Category Archives: Telecommunications

Filtering out the noise

In common with around 9 million people in the UK and presumably similar proportions elsewhere in the world, I have hearing problems. Some of my posts on this blog have expressed experiences with this and the most recent one described the lipreading course I am currently doing.

Every week now, I spend a morning associating with a group of 20 people who all share the same or similar issues. The one thing we are undoubtedly all agreed on is that it is a very noisy world out there. If you don’t hear well, noise is the biggest problem. Unless you are profoundly deaf, the chances are you’ll hear the noise all too well but what you won’t get is any clarity.

The majority of us in the group have hearing aids that help filter out the background noise and this is undoubtedly the best innovation to have happened with the arrival of digital hearing aids during the last decade. This works, to a point, but we are all agreed we would prefer it to be better. If things get unbearably noisy, one of the options for the hearing impaired is to remove, or switch off, their hearing aids completely and rely on their lip reading skills.  There have been times over the last few years where it has been an utter relief just to ‘switch off’.

So, if the real world is getting noisier and noisier, the online world has got even worse.

I share the opinion of those who say that Web 2.0 is just Web 1.0 that works. What are often described as latest innovations and ideas existed in some form online 5, 10, 15, or even more years ago. What we’ve seen more than anything else in the last few years is mass adoption and a more ubiquitous web presence. In other words, it has got a lot more noisier out there. As in the real world, I don’t regard more noise as a good thing but it is the by product of growth, it’s difficult if not impossible to switch it off and we just have to learn to live with it.

Right now, I think the vast majority of organisations are in the same position with the web as a hearing impaired person is in the real world. They are bombarded with so much noise, it’s difficult to get any clarity.

So, what are their choices? Well they can choose to ‘switch off’ completely. However, although it may give temporary relief, in the same way that a hearing impaired person will become increasingly insular and insolated if they don’t join in the conversation, the same will apply to the organisation.

My advice, based on web development experiences going back to the mid 90s, is to focus on using the tools they’ve been using for years and not to get overly distracted by the growing noise.

Continuing the analogy of the hearing impaired person for a minute, the tool that acts like the button on my hearing aid that filters out the background noise is one that the majority of organisations know best – email!

One of the biggest lessons I learnt in web development back in the 90s is the value of getting web email traffic (sales, technical, service, general etc) copied into your inbox. Everything, and I mean, everything I’ve ever needed to know about the expectations of users, the type and depth of content required, the information flows for customer service, the hot buttons for prospects and, indeed, the best tips for furture product development has come via those emails.

In the last few years, when people have been talking about abandoning the tried and tested communication channels and methods in favour of Facebook and Twitter, I have done some direct analysis of what can be gained from Social Media Monitoring versus listening to the feedback gained via email. Firstly, analysing social media properly, even with automated tools, takes a lot of time and effort. What you end up doing is manually filtering out the noise through cross-referencing the context and determining whether sentiment is genuinely positive, negative or neutral or just laden with sarcasm. What you end up with is something that is still fuzzier than the direct and unambiguous feedback you’ve already got in the emails.

Ironically, I’ve also discovered on a number of occasions that negative feedback in social media often stems from poor email handling within the organisation. If questions are not responded to quickly and efficiently, that’s the point at which someone will take to a forum or start Twittering. So, if you focus on getting the basics right, more than often, that noisy old social media environment will take care of itself.

From King Bluetooth I to SmartEars V1.0…

I’ve muddled through for quite a number of years now, but my level of hearing loss is now such that I can’t get through a working day effectively without wearing a hearing aid or two.  I’ve well and truly crossed the line where the awkwardness and issues created by bluffing/pretending to hear  a lot of the time far outweighs the irritation and discomfort of having lumps of plastic in and around my ears – day in, day out. You could say that I am now almost totally reliant on technology to function properly in work and family life – which, as I’ve mentioned before, is one of the key reasons I’ve always been interested in digital communications technologies.

The runic inscription of Harald Bluetooth

I wrote a post about a year or so ago now about my process of acceptance of hearing loss and love/hate relationship with hearing aids and, looking at my blog stats, my hearing related posts seem to gain more interest than the work related stuff I’ve written – so I hope it is proving useful to someone,  somewhere.  Please ‘speak up’ if you empathise/agree or disagree with my comments and observations.

The good thing about wearing the aids daily is that I won’t get moaned at so badly on my next visit to the audiologist. The aids have a data-logging capability that monitors exactly how long they have been worn between visits.

The effectiveness of the aids is also determined by use – as they are smart enough to learn about the environments/volumes you are exposed to regularly and make adjustments based on your hearing loss pattern. So I am pleased to report that they do indeed work better and better the more you wear them and it is well worth persisting beyond the irritation factors.

My latest hearing aids also incorporate wireless technology to communicate with each other – therefore changing the settings on one aid automatically updates the other one.

This technology is Bluetooth based and although my current aids don’t have the ability to connect with other Bluetooth enabled devices, the latest generation of aids do. Although, given the size and power requirements of the Bluetooth chip, this happens via a separate unit. The dream, of course, is the time when full Bluetooth connectivity can be incorporated into a hearing device as small as those now used widely – and at reasonable cost. The cost is an important factor when you look at the astronomical prices of top of the range hearing aids today.

