How I can help you if your event is cancelled due to coronavirus

Lots of my clients are calling and mailing to cancel upcoming events, for obvious reasons. Everyone wants to postpone but let's be frank, that won't always be possible. We won't have twice as many people to attend events in the second half of the year, or twice as many venues. So while postponing is obviously the ideal situation, it is worth considering alternatives. Here are a couple of suggestions based on my recent experiences.

Do it digitally

Yesterday I was due to speak to an audience at a local authority as part of their internal strategic and management development programme. I had created a 90 minute workshop covering the basics of applied futurism, athletic organisations, and the critical future skills. This is content that I have only ever delivered face to face. But for obvious reasons, they had to cancel the big gathering. Rather than try to postpone though, they moved the session to one that was all digital.Everyone dialled into a session run on GoToTraining that I delivered from my workshop at home in Manchester. I confess this was a little daunting at first. I'm used to feedback from the crowd. I couldn't quite see how it would work without that face to face interaction.Do you know what? It was brilliant. For a start, more people turned up than had been expected for the face to face event. And throughout the session, the engagement on chat was amazing! Not only could the participants chat to me, but they could chat to each other, sharing ideas as the session spurred them. The client told me afterwards that in the 15 years she had been working with that leadership team, she had never seen them so engaged!Obviously I would like to take some of the credit, but I think the format can really work as well. And at much bigger scales than I expected. We had 72 people in this session and they could all participate if they wanted to, whether that was on chat, polls, or in the exercises I set them as we went through.A week ago I would have been very sceptical about delivering talks and workshops down the line, but now I am a confirmed fan.

One to few or one to many

My session was interactive with a medium-sized group, but there's no reason you couldn't live stream to many more. If you're organising an event for a corporate or conference and want to talk about my experience of doing it digitally, then drop me a line. Happy to share what I can of what worked.

Turn it into a content programme

Events are just one form of content. If you can't get people together, and you don't think digital will work, then maybe turn your event into another form of content. Especially if it is for something time-sensitive, like a product launch.I have worked on a few incredible content marketing programmes recently, including Auto Trader's Future Car project and the Future Pizza project to launch the Big Bang Fair.The Future Car project combined an in-depth analysis of the future of the car over the next three decades, backed with a round of broadcast interviews that I gave to support it. (There are advantages to having 14 years and a few thousand appearances behind the microphone). The story went truly global with coverage in Nigeria, Malaysia and Portugal as well as on BBC News and in many of the national papers. You can find more information at https://www.autotrader.co.uk/content/features/cars-of-the-futureThe Future Pizza project was slightly different. I was commissioned to work out what the future pizza might look like, with our recipe (involving insects) turned into a video and a PR campaign. This again caught attention around the world, including from Germany's biggest science show, Galileo, who came to Manchester to film me making the future pizza. Again, the story was picked up by many of the national press. You can watch the original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEJpSLyUQsM

Get the message out

If you are worried that your marketing campaign is going to suffer because of the event shutdowns, maybe think about a future-focused content campaign? Drop me a line if you would like to chat through some ideas.

The Next Big Thing(s)

Judging this year’s Tech of the Future category in the Global Mobile awards, I was struck by the range of entries. They addressed many different market spaces, with different combinations of technology, and came from companies and collaborations of different sizes and shapes. While tech as an industry may still have its issues with diversity in hiring, its outputs are incredibly diverse.This should perhaps not surprise us. The connected computing revolution has stripped much of the friction from innovation, equipping more people than ever with the tools and the knowledge to create. It has brought global organisations closer together, reducing the friction of communication and increasingly demolishing the remaining barriers, like language. A shared platform of connected computers has allowed more people to innovate, and to find an audience for those innovations in an enormous network of niches.Given this breadth of innovation and the increasingly fractured nature of the audience, I have to wonder if we should be looking for a single ‘next big thing’.

What’s next?

This is a question that is asked frequently in the mobile industry, in one form or another. It takes the form of questions like: “What is 5G for?”, and “What will replace the smartphone?” Perhaps we should stop looking for a single answer to these questions and think much more in terms of answers, plural.The whole point of 5G for me is that it can support a diverse range of applications with a level of ubiquitous connectivity we have only been able to dream of until now. If I still have to think about whether or not I am connected in five years’ time, then it will have been a spectacular failure. I should only have to think about the applications, and more specifically, my chosen blend of applications, unique to me. Some will be more popular than others, and hungrier for bandwidth or low latency. But with the rapidly growing array of connected devices, perhaps the biggest category in any analysis of traffic in the future will be ‘other’, an enormous group of individually small but collectively very large bandwidth consumers.

Beyond the smartphone

Perhaps the devices running those applications will be equally diverse? I am compelled by the vision for the future of mixed reality, and the replacement of handsets with headsets. But it is unlikely this will suit everyone. Processors, baseband units, cameras and batteries can be assembled into a huge variety of form factors. As design and manufacturing capabilities continue to advance, the size of a profitable market for individual devices is likely to shrink further. There will likely be a device for every niche, well beyond the current diversity of handset designs. And that’s before we get into the incredible range of M2M (machine to machine) or IoT (internet of things) devices that we already see appearing.In summary, perhaps we should be less concerned about what is ‘the next big thing’. Instead we should focus on the things, plural. On continuing to enhance the environment for innovation and experimentation. On putting the tools of creativity into the hands of those that understand their niches and can build great things that they will love.

The internet of the future is a quest to close the gap between physical and digital

There’s something funny about 20,000 people gathering in a city to talk about a technology that promises to make the distance between them irrelevant. But that is what they did for Cisco Live! Europe, and I attended as a guest of the company. These are my big takeaways from the event about the internet of the future.

