The Future is Digital

Matthew Cowen

Regular essays about digital tech and the future of business in narrated form 🎧 thefutureisdigital.substack.com

  1. 27/01/2021

    Market Trends 2021 and beyond

    Good day from Martinique. I’ve been on a hiatus for a few weeks as I wind down a multi-month project researching and investigating the state of ICT in the Eastern Caribbean, I hope you don’t mind. Rather than the 2,000-ish words I write here, I’ve written and re-written over 50,000 words in the last month or so. Looking at the statistics for Grammarly —yes, I use it happily— I have written over half a million words over the previous year, despite being on a reduced schedule. I’m back malgret tout(1), and I’m hoping to share some of the insights and information I’ve been researching. In addressing COVID-19, the good news here in Martinique, infection rates are stable, and there is much hope to look forward to with the start of vaccination campaigns soon throughout our region. If I have a bad word to say, it’s about France’s strategy, which frankly was woefully inadequate and too reserved for dealing with a national and global tragedy like we’re seeing. Things are picking up now, so hopefully, we’ll have more good news in a few months. If I have any explanation for the French government’s attitude, it is rooted in technology, as almost everything is these days. This is a discussion for another day, but France is one of the most vaccine skeptical nations globally, so much so, the government was forced to introduce legislation that barred school children from attending schools if they didn’t have their vaccinations up to date. Social Media, particularly Facebook, had played a significant role in the amplification of misinformation. As a result, more and more parents had chosen not to vaccinate their children, making herd immunity less effective as the absolute numbers of vaccinated people dropped. I’d like to dig into regulation and control of “Internet Power” in the future, and I’m gathering my thoughts and researching, to bring you an informed point of view, hopefully. Back to COVID-19, around the Caribbean, the story is a mixed bag, but on the whole, the Caribbean has suffered far less from the virus in terms of infections and death, but paradoxically suffered far worse than others from the economic effects as the effects of substantially reduced tourism is affecting our region. I thought I’d start the 2021 season with a quick outline of some of the trends I see in the global market and how they may or may not affect us here. Let’s get started. Some of the trends I’m seeing Cloud Computing Despite the best efforts of various despots and nationalists worldwide, we are living in an increasingly global marketplace where local trends are being driven from outside sources, having profound effects on how a business operates locally. The increasing use of Cloud Computing, for example, is a trend that started outside the region and has now shoehorned itself into local politics and business strategy. COVID-19 has accelerated that push, but it has also exposed many weaknesses in our digital infrastructure that will profoundly affect our countries over the coming years. Subjects like Digital Health and Digital Healthcare are now starting to be taken more seriously than at any time in the past and looming regulations of “Big Tech” are also on the list of topic discussions for governments and businesses throughout the Caribbean. Cloud Computing is a catch-all term used to describe the tools and services offered by companies managed and controlled by remote data centers dotted around the globe. For example, in the region, Digicel has built a data center network in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago to host Infrastructure and Software services throughout the region to its customers. The two most prominent players in the market are Amazon with AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft with its Azure offerings. Cloud computing, as an opportunity, is still massive for the region, with IDC predicting more than 2T US$ of global cloud sales by 2023 with a reasonably even split over the types of service offerings (IaaS 9%, Managed Services 20%, Consulting 16%, SaaS 19%, and Support 17%) for the Microsoft Partners surveyed. (Source: IDC Software Partner Survey, January 2020). The Caribbean will be no exception in the coming years. Digital Transformation and Work from Home You know I’m not a fan of this overused and abused term, but it still resonates for many businesses just starting to open their eyes to the prospect of integrating at a deep level, digital technologies in their businesses. But it is precisely because it has become ubiquitous that there is now a serious drive around the world for companies to embark upon their transformative projects. COVID-19 has probably done more for the cause than any big-budget marketing campaign from the likes of Microsoft and Google. Lockdowns and new working practices are now beyond the point of being stop-gap solutions to stem a hemorrhage of income. Companies have been forced to experiment with new ways of working together, initially entirely remotely —which didn’t go down well for some— and now in a more hybrid mode. Indicators are starting to appear to suggest that we are in the midst of a sea change of working practices that legislation will likely adapt to. Vacant office space is at an all-time high in some cities, and immigration/emigration figures between different states in the USA show that a recalibration of resource distribution is taking place. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a significant shift in working remotely, collaboration and the need to be in a single-space to produce. For many years, we have talked about this possibility, but very few organisations have been able or willing to make the human and financial investments necessary to enable this new way of working. COVID-19 has come along and wholly blown all previous notions out of the water, making all but the most resistant organisation think deeply about how they can change their working practices to take advantage of a situation. That is not likely to be resolved in the next few months. Digital Transformation will be the backbone, or the operating system if you will, of this adoption. Companies that adopt digital throughout the value chain will be those that adapt to the new. Security Security is becoming a defining differentiator for solutions that are becoming increasingly complex as the old-world security perimeters are broken down as we move more services to the cloud. Security is no longer limited to firewalls, passwords, and antivirus. Technologies like two-factor authentication (2FA), Virtual Private Networks (VPN), encryption, and Single Sign-On (SSO) services are increasingly in demand and an example where expertise is not readily available in the region. These services cannot be isolated from the implications to business, marketing, and operations as sophisticated attacks are no longer driven by teenagers driven by pride and disruptive cyber-graffiti exploits. In 2018, the island of Sint Maarten (Dutch side) suffered an incident that took offline government services for the 40000 or so population, and according to the Caribbean Council, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was the target for ISIS originated hacks on Government websites, although details are scarce on the impact. Therefore, knowledge of the whole security stack and its integration with the business value chain is imperative to develop valued services and advice, such as risk management, BI, and Data Analytics. COVID-19 has provided an almost unlimited opportunity for individual, organised, and state actors to target users over COVID-19 fears. Just days after the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHPRA) approved Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, a sophisticated hack and phishing campaign was mounted to attempt to steal information concerning the logistics process. Regulation Besides the global pandemic of COVID-19, if 2020 has taught us anything, it is that regulation of a largely unregulated sector of the economy is about to start in earnest. Initially, it is likely to affect the multinationals such as Google, Facebook, etc., mostly. However, make no mistake, much of the legislation that will be implemented on national and local levels will affect businesses down to the small suppliers of technology. The GDPR of 2016, implemented in 2018, ostensibly protected European citizens from personal data transfers and data mining abuses. It affected every company on the planet that needed to collect and store personal data of European citizens. Online marketplaces and social media sites were the legislation’s apparent targets, but any business that dealt internationally was required to hire, train, and implement a Data Controller and Data Protection Officer responsible for ensuring compliance. Liabilities and penalties were harsh for non-compliance, the most mediatised being either a €20 million or 4% of annual worldwide turnover fine for a serious breach. GDPR is but one example, with others becoming hot topics in the coming years, such as COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), Do Not Track Legislation, ePrivacy Regulations, the Digital Markets Act, and the Digital Services Act, for example. In this climate, businesses will be required to update current and upcoming legislation continually and implement training, auditing, and compliance adjustments continually through training and consulting services from specialists. Many industries are subject to specific, technical regulation, such as Pharma, Oil & Gas, Finance, Utilities, and Cars. Tech and ICT are about to join that list with specific regulations affecting specific issues. It is essential to understand that rules are not usually implemented as wide-brush solutions, and that regulation is highly targeted to treat a particular problem as defined by the various regulatory authorities. “Banks” have never been regulated, only specific products and services in the banking industry are regulated, D

    17 min

  2. 17/11/2020

    The state of Digital Transformation in 2020 and some follow-up on the disruption of Intel

