Bradley Howard's Blog

Eight Digital Media Predictions for 2012

Dec 30, 2011 at 9:45am

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.

Photo courtesy of FL08 on Flickr

tags:

3D printing, Akamai, Olympics, mobile, predictions, trends,

4 Comments

2011 favourites

Dec 27, 2011 at 2:29pm

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.

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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?”

Favourite award

Without a doubt, I was extremely proud of the team to receive to a Sitecore Site of the Year award this year for our work with Cadbury.

tags:

LinkedIn, London to Brighton bike ride, application review, awards, bicycles, book review, iPhone, mobile, motorcycles,

0 Comments

Identity crisis

Sep 7, 2011 at 12:51pm

The photo above was taken eight years ago and shows my parents and my identical twin daughters Shelley and Natalie. I'm pretty certain that it's my dad on the left and my mum on the right, however I can't tell which baby is Shelley or Natalie.

Before I joined IMG I worked for a Finnish telco company called Sonera. At Sonera we enabled consumers to use mobile phones to 'sign' - to prove their identity. We used the SIM card in the phone as a secure, unique system. At the time (late 1990s) the system was designed from the ground up to be secure enough to sign mortgage papers.

As the Internet has matured over the last few years, the issue of identity hasn't gone away, however it has changed subtly. It's now possible to create an anonymous Twitter user, build up a few hundred followers and start a malicious rumour. This is why I find it hard to digest newspapers who reference Twitter for their news content.

It is quite secure for consumers to run a Google search for a product, land on a site they've never seen before, and hand over their credit card details. The main reason for this security is that your card issuer (bank) will provide a level of reimbursement if the website fail to deliver the goods.

However we are soon going to find that it's necessary for end users, the consumers, to have a valid identity.

We've read how some of the people accused in the British riots have been banned from using their Facebook account (which is ridiculous because they probably phoned someone as well, yet their mobile isn't being revoked, but I digress). There is nothing to stop that person from creating a new Facebook account straight away. In fact, Facebook's friend suggestion tool is so accurate that it will help recreate all that user's friends as well.

In order for the Internet to truly grow up and allow us to vote online and perform all the duties we've previously done in the Post Office, we need to sort out digital identities. Digital identities in the UK have always been seen in a negative light, despite the irrational xenophobic fear whipped up by some of our national newspapers. However we're going to need to jump over this fear if we can issue these digital identities.

These digital identities will be used to sign into most websites and will work across mobile, web, TV and anything else that springs up.

In order to apply for a digital identity, financial services organisations will require stringent checks - just like a passport, but probably with someone physically checking the photos and documents face to face. This is why Facebook Connect isn't the right platform for an Internet-wide ID platform.

The Internet is truly global, and the identities will need to work globally too. They will probably be government run, although it's feasible for some of the larger financial services companies to run them.

Like so many technology vendors, Sonera was doing the right thing, just at the wrong time - about 15 years too early.

tags:

Facebook, digital media, ecommerce, identity, legal, mobile, payment,

1 Comment

Stinging nettles? There's an app for that

Sep 5, 2011 at 9:18am

Although I love the outdoors, I haven’t been stung by stinging nettles for years. Until this weekend, when I went actively looking for small boxes in stinging nettles around the parks near to my home.

It’s all been part of an activity called geocaching. I’d heard about it from my niece whose Scout troop look for geocaches whenever they go camping or on a day out.

Geocaching is a simple concept – it’s a real world treasure hunt game. There are over 1.5 million caches around the world. You can go to the main website, geocaching.com, or use one of the iPhone/ Android apps and look for a cache near you. The site runs a ‘freemium’ model – you can play for free or for advanced features you need to pay a small charge.

I live in North West London and there is at least one geocache in every park near my house. There was even a cache at the end of my road - the one photographed above. Caches range from ‘micro’ size – the size of a 35mm film canister, all the way to a ‘large’ box. Inside the cache is some paper to write your name and a short message, and in the larger containers there are other objects. The rules are that you can remove an object if you replace it with an object of more value.

I’m always in favour of any activity that gets children away from the television, and part of geocaching’s success is that because there are so many places to find, it’s easy to have a spare hour on the weekend to pop out and find a cache.

There’s no policing or moderation of the system – so there’s nothing to stop you going to the website and claiming you’ve found all 1.5 million caches. But that’s missing the point – it’s a game, and the fun is really in finding the boxes more than the website components.