Face to face

Today there’s still no substitute for getting together face to face. The best digital experiences today cannot come close to recreating the incredible bandwidth of the full range of human senses: not just sight and sound but touch, smell and that hard to describe sense of the people all around you. There are social and chemical signals passing between us that we barely understand consciously, let alone can capture and transmit.I strongly believe that physical interaction will remain the premium experience for the foreseeable future. We want to grasp hands, kiss cheeks, and feel what people are thinking, not just hear their words. We want to feel the reaction in the room. But the internet of the future will get closer and closer to closing this gap. Indeed, one day, technology will offer experiences that supersede the physical in ways we cannot yet imagine.But this is still some way off. In the near term, the goal is to narrow the margin between the physical and the digital. The internet of the near future is one that addresses three critical aspects of connectivity. What you might, with my love of threes and alliteration, call the three Ss: seamlessness, speed and simplicity. Changing our experience of connectivity across these three dimensions has direct implications for every aspect of the way we live and work.

Seamless connectivity

With the internet of the future, we need never think about whether we are online. It won’t be a question. Wherever we or our things are, they will be connected, reliably, and with sufficient bandwidth that there is never any disruption to the services that rely on this connectivity. “Flawlessness”, as Cisco’s Danny Winokur, general manager for AppDynamics described it, will be the expectation in all our technological interactions.Getting to this point requires a combination of technologies. The fifth-generation mobile network we have all heard so much about, but also many less obvious technologies behind the scenes. Every component of the network “must be a sensor” as Cisco’s Scott Harrell, general manager for enterprise networking, put it. It must be able to monitor its own performance and flag issues before they affect service. The network itself must be smart, able to allocate bandwidth appropriately to ensure the robustness of different services. And we will need a layer of intelligence beyond human to oversee it in all its complexity.What does this mean for us as humans? The conversations we have today about any potential over-reliance on technology will look positively quaint in the future, when we have come to accept knowledge as largely a commodity available on demand and often served up without even a conscious enquiry. Truly seamless connectivity changes what it is to be human, removes some our limitations and equips us with the potential for extreme cognitive enhancement. The change will be gradual rather than dramatic. We won’t face this as a shock. Rather, the slow process of human augmentation will continue.For businesses, this presents a growing pressure to perform. Expectations of service will continue rise. Customers expect to be served 24/7/365, and served quickly. The drive will be to lower friction at every point of interaction with the customer ensuring that their seamless connectivity enables a seamless interaction. The threat is the loss of ‘good friction’ along with the bad, as I have written about before.

Speed: extreme bandwidth

Michael Bay revealed in one video shown at the event that he doesn’t know what a terabit is, suggesting it sounds like a dinosaur. But the film director knows that he needs a lot of bandwidth to do his job, shuttling high resolution clips around the world from multiple locations.Backed by clips from his latest big bang blockbuster, Six Underground, Bay gave what is a flashy example of what is a very real phenomenon: bandwidth has shrunk the world. Higher bandwidth shrinks the world even more. Each time we widen the digital pipes connecting us, we enable new services and allow simpler global collaboration. We can work with remote partners without issue on complex, rich endeavours like 3D design, construction, or films. We enable services like streaming video to the home, cloud-based gaming, and who knows what next (my guess is that mixed reality will consume a lot of the new bandwidth being built out with 5G and fibre).At Cisco Live! Europe the most prominent technical development towards greater speed was the company’s new silicon chips, capable of switching 10.8 terabits (not dinosaurs) per second. They do this with 80% lower energy consumption – a critical consideration given that the internet now consumes an estimated 10% of the world’s electricity supply.Of course, for some people, any connection at all is a massive step. Only half the world is yet online and this was another big topic for the show: what technologies will connect the next four billion people?

Simplified interaction

The internet has always been a heterogeneous domain, assembled from a wide array of devices from different manufacturers (albeit with Cisco having a dominant position in many of its critical sub-domains), and encompassing networks and services owned and operated by a huge number of organisations. The complexity, variety and sheer number of these devices, companies and services continues to grow, making their management increasingly difficult.The third key theme I took away from the conversations about the future internet at Cisco Live! Europe was about abstraction: how can we use computing intelligence to simplify the management of complex networks? And how can such machine-based systems augment the capabilities of those using the networks as well?From the network perspective this took the form of distributed sensors and computing power (‘edge computing’) collecting data about performance and then using machine learning to translate that data into meaning for operators. Rather than overwhelming humans with reams of numbers, the systems present them with clear exceptions where things are failing or not optimal, and even offer them solutions in a single click. This might be about saving money or energy by downgrading a needlessly over-specified virtual server, or it might be about reallocating memory to speed the throughput of ecommerce orders.This intelligence doesn’t stop in the traditional domain of the IT manager. Increasingly it looks like from a single dashboard, users might be able to get a view of what is happening across the business, right down into the chips that control every production line robot, automated warehouse, or delivery drone.From a user perspective, this is about taking further friction out of your working life. Sri Srinavasan, senior vice president and general manager for the Team Collaboration Group at Cisco, demonstrated real time translation to/from Spanish in a live video chat in Webex Teams, Cisco’s collaboration product. Again, technology shrinks the world.

