The rise and fall of the web

This is my part of a joint newsletter with Rohit Talwar, his was published just now as a guest blog.

The rise and fall of the web

20 years ago, the web was in its infancy and the first conferences appeared where we could all discuss what was coming next. Even then the need was obvious for search engines, portal sites, firewalls, social networking, online shopping, auctions, discount buying schemes and so on and even the seedier side of the web was already obvious back then. Not much around today on the web wasn’t being discussed 20 years ago. It just took that long to emerge and evolve into what was anticipated. What has happened is exposure of the naïve optimism of some of the early debate.

Over the coming years we saw the expected creation of companies like Amazon and ebay, Facebook, Twitter and Google, and the rise of already existing companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Samsung, in some cases from niche player to market dominance. Without exception, the companies I mentioned deserve praise for struggling through the difficult phases of market creation and the sometimes huge and prolonged losses leading up to break-even and eventual profitability. They all started with a dream and made it happen, knowing they would succeed if they worked hard enough at it.

Without wanting to remove any of that praise, it is hard not to wonder if at least part of the dream is starting to turn sour. Is there evidence now that power corrupts? Does possession of a strong market position always lead inevitably to market abuse?

In each case, there are recent examples of less-than-saintly behaviour, but some issues are spreading as a problem, so rather than pick on individual companies, I’ll focus on the issues. In each case, a large company with little effective competition is in strong position to force these policies since they know customers and clients can’t easily just walk away. There is no cartel, but if a problem happens to affect all the main providers for a service, or it is a de-facto monopoly, you really have no choice.

Privacy invasion or at least scant regard for privacy is the biggest issue for some, introducing policies that make it hard for users to remain private. In this case, the reason is obvious. Privacy conflicts with extracting maximum market value from a customer’s personal data. I don’t personally want everyone to know what I just bought online, what I watch on TV, what games I play or what music I am listening to, or to have full access to everything I ever typed on a social networking page. The choice we seem to be presented with is simple. If you don’t want to be fully exposed 24-7, either don’t use the web or a mobile app, or be prepared to spend time frequently to check every site you use carefully for their latest policy changes to make sure an oversight doesn’t allow your privacy doesn’t fall through a new hole they just dug. But even that may not be the real choice now. The emerging pattern seem to be that changes may be introduced retrospectively, eradicating any value in privacy commitments in existing policy. If that behaviour spreads, then any privacy you think you have today is merely an illusion.

Burning the candle at both ends is another recent issue. Although the web has few of the costs associated the with high street, large web companies are charging high fees now to companies to sell via their site, much the same as property developers with the best locations can charge high fees to shops. That end of the candle is well alight, but customers are finding the discounts offered are often far less now too. Now that they have been psychologically hooked by the web empires, prices are rising.

Walled gardens were a consideration for regulators when mobile and broadband networks were emerging – I took part in several workshops discussing their merits and drawbacks. Telecoms regulators understood well that dominant telecoms companies might try to force customers to use only services within their own areas of control, i.e. to stay in their walled garden, and they legislated accordingly to protect customers. It was presumed that competition would suffer greatly if people were not free to wander as they pleased and exploitation would follow soon after.  However, although some of the web giants are heading rapidly and determinedly down exactly that path, the authorities are either looking the other direction or unable to do anything about it. It seems that any regulators that do exist have too vague boundaries on their remits, or the companies fall outside their jurisdiction geographically, or they simply have too many issues to deal with and can’t keep up. It is unacceptable that we now by default have arrived at a business platform that lends itself to abuse but isn’t being properly controlled by the normal regulator processes that apply as standard elsewhere.

Arrogance is a term we hear thrown at web giants frequently now, and it does seem appropriate when a large company ignores protests by its customers and imposes policies that significantly affect the terms and conditions that applied when they first became a customer. Even incrementally small changes can add up to large change in a short time, but if customers have invested time and effort building a profile or establishing a place or network on a site, the personal costs of migration can be too high. There ought to be equivalent rights protecting the interests of customers online just as in the physical world, but online providers appear to be able to make their own conditions of use with much greater scope for abuses, knowing that very few customers will read many pages of small print. Especially where websites feature heavily in everyday use, and where not being a user might even may be a career or social impediment, there should be more protection from arrogance and unilateral determination and management of user rights. Some regulatory body should be making sure terms and conditions are fair and balanced because the market isn’t doing that by itself.

Another aspect of arrogance is the enthusiasm to avoid taxes by exploiting holes in the law, and reading between the lines, it is as if the companies think they know best how money should be spent for humankind’s best interests, not governments. They may be right about government, but that doesn’t excuse arrogance.

