The love-hate relationship of Governments with “cyberspace”

A few weeks ago I started contributing to the innovation generation blogs, an initiative sponsored by Alcatel. Here is my first piece entitled: Governments Ease Into Cyberspace.

In October 2012 I took part in the Conference on Cyberspace, an event put together by the Hungarian government on behalf of the international community. The conference hall was packed with ministers, dignitaries, and ambassadors, as well as a few business people like myself. My pitch was about the importance of the digital economy, and I learned that approaches can differ greatly depending on countries.

The conference title is eye opening. I hadn’t heard the term “cyberspace” since the beginning of the 1990s. Today, 81 percent of the UK population is using the Internet; we all spend our days in cyberspace, so it doesn’t need to be called that anymore. My hunch is that governments still perceive the digital economy as something on the side that they need to embrace — maybe reluctantly. I also know of too many businesses that still see the Internet in that manner. They are the ones that won’t be there in a few years.

[the digital economy and the public sector are, sometimes, worlds apart]

Developing markets are where things will happen and are already happening. Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, India, and even Albania are among those showing the most progress. The effort Albania is putting into digitizing schools and government institutions and procedures is amazing. The country went from nothing in 2005 to a situation where “all possible government services are pushed online” in the words of Genc Pollo, its innovation and ICT minister.

Similarly, India’s conference representative showed determination and poise. In India, information technology and the Internet are clearly seen as big opportunities, not just for business, but also for national development. Yet I couldn’t get the same feeling of passion from the more developed countries’ presentations. Western economies have a lot to worry about at a time when industrialization is faltering and the digital economy already weighs so much.

My peers on the panel about the digital economy and growth agreed with me that there is a serious disconnect between politicians and business people. This is not a matter of scorn or disregard. What it means is that we are not on the same wavelength. Most policy makers wish to foster growth and seduce innovators and entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, the language they use is often incomprehensible to the business community.

Living and breathing open data
Governments speak of open data as a goal, but we have lived and breathed open data for years (more than a decade, in fact, for many of us on that panel). Sharing information has always been a staple of Internet marketing. Our Websites must contain what Vincent Flanders calls “addictive content.”

The European journal ePractice said in a 2011 report that governments are coming to grips with this, but too often the rubber doesn’t meet the road, due to “the closed culture within government, which is caused by a general fear of the disclosure of government failures.” Not only can citizens benefit from open data, but businesses can, too, by proposing services and applications based on such data.

Control and ownership is probably one of the most difficult issues for government authorities. All governments want to embrace the openness of the Web and its promise of a porous global economy. At the same time, an unfiltered democracy in which all expressions are allowed is a serious challenge. There was a precedent for that debate with the eG8 forum that took place in Paris in 2011.

It’s hard to tell whether the Conference on Cyberspace will change the way governments and their citizens use the Internet or if our efforts to promote the digital economy will prove successful. It also seems that the Web grew organically from day one. Then citizens, governments, and businessmen embraced it and broke a few laws en passant. Then regulations were put in place, and all moved to the next thing. This chaotic yet pragmatic way of enforcing innovation has proven very efficient. I’m certain it will remain the case.

Nissan: lessons learnt from the “new star of India” business case

The first afternoon session at the usefulsocialmedia conference Nissan – David Parkinson, General Manager of Social & Digital engagement for EMEA & India (@dave_nissan). Dave introduced his pitch by saying he is not an “expert” that we all learn from our mistakes … I have made that statement very often myself so I cannot but agree more.

3 Nissan models are available in India amongst which the micra:

The New star of India video shot in Bollywood by Nissan

What was the problem?

The spending by Nissan was smaller in this country and the mindshare in the country was less than 10% compared to 40+% for VW. The aim was to double the brand awareness in India. At the time, social media awareness was lacking and a lot of the social media activity was also swamped with kinds trying to get a job before Nissan took over the page. Nissan hired the AKQA agency from London and came up with 3 big ideas:

1. big button in cities which could win prizes
2. social game for finding cool things in the city
3. crowd-sourced Bollywood movie!

Idea 3 was retained.

Indian Web

In India, mobile dominates, but 3G is still flaky. 60% of Internet users still access the Web through Internet cafés. Facebook is now the most successful platform in India so it was the right place to be. The idea started with this big idea “the star of india” off the www.facebook.com/nissanindia page.

People were asked to come and audition: an application was created on Facebook which which the users could film themselves dancing and then votes would decide who would be chosen. Podiums were set up in shopping malls and in fact, this is where most videos came from because Indians could not film themselves and upload the videos. “The application was our first mistake” David said and even, “some users couldn’t access the application at all” he added. Recruitment went on and bloggers were also brought into the campaign.

