Christos

CES can be very interesting, or very uninteresting, depending on what sort of tech you’re into. Personally, I’m fascinated by most stuff, so it doesn’t take much to keep me glued to the screen during CES. Here’s my five highlights from this year’s show in Vegas (isn’t it oddly suitable how new tech is showcased in a city known for gambling?):

The Sony Concept Tablet – Oh my god, this was a nice bit of kit. Separate keyboard (not a fan of keys I can’t actually push down into the chassis, but hey), nice looking chassis, and a series of coloured styluses. The highlight, without having seen it in motion, was definitely in the design. Sony make fantastic-looking technology without copying Apple (a first, lately), and although it’s likely to be expensive (it’s Sony), and this will likely pull in more than a few punters come release.

3D printers – One of them could even manufacture most of the parts required to replicate itself. What is this?! It’s certainly a nifty idea – 3D printing, in the home. My guess is that 3D Systems’ Cube will probably take home the gold once they’ve all launched, even at a whopping $1,299 for the printer itself. Still, if you want to make plastic objects, you could do worse!

Chromebooks – Yep, still going – they’re pretty divisive, though. A complaint I heard is that it’s as heavy and large as a laptop, but only runs the bare minimum of apps and other tools, compared to a laptop with an OS such as OSX or Windows (yes, or Linux, calm down). It does look sweet, though, and as a Chrome fanatic, I can totally see it working – especially with major game releases popping up more and more often for the Chrome platform.

Smart watches – It’s a tiny Android tablet, with a strap to anchor it to your wrist like a watch. Good lord, do I want one of these? Yes. The idea of having Spotify, Twitter and SMS as my three apps would mean… well. I can do this on my phone already (an HTC Desire HD), but god damn, do I want to use a watch face instead? Of course! Bring on the future! Flying cars for everyone!

Super smartphone battery life – I like my phone – it’s big, it’s powerful, and it does what I need it to do. So, the downside to that is battery life. Mine’s not too shabby, but iPhone owners must be sick to the back teeth of watching the little green bar vanish all too quickly. iPhone tribute act (zing!) Samsung have stepped in and offered all-day battery life. If they can make good on this promise, they’ve got a winner. It might even push Apple to finally get its good battery tech (currently sitting in the Macbook and iPad region of its product catalogue) into the iPhone. Then I can switch! Maybe.

Those are my favourites. So it leads me to ask – what are yours?

Now, I understand that asking why more people talk about the Oscars than CES sounds like a pointless question, as most people’s answer would be “because it’s The Oscars, Christos.” But if you take a few minutes to read through the following post, you may realise that the aforementioned response is at best misinformed and at worst completely ignorant.

The Iron Lady came out last week, a biopic of Margaret Thatcher, the first and, so far, only female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Played by Meryl Streep, it will no doubt go on to clean up at various film award events across the globe, because it’s a film that offers the precise amount of grandeur and historical scale to tip the favour of the critics in its own direction.

On the other hand, CES is in full swing this week, and features a range of new electronic products, some of which millions of us will be using by the summer. Some of the announcements made at this event will change the way you ring your partner, watch television, or play videogames. But people don’t often discuss this event at all in most circles.

This strikes me as odd. People will comment on the various political events of the day, despite rarely (if ever) watching the Prime Minister’s Questions, because they effect us as individuals, through rising taxes, budget cuts, or new laws.

Yet the technology that powers our day – indeed, the technology allowing me to write this post, and you to read it – doesn’t seem to be celebrated and followed with interest by the vast majority of people who use it. We have, at times, been blessed with some tech-celebrities, in the form of Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg, and they do draw the collective consciousness of the media-hungry human race towards the technology field for brief moments. It’s telling when even your strange uncle can tell you of his high scores in Angry Birds.

Yes, people are discovering games like Angry Birds, as well as Android apps and iProducts, at an alarming rate. Technology has swiftly and in a way never before seen, I think, turned into a fashionable concern. CES should be a catwalk, down which the latest hardware struts, hoping to wow the assembled masses with increased memory and more apps than the competition.