We found five geocaches this weekend (and couldn’t find a sixth, in the closest park to my house). It felt quite addictive and fun for all the family – including the dog who I don’t think we’ve ever walked so far. Just be careful of the stinging nettles.

tags:

application review, freemium, games, geocaching, mobile, site review,

1 Comment

Holiday news

Sep 1, 2011 at 9:05am

This week I've returned from a fortnight's holiday and for what was always considered a 'quiet period', there was a lot of news in the technology world:

Apple's Steve Jobs stepped down. Earlier this year I read the book 'From Good to Great' where one of the requirements of a great company over a good, high performing company, is that the former is able to lose key individuals and still grow successfully. There have been many good companies but when a key person has left, the company has lost it's way. Apple is currently the best of the good companies, and only time will tell whether it's one of the greats.
Eric Schmidt gave a great speech highlighting two key factors - the UK has invented so many high tech products, yet has been unable to commercialise them, and secondly the dwindling number of students studying maths and science. Both are sad positions to be in, and the second one is the worrying trend which needs to be addressed.
HP have bought Autonomy. I've never come across a company that so few people know what they do (Autonomy, not HP). 30,000 people a week probably sit in White Hart Lane wondering what their shirt sponsor does. As for the actual aquisition, I agree with Tech Market View that it's another sad day for British enterprise, and Eric Schmidt's words above simply echo our lack of commercialisation - why can't the UK create companies that buy US companies?
Google buying Motorola was a complete shock. The cynic in me thinks that Google bought the cheaper company, to spark Microsoft's interest in buying Nokia, which would eat up a huge amount of Microsoft's cash reserve and put it in a weaker position. Quite why any company would want to buy a handset provider - customers are extremely fickle and disloyal in the mobile market, and Apple are going from strength to strength. Oh, and there's the subject of huge investment required to knock the iPad off the top perch.

There was some good news while I was away though, I finished reading Lance Armstrong's autobiography and whilst I won't do a full book review like usual, I thoroughly recommend it. I couldn't put the book down and ended up reading it in four days - not an easy task when you go on holiday with four kids.

tags:

HP, apple, book review, business, google, mobile, news,

0 Comments

Wireless warfare

Aug 3, 2011 at 9:09am

A friend of mine is a soldier in the army. His role as an engineer is to set up a wireless network as soon as his regiment has moved into a new position. Setting up the wireless network takes is one of the first priorities when the soldiers move because the generals need to understand where the soldiers are - all the time. They don't use telephone networks because most of the time the war is being fought in a foreign land (and there's probably some breach of the terms and conditions of using a roaming network whilst invading a country).

Yesterday a group of us at work listened to the Akamai State of the Internet report. Akamai publish the report each quarter. Akamai probably has a wider view of the global Internet than any other company because they work at a transport and application layer, across multiple Internet providers, and serve so much of the Internet traffic all the way to end users.

One of the sections of yesterday's report showed that during the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings, the government switched off the Internet. Akamai showed their traffic patterns, and it showed a flat line during these 'outages'.

Back to my friend in the army. In past wars, aircraft used to drop leaflets over the countries they were invading (or rescuing, depending on your viewpoint) to explain to citizens what they were doing and why they were doing it (your government are the bad guys). In the recent Israel-Gaza war, both sides used voice mails and text messages (as well as the old fashioned leaflets) to warn citizens what was going on.

In the future though, when foreign governments see uprisings such as Egypt and Libya, expect them to deploy Internet hot spots for the public when the host government switch it off. With the amount of mobile and YouTube video content being shown on the news stations at the moment from current middle east uprisings, it's not unfeasible for the press to provide these hot spots.

Photo courtesy of Dunechaser on Flickr

tags:

Akamai, YouTube, mobile, politics,

0 Comments

Voice mail hacking vs website security

Jul 29, 2011 at 1:26pm

Whilst I think the actions of the journalists at News of the World (and perhaps other 'press' organisations) have been totally guilty of their conduct, I find it interesting how the phone companies have managed to get away relatively unscathed.

When a website user database is hacked, the press consider the lack of security of the website to be the guilty party. In the voicemail scenario, I've hardly seen any commentary around the mobile phone operators.

There are two main ways of hacking voicemails:

The first method is to use the remote dial in number to access voicemails, enter the phone number of the person you're trying to gain access to, and guess the PIN code. The PIN is usually 4 digits, and companies simply 'brute force' their way into mailboxes. Brute force is simply a case of guessing 0000, then 0001 and so on.
The second method is to clone a user's phone number using a proxy-style service. It's very simple - you dial a phone number (the proxy) and you'll hear a message asking what number you want your phone number to appear to be to the person you're about to call. You stay on the call and then enter the phone number you want to call, and the recipient sees the 'new' phone number you entered earlier. A number of offshoring cold call sales companies use this type of service to make it look like they are calling you from the UK. Voicemail hackers phone a proxy, enter the phone number of the person they are trying to hack, and the mobile phone voicemail thinks the incoming call is from that victim's number (and there's no need to enter a PIN number).

Neither of these methods are particularly elaborate. A simple Google search provides a long list of companies who offer the proxy service (although to be fair all the ones I went to said they didn't allow the service to be run for UK phone numbers).

In my opinion, the phone companies should do the following:

Every time the remote voicemail is accessed a text message should be sent to the phone number. At the very least, each unsuccessful PIN number attempt should send a text message to the mobile warning of the attempt.
If the wrong PIN number is entered more than say, four times, the voicemail should be "locked".
Phone companies should be able to work out if a phone number has been cloaked (run through the proxy) more accurately.

tags:

legal, mobile, news, web security,

0 Comments

Why the single mobile device isn't possible

Jun 14, 2011 at 9:33am

A true story (all the stories I tell on this blog are true - it's just this makes the story more dramatic) - I was standing in the kitchen washing the dishes last night whilst watching the television.

