Mobile culture and commerce for cultural institutions

March 9th, 2011

Today I spoke at a conference on how mobile communications can be transformative for cultural institutions – my keynote was called Assets and Access in the Cultural Sector. The overview of the event organised by Camerjam, CultureLabel.com and Spark are was that exploring the use of mobile technology by cultural organisations they could; generate new content and revenue streams, discover innovative ways to communicate with audiences, exploit content and exhibition archives, and develop new partnerships, and I did my best to explore what that meant. So here are my thoughts, I hope it proves useful food for thought. The quality of the speakers I saw was very high.

#camerjam #mobileculture

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    Intersections 2011

    March 9th, 2011

    It was a strange piece of sychronicity as I drove down to the Eden Project in Cornwall to speak at the Intersections Creative Business Summit as I was listening to a Radio4 programme about one of Cornwall’s famous sons Peter Lanyon (Tate St. Ives Bio),Lanyon took up gliding as a pastime and used the resulting experience extensively in his painting, The Tate explains, Lanyon talked about exploring vertiginous edges such as ‘the junction of sea and cliff, wind and cliff, the human body and places.In the Radio4 programme one of his sons remarks that if there was an edge or any sort Peter Lanyon found it.

      This was synchronous because Intersections was exactly about the same thing – but within a different context, how design thinking can come to the aid of social innovation and also the commercial world, resulting in business transformation by exploring emerging trends in technology and design. The summit also turned its gaze to, sustainable design and the environment, as well as social design and collaborative practices. Because it is when two unlikes come together in close adjacency, creating an edge and an intersection real creativity happens.

      I met some great people. I second Michael Thompson in congratulationing Andrea on becoming Associate Director of the Academy for Innovation and Research (AIR) and Head of the Centre for Sustainable Design at the University College Falmouth starting on 11th April, and the great job Andrea Siodmok and her team had done.

      There was for me, a palpable sense that people genuinely wanted to make and create a better world, and I also think that the two days expamded peoples idea of what design is and could be – whilst still retaining the origins of what motivates design and craft – to create new forms and give them to the world as a civilizing force.

      My presentation ended up becoming highly emotive as in the Q&A I discussed the extreme frustration I felt trying to educate my intelligent but dyslexic son in the state education system, with a very engaged audience. Here is my presentation for those that asked for it. #intersect

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      What is local TV?

      March 2nd, 2011

      Community purists fear just another national channel while others are sceptical of plan’s commercial viability, is the byline of an article about the desire of Jeremy Hunt and others to create local TV in the UK.

      I don’t think you need to be a community purist – to see the flawed thinking. Reading through the article, of the usual players and companies lining up to bid for local TV franchises, with the same old, same old business models I found myself, making observations and asking all sorts of questions:

      • When we are connected up to and across each other, when we can get what we need for each other, why do we need more of what we don’t need?
      • A people will only be free when THEY control their own communications – Frantz Fanon
      • Markets are conversations, and markets thrive through, commercial trading, knowledge and information exchange and entertainment, hence the role of the creation of a thriving market place is not about shoving stuff down tubes. Its not one way, and reality of the role of producer and consumer has collapsed.
      • Those companies that use revenue sharing to open up, stimulate, motivate and create a rich diverse eco-system are those that are commercially thriving: GrowVC, Qustodian, Android, NTTDoCoMo, Threadless,  are but 5 examples. So why is local TV any different?
      • Ask who uses a search engine = 99%? and what are we searching for? Knowledge and information. And we judge the quality of that knowledge and information by its ability for us to take and make decisions and transactions, right now, in 5mins time, this afternoon, tomorrow – we live in the intention economy.
      • Where is mobile in all this – because when we have a mobile penetration of 120%+ in the UK but millions cant get in online, surely local commercial communications, must be supported by mobile services? Qustodian certainly believes so, hence their growing relationship with Atletico Madrid. Because local is community – community is local. But this truth does not serve the needs of national media players.

      So how on earth do media companies believe they can fund their business models out of the institutional failure of paid for push advertising? The article quotes Pat Loughrey, former BBC director of nations and regions, says: “It’s arse about face. It would be a pity and perverse if what is created a just another metropolitan-dominated TV service, in which the UK is only viewed through national perspective and serving national advertisers.”