    My apologies for the long lapse between writing essays. If I’m honest, the world has been just too much to afford me the mental space to think, write, edit and record these essays. I’ve taken on more responsibilities and simultaneously fell down the rabbit hole with the US presidential elections. And, despite not being directly affected by the ousting of the “Great Orange Liar”, I can’t help but be touched on a personal level. Seeing the once-great nation disintegrating in front of my eyes bothers me much. That’s all I’ll say for the moment. On a more positive note, as we draw ever-closer to deploying what might be a solution to our number one problem of the novel coronavirus, I thought I’d take a look at what the pandemic has exposed and what digital transformation means today. One last note on housekeeping, the keen-eyed will notice that I have moved this newsletter to my companies’ domain (dgtlfutures.com). Everything else stays the same and all the existing links still work. It is now easier to find, as it is at newsletter.dgtlfutures.com The state of Digital Transformation in 2020 When the pandemic appeared to be a real threat to the countries in which it took hold, many including myself estimated that this might be the impetus required to get companies to start, deploy and finish their digital transformations. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth, and it comes back to some difficulties I’ve been discussing for years. Let’s take a look at where we are in digital transformation today. I’ll go on to show what is missing, what is needed and how we get there. The first wave - The implementation of computerised back-end systems The likes of IBM with their AS/400 and DEC with their VAX minis and mainframes were the masters of this. Not because it was hard, but because it was easy and it was a licence to print money. Ever since the first VisiCalc spreadsheet showed the CEO that he or she didn’t need to manually calculate the columns and rows themselves (or have one of the minions to do it), it was inevitable that computerised system would penetrate deeper and deeper in businesses. Those that afforded the outrageous costs of the time, were given an advantage that had not been seen since the invention of the wheel (the innovation that disrupted the movement of atoms from one place to another). Quickly, IBM and their competitors spun up massive sales teams that crisscrossed the globe demonstrating and selling stock control systems, basic accounting ledgers and simple statistical reporting programs. On the back of this, software-focused companies ramped up work producing ever more complex designs that piggy-backed on the already-deployed hardware. Being that the business model of the IBMs and DECs of the era was to sell high-margin hardware and lucrative support contracts for that hardware, they were pleased to let the software houses integrate their software as it made the hardware even more desirable. This symbiotic relationship even gave rise to the “Killer App” moniker we use today. The businesses that needed to make ever-quicker decisions wrote practically open cheques to the manufacturers, as they were confident that the returns on the investments would outdo the spend. And they were right to believe this, as the entire industry structured itself to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A long time ago, I interviewed for a support role in one of the world’s largest banks, in their London office. I was applying for a position as a support engineer that would be dispatched to the trading floor. I was genuinely intrigued by the floor and asked if it would be possible to see the environment in which I would be working. After a short pause, the IT manager agreed to the unusual request and led me down the stairs to the big oak doors that displayed an ominous sign on a big brass plate. “Do Not Feed The Animals” it read. I chuckled and braced myself for the spectacle that was a Trading Floor in the early 90s. I’ll tell that story another day. But what I most remember was that each trader had two complete AS/400 systems under their desks. This, a room with perhaps 60 to 100 people in it. That would be a multi-million pound budget by today's rates. But this was standard issue, as the opportunity cost was so high for traders that were just that slightly slower than their competition during trading hours. Their killer app was the trading platform that operated on super-slim timing to augment the trader’s abilities. The second wave - The paperless office After the fury of this first wave of digital transformation, it was clear to businesses that they needed to go further, and hunting season was declared on paper—a hunting season that has not, by any stretch of the imagination, finished yet even in 2020. But that is beside the point. End-user facing documents and reports were the next low-hanging fruit, and businesses proceeded to digitise these objects as and when they could based on the technologies at their disposal. Very few companies bought software with the sole intention of moving paper reports to digital versions of themselves. It was just the icing on the cake for most. So now, timesheets, TP reports (see Office Space) and countless other document types were converted. Operators would export data from the ERP systems like SAP, import them into Excel and produce the charts that ended up in Word and PowerPoint documents. But even at this stage, paper wasn’t entirely eliminated, as often these reports (and I see this still today) were printed out in colour and distributed manually or by mail (the physical internal and external postal systems) for analysis and treatment. At some point, people realised that this could be made more efficient. With the advent of internal email systems gaining popularity, sending the PPT over email was the method of choice that enabled faster and better “collaboration”. I used the quotes, as, by today’s standards, this could be nothing but further from the truth of what collaboration is. The back-and-forth of individually saved and edited documents on the network led to an exponential growth in data storage needs for both the email systems and the personal data storage systems. When working on sophisticated archiving systems, I discovered that it was not that uncommon to have approximately 100 copies of the same documents on the network. That email sent to 20 colleagues, saved on their “personal space” produces in one step 41 copies! The third wave - The age of collaboration When the apparent limitations of this model became apparent, and the software had caught up, we started to build-out specific collaboration software to address these limitations. As a side note, it must be said that IBM was (not for the first time) way ahead of this curve. Whilst the likes of Novell and Microsoft were supplying the pipes to connect businesses with unstable and simplistic networking hardware, IBM bought and extended a company that built a virtually limitless collaboration system that was too much too early. Lotus Domino was the first “proper” collaboration tool that let business easily deploy just-what-was-needed software to decision-makers. It included storage, sharing, app-building and elementary database capabilities that were far ahead of the curve at the time. Its complexity and frankly, the hostile user interface was part of its downfall, but it was an essential step in the computing-business interface building world. Fast-forward to pre-pandemic, and the state of collaboration today. We see that companies that had implemented the new generation of basic collaboration systems could provide some semblance of business continuity. Whilst those who hadn’t yet taken the steps, scrambled to implement tools, shoehorning them into day-to-day operations. With varying degrees of success, it should be noted. The pandemic has forced many companies to evaluate if the tools work. They work that is for sure, and work surprisingly well, as they are developed from years of research and experience testing. Forcing them on to unprepared staff will only expose the frailty of your operations if you don’t do the hard work of real digital transformation. But back to the pandemic. Businesses that have been forced to close their doors to receiving public in their offices and shops have turned to their most pressing problem of managing the customer relationship. How do I sell to someone who would previously wander around my shop for 15 minutes before picking an item and purchasing it? Facebook and WhatsApp, for example, have provided a means to interact with the client, and possibly vehicle some sales. I’d argue that those sales were probably not lost in the first place, but let’s not split hairs. However, they don’t address the fundamental problems of a wholesale shift in the customer journey fro discovery to purchase and beyond. Plasters on broken leg might make you feel a little better, but they don’t repair the break! So, as we progress in the pandemic, most are preoccupied with the customer-facing elements, ignoring the opportunity to implement real change that would set them up for the afterworld. In trying to schematise the idea, I’ve settled on three blocks; the back-end, the operations and the customer-facing parts. Source: Matthew Cowen The back-end has been deployed for many years and is efficient at what it does. What is doesn’t do is the problem we have today, however. Legacy AS/400 and DEC systems are still prevalent all around the world. Those legacy systems are notoriously difficult to interface with, notoriously poor at real-time and notoriously poor at providing reusable data for business intelligence, or BI. But the customer-facing elements are the new centre of focus. It doesn’t take much work to find hundreds and hundreds of businesses that increase your visibility online and help to market and promote your wares,

  3. 22/10/2020

    Digital Commerce. Blockchain (again)

