Paul Sergeant’s Blog

I spent last week inhabiting a black hole in the UK mobile networks while attending the BBC Scottish Innovations Lab. The Forrest Hills Hotel would seen an excellent site for a Picocell - although, judging by the performance of the flaky T-Mobile Wifi , there may be a back-haul problem. You can see a picture of me (on the left) along with Mark Grindle (centre) pitching to Martin Trickey, a Commissioner for BBC Vision. It’s a shame there wasn’t a camera rolling when we were interrupted by a waiter proudly presenting a silver tray with two large platters of reheated stew and congealed rice - closely followed by another with tea and coffee.

The lab itself was excellent. One of my stated goals was to learn eight times more than I did at the BBC Innovation Labs open day. Frank Boyd and the mentor team delivered on this and more: always there when help was needed, but never intrusive. Calico Jack has never been daunted by hard technical problems in agentive representation, advanced logics and communication management. In fact we’ve made part our living out of skepticism about what is technically feasible. The problem is that we have sometimes solved the wrong problems and committed sins of omission. As Frank’s persona based approach addresses both these issues, we are are integrating it into our development method. I’ll be writing about our experiences as we progress.

Matt Cashmore soaked up the stress and kept the whole thing rolling along - even on the day that his breakfast didn’t turn up. Well, look on the bright side Matt: it possibly saved another shirt.

The lab was also a good opportunity to meet up - or catch up - with folk in the Scottish technology scene. In particular, I should mention CerProc, Think Tank Mathmatics, Richard Harris and Feaghus McKay : CereProc - nothing to do with GM crops - are ex Rhetorical Systems guys with some excellent speech synthesis technology. A neat demo can be found here. ThinkTank Mathematics are a good creative crew, though I wish someone could dampen their enthusiasm for Android (just know I’m going to get mail about this). For me it would be enough to mention Richard Harris’s association with Douglas Adams. Richard has a lot of good ideas - and experience of implementing them. Fearghus McKay was also a contributing presence at the event. I knew that I’d met him before. It turned out that it was from the early days of Connect when he was with Intertrader.

I’ve got one bit of advice for participants in the other regions: Think about the end and what you are going to ask for. Would you offer it if you were on the other side of the table? If not, you might want to ask for something else. I’m quite happy to elaborate on that. Mark and I came away with a much stronger concept than the one we arrived with. I’m currently working on a technical implementation plan.

Catching up on Bloglines, I came across this post by Alec Saunders about proposed surveillance cameras in Ottawa. It evoked a strange kind of cultural dissonance: virtually every town in Britain is already a panopticon. And most people don’t think twice about the roving, all seeing eyes (there are two within sight of Calico Jack’s Dundee office). Should they? While CCTV undoubtedly does contribute to the detection and deterrence of crime, there are broader questions about how we came to this and where we are going now. Is the loss of civil liberties that surveillance cameras represent an inevitable consequence of both failures to address social fragmentation and to provide proper policing? And, if the battle against surveillance cameras is lost - sorry, Alec, I think it is - where is the current front-line in the defence of privacy?

One reason that people can live with surveillance cameras, is the assumption of anonymity provided by being unremarkable in an ocean of data. We make similar assumptions about email, phone calls, IM and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) - a group communication technology that I have always thought to be under-exploited. But now read Roi Carthy’s Techcrunch post on IRSeek, an Israeli startup that indexes IRC channels. It’s worth taking time to read Roi’s post and the IRSeek blog along with the many comments. Maybe we’re not so hard to spot in the big ocean? I don’t think that IRSeek are doing anything fundamentally wrong. In fact they have triggered an important debate, the resolution of which will assist companies such as Iotum (Alec’s company) and Calico Jack . As individuals we need to get serious about controlling use of our data and assert ownership rights. Can we blame Facebook for being cavalier with our data if we don’t treat it seriously ourselves?

Scott McNealy once said: “you have no privacy, get over it”. Although the remark was seized on as a gaff, in context it is probably a pragmatic reflection on our current situation.

I’ve always thought that social networking sites will turn out to be like pubs: rising in popularity, going out of fashion and then being reinvented. On this basis, planning future development on the basis of Facebook’s inevitable rise does not seem prudent - strategically, this is an important issue - even before the Beacon fiasco and its envelope of fog. Eddie Mair’s Radio 4 interview on Saturday, which can be found as a Podcast here, makes interesting listening. Eddie talked about the tipping point from a perception of good to evil. From a reputation perspective, there’s certainly bad stuff coming out for Facebook right now - and more storm clouds on the horizon.

Following the classic BBC formula, Seamus McCauley forecast of impending implosion was juxtaposed with Johnny Chatterton’s more benign view. Seamus predicted the growth of sites like Kaioo, while Johnny thought that Facebook had some way to run. Neither view is wholly good news for Facebook, but then as As J.M. Keynes said: “in the long run, we are all dead”.

