Jan
24
Think Block Chain, not Bitcoin
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, privacy, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Here is a really great moment to celebrate. A readable UK government report with a real impact on markets (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/492972/gs-16-1-distributed-ledger-technology.pdf). It tells us what Honduras and Estonia are doing that we are yet to fully consider. Yet it fingers a new area of creativity that some authorities liken to the dotcom boom – a new configuration that we relaunch B2B inventiveness in the network around commercial workflows in a way that will take us much further than conventional network technologies. So far it has been the instrument of the crypto currency businesses, but this is far more than that, and the U.K. Office of Science paper, prepared by a team reporting to the Government Science Advisor, Sir Mark “Open Access” Walport, deserves the very widest attention, especially in Shoreditch, Tech City and other parts. There is enough here to launch a whole raft of B2B start-ups.
So let’s start a bit closer to the beginning. When Bitcoin was launched in 2008 the thought was that if a shared, encrypted database could be installed and mirrored across the network, then transactions updated to each ledger and validated would form a useful way of circumventing the use of cash by creating a means for secure asset transfer. Data thus added in each instance of the transaction thus created a data “block”, and as transactions grew more numerous and blocks thus chained together more widespread it became even safer – intervention and alteration of data would have to take place on thousands of machines at the same instant, even if the encryption was circumvented. These Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) have seemed like the white hope of interference-free financial transactions, but despite the fame of Bitcoin have been very hard to move into popular focus.
But this too is a characteristic of the Internet age. Technologies arrive, get used on a narrow front, get half-forgotten, and then come sweeping back in to answer questions that were never even thought about when they were invented. This appears to be the fate of DLT. When the Hondurans wanted a new land title system that was not open to third part falsification and could be updated by parties to a land deal or ownership change, then this was obvious. When the Estonians sought a way of leveraging one of their areas of expertise – the use of PKI (public key) encryption technologies – the DLT provided the answers. Amongst the case studies in the report is one after my own heart – an angel investor service network called Funderbeam which uses DLT to allow investors to turn their investments into a trade able currency and move money from investment to investment, preserving investor liquidity while avoiding the lock-in normally experienced by start-up investors.
So DLT has real benefits where asset classes are being exchanged. But we have not been in the data game for the last 30 years without knowing that data itself is an asset. This week, during an eye examination and an annual routine Heart examination, I found myself wishing for DLT in healthcare. What if my records were automatically updated, and any of my health advisors, authorised by me, could see every alteration in drugs or treatment decided by other practitioners treating me? And if I sell my house or trade in my car, can the whole intermediary network please be informed at the same time, including the bank, the insurer, the new owners and the registrars in government who need to know these things?
In the early days of the Web we spoke earnestly about Disinter mediation. Then many of us spoke equally confidently about re-intermediation, as we saw how markets moved fresh digital agents into place in digital marketplaces. It may be harder for the middleman to reinvent himself in the brave new world of DLT technology, however, and taking jobs and increasing productivity will become the focus of inventiveness in this area. Before the last election the UK government made a half-hearted attempt to privatise its own Land Registry. That organisation enters records by hand as well as digitally and employs 5000 people in the business of admits ration and verification. Now imagine it Honduran-style: land transfers are entered by sellers and verified by buyers and their lenders, insurers and other concerned parties, and archived in a block chain where all transactions are archived and held. While we may need an office of Land Transfer Governance we may never again need the current structures. Anyone reading this report in the Shareholder Executive should sell government agencies fast.
All this sounds like redress for the problems of Big Government. But there are other aspects that could affect every business in the land. If we look at business relationships as an asset, then the report suggests that Smart Contracts are likely to become the way in which we action and police business deals:
“Smart contracts are being considered for a wide variety of uses, particularly for regulatory compliance, product traceability and service management, and also to defeat counterfeit products and fraud in the following sectors:
• Food
• Financial Services
• Energy
• Pharmaceuticals
• Health
• Aerospace
• Aviation
• Telecommunications
• IT and communications
• Transport
• Utilities
• Agriculture
• Oil and gas”
So if we are content to sit back and relax, thinking that the technology behind Bitcoin is a “sometime, maybe” phenomenon. This technology is as potentially disruptive as the Web was once perceived to be, it will spark a host of start-ups and within a year every one of us will be thinking about how it applies to what we do – and how we live. And this technology centres on the SmartPhone! Happy New Year!
