Communities Dominate Brands

Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting, yes Kung Fu mobile TV channel launches

Why didn't I see this one coming, ha-ha, I'm old enough to remember Bruce Lee's movies in the 1970s, when that horrible disco song by Karl Douglas was on the charts.

So yes, as the new converging industry is starting to emerge between traditional broadcast/cable TV and the mobile phone, one of the interests is to discover content that is particularly well suited for the small screen. Content that can be "snacked" in short bits. Music videos (MTV) are an excellent example of the short form content that seems to work particularly well on mobile TV.

So what other short form content. How about the fight scenes of classic Kung Fu movies? That is the idea behind the Kung Fu channel, which the Thailand mobile operator/carrier AIS is launching. They don't show the full movies, but rather have cut the exciting scenes into short bits of 30 seconds to 3 minutes in length. The Kung Fu channel is a premium charged channel on the mobile TV offerings of AIS. The story was reported in the September issue of Charged.

Oh, and those who are interested more in areas of mobile-TV convergence, I just released my latest Thought Piece around Mobile TV, so if you want to read the free 2 page document on these themes, send me an email to   tomi at tomiahonen dot com  and I'll send you the Thought Piece in return email.

From Japan: Location based mobile phone temporary work match-maker service

Alan Moore talked about this when we presented at the Mobile Social Networking course at Oxford. We both heard about it from our friends at Mobikyo in Tokyo and the service is also described in Mobikyo's wonderful Japan Mobile Internet Report released this September.

The service is called Otetsudai Networks, which literally means "help networks". It is a mobile phone service in Japan where anyone can register and fill in the kinds of skills they have available, say window-cleaning or washing dishes or loading boxes at a warehouse, etc. Then there are temporary employers who have short-term needs. Say a shopkeeper has a sudden illness and the one assistant has to leave the shop early. The shopkeeper needs someone who is reasonably qualified temporary help for his store. Just enter the need (4 hours this afternoon selling shoes at the store in this address at this shopping mall, cash register operation skills needed, pays x per hour). Then those who are near that location, who have indicated that their status is available to do temporary work, will get the alert.

And of course it allows for negotiating. If you don't like the hourly rate that is offered, you make a counter offer of what you'd be willing to do the job for. The shopkeeper may get a couple of responses, someone who agrees to the amount but can only do 2 hours, another one who is willing to do four hours but wants a higher pay, etc.

Matchmaker service for temporary help. Brilliant idea, Otetsudai Networks, in Japan. Probably soon in other countries as well.

Pepsi hands out one billion songs in 2008

I have a bunch of stories from late 2007 that I hadn't had time to blog about in the last few weeks of travel madness. One interesting development for 2008 is that Pepsi has announced a deal to give away 1 billion MP3 tracks of music in 2008 in a promotion that they will announce at the Superbowl. Pepsi's partner will be Amazon. The story was reported in New Media Age 6 Dec 007.

A billion songs? To put it in context, iTunes sold about 1.5 billion songs in 2007, so this is very big.

Queen Elizabeth II has her YouTube site

Found this on CNN around Christmas time. The Queen of the UK has launched her own YouTube site where she posted her Christmas wishes video. Pretty cool for the longest-serving British monarch.

Some holiday season good will seems to be spreading

Those who read our blog know I'm an eternal optimist. Those who know me well, proabably know of my long held interest in all matters of international political matters (Foreign Policy was one of my minors when I studied International Marketing at Clarion University in the USA)

So now, as we have this end-of-year season of holidays, there seems to be a string of recent, often small, but significant steps towards a "better tomorrow" for many of the trouble-spots in the world.

Iraq. This Autumn brought news that the violence is down. Iraq is not still a safe place by any means, but the worst levels of violence seem to have subsided. The trend is now clearly down. Now the British have handed over their regions to the forces of Iraq to control. There are signs for hope for the country.

Iran. This was perhaps the biggest surprise of the recent past, that the American intelligence agencies (who promised us there were weapons of mass distruction in Iraq prior to the toppling of Saddam Hussein) now have reversed their position on Iran, and said that Iran has stopped its military development of its nuclear weapons program, and did that back in 2003. So for those who had been worried that Bush would finish his term of office by adding the third in the line of Iraq-Iran-Afghanistan of US invasions of the region - can now rest rather much better, in that if the intelligence agencies of the USA so strongly say there are no nukes in Iran, then the president would have a very hard time indeed to get the political support to launch a surprise war on Iran. Good news.

