Technology on Philip Sheldrake

Software 4.0 — A New Neurosymbolic AI

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve reached an uncanny milestone in tech. We are building intimate conversational bonds with AI chatbots, yet the software infrastructure surrounding our daily lives remains as rigid, silent, and fragile as ever.

LLMs tease us with their facilities to write code, but forcing this new form of intelligence to work with programming paradigms that pre-date the World Wide Web is driving a silent crisis of structural decay in large-scale software systems.

This post introduces the Software 4.0 era. Informed by biological processes, it turns software into a living, self-verifying organism that provides the perfect complement to LLMs. It transforms how we build and co-evolve the digital fabric of our world.

Something Big Could Be Happening: A response to Matt Shumer's post

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A 2022 article in Noema magazine describes apophenia as “faulty pattern recognition. People see faces in clouds and alien ruins on Mars. … Humans are pattern-recognizing creatures, and so apophenia is built in.”

A Google engineer had claimed an LLM to be conscious, sentient, and indeed a person, and the article explores reasons for why he had reached such a conclusion. It’s well worth a read, particularly its observation that we apply concepts that have wholly anthropomorphic heritage and meaning to LLM technology. Pehaps we need new vocabulary.

The technology’s stochastic prowess is much advanced 42 months later, and perhaps that’s all the more reason we continue to see things that aren’t there. Matt Shumer’s “Something Big Is Happening ” is the latest example.

Supersoftware — software that is itself symbolic AI

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Trillions of dollars are flowing into LLM technology and services — that’s not an exaggeration — and yet LLMs can’t grapple with enterprise software. When we invite them to code, to update schemas, to modify configurations, they break things. Constantly.

But this isn’t an LLM problem. It’s a software problem.

Transition9 — the natural integration of human and next-level artificial intelligence

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m never quite sure if the phrase is that we’re blessed or we’re cursed to live in interesting times. Either way, we’re definitely here and it’s definitely interesting.

Both the internet and the web were designed purposefully to be decentralized. No-one could take control let alone turn them off. Since then we’ve witnessed many power grabs — from privately owned social networks to nation states ‘protecting’ their citizens — interspersed with a series of community action and associated projects to re-decentralize things.

Decentralizing done well is a means to some very welcome ends, but it has proven to be a harder design challenge than centralizing. And just as you think you’re making progress, along comes the next centralizing innovation.

Web3's future #fail is avoidable

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The point of failure is precisely where Web3 technology meets you and me. We must change our approach, not just to avoid failure, but to fully explore and expand the gifts of being human.

First published to the generative identity website .

The past, present, and possible future of software architecture

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It is important to understand the ways in which software may be conjured into the world for the simple reason that software and information technologies more generally have immense social and economic impact. The genesis of such process has been called software architecture, and there have been various attempts over the years to define the term and corresponding activities precisely, specifically in relation to the elements, forms, rationale, and constraints involved (“What Is Your Definition of Software Architecture?,” 2017).

A well-defined understanding of software architecture is critical to its practice and perhaps the word choice alone has helped sustain a certain nature of software architectural practice akin to that undertaken for buildings. The definitional approach taken by Perry and Wolf (1992) is typical of the traditional genre, drawing parallels with the precursors of hardware and network architecture, and their forerunner, the architecture of the built environment.

Samuel Butler (1912) observed:

Analogy points in this direction, and though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

To what degree are we misled by the architectural analogy? And might we find a better analogy, that is one that’s less misleading?

Towards a shared understanding of ‘digital identity’ — reflecting on conversations with Doc Searls and Drummond Reed

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the generative identity website .

No two people can share an exact understanding of anything deep and meaningful simply because we each have different contexts. Conversation relies upon and can never wholly substitute for context. Nevertheless, we can work to grow a shared understanding through conversation, and the relationship between conversationalists evolves in the process.

The relationship is immanent in such informational exchange[1].

On one level, the opening paragraph here pertains to this being a blog post about conversations I’ve valued in recent months. But there’s another level given that ‘digital identity’ is our subject. Identity, in what you might call the natural and non-bureaucratic sense, is reciprocally defining and co-constitutive with relationships and information exchange[2].

Identities are immanent in the relationships immanent in information exchange.

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity – Cooperating at Scale (part 2 of 2)

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .

In the first of this two-part blog post I described why cooperating-at-scale is humanity’s primary challenge. Here I outline some candidate concepts and pre-architectural principles to inform the necessary and sufficient ‘sociotechnological primitives’.

First I’d like to qualify pre-architectural. It’s not oxymoronic despite arche meaning origin or beginning. Both physical and software architecture originate structure and structural relationships, and we’re not yet at the stage to prescribe such things. Structure is ossified pattern and our purpose at this early stage demands instead that we offer just a little structure to open up the space to explore and nurture multiple patterns in preparation for the emergence of multiple structural forms. If pre-architectural doesn’t do it for you, then perhaps think of it as a parsimony of design.

A means to our purpose is the encouragement of multi-disciplinary cooperation towards ever-improving multi-disciplinary cooperation. At scale.

Nuclear physicists refer to the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction as the critical mass. No-one can know the variety or volume or patterns or structures of the methods, materials and mindsets required to constitute a critical mass for cooperation-at-scale, but perhaps your spidey senses are similar to our own … maybe, just maybe, assembling such critical mass is a possibility nearer, rather than further away.

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale (part 1 of 2)

Sat, 25 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .

Despite the over-emphasis of competition in Darwin’s theory of evolution, the great man himself sensed the importance of cooperation.

I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another …

[On the Origin of Species, Darwin, 1859]

Modern day scientists know that any investment of resources by individuals — of the same species or different — in acts of cooperation could in fact make those individuals vulnerable to non-cooperators, and yet cooperating proves to be a continuing strength rather than a weakness. We see cooperation everywhere we look.

[We have] a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.

[Microcosmos , Margulis & Sagan, 1997]

Cooperation confers an irrefutable advantage and we’re still grappling with understanding the qualities of the mechanisms that make this the case.

Human beings are brilliant same-species cooperators — hence our parasitic success — and yet a quick scan of typical news headlines would suggest quite the opposite. Without dwelling too deeply on international relations or indeed media theory, the reported character of interactions between the likes of the United States and China and Russia and India and Europe might be said to be more fractious than cooperative. And national news headlines compound the gloom.

Why?

Why can’t we just work together for mutual advantage on our little blue marble ? As co-pilots of Spaceship Earth ?

Webinar on identity, interpersonal data and collective minds for SSI Meetup

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I was delighted to accept an invitation from Alex Preukschat to host a webinar earlier this week on the topic of digital identity for SSImeetup.org . My presentation is based on the reciprocally-defining, inseparable conceptions of identity, relationships, and personal data — or interpersonal data as I like to call it after my AKASHA colleague Mihai Alisie unjumbled my previous garbled attempts to make a distinction.

Why decentralization needs more than cryptonetworks – the Internetome

Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Aldous Huxley (1937) regarded the decentralization of industry and government necessary for a better society. Norbert Wiener’s insights (1950) into the dynamics and ethics of humans and large computer systems hinted at the advantages. Marshall McLuhan (1962) anticipated a shift from the centralized mechanical age to the decentralized electronic age, coining the term global village as shorthand for such a welcome outcome. E.F. Schumacher (1973) considered decentralization allied with freedom and one of “the truths revealed by nature’s living processes”. Steven Levy’s hacker ethic (1984) includes the tenet “mistrust authority – promote decentralization”. And Nicholas Negroponte (1995) regards decentralization as one of the four cardinal virtues of the information society (alongside globalization, harmonization and empowerment).

When centralization is mediated by an organization, governmental or corporate, its best interests must be aligned perfectly and continuously with the parties subject to its gravity in the mediating context – otherwise decentralization must be preferred to avoid the appropriation and erosion of those parties’ valuable agency. Importantly, decentralization demands decentralization at every level without exception for any exception would be centralization. By definition.

This post aims to scope the challenge that still lies ahead to secure decentralization even with the rise and rise of cryptonetworks such as Ethereum . For more information about decentralization in general and why it’s important, see Decentralization – a deep cause of causes you care about deeply , written for the World Wide Web Foundation.

Value flows when data flows meaningfully through sociotechnical networks – in search of the ideal data architecture

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Competitive advantage and profitable growth doesn’t come from scale anymore. The rate at which big players in any and all industries beach their supertanker is unprecedented.

Competitive advantage and profitable growth doesn’t come from efficiency anymore either. What’s the point of making unwanted product efficiently?

Competitive advantage and profitable growth comes from adaptability. Pure and simple. Adapt or die.

A 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review pronounced adaptability the new competitive advantage. It asks how your managers can pick up the right signals to understand and harness change when they’re overwhelmed with changing information. The conclusion – instead of being really good at doing some particular thing, companies must be really good at learning how to do new things.

As Peter Senge points out, organizations only learn through individuals who learn, perhaps aided by machine learning these days. And learning craves meaningful data.

Lack of data was the problem of the 20th Century, yet the opportunity and challenge of the 21st is having too much of the stuff. This is the landscape of digital transformation and, I believe, the very bedrock of the meaning of business: establishing and driving mutual value creation (PDF ).