In an ideal world, we’d gather around the TV and catch the Microsoft keynote, in much the same way we’re content to do with other events more centred around showbiz. I hold out a small hope that we can engage with technology in the same way many of us engage with the topics of commuting, politics, religion similarly stimulating jump-off points for conversation. We’ll just have to make sure that the Android and iOS users aren’t sitting next to each other.

Ben Rudolph is what tech companies like to call an “evangelist”. Personally, I think a more realistic term is “paid fanboy”, but there you go. He works for Microsoft, specifically focusing on the Windows Phone 7 brand. But why’s he appearing in the news this week?

Well, it’s because he’s giving Windows 7 handsets to those who tweet their Android issues at him, and use the hashtag #droidrage. Yes, that’s correct. Tell him why your Android phone sucks, and he’ll send you a Windows 7 phone. Doesn’t sound like a bad deal. Unless you’re Google.

This is essentially the equivalent of being at school and offering anyone who calls Jimmy “fat legs” a chocolate bar. Few people are actually doing it because Jimmy has fat legs; they’re doing it for the free chocolate. But regardless of what their motivation is, Jimmy gets a load of bad press.

#droidrage could potentially become a trending topic in the United States today, and that’s going to cause Google a fair few PR problems. But what’s the right response? Offering Android handsets to those who tweet using the hashtag #wp7hasnoapps? Or being a little more mature and weathering the storm of bad-press anecdotes, some of them potentially fabricated?

It might be a new approach Microsoft are testing to see whether they can shake things up a little bit. Given that as I write this, news is going out that the head of Windows Phone 7 has been replaced, a new direction might actually be on the cards.

The legality of the issue is a little hazy, because neither the fans or Rudolph are saying anything libellous. But I think anyone who’s not waiting for Google’s reaction with bated breath clearly doesn’t have much interest in the future of the smartphone market. Android has a whopping market share (51%) simply because it’s not tied to one brand, as iOS is, and that’s its primary advantage. But if it starts to appear flawed in any way, all it will take is the average user becoming aware of the flaws, and Android’s grip on the market may begin to slip.

It’s a dangerous approach to marketing Windows 7 phones, but who knows? It just might work, provided Microsoft can get away with it. Thoughts?

So, if you toddle off down Soho’s fashionable Dean Street in central London in the next several days, you’ll pass a shop that you probably never thought you’d see in real life. An eBay shop. No, really. It has second-hand stuff in it, and you pay using your smartphone. There are weird ideas, and then there’s this. And I think it’s pretty original.

“But I don’t have a smartphone!” you cry. No problem – HTC have provided the shop with tablet computers for you to use.

“But I don’t have an eBay/Paypal account!” Why? What century are you living in? I’ll admit there’s always going to be people who feel a little unsure about Paypal, but realistically one could argue they’re a damn sight more open to helping you than your bank is.

“But I don’t want second hand stuff!” Then don’t worry. There are plenty of shops with new things in. But if you’re looking for a great deal on something you might not be able to find new, then this is a good idea.

It’s not often I go all voluntarily gung-ho on promoting an idea that’s not mine, especially a corporate one, but I really like this – I walk in, use my phone, pick up my item, and walk out. There’s no messing around, I operate my own till, and I can finally see the eBay auction in person, which, if you buy expensive stuff from the online auction house, is pretty important.

But it proves that a great business on the internet is fully capable of actually making the 2011 transition in reverse – moving from the digital to the physical space. It’ll be interesting to see how this would work on a larger scale – if professional eBay sellers would “rent space” within the shop, or whether or not they’d remain on the high-street or aim for an IKEA-sized warehouse.

But is it worth it? One of the main reasons people like eBay is because of the sheer range of rare and cut-price goods to be found there, and all without leaving your house, or worse, actually visiting a flea market. Or even a shop. The horror.