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      Critical enquiry

      February 24th, 2011

      Howard Rheingold provides and in-depth and eloquent lesson on how we need to engage in a world defined not by scarcity or information but abundance, in which we need to be able to determine for ourselves the validty, and quality of that information.

      Communities Dominate Brands in the top best books for starts ups

      February 23rd, 2011

      When I read this I was quite chuffed – IN CDB Tomi and I went beyond the social media hype before it was hyped. The lesson is – when new communication tools are not only invented but ubiquitously adopted, they can become a tool wielded for profound societal and political change, if society wills it.

      This was never a tech revolution in the same way Gutenberg’s printing press was a tech rev – it was like in Tunisia, Egypt, Libiya, and throughout the western world; a revolt against power, corporate power, political power who has it and who wields it – its interesting to note that Umar Haque although working for Havas struggles with the ethics of living in a world which is unfair. He is I believe representative of many. But the powerful are now beginning the pinch of the powerless, where people sick and tired of the same shit, are learning to get what they need from each other – institutionally American Government has failed, business are failing and we need a new literacy in which people know how to create new and better things. The fact was nobody was really prepared to listen not until it was too late.

      Communities Dominate Brands is six years old and yet people still tell me from RIM, to Disney, to startups that it is still mandatory reading. I don’t do it very often but hurrah for us.

      You can buy it HERE

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      True democracies in open space

      February 19th, 2011










      True democracies need open public spaces, that are shared, where people can meet as equals, writes John Keane in The Life and Death of Democracy. It is no surprise then that we see the square recently as the symbol of a free society Tahrir Square for example. Seumas Milne, writes

      The strong likelihood that neither the Egyptian army nor anyone else is going to be able to halt this process where it is, nor prevent a far deeper democratic transformation and settling of accounts with the old regime. This is not some phoney western-backed “colour revolution”, after all, swapping one elite for another with a stage army made for TV. The evidence of the scale of popular self-organisation and collective commitment reflects a profound social process that is unlikely to be derailed before it has delivered much more radical change. That will have a global as well as a domestic impact, and not only because of the impetus it has given to opposition forces across the region. The greater the democratic cleansing of an economically parasitic regime dependent on foreign support, the more a country that has been the pivot of western power in the Middle East is likely to take an independent course.

      Through the open squares, that were once upon a time, only symbols of people-power today are the medium by which the powerful begin to feel the pinch of the powerless. Yes, digital technologies played a role, speak-to-tweet, twitter, mobile communications, Facebook as tools for organisation. But its the people in the streets that are visceral, that force into consciousness the fact the people want back their public squares. In No Straight Lines; making sense of our non-linear world I argue, we are renegotiating the power relationships of how we want to live, work, govern, and that communication tools that are low cost and widespread can be used as tools for political change. In the age of networked communications, we are witness to something of a ‘Gestalt switch’ which makes us think differently about how we perceive power and who wields it’. This is a universal ideal not one linked to any particular region.

      Further reading


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      Did the church see Gutenberg coming?

      February 17th, 2011

      Social Media or Social Business?

      Did the Church see Gutenberg coming? I asked this question recently at an event on innovation and disruption. Those of you that are fans of Blackadder, let me use the comedic twinning of Rowan Atkinson as Bishop Blackadder and his side-kick Tony Robinson as Baldrick.

      So Baldrick comes running into Bishop Blackadders bedroom as he is preparing for his day

      Blackadder: ahhhh there you are Baldrick, I wondered when you might turn up

      Baldrick: sorry sir, I was out last night in the Tavern

      Blackadder: the Tavern Baldrick, have you taken leave of your senses

      Baldrick: well no sir, but I ended up over-hearing a conversation between two men, a Johannes Gutenberg and some other geezer, that, that, that, that,

      (Baldrick pauses)

      Blackadder: c’mon man out with it

      Baldrick: that could change the whole power base of the church sir – Gutenberg has taken a wine press and he’s going to print bibles on it sir

      Blackadder just stares at Baldrick, and slaps him around the head, knocking him over and then kicks him

      Blackadder: POPPYCOCK Bladrick (turning to face the window looking out onto the town of Mainz and its surrounding countryside) As Bishop Baldrick, I rule everything I see, and even that which I don’t. How on earth do you think that some fool up in a garret in Mainz with a convertible wine press is going to reform the church, and remove our strangle hold over the whole of Europe, hmmmmm?