    If you listened to the podcast version, you’d note I added some music. I broke out my skills in Garageband to make a quick accompanying jingle to spice up the podcast. Let me know what you think. 🎵 On to this week’s topics. I’m astonished I didn’t get roasted for completely dissing Blockchain as a useless technology a couple of weeks ago. I thought I’d talk about an example where I’m actually quite bullish about the technology. But first I wanted to expand upon a thought I had following a conversation I’d had with someone, discussing why digital commerce is so different from brick and mortar commerce. Follow on for my thoughts. The unique challenges of digital commerce for physical goods The difficulty for online retailers selling physical goods in the digital economy is that the value of digital products is significantly reduced, and in some cases, is virtually zero. That inherently puts pressure on the value of physical goods that are commoditised. Fortunately, luxury goods are seeing less pressure on their perceived value, but that is more a function of time rather than real value. Luxury goods houses and retailers are seeing these changes and are starting to act. Apple today has changed its retail sales processes to resemble more of a luxury brand one-to-one service rather than a Walmart get-it-off-the-shelf-yourself operation. From Apple’s press release: When iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPad Air are available Friday, October 23, customers can get their all-new products directly from Apple through tailored purchase experiences offered online, by phone, or in store. From a chat session with a Specialist that starts online and finishes with contactless delivery, to visiting select Apple Store locations for a one-on-one session with an Apple Specialist, customers can find the best way to get the products they’re looking for. Source: Apple So, the question is, how do businesses make money now that the products they sell are virtually worthless (economically speaking)? Answers to some of that lie in the services surrounding the product. Be that sales (see above), installation/delivery, support, subscription, ongoing help and many other possibilities, the key lies in giving the customer an ‘experience’ rather than a sale. Deriving value comes from developing and innovating on several levels to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. If we look at the above example from Apple, you’ll note they’re selling a phone. But that phone is so much more than a simple “… Widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communicator.”. The iPhone has replaced by some estimates, over 50 products; mobile phone, point and shoot camera, a torch, calendar, SatNav, personal assistant, to name a few. But it is a product in a sea of other products that are designed to resemble each other closely. There is little material difference between the flagship Samsung and Google devices that are directly competing with the iPhone. And, Smartphones themselves are becoming commoditised, as is evidenced by the increasingly smaller and smaller gains made in hardware design and technologies deployed. The differentiator is the software and what that software can enable hardware to do for the overall end-user experience. Two excellent examples are computational photography and health analytics. In computational photography, we are nearing the phase whereby even specialist cameras of the past are being innovated out of existence. It is only a matter of time before the computational aspect will outperform pure optical limitations of smartphone camera modules. In health, simple movement sensors initially enabled step tracking, instantly killing a growing market segment, and eventually enabled detailed sleep tracking that has (itself) been out-innovated by smartwatches. It is no longer science fiction to imagine the doctor’s office on your wrist. The overall experience of owning these products and their potential beyond the initial use-case is what I mean when I say ‘customer experience’. Apple has gone that step further and developed and Covid-friendly white-glove shopping experience previously reserved for the rich and famous. You book a 1 to 1 either in-store or directly on the Apple Retail site, and you are led through your purchase to contactless delivery or pick-up. It is a personal shopping service for the rest of us. Who doesn’t want to be made to feel special when buying something? Blockchain. Again I’m surprised I didn’t get more of a roasting from my somewhat sceptical articles about Blockchain here and here: According to a detailed academic-style “peer-reviewed” study by the Centre for Evidence-Based Blockchain and reported in the FT: “… outside of cryptoland, where blockchain does actually have a purpose insofar as it allows people to pay each other in strings of 1s and 0s without an intermediary, we have never seen any evidence that it actually does anything, or makes anything better. Often, it seems to make things a whole lot worse.” Worse, the report repeatedly highlights that the technology is a solution currently looking for a problem. The antithesis to the Jobs to be Done theory that helps us better design and provide solutions. With over 55% of projects showing no evidence of useful outcomes, over 45% showing “unfiltered evidence” (i.e., next to worthless), it would appear that Blockchain is a belief-system rather than a technological solution. And … …it is a huge energy consumer and hence by definition is inefficient. That, sadly, is not its only efficiency problem. Blockchain is actually extremely limited in its speed and quantity of transactions and scales poorly. So much so that in 2016 several banks exploring the possibility of using the technology in the personal and business banking sector abandoned the work as blockchain was just too slow. Quite the downer if I’m honest. But whilst many projects show no use for Blockchain, some projects show promise. One such example is Dominica’s Economic Growth team at the Climate Resilience Execution Agency for Dominica (CREAD). They are currently developing a parametric insurance product that uses blockchain technology to help small businesses and the typically underserved by traditional insurance products, manage their risk of natural disasters in an innovative way. It’s called BHP or Blockchain Hurricane Protection. From the article on LinkedIn: BHP aims to extend coverage to those excluded from traditional indemnity insurance, and provide Dominicans with a flexible and affordable tool for managing climate risk. Total damage from Hurricane Maria which struck the island as a category 5 storm on September 18, 2017 was US$1.3 billion, representing 226% of GDP. Uninsured losses were US$1.1 billion, or 86% of total damages. Damages to the housing sector totalled US$520 million. MSMEs suffered US$73 million in damages, and agriculture also suffered US$73 million in damage. In the years since Hurricane Maria, premiums for traditional indemnity policies have increased by more than 80%. This was the background to Dominica’s drive for innovation to better protect itself after multiple incidents that substantially affected citizens and businesses over the last decade. So, what is a Parametric Insurance and why blockchain? From Wikipedia: Parametric insurance is a type of insurance that does not indemnify the pure loss, but ex ante agrees to make a payment upon the occurrence of a triggering event. The triggering event is often a catastrophic natural event which may ordinarily precipitate a loss or a series of losses. But parametric insurance principles are also applied to agricultural crop insurance and other normal risks not of the nature of disaster, if the outcome of the risk is correlated to a parameter or an index of parameters. What’s great about this project is that it is intelligently using technology in the right places to fulfil the “Job to be Done”. Again, from that LinkedIn article: Once customers have downloaded the mobile wallet to their smartphone, they simply indicate the level of coverage that they would like to purchase, tag the location where they want the policy to apply, enter some basic information, and pay the premium. The policy is then issued and stored in the blockchain. In the event of a triggering event that meets the criteria of the policy, the payout is generated automatically and delivered to the customer's mobile wallet within three days of the triggering event. This product reduces friction at the critical stages of an insurance lifecycle; the signup and the payout. You’d be right in asking why a “normal” insurance product couldn’t do the same. And there’s no reason traditional insurance can’t reduce friction when it comes to the signup and management of the product. Payout is where the difficulty lies. Frequently, insurance companies need to wait for a “Natural Disaster” to be declared or during a smaller indecent, assessors and inspectors to audit and report back to the insurer before the insurer can start the payout process, which itself can be lengthy and time-consuming. In this product, they are disrupting traditional insurance at a particular level — this is not general insurance — and that disruption, like all disruptions, is to the benefit of customers in the way of simplification and increased speed in onboarding and payouts. Not to mention the pricing that makes it more accessible and hence more likely to be adopted, benefitting all in the process. But the interesting aspect from a tech point of view is the use of blockchain. In this instance, it is playing to blockchain’s strengths and not trying to overcome its weaknesses (see above). And that’s the intelligent way to use it. BHP is a product that doesn’t need to scale to hundreds if not thousands of transactions per millisecond like t

