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Miliband goes mad for Web 2.0

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David Miliband, the environment minister tipped to be the next Labour Party leader by a friendly Westminster press, says “a new spirit” is afoot in the UK, brought about by Web 2.0.

Miliband said the web had polarised debate into competing extremities, where the truth was decided by whoever shouted the loudest. Traditional engineering values, where things work, had been replaced by a “Permanent Beta” mentality where the vendor tries to escape its responsibilities by selling the company before it has to fix its own bugs.

He also lamented the devaluation of expertise in favour of what he called “a permanent idiocracy”. He painted a picture of high streets decimated by home shopping, and an atomised and fragmented society that could only express itself by blogging into the digital ether. The political class, Miliband concluded, had a duty to temper this dark side of technology.

Impressive stuff, or what?

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Miliband goes mad for Web 2.0

by

David Miliband, the environment minister tipped to be the next Labour Party leader by a friendly Westminster press, says “a new spirit” is afoot in the UK, brought about by Web 2.0.

Miliband said the web had polarised debate into competing extremities, where the truth was decided by whoever shouted the loudest. Traditional engineering values, where things work, had been replaced by a “Permanent Beta” mentality where the vendor tries to escape its responsibilities by selling the company before it has to fix its own bugs.

He also lamented the devaluation of expertise in favour of what he called “a permanent idiocracy”. He painted a picture of high streets decimated by home shopping, and an atomised and fragmented society that could only express itself by blogging into the digital ether. The political class, Miliband concluded, had a duty to temper this dark side of technology.

Impressive stuff, or what?

Of course he could have said all that – but unfortunately, he didn’t.

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Paid video has look and feel of dead duck

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Forrester Research has predicted that video download services such as iTunes will peak this year, unless consumers change their habits. Forrester analyst James McQuivey calls them a “temporary flash” but a “dead end”. He forecasts a sharp ramp in revenue this year, from $98m to $279m, powered by what he calls “media addicts”. But these … Read more

Govt IT 2.0: self-nominated for glory

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Although the New Statesman magazine’s annual New Media Awards (NMA) don’t quite match up to the EFF’s annual Nepotism Award – nothing quite does – they’re still a rich source of humour and embarrassment. Getting an NMA is the equivalent of getting an orange at half time from the coach of your village football team, … Read more

Free music has never looked so cheap

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For the major record labels, yesterday’s deal between EMI and Apple doesn’t herald a new beginning, but the beginning of the end.

From next month, EMI will distribute much of its repertoire without DRM through Apple’s iTunes store. Independent labels have been distributing DRM-free songs for three years, avoiding the lock-ins created by competing hardware manufacturers. But EMI is the first of the “Big Four” majors to recognise that artificially recreating the inconveniences of physical product in a digital form isn’t good business.

Let’s leave aside the many gotchas in the announcement, such as the price increase which takes the cost of an unencumbered song to almost $2 (that’s the UK price converted to US dollars, folks), the absence of the Beatles’ catalogue, and the continuation of DRM as “on by default”.

Let’s also leave aside the mutual panic which brought Apple and EMI together yesterday. EMI is in financial free-fall, it’s unsuccessfully tried to find a buyer for several years, and it’s now so desperate it will try anything. Apple is under regulatory pressure not only to modify its DRM consumer lock-in but, along with EMI and the labels, faces an EU anti-trust probe into its pricing. Both companies jumped before they were pushed.

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‘Please read this important email: you are being shot’

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These days, no major tragedy is complete without ambulance-chasing technology boosters muscling in on the aftermath. The Asian tsunami and the London 7/7 attacks both provided a tasteless excuse for evangelists to hype their favourite cause: instant real-time communications in general, and blogging in particular.

But with the Virginia Tech massacre, the reliance on technology itself is in the spotlight. Campus administrators took two hours to warn students there was a threat to their lives. Police were alerted that a gunman was on the loose at 7:15am. The second shooting spree began at 9:45am.

All students and staff received this warning by email (yes, email): “A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows.”