The vortex of digital disruption

Two clear messages undercut the prevailing sense of techno-optimism at the conference. First was what Cisco EMEAR president Wendy Mars called the “vortex of digital disruption”. Businesses will continue to be disrupted by technology, by its shrinking of the world, augmentation of human capability, and undercutting of legacy business models. There’s a sales message concealed in here: ‘we can help you’. But not every business can be saved.The second was about security, likely to remain the number one or two concern for most chief information officers over the next few years according to Cisco’s David Goeckeler, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Networking and Security business, in the opening keynote session. The more we connect, the greater the range of threats and targets in the network and the more impact an attacker can have in the physical world.But ultimately these are problems to be solved rather than insurmountable barriers. As Wendy Mars put it, “We believe in technology. We believe it provides answers to many of the challenges we face today.”Many of those answers will be underpinned by tomorrow’s internet, increasingly the universal platform for our communications, media and business operations. This places an enormous burden on its robustness. But the scale of its import means there are equally large efforts to maintain it.

The internet of the future

The internet of the future will be seamless and fast. It will be managed with systems that simplify its extreme complexity, and serve applications that strip further friction from our world. This will do little to assuage the fears of those who feel we have become too reliant on technology. But ultimately, I believe they will be forced to relent. In a hundred years, 10 terabit switches will seem no more advanced to us than combustion engines do today.Tomorrow’s internet compresses the world but more importantly it closes the gap between the physical and the digital. In a hundred years that gap will likely still be marked, but a hundred years after that, we may be completely rethinking what it means to be human in a world where the digital experience supersedes the physical.

Is immersive entertainment the future?

The Rolling Stones are releasing a 'radical, new immersive concert screening concept' based on their enormous 2016 gigs in Cuba. So what is 'immersive entertainment', and is it the future?

Physical and digital

Going to a gig is immersive entertainment. It engages all of your senses, for better or worse. If you're screaming at your favourite teen idol or thrashing around in the mosh pit, you are 100% in the moment. This is true of almost any intense form of physical activity or engagement. It's why these things are so good for us: they take us out of ourselves, and focus us wholeheartedly on what we are doing.The very need to describe something as immersive entertainment is for me an acknowledgement that this activity might not be as consuming as such a physical experience. That somehow through effort, design, or technology, the provider is trying to make something that might not be truly immersive into an experience that matches these physical-world highs.In the case of the Rolling Stones concert, this seems to amount to a combination of best-in-class audiovisual systems combined with some set dressing and live entertainers. These things together will not transport you back in time and across the ocean to Cuba. But they are designed to create as close an experience as you can get in your local concert venue.Critical to the success of this endeavour, will be the response of the rest of the audience. If they get into it, and you are surrounded by people having a good time, singing and dancing, then it will probably be very successful. If they treat it like a trip to the cinema, then it's unlikely to be close to immersive.

Future options for immersive entertainment.

Today the state of the art for group entertainment is ultra HD projection. But in 10 years time? Imagine the same event, with everyone gathering in a concert venue. But instead of the images being projected on a flat screen, you can see a virtual Mick strutting up and down the stage. He is indistinguishable from the real thing, until you remove your smart glasses and he disappears.Maybe you decide to stay home and watch the gig, and your living room is transformed into the concert venue. You lose the live atmosphere, but drinks are cheaper and there are no queues for the toilet.Neither of these options will stand up to the real thing. But with concert prices high and access limited, these sub-experiences are likely to be popular nonetheless. In this age of deepfakes, concerts need not be limited to current or living artists either. Why not time travel and see Springsteen at the Hammersmith Odeon in 75 (that's where I'd go), Nina Simone in '64 (yeah, I'd also go there) or Johnny Cash live at Folsom Prison (yep).

Experience economy

The idea of the experience economy is not new. It can arguably be traced back to the Tofflers' FutureShock in the 1970s. But it is true that a rising proportion of our expenditure is going on things we do rather than things we buy. In this world of FOMO, offering people the chance to get to a version of gigs that they missed - perhaps by decades - or couldn't afford to otherwise access, will likely prove popular. And in 10 years time, it might be the way that many of us experience live music.But the real, physical experience will always command a premium. Because for the foreseeable future, it will remain the richer experience and the only one that is truly immersive.

Why milk tells us everything about the future of content

The changing content of a bottle can tell us a lot about the future of content overall.I’m old enough to remember having whole milk delivered by the milk man, and that first creamy mouthful you used to get off the top of the bottle if you didn’t shake it first. These days we don’t drink so much whole milk. First, we started skimming all the cream and fat out of it. Then we started switching to a whole different range of milks. Oat, almond, and ten different flavours of soya. The milk we get has less cream in it, and we have a whole range of different milks to choose from.The same basic things are true of the content we consume. There’s more choice, but the ratio of cream to milk is almost certainly worse than it was. When we consider the future of content, there are some things to celebrate, and some challenges ahead.

The cream ratio

Why is the cream ratio so much worse now? Because of two factors, both of which I believe are ultimately positive.Firstly, more people now have access to the tools of creation and publishing. Education is more widespread. Digital publishing has brought the marginal cost of adding another video, e-book, or blog post to our collective digital catalogue down to near zero.Secondly, no-one is going to stand in your way if you want to publish something, with a few notable exceptions. The old intermediaries may have ensured that the quality that reached a mass audience was generally higher, but their processes also did a lot to limit the access to market of many people with talent but not the right connections or background.We have traded a higher standard of quality overall for much greater diversity and accessibility. And I think that is a trade worth making. But in the next few years, as the range of content in the global market continues to increase exponentially, we’re going to need some new ways to navigate the morass, both as publishers and as consumers.

