In a world where we’re increasingly expecting increasingly high definition in relation to the content that we consume, the TV business model is becoming increasingly blurred. In a recent case in the US, the Supreme Court decided that Aereo’s business model was no different to a cable provider, despite the difference in technology, and therefore…
Big data is a hot topic. In the UK the National Health Service has spent the last 25 years bring forward the concept of anonymising patient data from GPs. The aim is to create a pool of data that can be used for analysis and research into health trends and research. There is a precedent…
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…
As I write this article I’m surrounded by bookshelves loaded with books. Gazing at them looking for inspiration it becomes clear that there are two categories, those such as cookery books and reference books which get used many times, and those such as modern fiction which are really one time reads. With ‘real’ books we…
When we think of Facebook we often think of it as a social networking site. Yesterday, for a period of time, people trying to log into other, 3rd party, sites which use their Facebook account for authentication were redirected to an error page. At this point it became clear to them that services such as…
There have been many column inches given over to the changes announced by Facebook to the T&Cs for Instagram. Having paid ~$1Bn for Instagram, Facebook is obviously keen to leverage the synergies and find a way of monetizing their new acquisition. In their move towards these goals, what they seem to have miscalculated is that in approaching…
Increasingly in relation to business models we are seeing the use of terms such as ecosystem, keystone, and networks. This is not in itself new, as we have been used to the concept of supply chains more many years and they have been used throughout history. What we are seeing increasingly, is many organisations adopting…
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,…
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…
Do you remember careers guidance when you were at school? If you were lucky enough to get any then it was likely bite-size in nature. You either knew what you wanted to become, or you had no idea. In which case the 10 minute chat didn’t add any depth to your decision making and the…