Oct

23

The PM and the Hub

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Pearson, privacy, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

The Story So Far (for slow readers and foreigners): One morning, three years ago, the then newly elected UK Prime Minister awoke determined to right a wrong. The previous day, in a meeting with the fabulous founders of Google, he had heard that it would have been impossible to start Google in the UK because of the UK’s intellectual property law regime. “Something should be done” turned into “writing a report”, as so often in political life, and the good Professor Hargreaves was duly appointed to do just that. After pouring down invective and contumely on the industry he was meant to be examining, the good Professor recommended a Hub, and everyone agreed. The good Richard Hooper, late of OFCOM the regulator, was then appointed to decide what the Hub was and what it might do. He decided that it had five roles:

The sensible Mr Hooper then retired from the fray and the really very good Dr Ros Lynch took on the role of implementing the Hub. She was appointed last month and now has 11 months in which to complete her work.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently. The four 25 year old professional users of information who “keynoted” the Outsell Signature Event in early October are much to blame, since their apparent indifference to the existence of copyright – and their confidence that anything they needed could be found on the web, and usually for free, reminded me forcefully that the PM, Prof Hargreaves, Mr Hooper, Dr Lynch and myself live in a different world from those young(er) people, and it is not necessarily the real one. So I decided to to get back to the source of all of this and see if I could not find what had been in the PM’s mind at the time and whether he thought we were making progress. And as it happens my thinking about the future has just about reached thought and gesture based computer interfaces, so I thought I would get around the Press office at No 10, avoid the difficulties of where to put one’s bike in Downing Street, and go straight for Mr Spock and the old Venusian mind transfer. And the old one’s are the best ones: within minutes I had caught the great man between speeches on the new British criminal justice regime, which he said would be “tough and intelligent” (like the Guardian I wondered if the regime of the past three years had been ” tepid and demented”), and very happy to answer my thoughts with his own.

I started where he had started. Did the changes mean that the next Google could be sourced in Shoreditch? Well, the changes had not taken place yet, and were unlikely to do so before the next election, but he wanted to hope that we were building a regime  which would mean that any enterprize could start within this Green and Pleasant and not be disbarred by an inadequate legal framework. But, I urged, IP is about Global Networks in Global Marketplaces, surely. The next Google will grow where there is cost-effective labour, the most favourable tax regime, a large domestic market and an abundance of entrepreneurial drive. Well, he thought, it was unlikely that George would let him tweak the tax base in this sector, and we were a small country, but surely I must admit that we were smart and entrepreneurial? And the Hub, a great British notion, would create a point of exchange in the network for trading IP which would become as important as the City in financial services, leaving the nations of the world once more gasping in our wake at the ability of the Brits to organize the world’s marketplaces for them.

I admit this thought set me back a bit, but I countered by asking why, in that case, Dr Lynch had been given a year, and a staff of one, and was currently based in a small office gifted by Pearson for the purpose. He thought it vital that the Hub was not imposed, or, in these straightened times, funded by government. It should grow from the industry and be funded by the industry. My thought was that getting the whole media and information sector to think together was likely to be a difficult task – getting consistent data on rights – probably a Big Data issue in itself – to plug into the back of the Hub would prove hard for some sectors, and almost impossible for others. Might this not be an area where more government leadership was required? I thought, but banished the thought, that the strategy might be to get the media sectors spending the next two years building their rights databases and fighting each other, so they could be seen to be to blame when the Hub’s likeness to the tower of Babel at length became clear.

He thought that this was unworthy. And his counter-thought really interested me. “So where would you put the priority, clever clogs” obviously matters. My thought was that the front end was what needed government support if industry was to get the back end done in time. The interface that changed behaviours had to have values. Free or discount purchases for registration and the ability to audit? Want those graphs from this market research report in your powerpoint – subscribe to our loader toolset. Want to use this lesson with that video and this music in your classroom? Use our special comprehensive school-rates education one stop clearance system (Hooper says schools currently need to use 12 clearance agencies in the UK). I pointed out the precedents in this education zone alone: teacherspayteachers.com in the US, now competing with the UK’s TES Connect working with the US teaching unions. Was that not entrepreneurial? We needed to re-invent the way users saw rights, and we needed to make rights protection relevant to the work of every individual as a creator of IP, and offer them real value to be licit!