The continuing exponential

Why do I believe that the future supply of content will continue to grow? Because the next generation of content creation tools will not just benefit from even greater resolution and bandwidth, but more importantly they will offer even more natural interfaces for content creation. We will all have the ability to create rich three-dimensional pieces in the near future. Virtual objects, creatures, spaces and even whole worlds. And we will do this naturally, perhaps even subconsciously.If the current direction of technological travel continues, we will all be recording our lives in rich multi-dimensional video for large portions of the day, simply as a factor of how the next generation of mixed reality devices – headsets – will work. And we will interface with, edit, remix, and broadcast this content with intuitive voice and gesture commands, assisted by artificial intelligences that will do much of the work for us.How on earth will we navigate the range of choices available? And how will brands who want to reach us find their way to us.

Your decision engine

I foresee us increasingly outsourcing choice to machines. Personal assistants that know us deeply, intimately, and that can understand what we enjoy and what we value. They will know us by watching us, collecting data across multiple dimensions. They will watch our social interactions as they do now, but they will also watch our emotions. Monitoring our breathing, heart rate, galvanic skin response, and neurological activity, they will understand when we enjoy something. Examining our buying behaviour, our financial state, and watching the state of our possessions as they degrade and get used up, they will know what we need and can afford. Then they will take decisions on our behalf.Who owns these taste-makers, and who can influence them, is perhaps the biggest battleground for business in the second quarter of this century. Will we own and control them ourselves, having them act as shields for our limited attention, and curators of our own personal universe? Or will they be delivered by the corporate behemoths, the things they want to sell us wound invisibly into the strands of our own expressed interests?This matters, because in tomorrow’s blended reality, the content that reaches us literally defines how we will perceive the world, not just through the screen but everywhere we walk.

Watercooler moments in the future of content

The continuing expansion of the range of content presents challenges to publisher, consumer, and society.As publishers and brands, how will we find an audience in the future? Part of the answer comes from knowing your audience and accepting the likely limitations on the scale of that audience. The future is a million niches, and many fewer events that unite them. This is why phenomena like The Bodyguard and Game of Thrones attract such a frenzy: cultural events that unite us are increasingly rare.Smaller niches tend to be more protective of their own carefully curated identity in my experience. Cracking that shell from outside is hard as Budweiser’s pride experiment showed.As consumers, will we accept the role of the machine in defining our buying and consuming habits? In many ways, we already have accepted it. The lack of resistance to social media bubbles drenched in fake news over recent political cycles has shown that.As society, will we accept the decline of the watercooler moment, the cultural phenomena that bring us together? Or will we break out of our personalised worlds to find more shared moments?On the last question, I am cautiously hopeful. But we need to be conscious of the changes that are happening to the market for content over the next decade. We need to consider what they mean for the future of content, and consider our interventions if we are going to succeed in what could be a very challenging environment, as publishers, as consumers, and as a society.

Betamax was not better than VHS

There is a frequently-told story in the tech and marketing industries about the "format war" between Betamax (Sony's video recorder technology, based on the systems used for broadcast), and the alternative from Matsushita/JVC, Video Home System (VHS). This happened back in the late 1970s, but it has passed into lore and so still gets brought up in lots of conversations and conference presentations.The story goes that VHS won the format war for video recorders in spite of Betamax being technologically superior. This is true *only* for a narrow and marginal set of performance claims that were largely irrelevant to consumers.In the US, early Betamax units could only record one hour of video. A film is around two hours, one of their games of ‘football’, more like four hours. The supposed quality advantage over VHS? 250 lines of resolution versus 240, plus a few other metrics 90% of consumers would never understand. All available in a better-built unit, but at a much higher price.This is not what technologically superiority looks like to me. It’s a total failure to understand the customer.VHS, by contrast, could record two hours from day one, and this was very quickly extended to four hours by RCA, whose people understood what the American customer wanted. By the time the format war came to Europe, the volumes of VHS recorders being produced for the US market meant the price could be lowered further.VHS didn’t win because of the porn industry (one story) or because of better marketing campaigns (the most common story). These factors may have contributed to its ultimate success. But mostly it won because it was the technologically superior product in the ways that actually mattered to the customer.

What Apple’s announcements mean for the future of TV

Apple is making a move to dominate the future of TV. But it's not the one you think...It's a few months since I stepped back from reviewing gadgets and commenting on general tech stories on the Beeb. Since then, I’ve paid less attention to the occasional slew of press releases that drop into my inbox from Apple. But this morning, as well as talking about the future of work, Julia Hartley-Brewer’s team on TalkRadio have asked me to comment on yesterday’s announcements. So, I took a look.What I saw fascinated me.For me, Apple’s announcements are not so much about new products or services. They are about the way we navigate the explosion of choice in front of us when it comes to entertainment. In the announcements of Apple TV+, the new Apple TV App, and Apple Arcade, the new ad-free games service, the same words keep coming up: “curated”, “personalised”, “discover”. Apple is catching a lot of headlines for its big-name content signings. But I think its desire, and mission, to insert itself into our decision-making is much more interesting.Fair warning, there may be some confirmation bias here. I’ve been obsessed with how we navigate the surfeit of choice we now face for some time, writing about the phenomenon of ‘reintermediation’ here, and here. This, to me, is just another example. But it’s important because of Apple’s scale and reach.

Apple swagger

Apple offering new content is undoubtedly important. It doesn’t matter how late you are to the party if you roll up with Apple-scale swagger. But Apple inserting itself into the process for how 1bn people choose content? That’s enormous. If Apple becomes the tastemaker, the front end to all TV services, then it will have incredible power over what we watch. It can diminish the value of the brands behind that discovery engine – brands that right now act as a heuristic for choice. Don’t know what to watch? There’s probably something good on the BBC.I believe that in the future a lot of our decision-making processes will be augmented by smart machines. Many of us already let our digital music accounts do the choosing with automatically curated playlists. This potentially creates a more open market for content creators: no longer is your success at the whim of a big distributor if you can get it found by the right discover engine. But it also places enormous power with those discovery engines – just as we have already handed Google so much power by making it the primary means by which we navigate the web.