  4. 25/09/2020

    Nvidia, AI and the Big Picture

    There are currently many moving parts to the tech industry, and as tech becomes more and more pervasive in society, it is getting roped into discussions and being judged by standards that never applied in the past. Debates are ranging from whether or not big tech has built unmatched and unrivalled monopolies, whether those monopolies are legal or not, to whether big tech is going to be responsible for the downfall of democracy and ultimately the next world war. I can’t give you a credible answer, but I can say that it is mentally draining to follow the tech industry. Not because there’s nothing to read and write about, precisely the opposite. The fire-hose of news in this industry has relentlessly increased, driving an information flow-rate that is impossible to manage. Too much choice is ultimately a bad thing. I’m currently researching the ICT industry in the Eastern Caribbean, and the same data points appear continually. Small businesses are trying to survive by offering the same services competing with the same compatriots on the same value propositions. It is not only a zero-sum game, but it is also so misaligned to what is possible if we consider internet assumptions. I’ll write more about this topic in the future as I clarify my thoughts and the research reveals further insights. I thought I’d write a follow-up on the last newsletter, as pretty-much right after I’d recorded and published news broke about the sale of the subject of that issue, ARM. Read on for my thoughts on this. ARM’s History When I wrote about the disruption of a part of Intel’s processors’ design and build process, in the issues: The Tale of Intel’s Disruption and Blockchain is Useless and Intel’s Pohoiki Beach and Disruption Theory, and I delved further into Disruption Theory, in Disruption Theory. Is Wizzee a Disruptor? I was trying to give you an overview of Disruption Theory and how it may apply to your own business. I recommend you read those articles for a better context of this essay. Getting back to that news. I was aware of the potential sale of one of the most important actors in that field, ARM Holdings. What I didn’t expect was such a quick sale and a sale to a company that logic would reason is not best suited to the type of business it was buying. Let’s back up here just a little and recap on the timeline and where I think this is going. ARM Limited, as it is now known, was initially incorporated in 1990 under the name Advanced RISC Machines. Funnily enough, even that wasn’t its original name. It was born as Acorn RISC Machine, from the Acorn Archimedes computer that was powered by the new microprocessor design. The change was apparently at the request of Apple that objected to the name of a competitor in the name of one of the processors it was responsible for jointly designing and using in that ill-fated (but arguably necessary step) of the Apple Newton. Advanced RISC Machines became ARM Holdings for the Initial Public Offering (IPO) that took place in 1998. In 2016, Softbank, a Japanese Telecoms company with an appetite for Venture Capital, purchased ARM for an amount of approximately 32 billion USD. That transaction guaranteed the operations to continue as they were. That is a UK headquarters and offices in Silicon Valley and Tokyo. It allowed ARM to be close to the world’s disrupters and designers (Silicon Valley) and the world’s builders (Taiwan and China). ARM capitalised on this, and the catalogue of products that currently use ARM chips designs is un-fathomable. Just about every device that requires a processor of some kind, that isn’t a computer, contains an ARM chip. And that’s before we even talk about the just-starting revolution of the Internet of Things, or IoT. Image: nvidia ARM has just sold to Nvidia for an announced price of 40 billion USD, an 8 billion USD premium over its purchase price, or a 25% profit over four years. SoftBank will retain a 10% stake in ARM too. This money will go some way to stopping the haemorrhage it recently suffered when it indicated that it might lose up to 80 billion USD from failed investments—WeWork (cough, cough). As a recap, ARM makes no processors itself. And in some cases, it doesn’t even design the subsequent generations of some of its processor designs. ARM licenses its intellectual property, or IP, to anyone, following a long tradition of British tech design houses that have sprung up of the last couple of decades, like Imagine Technologies and ARC International. Depending on the license terms, companies are more or less free to use the designs as they see fit. ARM presents itself as the Switzerland of processor designs i.e., neutral. ARM reports that its designs are in around 180 billion processors in use to date. Qualcomm uses them for their processors that run a majority of Android phones, and most famously Apple has a lifetime license (from the days it was one of the original designers) and uses its asset to design and implement the most advanced mobile processors on the planet currently. But even Apple doesn’t build those processors; it farms that work out to the specialist I mentioned in the last newsletter, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, TSMC. You can’t get a more explicit name that reflects the companies’ primary purpose than that! Which leads me to where I think this is going. ARM-ing the Future The big question is why a graphics card builder like Nvidia would splash for a chip designer?  Part of the answer lies in the fact that Nvidia, itself, is a licensee of ARM, and presumably that annual fixed cost will be removed from the books being that it is now the owner of the company it used to buy a licence from. It’s an upfront investment that pays off over several years, and if the value accumulation of ARM continues, the investment might be justified relatively quickly (from an accounting point of view). But I think it goes beyond that. I hinted earlier that ARM processors are just about everywhere and are integrated into more and more devices in the form of SMART tech. The fridge, the toaster, the Espresso machine are all candidates for a coming home-smarts revolution. And the already processor-enabled world of home appliances like washing machines will be enhanced by the technological possibilities available to their builders. The TAM, or Total Addressable Market, for their IP is almost infinite. The ubiquity of wifi and the incoming 5G avalanche only goes to reinforce the inclusion of ARM-type processors in devices: even the comms technology itself, the routers, switches and amplifiers, use ARM processor designs. ARM is set to become the de facto processors of things that are not traditional PCs. Besides Apple, Microsoft is using more and more of the technology in its designs. The new Surface Duo is an ARM-based foldable phone/tablet hybrid with impressive screen technology, all running on a customised ARM design. The Surface X Pro is a new generation of the popular Microsoft Surface PC line, and is also ARM-based, running a customised ARM compiled version of Windows. Beyond Computers But again, it goes beyond this, to what will inevitably be as pervasive a technology as oil-powered personal transport has become. I’m talking about AI or Artificial Intelligence. From simple statistical models to more advanced nuanced-based algorithms like GPT3, AI is set to be included in everything from your everyday carry phone to the entertainment system of the future. Think Bladerunner 2049. Where does Nvidia step in then? From the Nvidia Deep Learning AI website: I AM A VISIONARY, A HEALER, A CREATOR, AND SO MUCH MORE. i am ai. POWERING CHANGE WITH AI AND DEEP LEARNING AI doesn’t stand still. It’s a living, changing entity that powers change throughout every industry across the globe. As it evolves, so do we all. From the visionaries, healers, and navigators to the creators, protectors, and teachers. It’s what drives us today. And what comes next. Many Data Scientists and technology teams around the world realised that they needed powerful processors to perform a highly reduced and specific set of calculations, for which only specialised and extremely expensive super-computers could perform. Super-computer makers like Cray and IBM sold their systems to large research institutes and universities with high profit-margins on the back of their uniqueness in their ability to calculate rapidly and massively parallel, an important factor when designing calculations of that type. On the other end of the computing spectrum, users wanted to get better quality graphics for video-gaming and image manipulation. Nvidia started to design and build and sell specialised video cards to OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) like DELL, for integration on their motherboards for a win-win situation. Better graphics meant that computers became more desirable as games or design machines. These designs evolved over the years and are sold as separate cards for builders to include in their offerings. In a quirk of circumstance, the type of processing required to produce detailed and fluid graphics for games was also ideal for the type of calculations required for AI. At a fraction of the cost, scientists and researchers could equip banal PCs with a bank of processors that could compete with the multi-million $ super-computers. As you’ve guessed by now, these cards are powered by ARM processors. With Nvidia as a pioneer in AI, it has developed a deep understanding of the field as the above website indicates. That pivot let Nvidia surpass Intel a few weeks ago, as the worlds most valuable chip maker. With AI becoming ubiquitous, like it or not, the purchase of what Nvidia sees as a cornerstone of its technological chops, the purchase of ARM will no doubt allow Nvidia to extend a lead in the AI world. Challenges remain in that ARM licenses its technology to direct competitors like AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) and ju

