Mary Meeker Morgan Stanley deck for June 2010

via morganstanley.com

So there is a lot of data in here, and most of it is extremely usable. For example there's quite a lot that is an update of the Oct 09 State of the Internet report that explained how smartphones differed in internet usage. Essentially Apple and Android OS had a share of mobile internet usage disproportionate to their respective marketshares. This data came from April 09, when Android v1 was on two handsets at under 1% global share, so this slide shows exactly the same trend a year on for Apple OS, but an evening-up of Android share (but of course Apple and Android both have a far greater share of the handset market now). This suggests that Android is not competing with Apple at the top of the market, but is providing a broad base of tier 2 smartphones between Apple and the traditional players. On Android devices the mobile internet experience is less good, but the app market is sufficiently well developed to make this an alternative. So share of app usage on Android is far ahead of marketshare. If you are planning mobile internet strategy this is a useful insight.

There's reams of other stuff in here too - anything that you need to explain about how the internet is changing there will be stats to back it up in this deck.

Posted via web from Graeme Wood

Record Companies, Bands and the concept of value

(Image used with thanks)
I've never really believed that telling people not to do things was a good way to stop them doing them. The War On Drugs for example has been pretty comprehensively won. By drugs. We are not a logical economically minded species, so changing how we behave changes how we think, not vice versa. And the simplest and most effective way to change how people behave is to make it worth their while - to give them something of value in return.

The idea of enforced behaviour change is in the news at the moment as the Digital Economy Bill has among its aims the toughening of copyright law online. In fact, this is seen as such a significant issue for the British economy that the government is willing to sacrifice on our behalf such seemingly useful things as Wifi (which will be too great a risk for any business to operate), fast broadband (which ISPs will be disincentivised from investing in as their focus will be on steaming open our digital mail), and internet access as a human right (as anyone who doesn't have a decent understanding of home network security can be disconnected from the internet in punishment for what their children or neighbours do). The opposition agrees that although there are parts of the bill that are even worse, they will let the copyright law stand because of its importance to the UK creative industry.

So let's ignore for a minute the fact that large parts of the UK creative industry, particularly those involved with music, don't agree, and have a look at the value transaction in a music purchase.

Record companies developed their business model through the scarcity of resources required to create and market recorded music: recording studios, musicians, pressing plants, distribution, access to radio stations to promote. These scarcities have changed beyond recognition since 1999. With a few $$s investment in software, any computer made in the last 5 years is a fully equipped recording studio (no extra software needed if it’s a Mac). No music now needs to be recorded onto anything. Myspace and a bit of talent can break a band far better than any radio promotion (not hyperbole – the Arctic Monkeys are the fastest selling week 1 debut in history). The scarcity problems that the record industry fixed no longer exist. Clay Shirky talks about this disappearance of scarcity problems in answer to Murdoch's claim that "Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use" by pointing out that this is only half of the equation:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

In the record industry things are slightly different: most people know how to stop creating in the costly and complex ways of the past, but they still want to charge the same amount of money for the product. Which, like the newpaper industry is freely available elsewhere. But while we are left with a near perfect distribution model, there is still a healthy supply and demand. It's just that the intermediaries, the industrial organisations who previously matched supply with demand, are no longer necessary. Supply and demand in recorded music still have two important discriminators: on the side of the vendor, talent to produce music better than the alternatives, and on the side of the purchaser, convenience to consume that music in the way they want.
(Image by Flickr user Mick Yates - used with thanks)
Talent has always been a scarcity: in fact that is why recorded music was developed - because it was more convenient than using actual musicians. That is a compromise, as having actual musicians play for you is a better experience. But the convenience makes it a worthwhile compromise. However as the creation and distribution of recorded music has become next to frictionless, more people are exposed to more music and demand grows for the scarce experience of live music (witness the growth of festivals - pre-Napster the UK had 2 or 3 major festivals each summer: now we have 2 or 3 major ones each weekend of summer). Now this is crucial in the search for music value, as the musicians who are distributing the most recorded music will be in highest demand for the extremely scarce/valuable live music market. So recorded music is essentially advertising the bit that makes money for performers (with the potential to charge for it if it adds to convenience).