It’s an idea that’s going to have to be test-run several times – this is by no means the first eBay shop in the UK, and this one only runs till the sixth of December (future people, it’s 2011 at the time of writing, so don’t send me hate mail if it’s not there just before the Mayan-predicted apocalypse next year). But if it goes well, we may just see a whole lot more of them. I’m totally up for it – what are your thoughts?

A lot of online businesses are run by a small team of people – and in some cases, just one person. That’s a lot of responsibility, but with hired help for coding and building the site, creating something that practically runs itself is going to prove to be an advantage in the long run. But sites will break, and not having the right skill-set to fix anything can really let you down in 2011.

“If you’re good at something, never do it for free,” states the Joker, in The Dark Knight. Odd place to source your advice, but I couldn’t agree more. If you’re doing something for free – i.e. fixing someone’s broken HTML – then you better be getting something great in return, or you’re costing yourself time you could be a) sleeping, b) making money, or c) not doing endless amounts of people favours with no rewards. But sadly that also means that those who are computer illiterate and trying to run a site will often run into difficulties – specifically, ones they can’t fix without forking out for a second salary.

Learning basic skills doesn’t take long at all – HTML and CSS are not impervious to the almost beginner – and even learning how to set up and manage a WordPress blog is going to help when it comes to making sure the small business you’re trying to get off the ground doesn’t falter in the early stages. After all, you don’t want to have to run to an IT-knowledgeable friend or relative (or worse, expensive freelancer) when you could be Googling and problem-solving.

The Google aversion is probably the source of 90% of the tech problems I hear. It’s so simple to Google your answer, and people are vocal and knowledgeable enough to have written about it years before you’re wanting questions answered and problems solved. Sometimes I ask questions on Twitter despite knowing I should be Googling, but it’s this knowledge – that the info I need is out there, waiting to be read, that means all is not lost if those I know personally can’t help me out.

Being a self-starter is all about being driven and committed, and making sure you can accomplish what you need to in a self-reliant manner is part of that. Starting a business means saying goodbye to the nine-to-five, and if you think any different then you’re kidding yourself. In the beginning, everything is down to you, from the accounting to getting the office internet connection set up. You don’t turn up for eight hours a day and claim a salary each month.

Sound daunting? It’s not – learning how to craft sites, deal with Paypal and forgo paid themes in favour of your own CSS artistry can actually be an enjoyable and empowering experience. It certainly has been for me – I know that after learning, Googling, asking questions and making mistakes, I can take a great site idea and actually build it into a working prototype. For every person who’ll call you a “noob” or claim you’ve no business, well, running a business, there’s someone who’s willing to walk you through the basics. Don’t get left behind – be one of the people leading the way.

This article has been emailed to us from the future. No, we don’t know how. We’re posting it anyway.

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[November 15th, 2021.]

Once upon a time, there were magical places in the centre of cities, called offices. These tall, sturdy buildings were marvels – people sat at “desks” to perform tasks centred around their day jobs, after travelling from home on a journey once known as a “commute”, during which they would read the paper and stare angrily at people who lacked noise-cancelling headphones.

Weirdly, people had the internet back then, and yet they all chose to work in the same room! Even with Skype, and IM, and even Twitter (that 140-character microblog post thing that was popular back then, before FaGoogleBook bought the internet), they were sat there at desks, talking to each other out loud! In person!

The reason I want to talk about this is because back then, running a small business was harder. Back then, you had to rent an office, which made things very expensive, and also really limited your staff choices because of the singular geographical constraint you placed on the roles you offered to potential future employees.

Now, you can start the business from your couch, and win awards – from your couch. All you need is a computer, and you can get started. Doesn’t matter if the trains are delayed, or if the City suffers a blackout, or even if the Olympics are in town (during which all businesses based in the city known as London gave up and went on holiday for a fortnight, causing countless riots across the capital). You’re comfy, you’re working hard, and you can work with a programmer in the States, and a PR whiz in China.