Talking about good news on the nuclear front - Kim Jong Il of North Korea has earlier this year agreed to dismantle his nuclear weapons program. This is a very good sign for world peace and he has some important milestones to fulfill about now, I think a deadline is around the 31st of December.

Then there is Israel and Palestine. Again, there have been very many attempts to solve the issues of this region over the years, but once again, we do have a fresh initiative. I have to be personally optimistic that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is involved, for whatever one might think of his time as PM of Britain, he did manage to bring to end the decades long civil war in Northern Ireland. Blair does have the experience to resolve a long-standing entrenched bitter war and he also now has the credibility. Blair did dedicate his career past his job as PM to this task of Peace for Israel and Palestine. And I would also guess, that now that he just "came out of the closet" so to speak - formally converting from the Anglican church to the Catholic church - would also give him added confidence on a mission of peace and love and forgiving. But yes, the signs are hopeful for the region.

Specifically Gaza. Perhaps the most dangerous individual spots in the conflict is the Gaza Strip. I just saw on CNN yesterday a piece about some Christians who are obviously a small minority on the Palestinian (and thus majority Muslim) Gaza Strip joining together to celebrate Christmas at a church in the Gaza Strip. This season of holy time, in the Holy Land, seems to have those spirits of kindness and gentleness in an area with so much violence in the past.

And on the other side of the peninsula, in Saudi Arabia we saw reporting on the Hajj, the holiest Muslim pilgrimage annually to Mecca. In the past few years there have been horriffic incidences of mass hysteria and deaths and injuries due to the enormous crowd. For this year the Saudis had carefully reorganized elements of the Hajj to make sure there would not be the accidents and unnecessary injuries or deaths due to the holy event, and it seems to have also passed with very good success.

And along a bit further towards the East, is Pakistan. Musharraf ended the martial law and has restored some (not yet all) of the restrictions on democracy so the country could have elections.

Everything is not perfect in these trouble-spots by any means. And of course there are many more bad spots where things are still desperate, from Darfour in Africa to Myanmar and so forth.

I met up with a friend who is also in his 40s like me, who is from Poland. He can remember well the time before Communism fell and how he would stand in line for a whole day with his dad just to buy books for school. Waiting in line for a whole day. I remember being a teenager in Finland, interested in world politics back then in the 1970s, and thinking to myself at that time, that the Iron Curtain would not fall during my lifetime, that East and West Europe were destined to remain divided. How happy I am that I turned out so wrong in this. And that I can have a good Polish friend who is free to fly to Oxford to meet up with me.

He and I talked of similar assumptions when we were young. I remember thinking of the major trouble spots in the world in the late 1970s. And I remember vividly thinking that South Africa would not get past its Apartheid and racial hatered without a bloody civil war; and that the two perennial regional conflicts - that of Northern Ireland and that of Israel-Palestine - would not be resolved in my lifetime.

So now I'm 47 and South Africa moved from a racially divided country to one with racial equality and achieved that in peace and Nelson Mandela is a world icon of peaceful transition, of forgiving, of statemanship. Northern Ireland resolved its conflict, after lots of battles, but in the end, through peaceful negotiations. The Iron Curtain fell and Eastern and Western Europe were re-united - now the Eastern European countries that have joined the EU are having their border controls removed, joining the "Shengen" region, ie that citizens can transit without passport controls between the nations.

So it does give me great hope that a lasting peace can be found also for Israel and Palestine. I have so many friends in that region, I really do hope this time the politicians can find the way to make it happen.

With North Korea and South Korea - obviously I am particularly connected now with South Korea due to my latest book and have studied that country so much more. My longer stay this August in Seoul had also clearly brought to me the recurring theme that this is a country that is artificially divided. There are lots of families who are split. There is a yearning of the two nations to come together. It is felt very strongly by the people on both sides. And while the progress is very slow, both South Korea and North Korea are taking continuing steps towards normalizing their relationship. Can it lead to a united Korea some day, who knows, but that there is now, this year, for the first time since the war in the 1950s, a regularly scheduled train operating between the South and the North - that is yet another small indicator that things are improving, not getting worse, on the Korean peninsula.