Does Apple own the future of TV?

This move by Apple is a smart one as it transitions to a higher proportion of service-based revenue. It makes Apple ownership more sticky, because your preferences are bound to your Apple account. But it also allows Apple to exert that stickiness beyond its own ecosystem, if it can use its new channels as a trojan horse to get the Apple TV app on to third party devices and smart TVs.Don’t get me wrong: I’m as dazzled by Oprah and Spielberg as the next person. But reintermediation is the bigger play here.

The ideology at the heart of the web

Has the initial ideology at the heart of the web been corrupted?There are events in the cultural calendar that lead people to call a futurist. For the last 24 hours my phone has been buzzing with researchers for radio stations, wanting a comment on what the next thirty years of the web might look like, on this, the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for a new scheme for information management.Berners-Lee has naturally featured at the heart of these conversations, with clips of his chat with Rory Cellan-Jones preceding my own interviews. Berners-Lee is concerned about the fragmentation of the web and internet, into often proprietary and less-open segments that stymie the web’s evolved purpose: universal access to knowledge. Whether it’s China’s restricted version of the internet, or the polluted conversation spheres of Facebook and YouTube, these closed rooms are anathema to this ideal. Inside them, access to information is limited, monetised, or otherwise leveraged for control. But there’s something more fundamental about these operations that I think offends the Web’s creator and perhaps should concern all of us.Each one of these domains can succeed in its less-noble goals because it is in some way closed. Building walls creates a smaller territory that can be more easily controlled. This is great for innovation: if you’re only trying to shape a smaller space you can do so much more quickly. Hence the speed at which Facebook and others can introduce features – “moving fast and breaking things”. The walls give you control over access, locking people in and keeping others out.Where it gets really pernicious is when you give users the ability to build their own walls. This is something the author Matt Haig pointed out about Twitter recently:https://twitter.com/matthaig1/status/1105382871412424704Tribalism is the right word, and it’s not just Twitter. Every attempt to Balkanise the web and its offshoots is effectively an attempt to create, or support for others attempts, to reinforce tribal boundaries, based on politics, culture, race, or any other factor. These may not be the intentions but they are definitely counter to the original ideology at the heart of the web: a single, shared, global resource.Berners-Lee’s work throughout the last thirty years has been about connecting humanity to the web: half the world remains offline. It’s a noble goal because of the inherent value of access to knowledge. But what underpins it is a recognition that we are a single group, in spite of our differences. A global web breaks down barriers rather than builds them. It forces us to confront the fact that we have much more in common than separating us. And it creates a platform for sharing knowledge and truths at a time when that couldn’t be more important, particularly with looming issues like climate change that can only really be tackled with political will underpinned by understanding.When we consider the next thirty years, even before we get into the media through which we access the web, we have to consider whether we will protect the ideology at the heart of the web. Do we want a single resource for all people, or whether instead we want to create a platform predicated on division.

Sensory Overload: Why we struggle with too many communications channels

It’s fashionable to knock email at the moment. Plenty of articles have been written about how it wastes more time than it saves, and many companies are now enforcing strict email management rules in a bid to reclaim productivity. But I don’t believe email is the problem.We now have a wealth of communication tools and information resources at our fingertips. Every one of them is competing for a bit of our attention, distracting us with sounds, images, flashing lights and vibrations. Every one of the channels and tools available to us is generally well designed as a product in its own right. Few people struggle to use Outlook, or Skype, or a mobile phone, or Firefox. But the problem is that it is never an either/or choice in the modern life — we are constantly multi-tasking in a bid to keep on top of all the information coming to us.Just looking at my desktops both real and virtual now, I have: a landline; a mobile; Skype and headset (for two SkypeIn numbers and my Skypename); Thunderbird (handling four email accounts); Outlook (handling a fifth email account, plus calendar and task list with pop-up reminders); VNC (for controlling my server and jukebox); and a Timesheet application (again with pop-up reminders).Any one of these I can handle quite ably, even two or three at a time are fine. But there are days when everything seems to go off at once, or even worse, in a constant stream that prevents any work except talking for an entire day.In the short term this means developing strategies to handle all the different media: ignoring some calls, putting Skype on DND, turning off pop-up alerts, and ignoring email for large parts of the day. But in the long term I think the technology has to change. While I am sure our brains will eventually evolve to deal with all the various inputs, why should we wait a few thousand years for that to happen?Instead there needs to be a standard for communications tools to collaborate and share information about our availability — and willingness — to accept inbound information and communications requests. This extends right across the different media: if my Skype is set to DND, I also don’t want calls on my mobile or landline (unless I have specified otherwise — perhaps calls from a certain number, friend or family group). If I am in the middle of writing a long blog entry, I don’t want my anti-virus to pop-up while I am typing, or for Windows to ask me to restart because it has completed an update. In fact, I want an interface that actively helps me to concentrate by blocking out other distractions while I am working, perhaps only offering me contextual information, or messages that are relevant to what I am doing.This ties in very much with the media filtering technology that is the ultimate goal of most search companies: they want to understand you well enough to suggest TV, books and articles that you might like and save you trawling the enormous oceans of data on the internet. That’s great for home, but if we’re going to stop the white collar classes becoming a nation of digital fidgets, some of that effort really needs to be directed at the workplace.