Convenience means portability between devices, and it means always available, and crucially it means participatory and recombinant. Those same computers that record music for free also remix it. So that's another element of value: status ("I created this").
Of course, what that all means is that DRM is the antithesis of value in recorded music. Well let's face it, we knew that anyway, but it is worth bearing in mind as music moves to the cloud (convenient). As Techcrunch pointed out this week, many online music retailers are embedding personal identification in the file so that there is the potential to block cloud uploads of anything that was not purchased online (ripped CDs for instance).

So obviously free music downloads harm record companies, and record companies don't want to be harmed. But no-one cares about the intermediary so much of the BPI PR focuses on the artists themselves. This is all based on the premise that if record labels aren't making as much money then that is bad for the industry. The Guardian have been tracking this closely, and this article lists a range of companies profiting from music even while album sales are falling. While they include Spotify, We7, Nokia, Shazam and Apple, they also miss the more obvious ones: Live Nation, Ticketmaster and O2. What all these have in common is that they are not traditional players in the music market. What they don't all have in common is passing their profits on to musicians. Spotify is useful case study: aside from the slick interface the real stroke of genius that allowed Spotify to scale quickly was to avoid the endless legal wranglings with record labels over payments (at least in Europe - they are still bogged down in the US). This allowed them to quickly access most of the music that you might want to play on the service. And they accomplished this by making sure that those payments went to the record labels rather than the artists, by effectively paying in Spotify stock. This is a cap table for Spotify (from this piece on Techcrunch, which also investigates what price the labels paid for their stock)

Shareholders in Spotify on 10/7 2009
Bolag Andel
Rosello (Lorentzon) 28,6%Instructus (Ek) 23,3%
Northzone Ventures 11,9%
Enzymix Systems (F. Hagnö) 5,8%
Sony BMG 5,8%
Universal Music 4,8%
Warner Music 3,8%
Wellington IV Tech 3,8%
Creandum II LP 3,5%Swiftic (Strigéus) 2,6%
Creandum II KB 2,4%
EMI 1,9%
Merlin 1,0%
SBH Capital (B. Hagnö) 0,8%

Helienne Lindwall in The Guardian suggests that the labels paid roughly 1/1000th of the price that other investors in the service paid. This would certainly have made negotiations on the price per stream simple - they would be kept artificially low to minimise the amount that had to be paid out to artists. Spotify has been removed from the Guardian's Fair Trade Music Business list
So there are grey areas even in the proposed saviours of the traditional music business. And 'value' is very different for fans and artists than it is for the intermediaries. And back to my original point, why won't artificial scarcity (of the kind supported by the Digital Economy Bill) work? Well, apart from it being counter to the way the internet works? The internet (in its earliest guise as ARPANET) was developed as a peer to peer system. One of its early benefits was the potential to maintain government communications in the event of a nuclear attack on the USA. This is because P2P systems route around blockages (an inexact analogy might be to say that they treat blockages as wounds, which they are able to heal). Although consumer access is nowadays based on a server/client relationship mediated by ISPs, the internet remains a global P2P system.

Other than that it won't work because telling people to change their behaviour doesn't work. It's currently not working in France, where total free downloading is up by 3% since the introduction of strict HADOPI laws last year(chart from Arstechnica, stats from M@rsouin, CREM, Universite de Rennes).

and because potential of the internet combined with the creativity of musicians and developers means that there is plenty of value for anyone who has good ideas and talent. So after this little rant I'm going to quit whinging about the record industry, and celebrate great marketing ideas from those creative folks.

Internet Blackout Week

So I'm running a pop-up on here this week, in support of the Great Australian Internet Blackout Week that is running at the moment. I've slated all sorts of interuptive advertising in the past, so I thought it deserves an explanation.

There are all sorts of devious pieces of legislation being attempted at the moment to force ISPs to censor internet traffic. In some cases this is framed in terms of filtering out child abuse sites, which laudable aim the NSPCC in the UK believe to require ISPs only to sign up to the the IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) to screen out illegal imagery. Most large ISPs in the UK already do this. The French government is quite upfront about the fact that their Hadopi laws are designed to block the free transmission entertainment content online, with the intent of shoring up the revenue streams of those 20th century business models that have failed to keep up with the news over the last twenty years. The Australian model that this pop-up is designed to warn against is a particularly insidious merging of the two - allowing deep packet inspection of ISP traffic to stifle innovation in Australian creative and technology industries, but to give it the sugar-coating of being all about protect children.