Having vaguely tracked Bluetooth related developments over the last decade since my time working for a mobile network technology provider this term has taken on greater significance for me in recent months – not just relating to hearing issues.

From a software perspective, I am a big supporter of Scandinavian originated developments, as other posts on this blog particularly relating to content technologies illustrate. So it has been interesting to remind myself of Bluetooth’s mainly Scandinavian driven history, from the name itself – an ancient Nordic King who united many tribes into a single kingdom – to its underlying principles of low power, interference-free, limited range transmission.

From a work perspective, I am currently immersed in launching a new range of innovative Bluetooth products built on a first generation of developments that are illustrated here… http://www.my-io.com/

Our clever technical team have been building on this music streaming and hands-free learning to develop the Bluetooth experience ‘on the go’. My job is to spread that message faster and further than before…A few clues as to why and how we are doing this can be found here…

It’s these type of developments that help to stretch the Bluetooth experience in new directions and hopefully by 2020 we will see the arrival of ‘SmartEars V1.0’ – truly clever hearing aids that enable full onboard integration with other Bluetooth capable devices. Who knows, maybe hearing aids will become so smart, they’ll even be ‘cool’ one day 😉

Wishing all my gadgets were like this…

I walked into a presentation to the Board the other day and couldn’t believe my eyes. Our Finance Director had exactly the same calculator as the one I use.

Errr wow???  So what’s the point of such a mundane observation?

Well, firstly that my calculator is my most reliable, faithful and long-standing gadget – dating back to my first job in 1987. It’s robust, fit for purpose and because of clearly very efficient solar technology just keeps running and running, even in surprisingly low artificial lighting conditions. For something that is over 20 years old it has a somewhat timeless design too – although doesn’t quite qualify for calculator museum status yet.

Seeing the FD with the exact same model, which I have since learnt is also well over 20 years old, my respect for my long-standing gadget has grown further. Unlike my device, which gets regular but not heavy use, the FD’s one has been hammered daily for a fair proportion of those 20 years. I would have expected some serious wear and tear after that – failed screen display, sticking buttons, cracked casing, power failures etc – but no – the only difference between his and mine is the ‘plus’ symbol has worn off – I guess if he doesn’t know what that button does by now then he shouldn’t be an FD 🙂

I like gadgets but I hate unnecessary waste. Seeing the mountains of tech waste grow and grow as we discard things like mobile phones on a distressingly regular basis is depressing – particularly when you see the toxic damage it’s doing not just to the environment but also the poor people who are forced to make a living salvaging valuable resources from the scrap.

Even on something as simple as my old calculator, there are at least 4 buttons I can’t remember ever pressing and a bunch of other functions I’ve never had reason to use and have long forgotten what they related to. I just want devices that do simple things well and don’t need replacing every couple of years.

I thought the iPhone looked promising but it’s hardly robust. Over the last few months I witnessed by brother-in-law crack the screen on his twice in the space of a week and my wife’s wifi antenna packed up beyond repair. I can’t see a current iPhone model lasting over 20 years unscathed and the constant recharging makes it far less convenient and instantly usable as my old calculator.

So, will there come a time before 2020 when I can buy a robust, solar powered mobile device that I can make simple phone calls on and access the web instantly to carry out all basic ‘office’ type tasks – but, above all, be able to undertake the same basic needs over 20 years later?

What's the point of analysts?…

Or rather, what’s the point of analyst organisations? This is really a question that’s been raised for me by the debate about Forrester clamping down on its analysts producing and promoting personal blogs.

Reading this excellent article about Forrester’s action underlines the dilemma for many organisations thrown up by Social Media – who becomes the ‘authentic’ voice or voices of your organisation? Is the genie out of the bottle as far as this is concerned and by trying to pull the reigns back now will organisations face criticism in the way Forrester has about being heavy-handed and effectively limiting its analysts from establishing their own personal brands.

As this pyramid from SageCircle emphasises, Analyst Relations can be quite a personal thing and it’s not so much the analyst organisation itself who you are building the relationship with but often an individual who has specific experience and knowledge of your market sector and operations. The individualism of analysts has been brought into sharp focus by Twitter. Firstly it makes analysts, and the organisations they represent, more accessible but also more transparent. In the cut and thrust of everyday debate, you get to see fallibility more easily but likewise, knowledge and expertise shine through too.

I think what we’re seeing with the Forrester move and recent consolidation in the CMS analyst space is an exposed vulnerability of analyst organisations which have, in many respects, built their operations on inherently poor knowledge flows, communications and, primarily ‘conversations’ between organisations and individuals. To a typical analyst organisation, knowledge is power and wealth, that it benefits from being a gatekeeper to.  Twitter has been blowing this apart over the last year or so by enabling like-minded and/or commonly interested people to get together online and offline far more easily and effectively to exchange knowledge and information. With technology continuing to break down boundaries and facilitate conversation perhaps it’s more the case that ‘we’re all analysts now’?

