One industry that isn’t a stranger to commercial innovation is the music industry. Taking recording formats as an example, since the late 19th century there have been several waves of advancement, including: – Phonograph cylinder (1888-1920’s) – Vinyl (1920’s – early 1990s ) – Cassettes (Late 1970’s – early 2000’s) – CD’s (1982 – )…
Increasingly we live in a society where we expect everything to be available instantly, 24/7/365. Yet often we take for granted the time and effort that it has taken to achieve this for each individual product or service. On another axis the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and therefore more complex. How many of us…
Whether you like it or not we are all contributors and users of crowdsourced data on a daily basis. Examples are all around us, whether it’s: voting on TV talent shows; product ratings on Amazon; or traffic on Google Maps; or mobile phone coverage maps collated by RootMetrics from user supplied data. Whilst the first…
We’re increasingly used to seeing articles in the press about the importance of cyber security. Thanks in part to some high profile cases, company boards are slowly waking up to the issue as a topic that they have to be involved in. However, a recent FT survey showed that only 3 in 20 said the…
In so many areas of life, being successful is about continually improving versus your previous best. The baseline is key. Outsourcing is no different, without a robust baseline it’s difficult to measure performance and apportion risk and reward in a sustainable and balanced way. The competition to take over the procurement of defence equipment for…
One of the key battlegrounds between Google and Apple over the next few months will be in the area of music streaming. The companies are likely to take subtly different approaches in terms of service offering and business model. Google’s recently launched ‘Play Music All Access’ is a subscription based service similar to Spotify and…
In an interview for CBS’ ’60 Minutes’ program, Bill Gates talked about his relationship with Steve Jobs. In it he talks about tablets, “We did tablets – lots of tablet – well before Apple did” he states, before conceding “they put the pieces together in a different way that succeeded.” In the world of tablets,…
As I’ve written before most mobile phone subscribers are unaware of the sweeping usage rights they give to their network providers in relation to their usage, and location data when they sign up to a mobile phone contract. The reporting this weekend in the UK of the partnership between EE, the largest UK mobile provider…
Back in October 2012 I wrote an article titled “Software by the Month – A better proposition than your gym membership?” in which I highlighted the increasing trend towards subscription based business models in terms of software licensing. In the article I investigated the opportunities for software publishers and users alike that the model could open…
In one of my sessions at the recent IACCM EMEA conference which looked at contracting skills I posed the question that whilst we would rarely let a product get to market without some form of testing or prototyping, how many commercial or contract management professionals consider testing their contracting structures or agreements? If we look…