The killer new feature of Apple’s MobileMe is the “Find my iPhone” where you can see in seconds exactly where your phone is. While I don’t believe all the stories of the baddies being nicked after mugging some poor victim, it does have a certain reassurance.
The most important thing is that it points to a future where crime – or at least petty theft – will become a memory. When you can track your possessions in the event that they are stolen – then thieving is going to become very difficult to do.
The combination of GPS and cellular radio will very soon be as embeddable as RFID and as cheap as a sheet of paper. Our gadgets, bikes, even clothes, will have hidden away in them a tiny tracking device that should a tea leaf try to half inch them will call home like ET to say exactly where they are.
At first I thought it was a spoof, an early April Fools joke, a little PR ribaldry. But no, it is real and they mean it. Some outfit called Quadriga University of Applied Sciences has come up with a conference in Berlin entitled: “Steering Dialogue through Change, Crisis and the everyday Workflow” that apparently is something to do with internal communications.
Now read that title again: “Steering Dialogue through Change, Crisis and the everyday Workflow” and ponder at its unfathomable meaninglessness, its total vapidity, its crushing obfuscatarity. What in the name of the saints are they on about? Even the raNdom usE of caPital leTters points to the utter irrationality of the organisers. And they propose to charge a staggering €1160 to attend this junket for internal PROs. They really should have called it “Steering Dialogue through an excess of beer, wine, pork schnitzel and schnapps” – more accurate and infinitely more inviting.
AxiCom is expanding and looking for new staff in our London office. We are recruiting at a number of levels and in all cases are looking for intelligent people who work well in a team and have plenty of initiative.
Trainee Account executives
We need junior account executives across our practice areas including consumer technology, public sector and enterprise computing. No experience is necessary but you should be organised, have a passion for technology, excellent writing skills and plenty of energy.
Experienced Account Manager
We are also looking for an experienced account manager to work in our business to business enterprise computing team. You will have worked with a variety of technology clients, have excellent media contacts and experience of managing pan-European campaigns.
What can we offer? A busy, challenging and rewarding career, and of course a fun and friendly place to work.
If you’re interested contact info@axicom.com with a CV and covering letter.
While we all like to push the fact that we have lots of offices that can service clients in multiple countries, the claim by one tech agency that they have an office in Second Life is just a tad sad. What clients are they representing there? Mucky web sites and nasty personal services I guess given the reputation of Second Life as a home for life’s weirdos and deviants.
Given how far and how quickly Second Life has fallen into disrepute makes you wonder if the agency has suffered the same fate.
Mind you, opening a PR agency in Second Life is still one up on the sheer embarrassment of being the agency that was appointed to run Second Life’s PR in 2006 when the craze was at its peak. Terrible thing the web as it does mean that the things that senior agency people said at the time will live on forever. Somehow the promise that Second Life would be “thriving in the world’s media” did not quite come true…..
Here at AxiCom we always regarded Second Life as something of a non-entity that would ultimately appeal to time-wasters. In fact, one of our recruitment questions was “do you do Second Life” – if the answer was yes, then the interview was terminated.
The burning of books becomes became quite a cause in the middle ages as governments decide that suppression of knowledge was a darned good thing. The Nazis had similar ideas about the burning of books and it seems that the Romans may have started it all.
Today’s equivalent seems to be the suppression of Internet application. While the news of Google’s issues in China are clear for all to see, the banning of applications has become a far wider issue as governments exert control. Last summer’s banning of Facebook and Twitter by the US military, has been followed by last week’s news that France and Germany have warned users against IE6, and Oxford University has banned Spotify.
Admittedly, France and Germany’s actions were based on security flaws in IE6 while Oxford’s actions were ostensibly to protect network bandwidth. But the very involvement of governments and their organisations in proscribing applications is in itself a new departure that requires close scrutiny.
The superb What the F**K is Social Media – One Year Later that is doing the rounds and being religiously plagiarised has a one tiny, teensy, little problem. It seems to answer all the big questions about social media – the what, why, when and who – but somehow overlooks the really big one; the HOW.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love this presentation and will doubtlessly pass it off as my own work in some future client meeting, but it does miss the elephant in the room. While lambasting companies for having campaigns and not conversations, and then inviting marketing departments to start listening in the hope that they will end up talking, nowhere does it address the issue of just who is supposed to do all the talking and who is supposed to manage all the conversations.
What social media gurus seem to overlook is that companies are not crammed to the rafters with brilliant communicators who have dedicated their lives to answering every tweet, post and blog of any customer who once spent £50 on a hard disk drive. The very reverse is true and every company that does have a large number of call-centre staff is desperately trying to shed them and replace them with a discombobulated machine.
And that is before you bring to mind the vignette of a call centre operative engaging in social media response: young Kevin from Norwich, all of 22 years of age, posts a comment to the blog entry from a customer whose hard disk has crashed to explain that the failure is in no way the fault of the company and the customer is entirely to blame…..a sure-footed and faultless road to corporate ruin. Companies are rightly paranoid about having staff posting comments with no vetting of the content and its message. The power of one employee to destroy a company’s reputation with a single Tweet is very real – and that’s before you get into the legal risks of libel and defamation. If anything, companies are deliberately trying to stop employees from joining the great Social Media conversation – unless you envisage that the VP of marketing is going to be working 24/7 to respond to every banal online comment.
So right now there is no “how” solution to the problem of Social Media conversation. But I fear is that there will be soon. My fear is that companies will become very skilled at automating the response and when a Tweet states “My damned qPhone just crashed again” back will come the automated response from the discombobulated machine: “We are sorry your qPhone has crashed but we maintain the highest quality standards, etc, etc” or more cynically “We would like to offer you a 5% discount on the purchase of a new qPhone”.
