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.