The Wireless Innovation Centre at Hillington, a key hub drawing together the disparate wireless scene in Scotland, hosted a mobile social networking event the Friday before last. The centre’s technology manager Alisdair Gunn kicked the day off by installing Andy Campbell (”Chief Networker” and CEO of Specialmove) as compere. Andy, well known in the games industry, is currently exploring Facebook as a recruitment tool. If you ever get blown out by a Facebook indiscretion, get in touch with Andy: He’s the kind of guy who will see the funny side. By way of diversion, prurient readers wishing to see the author caught in a moment of tendresse with a beautiful blonde look here.

Phil Taylor, Service Director at Strategy Analytics provided the business context - and numerous nuggets for business plan enhancement. He was followed by Richard Marshall, founder of Rapid Mobile, presenting work done with Betfair. Betfair made an interesting case study showing how the immediacy of mobile technology can tap into critical events: those where money changes hands. Mike Kinsella of Weeworld is an engaging speaker with a memorable turn of phrase. He described the company he founded prior to investment - with millions of users and five people employees - as “the world’s tallest dwarf” (which definitely demands a WeeMee ). Mike stressed the importance of understanding users and not building services that will attract “as many users as a Wigan B road”. His comment resonates with a remark made by Ian Hay at Barcamp Leeds: it’s possible to build a use case for anything - that doesn’t mean it will be useful. Frank Boyd offered a similar warning in his session on Persona development at the BBC Innovation Labs Edinburgh launch.

Emal Rumi of the Motorola European Innovation Team presented an overview of Moto’s enabling technologies for social networking. Motorola’s strong convergent technology portfolio, spanning emerging wireless technologies and the connected home, provides a natural platform for the next generation of seamless mobility applications. Hopefully this will not be under threat from the recent change of CTO and pressure for breakup into separate divisions.

So did the event live up to the promise and answer the key question: How can your company get its share of this growing market? Realistically, the best it was going to do was produce some interesting food for thought - which was duly served up. My particular problem is that, while accepting that advertising revenue will grow, I’m skeptical about the amount that can be rung out of mobile without totally trashing the user experience. It takes a shed load of cash to run the mobile network infrastructure and there is little scope for further operational efficiencies. Phil did touch on subscription services. But, although there is an argument that anything worth having is worth paying for, it may well be lost on a user base that is getting increasingly used to free. In my view, developers of mobile social networking applications will have to be a lot more subtle in their pursuit of a viable return. So, building on this, bring on the next event. How about Norman Lewis, Martin Geddes and Ian Hay?

The weekend before last I travelled down from Dundee to Barcamp Leeds 2007 with my colleague Rick Moynihan. From the outset Old Broadcasting House, a tastefully refurbished pristine innovation centre, was humming with a sense of energy and anticipation. It didn’t disappoint - with the exception of those who couldn’t get in due to over subscription. Amazingly, brought together under the .North banner, the whole thing was organized in just 27 days. The attendees, an eclectic group of entrepreneurs, developers, students, artists, academics and corporates set a dynamic agenda by marking out slots with Post-It notes on a large board. I went to Ben Dalton’s session on Future Forecasting and got to draw on large pieces of paper with coloured pens. Primary school nostalgia aside, Ben demonstrated a direct, simple and creative approach to service innovation. Paul Robinson’s thoughtful talk “Why Futurology Sucks” stimulated an interesting debate. The essence of Paul’s thesis was that Futurology is contaminated by corporate interests (for example automobile centric 1939 Futurama, sponsored by GM) and that methodologies such as Causal Layered Analysis cannot address real world complexity.

Ikem Nzeribe provided an interesting critique of Google Maps as functional but impersonal web maps that lack cartographic flair. Ikem conjured up images of Google’s B52 carpet-bombing the world with pins and directing hungry restaurant goers in the northwest of England to chinese restaurants in Manchester, New Hampshire. Ikem’s alternative vision was to overlay the existing provision with social networking over personalized, hand drawn maps. He ended with a Balmeresque call for developers.

Ian Hay, a strategic advisor on emerging technology at Orange, straddles two worlds by combining an understanding of emerging technologies with a strong grasp of telco business realities. A difficult task, but this is the guy who turned up to the Queen’s Birthday Party at the Paris Embassy - and looked quite at home. He shared his observations on hardware, platform and user interface trends in a talk titled “Is that a computer in your pocket?”. Ian also referenced work on Ethnography previously presented with Imran. Imran himself missed the Post-It note stampede and was consequently blown out of his own event (he’s far too honourable to move other people’s notes - yes, it did happen!).

When we left to catch our early evening train the event was still in full swing - and the free bar hadn’t even opened.

