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.

"My precious" - why IT/IM should not be like Gollum

(c) MGM 212

With the impending realse of the film version of Tolkien's The Hobbit in the UK, I was reminded of the character Gollum's attitude to the One Ring. He described it as "my precious" despite the fact it had distorted his mind and was gardually killing him. Whilst such an attitude to something you possess and control is a bit extreme, many CIOs, CTOs and even CFOs, take the same view of their information management/IT provision. 

I am the first to champion the call that information is an organisation's most important asset, but that does not mean I agree that the organisation is always the best to manage and explot that asset.

I keep my money in a bank, I pay my local mechanic to service my car, so why, if I were still a CIO/CTO, would I have issues about asking better resouced, focussed and trained professionals to provide my information management/IT capability?

There are 9 questions/myths about managed services/outsourcing and cloud provision that I regularly have to address - and burst.

Gollum didn't have a happy end in Lord of the Rings. Neither will CIOs/CTOs who do not prioritise delivery over (percieved) control.

FAST enterprise search is back - and doing it in Norway

Further to the Microsoft SharePoint 2012 Conference held in Vegas in mid November, Norwegian search solutions company Comperio has been running a series of events around Europe. In London Bjorn Olstad, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, and a key acquisition when Microsoft acquired FAST Search and Transfer, confirmed that Microsoft is lifting search out of SharePoint and that enterprise search development will be headquartered in Norway, where the company is intending to recruit 50 people.
This is highly strategic good news, and for me confirms the line that Bjorn (and I from an independent perspective) have been saying for at least the last six years, "search is the new portal".