What’s odd is this was doable in 2011, and although some companies find it easier, or prefer to work in offices, for small businesses it’s the best route possible. The risk is low – no moving house, no office investment, no office temperature debates – just the work and the proof of concept. If it doesn’t work, moving on doesn’t take months – it takes a week, if that.

The best part is the fact that everything from education to business deals can be done via the web, but of course, it does tend to turn us into sociopathic recluses feeding off Ocado deliveries and the odd gift-to-self from Amazon. But it’s all in the name of business, right? Right?

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[November 15th, 2011.]

It’s something I fully support, for small businesses – once you’re a team of over a hundred people, sticking to your living room isn’t really going to work, as you’ll need the speed and the ability to speak to people quickly in custom groups and give presentations without having to stream it to them over the web. It also means that servers and other technological concerns are, while centralised (if your net is down, everyones is), a little more accessible.

Small businesses have a lot to learn. You don’t need an office. Some of the best websites and companies I know of started in someone’s house, or in the houses of individual staff scattered across the planet. So sprawl out on your couch, get alone, and go people hunting. See it this way: during the Olympics, you’ll be the only companies around, if you’re in London!

It’s arguable that in recent years, the “buzz” has overtaken traditional channels of promotion. But what about news, and journalism? Is it faster to glean the headlines from your feeds, or from the front pages of whatever eclectic mish-mash of physical and digital content providers you’ve gone to, regular as clockwork, for years?

If you look at the hashtags for anything from Libya to The X-Factor, it’s clear as day that people are happy to inform each other and keep everyone up to speed, because what they’d tell five people around the water-cooler is now something they can tell hundreds of millions by tweeting – and both take less than a minute. In an astonishing turn around, journalism – a discipline that champions brevity and concise description above all else – has, in some aspects, been usurped by the popularity of a big old chat. Or has it?

The For

News has become stale. That’s not because it’s badly written, but because news, in its infancy, was about bringing people the facts as soon as possible. There’s an age-old saying in print journalism that your first paragraph should contain everything someone needs to know. Not only is this common sense, but it also means that if your article gets chopped down during the editing process, it doesn’t “break”.

In 2011, it’s possible to go one better, and present someone with an entire article’s worth of information in 140 characters, which trumps content several times the length. It’s said often during technological discussion, but we’re becoming an extremely impatient people, and seeing “Libya liberated, Gaddafi dead” flood my feed, rather than it hitting me once at six ‘o’ clock – rather than taking time out to read the news during the day – is what matters, to me.

If you’re a business, it also means that you’re able to reach into a space you couldn’t before – consumer’s personal information spheres. By doing so (tweeting at them, talking to them, and generally not being an old-fashioned “we only tweet promo content and never retweet or reply) you enable yourself to impress them directly, rather than through the love-hate filter of the press.

The Against

Twitter, Facebook – they’re far from perfect, and what’s worse is that they’re like blogs and their impact on online journalism – suddenly, everyone’s an journalist, and with Twitter, everyone’s an informant. As most people are a) prone to gossip, and b) not trained journalists, and will therefore proceed to repeatedly provide their followers with hearsay cast as fact, and hashtag relentlessly in order to flood key searches with irrelevant statements.

It can also be used alongside traditional journalism, or online – simply by delving into it and using it as a promotional tool, and if your business happens to deal in information, news, reviews and other media, there is no platform more prone to content going viral than social media. But to replace long-form content entirely would be a horrendous miss-step, especially given the long-established place in the media that journalism has, in comparison to the fly-by-night nature of social media – even Facebook’s losing members.

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It’s certainly a tough topic, and I think a mix of the two is best – read your long-form stuff, but grab your water-cooler headlines from Twitter or other mediums, such as Reddit. But for those businesses who are wondering whether their product press releases are going to be required reading for anyone in the near future when we’re social to a fault online, I’d keep your cards close to your chest until we see where Twitter and the like end up in 2021. Time will tell.