But an emerging market is “a completely different kettle of fish”

• did a good job of improving the recollection of the Micra in India (+50% awareness)
• the result for remembering Nissan was less successful David very honestly admitted
• The Facebook community went up to 500k users (from zero and became no.1 in India, above Audi!)

What went right and wrong?

• engagement was tremendous
• success with Facebook was good but wasn’t organic
• … yet the beauty is that fans are cheap in India
• the final film was good but … “it was almost too good” and besides, “there wasn’t enough money left to do the PR” David went on although PR is very important in India
• Lesson learnt is to make a lesser quality film and spend more on the PR(“the complexity of the PR market in India is tremendous”)
• apps are too sophisticated for an emerging country
• Nissan found it also very difficult to wind the campaign down and “the ending wasn’t graceful” David said.
• “never under-estimate how you work with people in India, relationships are different” so you “need someone on the ground”

Recommendations

• do your research
• Facebook may not be the right tool (in China, Russia for instance) or Twitter (in France)
• Emerging doesn’t mean cheap (in a “rupee for rupee” kind of way)

Q&A

• Q: did you consider Cricket?
• A: the first problem was that the sponsor was already another car manufacturer and the second  that Cricket is very expensive (one sponsor spent as much as $1m to support a batsman in India!)

Economics: More Competition Leads to Less Competition

today’s selection is a (very old post) dated 2006, taken from this very blog …

… in which I was commenting on a book entitled “the rule of three”. I realise that this analysis is still – or maybe more than ever pertinent – and therefore I decided to revive this post, update it significantly, and submit to my readers again today.

Have you ever wondered why most markets – when they are mature enough – end up being dominated by 3 players? Sheth and Sisodia (2002 – buy it from Amazon; note that there are second hand books available from as little as £0.49!) have carried out a study about this and their book is available in electronic format too (buy an kindle version here for £9.99). 12manage.com comments that this is not applicable to Europe. On the contrary, it does apply to Europe too, or any other area for that matter, provided local markets are open to fair and unbiased competition and transparent (I know, this is a paradox, fair competition leads to less competition in the event).

For instance, if you apply this rule to the telecoms market, it is very likely that you will find that the rule applies in each country/zone of influence individually (multi-national markets). It’s not that the rule is false. It’s just that those markets are heavily regulated and therefore, keep introducing new devices to revive competition at regular intervals.

In the US, the situation is different though; a few decades ago, AT&T was broken into small companiesby the regulator, but the rule of 3 applied in the end nonetheless (Stephen Colbert described this phenomenon in a classic pitch, click the Colbert picture below to view an extract). The process of introducing more competition ended after that though, it is not the case in some European markets in which new devices are still being introduced to fuel competition and lower prices (transparency : I work for a Telco, my comment is and will remain neutral for obvious reasons)

Where globalisation has already happened (for instance in the fast food market), the rule will apply across Europe with Mc Donald’s, Quick or Burger King and the rest of the niche players for instance. Does that mean that the ultimate goal of open competition is … less competition? Eerie isn’t it?

A final comment is that not all markets, even in the high-tech sector, are truly global. Whereas the IT market is for instance (same brands, strong consolidation, same products sold from one end of the planet to the other etc.) others aren’t. Besides, a multi-national market (i.e. an addition of heavily idiosyncratic markets in many countries) isn’t really the same as a global market. In multi-national markets, many discrepancies persist, even when the brand itself is global.

Zipf’s law

Seth Godin described this phenomenon in a different way, in his famous opus entitled “unleashing the idea virus“. Here is the passage about what he calls “Zipf’s law” (the book is rather old too, but it doesn’t matter anyway, what Seth described then is still valid now).

There’s a name for this effect. It’s called Zipf’s law, after George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950), a philologist and professor at Harvard University. He discovered that the most popular word  in the English language (“the”) is used ten times more than the tenth most popular word, 100 times more than the 100th most popular word and 1,000 times more than the 1,000th most popular word.

It’s also been discovered that this same effect applies to market share for software, soft drinks,automobiles, candy bars, and the frequency of hits on pages found on a website. The chart above shows actual visits to the different pages at Sun’s website [editor's note: in 1996] .In almost every field of endeavor, it’s clear that being #1 is a lot better than being #3 or #10.There isn’t an even distribution of rewards, especially in our networked world.On the Net, the stakes are even larger. The market capitalization of Priceline, eBay and Amazon approaches 95% of the total market capitalization of every other consumer ecommerce stock combined [editor's note: still in 1996]. Clearly, there’s a lot to be gained by winning.

