Well, the Apple Watch is here. You could have been forgiven for not noticing. Official sales figures haven’t been released yet, and won’t be for some time because Apple will bundle the Watch sales numbers with other devices in its next quarterly report.
Since its first announcement last year, I’d pretty much forgotten about the Watch being released. I thought the press announcement was smart – an announcement without a timescale and sent the share price even higher. So when I was with my son on the Tube recently and he whispered to me that the teenager sitting opposite us had “THE WATCH!” it served as a timely reminder (pun intended). Continue reading Apple Watch update→
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Question: Is this David Cameron’s rating or Apple share price?
Since the week before Easter I’ve been extremely busy – there was the holiday period, followed by a big family celebration, and then last Friday I managed to fall off my bicycle and break some fingers. In short… it’s been quite hectic.
During the family celebration I heard a brilliant quote from a friend, Yehuda, an IT Solution Architect, who had travelled from Israel to join us for a week. We were discussing how IT projects have become either prescriptive (detailed requirements) or business focussed (with high level requirements and leaving the solution to the supplier partner). He tells this to all his customers:
Tell me either what you want to do, or how to do it, but if you tell me both – go and do it yourself.
Today was the final day of the Payments International 2015 conference. Here are my notes. Again I apologise for any brevity, grammatical abominations and spelling errors – this post is a case of publishing speed versus comprehensiveness.
Keynote
Smart companies and dumb companies – according to Mark Stevenson
Mark Stevenson was the keynote speech. Mark is clearly a Marmite presenter – people either like or dislike him. Personally I liked his approach, and during the session started following him immediately at @optimistontour.
His keynote on “Why Infrastructure We Have Now Can’t Survive” began with describing how core infrastructure and business models are soon going to be unfit for purpose.
The Internet of Useless Things – well worth a quick read, even on the throne
Here are the best articles that I’ve read during the last week:
Warc – Measurement issues hit TV– regular readers will know my frustration with measuring TV audiences. Their time has come, just as they are reporting a sharp decline in audiences. But in an industry based on advertising revenue, the measurement companies are being urged to create ways of showing increasing audience sizes. Bizarre but inevitable.
Each year I forecast some predictions in the Digital Media/ Internet world, and at the end of the year I score those predictions to see whether they came true or not.
1. Self-service: Next generation self-service offerings
Expect to see more companies offering portals for customers to service themselves.
For instance, think of the last time you bought an airline ticket – you probably bought the ticket through a website and checked in online or through your smartphone.
This will become more commonplace. I can’t remember the last time I put coins in a parking meter – I use my smartphone to pay for parking instead.
2014 has been another interesting year in the digital world. The end of a terrible recession has forced most companies to place digital at the heart of their strategy. #Fintech has become a recognised term for banks, insurance companies and other financial services organisations trying to update their systems to become ‘digital‘.
1. TV will change
Last December I predicted Ultra HD will become production ready, 3D TV will disappear and we’ll start seeing transparent TVs on the market. Continue reading Review of 2014 predictions→
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Google Glass. Beware in bathrooms of someone winking at you.
Yesterday someone asked me a question which I’ve been asked before but never covered it on this site… “What company do I think is the most consumer-oriented, innovative technology company?”
The context of the question related to Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, who do I rate as the most innovative?
First we need to ask another question – “What is innovation?” To me, innovation is the skill to keep inventing new stuff, to keep redefining products and/ or business models. It’s the constant strive for change for the better, not just the sake of it. Continue reading Who is the most innovative Digital company?→
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We keep hearing stories about young people leaving Facebook in their droves. And how consumers are buying Android phones in multiples to Apple. Or how China’s growth is stuttering.
Combined global sales revenues of smartphones, tablets, PCs, TV sets, video games consoles 1999-2018 Source: Deloitte 2014
On Friday I went to Deloitte’s Telco, Media and Technology 2014 Predictions Event at the Google campus in Shoreditch. It was only an hour and a half, but well-presented (only if you were sitting at the front, but the microphones were so bad I felt sorry for people at the back) and very well attended.
Google Authorship alone improved blog traffic significantly
I’ve been applying a bit of Search Engine Optimisation to this blog over the last couple of weeks (successfully I should add – visits are already up over 30%) and one of the most recommended techniques is to assign authorship to articles.
What this does, is tells Google that the web site owner has trusted this particular person to add an article to the site. You might think that for this blog, the site owner and author is the same – but Google doesn’t mind this because it just wants to know there’s a human at the end of the keyboard, not another spammy robot knocking out (or copying) content. It’s the age old sign of trust of putting someone’s name at the bottom of a document adds credibility.
The way Google trusts that the person is a real human is by linking the ‘byline’ to their Google+ account. This is clever for so many reasons:
Improves Google+’s own PageRank of more incoming links (theoretically, and probably practically within Google’s control but it is now proven through this method)
Gets more people using Google+ (all those authors, who don’t want readers to land on an empty Google+ profile page)
It has moved Google along the journey of becoming the user authentication on the Internet.
A friend of mine sells furniture online. It costs him a small fortune to deliver it to customers, and with the distance selling regulations, he often gets customers who tell him after a week of delivery that they don’t want the item any longer. He reckons he can tell who is ‘trying it on’ to check whether he’ll offer a refund without bothering to collect the item again. He estimates that these “customers” go from site to site trying to take liberties from companies.
Wouldn’t it be a better system all round if a user bought an item from a website, and that site could look in a central place for delivery and payment information, and whether this user was trustworthy or not, before dispatching the item.
Another player in the market who might try to create this central authentication system is Apple. Combining Apple ID with fingerprint recognition and perhaps phone based GPS information could be a secure system.
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