Category Archives: Telecommunications

I keep dreaming I’m Tom Cruise…

Had a brilliant and very memorable ‘summer of fun’ with the kids in between work contracts but now back in the saddle on a new global web project.

Since spending a number of weeks using enterprise content management solutions again, rather than having my head buried in open source code for personal projects, I keep getting a recurring dream that I’m Tom Cruise.

20060727-minority_report_gestural_uiObviously I’m much taller and better looking than the diminutive movie star 😉 but my dream has me in his iconic Minority Report role manipulating data on his interactive ‘smart wall’ – only rather than working out the details of an impending murder, I’m managing a company’s global web presence.

I think this dream has been prompted by watching some impressive videos on the Microsoft envisioning website and also a clip tweeted by a former colleague.

I think it’s also been prompted by the repetitive monotony of piecing together a multi-lingual microsite for a major new product launch and feeling that the traditional mouse, keyboard and layer upon layer of pop-up CMS dialog boxes is just so 20th Century now.

In my dream I’m in a meeting with some marketing folks and we’re using the interactive ‘smart wall’ to build an engaging web presence for an exciting new product. ‘Wave like’ information collaboration and voice-to-text conversion combines with drag and drop template building and real-time image manipulation – creating product rotations, feature hotspots and integrated video on the fly.

Once all the building blocks are slotted into place, auto-translation produces 20 language versions almost instantaneously, country team members pop up on the smart wall to discuss and approve and the final site information is fed out into the social networks around the world for consumers to engage with and comment on.

Job done, I jump onto my 160mph electric superbike, zoom down to the local marina to my 10 berth fully solar powered superyacht for a leisurely jaunt across the channel to France.

If I’m thinking ahead to 2020 then the first part of this post is probably far more likely to happen than the last part -although if I get off my arse and help make the first part happen then perhaps the whole dream will come true 😉

Update 11th October – spotted in the Sunday Times today that the solar powered superyacht is already on the drawing board – so that’s a start 🙂

Update 17th October – spotted in Times Eureka supplement a reference to Mission One, an electric superbike unveiled earlier this year that’s been clocked at 161mph. It currently costs over £40K – so I better get saving 😉

Recession? What Recession?…

I first attended the UK Internet World Show back in the heady dotcom boom days of 2000 and have attended every year since. In that time it has proved to be a good barometer of what’s happening in the industry, from the post boom bust ,with vastly reduced floor-space and low footfalls for a number of years, to the resurgence of interest in 2006 with the arrival of Web 2.0.

If the first day of this year’s show is anything to go by, with the packed Keynote and Seminar sessions, it looks like being one of the busier years. No obvious sign yet of weaknesses in the digital/online marketing space but I think 2010 will be the real crunch point.

Some highlights for me this year…

• A very topical keynote presentation for my current role by David Walmsley, Head of Web Selling at John Lewis (one of Le Creuset’s main retailers ) who gave his six tips for smarter e-tailing…

1. Evolution not revolution – importance of multivariate testing
2. Listen – importance of user surveys, testing and analytics
3. Keep it simple – small incremental changes not big overhauls
4. Get and keep the right team
5. Trade – it’s about selling product not functionality.
6. Keep Looking Outside – watch the competition, scan the horizon

John Lewis website has 45,000 products online and sales in 2008 of £327 million. They are certainly helping keep Le Creuset’s UK sales buoyant in tough times and we are very mindful of building on and not damaging that relationship through our own online activities.

• An upbeat, dynamic presentation by Alex Hunter, Head of Online Marketing for the Virgin Group on Brand 2.0 and how established brands can benefit from social media interactions with consumers.

• Virgin Eye – was presented as an innovative way of displaying social media virgineyecommentary but smacks a bit of style over substance to me and seems much more about Web 1.0 online press coverage display than anything consumer generated.

• An upcoming re-launch of ‘virgin.com’ will see more ‘social network’ capabilities incorporated into the site to allow user generated content to feature across the site. It’s being designed by Rokkan– the screenshots were a little small and flared out to see much of the current proposals but the banner artwork looked great. Presumably Rokkan’s experiences with http://community.virginamerica.com/ have added insight here.

• Popped by Ian Truscott’s Alterian presentation on The Marketing Director’s Content Management System. I know it’s early days for the Alterian/Immediacy/Mediasurface collective and I know that acquisition in the CMS space is often detrimental to the original products but I can’t help thinking they have an opportunity to really make something of this, particularly at a time when marketing folks the world over are very focused on driving website engagement and ROI.

