television Archives

Thought Starters: TV, messaging, innovation and tension in Israel among other things…

Thought Starters provides me with a chance to review the research and opinions that I’ve read over the last week or so. This edition looks at the evolving worlds of mobile messaging and television, the increasing pace of innovation and profiles of network effects, intergenerational equity, Israel, Denmark and Brazil among other things.

Tomaž Štolfa reports on the evolution of the messaging formats, from IRC through to the movement to richer model we have today which goes well beyond acting as a means of basic peer to peer communication:

Each message has the potential to be a mini application. It might be just an application that displays text, a photo, or alternatively presents an interface for something more complex in the constrained environment of a message cell. There is an unlimited set of opportunities to create bite size applications like a photo carousel, media players, mini games, inventory items, in-messaging payments, and many others.

Snapchat has emerged as one of the break out winners in the mobile messaging space although monetisation has definitely trailed far behind user growth. Mark Suster argues that Snapchat’s reach, immediacy, authenticity, engagement, geography, brand recall and monetisation point to it being a channel you’ll see a whole lot more of in months and years to come.

Matthew Ball and Tal Shachar do some crystal ball gazing for the television and online video sector and positing three different business models (scale feed; social feed; and identity feeds) that are likely to provide significant business models in the future:

The end of traditional television has begun. That much is clear. And even if authentication is figured out, TV Everywhere isn’t the answer. The future of video will look, behave, be valued and interacted with very differently than it has in the past. It won’t just be a digital adaption of linear, and it won’t just be more Netflixes.

CB Insights’ Corporate Innovation Trends provides a window into why there’s so much incessant talk about disruption. Various technologies and business strategies are making it much easier to launch a startup:

At the other end of the scale, companies are finding their moment in the spotlight shrinking with firms on average spending less time in the S&P 500 Index:

Before you put all your life savings behind a high growth startup, it’s worth repeating that 92% of tech startups fail. There’s no secret ingredient for successful startups but a recent presentation from Andreessen Horowitz focuses on the role of network effects, contrasting it with economies of scale and virality which it is sometimes confused with:

Ross Baird and Lenny Mendonca call for business models that address the financial and geographical concentrations of wealth typically associated with the startup economy:

We need to figure out how to make the system work for everyone in the face of technological changes. We need policymakers to incentivize regional and industry diversity in our innovation, and entrepreneurs to focus on the larger, thornier questions related to building businesses that share the wealth better among those who create them — not design a system to spread the crumbs a little better.

Doc Searls and David Weinberger who are among the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, have pulled together some new “clues” in their call for a more collaborative open internet:

Sure, apps offer a nice experience. But the Web is about links that constantly reach out, connecting us without end. For lives and ideas, completion is death. Choose life.

The globalisation of the world economy can be clearly seen in a recently released report from McKinsey with growth in interregional data. Among the causes and effects are that startups are finding it easier to tap global markets whilst consumers are increasingly looking to interact with communities of interest rather than proximity:

Morgane Santos gives a spirited called for Designer Daves to take a less conformist approach to digital design in what should be a still evolving medium:

Certainly, design should follow some basic paradigms to make whatever we’re designing easy to use. All scissors look fundamentally the same because that’s what works.

But digital design—whether it’s for desktop, mobile, VR, games, whatever—is still relatively young. We simply do not know what the best solutions are. At best, we’ve reached a local maximum. And so long as we reward predictable designs, we will never move past this local maximum.

Much of the attention on income inequality has focused on the growing share earned by the very wealthy. Research in The Guardian on the other hand has pointed to the disproportionate share of disposable income held by older age cohorts with younger audiences having to fight increasingly hard to get a foot up on the economic ladder:

Pensioners have seen significantly higher disposable income growth than young people in almost every wealthy country over the last few decades

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always presented something of a conundrum with sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians tempered by concerns for the more moderate Jews looking for a peaceful resolution. Recently released research from the Pew Research Center sheds some light on the Jewish and Arabic populations and points to the growing political divide between the two. Unfortunately a peaceful resolution looks increasingly far off:

Whilst we’re on the subject of the Middle East, The Economist looks at which countries are (or aren’t) being generous in their welcome towards Syrian refugees:

One country that hasn’t welcomed them with open arms is Denmark. Hugh Eakin looks at the increasingly hostile attitude among many Danes and the Danish political system to the plight of refugees which unfortunately is becoming increasingly reflective of many other European countries:

In January, more than 60,000 refugees arrived in Europe, a thirty-five-fold increase from the same month last year; but in Denmark, according to Politiken, the number of asylum-seekers has steadily declined since the start of the year, with only 1,400 seeking to enter the country. In limiting the kind of social turmoil now playing out in Germany, Sweden, and France, the Danes may yet come through the current crisis a more stable, united, and open society than any of their neighbors. But they may also have shown that this openness extends no farther than the Danish frontier.