So the conversation will go on with little joy for the customer but little expense for the company. As Simon and Garfunkel once sang so eloquently: “After changes upon changes we are more or less the same. After changes we are more or less the same.”
Not that we would ever wish to hear less from our venerable clients, but the calm that has descended on our European offices these past few days as the US disappeared into its Thanksgiving reveries has been notable.
So too has the fact that spammers also seem to have taken the holiday off. Which led me to pondering whether spammers were actually human and actually take holidays (I’d always envisaged them as drooling trolls with gnarled teeth and blood oozing from their eyes) or if this is a case of clever spammers aligning their dreaded mail drops to avoid holidays – but that would require a degree of intelligence that those people who mail me with items of absolute irrelevance cannot possible possess.
The final possibility is too dreadful to even ponder; that it is in fact one or more of our clients behind the spam machines…
All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as self-evident. These words of wisdom were penned long ago by nineteenth century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, but could equally be applied to the innovations of the IT industry today and specifically to open source software (OSS).
Just fifteen years ago we saw the dawn of open source as a radical approach to software licensing. Rapacious proprietary licensing had left companies reeling as maintenance contracts were cranked up and CIOs were put to the rack by vendors with no feasible means of escape. But still, the industry ridiculed and misunderstood the power and potential of the open source concept. I recall clearly the cartoon that positioned open source as the free toy in the box of software breakfast cereal.
As adoption grew, so we saw the era of opposition. I would never say that it was violent – the likes of Microsoft and Oracle are gentle men and women after all – but it was tough, sustained and determined opposition to undermine the applicability of open source to all but the most fringe environments.
Today, we have seen in the past few months a major change in Governmental attitude both in Europe and the US. The UK Government’s IT procurement policy, announced in February, mandated that when there were no significant cost differences then “open source will be selected on the basis of its additional inherent flexibility”.
At a European level there has long been strong support for open source through the Enterprise Interoperability Forum, but in 2008 European anti-trust commissioner Neelie Kroes went further and stated “I know a smart business decision when I see one – choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed. No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.”
Finally, the US has made its colours clear. In a policy statement on the use of open source software by the Department of Defence, the acting CIO stated his belief in the advantages of OSS, while also acknowledging the past problems where adoption has been “hampered by misconceptions and misunderstandings of laws, policies and regulations”. Most important was his statement of intent to “increase the benefits of OSS to the DoD”.
My belief is that in Open Source we have now reached Schopenhauer’s third stage; where the benefits of the adoption of open source are now accepted as self-evident. It’s taken us a while to get here, but it’s good to arrive.
China continues to engender fascination and anxiety for the business world in equal proportions. One of the most extraordinary aspects of China is of course its scale.
On a visit to Shenzhen, Shanghai and Hong Kong this week with European journalists for client ZTE, I came across another extraordinary statistic.
China produces approximately five million university graduates every year, with about 60 percent of those being science graduates and 40 percent arts graduates. Of those three million science graduates about 20 percent are engineers. This means that about 600,000 engineers come out of Chinese universities every year. Of course not all of those will be world class, but…
ZTE, a major global player in telecoms equipment and handsets, employs around 2000 graduate engineers every year into its rapidly expanding R&D institutes.
Those 2000 new engineers thus represent just 0.3% of Chinese engineering graduates in any one year. As a major Chinese technology brand though, ZTE it is a very attractive employment destination. They can pick and choose from the best graduates from the best universities. That 0.3% most probably comes from the top one percent.
So ZTE – just one company – is employing the Chinese equivalent of the smartest electronics and telecoms engineering graduates from the best universities in all of Europe, Japan and the USA*. No wonder they are now bringing to market – more quickly that their European and US competitors – telecoms equipment that is as good, if not better than the West can produce.
Time to start learning Mandarin?
* Populations – Combined Europe, Russia, Japan, USA – 1,302 million. China – 1,330 million.
I don’t know what a petard is, but I do know that it is possible to be hoisted by one. And that I suspect will be the fate of News International.
An organisation that defined its success through the disruptive technology it employed is facing the mortal threat from a new generation of technology disruption as content moves into an entropic phase.
As Rupert Murdoch built his global empire it was his eye for a disruptive technology that really defined his success. First through digital printing systems he was able to redefine the economics of the newspaper industry and then through satellite broadcasting he rewrote the rules of TV. OK, he also did some truly inspired deals along the way – but they were all within the context of how to maximise the opportunities created by disruptive technology forces.
The irony today is that the entirety of Murdoch’s empire finds itself under siege from almost identical technology disruptions that led to his success through the inexorable rise of Internet content in both print and video. His response to the crisis has been fascinating; first to ignore and even deny the potential of the Intenet (admitted in his own words back in 2005), then to aggressively pursue it through huge investments including the rapidly failing ill-fated MySpace acquisition, and finally to shut the borders of his empire to the free Internet and to pursue a walled garden approach where access to content would be paid for.
While the first two approaches have been documented failures, the third is still I suppose open to debate – although given the total failure of any of the large media organisations to make walled gardens a success, I cannot quite fathom how News International can see profits from this path. Unless the content is so utterly esoteric that it is reproduced nowhere else on the net, then the walled garden will be instantly breached – and while Murdoch may send his copyright lawyers after every transgressor it has little more chance of stopping the inevitable reproduction of video and news content than the music industry had of countering music piracy.
Unfortunately for Mr Murdoch, the clock of time is ticking down on his era as new disruptive technologies replace the ones that once defined him.