So compared to what the world looked like in the Spring of this year with the Iraq war escallating and Iran and North Korea seeming to be on the brink of nuclear weapons, and so forth, this year has ended up significanctly better than what it seemed - I do think we have plenty of reason to sleep more restfully this Holiday Season for the end of 2007.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, a Joyful Festive Season to all of our readers

Oh, PS - also please do remember if you speak with children of that age where this is relevant, that Santa Claus comes from Finland, from the mountain of Korvatunturi in Lapland, near Rovaniemi. He does NOT live on the North Pole, but yes, Rovaniemi is on the Polar Circle, so yes, it is a common mistake to think Santa comes from the North Pole, he comes from just beyond it, from Northern Finland..

New Media and the Creative Industries In the UK

The Culture, Media and Sport Committee report

Opening paragraph of summary

The pace of change is so rapid that solutions to some of the problems that we sought to address have already begun to emerge. However, at the same time, new challenges are being posed by technological developments that are now coming to market. The ease with which consumers can now access content, copy it and keep it, makes the protection of intellectual property and enforcement of copyright law of far greater importance to the health, and indeed the survival, of our creative industries than ever before. Some have argued that the rights of intellectual property owners should be limited in order to promote the spread of knowledge and creativity. However, we take the view that this is a matter of choice for the creators and that rights owners who wish to retain control over the use and exploitation of their material should be able to do so. We also believe that the level and period of remuneration as well as the future direction of the development of technology are generally best left to the market to determine.

I am not convinced entirely that it is best left to the market. If you look at Korea, the investment in a digital infrastructure as catapulted an economy from being a backwater to a real global player.

I understand that this paper deals with the commercial context - but I think one needs a more joined up approach to infrastructure.

This paper also outlines the pressure being applied to commercial and copyright legislation which will become even more pressing for a variety of reasons.

In a knowledge economy our creative industries become a key component of employment and wealth generation, to this end ensuring the creative industries are well invsted in and financed makes a great deal of sense

The creative industries already make a major contribution to the UK economy and this is likely to continue to grow. The rapid take-up of new media offers enormous opportunities for both consumers and businesses and we welcome the increasing recognition of this. We look forward to the publication of the Government’s own Green Paper and hope that this will include many of the measures that we have recommended.

There are some 27 recommendations at the end of the report dealing with a host of commercial and legal issues created by living in a digital socio-economic eco-system.

The introduction quotes a BBC report from 2004

Digital radio and TV audiences will soon have the same flexibility as Internet users to control when and where they watch and listen to programmes. We expect seven in ten homes to be able to schedule their viewing and listening at a time that suits them best by 2016. Many will use personal video recorders (PVRs), which will be able to hold as much as 4,000 hours of content (equivalent to six months of output of a 24-hour television channel), compared to just 40 hours today. At the same time, downloading and file sharing of video and audio from the Internet will become commonplace for many people.

The current report states

Less than three years later, much of that vision has already come to pass, and the
predictions for 2016 seem, if anything, conservative. A revolution is underway not just in the way in which we watch television programmes and film but in the way we listen to music, gather news information, and use all forms of creative content: it could be said that the reproduction and dissemination of creative content has come to new life thanks to recent technological developments.2 This revolution challenges all elements of the delivery chain, from creators themselves through to distributors, broadcasters and consumers. These challenges are largely ones for the market to address and resolve, by adapting, by
exploring ways in which it can draw upon what technology can offer and by judging how to meet the public’s appetite. There are, nonetheless, roles for regulators and the Government in ensuring an open and fair marketplace, and in preserving a balance between public access to knowledge and ideas on the one hand and the right and ability of creators and rights holders to exploit full commercial value from creative products on the other. This report is about those challenges, roles and balances.

Of course Tomi and I have been charting these developments since 2003 and independently since 1999. But its good to see the government applying their thinking to such important issues.

One small point of interest to me was this

The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising described a “seismic shift” in the relationship between consumers and the media, with consumers now dictating how they used it.

When we asked the IPA to endorse our findings in 2005, we were told they could not because it was a "polemic". So I find their current perspective - interesting.

My question is and I understand that there does need to be different perspectives applied - but should there not be an holistic overview of what a digital universe means to us all in all our walks of life.

We see Education, Media, Commerce, Society, Organisation, Democracy all challenged by the same issues.

I wonder if anyone is looking at this universe from an holistic perspective? What benefits could that bring us?