Value flows when data flows meaningfully through sociotechnical networks, and I’ve been on a mission to find out how to make this happen.

The Digital Life Collective

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

An invitation to build our technology together … tech we trust for the web we want.

Our motivation

Digital technologies are undermining our privacy, permitting mass state surveillance, enabling censorship, undermining journalism, and spreading fake news. It feels forbidding, uncertain, unsafe – more problem than solution, and far from the original vision for the Internet and Web.

And yet we’re optimistic that we can join together to fix it. The problem isn’t really the technologies we have to work with of course, but rather the way they’re crafted and who gets to do the crafting.

The unfreedom of filter bubbles – let's pop the bloody things

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We could see it coming. Sort of.

I wrote a post titled myChannel back in 2005, a time without smartphones, Facebook, Twitter and news aggregators like Flipboard. YouTube was 17 days off launching. Reviewing the tech landscape I concluded:

… mass personalisation has become a ‘qualifying’ rather than ‘winning’ criteria. The advantages to the user include choice (of the most apt personalisation), collation, and access in their own time and filtering. …The user, the recipient of news and information, the listener, the viewer, the inter-actor, has been empowered to set the schedule. It’s what they want, when they want it and how they want it. They have one channel … and they own it. It is myChannel.

How and why I strive to maintain my privacy – a post in light of the Snooper's Charter

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_30414” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”] An aerial image of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
Photographer: GCHQ/Crown Copyright. CC BY-SA 2.0[/caption]

Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Edward Snowden, 2015 (source )

I get asked now and then how to improve one’s personal privacy, digitally speaking. It’s unsurprising that such questions are directed my way given privacy is a core objective of the hi:project , and yet I seemed to have attracted more than the usual number of questions since my last post – Introducing Google Assistant, the Surveillance Interface .

You might want to stop commercial entities intruding – it’s difficult to sum up in a sentence or two how egregious the state of commercial surveillance is today. You might want to help head off the realisation of a surveillance state if only because you’ve read somewhere that such things don’t end well. You might simply want to have less data about your movements and purchases and media habits and general proclivities out there because it’s not a case of if the corresponding databases are hacked but when.

Importantly, I write this post the very week the UK has passed the most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy. The so-called Snoopers’ Charter is disgusting, distressing and, in good part, stupid.

Introducing Google Assistant, the Surveillance Interface (SI)

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A new kind of interface has surfaced over the past five years – artificial intelligence (AI) based ‘personal assistants ’.

Apple Siri started the ball rolling, swiftly followed by Google Now , Microsoft Cortana , Amazon Alexa , and half a dozen others. But it now has a new apogee, a new sector defining moment, a revolution dressed up as evolution. The only thing more alarming than its instrusive, opaque, and society-altering capabilities is the way in which tech pundits have ladled out the accolades, pundits whose worldview appears as limited as a magpie’s regard for shiny things.

Google Now is now Google Assistant , and it comes integrated into Google’s first full-on (i.e. not just a reference design) mobile phone – the Pixel.

Lightning – cryptocurrency and the Internet of Things

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoin is an experiment. That’s granted. The fact that it’s trusted and actually useful is nothing short of phenomenal. Last week for example, the trade volume amounted to US$229m.

Nevertheless, Bitcoin has some fundamental constraints that keep it from going mainstream: it has a ballpark limit of 7 transactions per second, and having confidence that a transaction has ‘gone through’ – non-recourse transactions – takes roughly 20 to 60 minutes depending on the level of confidence you’re looking for. (The user experience sucks too, but that’s not for this post.)

While 229 million dollars is no small chunk of change, Visa processes many thousands of transactions per second, peaking at tens of thousands, and will have processed around US$130 billion last week.

State channel – more exciting than it sounds

The crypto awesome sauce underpinning Bitcoin is known as the blockchain, perhaps the No.1 tech buzzword of recent times. It’s at the heart of the currency’s success – preventing users spending the same money twice – but is also the nub of its relatively slothful nature. It’s with a fair degree of excitement then that I’ve been tracking the progress of Lightning, a protocol first mooted to my knowledge in 2013.

The jargon here is state channel – blockchain interactions that could occur on the blockchain but get conducted off-chain without impairing the trust parties have in the interaction. Lightning facilitates state channel to speed things up and attenuate the costs needed to prove transactions (and offers a little more spark in terms of brand appeal!)

Defining Sovereign Technology, so we can build it, and so we know it when we see it

Mon, 30 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Note: the IIW community adopted the qualifying prefix “self-” not too long after this post was first written, ie. self-sovereign technology.

Agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place.

To be able to ‘act otherwise’ means being able to intervene in the world, or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs.

(Giddens 1986 )

Technology must always be a component of agency as tools change our capacity to ‘act otherwise’. And it’s a component that’s all the more pervading and penetrating as the delineation of the analogue and digital dissolves, as ‘the device’ assumes an exo-brain role and as sensory ‘things’ form our exo-nervous system.

Simultaneously, I have a digital self and a self with digital presence.

Simultaneously, this is me and it is my representative, my agent.

Simultaneously, it is core to my agency and must be subject to it.

Why can't Deezer answer simple questions about privacy?

Wed, 06 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just bought an Onkyo TX-8150 network receiver. Lovely. Especially because it can drive two pairs of speakers, eats so-called hi-res music (24/192 with a 32/384 Hi-Grade DAC), and comes ready to play nice with the likes of Spotify, Airplay and Deezer.

Spotify tarnished its reputation somewhat with its privacy cock-up last year, and doesn’t yet entertain hi-res. Apple’s Airplay looks neat but doesn’t do hi-res either, and totally ignores Android. Hmm. So let’s check out Deezer I thought to myself. A rare European Unicorn . And while it describes lossless CD quality as hi-res when that’s not really what the term means, I’m not sure my ’listening environment’ is that sensitive! Lossless CD quality will do me.

On the future of manufacturing

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I was invited last week to talk about the future of manufacturing at an event run by the manufacturing practice of one of the big law firms. Here’s a whistle stop summary. It’s a mind-blowing vista.

Intro

On considering political, economic, social and technological factors, it’s unarguable that we’re contemplating major flux in manufacturing. As with any flux, today’s players will either win out or lose out, and clearly everyone in this room wishes to contribute to and participate in the winning side of things!

With that in mind, I’d like to explore some major themes:

Dehumanisation
Dematerialisation
Decentralisation
Deindustrialisation

That list sounds fairly destructive, yet I believe manufacturing is then transformed, manufacturing is vital, and manufacturing is more exciting than ever.

Google on collaboration – a new study

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

First published to Gigaom Research .

Our customers often tell us that encouraging and enabling collaboration has dramatically improved their business. We decided to dig a little deeper by conducting some original cross-industry research that measures the power of workplace collaboration in concrete terms.

This is how Google introduces the findings of its recent survey of senior staff and C-suite executives at 258 North American companies across a wide range of business sectors and sizes. (PDF of full report .) The primary conclusion is presented up front:

… collaboration has a significant impact on business innovation, performance, culture and even the bottom line.

This is quite right and quite wrong. Collaboration is at once driven and the driver; it is both a cause and an effect. As is culture come to that. Effectively, Google must grapple with two distinct appreciations of business among its customers and prospects.

Simply complex

If there’s one thing that differentiates organization this century from the last it’s that we may now acknowledge complexity and do something about it. We increasingly have the technologies to help navigate complexity. Choosing to do so offers competitive advantage for the time being; there will soon come a time when failing to do so renders an organization unresponsive, fragile and, consequently, bust. (Note that complexity and complication are different things.)

Work IT: bring-you-and-your-own-everything

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

First published to Gigaom Research .

Cast your mind back a decade or more. Did you request specific hardware from your company’s IT team? If so, you started a trend that continues to play out to this day, and will continue to its logical and exciting conclusion.

You may or may not have been successful in your request given IT’s historic intransigence, but nowadays many of us expect to rock up to work with the laptop and tablet and smartphone of our choosing – often our own – and expect the IT team’s full accommodation.

We’re also bringing our own applications. Non-IT staff have adopted software-as-a-service without necessarily going through their IT colleagues. Yammer, Trello and Slack for example. Perhaps Google Docs crept in without organization-wide adoption of Google for Work. Meeting schedulers. Note-takers. Expense trackers. Skype. Dropbox. Instagram. The list is as long as the kind of things you need to get done.

It’s useful to think of this in terms of Enterprise IT and Work IT. The enterprise owns Enterprise IT whereas the worker owns Work IT. In simple terms, Enterprise IT is focused on the organization, Work IT on organizing. Enterprise IT is top-down with the starting position of locking everything down, whereas Work IT is bottom-up, thriving by facilitating sharing and openness.

Toward a social compact for digital privacy and security

Mon, 08 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Updated 16th September, embedding the videos of the session below.

The Global Commission on Internet Governance (ourinternet.org) was established in January 2014 to articulate and advance a strategic vision for the future of Internet governance. With work commencing in May 2014, the two-year project is conducting and supporting independent research on Internet-related dimensions of global public policy, culminating in an official commission report.