As the French government take advice from the Chinese government about censoring the internet (link to ReadWriteWeb France for more detail) the Electronic Frontiers Association of Australia need support in fighting this proposed legistation - and it is important for people in the UK too as Mandelson sets the wheels in motion for 'copyright' and 'child protection' to be the Trojan horse in which Murdoch's vision for the future is legislated into a UK in which it won't work commercially. It won't work commercially because we already pay for non-commercial content through the BBC, and the role and scope of the future BBC is equally tied into this argument. You don't win elections by disagreeing with Rupert.

The battle for control of the internet

A couple of relatively unrelated news stories caught my eye yesterday. On one hand, Peter Mandelson announced amendments to UK copyright laws that appear to put the onus of illegal download prevention onto ISPs (reluctantly) and lawyers (eagerly). On the other, Google released more detail on what Chrome OS is going to look like when it launches next year.



The signs are that the battle for control of the internet is picking up pace. Copyright owners seem to have persuaded the government that the 20th century is worth saving, and that ISPs are the people to police it for them. Which aside from being a bit like blaming the Department of Transport for every speeding offence, is also something that we should be very worried about. Britain already has an outdated infrastructure for broadband: BT's copper wires will have to be replaced before we can get anywhere near the always-on HD quality entertainment that is possible over cable, and this will take significant investment, either in cabling or in much higher speed wireless for all. All of this costs money (lots of money), which will not be forthcoming if ISPs are having to spend their time trying to police a system of copyright that was effectively written in the dark ages. In a month that both Finland and Spain have made access to broadband a basic right of their citizens, the UK's short-termist approach has the potential to harm the country's knowledge economy for a generation.

All of this is very serious, and I suggest that if you agree then you join The Pirate Party and the Open Rights Group to help protest. However, the idea that the internet should be open access and open source has some pretty powerful support too. Google are a bigger deal than any content owner both in terms of financial muscle and political influence. And Google's big opportunity is more internet access for everyone all the time. This is what Ben Parr at Mashable calls the Google Revenue Equation:

Revenue = Amount of Time on the Web

It's that simple: their ad business is so effective at monetising the internet that they can afford to make everything else free. Email, browsers, mobile OS, storage, video, office software, GPS, mapping, etc. And not just free, but as good as the paid for equivalent. So the launch of their operating system, a replacement for Windows (that will be free, and probably as good as the paid for equivalent) is a big deal. Not just because of the potential to cut the heart out of the Microsoft empire, but also because Chrome OS is open source and fundamentally supports the idea that information wants to be free (because Google know how to manipulate and organise information better than anyone else. Information is what makes people spend time online. Time online = revenue). So although at a personal level we might not trust everything that Google are doing with our data, they are probably the biggest ally that anyone who wants a free and open internet, and is in favour of the UK knowledge economy, can have.

Charging for news

So we are starting to find out a bit more about News International's plans for charging for news online. Rupert Murdoch's interview with Sky News earlier in the week suggested that he hasn't recently looked at the figures for how much traffic his sites receive from Google. As Google frequently point out when the print media criticise them, it only takes a robot.txt command to exclude content: Murdoch apparently intends to finally take them up on this opportunity to opt out.

On a less confrontational note, Times editor James Harding explained a little bit more to the Society of Editors about how this is going to work for his bit of the Murdoch empire. It seems that the plan goes something like this:

Micropayments are too difficult, and let's face it, too different to newspaper publishing. Newspapers' business model was based on the scarcity of news. So let's try and recreate it by charging for access to everything published in the previous 24 hours.

My words not his, but that is the general gist of it. However, this is apparently going to "rewrite the economics of newspapers" (Personally I think they were rewritten some time ago....)

A lot of the discussions of Murdoch's print business model though forget that behind all the hype there is a solid basis for increasing revenue. For all the talk about rewriting business models, I don't think anyone at the top end of News Int thinks that they are going to increase print sales over the next ten years. They seem to be doing a better job on online ad revenue: the chart below shows that despite all the pressures on ad budgets over 2009, the Times has maintained its revenue online (figures from Nielsen Media Research, so the increase may be partly due to the improvements in online tracking that Nielsen have made this year).