Reintermediation is a direct consequence of walled gardens but is an issue in its own right. Early analysis of the web suggested it would lead to perfect markets, where people would be in direct contact with suppliers, thereby cutting out the middle man and his costs while forcing perfect information and hence maximum competitiveness. With good search, it would be easy to find all potential suppliers for something and compare them directly, and there would be no need to go via an agency. What we have now is interesting in that the search sites have themselves become intermediaries, and comparison sites another layer of that, listing results from a subset of suppliers. So instead of removing an intermediary we generated two new ones, three if you use an app store to do it. Everyone wants a slice of the pie of course, but the web was meant to bypass that, and it simply hasn’t. People can go direct, but it doesn’t take long to discover that using a search engine will often put hundreds of pages of the wrong sites before the one you search for. Most of the listings on the first several pages will often be intermediary sites.

In spite of all this, the potential of the web hasn’t gone away. It still allows word of new sites to spread rapidly, for reputations to be made and lost, for empires to spring up overnight, and for old ones to crash and burn. Boredom is under-rated as a motivation to change too. Social network sites in particular are highly vulnerable to their customers simply getting bored and leaving, but new designs and novel ideas can present a real threat to any of them. The sword of Damocles hangs over all.

For all their size and momentum, none of the web giants is guaranteed longevity. As some of yesterday’s giants discovered, a startup can replace them in just a few years. Maybe the first generation of web giants has climbed high, but decadence and abuse of power have made them ripe for conquest. All we need now is to wait for the imminent emergence of the second generation.

Sainsbury’s marketing have lost the plot

This one is more of a rant against poor marketing, and isn’t about the future.

I won’t mention names, but I know a few marketing chiefs who think their staff are largely a waste of space. I don’t have any experience of working with Sainsbury’s marketing though so only have experience as a customer as evidence one way or another.

I am sure someone thinks their new campaign is fantastic. Lets run a TV campaign telling everyone that if they could have got stuff cheaper elsewhere, we will give them a voucher for the difference. It worked well for John Lewis didn’t it?

Well, yes it did, but John Lewis did it right. You did it the opposite of right.

So, if we’d shopped in one of their competitors, we would have paid less.  But they are kindly ‘making it this easy to claim the difference back’. So, if we are still dumb enough to go back to Sainsbury’s soon, knowing we had been overcharged, and remember to take this voucher with us, we can ask for a refund of the overcharge, but only as a discount of our next purchases, which presumably, being a similar basket, will also be overcharged, so we’ll get another voucher and be locked in forever into a cycle of being overcharged and having to juggle vouchers and keep shopping there to get a fair deal. But it is only £1.31, (it was only a small top-up shop of around £20) so we’ll cut our losses and shop in Tesco’s again, where according to Sainsbury’s, we’ll presumably save even more than that every time, since we normally pay rather more than £20.

Not quite John Lewis is it? They are ‘never knowingly undersold’. If they find a competitor would have charged less, they will charge you that or less, at least that’s what I have always assumed. Not give you a voucher that you have to take back and get a discount of another overcharged shopping trip.

Sainsbury’s, you are not being clever, locking people happily into forever shopping there. First, you are telling them you overcharged and then secondly, instead of just deducting it at the checkout at the time which would be easy and fair, you are making people additionally jump through hoops before you’ll give them a fair deal, while telling them where they can get one right away. Not clever. Not at all clever.

 

The future of high street survival: the 6S guide

I do occasionally write a blog relevant to the news of the day rather than just what takes my fancy. The news today, apart from Tesco horse burgers, is the closure of another national retail chain, HMV. I learned on the news that HMV stands for ‘His Master’s Voice’. Never knew that, I thought it was a 90s chain. ’His master’s voice’ is immediately recognisable as an ancient and trusted brand. HMV has a nice up to date logo  though so maybe their marketing department though that is more important to appeal to a generation that has mostly never bought a CD. HMV also didn’t bother to explain the difference to shoppers between what you get when you buy a CD v what you get when you download, i.e proper ownership and rights v part and temporary ownership and severely restricted rights. Still, too late for them to ask me my views. They’re dead.

Some high street shops make excellent use of the synergy between a physical outlet and web presence. As we progress into the age of augmented reality, that will become ever more important. People will expect to be able to buy via either route but still use the facilities offered by the shop. AR also adds huge potential to add virtual architecture, décor  themes and gaming. Reserving online for high street collection, or buying for home delivery while in the shop are well established; less so is using 3d printing to accessorise outfits, or laser scanning body shape so that you can use stores as try-on outlets. These are starting to generate presence and will grow in importance. And some shops are getting extra income by acting as drop off centres for other companies, so that people can collect things on their way home from work, a big thing for the many households where nobody is at home during the day to receive goods.

Socialising is best done face to face, and shopping is a social experience too. Coffee shops and restaurants have been familiar in shops for decades now, but shops could make far more advantage of social networking to offer meeting and hanging out facilities for people using social networks and who share something in common related to the theme of the shop. Clothes shops could offer fashion related events, gadget shops demos of up and coming products, and so on. Establishing shops as something more than just places to buy increases their relevance and brand loyalty, hence survival chances. So, synergy, socialising. I feel a ’6S guide to high street survival’ coming on.