• More at this address: http://www.12manage.com/methods_sheth_rule_of_three.html

Chinese Internet industry ready to grow beyond borders (2/2)

Photo: Tencent home page

by Alban Fournier (http://www.value2020.net)

QQ ID: 1557637787

Alban Fournier is a graduate from Essec Management School in Paris. He has proficiency in Management, Change Management, Marketing and Consulting services. He has worked on various engagements with Schneider Electric and Tencent, the leading Chinese Internet company.

This is part two of an article on Chinese Internet companies

A success story named Tencent

Founded in November 1998, Tencent has grown into China’s largest and most used Internet service portal. In its ten year history, Tencent has been able to maintain steady and fast paced growth. In 2005, Tencent entered the social network market with QZone and Internet shopping with PaiPai.com platform. In 2006, the firm decided to compete directly with Baidu and Google with the launch of the Soso search engine.

above picture: the soso.com search engine: wait a minute, I think the graphic design vaguely rings a bell …

Tencent’s QQ Services is China’s largest and most used Internet service portal, with the largest customer base in the world. Key platform statistics are 647.6 million of active Instant Messaging (“IM”) user accounts and a peak of simultaneous online IM user accounts of 127.5 million. Active user accounts of Qzone, a social network included in QQ Instant Messaging, numbered 492 million. [2]

R&D staff group is large at Tencent. The company has obtained patents relating to the following technologies: instant messaging, on-line shopping and payment services, search engine, information security, gaming, and many more. In 2007, Tencent invested more than RMB 100 m (note: RMB stands for Renminbi, which is the other name of the Chinese Yuan)  and in setting up the Tencent Research Institute, China’s first Internet research institute, with campuses in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. The institute focuses on developing core technologies.  The revenue of the firm increased by 57% in 2010 compared to 2009, which means that Tencent is now more profitable than Microsoft Online or Google.

The business model of Tencent is not only based on advertising but based mainly on revenue generated by users and online sales. The firm is very well positioned in latter market. Furthermore, it has already a large user base which it can leverage. Online sales in China are a fabulous market for Tencent. We can expect at least a 35% increase per annum in the three coming years.

Estimate in growth of revenue generated by virtual micro-transactions will be outstanding according to Strategy Analytics[3]Compared to 2009, the global market of 2015 will be multiplied by seventeen (from US$ 1 billion to US$ 17 billions).

Conclusion

As a conclusion, you now know that the Internet industry in China and Tencent in particular are rather successful on their home turf. Now you must be wondering whether Tencent or any other Chinese Internet firms will  decide (and when) to go beyond its borders and tackle the rest of the world.

---

[1] http://www.cnnic.net.cn/

[2] Tencent corporate website http://www.tencent.com, Alexa site

[3] Source: Strategy Analytics, Inc

IDC’s Ho: 70% of future growth in emerging markets will come from Asia #live11

Adrian Ho from IDC presented “new technologies & future priorities for IT departments”, he was replacing Sandra Ng who unfortunately couldn’t attend that meeting.

Asia is shaking the world

Adrian (left) explained some of the most important drivers behind Asia’s growing importance: demographics, new middle class rising, mobile everything, smart/connected cities in increasingly big / mega cities and all of this is delivering hyper growth: 70% of future growth in emerging markets will come from Asia, Adrian said, 40% of which from India and China.

time to market mantra in Asia: “speed, speed, speed”

But the mentality is very different from other parts of the world in Asia: Flexibility, customisation and speed of execution are extremely important. Clients expect flexibility and on-demand customisation. Speed is of the essence too, when it comes to time to market.

Yet, the other side of the coin is that Asians also expect 25% pay rises otherwise they will leave your company for another one. There are also leading business concerns & priorities such as Escalating cost of operation and expansion.

Tech trends

Unified communications in Ho’s mind is a re-invention of past video and audio conferencing and other concepts brought into it. Social Media is really about “knowing one’s customers” Ho said, and when Unified Communications is linked with Social Media then it starts meaning a lot. The workspace of the future is almost, it’s not the collaboration tools though that are exciting, it’s the white boarding features that are attached to these new tools. As to mobility, it is now becoming mainstream with the introduction of tablets in first class airline service in some Asian countries.

Thorniley updates us on the state of the global economy

reporting live from Orange Business Live in Munich

Daniel Thorniley (left) runs his own private business consultancy, but in his own words, he is not a “loser”. He as 235 Corporate clients even though he is on his own. He was able to acquire so many clients because he knew them through partnership and trust and he had known them for many years.