Many international news reports from Brazil seem to point to a country that has had enough of corruption in the ruling PT party. Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Fishman and David Miranda give a more balanced account, not denying accounts of corruption but also pointing to a ruling elite who would like to see the democratically elected government out of power:

Corruption among Brazil’s political class — including the top levels of the PT — is real and substantial. But Brazil’s plutocrats, their media, and the upper and middle classes are glaringly exploiting this corruption scandal to achieve what they have failed for years to accomplish democratically: the removal of PT from power.

The featured image is an Add Fuel mural from the Memoire Urbane Festival in Gaeta, Italy and published in StreetArtNews.

Thought Starters: the move to mobile, Oculus Rift, post Arab Spring and experiments with universal basic income

Thought Starters provides me with a chance to look through articles, research and opinion pieces, highlighting interesting trends, developments and changes in the world you and I live in. This edition includes a look at the growing importance of mobile, questions about Oculus Rift, coverage of Middle East post Arab Spring, Finland’s experiment with the universal basic income and much more.

The International Telecommunications Union’s Measuring the Information Society Report provides a valuable collection of telecom statistics with an accompanying webpage enabling users to quick compare different countries and regions. What becomes quickly apparent in some of the statistics is how less developed countries have skipped of fixed telecoms as they make the transition directly to a mobile world:

Whilst the move to mobile is particularly apparent in many developing countries, figures from Enders Analysis point to UK’s own transition to mobile in internet use, ecommerce and online advertising:

Taking this further, Benedict Evans puts forward 16 hypotheses on how mobile has reshaped the technology landscape. Well worth spending time with this and the his accompanying articles.

Neural nets are one of the areas where we’re seeing significant advances in artificial intelligence. Steven Levy has an entertaining profile of the work Alexander Mordvintsev and his attempts to understand how these neural nets work which has led to computationally produced images that are probably best described as psychedelic:

Oculus Rift has become the poster boy for the virtual reality community but Jason Pfaff suggests the need for expensive goggles tethered to a powerful Windows PC and poor user experience could see it quickly disrupted:

Which brings me to Oculus, and their flagship product, the Rift. Today, as anyone with an Oculus development kit (DK2) will tell you, the experience provided by the hardware is like nothing you’ve ever experienced. It is pure, blissful magic. But, and this is key, to get to that experience you have to do a few things you haven’t done in a long time. For starters, you need to buy a premium and Windows based PC. Then, you have to find a massive file on an online store and wait minutes for it to download and eat large swaths of your memory. Then you go into Windows Explorer, paste it from your download folder to the folder Oculus will read from, and then you extract the files. Think about that. Then you crack open that folder to find the one that launches it, then you click, then you wait, and then you hope. And if it doesn’t work, you try another folder or another file, or look for another file called “Direct to Rift mode” to see if that forces the app through to the display. This is repeated for every app, piece of content or game you want to display on your Rift. A lot of friction.

The media sector continues to evolve as consumers move their content consumption online and content producers find their access to consumers increasingly dictated by social media. The Nieman Foundation has asked a long list of opinion makers what they think are the important issues and trends for journalism in 2016.

Consumers are moving to non linear television with the use of PVRs (eg Sky+HD box), catch up television services (eg BBC iPlayer) and subscriptions to streaming video services (eg Netflix). James Poniewozik looks at what this means for the makers and consumers of television programmes:

HBO series like “Deadwood” — which jettisoned the ad breaks and content restrictions of network TV — have been compared to Dickens’s serial novels. Watching a streaming series is even more like reading a book — you receive it as a seamless whole, you set your own schedule — but it’s also like video gaming. Binge-watching is immersive. It’s user-directed. It creates a dynamic that I call “The Suck”: that narcotic, tidal feeling of getting drawn into a show and letting it wash over you for hours. “Play next episode” is the default, and it’s so easy. It can be competitive, even. Your friends are posting their progress, hour by hour, on social media. (“OMG #JessicaJones episode 10!! Woke up at 3 a.m. to watch!”) Each episode becomes a level to unlock.