  5. 10/09/2020

    The tale of Intel’s disruption and Blockchain is useless

    It’s good to be back. I decided to take a summer holiday, of sorts, retiring myself from the pressure of writing these articles. If you know me, you’ll recall that I’ve pretty much not had a holiday since I started my professional life—much to the consternation of my family. So I decided to take a little time for myself this year. Being that this year has been, er, rather unusual to say the least, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity. These articles are a labour of love and earn me absolutely nothing in monetary terms, so I have to work at the same time to earn a living in my day job, putting pressure on the time I have for this writing. I really enjoy the writing and hope to make it a significant part of my professional life in the near future. Speaking of which, I have a small favour to ask of you, my dear readers. I’m running a small study about the ICT industry in the eastern Caribbean and have concocted a short survey to give me an overview of the market. If only half of you respond, I’ll be well on my way to having useful data to work with. I’m sure you can be that half :) It’s not all one-way either. The better the data and the more data I have, the more I’ll write about the results here directly to your inboxes. You give, I give. What could be fairer? You can take the survey here: Thanks for your help. Disrupting Intel Last year I wrote about Intel’s intention to ignore the threat of disruption to its core business if it continued to follow, virtually to the letter, Clayton Christensen’s Disruption Theory. From that article: If we follow DT to its conclusion, it is possible to see the risks Intel poses for itself, namely being innovated out of business. I’m clearly not suggesting that Intel will fail next year, but I think the long-term future is at risk if there is not some kind of reaction, with Intel creating further opportunities. I wrote at the time, that the fact that Intel was concentrating on moving further up the stack to increasingly more profitable zones, avoiding the threat of the lower-end processor makers like AMD, Pohoiki Beach was designed to ensure Intel’s prosperous future. It was a good strategy on the face of it. Desktop and laptop chips were increasingly under better-than-ever competition, something that was not the case when Intel was in its heyday. The real threat, Advanced RISC Machines’ ARM designs, were only beginning to poke their head out from the development studios, and whilst they had ambitions of capturing a small percentage of the market (10% if I recall well), this together with AMD provided real pressure on Intel. Intel had to react, and it did by going upscale and upping margins on those products because of reduced unit numbers. The thing many people don’t understand is just how phenomenally expensive it is to design a CPU. It takes months of research and prototyping, and each iteration and innovation adds substantially to those costs. As CPUs are designed using smaller and smaller transistor sizes, costs go the other way, and exponentially. Costs of design are often dwarfed by the costs of tooling too. Tooling is the process of the building and bringing online fabrication plants to build the processors. Marketing is another expensive cost centre. Intel has famously pilled millions into elaborate marketing campaigns to get the public to think that laptop chips only come from them.  Other factors influence the costs too. It should be noted that CPUs are defined not only by their speed —something that has mostly been maximised today, in that we can’t get the electrons to move any faster or for long periods without breaking the silicon— but are now defined by the transistor size in nanometers, or nm. When you look at processor specifications, they will talk of 14nm, 10nm and smaller. Looking at the following chart from International Business Strategies will give you an idea of the estimated costs, and how they have multiplied as semiconductors have reduced in size: Source: IBS In the beginning, when it was a simple arms race of raw processor speeds, Moore’s law —i.e., the number of transistors on a dye will double every 18 months or so— meant that Intel could produce faster and faster chips for their target markets, namely desktop and server devices. The server-specific chips came further down the road after Intel saw the opportunity to custom-design and build what was essentially desktop-class chip to supply a burgeoning market of businesses that saw the need to store documents and applications centrally. It followed the second-level of the Digital Transformation model I wrote about in Issue 4: The Digital Transformation model in detail: Internal Exploitation The second level, Internal Exploitation, is defined by the process in which organisation attempt to integrate the different silos of information systems and datasets with the aim to produce a ‘whole’. Integration is difficult, slow and often results in failures when starting out from a base that is not adapted to integration. Just how do you get the Accounts, Stock, HR, Sales systems integrated? There are two types of integration, technical and business process interdependence. According to the model most enterprises spend more time on integrating on a technical level than on the business processes. Since then, the battle has become more technical and has required close coordination between the designers wants and the builders’ capabilities. So far Intel has been outpaced by the likes of TSMC in reducing the size of its transistors who have become world leaders in producing the most densely packed systems-on-a-chip. TSMC is not the only one either, Qualcomm and a couple of others are also at the forefront in the production of ever-tinier devices year in, year out. The keen-eyed among you will note that I switched from talking about CPUs and processors to systems-on-a-chip (SoCs, pronounced Socks). That is where the most prominent battleground is playing out currently. Not on pure CPUs but on chips that contain several previously separate ancillary systems on the same dye. Graphics, memory and other components are being reduced in size and brought physically closer to the processing units. In these minute devices, even a fraction of a millimetre can wield significant gains in data-exchange, or processing. Intel seems to be having trouble developing and manufacturing smaller transistors reliably, which in part, explains the reason for multi-core and multi-processor CPU designs from them. Their designs don’t need to be too concerned with size, power and heat dissipation requirements. A desktop or a server is plugged into an infinite power source for all intents and purposes, and the cooling systems put in place in server rooms or the space in an office affords all the heat sink required to ensure stable operation.  Since the beginning, Intel took the responsibility to design, make, market and ship the chips to PC and Server makers. This vertically integrated strategy served them well, so well in fact, that they became the de facto leader in the world for processors. Remember Intel Inside? But as recent news highlights, something that is a traditional force for an organisation can be turned into a weakness when disruption theory is well understood and utilised by competitors. Intel has now shown that it is nearly a whole generation, or “node” as it is known in the industry, behind TSMC. As a result, they have stated that they are going to outsource some of their production to... none other than the company outpacing Intel in chip building. TSMC of course. From the FT: “To make up for the delay, Intel said it was considering turning to outside manufacturers from 2023 onwards for some of its production — a plan that appeared to leave little option but to subcontract its most advanced manufacturing to TSMC. The shift raised the prospect of a change in Intel’s business model, according to some analysts, forcing it to consider abandoning more of its manufacturing to focus on design.” Classic disruption theory! Cementing TSMCs lead in processor manufacturing is another piece of news that may send shockwaves around the industry. No doubt most of you heard the long-awaited news that Apple, following a successful transition from PowerPC processors to Intel processors years ago, announced their intention to move its entire line of Macs to its in-house designed A-series processors. The same family of processors that power their iPhones and iPads and probably countless other items in their inventory. These SoCs are currently world leaders in speed, power and cooling capabilities. For reference, the release of the iPhone 11 and iPad Pro showed that Apple-designed processors were faster than most of the Intel and AMD processors found in laptops of the day. Apple has successfully designed its processors using a small, relatively unknown player in the CPU market to produce a succession of world-beaters. That partner is ARM or Advanced RISC Machines. If you’re interested I could bore you with the in’s and out’s of the different philosophies of instruction sets in the CPUs — The RISC bit stands for Reduced Instruction Set Chip. They are all built by TSMC. Once Intel lets go of this market, it will be all but impossible to get it back in the future. Don’t worry, they’re not going out of business anytime soon, and will undoubtedly record higher profits and better margins in the future as they shift their production away from a market that looks set to transition lock, stock and barrel over to ARM-designed processors and SoCs. Intel’s own mobile-focused processors are starting to get better, but it is too little too late in my opinion. Blockchain, Schmockchain Regular readers will know that I have been mostly sceptical of the utility of Blockchain in its potential to change the world. It is currently a big, slow database that complicates things r