How’s business?

What is going on in the world. The IT industry is doing well ane even extremely well in emerging markets. Pharmeutical and health is doing vell. Industrial and b2b products are doing rather well but b2c is more sluggish. There are several reasons why business ie emerging slowly from recession:

Reason 1 is that the banking sector is not yet functioning properly. Big companies need banks to borrow money. Whereas emerging countries like China or India are trying to slow down growth, western countries would like to be able to borrow more money to whip up the economy,

Consumption is strong in many emerging countries, but in many others like Britain, consumers are not doing that well. Interest on savings is very weak, unemployment is coming down slightly but is still strong. In the US, 9-10% of workers are jobless. But what is the average number of hours worked in US is the lowest number since 1945 with only 32 hours per week (37.5 hours in Austria, 35.6 in France, UK 41 hours). Just because people have been kept in jobs in the US doesn’t mean that they are happy and ready to spend more. The value of the housing market has fallen dramatically since 2006. The Greek issue shot up because of corruption and misspending.

BRIC should include Mexico too!

BRIC should also include Mexico. Emerging markets are low volume, fast growth, whereas western countries will be high volume and low growth. We cannot apply our western patterns to the emerging markets. In the middle East, competition is coming from new markets (BRIC and Eastern and Central Europe) competing on low quality and prices.

Thornliley’s advice for working in emerging markets

Daniel Thorniley delivered the following advice to companies which want to do business properly in emerging markets:

• Don’t overburden yourself with KPI’s
• talents in the emerging markets are great! give more independence to local staff on the ground
• avoid short-termism: Quarterly reporting isn’t working in the emerging markets

Long Now Foundation: slower pace, better future … well maybe

(you may also vote for this article on Marktd)

Good morning, we are on Monday, the twenty first of January zero two thousand and eight. No this isn’t a typo, but rather a sign that we are taking into account the fact that humanity still has a few millenniums to go through. Well… hopefully! [One may have doubts when one considers the dreadful status of pollution in emerging behemoths like China (and this is just a beginning; despite courageous efforts by the likes of the ex Prime Minister Gordon Brown, there is little or no evidence that anything will be done to curb carbon emissions over there)]. Thus, focussing on the long term is what the ‘Long Now Foundation’ (a term coined by famous UK musician and innovator Brian Eno) is doing as a day job. The foundation is a think tank aimed at promoting long term thinking (by long term, the foundation member certainly don’t mean anything like 18 to 24 months). As a result their seven recommendations are that we should:

1. serve the long view (and the long viewer)
2. foster responsibility
3. reward patience
4. mind mythic depth
5. ally with competition
6. take no sides
7. leverage longevity

All which items should be heard by marketers as the foundation for increasing Corporate Responsibility in what they are doing. Needless to say that we still have a long way to go, but there are also encouraging signs that things are moving in the right direction. Yet, those of us who are endeavouring to take a lot of hindsight and put Nature above Fashion and not sacrifice Culture and the Environment on the altar of greed, may have a tough time now and again. It was my case when I read that issue (Vol. 171, No. 4 dated January 28, 2008) of Time magazine Europe; the ‘briefing‘ section on page of this issue triggered a few thoughts related to that subject. In this section weirdly entitled ENVIROTECH and even more weirdly substitled Green Machines, Time describes some of the highlights of the Detroit 2008 auto show:

Detroit’s annual Auto Show displays the best and brightest prototypes for eco-friendly cars Jan. 19-27. A look at some of the top innovators from the U.S. and abroad.

• TOYOTA A-BAT Utilizes solar panels
• SAAB 9-4X BIOPOWER Runs on biofuels
• FISKER HYBRID First true electric plug-in car
• JEEP RENEGADE Gets up to 110 m.p.g.
• MERCEDES-BENZ VISION GLK Powered by a diesel engine
• LAND ROVER LRX 2-L turbodiesel

This is how huge diesel-powered SUV’s, dubbed Chelsea Tractors in London by Environmental activists, are deemed “green” (for a hint on what Diesel fumes have in store for you, please check the UK Government’s official Health and Safety Executive website). Seeing this makes you think about long term view doesn’t it.

The Long Now Foundation describes its Clock and Library project in the following way:

“Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think”.

But the real question is not whether people see the clock (or Arthus Bertrand’s earth from above photos or Nasa’s or anything else) and think it’s cool. The real point is how do we go beyond this and actually do something about it. Marketing and Innovation has to go beyond this green paradox and start acting on it, or it will disappear. For those who still doubt it, I would recommend that they read Futurelab’s Alain Thys’s presentation on how Marketing committed suicide.