With those new mechanics comes a new relationship with the audience. Traditional television — what the jargonmeisters now call “linear TV” — assumes that your time is scarce and it has you for a few precious hours before bed. The streaming services assume they own your free time, whenever it comes — travel, holidays, weekends — to fill with five- and 10-hour entertainments.

Tom Mitchell and Patti Waldmeir look at the massive growth in China’s business elite and the growing tension with the ruling Communist Party which has seen the temporary disappearance of a number of business leaders:

Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is about to come out of copyright in Germany which has prompted The Economist to look at the shadow Nazi rule casts on contemporary German society:

If a country can ever be said to be good, Germany today can. And yet Germans know that whenever others are angry with them, they will paint a Hitler moustache on posters of their chancellor. Many Germans are fed up with this—with being “blackmailed”, as Bild, the leading tabloid, complained this spring, when Greece unexpectedly brought war reparations into negotiations about bail-outs in the euro crisis. Other Germans, mainly on the left, fret about a new “post-post-nationalism”, as Germany tentatively articulates its self-interest abroad. For most countries, this would count as normal. For Germany, it remains complicated.

Gilbert Achcar and Nada Matta look at the more recent legacy of the Arab Spring five years on from its beginnings in Tunisia, and they point to why some countries where more successful in their transitioning than others:

Five years into the uprisings, however, counterrevolutionary forces composed of the old regimes and Islamic fundamentalist forces have regained the political initiative, and are now violently vying for control. Egypt is under a worse dictatorship than before its uprising, and civil wars have broken out in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Hundreds of thousands have died, and many millions have been displaced.

It’s also well worth reading Scott Atran’s detailed analysis of the rise of ISIS in which he draws parallels with earlier revolutionary movements and the conviction of its members which is in stark contrast to much of its opponents:

Civilisations rise and fall on the vitality of their cultural ideals, not their material assets alone. History shows that most societies have sacred values for which their people would passionately fight, risking serious loss and even death rather than compromise. Our research suggests this is so for many who join ISIS, and for many Kurds who oppose them on the frontlines. But, so far, we find no comparable willingness among the majority of youth that we sample in Western democracies. With the defeat of fascism and communism, have their lives defaulted to the quest for comfort and safety? Is this enough to ensure the survival, much less triumph, of values we have come to take for granted, on which we believe our world is based? More than the threat from violent jihadis, this might be the key existential issue for open societies today.

There’s been a lot of talk about a movement from corporate to self-employment. For those people whose skills are in demand, this can offer substantial benefits but for the less in demand, the transition to the freelance economy can pose significant challenges to individuals financial security. One of the solutions being suggested to this problem is the introduction of a universal basic income, guaranteeing all members of society an income regardless of their situation. Ben Schiller covers Finland’s experiment with the model, with the country seeing real potential benefits in terms of security, incentives to work and reduced bureaucracy:

The Finnish government likes the concept, and it’s putting serious resources behind a national experiment. Starting in 2017, up to 100,000 Finns could get up to 1,000 euros a month, in lieu of other benefits. These lucky souls won’t have to work. They won’t have to prove they’re in poverty to get the money. For two years, they’ll get a fixed amount to do with what they will.

The featured image is a mural produced by 108 for Bien Urbain in Besancon, France and found on ekosystem.

Thought Starters: children’s media use, app streaming, Dribbbilisation and privacy

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The following is a look through articles, research and opinion pieces highlighting interesting trends, developments and changes in the world you and I live in, with an emphasis on technology.