Marketing and PR and the General Data Protection Regulation

Fri, 22 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My main character in Attenzi – a social business story , the CEO Eli Appel, has this to say over lunch with his chairman:

Good business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.

He adds:

… No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network.

Eli is referring here to the visceral difference between ‘doing’ social (bolted on) and ‘being’ social (built in), and you know which one you’re on the receiving end of in any given situation right?

What, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The first post in what turned out to be a series of three on the topic of the purpose of business:

Peter Drucker asserted that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. He was right at the time in offering previously inward-looking firms a more appropriate beacon. His dictum is, however, wrong for our time.

The assertion is insufficient in sustainability terms; ie, being concerned with the health and resilience of living systems such as organizations, society and the environment. A customer-centric outlook is too simplistic, simply failing to recognise complexity, and therefore at threat from business that has progressed beyond Drucker’s heuristic.

Different kinds of privacy, empowerment and autonomy – centralized versus decentralized

Thu, 09 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally posted to the hi:project blog .]

In an article in the Guardian last week , Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland mooted the potential for Google to cleave in two, with one part dedicated to providing a regulated bank-like service for data. Pentland directs the MIT Human Dynamics Lab and co-leads both the Big Data and the Personal Data and Privacy initiatives of the World Economic Forum, and I’m surprised how often his name crops up in my hi:project related research, yet I find it difficult to reconcile his observation here with his fluency in the power of decentralized networks :

Social physics strongly suggest that the [Adam Smith’s] invisible hand is more due to trust, cooperation and robustness properties of the person-to-person network of exchanges than it is due to any magic in the workings of the market. If we want to have a fair, stable society, we need to look to the network of exchanges between people, and not to market competition.

Pentland continues under the heading: How can we move from a market-centric to a human-centric society?

Technology trends relevant to change management

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have been invited to talk about tech trends relevant to change management at this evening’s London meeting of the Change Management Institute .

I’m keeping most excellent company alongside Karolina Lewandowska , Change and Transformation Manager at Google UK, and Faith Forster , Founder and CEO Pinipa .

The image here is taken from an excellent blog post by Lee Bryant of PostShift – The Quantified Organisation: can change become routine?

The quantified self, the quantified organization, and the organized self

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The diagram here portrays where I’m going with this post, so let’s dive in.

The quantified self

The current Wikipedia entry for quantified self (QS) describes it as “a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).”

And it doesn’t stop at mere data acquisition of course; as the strapline for a major QS community puts it, we’re looking at self knowledge through numbers. Adriana Lukas, founder and organiser at London Quantified Self Group , proselytizes self-managed QS, a future in which “expertise is supplied rather than outsourced”, where each of us acquires “agency as sense-maker”.

That’s certainly a powerful and possibly quite natural vision, and one I wholeheartedly embrace. Yet it’s also counter to the branded data siloes many a purveyor of QS gadgetry would, it seems, have one locked into. Adriana employs a turn of phrase, which may well be riffing off Doc Searls :

We can’t treat individuals as data cows to be milked for the data bucket.

The quantified organization

Lee Bryant, founder of PostShift, describes their take on ‘quantified organization’ :

… a framework of organisational health measures, informed by theory and company goals, that can guide ongoing change in an agile, iterative way and assess the success or failure of change actions against a desired future operating state.

The hi:project, social business and Flat Army

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I help organisations work better, so how on Earth is that connected to the hi:project ? Given I dedicate not a small fraction of my time to this non-profit endeavour, I’m asked on occasion to explain how the two are related.

The ‘HI’ of the hi:project stands for human interface. It’s our way of describing the technology we think should and will largely supplant the user interface, the UI. Here’s how I’ve begun to explain it of late …

When we approach digital, we have a natural propensity to digitize the pre-digital; after all, that is all we know. That’s how we ended up sticking an ’e’ in front of mail for example, and went from having desktops, files and folders to, well, desktops, files and folders.

Yet digital has unprecedented qualities – it just takes us a while to discover and exploit them. It’s only with the passing of decades for example that organisations can now explore alternatives to email. And filing stuff looks increasingly anachronistic with the power of near-instant search at our fingertips.

In the same way, the UI is attached to the digital machine / service today because pre-digital physical machines had a physical interface.

Introducing the hi:project

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The hi:project launches today. It’s a synthesis of many of the things I care about, from the original decentralizing visions for the Internet and Web, the aspiration that digital technologies can help people relate to each other better and understand each other better, and the idea that we might connect to each other without wondering who’s monitoring our every action.

I believe that making all variety of organization more agile, more valuable, more useful starts by empowering all the individuals that play a role in the organization’s success. The creation of mutual value begins with acquiring self-knowledge and mutual understanding to effect mutual influence, and this is exemplified by the question that concludes Attenzi - a social business story :

The blockchain is coming your way

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoin is the most famous cryptocurrency with the highest capitalization. As you can see from this screenshot from the “block reader” blockr , the capitalization at the time of writing is over eight billion dollars. According to citations of an IMF report on Wikipedia, that places it just above Moldova ’s GDP.

This post isn’t about bitcoin but the cryptographic foundation of Bitcoin. (The community prefers to capitalize the word when referring to the system, and lower case when referring to the currency.) This post doesn’t explain Bitcoin or the blockchain in detail – I recommend this series of presentations courtesy of the Khan Academy for those who want to learn more – but rather it’s about the technology’s wider application and its emergence and growth beyond the early adopters.

Get this into your block

So why am I interested in Bitcoin specifically, and its blockchain foundation more broadly? What does this have to do with social business ?

We are contemplating blockchain platforms to enable decentralized consensus in the not too distant future, allowing us to codify, decentralize, secure and trade many things that historically have demanded some centralized facility. This is akin to the bitcoin currency functioning without the need for a central bank, and the vista includes voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowd funding, organizational governance, intellectual property, contracts and agreements of most kinds. The landscape even extends to so-called smart property with appropriate hardware integration.

Sometimes I wish I was more of a wordsmith, but this word will have to suffice – wowzers!

Taxi! Hailing a ride, but not too far into the future

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The controversy Uber is causing right now prompted me to delve into the archives. Way back. Back to March 2000 when I was pitching a proposition called Peoplestaxi to the likes of 3i and Avis. It got selected for First Tuesday’s “Wireless Matchmaking” events too. Here’s a quick extract:

Peoplestaxi leverages the latest technologies and customer-centric e-business philosophy to deliver the ubiquitous, convenient and intelligent taxi management service for business and consumers.

Important – the Internet is changing to a new protocol

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The Internet has transformed the world. Period. I think it’s important then to help everyone understand what it is exactly. I’m not talking degree-level understanding of computer networking, but a feel for the kind of thing going on ‘under the hood’.

This post explains the new numbering system for the Internet – fundamental for the continued health and prosperity of the Internet this century – and does so without the reader needing any prior technical understanding. There’s an executive summary if you only have two minutes. And then more detail if you fancy. It describes what your organization needs to be doing and why.

Most of the post is based on a document I wrote under the auspices of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS ).

So let’s get stuck in. Firstly, allow me to differentiate between two terms too often and erroneously used interchangeably.

The Internet and the World Wide Web are different things

The Internet emerged in the concluding months of the 1960s. The World Wide Web on the other hand, like many other protocols, ‘runs’ on top of the Internet, and first twinkled in the eye of Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.

Organization is software

Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post is about an exciting vista for organization, one that may sound unhuman on the face of it but which, in contrast, I think could serve human dignity very well.

I first presented it in my Future of Organization video May 23rd, a presentation that appears to have been well received (and the accompanying Slideshare accrued over 2000 views in the week). Given the variety and perceptiveness of the comments the video garnered I’m particularly pleased to have excused the presentation up front as being far from comprehensive. Pete Burden picked up on building inclusiveness and sustainability, and humanity, pointing me to this webpage on concious business . And soulfulness was at the heart of a similar exchange with Frederic Laloux, author of Reinventing Organizations . (I consequently elevated the book to the top of my to-read pile and at page 36 I’m enjoying it very much so far.)

Mr. Wirearchy himself, Jon Husband , was good enough to ’tweet out’ (appended here). And my dear friend Gabbi Cahane wondered what balance of my living in the future and living in the present might be best for business. Hmm, good point :-)

In this post, I’m referring to what I’ve named Bread incorporated – a distributed, self-regulating, incorruptible, frictionless market for organization. Here’s the slide in question and the transcript:

Access to this search result is denied, unless you have the money of course

Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today, Google has published a webpage with a form allowing anyone in Europe to ask that personal data be removed from search results. This follows the recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, deciding that:

Indexing information by a search engine is ‘processing of personal data’
Google is a ‘controller’ of personal data
Spanish data protection law is applicable, even if indexing happens in the US
Google should remove links to webpages containing personal data, even if the webpages themselves are lawful
A fair balance should be sought between the legitimate interests of search engine users and the privacy rights of individuals
The right to be forgotten is recognised by the Court of Justice.