    13 min

  6. 17/07/2020

    The digital Caribbean and the digital reality

    Today’s essay is a slightly longer one, it’ll take a couple more minutes to read than is custom for my essays. The subject is broad and couldn’t be condensed without losing some of the finer details. I hope you don’t mind. This essay is based on a small presentation I did to talk about COVID-19 and how we could kickstart after the worst of the pandemic is over. This essay expands on the first part of that presentation exploring the themes in more detail. Look out for the second part in the near future. Enjoy! Your feedback is welcome. The digital Caribbean I’ve written here several times about the state of digital in the Caribbean, and I encourage you to read those earlier essays, you can find them all in the archives. However, what I didn’t emphasise is just how connected we all are in the Caribbean, but only connected in ways that are mostly ephemeral. Out of the nearly forty-four million people in the Caribbean around 77%, that’s thirty-three and half million people are connected with a data-capable mobile phone. More than 26 million people connect to the internet using a computer. But critically, over 50% of us regularly use social networks, a percentage that is higher than most places in the entire world. Which begs the question, why are our services, our stores and our governments not online? It would appear that COVID-19 might be the impetus that finally changes that, and I think that we have more chance that this will change because of this pandemic rather than an earthquake or even a hurricane. I feel that we are in a big, forced experiment where the entire world is collectively conscious at the same time and that we all have some amount of control on our outcomes, which is entirely different from a natural disaster that a) we have virtually no control over our outcomes, and b) nothing works during the disaster event. If you look at the islands in the North Leewards that suffered greatly in the 2017 hurricane season with Irma and Maria, and the Bahamas during last years’ terrifying and unimaginably tragic passing of hurricane Dorian, all islands affected suffered a complete breakdown of most if not all services, digital services included. With COVID-19 there has been virtually zero downtime and zero outages. Sure, many people could not work when their jobs were centred around physically being at work, but those who could work albeit remotely continued with relatively little effort —if we ignore Zoom fatigue that is— which is a real thing. To answer the above question, I’m noticing more and more services coming online, like the recently announced online Immigration and Customs Form for travelling to Barbados. It’s great to see this move but it provokes the question about why it took so long. The real answer, of course, is the will or lack thereof. There are virtually no technical reasons in 2020 to not have most services online, it was even possible ten years ago. And even those services that cannot be completed fully online, a major component can be digitised to make processes easier. Quite often, in the companies I consult for, I see multi-step manual processes in use, despite the company being willing to digitise its processes, for example, A ➔ B ➔ C. These processes cling on in manual form often because process A cannot be easily or successfully digitised despite B and C being eligible. The result is the abandonment of the digital process change. There are, of course, at least two ways to go about this. One is to digitise processes B and C, with process A being manually entered into the system for B and C to run the data. Or, as I tend to analyse, why not re-think the process from start to finish seeing if there is a way to digitise not only B and C but a part of A. It looks like this; A1 (manual) ➔ A2 (digital) ➔ B ➔ C. Going a step further the process can then be redesigned, considering the desire to eliminate manual processes; X ➔ Y ➔ Z, for example. XY&Z achieves the same goals but the data entry and data processing are reorganised to eliminate as much manual entry as possible. In this case, this new process no longer resembles the original process. I’m simplifying the work of course, but you get the picture.  The digital reality We’re living in a new “digital reality” and approaching an inflexion point where the majority of our lives will be online and those that fail to embrace and effect change will feel pain in many areas of their society. Which is why these first steps cannot come soon enough and why politicians and businesses need to start to radically change their minds to adapt to what is coming, not what is current. So, how do we achieve this? The first thing to understand is the current state of affairs, my writing on the current state of digital in the Caribbean goes some way towards this, but further research is needed to look further into the economic, socio-political and business world in the region. Again, I’m doing some of this and intend to do even more going forward, but funding is needed for this to be more widespread. A few examples of my research can be briefly summarised here in five important categories; discovery, purchasing, payments, aggregation/uberisation and automation. Let’s take a quick peek at each of those in turn. Discovery In a world of virtually infinite information, content generation and a never-ending avalanche of information flow, we can extrapolate that the chances of information types we want do not exist are virtually zero, in other words, the information is there somewhere. The issue is in finding that information. This is initially where Google stepped in. Google understood that the exponential growth of websites on the internet would render the old model of listings and directories useless at best and dissuasive at worst. Google’s trick was to ignore the direct listings of names and URLs and concentrate on understanding the relationships between all online sites. PageRank was designed around this principle and was implemented to provide more “relevant” results to people’s searches. Up to that point, the internet had logically reproduced the physical Yellow Pages world. As a result, a whole new industry was born around getting better visibility for businesses on the internet, it’s called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. A name born in the generation when Search was the primary tool used online. This name is already becoming redundant as the “optimisation” is not restricted to search engines, but relevant to all online platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc., which run their own in-house developed algorithms of their users’ content. Purchasing Purchasing habits were being fundamentally altered even before COVID-19 hit. Today’s purchasing can be easily resumed as a few words : Buy online. Pick-up in-store. According to qudini, a specialist SaaS Retail Experience company, in a recent survey, 76% of respondents said they had purchased items using in-store pickup after researching and evaluating online. This is only part of the story, as the online retail giants like Amazon are putting greater effort into reducing friction at the point of sale enabling easier and faster consumption. And, despite this, there is still room for the niche markets to be highly profitable businesses, simply because of the sheer scale of the internet. A niche on the internet is a misnomer. Payments There is an ongoing trend of mass democratisation emerging in the financial world. Banking is being disrupted, with online-only banks not only reducing friction to access your money but providing more timely services for a fraction of the cost of traditional banks. And as nothing exists in a vacuum, traditional banks are not ignoring this and are implementing new strategies to ensure survival, for example, pivoting some sectors as online banks using a different brand. Consolidation in the back end additionally helps capitalise on the opportunity to become the guarantor for the online banks. Payments are being simplified and increasingly more integrated with online platforms from everything from membership systems to complete online marketplaces. Stripe is probably the most known and capable in this industry. However, more and more banks are starting to roll out their own online payments solutions. Not willing to let Stripe eat their lunch so easily they are hoping on keeping their clients in-house. They’ll need to be careful of hidden fees, simplicity and friction reduction to do this… something the banks have shown they are not very good at up until now. Investing is also opening up and becoming easier for the public. Efforts like Betterment and Wealthfront are only the first step of a wholesale dismantling of the staid and exclusive boys clubs that are current investment bankers. Not only that, as we’ll see later, but their use of technology is also outperforming traditional investment experts: Betterment portfolios outperformed average advised portfolios 88% of the time. Aggregation and Uberisation Aggregation is largely an internet phenomenon. It’s an extension of a well-trodden path from the powerful retailers using their muscle to keep clients coming back, thereby using that power to entice suppliers to prioritise their stores (being that the stores can guarantee customers), rinse and repeat. The traditional giant stores like Macy’s and Debenhams rode this wave for several decades. With digital distribution being essentially free, the value chain has been turned upside down meaning that those who integrate throughout the value chain and commoditise their supply generally increase their profit over the incumbents. The uberisation of services is another trend that appears unstoppable for now. Uberisation facilitates a peer-to-peer driven business model enabled through the use of technology to simplify the on-demand delivery of physical goods and services. The growing use of mobile and the