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Widget-fiddling at Nokia

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When one looks at the prime assets of the Nokia of five years ago, it’s alarming to see how many have been discarded. At the turn of the decade, the Finnish giant boasted a formidable reputation for reliability, security and ease of use. Now it’s thrown all three out of the window, with security being the last to go.

The diminishing reliability of these devices isn’t unique to Nokia, and it may be a consequence of having so many products, in so many markets, all at once. But engineers deep in Nokia we’ve spoken with describe how they grew weary at being conditioned only to fix a proportion of bugs. It offends an engineer’s pride to release a flawed product, but this became a way of life. There was simply too much to do.

As for usability, the company which pioneered an interface that helped popularize the digital mobile phone – NaviKey™ – now falls far behind much of the competition. With feature phones, Nokia’s interface has failed to evolve with the tactile and graceful interface of Sony Ericsson, for example.

At the high end, the story is far worse. The S60 UI initially provided Nokia with a clever bridge to the future, but it looks pedantic and cumbersome besides Motorola’s MotoRizr 8, let alone Apple’s iPhone. Nokia answers the perennial S60 user’s question, “Why so many clicks?” by adding extra hardware buttons, such as the slow and inflexible “Multimedia” key. S60 is incredibly poorly written in parts, but Samsung has demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be sluggish, by using its own chip to speed up its first European S60 phone. Yet Nokia has ensured most of its smartphone users have a substandard experience, by starving the devices of sufficient memory or fast enough processors.

It doesn’t augur well that the company’s skill at exploiting the emerging markets owes little to its recent R&D work: it’s succeeded with low cost models in China by dusting off older, more reliable, and easier-to-use technologies. In other words, it’s living off past glories, rather than looking to the future.

In fact, Nokia now appears to quite relish the complexity of its devices. Quite bizarrely, a company which had no need for an inferiority complex appears to have acquired one.

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Are you a Top Gear Tiger or an iPod Babe?

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You’ve heard of Soccer Mom and Mondeo Man. Millions are spent each year on research that segments us to into such convenient categories. But have you ever felt these vague and unimaginative descriptions leave you wanting more? If the marketeers are going to be so reductive, why not get creative and give us a ‘Wolverhampton Tightwad’, or a ‘Carling Depressive’?
Top Gun Tiger
Help is at hand, courtesy of this top secret market segmentation guide. It’s designed for sales teams at a leading UK mobile phone retailer. We won’t say which one, but Phones4U staff should be able to recognise it instantly.

This divides potential punters into 12 categories, and what phones they want. An Insight section takes us into the mind of each segment.

Top Gear Tigers, for example are men between 25 and 44, who “work hard – for the cash”, the briefing tell us. The Top Gun Tiger cluster size is 1.16 million.

Favoured brands are Auto Trader, Sky Sports, Subaru, Ray-Ban and (no surprise) Top Gear.

“I do well for myself and don’t mind telling you,” is the main insight from a Top Gear Tiger. “The ‘i’ on the back of my car is crucial to me!”

But Top Gun Tiger is outdone in the bling stakes by Flashing Blade. (Cluster size: 1.68 million)

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Blog refuseniks facing the sack?

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We’ve all heard about employees being sacked for blogging. But as the fad begins to wane, will staff soon be sacked for failing to blog?

Last week, Sony BMG UK issued a new corporate marketing strategy.

According to an official release from the group, Ged Doherty, chairman and chief executive of SonyBMG in UK and Ireland, said the company “has made it obligatory for all senior staff at both Columbia Records and RCA Records to start blogging actively”.

So what happens to staff who refuse to toe the corporate line, or perhaps fail to produce the required quantity of blog blather?

We had to find out.

A spokesperson for SonyBMG told us “you won’t be sacked for failing to blog”, but added, rather ominously: “If you don’t blog, it’s going to be frowned upon. Ged has made it clear that staff are expected to blog and participate in the community. He sees it as part of people’s jobs.”

But what if you’re in, say, accounts?

“It’s more for staff in the creative areas of the company. It’s unfair to insist someone in the royalty department dealing with the backend engage in this, but if you’re a marketing peerson then you should.”

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