I’ve owned the domains forgetweb.com and forgetweb.org since 2010, so this is something I’ve contemplated for some time and the domain names betray my leaning, yet I can confidently say the Court has got it wrong. Julian David, techUK CEO, explains why in The Telegraph: “Forget about it: the ECJ ruling on the ‘right to be forgotten’ is unworkable .” I support his balanced sentiment 100% and would add one more vitally important perspective.

The Internetome

Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Just going back through some archives and found the definition I developed for the Internetome conference in 2010. Sponsored by Intel , Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association , it was, I believe, the UK’s first all-day Internet of Things conference. The conference website bit the dust some time during my subsequent server migrations, so for posterity, particularly as everyone is talking about the Internet of Things these days …

ZiL Lane 2.0 - the new killer app for the interwebs

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The pitch for this new product is simple:

The Internet is the most important infrastructure we’ve ever created, so we mustn’t neglect it. We need to build infrastructure for fast, pervasive and inclusive connectivity. We need to invest.

And where should the money come from? It’s obvious. Those who use today’s infrastructure freely for their commercial gain should pay for the privilege. Blockbuster paid for its own video rental shops, so why shouldn’t Netflix pay to deliver its products down our pipes?

For-profit companies cannot expect a free ride. They pay. We all benefit.

So, are you buying ZiL Lane 2.0?

Net neutrality and ZiL Lanes

Net neutrality is a simple principle integral to the original design of the Internet and, to many minds including mine, absolutely essential to it. The principle asserts that the network will not prioritise – and by inference discriminate – some traffic over other traffic based on where it’s come from. Sure, we’re all happy to prioritise traffic constituting a video feed over email because who cares if the email takes another tenth of a second to arrive, but we should not for example allow those who operate the Internet infrastructure to prioritise one party’s video feed over another.

Why?

Big data. Big trust.

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, my colleague Hector Arthur pointed me to a new report from Ovum’s Mark Little knowing I’d have a few comments to make. In the corresponding blog post – “Big Trust is Big Data’s missing DNA ” – Mark kicks off with:

In the rush to monetize customer data, companies risk diminishing the trust people have in services and brands. Sustaining and growing people’s trust in services is not just about “doing the right thing,” but also makes commercial sense.

As I like to say in other words, big data is worth more when wielded with customers rather than at them. Ovum calls this approach Big Trust.

Big Trust strategies are designed to build “trust equity” with customers as a basis for making core services stickier, for selling new services, and for brokering personal data to commerce under a new set of trust principles.

Public relations

The outlook is informed, directly or indirectly I know not, by the excellence theory of public relations presented by James E Grunig more than twenty years ago, which champions the two-way symmetrical PR model. This model uses communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organization and its stakeholders. My Six Influence Flows model from 2011 extends this work for the digital / social / big data age, and you can find out more about PR models in my post here if it’s your thing.

Of course, this is not how the majority of practitioners practice PR, deferring instead to publicity and ‘spin’, which may be associated more closely with distrust than trust. But excellent practice is championed if, as a shrewd procurer, you know where to look.

You have to deal with both complication and complexity, so you'd better know the difference

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Schumpeter column in The Economist got it wrong: “It’s complicated. Management thinkers disagree on how to manage complexity. ” The column comments on the recent 5th Global Drucker Forum – Managing Complexity and describes organizations as having two choices, deal with complexity or simplify.

Those that deal with complexity “may look complex and unwieldy but they have an inner logic and powers of self-organisation.” In contrast, “the second, rival solution to dealing with complexity is to impose simplicity.”

But to present the situation as ’either / or’ is simply misleading, and I think it comes down to a failure to appreciate the critical difference between complexity and complication, a difference that must be well understood when redesigning the way your organisation works.

An introduction to Web 3.0 for Social Data Week

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Next week is Social Media Week . That’s well known. What’s less well known is that this is Social Data Week , and this facet of social underpins a lot of the stuff on next week’s agenda. Nevertheless, many people with social in their job description, from public relations to marketing to ‘digital’, are not yet fluent in the data foundations.

One aspect of social data that particularly excites me is the Semantic Web, often referred to as Web 3.0. According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Web 3.0 describes the web as a universal medium for the exchange of data, information and knowledge. It’s an awesome vision that’s playing out right now.

A presentation to the Open Mobile Alliance conference on big data

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

According to its website, the Open Mobile Alliance “was formed in June 2002 by the world’s leading mobile operators, device and network suppliers, information technology companies and content and service providers. OMA delivers open specifications for creating interoperable services that work across all geographical boundaries, on any bearer network.”

The OMA met today in Dublin to discuss aspects of big data, and I was invited to present on personal data, social media and social business.

Setting the standards for influence

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a special advisor to AMEC (the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication), wearing a CIPR hat as and when. I’m part of a working group assembling recommendations on the topic of influence for deliberation at the AMEC European Summit in Madrid this June. We have input from IPR, PRSA, Womma, SNCR, IAB and other groups, associations and institutes.

I took an action to create “something to shoot at”, and I distributed the following over the weekend. On the basis that we’re an open and transparent working group, I thought I’d post it here too. Do get in touch if you’d like to tell me what you think. Now’s the time for dialogue – particularly if you can’t attend the Madrid summit – ahead of the standards setting.

Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally posted to Euler Partners .]

We kicked off our New Year speaking with the eConsultancy team about the upcoming update to their successful Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide 2011 . Here’s a rundown of the questions Amy Rodgers put to us and our responses.

1) What are the most important trends occurring in this market?

Maintaining one system for external social media management and workflow, and another system for “buzz monitoring”, and another system for enterprise social networking looks increasingly disjointed. We have media to communicate, and we communicate to influence, and influence flows are the lifeblood of mutual understanding, knowledge building and decision-making. Maintaining technological islands for influence flows with one group of stakeholders (eg, customers) distinct from another island for influence flows with another group of stakeholders (eg, employees) effectively ‘misses the trick’. It fails to recognise that today’s organisations must strive to be more than the sum of the payroll.

Destroying the web

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

The Internet is the most powerful, flexible and critical infrastructure ever invented. Every aspect of our daily lives is supported by this wondrous invention.

But here’s the important thing.

We’ve passed the point where the fabric of our societies is supported by the Internet – the all pervasive Internet increasingly defines that fabric. Its architecture is becoming our architecture, and that is why any motion to challenge or change the way in which the Internet is governed must be subject to the most critical eye.

I’ve been on tenterhooks the past fortnight watching the deliberations of WCIT play out – the World Conference on International Telecommunications. WCIT is a UN body that has played a vital role over nearly one and a half centuries coordinating telecoms standards and interoperability and radio spectrum and satellite orbits, and it has tried once again to wrestle Internet governance from the hands of the open community that has shepherded it so beautifully to date.

Social business webinar with Jay Krall, Cision's Media Research Supremo

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Cision webinar on 8th November was dedicated to social business , and I was delighted to be the guest in the hot seat. It was great to be able to chat with Jay Krall and answer questions from listeners about the impact of social web and related technologies on organizational structure, culture, process and performance measurement this decade.

I’ve known Jay since we started following each other online several years ago now, and he took part in an Influence Scorecard workshop I ran in New York in 2010. His contributions were invaluable then, and London is better off for having persuaded Jay to upsticks from Chicago. And if ever there was a guy with the most fabulous radio voice…

Banking your reputation

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

Matt Ambrose posts this week about Red Hot Openers that Get Readers Eager for More . So here goes…

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, standardized and reliable environment.

How am I doing so far Matt? :-)

Seriously, SWIFT matters to you this week. This member owned co-operative is actually at the cutting edge of dealing with your 21st Century currency – your data. And as I posted a month ago, data is this decade’s number one revolution .

If you accept that your data is your reputation (credit scoring is over 40 years old), and that your data has value to those who want to understand and serve your needs, then it’s a bit of a shocker that in 2012 you don’t have much control over it.

Are you a professional or a user?

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve never been fond of the word ‘user’? It lacks the caring qualities of a much more appropriate word, customer, and even evokes images of substance abuse.

On making this point, I’m asked what I’d call people benefitting from a service or application without handing over their hard-earned. Well, customers of course. In such situations they’re simply paying with a different currency, such as their personal data and/or attention, which the supplier of the service does its utmost to monetize.

But in one instance, I like that evocation of substance abuse. Of addiction. Of misuse.

Do allow me to explain and let’s see if I’ve just been critical of you or a colleague. Please go easy on me if I have, my intentions are honourable.

I had the privilege of speaking with 150 Masters students at Imperial College London yesterday, taking their Technology in Marketing module. All marketing activity in 2012 is underpinned or impacted by technology, and thousands of tech vendors tempt us with thousands of marketing and PR applications, tools and services. And we buy them. Lots of them. The question is, are you a professional or a user?

What’s the difference?

Who are you?

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

Identity is not a black and white thing. Sure, at one end of the spectrum anonymity reigns. This is the world of 4chan , the popular image-based bulletin board from which famous memes such as lolcats and Rickrolling emerged. At the other end of the spectrum we have passport border control.

And in between we have many shades of identity.

Nightclub handstamps for example are needed only to ascertain who has already paid. Many a website cookie serves just to determine if you’ve dropped by before. A supermarket loyalty card serves just to build up an understanding of your shopping habits, and may be associated with a bank card proffered for payment.