Convergence is not (only) the future of gaming

Hideo Kojima is a gaming legend. His plans to integrate gaming, film, music and more, formed the basis of a quick interview I gave this morning on the sofa at BBC Breakfast.It’s not a new idea that these different media might converge. In some ways it is happening already: look at the integration across the Marvel Universe where comic stories weave in and out of games, TV shows and films. Or how film promotion now starts with experiential games seeded around the internet. People have long considered ways to make the cinema experience interactive — a group ‘choose your own adventure’. And the natural conclusion of high-end games is total immersion in an experience of cinematic reality via VR.But I don’t think this is what Kojima is suggesting. Rather, what I interpret from his few words, is that a single, multi-threaded narrative might be explored through multiple forms of media combined in a single entertainment package.This makes a lot of sense with the convergence of entertainment delivery on a small number of devices: phones, tablets and streaming boxes. With some caveats, and the support of some high-end servers in the background, these devices are capable of delivering anything from a simple page of text to a rich VR experience.Why not utilise this breadth of capability to engage us in many different ways? It’s certainly one answer. But I don’t think this is the biggest opportunity in the future of gaming.The largest single segment of the gaming market, following years of rapid growth, is mobile gaming. Within that, the largest phenomenon in recent years is Pokemon Go. Though limited, I think this AR experience points to what will be the most popular and pervasive form of gaming.

Lessons for tomorrow

Imagine real life, gamified through the overlay of the physical world with digital sights and sounds. Virtual places, people, objects and creatures that you can interact with as though they were real. We’ve acclimatised to people speaking to themselves on wireless headsets. People running around the streets chasing Pokemon seemed to generate a lot more smiles and good will than criticism and questioning. I think we’ll adapt to people playing in the streets in their own virtual world — eventually.The revenue streams are certainly there to drive such an industry. Imagine an advert you have to interact with to win a game. Imagine that advert is a virtual character with a rounded virtual intelligence. This is a far cry from today’s billboards: this is hyper-targeted, totally personalised, and fully interactive.Whether you like the sound of that or not, it’s coming.

Why I Hated the iPhone, and What Amazon Can Learn from It

Ten years ago, Apple launched the iPhone. Not long after, Apple offered to loan me an iPhone for review. I hated it.

By this point, I was a few years into smartphone ownership. Not only that, I had helped to launch a smartphone that was pretty revolutionary in its own right.

Working on the marketing campaigns of a range of tech firms, I had attended the enormous Mobile World Congress conference for probably five or six consecutive years. One of our clients there provided the OS for a new smartphone from a Finnish start-up. This phone combined a full touch display, gyroscopic controls, and a browser that neatly handled full web pages. So many of the things that would go on to form part of the iPhone story.

This was 2003.

For all our efforts, the MyOrigo MyDevice, as it was called, flopped. It couldn’t get approval to run on enough mobile networks (a slow and painful process then) before the start-up ran out of cash. But it set my expectations for what a smartphone should be.

Without this device, I stuck with Handspring Treos. Bulky, but very effective business tools. There were even a few games for them thanks to their extensive Palm heritage.

Then the iPhone arrived.

By 2007 I was used to having two key features on my smartphones: 3G connectivity and the ability to add new apps. The iPhone I tested had some clear benefits. The touch screen was great, the software was slick and the design was slim. But no apps? No 3G? This seemed like a massive retrograde step. I was happy to stick with my chunky Treo, and later chose a SonyEricsson P1 over the iPhone because of the lack of these — to me, at least — core features.

Of course, eighteen months after the launch of the first iPhone, Apple had introduced the 3G version and the App Store, not just addressing my objections but crushing them. The App Store particularly has been revolutionary, giving anyone a simple, trustable experience in installing additional software.

Steve Jobs initial assertion of ‘desktop class’ apps may have been slightly overselling it. But from that point the iPhone became a serious productivity tool and entertainment device. And now the smartphone, that has always followed this initial template, is the primary platform for all our computing interactions.

What’s next?

It’s interesting to examine Amazon’s Echo/Alexa in the light of these objections. What needs to be added to take Echo from an interesting and clearly popular product, to the template for a class of device that may reach smartphone scale?

I think there are three problems to solve.

1. Connectivity

This time it’s not about data, it’s about interaction. The smart home is a very clunky construct at the moment. If Amazon can smooth the interactions with a wider range of devices, it would be welcome. This is not unconnected to…

2. Apps

Alexa seems to be reaching the scale where everyone will want/need to be part of its app/skill store. This would be hugely beneficial to users. Finally, there will be one interface to unite the disparate devices around the home. And the many services we have become used to accessing through distinct apps.

3. Discovery

Of course, none of these capabilities have any value unless people know they are there. How do you discover skills and interconnection options on a screenless device? It feels to me like there is an Alexa-initiated conversational element missing here. It would need to know who is in the room, not just that someone is there. But imagine a conversation like: “Hi Tom, I’ve detected a Fibaro home automation system on your network. Would you like me to connect?” That would be much more satisfying than the current app-driven controls.

Facebook Facing the Same Challenge As Every Media Owner: Editorial Integrity vs Advertising Revenue

So Facebook’s results are out and they are largely positive — at least as positive as the previous quarter’s. Which just goes to show fickle the stockmarket can be: last quarter Facebook’s shares took a hammering, whereas this time around they’re up 13%.

Personally I’m more interested in the business than the vagaries of the stock market, and particularly in the challenge that Facebook is now facing. Because it appears to me that this very modern business is facing a very old challenge.

Newspapers and magazines can very rarely survive on the cover price alone. So they take in advertising. This advertising sometimes comes in very innocuous forms that can be of great value to the consumer: for example, small ads. Or it can be rather more insidious: poorly flagged ‘advertorials’ for example, adverts masquerading as independent editorial content.