Ofcom released Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report this month which provides a detailed look at the media consumption and device usage of children and teenagers in the UK. Among the interesting statistics are changes in the social media usage and inevitably high penetration of smartphones:

Consumers movement from a browser to an increasingly app based interactive experience poses a significant threat to Google’s business model where the majority of income continues to come from search. Among the ways that Google is looking to address this threat is the deeper indexing of content from apps and the launching of app streaming smoothing the transition from search to app usage. You can see an example of it in action below with a search for a hotel in Chicago leading to the Hotel Tonight Android app below:

A further indication of the growing importance of mobile can be seen in the growing share mobile is taking of ecommerce revenues in the US according to figures from comScore:

An interesting companion piece to comScore’s forecast are figures from the Wall Street Journal which point to a decline in retail space per capita in the US which is no doubt fueled by growing ecommerce sales:

WeChat provides an interesting case study in how we might see the mobile ecosystem developing in the West with mobile messaging becoming a hub for an increasingly diverse range of services. Edith Yeung profiles some of the different services currently offered in China – we’re beginning to see this with Facebook Messenger’s expansion of functionality and there’ll no doubt be plenty more to come in the near future.

Paul Adams criticises many designers for paying too much attention to aesthetics and not enough attention to purpose in what he describes as the Dribbbilisation of Design (referencing design showcase site Dribbble). Adams argues that designers need to give greater consideration to outcomes, structure and interaction, particularly as we move to an environment where interactive design permeates everything:

Tony Aube points to the move to an increasingly messaging based world driven by artificial intelligence as making the traditional model of visual user interfaces irrelevant:

“What I do believe, however, is that these new technologies are going to fundamentally change how we approach design. This is necessary to understand for those planning to have a career in tech. In a future where computers can see, talk, listen and reply to you, what good are your awesome pixel-perfect Sketch skills going to be?

Let this be fair warning against complacency. As UI designers, we have a tendency to presume a UI is the solution to every new design problem. If anything, the AI revolution will force us to reset our presumption on what it means to design for interaction. It will push us to leave our comfort zone and look at the bigger picture, bringing our focus on the design of the experience rather than the actual screen. And that is an exciting future for designers.”

Benedict Evans reviews the competition for control of the television which he characterises as a ultimately a sideshow to the broader battles for the PC and more recently the smartphone and tablet:

“Games consoles’ closed ecosystem delivered huge innovation in games, but not in much else. The web’s open, permissionless innovation beat the closed, top-down visions of interactive TV and the information superhighway. The more abstracted, simplified and closed UX model of smartphones and especially iOS helps to take them to a much broader audience than the PC could reach, and the relative safety of installing an app due to that ‘closed’ aspect enables billions of installs and a new route to market for video. It’s not that open or closed win, but that you need the right kind of open in the right place.”

GroupM has released its forecast for the UK media sector, with a continuation in the trend of decline in print advertising and robust growth from television and interactive advertising:

The Flexport blog looks at the overinvestment in freight shipping capacity where the impact has been compounded by a decline in Chinese exports leading to some unintended consequences:

“It costs $300 to move a 40-foot container from Rotterdam to Shanghai, which is barely enough to cover the cost of fuel, handling, and Suez Canal fees. Here’s some more context. Let’s say that you want to travel for a year; it’s cheaper to put your personal belongings in a shipping container as it sails around the world than to keep it at a local mini-storage facility.”

Germany has long been a manufacturing powerhouse (see below). What The Economist asks is whether the country can adapt to an environment where a greater share of the value added comes from outside the traditional domains of designing and assembling goods:

Turkey’s recent shooting down of a Russian air force plane has raised serious concerns about a further escalation of the conflict in Syria. Liam Denning argues the conflict reflects the increasingly embattled position Russia faces as oil prices decline (I wouldn’t paint Turkey’s role as necessarily benevolent given its support for anti Kurdish forces in Syria):

“Two things flow from this. First, Syria may represent just one front in a many sided struggle by resource-dependent countries such as Russia to maintain their position in oil and gas markets that suddenly look more like actual competitive markets than they did just a few years ago as new supply has entered the scene. That, rather than a Turkish border dispute, is the central geopolitical drama affecting energy.”

We’re seeing privacy at the centre of debates around online advertising and state surveillance but Greg Ferenstein explains that the concept of privacy is a relatively new one. He explores the emergence of privacy and looks at how we’re likely to see it further evolve in years to come:

The Economist has produced a valuable interactive infographic (it’s worth visiting The Economist for the interactive version) allowing viewers to examine which countries are doing a better job of empowering women in the workplace. Britain seemingly doesn’t do well in any of the measures:

The US is often characterised as deeply religious which has an inevitable impact on national and ultimately international politics. Given this, it’s interesting to see Pew Research Center’s latest recent research into religion and faith pointing to the country becoming more secular:

The featured image is Pistache, Bleu Gris et Noir by eko.