But, sadly there came no reply. All I faintly recall was the echo of another thought, as though someone was whispering in his ear, “now this Savile scandal has broken you can attack the BBC on all fronts without fear” and the thought transfer process came to an abrupt end. I will try to re-connect, but, in the meanwhile, these are make or break months for the Hub.

 

 

Oct

19

DQM and the Market of One

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data protection, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, privacy, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

I thought it might be a restful day. After the conferences, after Frankfurt, try another conference, in a different field, and attend as a spectator – NO Speaking. Add the fact that this one was to be held in the Royal Institution (Faraday’s lecture theatre is a favourite place) and that I was invited by an old friend and I anticipated a light day catching up with the good folks in data marketing and what we used to call “list cleansing” years ago. The hosts were DQM (Data Quality Management), who I have known for a long time in different manifestations and the meeting was organized by their magazine, DataIQ, who have developed ways of benchmarking and replicating best practice in data management (www.dqmgroup.com). I settled into my seat prepared to be mildly re-educated: by mid-morning I was in a state of shock, and by the end of the day I was sure that another significant convergence was now locking into place.

Just think back a few years. For the information industry, preposterously concerned with their own proprietory content, data management of this type was simple housekeeping. Keeping lists of customers and prospects in good order was a non-strategic mid-level task. But now we live in a Big Data world, and while speakers urged us to see this as developmental as much as revolutionary, and pointed out how old the concepts are, there was still a feeling in the air that we could know so much more about customers and prospects that our chances of selling them something they wanted were increasing all the time. John Belchambers from Telefonica and Colin Grieves from Experian both hammered home the lesson, but as they were talking about global corporations and global marketing, my head was working furiously in the information products and services space. Think through the future of marketing information and the future of “publishing” (or creating information services and solutions) and you come out at the same place: The Market of One.

Noel Penrose, the former COO of Interbrand, made a vital intervention when he reminded us that Brand can be valued, and so can Data. We are not living in a place where data becomes commoditized if we are perpetually developing market-leading techniques for qualifying and comparing it. It was around this time that I saw why the agenda was dovetailed between speeches by two eminent futurologists. Melanie Howard, the chair of the Future Foundation advisory service began the day in fine form, and Dr Ian Pearson, formerly BT’s futures man, ended it. Both gave excellent value in predictive terms, but their effect on me in terms of  the information marketplace was to drive me towards the Market of One prediction and what it means for all of us.

They reminded us of some things that we should know already. Demographic change should be the first stop in every strategic enquiry. In a sensor dominated society, each of us will be in receipt of 2 gigabytes a day of unsolicited content, and equally, as we walk and talk and move around the networks, we shall create as much again each day. While we talk about “mass customization” in a hopeful way, the drive to personalization, both in terms of marketing  and services, is surely inexorable. Having just come from Frankfurt, where I moderated a panel on what we called “network publishing” I can testify to the willingness of producers to think about “customized textbooks” (CourseSmart) or custom workflow for lawyers (Wolters Kluwer Germany) but can we really see beyond that?

Christine Andrews, DQM’s Managing Director, certainly sees the regulatory issues (another round of European Community privacy law belt-tightening is due in 2015), but sees beyond it as well. One of the criteria for value may well become the quality of data governance in a business, and its ability to audit and report its own performance. But she is very right to point to the barrier that consumer-based legislation creates at the moment – and will increasingly in the US as that market catches up with European concerns. So turn that upside down for a moment. I could well predict, from what I heard this week, that we shall see a market where the power of the customer steadily increases to the point where powerful consumers are able to save and make private all aspects of their performance as network users, enabling them to sell it back to suppliers and marketeers in return for – coupons, discounts, customized products and services. In this permissioned world we shall have different levels or strata of market optimization – I can make this service fit a class of people who behave like you, or to fit your behaviours specifically.

So what classes of data will have most value: objective data, derived from observation of what happens on the networks which is commonly usable by all, or subjective data, derived from individual transactions and owned by the individual themselves? The latter, I imagine, but by gaining permission to use the latter, or enough of it, we could add real value to the former. This is what the Financial Times do, I hope, when they assess the reading habits of 300,000 recordable readers every day using Deep View. The inestimable Chuck Richards at Outsell took us down this track in his note this week (October 15) on 1 to 1 marketing, which also indexed companies like IDG Techsignals and Scout Analytics (www.outsellinc.com).

I came down the road from the Royal Institution grateful to my hosts for a reminder that the future is part of the present, and that marketing data and content data are all data in the context of an individual customer’s requirement.

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