At worst, the wall between editorial independence and advertising revenue can be demolished altogether and when that happens, the ‘news’ is defined by whoever pays the most money.

Now take a look at Facebook. It may be we who generate the editorial content, rather than a team of journalists, but its business is not that different to that of a newspaper or magazine. More than 80% of its revenue comes from advertising. And as it tries to grow that revenue, it is going to be pushing the boundaries of our editorial independence.

Take for example, Promoted Posts: the ability for advertisers to bump up the visibility of their posts to those who have liked their page — and their friends. This is an explicit manipulation of the feeds we receive from our friends, confusing what might be important/valuable to us, with what someone else wants to be important.

Likewise with mobile: with limited screen real estate, how is Facebook going to insert ads without squeezing them into the streams that we really want to read?

These are my concerns for Facebook, because I think many users are already reaching the limit of their tolerance with the platform. Privacy breaches and unwelcome redesigns have already tested people’s commitment. And in the last couple of years we’ve seen growth rates slow and even temporarily reverse in some territories around the world.

As ever I’m not saying Facebook is going to fail tomorrow. Or that I don’t like the platform: I am one of the billion active users. But I think it has a serious challenge on its hands to sustain its position in the market, and I don’t fancy its chances in the long term.

We’re just not that tied to Facebook. The more it infringes on our editorial control, the more we will move away.

Future language: precision matters

Life is (sadly) not like an Aaron Sorkin script. Whatever we may like to think about our own linguistic abilities, not many can spar with the wit and speed of his characters. Maybe Stephen Fry. But not most of us. We always think of the perfect retort three hours later.

Perhaps in the future we will be more Sorkin-esque. We certainly might wish we were. Because two things are happening that will raise the value of efficient, effective verbal communication.

Speaking machines

Firstly, our interface with machines is increasingly going to be based on natural language. We will talk and the machines will listen. And vice versa. The greater the speed, accuracy and range of our verbal communication, the higher the bandwidth of our interface to the machine.

This could take us in a number of directions. Witness the rise of txtspeak, a rich and highly efficient form of communication, even if it offends the eyes of the preceding generations. Or look at the syntax of really powerful web search terms, a mixture of human language and computer code. Constructing them well requires great skill.

I like to think that the depth of our long-evolved languages will prove superior to these hybrids, but future language will doubtless evolve in response to the new needs, as it always has.

The end of low-value interactions

The second thing that’s happening is that our low-value interactions are disappearing. For people like me who hate, and I mean HATE, administration, this is a huge bonus. Less and less will we need to fill out forms, interact with call centres, deal with post, or scan receipts. Because we will either allow institutions sufficient access to our personal data to let them find the answer. or we will have an AI assistant who handles these things for us.

There are serious issues with both these steps, around privacy, security and employment. How much do we want institutions to know about us — particularly states? How much are we willing to trade or risk in order to eliminate many of life’s major irritations? How many jobs will be lost as a result of the falling friction in our interactions — friction previously smoothed by human intervention?

Personally? I am concerned about just how much I might let go in order to never have to fill out a form again. For all my principles, I would give a lot for that.

Future language

As low value interactions diminish so the the importance of being skilled in high value interactions will grow, whether they are with machines or people. The better we can express ourselves, the higher the bandwidth of those interactions. I’m not saying every conversation is going to be like a Sorkin-script. But we might all start to place more emphasis on the quality of our repartee.

The Unbeatable Bandwidth of Being There

I gave a talk last night to the Latvian events industry in a little town called Ventspils on the Baltic coast.

Sometimes when I give a talk, it is on a subject I know inside out. Sometimes, I have to get to know the industry first, using my Intersections tool to analyse its pressure points and understand the likely impact of the big vectors of change. If I’m speaking to a new industry in a foreign country? Well, let’s just say it’s reassuring when my hypotheses are confirmed by the audience’s reaction.

I put it to the audience last night that the reason for the continuing — and in fact growing — success of live events (both popular arts and business), is about the bandwidth of communication between human beings. This bandwidth, across the multiple channels of our senses, remains exponentially greater in a live, physical environment when compared to any form of alternative media, however rich.

If anything, the increasing prevalence of digital media, in incredible volumes, has actually enhanced the value of live events. Just as the prevalence of email has made real mail more exciting, and the rise of the MP3 has created a boom in vinyl, a more tactile format.

This isn’t to say that the events industry doesn’t face challenges. Technologies continue to advance and increase the bandwidth of the experience that they deliver, as we saw this week with the delivery of the first Oculus Rift to a consumer.

Technology also underpins the increasing choice of events that consumers can access, reducing the friction of organisation through intermediary platforms like Meetup, Eventbrite and Fatsoma. Combine this with the many ways of reaching consumers and the growing noise across the many channels of communication, and making an event economically successful will be increasingly difficult.

As a counterbalance, there is the opportunity to re-market the content created at live events as many organisers are now doing. Streaming passes for business conferences, or recordings of live DJ sets as enabled by new start-up Evermix.

Overall then, it’s a positive picture. But to realise this ideal, the events industry must like every other, be highly adaptive, capable of latching onto new trends and meeting customer demand while it lasts, before moving on to the next big thing.

You can access my slide deck here. Use your arrow keys to navigate. You may want to zoom in our out depending on the size and format of your screen.

Twitter 'Favorites': A Case Study of Evolving Social Media Etiquette

How do you use Twitter’s ‘favorite’ button? Twitter itself suggests a couple of ways that people can use it here: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169874-favoriting-a-tweet

“Favorites, represented by a small star icon in a Tweet, are most commonly used when users like a Tweet. Favoriting a Tweet can let the original poster know that you liked their Tweet, or you can save the Tweet for later.”