Let us hope that the clock is really well engineered and that we’ll keep our eyes on it all the time, there is a lot of catching up to do.

side note: many thanks to Stewart Baines from Futurity Media for telling me about the Long Now Foundation.

economic downturn shouldn’t deter job seekers bnet expert says

Catherine Hearn - a seasoned expert at Heidrick & Struggles, an exec search company, and a Bnet columnist,  has this interesting story on Bnet about job seeking in the current downturn. And I think she has a very valid point. After all, if an executive search is saying that there are very interesting jobs to be had out there in the cold, she must be right. 

At the same time, the virtually never ending gloom echoed by the press, namely in the UK and especially on the BBC, is somewhat weighing thick on the morale of not only job seekers but people in employment too. 

Come on people, keep your chin up!

• Read on at Bnet.co.uk by clicking here

investing in innovation in times of crisis

Business week has a very brief story – relayed by innovation tools on their site – on why businesses should go on investing in innovation. Atkins argues that companies have to go on investing in innovation in order to dominate in the next decade. He is right, but unfortunately and despite the title doesn’t really explain why we – and our managers – do have to pursue the innovation effort.

The answer to that last question is in previous studies carried out by PIMS (see PIMS history in the following transcript) – included in my lecture on innovation at the Paris university. What this PIMS study is showing is that even in times of crisis, innovation is not an option. On the contrary, it is during these periods that innovation is the real driver for success. however, the return on investment is not immediate and therefore patience is required. Success for innovators who won’t give up during the current credit crunch will show – according to PIMS – in the years following the crisis through the acquisition of a few extra-points in terms of market dominance. Results will in no way happen in the short term though and this is why the real difficulty is to show managers that innovation budgets have to be maintained, let alone increased.

It is certain that the main inhibitor in that process is that managers are also driven by short-term issues in those difficult times, sometimes fighting for their own survival and therefore focussing not on innovation but on the bottom line. Hence Sir Stelios’ – the much reverred Easy group innovation – response to an interview I saw on the Beeb a few weeks ago. When asked about the current credit crunch, Sir Stelios responded (quoted from memory) “I’m afraid that business is bound to be boring again; one will have to be a lot more cautious; at the same time” he added “when the going was good, it was easy to confuse luck for skills, but from now on it will be a lot more difficult”. (note: similar feedback from Stelios in a Times article available online at this url).

TRANSCRIPT FROM THE NOTES OF MY SLIDE

Brief history of PIMS
The PIMS project was started by Sidney Schoeffler working at General Electric in the 1960s, then picked up by Harvard’s Management Science Institute in the early 1970s, and has been administered by the American Strategic Planning Institute since 1975.
It was initiated by senior managers at GE who wanted to know why some of their business units were more profitable than others. With the help of Sidney Schoeffler they set up a research project in which each of their strategic business units reported their performance on dozens of variables. This was then expanded to outside companies in the early 1970s.
The survey, between 1970 and 1983, involved 3,000 strategic business units (SBU), from 200 companies. Each SBU gave information on the market within which they operated, the products they had brought to market and the efficacy of the strategies they had implemented.
The PIMS project analysed the data they had gathered to identify the options, problems, resources and opportunities faced by each SBU. Based on the spread of each business across different industries, it was hoped that the data could be drawn upon to provide other business, in the same industry, with empirical evidence of which strategies lead to increased profitability. The database continues to be updated and drawn upon by academics and companies today.
What Pims have shown is that the impact of innovation is not immediate. mostly takes place 2 years after investment. This is why really successful companies never stop innovating (look at cisco) and don’t handle innovation as a 6-year cycle which only lasts for 2 years. It must be a continuous effort or it mustn’t be

ROCE: Return on Capital employed: ROCE is a measure of how productively a company manages its refining, marketing and transportation assets. ROCE is the ratio of operating profits generated to the amount of operating capital invested.

http://www.marathon.com/News_Center/Marathon_News/Glossary/

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/tips/archives/2009/01/why_its_time_to.html

e-payments in the 21st century

On October 2nd, I gave a lecture on electronic payments in front of the MBA e-business students of the Paris graduate School of management as the opening session of the 2007-2008 school year. In this lecture, I was able to go back to the genesis or Internet banking (I was lucky enough to be part of this in the UK in the middle of the 1990s). From this experience I derived a number of consequences on how security is or isn’t important with regard to the development of e-business, and then drew a parallel with payment systems and the way that they are used in the context of modern day e-commerce. In part two, I described my three-pronged analysis of electronic payments.