They have also been increasing UK traffic figures according to the latest comScore stats. To the extent that according to the combined Nielsen/comScore figures, to REPLACE their UK ad revenue would require some £0.17 per UK unique user. Obviously every unique user is not going to pay them: a Forrester report published earlier this week had a figure of 20% (of US internet users) who would be interested in paying for newspaper content. So based on an example of 15% of Times users being signing up to this project (still an extremely ambitious target), News Int would only need £1.14 a month to REPLACE ad revenue. Bear in mind that they aren't going to be stopping running banner ads any time soon, and will certainly be charging media buyers a premium to target subscribers based on user data. And that there will also be a substantial chunk of Times inventory that is outside of the paywall, also running ads to a wider audience. But £1.14 doesn't sound that much if you like reading the Times online: most people spend more than that per day on coffee.

This doesn't mean that this is a good idea, or that it will secure the future of News Int's media properties. I've written lots of random stuff about what I think might be, but then of course I'm a random blogger and Rupert Murdoch is a media mogul with a track record of leading the market. I think the point I'm trying to make is that this isn't a great crusade to save paid content, it is more a pretty plausible attempt to create a new revenue stream to cover for the lack of ad advertising 2010-2011. Whatever is going to "save news publishing" is something different (probably something that doesn't start off by treating news as a 'once every 24 hours' concept). It might be, as Conde Nast are eagerly anticipating, something that happens on a new size of Apple branded screen. It will certainly demand the sort of radical innovation that established market leaders often find difficult to embrace. But if it is found, News International need to ensure that they are still a leading publisher of news when it happens.

What people are doing online in real time

I know that this is all over the internet already, so you've probably seen it, but it answers so many 'Why?' questions that I couldn't resist!

Blogging about Blogging

(Or 'how I organise my stuff on the internet)
Okay this might look a bit self-indulgent. Actually it is a bit self-indulgent, so you might want to stop reading now, but there is a reason for it. I like to sign up for pretty much any new sites or services I can find, and I try to have a go at using most of them. Which means that people, particularly at work, tend to ask me which ones to use for different stuff. So I thought I'd write down what I use, so I can just send them a link when they do.

News
I've sort of run out of space on both iGoogle and Google Reader - I've got 10 tabs on iGoogle split into work and non-work related stuff, so there's not many places to put new feeds other than well down a page. I only use Reader for the 30 or so that I'm really interested in, because I run the Reader feed into Viigo, which downloads them automatically to my phone so that I can read the latest stuff on the Tube when there isn't a mobile signal. Viigo also has the main news, tech and social media sites plugged into it, so I've got BBC, Guardian, Mashable, Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Engadget, etc there as well. Anything worth saving can be sent to Delicious, or worth sharing can be sent to Twitter from the Viigo app.

Actually I do pretty much the same from a computer too - keep an eye on anything interesting on Twitter, and then save it to Delicious if it looks like it might be useful. As well as Tweetdeck groups to split out different types of interesting, I've also got Tweetdeck alerts, and FriendFeed desktop alerts so that if the (much smaller number of) people I'm following on FriendFeed add stuff to Delicious or Slideshare then that will trigger an alert as well. As well as the Digsby alerts for new Gmail, Hotmail or Facebook activity. I used to use Delicious for all bookmarks, but it's increasingly become work-related stuff. Like most internet stuff I do, I've sent the most recent links back to the sidebar on this blog. There are some browser bookmarks - synced between work and home through the lovely XMarks, which also means that I don't ever have to remember passwords either

Music
As explained here, I used to love Last.FM, deleted my account, and came back sheepishly a few months ago. At home I organise music through iTunes like most people, but to find new stuff AND listen to it (not easy through either iTunes or Amazon's recommendations) I use Last.FM's recommendations and Spotify's streaming. Anything played on iTunes, Spotify or Last.FM gets pumped back to my Last.FM profile to help improve the recommendations (and from there to the 'what I'm listening to' widget here).

Photos
Through not having done much photography in the last couple of years, my photos are scattered around a few sites - Picassa, Flickr, PhotoBox mainly. I've never got hooked on Flickr, I guess becuase you can't do that much without paying. Since discovering Compfight creative commons image search I'm using more Flickr images in presentations, and feel that I out to put some more stuff up there to give back to the community. But I haven't yet: mostly what I take photos of at the moment is family snaps to post straight to Facebook from my phone so my folks can see them. For online image editing Picassa works better for me than Flickr if you have it installed. Aviary is the best cloud based editor I've found. I could write PLENTY more on iPhone photo apps, but most of it would be paraphrasing Iain Tait.

Things are happening quicker....