I find this to be the second most therapeutic place in the World - the first is in the shower (for more information about why we seem to think clearer in certain positions but never at our place of work, read Future Minds.

Anyway, back to washing the dishes, and I saw the new Sony Xperia Play advert shown below.

This got me thinking the same thing as the R&D guys and girls in every handset company in the World - what is the perfect handset/ mobile/ slate device? By perfect, I mean "what device will take over from all the other devices we own?" I remember conversations in the late 1990s when I worked at the Finnish Telco Sonera (for accuracy, I worked at a subsidary called SmartTrust - now part of G&D, however these conversations took place with the parent company) where we discussed more than 100% penetration of handsets in the World (i.e. more active handsets than people).

Why would people want more than one handset? Because you'd have a super smart/ fashionable one in the evening, an email device with QWERTY keyboard during the day, a sporty/ waterproof one on weekends and so on.

I remember hearing that the market research teams at Nokia (despite the recent bad news I'd recommend anyone with any technology interest to visit their amazing corporate headquearters in Finland) kept hearing that their users wanted tiny phones and massive screens; they wanted as few keys as possible and full QWERTY layouts; they wanted the simple, original, 'flat' Nokia menu and a gazillion functions on the phone. The users wanted the impossible - mutually exclusive functions.

After I'd finished the washing up (we have a large family and had guests that evening - these things take a while), I sat down and caught up on some recorded TV - Secrets of the Superbrands: Fashion when the penny dropped.

We won't be able to have a single device because of the following factors:

Fashion - too many of us want the latest new shiny (or distressed as I learned on the Secrets programme) thing, for the sake of having the latest new thing.
Best of breed. I use the toaster because it makes the least mess; I use the microwave because it makes hot chocolate quickly and without getting a saucepan dirty; I use the oven to roast chicken because I imagine it's going to taste nicer than the small microwave/oven (and I'm worried all future hot chocolates will taste a little chicken-ey).
We want change. I like love Dairy Milk. But every so often I'll have a Flake, or a Twirl or a Wispa. Think of your favourite yet balanced meal - why don't you have it every night?

And for these reasons I don't think the single device to take over our wallet, mobile phone, laptop and paper pad is ever going to come along.

tags:

Nokia, PC, brands, design, future, ipad, laptop, mobile, trends,

0 Comments

German politician truly transparent

Apr 6, 2011 at 9:29am

An interesting timeline showing how much customer data is recorded by mobile phone companies. Zoom in a few times to get the real picture of how accurate the data is.

Is this good or bad? Well, I don't personally believe putting this on the Internet is such a fantastic idea. I guess it's the same as other huge sources of data... it's fine when the right company own it, and quickly becomes quite scary when the wrong company own it...

tags:

data, mobile, privacy,

0 Comments

The migration of Digital Money

Feb 12, 2011 at 7:28pm

The scan above is from this week's edition of my local newspaper.

There are two popular pairs of terms used to describe users in Internet terms - Digital Migrants and Digital Natives, and Gen X and Gen Y. Personally I prefer the first term because it describes the groups perfectly.

Digital Migrants are pretty much anyone over about 20 years old, who remembers life before The Internet. They (errr, 'we') had to change our mindset to adjust with the cultural and technological challenges and advances the Internet has provided. Digital Natives are the opposite group - those under about 20, who don't know any different.

Back to the article in the newspaper.

I have two thoughts regarding the 81 year old Mr Moller (and yes, I do think his age is important):

The poor old pensioner. Not everyone needs or wants a mobile phone. It's neither an identity or mandatory device (yet) and it should be up to individuals whether to have one or not. The pace of change is happening too quickly. After 40 years of credit cards (25 years older than mobiles), you can still live a perfectly normal life without plastic. Migration through technologies should be a slower process.
It's evolution. Yes you can live life without a credit card, however you can also live life without cash too, and just use plastic. It's natural evolution to move from cash, to plastic, to mobiles. In fact Mr Moller highlights the very real possibility of jumping straight from cash to mobiles. Mobile penetration is above 84%, so it's perfectly reasonable to expect everyone to have one.

Earlier this week we ran an event at Endava called The Future of Social Media for Financial Services. At the event, the author Richard Watson gave a speech on The Future of Money. I wasn't quite expecting to read an article in my local paper the following day highlighting that it's not so much about the future... it's already happening right now.

tags:

Endava, banking, business, digital media, economy, mobile, predictions, press, trends,

0 Comments

Tags

Eight Digital Media Predictions for 2012

2011 favourites

Identity crisis

Stinging nettles? There's an app for that

Holiday news

Wireless warfare

Voice mail hacking vs website security

Why the single mobile device isn't possible

German politician truly transparent

The migration of Digital Money

Bradley Howard

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