy them from under £2,000 and that printer will fall as demand increases. 3D printers will compete with Windows 8 for Christmas presents next year.
6. Akamai stock to rocket around EURO 2012 and the Olympics.
The Content Delivery Network Akamai will be covering the two biggest sports tournaments of the summer for most broadcasters around the world. With encoding bitrates (quality) constantly increasing to end viewers, they will be handling record levels of traffic during the summer. More traffic will mean significantly increased revenues.
7. More toolbars
In a bid to keep their logos on the screen in ever more engaging user interfaces, expect to see JavaScript toolbars being used more regularly, sitting like a taskbar inside your browser. This is not to be confused with browser toolbars - I don't think you'll be proactively installing anything.
8. Home automation to make a comeback
Its been possible to connect your household appliances to a computer for many years. The problem has been selling it as a technology rather than a function - and this made it marketable to geeks and no one else. With apps such as Sky Anywhere, people will want to turn their heating up, or switch the oven on while they are commuting home from work.
Last year I wrote about my 2010 favourites and it was one of my most viewed posts of the year. So I thought I’d repeat it for 2011 too - and there's a clear theme running through these favourites!
Favourite new gadget
One of the things I’ve really got involved with in 2011 has been cycling. It started in February when I was out of breath going up a local (yet very long and steep) hill, then got to June where a group of friends rode the BHF London to Brighton. I then started riding into work (13 miles, from North West London to the City).
Three rear wheels later, thanks to the Holloway Road, I decided to go for a new bike. My £27 eBay investment (see below) had had its day after almost 1,800 miles between May and December.
However my favourite gadget wasn’t the new bike, it was the base layer clothing. Base layers have been around for a few years and despite some literally freezing motorcycle journeys, I hadn’t used one until cycling this winter. They are fantastic and if you get cold easily, try wearing them under your clothes. There you go, a favourite gadget that doesn’t run out of batteries!
Favourite book
Without a doubt, it was Lance Armstrong’s autobiography. It’s a very easy read that is very emotional about someone’s battle with cancer, from denial through to winning the Tour de France afterwards. Thoroughly recommended.
In second place was Alan Sugar’s autobiography which was several times longer than Armstrong’s, but just as enjoyable.
Favourite iPhone app
I’ve started using Barclays Boris bikes to travel around the City if the meeting is only one or two tube stops from the office. So the BarclaysBikes app is really handy, showing how many bikes and spaces are at a specific location. The AR (Augmented Reality) view is genuinely useful to find the nearest bike.
A close second is the updated LinkedIn app. The previous version never seemed to work without wifi. The latest app is excellent for looking up contacts after a meeting or even in the middle of a meeting when we’re discussing a mutual ex-colleague.
For outside work, the Geocaching app is excellent. It shows the three nearest geocaches and makes a spare hour disappear quicker than you can say “Where on earth would someone have hidden it around here?”