Next S:  service. This should be obvious, and most shops do appreciate the importance of differentiating on service quality. While it used to be a concern that people would use the shop for service and then buy online, having good web presence and competitiveness anyway makes this less problematic. There is nothing wrong with having some premium services and charging for them in addition to free basic service. Some premium services could even be provided for competitor web sites with no high street presence, making a potential income stream even when people do use competitors. Opticians doing prescriptions for online glasses sellers, or clothes shops providing paid measuring services are good examples where this already occurs. Seeing competitors as potential market opportunities rather than just as threats is key.

Suck and see. OK, a bit contrived to get the S this time, but shops are starting to do it. The Apple Store is a good example, where you try it out in the shop but the purchase is essentially an online one. Clothes shops can let you try a garment on and then order it in your size for home delivery, using rapid customisation manufacturing and delivery systems.

Surprise is another one. It is easy to shop online when you know what you want. If you don’t, shops can offer that mixture of expected and unexpected to make you want to visit. Call it serendipity if you prefer.

The 6th S is for Special. This could be customisation or personalisation of products for customers, or it could be an extended relationship with customers in terms of pampering of regular customers, after-sales services, advice, affiliate programs, belonging to social groups… People want to feel special.

There you have it. Service, surprise, suck-and-see, socialisation, synergy and special. The 6S guide to high street survival.

 

Casual displays

I had a new idea. If I was adventurous or an entrepreneur, I’d develop it, but I’m not, so I won’t. But you can, before Apple patents it. Or maybe they already have.

Many people own various brands of pads, but they are generally expensive, heavy, fragile and need far too much charging. That’s because they try to be high powered computers. Even e-book readers have too much functionality for some display purposes and that creates extra expense. I believe there is a large market for more casual displays that are cheap enough to throw around at all sorts of tasks that don’t need anything other than the ability to change and hold a display.

Several years ago, Texas Instruments invented memory spots, that let people add multimedia to everyday objects. The spots could hold a short video for example, and be stuck on any everyday object.These were a good idea, but one of very many good ideas competing for attention by development engineers. Other companies have also had similar ideas. However, turning the idea around, spots like this could be used to hold data for a  display, and could be programmed by a similar pen-like device or even a finger touch. Up to 2Mb/s can be transmitted through the skin surface.

Cheap displays that have little additional functionality could be made cheaply and use low power. If they are cheap enough, less than ten pounds say, they could be used for many everyday purposes where cards or paper are currently used. And since they are cheap, there could be many of them. With a pad, it has to do many tasks. A casual display would do only one. You could have them all over the place, as recipe cards, photos, pieces of art, maps, books, body adornment, playing cards, messages, birthday cards, instructions, medical advice, or anything. For example:

Friend cards could act as a pin-board reminder of a friend, or sit in a wallet or handbag. You might have one for each of several best friends. A touch of the spot would update the card with the latest photo or status from Facebook or another social site. Or it could be done via a smart phone jack. But since the card only has simple functionality  it would stay cheap. It does nothing that can’t also be done by a smartphone or pad, but the point is that it doesn’t have to. It is always the friend card. The image would stay. It doesn’t need anything to be clicked or charged up. It only needs power momentarily to change the picture.

There are displays that can hold pictures without power that are postcard sized, for less than £10. Adding a simple data storage chip and drivers shouldn’t add significantly to cost. So this idea should be perfectly feasible. We should be able to have lots of casual displays all over our houses and offices if they don’t have to do numerous other things. In the case of displays, less may mean more.

Flat lenses – oozing potential

Lenses used to be curved. Not in the future thanks to Harvard scientists: https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/press-releases/flat-lens-offers-perfect-image and http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl302516v.

Ht http://nextbigfuture.com/ for making me aware.

Flat antennas aren’t new per se, phased array radio antennas have been around decades, but this is the first optical flat lens I am aware of. Theirs is pretty damned clever!

They are already looking at applications such as flat microscope objectives, and have probably covered most of the biggest opportunities. But just in case, and researchers do occasionally miss some opportunities, here are a few for free:

Kite telescopes

NASA are currently flying a 747-based telescope, chucking out huge quantities of water vapour into the high atmosphere, contributing to global warming to take over from their space shuttles. Ironic that such a warmist organisation should do that, but there we go. A large flat surface telescope could presumably be made into a high altitude kite, albeit one that needs a little engineering. And it wouldn’t add to stratospheric water vapour, or even add CO2.

High altitude telescopes could be used for ground imaging as well as space of course, and there would be many commercially viable businesses from this root, as well as military surveillance of course.