    20 min

  7. 25/06/2020

    Digicel’s demise (not) and the data-only reality

    Hello from a severe Saharan-dust-cloud-covered-Caribbean. A once-in-a-50-year event according to The Guardian. COVID-19 has accelerated the use of digital throughout the world, the question is, is the Caribbean ready for the change and made the recent difficulties at Digicel a cause for concern? Before getting into this week’s essay, I wanted to let you know that I got some pushback from my last article dealing with online and virtual conferences. I thoroughly appreciated the discussion I had, and I got some more exposure to other solutions to some of the problems I highlighted. Taking that a little further, I did some more in-depth research and found this graphic that highlights all the solutions surrounding digital conferencing. There’s a lot there, wow! The main point of the feedback was that I said that there weren’t solutions to the problems I mentioned. I was —sort of— wrong. There are lots of solutions as the graphic shows. But one thing that they all fail on is massive scale. I should have been more explicit in my essay, explaining that I was targetting large-scale conferences, conferences that typically have tens of thousands of visitors over a few days. None of these solutions scale to that level sadly. Let me know if I’m wrong again, I’d love to hear from you. 😀 Is the death of Digicel greatly exaggerated? There's been a lot of ink spilt recently on the death of Digicel in the Caribbean. To paraphrase and to misquote simultaneously… the reports of Digicel's demise are greatly exaggerated. Here's why. To understand what is happening, it is essential to understand not only the history but the current context. If we look at it in detail, two aspects need to be taken into consideration; the offer and the usage. It is here we see the first signs of a strategy that is no longer in line or adapted to the current market and the emergence of a strategy targeted to the way we use mobile phones today. The Context - Digital in the Caribbean In the last several years, it is clear that three things have become increasingly important and more frequently used than at any other time in history; digital technologies, mobile and social media. With a global population of 7.7 billion, we now see more than 4.5 billion people use the internet. Social media boasts 3.8 billion users, essentially making around half of the planet using some form of social media. The COVID-19 pandemic has done nothing to stem that growth, if anything it has likely increased usage and signed up many more users that would have eventually got on board. Interestingly, of all internet usage, mobile data usage will top 50% for the first time this year 2020, with the average time spent on the internet of 6 hours and 43 minutes. Basically a full workday is spent on the internet, either for business or pleasure, most likely a mixture of both. Of that time, users around the world spend on average 2 hours and 24 minutes on Social Media. Growing categories such as Ride-Hailing, Digital Marketing and Online Shopping are all being affected by the growth in access to data on-the-go.  I previously wrote a brief piece about digital in the Caribbean, so it is pertinent to revisit this with the latest statistics I could research. As with the original essay, all data is from wearesocial unless specified otherwise. Starting with literacy, which is table stakes when it comes to using digital technologies like computers and mobile phones, sadly, the Caribbean still has much work to get the population above 90% literacy in the region. Looking at the general breakdown, women’s literacy rates are 88% with men’s only slightly above at 89%. To look at this the other way around, over a tenth of the population are unable to read and write by the age of 15. How are they going to buy food online or use other digital services? Internet penetration (the number of internet-connected people compared to the total population) is again, sadly, lagging even our closest neighbours. With 60% penetration in the Caribbean compared to Brazil’s 72%, or Central America’s 66%, that translates to roughly 17 million people in the region still unconnected. But it’s not all bad news, as growth in internet-connected users is a healthy 8.5%. Meaning that 100% connectivity is still more than a decade away, but it’s moving the right direction. If the COVID-induced recession is not as damaging as feared, I suspect that growth will accelerate.  Devices are an important part of getting online and globally, only 3.3% of users have “feature phones” (yes they are still on sale in the region) that get internet connectivity, compared to 91% of smartphone users. The only reason to get a smartphone is to use the internet. This is corroborated by the fact that 53.3% of all web traffic is from mobile phones, an increase of 8.6% globally, at the expense of traffic from fixed devices like PCs and laptops, tablet devices and consoles, all reducing in usage; -6.8%, -27% and -30% respectively. Mobile connectivity as a percentage of the total population is currently 77% in the Caribbean. As a comparison, most of the “developed” nations run at over 100%. However, the distribution in our region is less than even. Antigua and Barbuda is third in the global table with mobile connectivity at 195%, just behind the USVI at 198%. The French West Indies (Guadeloupe, Guyane and Martinique) are at an average of 138%. All this drives an average of 7.2 GB of data per month, per mobile connection in the world, with Latin America and the Caribbean running at half of that, i.e. 3.6 GB. Social media usage in the Caribbean runs at around 51% of the total population, an increase of 11% since 2019. Some of our islands make it to the top ten list, with Aruba and Cayman Islands coming in 6th and 7th with social media penetration rates of 90% and 89% respectively. Looking further into the data, eligible users are defined as children 13 years and older, which puts the Caribbean above Europe in the use of social media, 64% compared to 62%. Incidentally, Aruba tops the chart when it comes to Facebook eligible audience numbers, a full 96% of 13+-year-olds are available on Facebook. We’ve never been more connected. What are we all doing online? Well, according to the data, 90% of users watch online video content, 70% are streaming music, and 47% and 41% listen to online radio stations and podcasts respectively. Mostly, entertainment services make up the bulk of internet usage, goodbye traditional TV and Radio seems to be the order of the day. Looking at the apps currently used, it is chat (mostly WhatsApp), social networks (Facebook), video apps (YouTube), shopping and (Google) maps, when looking at global usage. Unsurprisingly, social media makes up the lion’s share of that usage; in fact, a full 50% of the 3h40 minutes is attributed to social media. This usage is also corroborated by the top three most visited websites (globally); Google, YouTube and Facebook coming in third place. Interestingly, and something I’ve noticed for quite a while, the younger generation, Gen Z, are the least interested in Facebook, with only 3.1% of males and 2.5% of females on the site, only the over-65s have less presence! The History - The offer in the Caribbean If we ignore the smaller players that are primarily localised to a specific market like the Dominican Republic or the US Virgin Islands and Porto Rico, there are two leading operators, Digicel and Flow. Flow is the incumbent and has been in the region in one form or another since the early twentieth century, as this map of the Eastern Telegraph Companies network shows. Digicel is a newer entrant, but by no means unique to the region. Digicel launched in 2001 in Jamaica and has quickly spread across the region and into other overseas territories in the Pacific Islands region in 2006. Source: Wikipedia Both operators are well implanted and serve the wider Caribbean with mobile phone, data and other services such as broadband and television. Digicel has recently got into the mobile money transfer business with Digicel Mobile Money launched in Fiji in 2010 and is looking to expand around their markets. Without taking on exhaustive research to compare offers, services and pricing (which is incidentally about as transparent as mud), it is difficult to get a detailed picture across the region. Complications such as currencies and fluctuations in exchange rates only further obfuscate value comparisons. Suffice to say though, that if you live on an island that has a small population you are likely to get less for your money! Broadband pricing ranges from an average of 25 USD per month for a broadband fixed-line connection in Saint Martin (French side) to an average 179 USD per month in the British Virgin Islands, that’s according to cable.co.uk, a firm dedicated to researching broadband pricing globally. But that’s not the real issue, as far as I can tell, most offers are geared toward the old-reality of the internet. That is to say that once upon a time we were entertained by television and would communicate with friends and family using a phone. The current offers are squarely aimed at that, with classic triple-play deals; TV, telephone and (limited) internet. Note that the internet is last on the list! The Future - The way we’ll all be using the internet Source: Apple Habits on the fundamental way we’re consuming entertainment are changing concurrently with the way we are communicating. As more and more streaming opportunities coming online, people have got used to watching what they like, when they want, not when a TV station dictates. There’s no surprise of the rise of Netflix and the up and coming services like HBO Go, Disney+ and Apple’s own attempt, Apple TV+. In this reality, content is king, and the internet providers are reduced to simple data pipes, shipping IP bits backwards and forwards at the demand of both the customer and the conte

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  8. 10/06/2020

    Can digital conferences work?

