Work and Play on the same page

As readers will know from my profile, I am a trainee guard on the North York Moors Railway. Whilst a heritage line and labour of love for volunteers like myself, it still has to pay bills for the likes of coal etc.
One 'nice little earner' is using the railway for photo and film shoots, the most recent being for the fashion house Ted Baker.
The trains are normally completely divorced from my analyst role and day time work, so imagine my surprise/delight to see an advert including a shot from the shoot on a page of the irreverent online rag TheRegister - totally distracted me (the train shot, not the model).

If you are into stylish clothes, and looking at the attendees at this week's Oracle Open World that doesn't apply to many in the IT fraternity, the full set can be found on the Ted Baker blog.

IBM Cognos Finance Forum 2013 - 20 June - It is a good elephant in the room

I was delighted to be invited to speak on Big Data in finance by UK based Budgeting Solutions, as it appears that many in the finance field are still (often rightly) sceptical about so called 'Big Data'. They have seen multiple definitions, got all excited when they heard the software was 'free', because it was open source, and then scared when told the analysis was best done outside the organisation's boundaries in 'the cloud'. Finally when they went looking for some meaningful information at a conference or exhibition they find the 'logo' (for Hadoop) is a yellow elephant that belonged to the child of Cloudera's founder Doug Cutting.

Whilst I recognise that many of my finance colleagues are not as 'serious' as the stereotypes would have us believe, we rely on the presumption that they are naturally conservative in nature and like to work on facts and evidence. Certainly not on hype and definitely not on fashionable logos. We like finance people to be innovative and open, but 2008 onward has shown us what happens when some get too 'creative' and ignore the conservative instinct.

On Thursday I wont be bringing a yellow elephant, and I may not wear a tie, but I hope I can show some great examples how Big Data is more than a fad, and has a great deal to offer the finance community in making better and less risky business decisions.

Gamification?

I am currently reflecting having posted the two tweets I have copied below:

Why do we need 'Municipal Gamification' to incentivise public workers to do their jobs? why did we kill vocation? #sad

why is it, whenever I hear the term #gamification I think of Hans Christian Andersen? http://bit.ly/zzbbaZ #gsummit13

Having just undertaking an extensive bit of consultancy/research for a customer on exploiting big data in the retail arena, I am currently thinking that a considered opinion on Gamification is needed. It probably needs more psychologists than entrepreneurs.

Would love to debate, but it needs to be away fro the buzz of a San Francisco 'hype fest'.

Who is my broadband provider?

The announcement by BSkyB (Sky) that it had bought the half milion broadband customer accounts from O2 illustrates both the pros and the cons of a 'semi' regulated market for communications (whether Broadband, telephony, wifi, radio, satellite or terrestrial televison). Of course the pros and the cons differ if you are a customer rather than a provider.
BSkyB has, with a £180 million cheque, become the second largest broadband provider in the UK after BT, leapfrogging Virgin Media and Talk Talk.
So customers have the pros of being having a relationship with an organisation which makes its money form multichannel content delivery, and the cons of the same (expcet a lot of upsell/crossell emails phone calls etc).
BSkyB has the pros of a bigger market for its multichannel products, but pushes itself closer to the centre of the regulator's (Ofcom) radar.
O2 of course can now concentrate on its core business i.e. getting money out of mobile contracts, and £180 million will by a significant number of 4G masts.
There was speculation that in the recent UK 4G auctions Sky would want to acquire some spectrum. This deal gives it a whole lot of customers without costs and risks of establishing the infrastructure to become a mobile network operator (MNO). Lets hope that the so called 4-play operator also extends it Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) so that the former O2 customers see service benefit in addition to the increase in marketing calls.

Blasts from the past

Just found two videos of myself on the interweb. One at EMC Documentum in Lisbon, and the other at the EU ICT conference in Lyon. Quite scary, but they do give the confidence a boost. Links here if you promise not to criticise.

BT goes mobile (again)

I write as someone who still has the copy of his first personal mobile phone contract with an organisation that was called BT Cellnet. Of course BT decided that mobile wasn't core to its business and sold it off as O2. Now its back as a mobile network operator (MNO) having bid a significant amount (albeit of a lower than expected overall government take) for UK 4G spectrum in the recent auction.

It was originally considered that BT would be using the spectrum for in and around buildings to increase the attractiveness and utility of its Total Internet offering for both subscribers and casual users. However it may be that the ambitions have grown and BT sees an opportunity to both take on the four incumbant MNOs (EE, Telefonica/O2, Vodafone and 3) in populated areas, and to use the spectrum to address the 'digital divide' issues for areas that cannot get effective broadband (unless they do it themselves).
Furthermore, BT paid for what was described as a 'meaningful quantity of spectrum'. It may have been coincidence, but this week BT announced it had bought ESPN's UK and Ireland TV channels, and as I have postulated before football 'on the go' needs 4G.

Irrespective of what BT intends to put across its spectrum, having BT back in the MNO game can only be good for competition.