Smart glasses and contact lenses

I would like a pair of glasses that record everything I look at. Flat surface cameras would allow this. Glasses are much bigger than my pupil, so they could allow much higher resolution, so I’d be able to see at very high magnification without having to use binoculars. I’d also be able to see infrared, microwaves, see where the strongest cellphone signal is, enable a whole new kind of fashion using different spectra, add to augmented reality hugely by using the infrared channel to show real as well as digital auras. Wow, can’t wait for these! I am playing Assassin’s Creed again, and this is Eagle Sense and then some.

Of course, active contact lenses could also use this tech and offer intuitive optional zoom. I would see the world as normal, but by trying to focus on something in the distance, it would zoom in automatically. There have only been a few updates to my original active contact lens idea from 1991, http://www.futurizon.com/inventions/activecontactlensmay91.pdf but this will be another generation for its 21st anniversary.

Credit card cameras

The smartphone is causing the decline of standalone digital cameras. Digital jewellery will cause the decline of smartphones, but one of the things we still needed them for is the camera. Not any more. A simple credit card camera would work fine. Or maybe even a wristband could be used. Flat cameras will hasten the decline of smartphones.

Smart posters

If they can be printed cheaply, cameras could be built into much of the urban environment. Any poster could have video capture and storage built in, powered by solar, with some comms added too. What and who it sees could direct what it displays. Sure, you can do all that and then some with augmented reality, but augmented reality is a whole load of additional functionality that lives happily alongside other stuff, and doesn’t necessarily replace everything. Posters could be the next wave of Big Brother or the next wave of advertising. Or both.

Teletubby T-shirts revisited

When the Teletubbies were still new, I suggested that we’d be able to make clothes with video panels in using polymer screens. Teletubby t-shirts. Flat panel cameras would allow these to be two way. They could display images but also act as a cameras. They could link to cameras in other people’s t-shirts. You could have a camera on your back that links to the video image on your front, making you appear to have a big hole through you.

Thought recognition and smart microwaves

Wired carries another interesting article on brain wave recognition of PINs via the headsets used to play computer games. Old stuff in idea terms perhaps but it’s always nice to see practice catching up. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/brainwave-hacking/

It seems obvious that this could work nicely with the flat lens idea. A flat surface could image the electrical activity in the brain from a greater distance instead of having to use a helmet.

It would also be possible to put flat cameras on the inside surfaces of microwave ovens, looking at the food to see where the hot spots and cold spots are, so that the microwave beams could be directed better to the areas needing heated.

I think that’s enough for now.

Spotify definitely isn’t the future for music. So what is?

Rant ahead, move along if you aren’t interested.

Actually, 6 months on, I tried it again. Content-wise, it is far far better than it was with a lot of stuff I wanted now available, albeit they have the same probs scanning in albums as me, with some tracks mixed up. I haven’t subscribed so cant try streaming it via my squeezebox which was my biggest gripe. Certainly might well give the free version a good play on my PC for a while and might even try again. No company is beyond redemption. Anyway, here is my original. Just bear in mind that some is now out of date.

 

 

So, I just cancelled my Spotify premium account. I gave it a good try – just over a year, so that’s over a hundred quid, and I reckon because of the problems using it I have listened to about 100 tracks over that time. Pretty poor value for me. It can be used, but is so difficult to use with my setup, I hardly ever did. And when I tried, usually the licenses had expired so it would spend ages downloading them again before it would let letting me listen. And usually several of the tracks on each playlist were no longer available. And worse still, on three occasions over that time, the whole application has gone missing off my PC spontaneously and I have had to download it afresh.

When I just want to listen to a music track, I don’t want to have to find the Spotify page, download the app again, wait ages while it installs, resyncs a few hundred tracks across all my playlists, clogging up my internet access for ages, log in again, figure out why it won’t talk my Squeezebox any more, fix the complaints by the software that my Squeezebox is logged in so I cant log in via my PC, put up with the inexplicably bad interface to the Squeezebox, wondering why the hell I can’t just use my PC version and then click a button to stream it, then take a trip to the lounge to change channel on my media system, then come back, switch off the one on playing on my PC speakers at the same time, and then figure out which of the two playlists I now have up is the right one, and then work out that the reason it isn’t playing the one I want to listen to is no longer available from Spotify, then figure out how to go back to the Squeezebox interface and find it on my hard drive from my CD collection, then play that, then wonder how I get back onto Spotify without losing the track playing, then try to find which playlist I had going…. etc etc.

Spotify does not work for me. It is better than Napster, but only on a 3/10 score is better than a 1/10 score basis. Both are total rubbish when used with a Squeezebox in another room. Part of that is the Squeezebox’s (Logitech’s) fault, part Spotify’s but if they have an agreement to work together, and claim to do so in their sales pitches, then it is both their faults. My Squeezebox is wonderful when it works. When!

