Stories

‘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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Can Big Telco do Perestroika?

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While the CTIA Wireless jamboree took place in Florida this week, European telcos were drawn in a huddle in London at one of the most intriguing events of the telecoms calendar.

The theme at STL’s twice-yearly Telco 2.0 Brainstorm is familiar: “How to making money in an IP-based world”. But it has an added piquancy now.

And there’s plenty at stake. The part of AT&T formerly known as Cingular, the cellular division, makes more revenue than Google and Intel combined each quarter. But as with all mobile network operators, it’s been made from a large, vertically integrated operation, and a fiercely-protected, closed network. The rise of the Internet Protocol stack (IP) changes all that.

IP evangelists can be pretty scathing: IP will destroy the Soviet model; their “Net heads” will triumph over “Bell heads”. At stake, they say, is a battle which pits innovation versus atrophy. Unlike the open internet, telecomms provide a barrier to fledgling service providers or application developers. There’s no common API, and the service companies need to beg permission.

But there are other ways of looking at it.

Mobile telephony – at least in Europe and Asia – is the most successful application of technology since the combustion engine. It’s affordable to the poorest, but it feeds the id of the wealthiest fashion victims. Take up is almost 100 per cent – while internet adoption is stubbornly stalled at around 60 to 70 per cent of the Western population, and is seen as little more than a platform for games in much of the world. While mobile operators take a tax from almost all of us, very few of us (outside the US, at least) seem to resent this. And it’s perceived as reliable. Rich or poor, drunk or sober – when you push a button, the call gets through. When you send a message, you know it gets delivered. Imagine if that simplicity and efficiency was applied to your local tax rebate bureaucracy – or the financial services industry. And mobile telephony gets cheaper and better every year.

Yet this success story is under direct attack from a very American model of how business should work. This is a model which values abstractions over outcome.

To give you an example of what I mean, this week, I heard more than one person seriously endorse the idea that mobile phones should have two ‘send buttons’ (that’s the green button ‘call’ on every handset) so we could engage in “dynamic differential pricing”. This would delight American economists, but I found myself thinking how I could explain this innovation to a new user down the pub.

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Tim Berners-Lee says some really stupid things, then goes mad

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In which the Greatest Living Briton says some very silly things, and then loses his temper

So there we were. In a room devoted to Engineering, the man voted the Greatest Living Briton had exploded in front of me.

Sir Tim Berners Lee, co-inventor of the World Wide Web, was at Southampton University to deliver an inaugural lecture for School of Electronics and Computer Science, and promote his latest initiative.

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Web 2.0 firms lobby for £100m gravy train

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If the Web 2.0 hype is running out of steam, a healthy injection of public funds should kick it back into life. New media companies in the UK are lobbying for the establishment of an institution which could spend what critics call a £100m “jackpot” of public money each year.

The new agency, which Ofcom calls a “Public Service Publisher” or PSP, would play a “gatekeeper” role in commissioning new media concepts. These range from interactive websites to participatory games involving different kinds of digital media, such as text messaging.

And without Parliament so much as examining the idea, it already looks like a shoo-in.

The idea has the powerful backing of UK Telecoms regulator Ofcom, and the personal imprimatur of its CEO Ed Richards, who describes it as the centerpiece of his “personal crusade”.

“It’s a new media answer to a new media question”, Ofcom spokesman Simon Bates told us.

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Google snubs UK’s first Net Neutrality debate

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The first significant Net Neutrality debate to take place in the UK was held today at Westminster. Chaired by former trade minister Alun Michael and the Conservative shadow trade minister Charles Hendry, the event attracted the chief Telecoms regulator and ministry policy chief, a clutch of industry representatives, and a sprinkling of members of both … Read more

PacketExchange’s counterpoint to Neutrality hysteria

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Networks need to get smarter, says PacketExchange’s Kieron O’Brien, in a sharp counterpoint to the “Net Neutrality” hysteria.

PacketExchange bypasses the congestion of the internet by offering its customers a private end-to-end network. Some of its customers, such as Nokia, Microsoft, and cable ISP Telewest (now owned by Virgin) aren’t so surprising. But last week it added social networking site Bebo to its client list.

But look at what Bebo does, O’Brien told us. You’ll see why it wanted to bypass the net too.

For most internet users at home uploads are far from optimal – and Bebo users like to upload stuff, like photos and clips. They’re very model “Web 2.0 citizens”, if you like.

Which is where it runs into today’s network – and trouble.

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Babelgum: another new, new TV thing

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“Frankly the business plan is subjective”- Babelgum chairman Silvio Scaglia

So P2P TV services really do conform to the proverbial bus cliche: you wait ages for one, then loads of cliches come along at once.

If you know Joost, then you’ll know Babelgum, which unveiled its service in London today. Both are PC-based upstarts to the industry’s own IPTV standard. Both are in closed beta, both offer TV over broadband, both RE free to end-users, as they’re both ad-supported propositions, and both have an element of P2P.

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