Thought Starters: Facebook grows, software as the new oil and the music industry evolves

The following is a look through articles, research and opinion pieces highlighting interesting trends, developments and changes in the world you and I live in, with an emphasis on technology.

Facebook’s release of quarterly financials point to strong growth in mobile users and video although costs grew at as faster rate than revenue. This seen a reshuffling of the S&P 500 in the US with the social networking overtaking a still healthy General Electric and Amazon.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson points to software as taking the place of oil in securing a disproportionate share of the global economy’s economic surplus going forward:

“Companies that control the software infrastructure of the information revolution will sit back and collect the economic surplus of the information revolution and that will be a path to vast wealth and economic power. It has already happened but I think we are just beginning to see the operating leverage of these software based business models.”

We’ve seen a growing number of startups pass the $1bn valuation mark in recent years but a much smaller number have chosen to expose themselves to closer scrutiny and take themselves public. One of the enablers of this has been the availability of venture capital which is looking more and more like traditional debt financing:

“This is hardly an equity instrument at all,” says Altman. “Investors are buying debt but dressing it up close enough to equity to maintain their venture capital fund exemption status. In a world of 0 percent interest rates, people become pretty focused on finding new sources for fixed income.”

Consumers’ media consumption habits are inevitably changing when faced with a growing array of choices. Traditional television channels have up until recently managed to hold its own but Liam Boluk’s analysis points a substantial drop in viewing habits among younger consumers in the US:

Content marketing appeared to provide an obvious choice for many brands looking to engage with their audiences providing relevant content in return for consumers’ attention. As Greg Satell points out, it’s not quite that easy as a growing glut of content is making it harder for companies to get their brand noticed unless your content really stands out:

“Yet despite these scattered successes, there is mounting evidence that most marketers’ content efforts are failing. The Content Marketing Institute reports that although the majority of B2B and B2C marketers have some kind of content marketing program, less than 40% find those efforts effective. Clearly, things need to improve.”

Songkick’s Ian Hogarth points to the convergence of radio, on-demand music and concert ticketing as reshaping the music industry, with data enabling musicians to foster a closer connections with their audiences:

“The integration of these three, previously distinct industries will produce a richer experience for artists and fans, unlock a ton of additional subscription, ticketing and advertising revenue for artists and create a better experience for fans. It will resolve the central tension between fans, artists and technology companies that so much ink has been spilled about.”

David Pakman argues strongly that as the automotive sector evolves with the introduction of electrification, software and data, traditional manufacturers will be poorly placed to fend off competition from new entrants:

“I am confident many of the existing automotive companies will produce cars with autonomous features. And some of them will be quite good. And eventually they will produce some fully autonomous electric cars too. In the meantime, there are many super-strong, thoughtful entrepreneurs with lots of incredible hardware and software experience working to fundamentally redefine what consumers should expect from cars.”

Chrissie Giles provides a fascinating look at Britain’s changing relationship with alcohol as the industry adapted to changing societal norms and trends which saw UK reach ‘peak booze’ in 2004:

“As the new century began, alcohol was easier to access, cheaper to buy and more enthusiastically marketed than it had been for decades. By 2004, Brits were drinking well over twice as much as they had been half a century earlier. The nation stood atop Peak Booze, and my generation was drinking the most.”

There’s a general expectation that we should see health statistics improve over time with advancements in healthcare seeing many problems either addressed or mitigated. So it’s rather shocking to see research from Anne Case and Angus Deaton point to growing mortality among non-hispanic middle aged males in the US:

The featured image is by Argentinean artist Pastel in Playa del Carmen, México published in StreetArtNews.

Thought Starters: innovation, unicorns and a critical look at the sharing economy

The following is a look through articles, research and opinion pieces highlighting interesting trends, developments and changes in the world you and I live in, with an emphasis on technology.

Matt Ridley focuses on the forces that drive innovation forward, describing it as a more organic and chaotic environment that isn’t something that governments can readily turn on or off:

“The implications of this new way of seeing technology—as an autonomous, evolving entity that continues to progress whoever is in charge—are startling. People are pawns in a process. We ride rather than drive the innovation wave. Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa. Short of bumping off half the population, there is little that we can do to stop it from happening, and even that might not work.”