So that’s why I cancelled. I clicked the ‘don’t use enough’ button on their form, but couldn’t click all the others that applied because they only permit one option. I didn’t use it enough because it is total crap. The only reason I didn’t cancel earlier is because I kept forgetting to.

Spotify is fine on just my PC, but then I don’t need the streaming, so the free one is fine, I just turn down my speakers when the adds come on.

OK, let’s move on from Spotify and my darned Squeezebox. I like listening to music, when it’s easy. When I used CDs I listened frequently. Then I got my first MP3 player, and much later various iphones. I have never used any of them more than a few minutes at a time. Having all your music on an easy button click means that with my hamster-like attention span, I hit a new track every few seconds and my enthusiasm quickly burns out. A kid in a sweet shop soon gets sick. And anyway, my iPhone battery seems to be empty every time I pick it up. Another piece of crap but that’s Apple for you.

I use my PC to store all my CD music, and rarely use them now. One problem I have and I am sure must share with others is that on iTunes some tracks get misnamed or worse still, just come over as unknown. I made the huge mistake once of letting iTunes reorganise my library and everything got so screwed up I had to scan in all my CDs again. I own about 20 tracks I bought from Amazon or Napster. They are on my PC, but are always hard to find when I use the media server or Squeezebox because the interfaces are bad. So even there, with music I own, on my own PC, listening is OK to a point, but still has loads of problems. I am listening to a playlist right now and picked ‘play all’, but I still have to go into the Logitech screen every track to make it play the next one instead of  letting it repeat the same track endlessly. It doesn’t work! It isn’t my fault. I am reasonably smart and have 30 years IT experience. If I can’t use it, it is designed badly. Simple as that.

I have a new Freesat system with a hard drive, and am told I can use that to store and play my music. I’ll reserve judgement on that till I try it. I haven’t plugged it in yet.

The future

So how do I get music? I don’t want to use a personal MP3 player all the time. What I really want is to be able to just see a big swathe of album covers, preferably virtual ones hanging in space in front of me, and touch one, then pick the track, or do all that with a playlist. Or speak a voice command, or use a simple search tool by .

When I play it, I want to watch the music video, and I want music made for full 7.1 surround, not bloody stereo. I want to feel I am there in the studio or concert. I want full sensory, full immersion music, with every sense stimulated in synch.

I don’t mind paying. I have never listened to a track I don’t have the legal right to listen to. That never has been an issue. I have bought a lot of what turned out to be rubbish and I’d like a refund please. Same with all the many dupes I own. Can I sell them please? Also, can I give in all my vinyl LPs and get lifetime licenses to digital version please? But I won’t hold my breath on that.

I want to pay a subscription to something a bit like Spotify, but a more professional one that sort of works. I want access to all the other music. And when I spend time making  a playlist, I don’t want to find 20% of the tracks won’t play next time I access it. I want it to integrate seamlessly with my owned tracks, in the correct sense of the word, not exaggerated sales hype. And I want to be able to point at any set of speakers in my house, or anywhere else for that matter and stream it from there, now. I don’t want to fight battles with software or have to log in to anything, or to update software, or re-establish internet connections, or be told I cant use it in the lounge because I am logged on in the office.

The music industry insists on being paid. But by doing so in such clumsy and badly implemented ways, they have destroyed any pleasure from listening to music and alienated countless customers. I tried to buy CDs, but Apple can’t copy them properly onto my PC. My PC can’t stream them reliably through my Squeezebox because of Microsoft and Logitech. No music subscription service I can access on the Squeezebox is any good at all. So I’ll keep the money in my bank account. I listen to music so much less now because it’s such a pain, so the novelty doesn’t wear off any more, so I have enough. A small loss to the global music industry perhaps, but many others aren’t willing to pay at all so I am part of the group they needed to keep on board. For 20 years they have been trying to get a working business model. This isn’t it.

Spotify aimed at the future, and missed.

Are advertising and Apple expenses we can do without?

If you wage war with someone and he gets a bigger gun, you feel pressured to get one too. It’s the same in the war to take your money. If everyone else spends a fortune on advertising, you are likely to feel forced to do so too. But it costs, heavily, and those costs ultimately have to be recovered in higher prices.

When you click on an ad on a website, an advertising company somewhere typically gets about £0.50. That 50p plus has to be recovered when you buy the product, but many of the clicks are ineffective, and there are other expenses in the whole chain apart from the actual click fee (the seller’s own staff, banking costs, accountancy, management etc). Whether you even notice ads or have ever clicked on one, the money you hand over nevertheless subsidises a great many ads, and the ultimate price you pay is much greater than the price that would be needed without advertising.