Aug
25
That Ghost in the Machine
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, privacy, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
There has to be a better way. Seven times have I raced to the telephone today, and seven times have I been greeted with “(pause ..click.) Here is an important message about your insurance/ mis-sold PPI/ tax filing etc etc”. I have put my name on every register but still the intrusive rubbish pours in. My mail box is full of it, and the kindly folk who send us magazines pack a few between every page as well as on them. This dandruff of sales offers is perfectly understandable and indeed some of my best friends, the nicest people you can imagine, make a living out of creating space – filling promotional gunk. And, even worse, many of my clients depend for a revenue stream on selling that space. But I cannot be the only person on the planet who feels exhausted by fending off the intrusive presence of advertising, and feels like saying “When I’m ready to buy, I will give a signal!”
Yesterday I read a fine and stimulating article in the Observor by John Naughton (http://gu.com/p/4by3j), a commentator I much admire and who I have often quoted here. He entitled it: “Is this really the beginning of the end for web ads?” And he cited his use of the Ghostery app to measure the numbers of services watching him using the web in order to find out what he was doing in order to serve him an ad. He counted 31 trackers, and he also quotes a Mozilla engineer as looking at a page served by a well known tech site and finding that the “content” comprised 8k of storage and the ads 6 mb. And we wonder why, in bandwidth starved, fibre-scarce, pseudo-broadband Britain, pages take so long to load! And by now you will be ahead of me, I suspect. Put together the trackers and their bandwidth use, and the ads and theirs, and any school child with a smartphone who wants to get a decent upload time ( – to quote Naughton, we are talking about loading a page to an iPhone in 2 seconds as against eleven at present – ) will load ad-blocking software. Apple, who have no skin in this game, have revised IoS9 and the iPhone release due in the autumn with heavyweight content blocking facilities. They will not be universally effective but think of this: online has the greatest potential for advertising of any medium we have yet acquired for communication purposes. You can track an ad, fit it precisely to your customer’s behaviour, adjust it so readers react to it – and yet advertising in the network has never commanded the rates that it did in the pre-digital world.
So let’s follow the Naughton thesis a little further. Imagine the revolts gain strength. Resentment at the intrusiveness and cost of receiving all those online ads turns into a global movement that blocks them out. Network speeds improve and user costs go down, but that part of publishing that still depends on advertising for a revenue stream takes a further big hit. This will be offset to an extent by Buy Buttons in apps and by brand sponsorship to promote them.
But in a world where users demand free information – and can get it – subscription is not the complete answer in filling the consequent revenue deficit. And providing services, in which information is a part of the deal, is certainly a part of the solution, but how many service vendors do we need? Recent evidence seems to show that users value a dominant incumbent, a challenger and an innovative newcomer – but not much else.
We shall certainly have sponsorship, and that may be a growth point. And it is not hard to imagine the rapid growth of brokerage businesses designed to introduce buyer and seller. I know many in the software sales area, and they infest travel markets. As a general rule the B2B brokers tend to build brand by word of mouth while their consumer equivalents are big brand advertisers – and may be the big brand sponsors of the future. In a world where you buy your Olympic Games coverage from Amazon, watching the Expedia 100m final may make a lot of sense. And Expedia advertising online may not.
This year has seen another new flood of Internet service start-ups. I think we now have to look very carefully at the funding of advertising dependent services in the years to come, and ask where the revenue streams come from in a world where the advertising balloon is deflating. The next DotCom Bust, and we can be sure there will be one, will have The Decline of Advertising running through it like Brighton Rock.
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