The UK has some great institutions which are often the envy of the rest of the world, the BBC, the Royal Mail, and the National Health Service. Sometimes as a nation we are too busy competing them to within an inch of their existence to see what we have in them. Taking the Royal Mail,…
Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator recently published its annual review of the UK communications market. The report is 400+ pages of analysis of the nation’s usage of communications mechanisms from social networks, to mobile voice and texts, to post and face to face. It’s data rich and a great snapshot of the nation in this rapidly…
Ideas for blog posts come from many sources. While I was travelling back from a recent meeting I happened to listen to the lunchtime current affairs programme which had a discussion on the plans of the Manchester Central Library to use the £60m refurbishment programme as an opportunity to review its collection of about 1m…
With the launch of the Google TV service in the UK imminent there are many views and opinions of the Google offering from a technology and functionality perspective. Many of them speculate how it’s rival, Apple, must now be racing to release its own TV offering. What is really interesting is that Apple has had its own Apple TV…
You may have seen the recent announcement by the Managing Director of UK retailer John Lewis that they are looking to allow customers to collect purchases through other retailers as of next year. By taking this approach, together with their other online distribution channels it will allow them to create national coverage with 60-70 physical…
We are constantly reminded that we live in an increasingly connected world. If you believe the projections with regards to the number of devices connected to the internet then it will increase from just under 2bn today to over 5bn by 2014. A more than doubling in two years. In terms of business models, the…
If you think back to the 80’s you’ll probably think of the music of Queen, Madonna, Prince and Duran Duran, you may well have gone to the Live Aid concert and the most technologically advanced device in your house was a Walkman! You may have seen and touched a PC for the first time. What…
Cash flow is the silent killer of businesses and never more so than in the current economic climate. There is rarely a week when the business pages tell of another story of a small or large business that is struggling to access suitable lines of credit. In the UK yesterday was the ‘quarter day’ when…
I just read ‘What’s The Future of the Sharing Economy‘ on Fast Company and it re-kindled some thinking about the business models that we’re seeing in the digital publishing world. Many of us are now used to receiving books, magazines and newspapers in a digital form, however, how is this impacting the sharing economy? Where…
In this cost conscious age many organisations are looking for ways to maintain margins by managing their cost base. When they look around for low hanging fruit they see the opportunities opened up by the increasingly connected world and the changes in people’s willingness to do themselves, what others have done for them before. The…