    I look into the conference bundle and how the digital twins stack up I’ve had a tough time being productive over the last few days. The events around the world currently are a lot to process, and as I’ve said before, I’m not the type to react instantly with hollow missives. I need time to think about it, reflect upon it and do some research to know more about it. I’ve struggled over the last few days to come up with a response here for this newsletter, to try to fully come to terms with what some are only just waking up to acknowledge. I’m fifty years old now, and have lived through a few life shocks —I don’t need to bore you with the details. Suffice to say, what is currently happening is deeply troubling to me and I’m starting to form a bigger picture of where the world might go in the future, and I’m not comfortable with it. On to administrative matters. I’ve decided to simplify the delivery of this newsletter and narrated podcast. There will now only be one email that contains both the text and the podcast version ensemble. You do not need to do anything to continue to enjoy it. If you prefer reading, the full text is in the email and if you prefer listening, keep pressing play as you’ve previously done. For those that pick up the episode through your podcast player, the show notes contain the full text as well. It’s to make it easier for you to consume these essays. Additionally, in the event of another interview issue, it’ll allow you to follow along with the conversation while listening by browsing the show notes. DM me at @tfid_newsletter if you want to know more. The door is open. On to this weeks’ essay. The Conference Bundle Last week’s issue was a little, shall we say, unstructured. I apologise. There was a reason. I wanted to write down what it is that makes a conference. I probably could have done a better job at explaining what the constituent parts of a conference are for starters. So I thought I’d expand upon those initial thoughts and try to give it some structure. The conferences we know today were developed in the pre-internet era. The earliest reference I could find was the Convention Nationale of 1792 in France. The assumptions made during this development have applied to all conferences since. Get a bunch of people in the same city at the same time, mix it up and see what good comes from it. For conferences to become digital, those assumptions will be ignored, and a new digital conference template will emerge, one that is based on internet assumptions. Looking at conferences (or conventions if you prefer), several parts are common to all meetings. Firstly, there is content. Content is delivered in different forms; presentations, Q&A, etc., the content is also an opportunity for marketing to spread its message to the attendees. Additionally, conferences rely on the physical structure and cognitive separation from day-to-day work, providing opportunities for attendees to meet, chat and learn. Many sales-oriented attendees are present simply because they know that potential clients will be in the same city at the same time. At large conferences, people often don’t even attend any of the content provided; their expectations simply targeted to compress several months’ worth of meetings into a multi-day conference. It saves on travel expenses and not least, time away from the office and family. Packaged together is the social aspect that tries to engineer meet-ups and new introductions —like side meetings, social evenings, corridor chats— in an attempt to enlarge the ecosystem and the potential for business for the conference hosts and sponsors. Some conferences even attract attendees to the host city without having any intention at all to attend the meetings. WWDC is an excellent example of this. The conference is typically limited to 5000 attendees with several thousand more present in San Jose during the week it is on. Again, the aim is to take advantage of the gathering of the people they need/want to meet during the conference. Lastly, most conferences have at least some expo capacity. Tens if not hundreds of vendors set up shop and promote their wares for the duration of the conference in the expo hall. It’s a convenient gathering to browse and scout out new products, services and businesses. So if you think about it, a conference is a bundle of products, and much like Microsoft 365 is a bundle of solutions for productivity or your triple-play TV/Internet/Phone service is a bundle for entertainment, the conference will appeal to different needs for different jobs to be done. And like all bundles, not all users will use all the products and services included during the week. The trick for conference hosts is to provide enough of a value for each attendee profile. I detailed the Conference Bundle in the diagram below: Matthew Cowen Looking closely at each part of the bundle, it’s not difficult to see that pretty much the only part that has been solved for the digital and online world, is that of content. In record-time, many conferences across the globe pivoted to “virtual” meetings very quickly. Some of the biggest and most prestigious conferences, like Microsoft Build, the WWDC as mentioned earlier from Apple, or VMworld have all shifted online, simultaneously avoiding cancellation (unlike Google’s I/O) in offering more than before. I’ll get to that in a little bit. The proximity problem of side-meetings has also largely been solved, in that it is easy to schedule individual one-to-one meetings during conferences. Again knowing that your colleagues and friends are attending allows this, but how is that any different than planning a one-to-one outside the conference? Does the conference itself bring value in that instance? What has not been solved, however, is the organically generated social nature of large gatherings that attract like-minded and open-to-learn individuals cooped up in the same room. Something that, by circumstance, breeds the kind of interactions I attempted to highlight in the last issue, i.e., the impromptu lunch meetings, the corridor conversations, the sometimes-awkward socialising over vendor-provided drinks. These interactions, however brief or however staged, are part of the experience, in that they add to the value of your presence. How do we solve for that in the digital world? Outside of the presentations and social interactions, exists the show floor, or the expo hall. This element of the bundle doesn’t currently have a digital equivalent. Wandering around the expo hall, fulfils two jobs to be done. One is the exposure to new products and services, and the other is access to technical staff or to C-suite execs of companies you may be interested in learning more about. It’s quite efficient when you think about it. If of course, you take advantage of it. But how do you transfer that discovery experience into digital, an experience that solves the jobs to be done puzzle? This change in the nature itself of conferences provides some insight and ideas on their future. The most significant difference during the pandemic is not the fact that some conferences have become cheap or free, it is that their reach has widened to such an extent that the potential audience for a popular conference is now up to 4 billion people! It is also interesting to learn that even niche conferences may develop into international affairs. Looking at the expo hall, it is entirely possible that in some instances an online expo hall could take on some of the attributes of a contemporary massive online multiplayer game like Fortnite or PUBG. The Marshmello concert in 2019 and the more recent Travis Scott show directly in Fortnite taught us that entertainment in an online setting had the potential to be just as enjoyable as in a typical concert venue. It provided a glimpse into the future of online events. You may be recoiling at the thought of this, but there’s no easy way to put this, our time on this planet is limited. The generations following on from us are growing up with entirely different frames of reference, ones that are based on internet assumptions. Organisers of conferences of the future will also have those frames of reference and not 18th-century shackles in which to operate. This will free up their imagination, and when they design future gatherings, the contemporary conference will be a completely different beast. Taking that a step further, the interactive nature of a conference, and if I’m continuing the comparison with online MPGs, players (you can substitute attendees) already use multi-channel communications in realtime. When kids play Fortnite today, those with a PS4 create a “Party” and invite each other to join. The non-PS4 players join the game too but interact using WhatsApp or FaceTime. What you get is a realtime interactive tissue, where the common interest is the game and different branches of communication join the participants. It should give designers of future conferences encouragement to be more ambitious and organic in their development. From one of my presentations With more and more people now meeting and dating online, interestingly doing so without third-person intermediaries, is it too far-fetched to believe that this could provide a model for online conferences also? Many of the social taboos surrounding meeting on the internet have all but disappeared where dating is concerned, why not for business meetings? Perhaps future conference software may include an attendee directory that, when browsed with the relevant filtering, you could swipe right to set up a meeting? What about Virtual Reality? For what it’s worth, I don’t currently believe for a second that VR will take an essential role of this new wave of online conferences. In its current form, it is just too restrictive and too cumbersome to be used in that way. The friction required to enter the virtual world is too significan

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About

Regular essays about digital tech and the future of business in narrated form 🎧 thefutureisdigital.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Matthew Cowen
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2021
  • Episodes
    17
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © dgtlfutures
  • Show Website
    The Future is Digital