(NB. This is part of some work that the IPA are doing on the impact of social media on the ad industry. When I say 'part', it's more like a big pile of ideas that would need sorting into some sort of order before they became part....)
The changes going on in the advertising industry are doing so faster than ever before. It is probably fair to say that they will also never be this slow again. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone; Intel founder Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that since the invention of the integrated circuit 8 years previously the number of transistors that could be placed on a circuit board had doubled every 18 months, and predicted that this trend would continue unchecked. So far he has been proved right, and the increases in computing power that Moore's Law describes are the reason that we are coming to talk about technology and advertising interchangeably.

That isn't to say that people are changing. Without paraphrasing Clay Shirky or Mark Earls too far here, all the things we are evolutionarily disposed to do, and that we have cultural requirements for, are simply quicker, easier and further reaching than previously. This is not a different challenge to those faced by our 20th century predecessors:
Early radio ads were print ads read out. Early TV ads were radio ads in which you could see the face of the person reading. In each case the rise of a new medium provoked a step change in the advertising industry, but one that didn't happen immediately. So if we have survived and adapted in the past, is the challenge really as great as it appears?

Well, not unless you believe that the set of assumptions that underpins how we help brands communicate might also be a casualty of the power of Moore's Law. It is fun to speculate on how technology will improve, but most examples follow Bill Gates' suggestion that

“We overestimate the change that will happen in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will happen in the next ten”

Our ability as individuals to control access to our attention is likely to be amongst these. Since the internet was invented, it has slowly grown to a point where it has roughly the same number of computers connected as there are cells in the human brain, and about the same number of links as there are connections. The number of synapses, or connections, in our brains is taken as a proxy for intelligence – it is basically processing power. So in the 18 years since the public birth of the worldwide web in 1991, the internet has developed the intelligence of one person. Moore’s Law means that all the processors, and all the storage, and all the other capacity will each be doubling in power every 18 months. According to Kevin Kelly’s calculations, by 2040 the internet will have the brainpower of 4 billion people. According to Kelly, in the medium term future we will move from computers connected BY the internet, to one single computer that IS the internet. Our devices will simply be views into it, our networks always on.

Advertising tends to be seen as a necessary evil, as a transaction in return for content, which means that the challenge that has historically faced those who work in advertising has been to disrupt, interrupt, gain attention. Increased demands on peoples’ attention has made this job more difficult in recent years, but it has still been fundamentally the same challenge. What will alter it dramatically is the shift from gaining our attention to gaining the attention of our digital gatekeepers, the devices that will increasingly filter our access to entertainment and information. If I trust my applications’ recommendations, why should I look myself? They know more about what I like than I could ever have time to. Technology simply amplifies and speeds up underlying human behaviour and interaction. Brands that are asking themselves why people would want to be friends with them should think about what the alternatives may become.

And going back to the earlier question, is the challenge really as small as it appears? If I knew the answer, I'd start the agency that solved the problem. What we do know is that it is time to test. We have been wedded to the big idea of the Big Idea for generations, but big ideas that are rigorously researched and pretested will struggle in a world of ever increasing change. Things are happening quicker, including irrelevance. The idea of lots of little ideas seems more suited to this quicker world. In the words of AG Lafley, the former CEO of P&G,

"..our company's success rate runs between 50 and 60 percent. About half of our new products succeed. That's as high as we want the success rate to be. If we try to make it any higher, we'll be tempted to err on the side of caution”

Lots of little ideas acknowledge that all we as an industry can do is to make things as mimetic as possible. It is down to the other 99.9% of the population as to whether they happen. In Sketching User Experience, Bill Buxton talks about an art college ceramics professor who comes in on the first day of class and divides the students into two sections. He tells one half of the class that their final grade will be based exclusively on the volume of their production; the more they make, the better their grade. The professor tells the other half of the class that they will be graded more traditionally, based solely on the quality of their best piece. At the end of the semester, the professor discovered that the students who were focused on making as many pots as possible also ended up creating the best pots, much better than the pots made by the students who spent all semester trying to create that one perfect pot.

So the real step change for agencies is about not trying to build that perfect pot – it’s about not worrying about the bad ones. Charles Darwin said “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” We know that species of animal can remain unchanged for millennia, and then suddenly evolve in a few generations as their environment changes. As the increasing speed of communications erodes the 19th and 20th century assumptions that our businesses are built upon, our role is to avoid erring on the side of caution.