• From what I understood from Ian’s presentation and few chats with Alterian folks, they are taking the ‘best bits’ of Immediacy and Mediasurface and combining in the core Alterian analytics and email campaign functionality to provide a potentially very dynamic platform for creating, measuring and incrementally improving websites. ‘Try, tune, repeat’ is the essence of what online marketers do – so anything that helps make this easier and more measurable has got to be a good thing in my book.

• Comments by fellow CMS geek Jon Marks here suggest that EPiServer had the ‘buzz’ this year in the CMS ‘Stand Wars’ with a bigger and more prominent stand than previous years. As an EPiServer customer it was an opportunity for me to give the senior management some ear-ache for releasing a new set of functionality before it’s been properly tested but in talking with their Product Development Director it was a reminder of how fraught the whole process of regression testing and releasing quality software can be. Still… hopefully a bit less haste and more attention to detail next time guys!

• Fortune Cookie’s Surface driven Smart Table and latest laser eye-tracking kit for usability were fun and we’ll be using this soon for an upcoming phase 2 user experience survey and redesign project.

• Post show drinks, which were attended by Tony Byrne from CMS Watch, gave me an opportunity to buy Tony a drink after many years of reading and valuing his insightful commentary on what is often a confused and complicated industry for buyers. We didn’t quite get him drunk enough for some ‘world exclusive’ soundbites but the incisiveness of the comments he did make about the history of the CMS space and the movers and shakers over the years certainly demonstrated why he has gained such a following for his work. I did like his comments about ‘SharePoint MVP’s almost religious fervour about their product’ and a question from one of the LBi guys about whether he receives hate mail from Microsoft employees.

And one major lowlight…

The continuing customer confusion and potential for cowboy vendors and dodgy practices around Search Engine Optimisation. Let’s keep this one simple…

1. Use a CMS that produces accessible and search engine friendly code – a mid-tier proprietary one like Alterian/Immediacy if you can afford it – or an Open Source offering like Joomla or Drupal if you can’t
2. Use your own website analytics and keyword tools to determine the most relevant keywords and phrases to your area of business
3. Create readable and logically linked web pages that focus on those keywords and phrases your users may be using to get to your site – put them in headings and links for added impact but not at the expense of usabilty
4. Build a useful and attractive enough site that relevant, more established sites will want to link to you
5. Tell the major search engines all about your site and what they should be looking at through their sitemap submission processes – Find Google’s here and Yahoo’s here

Above all – just focus on building a good website that over time you can make great!!! Avoid the SEO cowboys at any cost and tell any cold caller from companies like http://www.itscoldoutside.com/ to get stuffed!!! – Don’t waste your money on so called ‘quick wins’ that you’ll end up paying for in the long run.

Wired's predictions for 2020 and beyond…

crystalballIn the recent UK launch issue of Wired, a panel of experts and ‘professional futurists’ (how the hell do you get to be one of those ;)) gave their predictions for developments up to 2050.  The predictions made for the years up to and including 2020 are listed below… 

  • 2010 – Citywide free WiFi – ( I like the word ‘free’)
  • 2013 – Rapid bioassays using biosensitive computer chips (I think this means less animal testing – good news for rabbits 😉 )
  • 2014  – Care robots – (not your iRobot style ones but pragmatic machines to make life easier for those with physical difficulties)
    • Life browsing – (personal data management)
  • 2015 – Intelligent advertising posters (Minority Report style)
  • 2017 – Window power – (energy efficient buildings adding power back to the grid)
    • Intelligent packaging
  • 2018 – Teledildonics – (oooh missus! –  remote control sexual stimulation)
    • Active contact lenses -(like the Terminator head-up display)
    • Meal replacement patches – (taking nicotine patches a stage further)
    • Non touch computer interfaces – (wave your arms around like in Minority Report)
    • Nanotech drugs
    • Everything online – (the intelligent grid arrives)
    • Office Video walls – (like Quantum of Solace)
  • 2019 – Folk-art revival – (cause anybody can do anything online)
    • Electro sex – (these people are obsessed!!! – but probably right, as sex has driven most mainstream consumer tech developments in recent decades)
  • 2020 – Death of Web 2.0 – (a real dig at amateur journalism and the blogging generation)
    • A machine passes the Turing test – (artificial intelligence arrives and we’re all doomed if the autonomous US battlefield robots haven’t wiped us out already ;))
    • Space currency floated – (what are they smoking???)
    • Universal cloud computing – (if they can all stop arguing and ever agree on standards)
    • Genetic prophecy at birth – (survival of the fittest and a new super-race is born)
    • Humans visit Mars – (and find they didn’t learn any more than all the robots they’d been sending there for 30 years already)