OK, so what has this got to do with marketing and public relations?

This decade's number one revolution

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Data is the new oil." So said Clive Humby back in 2006.

“Data is the new soil” said David McCandless in 2010.

In between, in 2009, Meglena Kuneva , European Consumer Commissioner, said: “Personal data is the new oil of the internet and the new currency of the digital world.”

I’ve long been excited about the advent of big data, and started posting about visualising the stuff back in 2008. If anything distinguishes the modern professional – in marketing, PR, HR, R&D, operations, etc. – from her predecessors, it’s the facility to work with data.

Social media are the eggs in the social business cake

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A thrill of working in a fast changing market is the opportunity to innovate. A burden of working in a fast changing market is the need to bend existing language to new concepts. And of course, evoking existing language evokes existing meaning … both an advantage and disadvantage.

So, we’ve been working with social media for the past decade; as if all preceding media was anti-social. And during the past couple of years, we’ve been tasking our tongue to the topic of social business; as if business previously attracted loners.

The Internet we know and love is at serious risk

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup .]

Public relations – the pursuit of mutual understanding and goodwill – has been transformed by the Internet. Of that, no regular reader of The Conversation and the Roundup can be in doubt. And yet it is all too easy to take the Internet for granted.

The way the Internet has evolved to date has been critical to the way social media has evolved and our corresponding facilities as citizens, employees and consumers to participate, to innovate, to produce, to mashup, to share and to converse.

The open, decentralized Internet, governed by many stakeholders, is under threat. Right now, several countries, including China and Russia, are proposing to expand the powers of a non-transparent global institution, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), allowing it to change the rules on how our internet is used and governed.

And what’s worse, the ITU won’t even release their negotiating documents to the public or give internet users a seat at the table. The ITU simply isn’t used to public accountability.

Trial rides on the new London Underground, 150 years ago

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday marked 150 years since the first ’trial ride’ on the London Underground, the first underground railway system in the world. I know this only because I visited the National Portrait Gallery in March and found this photograph (more precisely, this is my photograph of the photograph). The gallery’s accompanying text is as follows…

Future Vistas for SEO

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed _code/12522700

The Brighton SEO conference is, I believe, the largest of its kind in the UK. We’re expecting over 1,000 delegates today. I’m up immediately after the “Ask the engines” panel featuring representatives from both Google and Bing, and you can peruse my stack above on where I think the third decade of the web’s development might take today’s SEO practitioners.

The Business of Influence for REALLY BIG Digital Impact

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s my slidestack for PRSA Digital Impact Conference (#PRSADiConf) today.

I hope it goes without saying that I’m happy to answer any questions this stack or my presentation today may raise, or just have a chat in general. Always my pleasure. My contact details are always easy to find on philipsheldrake.com.

Thanks of course to the PRSA team for the opportunity.

PRSA Digital Impact Conference April 2012

The REALLY BIG Digital Impact, at #PRSADiConf

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in New York today at the PRSA’s Digital Impact Conference . In fact, I get the opportunity to present at 2.30pm this afternoon, and I’m really looking forward to it.

And the more I think about the conference title, Digital Impact, the more I’ve come to recognise that my presentation has two main thrusts…

First, most organisations don’t yet feel the digital impact of 2012 fully. They haven’t yet wholly adapted to today’s social media and digital technologies.

Social Media Week – something missing

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

This week has been Social Media Week with events taking place in over twenty cities around the world. No-one can hope to take it all in, but I’ve done my best to keep abreast of the themes, big and small.

But there was one thing I was keenly looking out for yet did not see. If you did, please let me know. Machined media – or at least that’s my term for it.

I define machined media as content that’s automatically discovered, presented and published by machines for humans, and I introduced it at last year’s CIPR Social Media conference.

Machined media has had a fairly ignominious start in life. Anyone online will have stumbled across it. You will have seen some weird looking text in spam emails, and spam websites just looking for any and all traffic they can entice a search engine to send their way. The text has been generated automatically to try to by-pass spam filters, and then to encourage you to click so the spammers make money. The content hasn’t had to aspire to Shakespearean fluency because one click in a million will do just fine thank you very much.

But semi-machined media has entered prime time, and pure machined media is on the cusp.

UK businesses will have to pay a UK media license – Copyright Tribunal implications

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, you read the title to this post right. Are you in business? In the UK? Online or use email? Then you apparently owe the Newspaper Licensing Agency some money.

I first expressed my interest in an increasingly aggressive Newspaper Licensing Agency in a 2007 blog post suggesting a more appropriate title for the body – Newspaper Licensing Anachronism. Please note that I have nothing against the monetization of copyright content (hey I’m an author!), I just think the way the NLA conducts its business is all rather 20th Century. And this week, we’ve had a Copyright Tribunal Interim Decision . [The square brackets below reference this decision.]

The NLA’s relevance in the 21st Century has been tested, as far as the law is open to interpretation, by the innovative media monitoring company, Meltwater . Actually, the description the Copyright Tribunal uses to describe Meltwater, or rather Meltwater’s witness, is “unnecessarily combative” [35]. Well, talking of combat, the latest battle in this war concluded yesterday.

The result is a mixed affair, with neither the NLA or Meltwater coming out on top. I’ve just recorded an interesting conversation with Meltwater’s JP Glittenberg about this week’s decision… do take a listen, particularly if you work in media, PR or copyright.

[audio:https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Meltwater-interview-15Feb2012.mp3|titles=Meltwater interview 15th Feb 2012]

Now the Tribunal is quite restricted: by law; by precedent; by previous adjudgements in this ongoing case; by its own terms of reference. Generally, on reading the entire 60-page decision, I find the Tribunal to be most diligent, but given my background, I get a bit uptight every time I read something that indicates a lack of technical understanding of the Internet and the World Wide Web (yes, they are different things!)

Despite some stumbles however, they get somewhere interesting in the end. In fact, they end up showing up UK copyright law for the shambles it is.

The Role of PR in a Digital Age

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

European PR Congress 2011 – The Role of PR in the Digital Age

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .

I’m in Kiev this evening preparing my presentation for tomorrow’s European PR Congress 2011. I’m the first session of the day so I have the challenge of exciting the delegates, with getting some energy in the room. I was fascinated by the enthusiasm from the audience when I presented last month in San Francisco, so it’ll be interesting to compare the two.

Now, I was briefed by event organiser Marina Starodubska (General Director, Partner, Mikhailov&Partners.Ukraine ) that social media in Ukraine has not yet gained the momentum it has in Europe and the USA for example. She estimates that household broadband Internet penetration is just 26% [updated following the first comment below]. Interestingly, however, according to Total Telecom in July last year : “Ukraine as a whole had 55.60 million mobile subscriptions… putting penetration at 121.2%.”

Whilst I haven’t been able to find a breakdown of feature phones and smart phones, the waiting staff in the restaurant this evening indicated that such devices are booming. In the car to the hotel I also noticed that Nokia is investing in quite a big outdoor advertising campaign here for its feature and smart phones.

My stack for tomorrow is included here. The majority of the slides are taken from the longer stack from last month’s Dreamforce , so if you took a look at that, you might not want to take the time here. But it’s more the narrative I intend to tailor for this event. The emphasis tomorrow is simple – Public Relations, as defined by the Excellence Study, has a very bright future.

Click and type or touch and swipe

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup:

Regular readers will know I’ve argued for some time that we’ve really past the point where we can talk about digital media as if it’s the exception. The majority media is now digital, or has a digital component via something like a QR code , image recognition and augmented reality. If anything, we should be calling out analogue media in its minority role by now.

And yet in 2011 it’s probably still pertinent to make the distinction between ‘being online’ versus ‘offline’. Sure, your smartphone is always on; and sure, it always knows where it is and reports that data back real-time to all those app vendors that demand this data (even if it’s just to allow you to chuck an angry bird around the screen). But you’ll find yourself hard pressed to find someone who considers themselves to be actively online 24/7.

However, this is changing. And fast. In just a few short years we’re well down the line in moving from so-called ‘click and type’ interfaces to ’touch and swipe’. Think about someone just like you living a century ago… the actions of clicking and typing would have been alien to them, yet touching and swiping are quite natural.

Socializing the enterprise. Are you?

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

[Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup]

I adopt the US spelling of socialize here because I’m doing the roundup this week from San Francisco where I’m attending the Dreamforce conference, a conference dedicated to this very theme.

Dreamforce is the annual Salesforce.com conference and with 45,000 registered delegates this year it is now, or so CEO Marc Benioff assures us, the largest corporate tech event of its kind. There is a palpable enthusiasm for the theme, regularly articulated as “awesome” by the American delegates.

[Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]

Salesforce.com advocates a three-step approach to socializing the enterprise, in no particular order:

Meanwhile in Mumbai

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The Meanwhile team decamped to Mombai (aka Bombay) this week to find out what’s happening in the ‘I’ in BRIC – one of the fastest growing markets in the world. With a population of 20 million in a country of 1.2 billion and 771 million mobile phone subscriptions , no visitor to Mumbai is left in doubt that there’s an energy and urgency about the place, even if the traffic ends up being very far from fast as a result. (Seriously, the 3km between hotel and airport mid-morning took 30 minutes.)