Wiki Government: Nobody is as clever as everybody

The core of the argument by Beth Noveck in Wiki-Government. How open-source technology can make government decision-making more expert and more democratic.

new technology may be changing the relationship between democracy and expertise, affording an opportunity to improve competence by making good information available for better governance. Large-scale knowledge-sharing projects, such as the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, and volunteer software-programming initiatives, such as the Apache Webserver (which runs two-thirds of the websites in the world), demonstrate the inadequacy of our assumptions about expertise in the twenty-first century. Ordinary people, regardless of institutional affiliation or professional status, possess information–serious, expert, fact-based, scientific information–to enhance decision-making, information not otherwise available to isolated bureaucrats. Partly as a result of the simple tools now available for collaboration and partly as a result of a highly mobile labor market of "knowledge workers," people are ready and willing to share that information across geographic, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries.

And The Problem with Experts

In his award-winning book On Political Judgment , social psychologist Philip Tetlock analyzed the predictions of those professionals who advise government about political and economic trends. Pitting these professional pundits against minimalist performance benchmarks, he found "few signs that expertise translates into greater ability to make either ‘well-calibrated’ or ‘discriminating’ forecasts." It turns out that professional status has much less bearing on the quality of information than we might assume, and that professionals–whether in politics or other domains–are notoriously unsuccessful at making informed predictions.

Moreover, the traditional reliance on institutionalized expertise is fraught with political controversy. Sometimes these pre-selected scientists and outside experts are simply lobbyists passing by another name. The current administration, for example, regularly replaces experts on agency advisory panels with ideologues and political allies. In a published statement titled Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making, over 60 preeminent scientists, including Nobel laureates and National Medal of Science recipients, lambasted the Bush Administration for "manipulation of the process through which science enters into its decisions." But if Bush is among the more egregious violators of the presumed wall between politics and institutionalized expertise, his actions only go to show how easy it is for any executive to abuse his or her power of appointment to disrupt experts’ advisory function.

Via Smart mobs

Thought provoking

Media - News - Trust - Morality - Ethics and Commerce: Uncomfortable bedfellows

Get your facts straight mate

In 1985, when asked whether news organizations "get the facts straight" or are "often inaccurate," 55 percent chose the former option and 34 percent the latter. This past July, when Pew asked this question, the responses were almost exactly reversed: 39 percent said news media get facts straight and 53 percent said they often don't.

Writes Beth Blanks Hindman Referring to a Pew Research Center findings over several years

1). In 1985, when asked whether news organizations were "moral" or "immoral" in their practices, 54 percent indicated the former, 13 percent the latter, and 33 percent said neither or that they weren't sure. This past July, 46 percent said news media were moral while nearly a third, 32 percent, said immoral.

2). In 1985, when asked whether news organizations "are pretty independent" or are "often influenced by powerful people and organizations," 37 percent chose the former option and 53 percent the latter. That wasn't good for the press then. It's even worse now: In July, 69 percent said news media are often influenced by powerful actors and institutions.

3). Finally, in 1985, when asked whether news organizations "protect democracy" or "hurt democracy," 54 percent chose the former option and 23 percent the latter. In July, only 44 percent said news media protect democracy, while more than a third, 36 percent, said news media hurt democracy.

These trends (and there are more data, none of which shows improving perceptions of the press) are unsustainable for any industry that depends on public support, both philosophically and economically. In decades past, journalism as practiced by newspapers, network and local TV news, and newsmagazines might have been able to turn around these views. But today, with Internet blogs and the loud voices of cable television gaining audiences, what we know as mainstream journalism might simply fade away, seen as increasingly unnecessary.

These trends (and there are more data, none of which shows improving perceptions of the press) are unsustainable for any industry that depends on public support, both philosophically and economically - read Robert McChesney

Trust a word we use so often and then forget its value. Trust is the most precious commodity any brand or business has. Its just in todays world of information empowerment trust must rethought as information travels at the speed of bytes, across time and continents And Reputation: the growing importance of trust in our digital world In the same way mass media obliterates ideas around context and meaning - these are unique and specific - consumers, thats us, all of us have moved beyond the whole notion of assumed positions of authority - information pushed outwards and gratefully accepted. Who in todays worlds as Walter Kronkyte used to say at the end of his broadcast "And thats the way it is". Today, people would be going online to fact check, discuss, argue debate, concur and reflect.

Glen Urban wrote

Evidence is building that the paradigm of marketing is changing from the push strategies so well suited to the past 50 years of mass media to trust-based strategies that are essential in a time of information empowerment

There will be those happy to shore up the defences and others willing to leap beyond the edge to find a new ledge and new logic and a new way of doing things.