Social media and politics

'Head on the internet, and feet on the ground' is the slogan used by Italian stand up comedian and leader of the Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle) (M5S) political party, Beppe Grillo. M5S gained 25% of votes in the country's February 2013 election, up from 5% poll level in May 2012. I am not in a position to undertake a detailed geo-political analysis of the result, what I do know is that M5S was only started in 2009 and has now truly demonstrated the potential political power of social media. Although the focus of M5S is challenging the political status quo, one of the party's policies is free internet access. With this in mind it organises and communicates highly successfully via Facebook and Twitter. Furthermore Grillo's blog is the most widely read in Italy.

M5S isn't the first political party to gain impact by making extensive use of the internet and social media to communicate with supporters. The German Pirate Party started in 2006, has been achieving 7-9% of votes in elections in the last two years. Across the Atlantic the reelection of President Barack Obama was acknowledged to have been widely supported by the clever use of the Obama Facebook Page, and there are other many other similar examples.

Yes M5S is running on an anti-austerity protest ticket and that has obviously boosted voting numbers. However, whilst it still holds meetings, unlike 'legacy' parties M5S appeals to young people and arranges those meetings and political rallies using the same tools as those people use to organise a meal out. In 2012 there were reportedly in excess of 1 billion smartphones in the world - that's a lot of potential voters. Legacy parties take note.

Big data roads lead to Santa Clara

There were a lot of really good conferences on Big Data last year, but the one that stood out for me was the combined Strata Conference + Hadoop World, held in London in November. So this week's two-day conference in California, with some cracking case studies, is starting the year off very nicely. Particularly looking forward to presentations by Mark Madsen, Sarah Sproehnie and Yael Garten. Will report my thoughts.

Data mining goes mainstream - mark your diaries

26 March, London, the UK Symposium on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2013, organised by BCS SGAI, the Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence. Very flattered and almost intimidated to be invited to add an analyst's view to the speakers.
Here's the abstract;
"The emergence of in memory databases, notably for businesses the announcement in January 2013 that HANA now underpins the SAP Business Suite (and by the time of UKKDD 2013 expect Oracle to have offered something similar), illustrates that data mining capabilities are moving from the ‘interesting, and nice to have’ categories, to potential business differentiators. In this presentation Mike will look at the potential adoption and benefits of in memory databases, and describe why he believes that Data Scientist is going to be the next big role within business information management."
Expect some challenging debate.

NI plays £20m 'Spot the Ball'

News International (NI) which publishes The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun in the UK has purchased the clip rights for English Premier League matches starting with the 2013/14 season. This is a deal reported to be valued at £20 million. Clip rights allow the publication of 'near real-time' (actually a couple of minutes delayed) snippits of action, such as goals, that are ideal to be consumed on mobile phones and tablets.
So why am I, as technologist, who was always the last to be picked for the football team at school, interested in this? Because it is all about the technology raising the money to rescue the loss-making broadsheet papers, and ensuring an additional income stream for the 'red top', before as seems inevitable, parent company News Corporation sells its newspaper publishing business.
As demonstrated at the Olympics last year and by NI's sister company BSkyB's Sky Go offering, streaming technology is now very robust, and as 4G spreads across UK population centres (where Premier League football stadia are) next year performance should be good.
However, monetising clips is incredibly difficult because the consumer market has come to expect the majority of content to be on the internet for free. Furthermore the combination of HD cameras on mobile devices, wifi and YouTube means that user generated clips are always quickly and readily available.
Notwithstanding that I believe these clips could be the 'killer content' on the three newspapers' apps for tablets and smart phones. The Times and Sunday Times already have their written and expanding video content behind a £4/week paywall, admittedly with only 131,000 subscribers in October 2012. However, The Sun does not currently have a paywall, and it must also be assumed that a significant proportion of the red top's football loving readership will already have access to Premier League action via SkySport television.
BUT, and it is not so much of a big but, Premier League season tickets now range from £500 - £2000 a year. With single match day tickets being not less than £30, a significant proportion of the target market for match attendees is becoming  ABC1. Those who have more than average incomes, those most likely to have iPad and also those most likely to read The Times and Sunday Times. Could be a nice alignment and inducement to pay for the broadsheet app?
NI has said (at the moment) it has no plans to syndicate the clip rights so it is going to have to get its returns from the apps for its own titles. With The Times and Sunday Times currently losing £40m a year, this means The Sun app must be going behind a paywall this year. Will The Sun readers go for it? Well many pay £60-90 a month for their SkySport subscription, something many of us would never have thought sustainable a couple of years ago, and they are probably also paying approximately £20 month on their mobile contracts.
I remember watching football matches of the 1970's and 1980's when supporters in the stand would be listening via an earpiece on their transistor radios to the commentary on a rival's match whilst watching their favourite team. Their equivalents now have tablets and smart phones.
So how about £4/week to access and share HD clips with your mates at the stadium, in your living room, in the pub, or wherever else you are watching a match?
I think NI has spotted the ball, and also expect to see many more tablets in the hands of Premier League supporters while they are supposedly watching a match they have paid for.