The Indian economy

The OECD’s June 2011 review of India identifies adult literacy of 74% and a GDP per head US$1068 (equivalent to US$3296 of purchasing power parity). The review starts with this assessment:

How data is transforming digital marketing

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Digital marketing has come a long way in the past decade, as we’ve moved beyond putting existing materials online and learned how to really harness the native advantages of digital technologies.

The pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data.

Every one of us is going to be producing more data describing our use of digital products and services. This is what I like to call digital detritus. Detritus – discarded organic matter which is decomposed by microorganisms and reappropriated by animal and plant life – is interestingly analogous to our regard for, and treatment of, the data that we’re all shedding.

Big data

When it comes to the increase in data, we’re working on a logarithmic scale: we’re talking about hundreds and thousands of times more. Data in such quantities may well prove to have important new mathematical properties that are attractive to marketers, customer service and product development teams. Moreover, we don’t actually do much with the digital detritus today – it mostly resides in inaccessible log files, although the technology for collating it is becoming increasingly achievable and affordable.

What does this mean in everyday terms?

Profiting from the New Web – the video

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I posted about the Profiting from the New Web conference last month, and now the video summary of the day has been published. It was a real pleasure to chair the event and have the opportunity to provide some commentary in the video too.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to get in touch after the conference. I’m sure, given the overwhelming positive sentiment, that we’ll be making this conference into a series. Watch this space.

The Web this decade and what it means for your organisation

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a fortunate geek. I got to chair the 6UK launch back in November, with keynote by Vint Cerf – fondly referred to as one of the fathers of the Internet. And on Monday this week, I chaired Profiting From The New Web at the Royal Society with keynote by Sir Tim Berners-Lee – inventor of the World Wide Web. How cool is that?!

[caption id=“attachment_28121” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Sir Tim Berners-Lee, New Web, London, 23rd May 2011 (courtesy Intellect)”] [/caption]

I worked with the Web Science Trust and Intellect to design this week’s conference, and we set ourselves this mission:

Discover new and better ways to do business, run our countries, and lead fulfilling and sustainable lives via the intelligent, innovative and diligent development of the New Web, and to make progress faster than otherwise.

Web Innovation

The term Web 1.0 is applied retrospectively to a Web of documents and ecommerce. The term Web 2.0 has come to describe social community and user-generated content. The New Web – the Web of Data or the Semantic Web, and sometimes Web 3.0 – entails the Web itself understanding the meaning of that participation and content.

A component of the Web of Data, known as Open Data , encompasses the idea of freeing data so that others may query it, check and challenge it, augment it, and mash it up with other sources. Sir Tim is particularly motivated by this vision given its potential to drive scientific breakthrough, enhance delivery of public services and open up new frontiers for competitive advantage.

My book, The Business of Influence, is out today

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s the day!

It’s ready for delivery in the UK today, and pre-order in other parts of the world. For those of you tweeting about availability in the US, currently listed as mid-June by some bookstores, Wiley tells me it should actually be with you mid-May. Thank you for your interest and patience.

What’s it about?

The Business of Influence is a rethink.

It’s about improving the capabilities of organisations to design and attend to the way in which all aspects of its operations influence stakeholders, about making sure stakeholders influence it, systematically, and about how well competitors are attempting the same. It focuses on influence as the common denominator of marketing and public relations and related activities such as customer service, sales, product development and HR, and therefore the basis for redesigning these and interconnecting them.

The book introduces the Influence Scorecard, named in homage to the dominant framework for business performance management, the Balanced Scorecard. The Influence Scorecard then is a subset or view of the Balanced Scorecard containing all the influence-related key performance indicators (KPIs) stripped of functional silo, and it may extend beyond the Balanced Scorecard should a greater operational granularity of metrics be demanded by the influence strategy.

The Influence Scorecard is a new framework for the 21st-century designed to help organisations focus on what matters rather than continue to carry the baggage and inefficiencies that come part and parcel of the typical 20th-century marketing and PR structure and approach. It’s a reframing in the context of 21st-century media and disintermediation, 21st-century technology, and 21st-century articulation of and appreciation for business strategy.

Taptu for iPad – with gorgeous illustration

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

With a spike in visitors to my blog exceeding 1000% of normal activity, the most popular post of all time on this blog is Content – an illustrated history . That obviously excludes the much greater exposure the illustration by Nic Hinton (@karoshikula ) and me will have garnered when Mashable and Wired ran with it, and I’ve since heard that the illustration is being used to teach university students and school kids, and for the purposes of social media training in organisations.

I mentioned in the updates to that post inserted during the ensuing days that Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar had become smitten with the illustration style and had expressed an interest in applying the style at Taptu in future. Well now they’ve done just that.

Today, the next generation of the popular and free social news reader comes out for iPhone and iPad (it’s already rocking and rolling on Android). Taptu calls it the social news DJ – allowing you to mix your favourite news streams. I’ve posted some of the illustrations used in the app here, but there’s nothing quite like checking the app out for yourself and seeing all of them in all their glory… particularly on the larger screen of the iPad. I’ve also posted a video of the new iPad version in action.

I consider an app like Taptu to be an indispensable tool in the PR professional’s armoury. Do you have a favourite social news reader?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkcMi3EuKew

Influence in the age of the social web – keynote to EUPRERA

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a beautiful sunny Spring day here at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium in Lisbon. It’s my first time at this gathering of the European Public Relations Education and Research Association – the forum for innovative PR research and education – and I’m delighted to have been invited to deliver the keynote.

Thanks to Philip Young and David Phillips for the invitation. Here’s the slidestack. I was a bit surprised to get a slide count of 77, but 16 of the slides present the infographic ‘Content – An illustrated history ’, which is easy to breeze through :-)

The Marketing Century – a compilation of expert insight

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

You can now get your hands on The Marketing Century – out this week – a compilation of expert insight across a wide gamut of marketing and PR related topics to celebrate the centenary of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM). The chapter outline here is based on the book’s introduction.

I’m delighted to have authored the chapter on digital marketing, and I’m more than happy to answer any questions you may have on reading it.

Buy at Amazon / CIM / The Book Depository / Blackwell’s / Waterstone’s . And more info at Google Books .

1. Strategic Marketing (Martha Rogers and Don Peppers , Peppers & Rogers Group)

The Marketing Century opens with a clear statement from Don Peppers and Martha Rogers: it is vital that organisations put customers at the heart of what they do, both in the long-term and the short-term. To create value, firms must lift their sights from the typical focus on current profits and instead start seeing customers as the company’s long-term resource – looking at each customer in terms of the long-term return they generate. A long-term strategy for marketing – one that focuses on customer equity and not solely on current profits – can provide marketing with the context and objectives needed to maximise the overall value created by each customer.

Content - an illustrated history

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE 1: Thank you to Wired , Mashable , @dmscott , @guykawaski and everyone else who has posted and shared our illustration :-)

UPDATE 2: Now available in Slideshare format .

UPDATE 3: Now available in for printing or anything else you fancy.

UPDATE 4: Now available in Spanish . Thanks to @FollowFlock & @rulsCC .

UPDATE 5: Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar loves our style (and the Taptu reference no doubt!) so we agreed earlier this week to apply our illustrative style to Taptu’s brand communications going forward. Cool.

UPDATE 6: The Slideshare format made the number 1 slot on Slideshare’s homepage for part of the day on the 27th Jan, and accrued over 4,000 views in 48 hours.

UPDATE 7: August 2011. Now available as a YouTube video. Don’t know why we didn’t think of it earlier! Embedded below.

No-one with a smattering of social Web literacy can fail to marvel at what’s taken place in recent history. The rate of change has been unprecedented.

Who would have thought thirty years ago that the Internet would go mainstream and the World Wide Web would transform content business models (and many other business models come to that) so radically?

Who would have thought twenty years ago that the average Joe would carry handheld devices as powerful as the Apple and Android devices?

Who would have thought ten years ago that consumers of media content could also, just as easily, be producers of media content?

Who would have thought five years ago that each and everyone of us could, with a stroke of a touch screen, design their own content channel and publish it.

A non-techie explanation of how web pages are secured

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I first published this overview back in 2004. I’m prompted to update and repost it here because the original website is no longer live (it was the website for Fuse PR back in the day), because I was talking about it with some Meanwhile colleagues this week, and because it’s interesting. No seriously, it is.

When is a web page secure?

Content on a web page is secured when the URL starts “https://” rather than “http://”. Saying that, this doesn’t mean that all content on a page marked as such is secured, but if you’re on a website of a trusted source, like Amazon, you may be happy to assume that the parts that need to be are, by design.

If you’d like to find out what other information your browser gives you about the level of security for a particular web page, check out the relevant link here:

Book reviews, or what to give a marketing and PR professional for Christmas

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In a fast changing marketplace with fast changing technologies and consumer behaviours we have no option but to work hard keeping ourselves up to speed, week in week out. Time and money constraints rule out keeping abreast simply via course and event attendance, and the only real option is books.