 

 

Firstly, the human perspective with a focus on the way that payments are used, including a thorough statistical analysis of the various discrepancies between e-payment usage in Europe and the United States. I also made a comparison with the way that these payment systems are used outside the Internet and how they shape usage and configure the e-commerce landscape in all these respective geographies.

Secondly, the description of the various means of payment, with a particular focus on debit and credit cards, be they virtual or real, and a host of micro-payment solutions such as Internet + (a revolutionary micro-payment system invented and developed by an Israeli/French company at the end of the 1990s), of which I was the first client in this country.

Lastly, the security component was described in details, not only through its most common (phishing, pharming and key logging), but also and mainly through the detailed comparison of official statistics regarding fraud on other payments on and offline.

The duration of this conference was 1 1/2 hour.

• read the full presentation in html format, complete with comments and notes

a globalised economy, but socially diverse behavioural patterns

Yesterday, I got an e-mail by Stan Relihan, an extremely well connected user of linkedIn. In a recent podcast, he explains how he uses linkedIn to generate business relationships. His description of his usage of linked in is different from what we hear ordinarily, that is to say that you have to invite only people that you know beforehand. Stan is more in favour of an open network approach, and I think he is entirely right. In this podcast, he proves his point by showing that thanks to LinkedIn he has been able to connect to Vint Cerf himself. Thanks to my connection to Stan and others, I realised last night that I was only 2 degrees away from Vint too. Amazing!

This podcast triggered a few other thoughts, namely with regard to technology usage in the US and elsewhere and a potential halo effect. It was interesting to hear Stan say that Australians were lagging behind in terms of technology usage (certainly not in synch with their image on this side of the globe). As a matter of fact, this is something that I have heard in almost any country that I have visited, maybe if we except tiny Lithuania, where weather conditions are so adverse that technology now has almost acquired sacred-cow status. In fact, at the end of the day in an ever more globalised world where we think that everything is similar, that we all think the same, that we all behave the same, reality shows that it is not the case at all. In that ever more globalised world, individual country behaviours are still very different. And I have chosen a few examples in a mobile and telecommunications industry to prove my point. Here they are:

Depending on the technology difference in patterns is proven by numbers. Here are a few examples/questions:

• Who are the biggest users of mobile telephony? Italy (in 2007, equipment rate at 150% or the US at 84%)
• have a look namely at this Idate 2007 report on mobile telephony and compare mobile density in Western Europe and US
• Who is the biggest world user (handsdown, one in 3 in the world) of IPTV: US or France? Check Lynette Webb’s article on Futurelab’s blog
• Who are the biggest world users of 3G? Korea, Japan or US? (Idate 2007 report again but page 28)

Now, of course, the US is so big, that in terms of sheer market value they beat any other country hands down (they ususally account for 50-60% of the world’s market potential but these numbers are decreasing what with the BRIC countries and other emerging markets experiencing double digit growth) .

Tat is really the global paradox in my eyes. We are increasingly similar and uniform and still… behaviour patterns – despite globalisation – are still very very different from one end of the world to the other. At the end of the day, this world is a lot more diverse than people think and I think that this is what is making international business so exciting.

What about you? are you sad that there are differences or on the contrary, do you think that this is a great asset? hit this comment button and share your ideas with us now.

• download the Idate 2007 report on mobile usage

tentative segmentation of pro and anti second life behaviours

While I was posting an article on http://www.marktd.com, I came across this very interesting post about second-life. The very politically incorrect idea that second life may not be the promised Eldorado is actually a frightening prospect to many. But as Marketing is the subject here, the very conventional Marketing idea about segmentation arises. So, what are the different categories of second live users, and is it possible to give an opinion about second life without categorising, and even possibly measuring, these segments?

Careful! Dangerous subject. Giving an opinion about second life is a difficult subject. It’s difficult because on the one hand it is very hard to make any sense out of this new emerging so-called meta-world. One day I got hit on the knuckles in a blog comment by a second life aficionado because I had described second life as the 3-D game. “It’s not a 3-D game” my opponent said, “it’s not even a meta-world, it is a meta-verse”, and since then I have been extremely careful with expressing ideas about second life. To a certain extent, it is a big like debating Communism with a Communist or debating PC’s with an Apple fanatic: you won’t stand a chance.