We talk about the Age of Engagement: the ability to find a new way of connecting and communicating, of building trust and advocacy.

The biggest obstacle is legacy organisations, logic and business models that struggle with a new language, metrics etc., as this new ecology cannibalises their existing eco-systems... that is the consequence of structural change.

Imagine you are listed on the stock exchange, you have quarterly reporting, dividends and share price expectations and the CEO realises that his business model is flawed – what does he do? He doesn't sleep nights. Revolutions are always bloody.

But the evidence is there, the work is done, its the execution we are now fighting over.

But returning to the idea of the media and trust, we will seek those out who we believe are credible, believable. We know advertising and commercial marketing objectives drives news organisations in the US, but also elsewhere, its hard to believe the voice of authority if we know other agendas form the words.

Just take this as but one example Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed

The key to New Media's victory: communities

In 2007 That's why Communities Dominate Brands.

Compare that to the New Media style of community and immediate response, and an interesting dichotomy develops where those in the Old Media are still clinging to the past, while those in the New Media are trying desperately to move away from the ties that still bind us to the twentieth century.

But if we've learned nothing else over the past decade, we now know that people have been craving for the ability to communicate. For too long, readers like yourself were caught in a trap where writers would write and readers would read. If the reader wanted to cross that boundary and write, they would need to send a letter to an editor and hope to see it in a future issue. By that point, almost everyone has forgotten the topic and the reader will never be able to see a response.

And

If someone says New Media has become popular solely because of the ease of access to information, they have no idea what they're talking about. New Media has proven to be a success because any reader can read this column, scroll down the page and leave a message telling me I'm right, wrong or just plain smart or stupid. And once that person leaves that message, they are immediately part of a community where I tell everyone what my opinion is and then the reader tells the rest of us what they believe.

Although some people may not find the time to comment or have nothing to say, commenting and discussing a topic can be addictive and extremely pleasing. Instead of absorbing information in a vacuum, we now have the ability to communicate with those that may share the same belief or disagree entirely. And in the end, who can say that either one of us is wrong? After all, an opinion is an opinion and no one should be thought less of for having one.

A We species for a We Media - Old Media vs, the New

Ironically, Old Media has yet to discover the secret to New Media's success. Sure, some major publications like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have found ways to include a semblance of a community on their Web pages, but by and large, most Old Media publications have been extremely unsuccessful in this new age.

And although many Old Media outlets have tried to find a way to turn it around, they have lost sight of the true allure of New Media -- communities. And by allowing readers to run astray and become valuable parts of communities all over the Internet, Old Media has very few options at its disposal. Suffice it to say, Old Media may fail sooner than you once thought.

Via CNet: The key to New Media's victory: communities

That is why the Editor of the Guardian said The last presses we ever own - redefining newsprint media

And that is why the Guardian distributes .9 million physical copies of its paper but has an online readership of 18+ million people.

Scaling the database wall in the age of engagement

Nice bit of thinking from Dave Winer in Amazon removes the database scaling wall

Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There's a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven't had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill.

And

Their move makes many things possible. As I said earlier, if it existed when we had to scale weblogs.com, we would certainly have used it. One could build an open identity system on it, probably in an afternoon, it would be perfect for that. A Twitter-like messaging system, again, would be easy. It's amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response. It seems likely they have something in the works.

The database network? Thats GFN's on steroids

Now let's think about what happens when thousands of web startups start using Amazon's database system to support the services they build. Thousands of web applications using a common and shared web native database. That's going to allow some very interesting things to develop. It may become necessary at some point to build on top of Amazon's database if you want to get a level of interactivity with other similar services. Is Amazon building a data API? I don't know because I am not technical enough to truly understand all of this. But it sure smells like a big deal to me.

Dave Cushman said

Everything the network touches - it disrupts

And what happens when that capability is utilised as unique intelligence across all media?

Like the concept of blended reality - Its not the same, its different. The digital social network is a different: language, philosophy, art, structure, infrastructure, economics, legal framework, set of relationships, distribution points.

Yet it still comes down to one very singular principle. Its all about a We Species - doing what a We Species does best - Collaborate, Socialise - that's why

Nobody is as clever as everybody

THATS WHY TODAY... TECHNOLOGY IMITATES NATURE: Why does every culture on this planet have collaborative dance as part of its rituals and mythology? That is why we are dancing in the streets and rejecting the architecture of authority

The most successful businesses in the future will be the ones with the most powerful network AND I don't mean Facebook.