      This particular question has a certain relevancy if not urgency today, as it was through Gutenberg’s invention we as a society moved from the Dark Ages into the Reformation. The Church controlled all, its omnipotence felt by every single European man woman and child. Yet within a brief decade of the printing of the 42-Line bible and the facsimile re-creation of Gutenberg’s printing press, between 8 – 20 million books had been printed, whereas before, none had existed outside of a monastery. Martin Luther unleashed of the power of the printing press to decouple the Church from its divine power base, whilst simultaneously challenging political stability.

      The lesson is – when new communication tools are not only invented but ubiquitously adopted, they can become a tool wielded for profound societal and political change, if society wills it.

      So lets ask another question; which business, which industry, which NGO or political organization, democratic or otherwise has not been touched by the impact of our most recent communications revolution? In a breath it seems, businesses defined by their socialness, community, and peer to peer interactivity have erupted in complete violation of the orthodoxy of traditional business, and how that business is made: controlled access to stuff, to information. This is the Gestalt Switch – once we were atomized but connected up to each other by big media but not across each other, today that power has eroded, people are using communication technology to get what they want and need from each other rather than through existing organisations and institutions.

      In 2005, Facebook, and YouTube were born – we were aware of the emergence of digital communications but that was seen from afar, there but not here. Today Facebook has a congregation of 500 million people connecting and getting stuff done though its platform, Youtube uploads 20 hours of audio visual content every minute of every day of every year, Flickr holds the largest repository of still images anywhere in the world – but why all this sharing? Because, as USC Professor Henry Jenkins states, an expert on participatory cultures, we were ready for it. Linux is a co-created operating system, (which companies like IBM use) generating huge sums of money for those that build businesses around its services even though the operating code is free and the people that write the code do so for free. From a traditional standpoint it is illogical, yet it works.

      At the same time we are using the words social media and social networking, which drip off our lips like an adman would say 60 second TV spot 15 years ago, it seems people are all atwitter about twitter and the CBI produces a report about how employees using “social media” during their working hours are losing the UK millions. The truth is the connection of participatory cultures, socialness and a communications revolution in the true context of our age has been misunderstood by many.

      In The Enterprise of the Future a report published by IBM in 2006 – their survey of CEO’s revealed that 8/10 CEO’s saw significant change ahead and yet the gap between expected levels of change plus the ability to manage it had tripled. This is natural because as a new economy takes hold, as a consequence of the old one faltering, it unleashes a powerful set of forces that cleave the fabric of the economy along fault lines, consequently there is a catastrophic resistance to change. For example, social media from a business context is easy to dismiss, it is looked at with idling curiosity, or downright mistrust in the C-suite as it is not a core part of daily grown up business, sadly this is the same mistake which the church made in misunderstanding Gutenberg in his garret in Mainz.

      The reality is people are a highly participatory social species, we are designed to work in aggregates, this is different to the logic that created firms perfected for industrial production. We are in the process of renegotiating that power relationship. What companies face today is a design problem and part of that problem is understanding that embedding socialness into the core of what makes a company work successfully is very different to thinking about social media as an addendum to what it does. It requires a new philosophy, language, media and communications literacy, tools and processes. There are companies which whether it be automotive; Local Motors, venture funding; GrowVC, scientific innovation; innocentive, YourEncore, or Topcoder which has NASA as a client, books; Amazon or book mooch, mobile marketing; Qustodian, trading; ebay, that have all embedded socialness into the DNA of the company to improve commercial success. So is it social media or social business – as answering that question might be more important than you think.

      Related articles

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      Apple’s business eco-system = NTTCoCoMo

      February 15th, 2011

      My friend Lars who runs Mobikyo in Japan has a presentation that demonstrates that Apple’s business model and eco-system was a good facsimile of NTT DoCoMo’s.