Last Thursday (November 15th) I went along to the BBC Innovation Labs Launch Day in Edinburgh. I was resigned to a day of polite PowerPoint consumption punctuated by tea, coffee, biscuits, lunch and occasional questions. But that’s not what Matthew Cashmore, Ian Forrester and Frank Boyd had in mind. Yes, there was PowePoint, but Matthew effortlessly kept the show rolling along, providing useful context for the briefs. Working with corporate tech guys, you get used to being told why you can’t do things. In contrast Ian’s message was “don’t worry about whether your idea is possible, we’ll find a way. The words “rod” and “back” come to mind. I wonder whether he ever regrets saying things like that. Frank Boyd ran an afternoon workshop on user centred design based around the construction of personas. The ideas may not be new - Frank cited many of the sources - but the point is that they were distilled into a coherent, effective package capable of dissemination within an afternoon. It was fairly apparent from the resulting presentations which groups had actually the methodology: an observation that Calico Jack has taken on board by actively adopting the ideas into our development process. I guess this makes us third party beneficaries of Greg Dyke’s vision for an ultra-creative BBC. Incredibly, the room was half empty. If you get the chance to go to one of these event, go. By the way, though I can’t vouch for the coffee, the rest of the catering was excellent.

To be entirely honest, not being an enthusiastic meeting hound, I often attend events out of duty rather than desire, coming away from events bored and frustrated: stupified rather than inspired. But last week I had the privilege to attend two genuinely inspirational events: the BBC’s Innovation Labs launch day in Edinburgh on Thursday and Barcamp Leeds 2007 on Saturday. By a strange coincidence, the Barcamp was in Old Broadcasting House which, when I was doing my PhD at Leeds University, was the home of the BBC in Leeds. The insipiration stretches to retrieving my blog from its virtual orphanage. I’m going to write about these two events in consecutive posts.

It’s been interesting to watch the reaction to Tomi Ahonen’s Mobile the 7th Mass Media post. You either like Tomi’s brash style and bold claims or you don’t. I do. Even if he goes too far, the blog and the book are powerful antidotes to a pervading cloud of negative sentiment - often unsupported by evidence - enveloping the mobile world. A few years back, I was being told that any business plan predicated on smart phones was doomed to failure: Nokia was going to be hammered by the PDA manufacturers. There is no need for further comment - it’s pretty clear who emerged as top dog.
I would not accuse Dean Bubley of negative sentiment - and certainly never of proffering unsupported opinions (the meticulous construction of his arguments makes Dean’s Disruptive Wireless blog a pleasure to read). In his contribution to the debate on Tomi’s post Dean homes in on two potential fallacies concerning the personal nature of mobile communications. First, he points out that it is increasingly hard to define a mobile communications device. While true, this does not in itself depersonalize mobile communication. However, Dean’s second point is potentially more troubling for Tomi’s case. He points out that the one-to-one relationship between SIM, mobile number and identifiable number is breaking down. The seven items of supporting evidence including the blurring of fixed and mobile numbers, the use of SIMs in M2M, mobile devices as gateways and shared devices are at first sight compelling (careful readers will note that Dean’s first point re-emerges as item four).

So where does this leave one-to-one marketing? That depends on the assumed primacy of the SIM in identity management. Even acknowledging that the SIM will continue to play a critical role in identity management, I think its primacy is open to question. Tom Nolle’s notion on individuality is close to the vision behind Calico Jack’s Smart Presence and Context technology. Mobile can still be personal - it just getting a bit harder to do.

Apologies to readers for the total absence of postings over the last weeks, but I’ve been busy on some important projects - more on these in subsequent posts. I was at 3GSM in Barcelona last month. I like 3GSM. It’s brash, inspiring, full of interesting people and in Barcelona. Yes, I can recognise the perspective in Martin Geddes’s Telepocalypse blog, but that’s an aspect of all large business events.

Even so, if you get stuck in a Costa Brava hotel miles away from the city, make sure that the 3GSM catalogue isn’t your only bedtime reading. The endless, semi-literate blurb describing “leading suppliers of global solutions” and platforms - often last year’s offering with a thick layer of buzzword friendly gloss - purporting to deliver bucket loads of ARPU becomes deeply depressing to anyone with the remotest respect for language. Despite the frequent claims for customer-centricity, it’s hard to get a sense of any real concern for the customer. And that is the real problem with business speak: as any viva examiner knows, a lack of linguistic integrity masks deeper flaws in thinking. Many of these suppliers need to take a shower and think about customer value.

As a rule I shun surveys whether by phone, web or snail mail. Frankly, most are just too boring to contemplate without the incentive of a large carrot - deadpan deliveries of irrelevant questions, crappy ASP programs that crash before the end and letters from researchers who think people have got nothing else to do.

However on Friday, partly motivated by the strange psychology of looming deadlines and partly by sense of obligation to give something back to an interesting blog, I made an exception the Telco2.0 Trends Survey . Unfortunately you’re too late - it closed last week.

I say “unfortunately” because, whatever emerges from the survey - I’m looking forward to the results - the process itself was interesting. For so many questions I found myself explaining why I would probably agree with statements that I had supported and vice versa. Then, towards the end, interviewees were given a set of options and asked to formulate a strategy. The point is that making hard choices is much harder than commentating. Sometimes there are no obvious options - prefabricated strategies are unlikely to yield real competitive advantage. In a previous posting I mentioned von Clausewitz. If strategy is your business, you may want to add this abridged translation by Tiha von Ghyczy, Bolko von Oetinger and Christopher Bassford to your Christmas reading. I just wish my German was good enough to read the original.