Reading. Lots. Lots of books. Here’s a couple to make the Christmas List of any marketing and PR professional.

Real-Time Marketing & PR, by David Meerman Scott

Subtitle: How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.

I got my copy of Real-Time Marketing & PR end-October and I just read it yesterday. Mmmm, not exactly a real-time book review then. My only excuse is that I’ve had to focus on completing my own book (the manuscript is now submitted and it’s due out in April with Wiley, the same publisher of David’s latest books).

Let’s cut to the chase. Should every marketing and PR professional read this book? Yes; even those who consider themselves or are considered to be at the leading edge of this sort of thing. And I make that assertion simply on the basis that David peppers the book with many case studies and examples that will prove useful when attempting to convince the less savvy amongst your colleagues and clients of your point of view.

It's all about curation

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If one word has dominated social media in the second half of 2010, for me it’s “curation”. We have reached a certain maturity in our interaction with media to question our traditional abdication of curation to others.

Until recently, people we don’t know decided what we might like to read, listen to and watch. Our only choice, should we disagree with theirs, was to switch channel; change newspaper; retune the radio. And employ technology like personal video recorders to collect what we might want to watch later.

Now a new breed of services is emerging, sometimes referred to as social news aggregators.

Marketing and Communications in the Internetome

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been out of circulation but had a crazy week before I left, including chairing the launch of 6UK for the promotion of the new Internet Protocol and running the UK’s first Internet of Things conference, Internetome . Thanks to the Intellect events team for super event management, and to the sponsors Intel, Qualcomm, Consumer Electronics Association, Meanwhile and 6UK.

Here’s my presentation “Marketing and Communications in the Internetome”:

Marketing and Communications in the Internetome

The next big big thing: it's happening now

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Marketing and PR as we know it today have been transformed by two massive technological revolutions. The first was the Web, when the Internet became user-friendly, and its subsequent social morphings. The second was the mobile phone and its current zenith, the smartphone. These are the two giants to which most everything else that’s changed relates.

The vast majority of marketing and PR strengths and weaknesses, and associated opportunities and threats, stem from the Web and from the smartphone. And yet another giant has emerged to which the vast majority of marketing and PR professionals are mostly blind in my experience: the Internet of Things.

Everything is being connected to the Internet. Cars, dishwashers, air conditioning, power supplies, clothes, animals, bottles of whisky, public transport, medicines, joint replacements, your front door, your training shoes and your bicycle. It is happening right now.

If you’re an innovator on the lifecycle / adoption curvy thing, then you were thinking about the Web in 1995, about mobile in 1998, and smartphones in 2005. You started scoping the Internet of Things in 2008.

Now it’s the end of 2010, it’s the time for the early majority to embrace the Internet of Things, and that’s you if you want more of that opportunity to come your way than the competition’s. Join me at Internetome, the Internet of Things Conference , in London, November 10th. Sponsors include Intel, Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association, and my own company.

And as the Internet of Things impacts all aspects of business not just marketing and PR, I’d urge you to get on the front foot and let the rest of your organisation / your clients know. Today.

Hope to see you on the 10th :-)

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things at the CIPR Social Summer session

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .

@dewilded summed up one of the key conclusions we reached at the CIPR this evening in his tweet:

Companies thought they were laid bare by Web 2.0, they’ll feel positively naked w/out reputation mgt set for RDF & the semantic web #CIPRSM [link ]

My role was to act as tour guide and polemicist; to introduce the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things in just 90 minutes; and to leave the session attendees with considerable food for thought.

Ethics in PR Measurement

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I took part in the #measurepr Twitter chat today on ethics in measurement. These chats are organised by Shonali Burke and her blog post “Influence: From BS to Best Practice ” set the scene nicely.

At the most fundamental level, we were asking whether some of the techniques being deployed for PR measurement are compatible with the aspiration of public relations professionals to be transparent and authentic, and, more precisely, whether they are compatible with codes of conduct as published by the likes of the CIPR , PRSA and CPRS .

In one of my tweets I suggested a more straight forward test, what one might describe as a layman’s test for those of us uneducated in the matters of ethics:

RT @kseniacoffman : Q2: Where do you go for best practices? <– Ask your mum, siblings, neighbours what’s acceptable to them!? #measurepr

At Shonali’s invitation, I contributed the three questions posed today…

Friday Roundup: Let's get emotional... a milestone for PR and marketing

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A very interesting thing happened at the end of July.

It affects every single practitioner in the public relations industry, indeed practitioners across all marketing disciplines.

And yet I haven’t found one reference to it amongst the PR digerati yet, so I’m going to put that right. Now.

The subtleties of digital

At its core, this digital world is just a set of 1s and 0s that have been applied with increasing sophistication and power. It revolutionised the more numerical professions first, such as accounting and engineering in the seventies, before moving through manufacturing in the eighties and retail in the nineties.

In the noughties, “digital” arrived big style in the lives of marketing and PR professionals simply because it arrived big style in the lives of the stakeholders we look to communicate with, learn from and influence.

My browser history is my own, so back off with your unethical social media metrics

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Privacy is a personal thing. Some people want to be as “off grid” as they can get. And then there are those who actually bolt a camcorder to their heads and stream their life 24/7. Irrespective, I believe there are some things that everyone expects to be private by default; even Marc Zuckerberg ! And one of these is your browser history… the log that lists every webpage you visit.

It’s this list that enables modern browsers to suggest auto-completions for URLs as you enter them in the address bar. It’s this list you might visit when you’re trying to find that something or other you stumbled across the other day. It’s this list that allows your browser to try to render unvisited links one way, underlined blue by default, and previously visited links another way, underlined purple by default (even though individual webpages and associated styling information may actually override these defaults).

My browser history is mine. My wife’s browser history is hers. Your browser history is yours.

But whilst the Internet turned 40 last year, the World Wide Web is still a teenager, and that relative immaturity places irresistible temptations in the path of the less ethical. And being able to read your browser history is just one of those.

Has your browser history been “sniffed” recently

You wouldn’t know.

The Web of data is a Web of influence

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a fan of Web 3.0. Perhaps obsessed is a more accurate description.

Web 1.0 is the Web of documents. Web 2.0 is the social and user content Web. Web 3.0 is the point at which the Web itself understands that content and social interaction. Some call it the semantic Web, and some call it the Web of data, but regardless of naming conventions, it’s going to mess up a hell of a lot of business models, and create some fascinating new business and public-benefit opportunities. And it’ll transform reputation management too.

If you think ‘atoms of influence’ trickle far and wide courtesy of human expressions and understanding with social media acting as loyal conduit, just wait until machines understand these contributions too.

Mobile World Congress - devices every marketer should know about

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the recent follies of the bankers, business remains business and technology marches onwards. And at this year’s Mobile World Congress the mobile industry is putting the user front and centre in every effort to differentiate one from another.

Smaller. Lighter. Brighter. Faster. Easier. And most of all, as user-friendly as can be.

This colourful image is a bank of Samsung Omnia ’s demonstrating their bright OLED screens. I’d like to show you one of their new devices but photography was not permitted. What a crazy decision. This is a SHOW. There are many journalists and bloggers here and Samsung tells us photography is not allowed… it can only make anyone think that the Samsung team has no idea about social media marketing!

I spotted a marketing innovation from Qualcomm Mediaflo … a technology to stream data to mobile devices predominantly for video applications such as real-time TV. Rather than interrupt viewing with the same adverts for all viewers, one of their latest innovations allows a different set of adverts to be delivered based on rudimentary user segmentation.

Where the social Web goes from here

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s good to talk. The more people can reach out and find the right people and organisations to relate to, to discuss the issues important to them, to learn, to hang out and have fun, to contribute content and opinion and ideas, then the more satisfying they will find being part of society. I’m no sociologist, but it sounds like a good heuristic to me.

I stand by the assertion in my ebook on Social Web Analytics : “Ultimately, the Social Web has revolutionised communications massively and irrevocably, to the benefit of the consumer, the adaptive and agile organisation, and those who cherish an open society.”

Organisations’ engagement with the Social Web is still sufficiently nascent that it offers earlier adopters competitive advantage. And in the longer term however, it will be a condition of staying in the race.

Three amazing things

I’m posting today because three pretty amazing things have happened recently to catalyse this future; to extend the highly networked and Twitter -fuelled connectivity enjoyed by the minority today to the general population. I discuss these below, but first let me put this into context for those of you who not only have a FriendFeed , you’ve already fed it your BackType profile.

You’re not normal.

When Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be the marketers best friend

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Let me show you an image and ask you some questions. Do complete the questionnaire and all will be revealed later at the end of this post!

________________________________

You might have established that I am not a qualified automotive designer, researcher or marketer. But what do you do when you do want to know answers to questions like these?

Enter Amazon ’s Mechanical Turk service.

Their FAQs describe the service as follows:

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it’s convenient.

The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Social Web Analytics (SWA) is the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence.

The advent of SWA is a pivotal moment in the development of the marketing communications industry.

It’s just over ten weeks since I posted about my intention to write an ebook on social Web analytics, and now it’s done. The ebook is hosted at www.socialwebanalytics.com , or you can simply click here to download it .