      Lars writes in Japan’s super advanced mobile-web

      The entire approach from key players in the value chain is focused on the direct benefit of the industry as a whole, ultimately via the satisfaction of their customers. A perfect example would be the generous – from day one – 90/10 revenue share to content providers. By the vary nature of building an open sales channel platform and offering an acceptable merchant billing fee the operators primed the data pump with plenty of interesting content rushing into their pipeline. Another key move from the operators was their decision in 2004 to make Flash-Lite a mandated pre-install on all devices. While of course their menus looked even more compelling, the move also allowed content players a common code platform with less concern about specific handset rendering parameters. The golden triangle of open web access combined with flat-rate data plans and ubiquitous 3G speed has lead to a server-side model driving ever greater adoption of content and services. Of course the telcos are happily counting their flat-rate data subscriber revenues as a result of even more great contents on offer and the satisfied mobile web surfers keep on clicking.. the win-win-win scenerio.

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      The mobile patent wars[3]

      February 15th, 2011


      http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/whos-suing-whom-in-the-telecoms-trade/




























      Data source

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      My East End is no longer our East End

      February 2nd, 2011

      Why do people quest for connection and communication? Why is the world gone all social? Why does social communication dominate? Why is everyone writing about it? And why is everything that we define as 2.0 defined by participatory culture and technologies that amplify the unique human ability to work in aggregates and cooperate? In part this is explained by Jung saying “I” needs “We” to truly be “I”, technology is a tool, we create it and we wield it, it is no accident that our world in part is being transformed by our fundamental desire to find meaningful human connection wherever we can find it. At a football game, in World of Warcraft or in the transcendent realm of a music festival or a religious ceremony. We seek the surge of conversation, the intensity of engagement as much today as we did when we first learnt to work in groups. The question is can the modern world deliver that for us?

      People are often mourning the loss of a way of life in which they were part of a community that had grown organically over the generations… Unlike the planners and architects who moved them around as if they were pawns in a chess game, they understand that communities are not created by ordering removal vans simply to transplant people from one location to another – not if they are to have a cohesiveness that makes sense to those who live within in them.

      So wrote Gilda O’Neill, who is sadly no longer with us. She was referencing her life experience growing up in the East End of London.

      In the Miracle of Hudson Street by Malcolm Gladwell he talks about Jane Jacobs,

      In the early nineteen-sixties, Jane Jacobs lived on Hudson Street, in Greenwich Village, near the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Bleecker Street. It was then, as now, a charming district of nineteenth-century tenements and town houses, bars and shops, laid out over an irregular grid, and Jacobs loved the neighborhood. In her 1961 masterpiece, “ The Death and Life of Great American Cities ,” she rhapsodized about the White Horse Tavern down the block, home to Irish longshoremen and writers and intellectuals – a place where, on a winter’s night, as “the doors open, a solid wave of conversation and animation surges out and hits you.”

      Her Hudson Street had Mr. Slube, at the cigar store, and Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, and Bernie, the candy-store owner, who, in the course of a typical day, supervised the children crossing the street, lent an umbrella or a dollar to a customer, held on to some keys or packages for people in the neighborhood, and “lectured two youngsters who asked for cigarettes.” The street had “bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s,” and “teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips show or their collars look right.” It was, she said, an urban ballet.

      And why was it a miracle?

      The miracle of Hudson Street, according to Jacobs, was created by the particular configuration of the streets and buildings of the neighborhood. Jacobs argued that when a neighborhood is oriented toward the street, when sidewalks are used for socializing and play and commerce, the users of that street are transformed by the resulting stimulation: they form relationships and casual contacts they would never have otherwise.

      And going further Gladwell expands

      The West Village, she pointed out, was blessed with a mixture of houses and apartments and shops and offices and industry, which meant that there were always people “outdoors on different schedules and… in the place for different purposes.” It had short blocks, and short blocks create the greatest variety in foot traffic. It had lots of old buildings, and old buildings have the low rents that permit individualized and creative uses. And, most of all, it had people, cheek by jowl, from every conceivable walk of life. Sparely populated suburbs may look appealing, she said, but without an active sidewalk life, without the frequent, serendipitous interactions of many different people, “there is no public acquaintanceship, no foundation of public trust, no cross-connections with the necessary people–and no practice or ease in applying the most ordinary techniques of city public life at lowly levels.”

      Gladwell’s point is about space, proximity, communication and trust in the context of the failure of the office vs. the success of Hudson Street.


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