Nothing new there, but advertising has become a significant and unavoidable extra cost along with taxes and banking fees (and parking charges if you buy in town). You don’t get a choice whether to pay extra to buy via an advertising route or get it cheaper by somehow buying direct. Add up all the web ads, junk email, text messages, paper junk mail, newspapers and magazines, TV and radio advertising, and the whole advertising mark-up is big.

Advertising doesn’t just increase costs. With the exception of some wonderfully entertaining ads, many involving meerkats, adverts waste our time too. Count up all the hours people waste fast forwarding over the add breaks or even sitting through them, and consider the significant personal stress directly resulting from the irritation they cause, that may have a small but finite impact on health. Add to that the extra demands on landfill from the paper junk mail, plus the wasted time opening and sorting the waste. The negative impact on our lives, the environment, and on  the overall economy is vast. Sure, the ad industry creates jobs, but jobs in advertising don’t generate wealth (though there are obviously cash flows between regions). Like banking and the public sector, advertising is a drain on resources. It syphons money from the productive economy and impoverishes us. 

On the other hand, advertising pays for a great deal of what we use on the web, watch on TV or read in newspapers. Some of that wouldn’t exist if the advertising went away, though some would survive via other business models. We’d still have to pay for the things we want to use somehow, so any notional extra fees and administrative inconvenience can reasonably be offset against advertising’s negative impacts.

But even with that offsetting, we really should challenge the cost:benefit ratio in advertising and see if we can find better ways of letting suppliers make potential customers aware of the merits of what they have on offer.

Advertising is only one strand of marketing of course. Marketers know that people want to learn about their new products when they are potentially interested. Context is key. If I have just eaten, I am not interested in marketing from nearby restaurants. If I haven’t, I might be. Using context makes direct marketing possible, especially knowing the location of the user and their tastes and preferences. I will gladly pull information from companies willing to sell me stuff I am interested in, when I want it. They won’t have to pay anyone. Pull marketing is potentially very low cost to both parties, providing the consumer with the info on suppliers’ offerings so they can make an informed decision on what to buy. If we moved entirely to that sort of model, we could greatly reduce the price of everything we buy while saving time and stress.

It is certainly possible to build such a system and make it work well. The technology exists and we’d all be far better off. The really huge problem is that we have bought into the smartphone model, buying iphones, pads or similar, and were taken in so well by beautiful designs and features that we didn’t look under the covers. What we didn’t consciously buy, but bought nonetheless, were devices that only give us access to things on condition that Apple or another big manufacturer gets a big slice of the price, via a variety of mechanisms. A smartphone is perfectly capable of providing exactly the platform we need to save lots of unnecessary spend, but Apple has used its power to extract its own slice of our spend not just at device purchase but throughout its lifetime. Not only has it not let us avoid the expense of advertising, it has added its own extras on top. It has made the situation even worse. Most other companies also use strategies that are designed to get into the most lucrative position in the value chain, expanding the price increase industry.

As I remember it in the beginning, the web was meant to get rid of intermediaries and save costs, making the economy more efficient. What has happened is that layer upon layer of new intermediaries have become adept at selling us products and purchasing systems that allow them to skim off extra slices of revenue for themselves. Anyone working in IT is very familiar with the many layered system architectures, and each layer is another opportunity for some company to take a slice of the revenue passing through. All add ultimately to the purchase price, and companies like Apple win several times because they control several of the architectural layers that their devices are used in. But we are suckers, and keep buying them. Because the extra costs are cleverly hidden or disguised or renamed, we don’t notice them until it’s too late.

I may sound critical of Apple, but all they are doing is to maximise profits for their shareholders, whilst giving customers products they can’t resist. There is no fault there. The same goes for Google or Facebook or any other intermediary. It is the model that we need to change, not companies, who will always do what they can to make the most money. That’s what companies are for.

I’ve written often about cloud nets and digital jewellery nets and the forces of censorship and surveillance and web-based politics and the consequential likely emergence of sponge networks. Check them out in my recent articles list. Freeing ourselves of parasitic companies and advertising is another potential pressure. It may go two ways. We could simply recreate exactly the same problems all over again, just swapping one set of intermediaries for another. Sadly, that is the most likely outcome. History teaches us best that we don’t often learn from history.

But, and this is a long shot, but one that would really help make the world better, we could make devices that people buy, and are then free. No charges for making apps for them, no push advertising, completely open, highly context aware, and high powered, yet completely free to own and use after purchase. Even the comms could be free. They would be capable of everything that you do now, and more. We could use them to talk direct to suppliers and do business with them without anyone else involved. It is even possible to design a free payments and banking system. We could avoid paying anyone except the device manufacturer, once, and the companies we want to do business with using the devices. And with all the time and money we would all save, none of us would mind paying a fair price for such a device. Many people paid via advertising would have to find alternative support models, but the economy would be better off, the rest of us individually would be better off, and the environment would be better off. It is hard to see a downside.

History tells us we will still pick the other system and pay more for a worse life.