But second life is a little different, it’s even more complex than Communism – well, to an extent. The attitudes towards this new meta-verse (did I get it right this time?) Are extremely diverse. Let me list a number of different attitudes which I have spotted when talking to people about second life:

1. category number one: these are the ones I would call the ignorant enthusiasts. Category one is that people who heard about second life and read about second life, but I’ve not actually browsed the meta-verse for any length of time. Having said that, they tend to be very enthusiastic about it, and start evangelising all around them. To a certain extent they can’t even understand why their management for instance does not want to invest on second life. But to another extent, they would be very bad at explaining why they should.
2. category number two: category number two are those who have heard about it and read about it (they have even read the Gartner report stating that by 2010 everybody would have a second life), but unlike category number one, they are very scared about the fact that they will have to go there and adapt to this new universe. They also hate the idea of ‘living’ with avatars. And the idea of spending the rest of their lives trapped on a 3-D environment is just awful to them. Still, category number two, which I would call the Scared Believers, does not question the fact that second life may be a bubble which could burst any minute now.
3. category number three: the third category is about what I would call Positive Participants. They have read about it, and even possibly they know quite a lot about it. They have their own avatar, and they browse the meta-verse from time to time in order to make their avatar live and develop. And they are really proud of being one of the early adopters. To be honest with you, I haven’t met many of that sort.
4. category number four: this is what I would call the diehard fanatics. They are probably the ones responsible for all the hoo-ha about second life i.e. responsible for the very existence of all the preceding categories. They have been on-line on second life for a long time, they have even started their own business, they buy things from second life and even possibly sell things to other avatars on second life. Because they are not very numerous, they are often interviewed and they serve as references. They can be met on television screens or in innovation meetings (yes, I saw a few of them).

Of course, I am not talking about those who haven’t heard about Second Life, or worse, those who think it’s an awful bubble which will burst one day and sooner than later. Either they don’t exist or they must be living in caves.
At this stage it is very difficult for me to tell you how many of these categories are represented by real people, supported by real numbers. Strangely enough, it may seem that talking around you, there aren’t so many people who will have gone beyond reading a few articles about it. But is it a valid sign? I remember the day in 1996 when I went to a bar in Nice. This bar was packed with students from all around the world. We ourselves had flown from London to evangelise a bunch of European bankers about the potential that the Internet had in store for them. We were so full of our knowledge, knowing that most of the people around us hadn’t seen much of the web, that we couldn’t resist, beer in hand, the pleasure of telling everybody about what we were doing for a living: we were Internet consultants for goodness sake, at an age where practically nobody could access the Internet! The feedback we had that night from a Danish girl, regardless of how much beer was poured in our glasses, was “the Internet! It’s so naf! It’s slow and it’s crap!”. Tells you how wrong people can get sometimes.

This is why, belonging to category number two as I do, (and I am even worse than that in fact, I just can’t stand these 3-D environments which I think are really ugly for one, and are also disconnected from reality and a dislike this, plus it really looks like a 3-D game despite what second life fanatics may say, plus it really looks like a bubble), I really feel uneasy about admitting that I belong to that category, because it really makes me feel like that girl we met in that café in Nice in 1996. However, although I have spent the past 12 years trying to be ahead of the bunch, and try to know everything about all the newest fads in the industry, I have decided not to go beyond the creation of my avatar. After all, maybe I have created category number five: those who do create an avatar, but never bother to do anything with it and don’t care anyway.

If you belong to that kind, welcome!

marketing in social networks

Joe Lewis has an interesting story about social marketing or rather, marketing in social networks as a reader righfully pointed out (social marketing is indeed about marketing products or services which can be viewed as beneficial from a Society point of view).

To sum it up in a few words:

• an iProspect (a search-engine marketing firm) report suggests that social networks are attracting an increasing number of visitors (1 in four users each month), however still far less than search engines,
• that the rise of social networks is the sign that the Web is moving from information grabbing to participation,
• that search engines often link to social networks,
• that marketers should be using social networks more often and better (ie use niche, verticalised social networks as opposed to large mixed up communities such as myspace or youtube)

iProspect can be reached at the following URL

devalued manager status could explain collaboration / wikinomics surge

Is this another sign of the times, the after-shock after 10 years of Dilbertish hard-talk against managers or just the result of a profound transformation of the employment landscape? It’s probably hard to tell exactly but last december, the FT came up with an interesting article about how managers were perceived in this day and age. According to FT’s Stefan Stern, when 50 bright mba students were asked how they would describe themselves, they chose titles such as ‘catalysts’ or ‘change-agents’ but refused to be regarded as ‘managers’. To them, almost everybody else is a manager and besides, if it means anything to anyone, being called a manager wasn’t associated with a particular good image of human activity: “When some of our catalysts and change-agents were pressed on what they understood by the term manager, they said it conjured up for them an image of a person who was probably not terribly imaginative or bright. One declared that a manager was someone who was “bossy, weak and insecure, who tries to intimidate people and does not contribute to the bottom line“.