Activate provide a valuable look at the intersection of media and technology, focusing on the evolution of media usage, mobile messaging, audio, television and mobile apps. Good overview of how the landscape is likely to evolve over the next year:

Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky explore how smartphones represent the latest format in computers evolution, expanding technologies reach and ask what might be next in this cycle:

Wall Street Journal’s data visualisation (click through for the interactive version) makes apparent the massive growth in valuation of various venture funded startups over the last two years…exciting but also scarey:

The rapid growth of various unicorns has not come without its critics. Airbnb has accelerated the process of gentrification as property developers shift their focus from local residents to visiting tourists in markets already dealing with shortages of affordable housing. Steven Hill states:

“In a tight housing market, rent-controlled apartments are prey for what we might call “slamlords,” who promote condo conversions or renovations that would justify massive rent increases. Airbnb provides another layer—a powerful financial incentive as well as a technique for landlords to convert their apartment buildings into tourist hotels.”

Zeynep Tufekci looks more broadly at startups associated with the ‘sharing economy’, characterising them as fueling a growing gap between the winners and losers in our current labour market:

“It sounds great, except for the ugly reality which lurks under the proliferation of “uber for…”s: the calcification of the two-tiered system between the overworked who need and can afford the “uber for…”s and the underpaid who are stuck in its 1099 economy of unstable, low wages.”

For the moment, the impact of the “gig economy” might be overstated. Figures from America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics points to self employment as actually decreasing in recent years (although that’s not to say this trend will continue):

The majority of developed market economies are facing the challenge of an aging population as fertility rates decline so it’s interesting to look at those countries with large young populations with China and India standing out. A closer look at the statistics by John Poole reveals some more unsettling truths with China “missing” about 24 million girls between the ages of 0 and 19:

Half the world's teens live in these 7 countries — Countries with the largest teen populations

Climate change is reshaping our planet and forcing many indigenous ecosystems to adapt with a negative impact on our planet’s biodiversity. The effect on countries’ economies is more of a mixed bag according to Marshall Burke, Sol Hsiang, Ted Miguel’s forecast with winners and losers (click on the map for more detailed information). Whether such modelling can accurately accommodate all the different consequences of climate change remains to be seen:

The featured image is a mural by Italian artist Tellas in Shoreditch, London and published in StreetArtNews.

Thought Starters

A mixed collection of materials looking at societal trends and the impact of technology on the way we live.

Despite the growth of the internet, television continues to retain a strong hold on our media habits, but what is changing is how we watch it. Figures from GlobalWebIndex point to younger cohorts moving towards online viewing, something that’s even more prevalent in developing markets:

Statistics from Britain’s Office of National Statistics point to continuing growth in broadband, mobile internet and provide information on what consumers are doing online:

Ethan Zuckerman takes a critical look at the growth of the advertising funded internet. He points to consumers’ loss of privacy as businesses look to capture more elaborate collections of data to enable the more sophisticated targeting of online advertising:

Once we’ve assumed that advertising is the default model to support the Internet, the next step is obvious: We need more data so we can make our targeted ads appear to be more effective. Cegłowski explains, “We’re addicted to ‘big data’ not because it’s effective now, but because we need it to tell better stories.” So we build businesses that promise investors that advertising will be more invasive, ubiquitous, and targeted and that we will collect more data about our users and their behavior.

The mobile app industry has seen rapid growth over the last five years, but commentators and analysts are pointing to a maturing of the sector with the Financial Times taking a more detailed look:

Yet amid the apparent wealth, the mood is gloomy among the independent coders and small businesses that make most of the apps now available for Apple and Google devices.

Luc Vandal, founder of Montreal app shop Edovia, sums up the feeling of many: “Let’s face it, the app gold rush is over.”

Smartphones have traditionally provided a more secure environment aided by the more restricted environment that software works in when compared to the traditional PC. Unfortunately this may not be enough with John McAfee warning that security is becoming increasingly threatened by mobile apps which carry malicious payloads.