IE6 No More

Mashable reported today that the campaign to kill off IE6 reached a new level as Google's Orkut social platform (the largest in Brazil) announced plans to stop supporting the browser. On the face of it this might look like Google having another pop at its biggest rival, particularly in the face of Bing's takeover of Yahoo search last week. But the recommended alternatives are not just Chrome - Firefox, Safari and for that matter IE8 are also suggested as upgrades. This isn't really about Chrome at all (although the implications for advertising are related to it, which I'll speculate vaguely about later on) - it's about the future of websites themselves.

IE6 dates back to 2001: if you can't remember exactly what websites involved in those days, here's an example of the BBC's home page from January 2001:
and this was the sort of site it was designed to browse. Even if internet connections had been up to it, web designers would still have been limited by the fact that 95% of interent access was through IE6 at its peak. This was after Netscape had been seen off, and well before the days of Firefox. So although 20% of internet users are still using this technology, it was designed for a bygone age. The world wide web was 18 last week, and this is the equivalent of asking a ten year old to graft like an adult.

Now up till recently that has only been a problem for the coders who had to shoehorn state of the art websites into IE6's limited abilities. It is becoming a problem for everyone who wants a genuinely useable internet. HTML 5 is capable of providing audio and video files that interact (ie edit and change) in real time on a web page. It removes the distinction between desktop applications and websites, enables dragging and dropping from web to desktop and back, and is built on the basis of complete location awareness. It removes the need for Flash and Adobe Air (the heavy duty code that PCs can run but mobiles can't) so blurs the boundary between mobile and pc screen. In short it enables all the things that are going to make the web a whole lot more useful. And it won't work with IE6.

So for Google, for whom interactive audio-visual (YouTube) and drag & drop functionality (Google Wave) are key to future innovation, HTML 5 is a pre-requisite. This is great news for everyone, because the main problem with changing browsing behaviour is that most people don't care about all the stuff I'm talking about. Or at least they won't until it is developed and ready to use. But if they are threatened with losing access to YouTube (or potentially Facebook) if they don't upgrade, then they will soon work out how easy upgrading is.

To be fair, Microsoft agree that they would love people to upgrade, but that they won't phase out support for the browser, which was the standard in Windows XP. On their IEBlog the view is:

"Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product, and we keep our commitments."

So (partly based on the failure of Windows Vista to tempt people away from XP) they seem happy to let other people put a range of non-IE options in front of them. And to bring this back to advertising, that opens up some interesting questions about Firefox uptake. Chrome and IE8 are based on being ad-friendly: Google and Microsoft have the world's largest ad revenues to support. Firefox on the other hand offers the opportunity to block all online advertising (although it too makes most of its income through a revenue-share deal with Google for search ads). Only a fraction of FF users (9m, or 3%, of the 300m users of Firefox) block ads. But then, back in 2005 only 3% of internet users ran Firefox. Now it is 23%.

Of course on the other hand maybe sites running on HTML 5 will carry interactive applications and realtime audiovisual narrative that people won't want to block. Let's hope we get the chance to find out soon

www.old enough to vote.com

I don't know if I missed this, but the World Wide Web came of age last week. On the 6th August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a summary of the W3 project that he'd been working on on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. Although the first server, Berners-Lee's NeXT computer, the first browser and the first web page had been live since earlier that year, this marked the first time that the project had been available to the public.

It's fair to say it has had a very public adolesence and been a troublesome teenager in the eyes of established businesses. But I reckon that we've not seen anything yet, and now the web is old enough to vote it can get on with the serious stuff

David Armano on the Future of Advertising

The Future of Advertising. WTF?

View more presentations from David Armano.

Sure most people will see this without me posting it, so if anyone has accompanying notes i'd love to see 'em 

Future of the Internet

Kevin Kelly on the next 5000 days of the web. This is on the basis that as of December 2007, when this was filmed, the web was 5000 days old, and he explains how based on processing power, memory and number of links, we have built something that is roughly equivalent to one human brain in that time. Then he applies Moore's Law.

So over the next 5000 days, we will not see cloud computing in the sense that it is usually portrayed, where all those lots of machines that we have at the moment just shift their storage and systems onto the network - instead, we'll see those machines just become screens into one single worldwide machine.



Personally I just get excited by the whole Matrixness of this, but the analogy that I really love (and the reference I followed up from Faris to find this clip) is an improvement on 'social media is like air'. It is this: The most comparable technology to the internet is the alphabet: it utterly transformed communication and data recording, and we take it for granted to such an extent that it is invisible.