Beyond 2020 some notable inclusions are…

  • 2021 – First global warming conflict – floods in Bangladesh lead to mass emigration and drought in South East Asia will cause battles for water
  • 2024 – Microbial diesel provides most of our fuel – (oooh cheap fuel again – all energy problems solved)
  • 2032 – Cancer no longer a problem – (that’s a relief then)
  • 2035 – China goes global and dominates the world economy and its worldview starts to change culture – (I’ll stock up on woks then)
  • 2045 – Super intelligence – machines will build other machines – (and we’ll all be moving to The Matrix)
  • 2048 – Space elevator – (I thought they were already building this? ;))

Notable exceptions…

Bit surprising given that those two really do have the potential to change the world – but as long as we get ‘Electro Sex’ at least we’ll all die happy!!!

Please speak up! – Voice search is growing fast…

Due to a genetic curse that has plagued my family for generations, I have impaired hearing (well before natural ageing determines that I should have anyway). It’s probably not the sort of thing (along with politics, religion and relationships) that I should be discussing on a blog site. However, the simple fact is that this growing disability has driven my interest in web and communications technology and, on that basis, has actually enhanced rather than damaged my career so far.

Having seen my father’s career impacted badly by not being able to communicate effectively in an office environment I was naturally very keen to understand how and where things like email, the web and instant messaging could help me, as and when traditional communications such as the telephone became difficult to use.

speakupSimilarly, I have always kept a close eye on things like voice-to-text translation. Watching my father and aunt trying to communicate these days would illustrate why. Neither of them has any natural hearing left and even the most advanced digital hearing aids are not much use to them anymore. So they have to communicate using a combination of lip reading and pen and paper – which is not the most conducive way to have a meaningful and useful discussion.

During my time at Lucent, I worked on a couple of projects to help explain and communicate VoiceXML concepts. This is basically the ability to drive mobile phone functions by voice which has been adopted by most operators in some form to help users navigate through multiple options, particularly in hands-free usage.

A few years later, at the hosted services company I worked for, I was promoting the use of SpinVox, a service that converts voice messages into SMS and email and does so surprisingly well too.

However, when I suggested a couple of years ago now that the rise of sophisticated mobile apps might mean people being able to speak content into their content management systems in the future and control its publication via voice – suffice it to say it the idea was met with stony silence.

It’s therefore with both personal and professional interest that coverage of Google comments at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo have focused on its announcement that it believes “Voice search is a new form of search and that it is core to our business” and to support that statement the Google representative, Vic Gundotra said “I get the advantage of looking at daily voice queries coming in and it’s amazing. It’s working. It’s reached a tipping point. It’s growing and growing very, very fast and we are thrilled about it,”

Interestingly its uptake as an iPhone app is being credited with this growth and, as it is one of those developments that improves as more people use it, then it looks like this an area destined for bigger and better things. I can already see the potential for an iPhone type device to give a real time text view of what someone is saying to me, as and when hearing aids can no longer provide any benefit. With 9 million hearing impaired people in the UK alone and an iPod generation merrily destroying their hearing prematurely – it looks like a potentially big market. If a developer’s not already buried in the iPhone SDK doing this already then there’s an idea for free. Just send me a note when it’s ready – don’t bother calling as I don’t hear the phone ring 😉

You can't predict the future…

 The writer Arthur C. Clarke said, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

As this list of failed technology predictions shows we get it wrong when imagining the future because the starting point for our predictions is invariably what we know and feel today. However, we also know that the future will be full of surprises as unexpected discoveries are latched onto and take things in completely unpredictable directions.

The launch of the UK version of Wired this week shows that presumably there is an interest and appetite in looking ahead and I think with all the doom and gloom around right now it’s important to be looking towards a better future.

cougar_aceI read the sample copy that came with the Times at the weekend and there are some interesting features in the first issue, including a timeline of potential developments over the next few decades. The article that will get me buying the first issue though (as I’m sure was the strategy of the Editor) is the true account of the Cougar Ace a massive carrier ship that was rescued in a complex salvage operation a few years back. Apparently Steven Spielberg has bought the rights to the story and just from reading the sample article I can see what a good film the story could make.