Vodafone. The evolution of mobile

From ringtones to snakes to maps. 

Smartphones now make up 20% of 3 billion devices worldwide, with market share blazing towards 50% over next 2 years (Ofcom).

“It’s an always on medium. People love their mobile phones so much  researchers found people often feel a phantom ‘tingle’ in their pocket that normally proceeds the excitement of a text/call.” 

5 advertising blogs I read

Sell! Sell! Interesting stuff from this uber smart creative agency.  

CopyRanter New creative hyped and hated. 

Copy©unts No holds barred exposing advertising's most blatant rip-offs.  

AdsoftheWorld The most popular ads from around the globe. 

AdRants Smart ad news from the US.

 

Is the Internet doomed?

Great talk by Timothy Wu at the RSA yesterday. A talk about his book, Master Switch and a timely reminder of how history has a tendency to repeat itself. When new information industries appear (telephone, radio, film, tv), a pattern often emerges… 

1. We get over-excited about the potential benefits (we think most technologies will solve the worlds problems). 

2. There's a period of openness and experimentation by hobbyists (in the early days of telephone farmers would use barbed wire fences as telephone lines in an effort to be alerted when prairie fires started). 

3. A corporate power intervenes and centralises control of the new medium. We accept this because once the novelty's worn off we want order, reliability and less spam. We're also overwhelmed by the openness and overwhelming choice/confusion. 

4. The new power monopoly helps for the first 5 years or so, creating order out of chaos but after than innovation flounders and their key motivation becomes protectionism. 

He drew an interesting analogy of monopolies with dictatorships. They often begin with a wave of populist support (Mubarak, Mugabe, Hitler & Mao) but become corrupted through absolute power.   

So will the internet follow suit? Will Apple, Facebook & Google create closed, safe environments for us to sleepwalk our digital lives in? 

I think not. It's always hard seeing beyond monopolies (Microsoft, MySpace) but the reality is, empires crumble. There's too much competition. Too much potential for upstarts to challenge the dominant. 

I think we're ok for now…  

All In

Hot or Not. The Disruptive Tech Outlook for 2011

Great overview of new technologies and how they're confusing business today. Common themes are location location location, mobile, data and social. I can't think of one smart company that isn't experimenting in these areas (can you?). In a blog post Charlene also breaks down how you should prioritise where your focus lies: 

• User Experience. Does this technology pass the “no manual needed” test? Does it allow people to connect in new ways? Twitter is powerful as a platform, but inscrutable if you’re not familiar or comfortable with @ and DMs — which thereby limits its disruptive power. In comparison, social networks like Facebook are intuitive and provide tremendous value with the new experiences they enable.

• Business model. Simply put, can you make more money, or save costs because of these new technologies? And by using the technologies better and faster than your competitor, can you gain an advantage? An example of this is YouTube, which when deployed in a strategic way can lower acquisition and support costs for companies.

• Ecosystem value. The most disruptive technologies are when ecosystems get impacted. Streaming, on-demand video seemed to be the dominion of cable companies but then along comes Netflix who wasn’t even in the streaming business at all — but has the relationship with movie viewers who were sick of keeping track of red envelopes. Value shifts with the entrant of a new player who is able to tap into this new technology.

Here's the full deck. You can download the ppt and share. 

Simple Media Planning

Nice graphic describing the oft over-used but sometimes useful idea of Bought, Owned and Earned media.

Present Tense, Future Perfect?

A talk I gave recently on some issues facing advertising and how I try to help. 

Present tense (& future perfect)

View more presentations from Tim Sparke.

Phone fluff

I made some new ringtones. I love the sound of old phones so the first 3 are based on the old analog bakelite phone rings. The next 2 are submarine sonar sounds. The last is from the Tokyo metro system (where they have a different audio motif for every station so you don't have to look at the signs). 

Old Phone 1 Old Phone 2 Old Phone 3

Sonar 1 Sonar 2

Tokoy Subway

Enjoy!

I'm fascinated with why we're so keen to use old ring tones on new phones. It seems to soften the shock of new technology, to help us enjoy a smooth transition to strange new things. 

Markets of Britain

A look at our not so distant past by Lee Titt. 

Inspiring Voices - Tim Smit

I heard Tim Smit, the founder of the Eden Project on Radio 4 last week and was completely blown away by his intelligence, sense & humility. Ted, who I met on Monday did the smart thing and put the videos on YouTube. Thanks Ted! Well worth a listen. 

Why is DropBox so much more popular than other similar tools?

I love DropBox and I'm intrigued by Quora so I was happy to see this post asking why DropBox is so popular compared to other file syncing solutions. 

"Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:

• There would be a folder.

• You'd put your stuff in it.

• It would sync.

They built that.

Why didn't anyone else build that?  I have no idea.

"But," you may ask, "so much more you could do!  What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding.  More than just folders and files!"

No, shut up.  People don't use that crap.  They just want a folder.  A folder that syncs."

Exactly. DropBox does one thing very well and it doesn't try to make you do anything new. If you haven't tried it. Do. It's an amazing way to backup and sync your stuff. 

Why we struggle with Data Overload

I just found Linda Stone's writing on the back of a Henry Jenkins article. Boy is she smart. This article's so great I'm just going to rip it. She quotes Dee Hock, the Founder of Visa and his definition of how information evolves. She then uses it to describe how technology is evolving us, how we’re evolving technology and how both are evolving culture.

• Noise becomes data when it has a cognitive pattern.
• Data becomes information when assembled into a coherent whole, which can be related to other information.
• Information becomes knowledge when integrated with other information in a form useful for making decisions and determining actions.
• Knowledge becomes understanding when related to other knowledge in a manner useful in anticipating, judging and acting.
• Understanding becomes wisdom when informed by purpose, ethics, principles, memory and projection.

Further, she maps this evolution to a timeline:

• 1945-1965 - Noise to Data
• 1965-1985 - Data to Information
• 1985-2005 - Information to Knowledge
• 2005-2025 - Knowledge to Understanding
• 2025-2045 - Understanding to Wisdom

Today, we are Knowledge Workers evolving into Understanding Workers. Understanding Workers use technology to anticipate, judge and act. Think about it. This is what we’re doing with FitBit, Quantified Self, 23andMe.com, Facebook, and so many other technologies of this era.

As we move into an Era of Conscious Computing, we’ll also be moving deeper into Understanding and closer toward Wisdom.

Data gets a bad rep sometimes but as we all know, in the right hands it can be pretty amazing...

 

Content, An Illustrated History

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake.

2010 in Numbers

People throw around way too many meaningless stats about the internet. Here's some good ones from Royal Pingdom which are worth a look. Essentially: Email's still huge. Most of the internet doesn't speak English. People really love sharing photos...

• 107 trillion emails were sent last year (294 billion a day). Of those, 89% were spam.
• There are 1.97 billion internet users in the world (up 14% on last year). Asia has 825 million, Europe has 475 million, North America has 266 million.
• There are 152 million blogs. There were 25 billion tweets sent. Lady Gaga had 7.7 million Twitter followers. Facebook had 600 million members. And 20 milion Facebook apps were installed a day.
• Internet Explorer's still the leading web browser worldwide with a 47% marketshare. Chrome has burst in with 14.9%.
• 3000 photos a minute are uploaded to Flickr. Three billion photos a month are uploaded to Facebook. 

The best holiday stat came from Mashable. Over New Year's weekend records were broken when we uploaded 750 million photos to Facebook. Wow.