How much choice should you have?

Like most people I can’t get through an hour without using Google. They are taking a lot of flak at the moment over privacy concerns, as are Apple, Facebook and other big IT companies. There are two sides to this though.

On one side, you need to know what is being done and want the option to opt out of personal information sharing, tracing and other big brothery types of things.

On the other, and we keep forgetting this, most people have no idea what they want. Ford noted that if you asked the customer what they wanted, they would say a faster horse. Sony’s Akio Morita observed that there was little point in doing customer surveys because customers have no idea what is possible. He went ahead and made the Walkman, knowing that people would buy it, even though no-one had asked for it. Great visions often live far ahead of customer desires. Sometimes it is best just to do it and then ask.

I think to a large extent, these big IT companies are in that same boat.

If your collective IT knows what you do all day (and by that I mean all your gadgets, and all the apps and web services and cloud stuff you use), and it knows a hell of a lot, then it is possible to make your life a lot easier by providing you with a very talented and benign almost telepathic personal assistant. Pretty much for free, at point of delivery anyway.

If we hold companies back with  too many legal barriers because of quite legitimate privacy concerns, this won’t happen properly. We will get a system with too much internal friction that fails frequently and never quite works.

But can we trust them? Apple, Google and Facebook all have far too much arrogance at the moment, so perhaps they do need to be put in their place. But they aren’t evil dictators. They don’t want to harm us at all, they just want to find new ways to help us because it’s on the back of those services that they can get even richer and more powerful. Is that good or bad?

I deleted and paused my web history on Google and keep my privacy settings tight on everything else. Maybe you do the same. But I actually can’t wait till they develop all the fantastic new services they are working on. As a technology futurologist I have a pretty good idea how it will be, I’ve been lecturing about Google’s new augmented reality headset since 3 years before Google existed. Once everyone else has taken all the risks and it’s all safely up and running, I’ll let them have it all. Trouble is, if we all do that it won’t happen.

Terrorism and marketing

Firstly, rather than cutting and pasting large amounts of text, here are a couple of links to papers I have written on future technologies that can be used by terrorist groups, mad scientists or anyone else wanting to cause trouble. They are a couple of years old, but mostly still valid.

http://futurizon.com/articles/backlash.pdf

http://futurizon.com/articles/threats.pdf

http://futurizon.com/articles/madscientists.pdf

Terrorism is diversely motivated. Feelings of oppression or political disenfranchisement are common excuses, as are religious zeal, xenophobia and other forms of hatred. Those are the oldest justifications and go back millennia.

Terrorism makes culprits instantly famous, and gives them a feeling of power and importance far and above what they could otherwise attain. One of the reasons terrorism was so persistent in Northern Ireland even after most of the original political and religious reasons had evaporated was because nobodies could suddenly be someone once they carried an armalite rifle. They were all too aware that when they put it down, they would be nobody again. In that sense it achieves dual goals of status seeking and self actualisation, and that is often as important to individual terrorists as the cause they back, probably more so.

But terrorism can also be a form of marketing, and this I believe is the biggest problem we face from it in the future. Marketing is growing in importance, but is very expensive, and many organisations struggle to make their messages heard within the budgets available to them. So there is a growing temptation to bend the rules, and some are succumbing. Marketing is losing what’s left of its innocence and the boundary into terrorism-land is blurring.

When it come to getting attention for a message, there is a sliding scale all the way from simple innocent marketing at one extreme to 9/11 at the other. Starting with conventional marketing, shock tactics magnify the message significantly, albeit at a price. For example the use of FCUK is a pathetic attempt to raise awareness by shocking and offending people. It attracts some people but alienates many more. The company might argue that the ones it alienates aren’t their target group anyway. Benetton used similar techniques in their 90s campaigns and achieved similar results, alienating many and winning a few. They didn’t use actual violence, and fell short of advocating or glorifying it, but actually, the deliberate offending of people to grab attention is just a mild form of terrorism – it creates mental distress instead of physical pain, it is really only degree that is different.

Unless you draw a huge distinction between mental and physical distress, the low end of violent terrorism is just one stage further along the scale than using deliberate offence. It is really just a relatively cheap but highly effective way to draw attention to any cause, however undeserving. Given that, I do wonder how much French Connection and Benetton contribute to terrorism by demonstrating effective use of deliberate offence. Offence is a cheap and crude substitute for talent. By comparison, Compare the Market’s Meerkat campaign is sheer brilliance that offends no-one but wins huge support and awareness.

Marketing exploits any new platform that it can, but as old platforms such as TV and newspapers go out of favour (people tend to skip ads) and as people seem oblivious to most web ads, the game is gradually getting more vicious. This is obvious at the grubby end of web advertising. Hijacking of web browsers is common now to force adverts into your field of view. Many otherwise high quality sites often force adverts and use cookies to track browsing – they used to just use cookies to remember who you were so they could save you logging on afresh, but now they collect a lot more. Only slightly further along, some websites use web browsers to infiltrate PCs with more dangerous forms of malware and harness them in denial of service attacks.