With the arrival of OnLive, the game-streaming technology that’s been so hotly anticipated by those who want to play great games without the cost of a console or high-spec PC, and YouTube’s announcement that they’ll be renting HD films to users, it seems that allowing users to receive a constant flow of data over a delay and a physical copy is rapidly becoming the preferred method for enjoying new media.

But what does this mean for businesses? Digital storefronts have proven themselves to be the consumer delivery method with the brightest future, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s completely reliable yet. Businesses like game publisher Ubisoft have, by using controlling methods of delivery akin to a gun to the head of the user, suffered delays and outages that have permanently damaged their reputations. Users avoid streaming and download services due to the fact that if the servers die, their paid-for content does as well, and this is a valid concern.

The easiest way to battle these concerns is to take the Facebook approach – that any outage must be avoided at all costs, because a single one could scar their brand image permanently. It’s worked for them so far, and it’s certainly possible if you’re willing to invest in the hardware to back up the services you’re offering to your customers.

Streaming content is also something that’s an unproven concept with businesses who don’t have the budget or company size of sites like YouTube (Google now, really) or UStream. Funding it however needn’t be difficult at all – delivering streaming content is extremely expensive, whereas consumers who receive streamed content often get it for free – so there should be a opportunities for income and potential advertising to soften the blow of expenditure on more servers and better tubes.

It’s certainly a new way to run the local Blockbusters, that’s for sure. Especially given that physical rentals, while popular, are something that could potentially be overtaken by offering people the same content but without the hassle of dropping things in the post box every now and then. It’s also a save on the traditional storage space required for all the DVDs and games you’ll be renting out, and you’re also not even using your customers’ hard-drive space.

The challenge for any business looking into digital content streaming will be to out-do the left-right-knockout punch of YouTube and OnLive. Even major television networks in the UK have thrown their lot in with Google’s (arguably) wisest purchase, and OnLive seems set to become the standard in videogame streaming. But it’s possible to hit a niche – Vimeo seems to have done relatively well, despite its on-off (usually off) relationship with my mobile device.

Only time will tell us how well streaming performs, but with broadband speeds consistently rising, there’s little argument against streaming becoming better and easier as we move forward.

It’s odd – I was discussing topics for today with my editor, and we spoke about the importance of a certain individual who sadly passed away this week; one Steve Jobs. It seemed fair to mention him this week, to mark his passing, but it wasn’t clear how. That’s until it hit me that realistically, without Steve and the team at Apple, we wouldn’t have seen a great deal of the inventions we now celebrate as some of the best technology around. There wasn’t a single person with a love of technology who didn’t feel a sense of shock and sadness this week. Whether iTunes intends to pursue streaming is another matter entirely, but consider this a mention with the utmost respect for the wealth of content put out about him this week already.

On Monday, socialmediatoday’s Debra Ellis posted an article that argued that social media metrics are useless, for a wide variety of reasons. It’s reassuring to know that there are those working and/or writing in the field who think the same as I do. These statistics, as a concept, will always be flawed, and rarely useful for making assumptions that rely on precise data. Social media metrics are essentially statistics based around attention-seeking and numerical fetishes. Let’s take a closer look at Ellis’ points.

She states that “the only real numbers that matter to your company are the ones generated from your marketing activities.” This is true, but a little unclear. What Ellis may mean is that the real number, at the end of the day, that matters more than all the others comes under the title of ‘sales’. The end product of a marketing campaign is either more, less, or equal sales to the figure that came before it, and everything else, from numbers of followers to your Klout rating, is somewhat irrelevant.

Mack Collier, social media strategist, reinforces this when he explains that having 22,000 Twitter followers doesn’t mean that 22,000 people are going to click a link you post – in most cases. There are exceptions, and author Neil Gaiman has an ability to – in his own words – “Neil web fail” any site by bringing the attention of his huge follower crowd onto a small site that isn’t prepared. But Collier states that there needs to be a better way to explain the shortcomings of these statistics to clients.