Some learning from the Noughties…

Although the rolling passage of time makes a changing year somewhat irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, the turn of a decade is a useful milestone for reflection and looking forward. My biggest learning points from the last 10 years are…

The web has exposed what we really are…

Animals. There is no better illustration of this than the herd behaviour it has facilitated on a global level, which has been a repeated pattern of the last decade – from the dotcom boom and bust to the financial bubbles to Twitter. The latter is an appropriate name for something that induces ‘flocking’ or ‘swarming’. You can almost visualise this happening as a leading influencer changes direction or swoops down on something new.

So – is this a good or bad thing? I guess it depends whether, on balance, it has done more harm than good. It’s driven growth, that’s for sure – but has it been the right sort of growth? There would appear to be an even greater gap between rich and poor and it is becoming ever clearer that we have raped and pillaged our planet more in the last ten years than at any time before. The consequences of that could well be catastrophic if you believe the growing consensus of scientific opinion.

Bill Gates is right…

Well about one thing anyway. His soundbite from The Road Ahead about people “overestimating what will happen in the next two years but underestimating what will happen in the next 10” keeps playing out. Slightly ironic I guess that the biggest example from the last decade is the mobile market. When I worked on projects at the beginning of the decade to visualise the types of services 3G technology would bring to phone users I must admit that none of them looked much like a Microsoft approach. However, I had an underlying sense that the proprietary monolith would come to dominate the mobile world, as it had the desktop.

The big lesson here is that applying thinking and approaches from one environment to a fundamentally different one – is deeply flawed. Fresh thinking is needed. And Apple demonstrated that so well with the iPhone. Design a device and applications specifically for the context in which they are used rather than trying to get a phone to behave like a desktop PC. Lessons from my time at NTL in the 90s suggest exactly the same is applicable to the web and interactivity ‘on TV’ – in a communal, lean back environment, the context and approach must be relevant and compelling. Also lessons from spending half of the last decade in IT/software development roles also suggest that continuing to apply desktop thinking to an inter-connected always-on online world is also ultimately flawed.

Tony Blair was wrong…

Well, not about everything – but certainly in ‘his’ decision to commit the UK to an ill-conceived war and extremely badly planned peace in Iraq. Although I’ve highlighted the dangers of herd behaviour in the first point, there are times when ‘the wisdom of crowds’ is right – the challenge of course is to read the situation correctly. The largest demonstration ever on the streets of London and in other capitals around the world suggested that the majority of people felt uncomfortable with the reasons for going to war – even if they didn’t physically take to the streets. I’m sure that I and many others are having our own thoughts back in 2003 confirmed as the latest enquiries expose the degree to which we were misled. It is particularly galling to remember our prime minister telling us that we didn’t see what he saw in terms of intelligence reports and therefore he had to make the decision on our behalf.  There was a collective sense, more than anything I have experienced in my life, that this was wrong – I feel we had an innate understanding that we were being lied to but were ultimately powerless to stop the political machinery taking us to war. This matters deeply and it’s made me question everything I ever understood about ‘democracy’. If social media had been more prominent in the early part of the decade I’m wondering if things would still have happened in the way they did and if many hundred of thousands of innocent lives could have been saved?

There is hope…

If we can harness herd behaviour effectively in the next 5 years to help fix some of the damage we have done to our environment and promote more sustainable ways of living – then the web driven booms and busts of the Noughties will provide some consolation. But, and it’s a big but, we need to be convinced that those influencing the herd or causing the flock to change direction have thought about what they are doing and the effect such mass changed behaviour will have in the longer term.

If we can be brave enough to slow down, take a step back and look at things differently then the next decade could be full of exciting innovations that really would have the potential to change the world for the better. The challenge here is having the courage and vision to turn away from the herd and head for new pastures. I encountered the Blue Ocean Strategy a while back which, although it really is a post-justification reasoning, it does illustrate the thinking that has created some of the iconic gadgets of the last decade such as the Wii and iPhone. Perhaps a more appropriate title for this approach in the next decade would be Clean Ocean Strategy given the damage we are doing to the remaining Blue Ocean. In this, we would be looking to create new opportunities that didn’t add to the plastic, chemical and CO2 pollution that is turning our seas to an acid bath but also captured people’s imagination in the way that communications and entertainment have done in more recent years.

If we can use the technology to empower those who are repressed and discriminated against to gain a voice and learn for themselves that there are alternative ways to think and live, fundamentalism in all nations can be shown for what it is – a destructive, pseudo reality. For instance, if women had been in a stronger position in places such Afghanistan and Iraq, and likewise in the leading administrations of the Western world earlier this decade I doubt these complicated, entrenched and drawn-out wars would ever have started. Social media in its broadest sense offers the opportunities to make things more transparent expose hypocrisy and lies and amplify wisdom. Conversely, it could be manipulated unhealthily to amplify destructive forces and promote damaging herd behaviour. We have it in our power though to use it for good, rather than evil.

Let hopes rather than fears prevail in the next ten years

2020 here we come…