To get back to my earlier question at the beginning of this post, I think that such astonishing results are indeed a sign of the times. They are a sign that management is evolving from this frozen image inherited from the military into this much more intricate notion of cross-functional management which is – by nature – required from modern flexible and information-based organisations. Project-based, peer-to-peer collaboration is what is required by companies which need to reposition themselves swiftly and move faster in a more globalised world. At the end of the day, young ‘managers’, or should we call them ‘symbolic analysts’ like Charles Handy in Trust and the Virtual Organisation have not only learned how to adapt to always changing and flexible situations, they have also begun to get used to that fact and now they even like the new status better than they do the old one. William Bridges had warned us in 1995 with ‘Jobshift’ of which one can find a summary here. A little more than ten years later, one can say now that the lansdcape has really changed. We are no longer in a period of mass redundancies and growth is sustained; even though the American house market has slumped, economists today – except Alan Greenspan – deny that this is going to have a negative impact on the World’s economy. Despite this phase of continued growth, our economy is constantly under pressure to do better, more and also differently, forcing all layers of the labour force – not just workers or employees – to adapt to that pressure.

I believe that such funcdamental changes in the structure of work and on the aspirations of young professionals is also a source of motivation for people to work differently, ie to cooperate. In traditional hierarchical organisations, the need to cooperate is meagre. One just has to way for instructions and execute them. On the contrary, in a world of cross-organisational initiative, noone is giving you instructions and if you want to solve your problems and propose new solutions – unless you can do it alone and let’s face it few people can – one has to ask others for help and guidance.

To a large extent, I see examples like the one shown in this FT article, more than anything else, as a living proof that cooperation is happening and why it is happening across the board and why there is such a requirement for people to exchange ideas and help and also to equip themselves with the tools supporting collaboration.

Are there any tangible signs that Web 2.0 is an other bubble?

Since the beginning, the Web 2.0 craze has triggered thoughts by many an observer as to whether the concept was a fad, a bubble or even just a rehash of earlier Internet ideas that failed. Now, as in this WSJ article, debating this subject is pretty much a matter of ‘yes I’m right’ ‘no, he isn’t!’

But another article published by Les Echos in Paris on December 18th is more precise about the web2.0 phenomenon. Their title reads ‘is the golden age of blogs already over?’ and they are fairly pessimistic when they quote a Gartner report and numbers which may hurt a few of us.

Gartner warns us namely that:

• only 56 out of a total of 260 million blogs are active
• only 2% of web users are regular contributors to blogs
• the myspace and facebook social networks respectively lost 4% and 12% of their unique visitors between August and September 2006

Now I won’t comment too much on point 3. August numbers are usually bad and in 2006 I realised that many users had kept out of sight. The other numbers may seem more worrying to some. Below are the references of the Gartner report mentioned by Les Echos.

• report title: Gartner’s Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2007 and Beyond (Dec 1, 2006)
• direct access to the Gartner report on the top 10 predictions for IT organisations and users, 2007 and beyond
• excerpt :
  • “Community Marketing and Blogs
    • Blogging as a phenomenon has entered the public consciousness in a big way. However, there are limits to the growth of even a Web 2.0 phenomenon like blogging, as the initial excitement about it has begun to be replaced with a more rational view of how blogging technologies should be used. This leads us to ponder whether there is a peak point in blogging growth, after which the phenomenon will become the norm.
  • Prediction
    • “Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007″.
      Analysis by Ed Thompson, Adam Sarner and Esteban Kolsky”
    • … time will tell
      

A survey of the IT sector in Japan (october 2006)

Michael Thulin is providing access to a few studies which help us understand what the status of broadband subscribers is like in the world and how countries compare to each other (see excerpt on the left-hand side). Otherwise, the EU report on Japan is giving you insight into what the situation is really like over there. The Internet penetration rate is approximately 62% but what is remarkable is that the lurning curve seems to have reached a maximum and growth is reducing now. Internet mobile numbers are also provided in the report (in winword format).

What I found particularly interesting is the sudden take-off of ftth (fiber to the home) technology which is bearing the promise of synchronous very high bandwidth rates and is said to enable video on demand. The ramp-up of Digital Terrestrial Television (DTTV) is also shown. Unfortunately, very little is said regarding video on demand.

The main report can be downloaded from here