Similarly, some sites put spyware and ad-ware on to PCs to force adverts of capture marketing information (it isn’t just bank details that are valuable). It is hard to see much difference between the nastier kinds of marketing abuse and milder forms of terrorism, other than intent. Marketers use sometimes quite nasty techniques to gather data and better push their products, often hiding them well from users. Terrorists use similar functions to hijack PCs for illicit spamming, spying or DOS attacks. The boundary between marketing and terrorism is becoming blurred. That is not good news.

With people exposed thoroughly to such ethics from business and government alike, it isn’t very surprising that they think in similar ways when they want to further a specific cause. Grabbing attention is the aim. Marketing gives them the tools. And if the temptation exists to modify those tools or use some of the less benign ones, it doesn’t take such an enormous shift of attitude now to make that transition. And so we saw last year the use of the web to push for democracy in the Middle East and also to market the riots in London, because marketing it certainly was. We  see attempts to boycott companies and pressurise governments with mass email campaigns, to market demonstrations. You draw the moral  line somewhere along that line according to your own preferences, but it is a very long thin wedge. We all make our line at different places now. And when the marketing doesn’t quite achieve enough, maybe a slightly more violent demo might work better to grab more headlines, or maybe a bomb or a shooting or kidnapping a scientist’s daughter or something.

So, where next? We have the web and the media, mobile phones. Augmented reality will present many new opportunities for marketing. AR is a marketer’s dream. I can hardly type AR without getting excited at all the ways it will improve our lives. But it also will allow threats and coercion and overlays from less scrupulous agencies. It will enable bullying. It will allow people to be digitally marked out, exposed, made vulnerable to anyone looking for them in order to harm them. It will greatly enhance boycotts and demonstrations and make the work of pressure groups so much easier. It stretches very well from the benign to the malign. And when it comes to enhancing the violent side of terrorism, it will help a lot there too, assisting in coordinating the maximum damage and effect, as well as reporting. Positioning systems enabling easy linking of what is happening to where it is happening, and that increases effectiveness too. Of course, any technology that allows adverts to be placed in someone’s field of view also makes it easier to show a terrorist exactly where to put a device.

It is highly likely that some pressure groups and attention seekers will use the seedier marketing tools and these can be expected to get steadily more powerful and potentially harmful. As they progress gradually to the more extreme end, they will also want to maximise the impact of any violent measures they undertake, using whatever clever marketing available to make sure they get the best spin in the media and the biggest overall impact.

We need marketing but it will always be the case that it will give extra power to would-be terrorists, and as it progresses, we should remain aware of this and try to avoid some of the areas where benefits might be outweighed by the problems.

BHS and online retailing: delivery of faulty goods should be compensated

I haven’t had a lot of luck the last year buying stuff on-line. I have had a few deliveries of items that have been dead on arrival. In some cases they have been broken in transit, in others they were faulty at the factory. Manufacturers or retailers can obviously save money on testing if they just send any old junk out to anyone, assuming that some will come back. But customers are being used as unpaid testers. They have to unpackage the item, get it up and running, discover it doesn’t work, have to contact the retailer and/or manufacturer, fill in some forms, repackage it, take it back to a post office, check that a refund has arrived and then re-order a new one. This is a substantial amount of work.

This week I bought a lamp from BHS. It arrived in a badly damaged box, obviously having had some severe trauma somewhere, but I couldn’t immediately see the damage to the lamp shade until I had fully unwrapped it, at least 10 mins given the extreme overwrapping. Given the additional tape on the box, I deduced that it must already have been returned and had just been sent out again, with me as the unfortunate recipient. I will have to send it back. They don’t provide a phone number on the documentation that arrives, but loads of instructions about all the things I have to do, just to send it back and eventually get a refund. At the end of all that, I will be no better off then I was before I ever went near BHS but will have wasted a lot of my time and effort. I am furious with them.

I emailed them to complain but have heard nothing.

At the very least, when something is faulty, they should collect it from your home and bring you a replacement at the same time. If they expect me to work as an unpaid quality tester, then they should compensate me for my time – at my standard rates.

As it is, I paid £30. I have a broken light and some packaging to dispose of. I can either write off the £30 or waste £100 of my time to get it refunded. I suspect many people would just write it off, which obviously is of great benefit to the suppliers.

We really need a change in the law so that retailers are fully responsible to collect and make good, with no significant effort required by the customer, or fair compensation to be paid. Until then, companies like BHS will be able to send out faulty goods, with appalling customer service, not even provide proper contact details, ignore customers complaints, and get away with it. The only recourse customers have is the power to embarrass them online.