End-to-end marketing: the possibilities of a new Internet protocol

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’re just about to go through a complete renumbering of the Internet, and I think some marketing issues and opportunities will emerge along the way.

The way the Internet works today means that just less than 4.3 billion different Internet devices can be addressed uniquely… an address being just that, the unique identifier stating where packets of information are sent from and where they should go. So just as my work address is Building 5, 50 Brook Green, London, W6 7BJ, UK - a unique address at which I’m sure to receive anything you send me - my current IP address at this Boston hotel is 209.190.164.35.

I know that because I just visited www.whatismyip.com and they looked at the server I was connected to, grabbed the address and stuck it on their homepage for me. Try it.

A Rolling Stone gathers no location based information

Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

I met Ronnie Wood this week. He sat down next to me in a bar and bought me a drink. That ranks him in my book as a very nice chap. And I got a 90 minute window into living life as a globally famous rock star, an insight that confirmed my relief, as if the situation could be otherwise, that I’m not a ‘celebrity’…

“Is that Ronnie Wood? Ronnie Wood? Rolling Stones? Ronnie Wood?”
“I don’t believe it… is that really you? We’re big fans of……”
“I’ve got all your albums.”
“Could I have your autograph and a picture with you?”
“I don’t believe it, is it really you?”

Although Ronnie has had four decades to come up with witty ripostes, I particularly liked his response to the last one… “Actually, I only came fifth in a Ronnie Wood lookalike competition.” From what I saw, he has a lovely way in dealing with the countless people that approach him; what the rest of us would call invading our space.

We got talking about my line of work having danced through the ages of music technology, from the vinyl and 8-track of the mid-60s, through compact cassette and CD to mp3. Not unexpectedly, Ronnie mourns the passing of the physical format, but loves the idea that music has returned to the 60s notion that it’s all about the music, having been distracted in between times by the huge music marketing machine. The 80s and 90s were all about shifting massive volumes of records and CDs, and gigging was just a distraction.

Internet Best Practice Challenge - recognition for your Internet leadership

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Nominet is running their Best Practice Challenge for the second year. The awards recognise organisations, groups or individuals that have worked to deliver a safer, more accessible, diverse and open Internet experience.

The six award categories for 2008 are:

Best development project
Best security initiative
Raising industry standards
Personal safety online
Internet for all
Open Internet

If you think your organisation, or your client’s, should be recognised for leadership in any of these categories, you have until 25th April 2008 to get your entry in ! Winners and runners-up get some significant international exposure feeding in to the UN’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and the newly formed UKIGF.

Twingly in private beta - "a next-generation blog search engine"

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve signed up and will let you know what I find when I’m allowed in! From their press release today…

Today we launch a next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com. Participate in the invite-only beta by getting invited or signing up at beta.twingly.com. So what’s cool with the new Twingly.com?

Spam free, social search

Twingly takes a zero-spam approach to blog search using an algorithmically expanding white list instead of the traditional blacklist. Powerful moderation tools allows us to win the fight against spam by one-click removal of clusters of tens of thousands of spam blogs. Fat tail manual moderation yields quality input to long tail algorithmic filtering.

Social search features allows users to share quality content with each other and the community as a whole.

Powerful search language and tech plan Digg

Twingly provides the world’s most powerful search language for blogs, where search filters can be combined in new ways.

But we’re not done by far! Participate in voting on our tech plan by signing up for the beta. JSON api? OPML import or APML export? Help us decide what’s next!

UPDATE

Well I’ve got my invite and I’ve logged in to take a look.

UK Next Generation Access - what might we have to play with?

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve come a long way since 56k dial-up, and marketers have long taken advantage of the audio-visual capabilities of broadband for advertising (digital media marketing more generically) and not-paid-for influence (digital media relations). You only have to witness the furore created by the online videos seeking to influence the US primaries .

But what is broadband, and where are we going from here?

To quote Connect’s excellent report “Connecting Britain’s Future - the slow arrival of fast broadband ”:

So what do we mean then by fast broadband? There is no standard set of definitions, but commonly:

narrowband would mean up to 512kbit/s
broadband would mean up to 25mbit/s
fast broadband would mean anything over 25mbit/s

The common industry term for such fast broadband is NGA - Next Generation Access.

Over sixty people from the communications industry (the other communications industry… the one with the switches, wires and fibres) came together yesterday evening at the Convergence Conversation event I chair, and invested a couple of hours teasing out the complexities of delivering NGA in the UK.

Write-off reading and writing. The three R's are dead; long live the three M's

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the hammerings of educationalists, the so-called three R’s are far from sacrosanct: reading, writing and arithmetic. I’m talking specifically about the first two of these.

(OK, I’m not talking about them, I am actually writing and that irony isn’t lost on me. But then I am future gazing, and I could after all have podcast this post.)

Reading and writing have been bedrocks of civilisation, some would say the foundation, and it is only relatively recently that they have had competition as a media for non-synchronous communication. The 20th Century triumphs of broadcast radio, broadcast TV and semiotics compensated slightly for an individual’s illiteracy, but they were far from a perfect substitute and entirely useless when that individual wished to communicate back.

The 21st Century hasn’t taken long however to present a cornucopia of communication possibilities. Whilst applications of the Internet were dominated just a few years ago by text, and lots and lots of it, new applications pivot massively around the audio-visual. “Radio” and “TV” over IP / Narrowcasting / Podcasting / Moblogging / Vlogging / On Demand / Voice over IP / Video conferencing…

Morph

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m obsessed with device usability, and high on that list is the graphical user interface. Marketers focused on phones and mobile Internet devices emphasise their understanding of the impacts of the user interface and everything stacked up behind it, but what about the possibilities of mobile sensory marketing?

Future mobile devices will be able to sense their surroundings: sight, sound and smell. We already have forward thinking companies like Mobile Acuity interpretting still images taken by mobile phones for consumer engagement objectives, but what would you do with smell!?

Convergence Conversation: The 21st century classroom - opportunities for digital education

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The second convergence conversation of 2008 will be on the potential impact of converging technologies on education.

What’s being talked about?

Jim Knight, the schools’ minister, recently announced that he wanted to allow parents to access ‘frequently-updated information on children’s achievement, progress, attendance, behaviour and special needs wherever, whenever parents want, using password-protected, secure, online systems’.

Here then is the potential impact of convergence on the delivery of education.

Readius at Mobile World Congress

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Following my earlier post from the Mobile World Congress , another gadget update…

Philips spun off Polymer Vision in 2006, and February last year the company announced that their first product would be the Readius. At this year’s show, the company demonstrated the final commercial product for the first time. Slated for a “mid-08” launch, it will be very interesting to observe how retail categorises the device, and its rate of uptake.

Is it a phone? No. Is it an eBook; well yes I guess, but not in the same vein as Amazon’s Kindle or the Reader Digital Book from Sony .

The Readius measures just 75mm x 21mm x 15mm closed, sufficiently compact to slip in a breast pocket or a handbag’s phone pocket with ease. Well, unless you store your phone there of course. But the screen (aka epaper) has to be seen to be believed. It is so un-screen like that I assumed at first I was looking at a mock-up! It’s pretty damn fascinating, and considerably more akin to the pleasure and ease of reading paper than looking at a LCD.

Mobile World Congress: Tech news and the implications for marketers

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There were no female passengers on the plane. I kid you not. It could only mean I was headed for a gadget fest.

The 2008 Mobile World Congress is buzzing. No signs of a recession here. It’s particularly buzzing about, yet without mentioning, a company that’s not even here. Apple.

Whilst official company statements make no comparison between Sony Ericsson’s 10 new phones and the iPhone, Samsung’s 8 new phones and the iPhone, or Nokia’s 4 new phones and the iPhone, the overarching message is clear. The market will not coalesce on one style of phone. Variety is the spice of life. So up yours Apple.

The mobile phone, or “device” more generically, ranks amongst people’s most personal possessions. It’s up there with your wallet and keys on leaving your front door, and the variations of mobile device will continue to be as diverse as the variations in everything else we consider personal. Clothes. Cars. Furniture.

Mobile devices will never share the same hardware platform, or the same software platform, but they do universally represent the greatest and most enticing conduit to the end-customer the marketer has ever known. For both B2B and B2C, for advertising, interactive dialogue and customer engagement.

BBC hi-def: common sense prevails

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

So Ofcom has given the BBC the go ahead to start a high definition channel later this year. Whilst I recognise that anything the BBC does these days has to be scrutinised for “public value” by the BBC trust, but this decision also had to be reviewed by Ofcom with the purpose of assessing the marketing impact.

Ofcom has concluded that the launch of the free-to-air channel is “unlikely to have significant negative market impacts”.

2007: The Info Tech Year Ahead

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Niels Bohr said “It is very difficult to make an accurate prediction, especially about the future.”

As we ruminate on our 2007 predictions we also consider another of his insights… “Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.” Only time will tell!

Every year we take stock of the trends of the past twelve months, and take time out to map ahead.

We’ve distilled some of our favourites here for your consideration today and possible derision twelve months from now…