Personally, I use favourites1 largely for the latter reason as part of an attempt to overcome what I still believe is one of the biggest problems on the web: discovery.

I want to know who is talking about issues that are important to me, primarily the four categories we cover: the future human, future cities, future business and future communications. I also want to know about great keynotes (and not just TEDTalks), both as a speaker who is always looking to improve, and as a conference organiser with TMRW, thinking about the next event.

I don’t have time to manually scour Twitter for people talking about these things so I use an automated tool that finds and favourites tweets containing certain key phrases2. This creates a shortlist (or sometimes a long list) of tweets for me (and Mason, my colleague who co-curates the feed) to check out.

The phrases we search for are constantly being tweaked but as you can see from looking at the current favourites list, it has a pretty good hit rate of interesting stuff. From it I find new people to follow, interesting articles and things that we might retweet.

We also find abuse. Like this (excuse the language).

Now this person clearly uses favourites in the other way that Twitter suggests. They’re having a very difficult time. I can absolutely see how favouriting a tweet where they were documenting their problems could be seen as offensive — if you assume that by favouriting the tweet I was ‘liking’ their misfortune.

For me and others (I know I’m not alone in this), the favourite has two meanings. It’s not as simple as a Facebook ‘Like’. But we may well be in the minority. To the extent that in the future our usage of the favourite is not only not recognised, it is broadly accepted as wrong. Maybe that’s the case already?

Either way this is an interesting little case study of how the meaning of simple gestures in social media can evolve rapidly, be interpreted differently by different people, and how that difference in interpretation can clearly cause offence.

1. Dropping the quotes and adding a 'u' from this point on.

2. By the way I'm not trying to hide the fact that the tool that I use to do this is promoted as a marketing tool, that that is how we discovered it, or that it works very well at finding us new followers as well as people to follow. But research is absolutely a key part of its value.

Is Social Media Good Or Bad?

Ah those wonderful binary choices born of radio phone-ins. I spent this morning defending social media following its shocking abuse in the Criado-Perez affair.

Is social media bad? Of course it isn’t. Normally I’d say something along the lines of “It’s technology. It has no agency. It can’t be inherently good or bad. It’s how it is used.” But I’m not sure that’s entirely true in this case.

For a start the platforms themselves may be all bits and bytes. But they are operated by companies that do most definitely have an agenda, encapsulated in everything from their user interface design to their usage policies. These policies for a long time led Facebook to justify removing images of breastfeeding while leaving untouched images of domestic abuse. Clearly while there is no agency in the technology, there is in the people behind it.

There are many examples of the powers of social media being abused, beyond the Criado-Perez threats. There is the daily trolling, the torrent of threats and abuse that regularly seem to arrive at the accounts of prominent women, and also the bullying that takes place on more closed social networks like Facebook. As a teenager being victimised there are few places to hide these days.

But you have to balance all of this against the good that social media does. And not all of this can be put down to people doing good using social media. Some of it is intrinsic in the technology’s very concept.

This comes down to democratised, disintermediated, decentralised, distributed publishing and communications. The ability to communicate with one person or many without limitations of cost, state or editorial control. These things are a fundamental part of the architecture of social media. There are weaknesses in this model — the lack of verification for example, or the power put into the hands of those wanting to abuse — but these for me are far outweighed by the good.

The power for communities, political and protest groups to self-organise faster, across greater geographies and without restrictions. The ability for people with shared niche interests to connect across the globe. The chance for families and friends distributed by the nature of our globalised world to stay in close contact. These things are almost immeasurably valuable and in 99% of cases are not abused.

Positive use of social media dramatically outweighs the negative. That’s why stories like the threats to Caroline Criado-Perez make the news. Change needs to happen to protect people in her position and prosecute the criminals abusing those threats. But we have to make sure that the great things about social media are protected when we make those changes.

Social Media and The Hive Mind

Science fiction is full of instances of the ‘hive mind’, a collective consciousness shared across small groups or even entire species of beings. The narrative varies: sometimes they act as one individual through many bodies, and sometimes they have distinct personalities but share their thoughts through some form of telepathic communication.

While we’re a long way from telepathy, you can see the parallels between the latter description and the current generations of heavy social media users. We freely share many of our thoughts across the networks to our friends and family wherever they are. As a result I know what my friends are thinking, what they are doing (or have been doing) and where they are.

Some people are clearly more open than others: I consider myself a fairly heart-on-the-sleeve sort, but I can’t imagine sharing some of the updates (or pictures) posted by some in my network. But I can see that level of broadcast intimacy becoming increasingly the norm. It feels very in sync with the current culture of emoting, present in music, celebrity revelations, lifestyle magazines and newspaper columns.

And as the friction involved in sharing updates becomes lower, I can see us sharing more and more. Some of it will be automated (such as location), much of it will be banal. But it will all contribute to a kind of background hum that gives us an extra sense of what is going on with our connections. We are already developing and using meta analysis tools that will help us sift meaning from this hum: just look at trends on Twitter if you want to see the most popular memes circulating the earth.

Where will this all end? Well if you take my rosily positive view of the world, it could all work out quite nicely. Tying this flight of fancy back to present day issues, imagine a global consensus based on the collected thoughts of the species. A grand, global, technologically-inspired version of proportional representation. It would provide an interesting take on democracy.

I just hope our judgement — and our wit — can keep pace with the advances of technology.

[This blog posts finishes a train of thought started on the way home from FiveLive last night talking about the fact that young people are switching from SMS to instant messaging according to a report from Mobile Youth. My take? Not surprising given that IM is lower friction and lower cost.]