The open source nature of the Android ecosystem has fostered a broader array of devices when compared to the more closed environment of Apple’s iOS. OpenSignal have updated their report looking at the fragmentation within the Android ecosystem profiling both the range of devices as well as the operating system versions employed:

Another interesting chart from OpenSignal’s presentation looks at the growing array of sensors in Samsung’s Galaxy smartphone, confirming the devices role as more than just a phone (loss of temperature and barometer sensors presumably to enable S5’s water resistance):

eMarketer’s forecast for the UK market point to Android and iOS continuing to dominate with BlackBerry and Symbian falling off rapidly and WindowsPhone coming up a distant third:

Amazon has moved into the mobile payments market with its Amazon Local Register offering with pricing that is designed to grab marketshare from Square and PayPal Here. Whether we’ll see this being a big money earner for Amazon remains to be seen although the company is well known for taking a long term view when it comes to new market opportunities:

I’ve spent many hours listening to Soundcloud with favourite contributors including 99% Invisible, Andreessen Horowitz and The Fader among many others. So it’s with interest and concern that I’ve greeted Soundcloud’s latest announcement to commercialise it’s streaming audio service:

Now SoundCloud has decided it is time to grow up. On Thursday, as part of a new licensing deal with entertainment companies, SoundCloud will begin incorporating advertising and for the first time let artists and record labels collect royalties. Eventually, it plans to introduce a paid subscription that will let listeners skip those ads, as they can with Spotify and other licensed services.

As consumers spend more time on their smartphones, Facebook has provided a growing array of services for consumers to spend their time either through acquisition (eg Instagram) or in house development (eg Poke, Slingshot). Mark Milian charts Facebook’s mixed results in developing its own solutions but goes on to suggests that they may be on to a winner with Bolt:

Facebook provide a great means of establishing maintaining ties with friends irrespective of location. A contrasting approach is the social network Nextdoor which looks to foster networks among local communities with The Verge describing it as the ‘anti Facebook.’

There’s been some pointed commentary lately contrasting the Twitter and Facebook’s approach to their respective newsfeeds. Facebook’s algorithmically driven newsfeed has been criticised for the ducking of harder news (eg Ferguson) whilst focusing its coverage on more light hearted viral content (eg Ice Bucket Challenge) .

Twitter’s approach is often characterised as being great for more advanced users with its unedited stream of content, but the onboarding process has long been criticised as bewildering for newer users. Twitter is experimenting with a move that will see it injecting content into the newsfeeds of users that it believes they will like, a move that hasn’t been welcomed by some users:

Consumers are spending time on a broadening array of media with newspapers and online news portals no longer monopolising consumer’s attention when it comes to news coverage. Mathew Ingram looks at how news media are using a growing array of channels to reach consumers with NowThisNews’ Snapchat on Ferguson given as an example of where things might be heading:

As ridiculous as the updates posted to Snapchat may look, with poorly handwritten text superimposed on newsy images, NowThis News has gotten something right that many media outlets continue to struggle with: namely, that if it is to be effective, news needs to reach people where they are, not sit on a home page somewhere waiting for people to show up.

Technology report Chris O’Brien’s departure from Silicon Valley has prompted him to look at the region’s ups and downs. Among the greatest opportunities he sees is the Maker movement which PSFK have recently launched a profile of:

Another tech hub which is growing in international prominence is Shenzen in China. The city provides an important incubator for hardware innovations with Joichi Ito of MIT’s Media Lab writing a fascinating profile of this exotic ecosystem for LinkedIn.

Much has been made of the way that new technologies and processes have enabled consumers to escape the confines of a traditional 9 to 5 employment. But the benefits are not equally distributed. The New York Times points to the burden that scheduling software is placing on families and David Mayer criticising the lack of protection for participants in the on demand workplace.

The Brookings Institute takes a closer look at inequality and social mobility, highlighting the effect that education, marital status and race have on people’s attempts to move up the socioeconomic ladder:

The featured image is of a Hannah Stouffer creation for Sea Walls: Murals for Oceans – Mexico Expedition in Isla Mujeres, Mexico and reported in Arrested Motion.

Tag: television

Thought Starters: TV, messaging, innovation and tension in Israel among other things…

Thought Starters: the move to mobile, Oculus Rift, post Arab Spring and experiments with universal basic income

Thought Starters: children’s media use, app streaming, Dribbbilisation and privacy

Thought Starters: Facebook grows, software as the new oil and the music industry evolves

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