This makes sense – a client is going to see 22k followers, and only 200 clicks, and ask what the problem with your campaign is. The realistic answer is that there isn’t a problem with your campaign – 200 clicks is a great number considering that most people are not following less than a hundred people, and reading every tweet becomes difficult, let alone clicking every link. To quote a protester shown during Bowling for Columbine: “does everyone who watches a Lexus ad go out and buy a Lexus? No, but a few do.”

Discussing things with Jon (as one is wont to do quite often at MoreDigital – the man has a Wikipedia cache installed in his brain), we agreed that looking at follower numbers and Twitter graphs serves little purpose when it comes to measuring your social media reach, and this is true – an advert during the Superbowl could reach tens of millions of people, but it doesn’t mean anyone is actually watching with interest, given that it’s not the scheduled entertainment causing them to look toward the screen in the first place.

“The numbers that matter from social media participation are sales, costs, and satisfaction,” says Ellis. “If sales don’t increase, costs decrease, and/or satisfaction improves, your online activity is a waste of time.” It’s a tough pill to swallow if you’ve been working on a campaign non-stop only to realise that 75% of your followers are spam bots. At the same time, you can’t ditch the spam bots, because if they’ve given you a 300% increase in follower numbers, you’ll know that having 20k followers over 5k increases a user’s chance of following you.

Social media metrics have a long way to go, and there’s nothing wrong with keeping an eye on how you’re doing. But assuming that you can judge company performance using this sort of data is ludicrous, because it’s not actually relevant to company performance. Shouting about fresh fruit and vegetables while working at the market sells you four oranges. It doesn’t matter how many people heard you hawking your wares – those four oranges are your clue to whether or not you should be in the vitamin C game at all.

It’s arguable that due to the standard of today’s technology, we no longer need to work within an office environment in order to finish a profit and loss sheet. But are we really producing work of the same quality when tapping away at a netbook at thirty thousand feet, or are we sacrificing doing our jobs properly in order to complete a higher number of tasks and reduce downtime?

I find airplane travel to be an interesting experience. I love airports, for one; strolling around the duty free area, getting something to eat and drink for the plane, buying a magazine and enjoying the atmosphere (easy when everything is around 20 % cheaper). But I don’t feel compelled to work on the plane whether it’s a short trip or a long one, because it’s not a productive environment.

The seats usually aren’t comfortable – unless you’re in Business Class, a category whose name makes no sense whatsoever given that a business shouldn’t be forking out more for a flight than it has to. The noise is somewhat disruptive. Most of all, travelling is exhausting, and anyone with the desire to stay awake at a meeting after an eight-hour flight is going to use those eight hours to get an entire night’s worth of sleep.

I will sometimes work on the Tube – as a Londoner, our transport network is reliable, and you can work in relative peace as everyone is so fearfully antisocial when placed in a public environment. I’ve even written a MoreDigital blog post while sailing down the Piccadilly Line, but I find that it’s slightly more difficult when you can’t access the web to double-check your facts, or edit header images. So you can get your rough work done, and clean it up later.

Anyone expecting a neat finished product produced in such a stressful, disruptive atmosphere is kidding themselves. But you’ve got to do something with the time, and occasionally you’ll find that doing two hours of work while travelling (The Evening Standard indicates that a fifth of London commutes are over an hour long) means that you’ll be leaving at half five, instead of half seven.

Geekpreneur offers a few tips for working on the plane, most notably that you can’t work on any confidential projects, or that you probably shouldn’t be working, because no one would expect you to do so – not your boss, not your clients, not your staff. It’s simply unfair. If you want to do it, then go for it! Pass the time with a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation. But don’t start in on that quarterly report because you feel that to snooze or read a novel would be to waste people’s time.

Do any of you work on the commute? I’d love to hear about people’s various attitudes to getting their projects closer to completion whilst being jostled around on the bus or making a major medical breakthrough while on the 5:29 to Bristol. So chip in, and share your thoughts.