London Eye Galaxy Tab Wall

So, when your competitor is being a pain in the ar.. (sorry, these patent wars are ridiculous) ..see if you can put the unsold stock to work and why not scoop some great PR while the lawyers are busy limiting consumer choice...

So how do you do this??? I was long thinking Samsung should sponsor galleries, like the Hockney instant art exhibition in Paris, or even sponsor schools to get kids doing their art on tabs rather than paper (if you go beyond a bit of art the commercial questions may be raised again) but this is is one better and I want one in my hall, and my kitchen, and...

It all raises some interesting questions:

1. given the complexity and cost of big screens being made touch, is the concept of the interactive wall and the interactive table, more likely to be multi-tab than big screen? After all, you can adapt the size and shape, for example an oval could be made of a centre of 9" tabs and 7" ones at the sides and even the odd smartphone to fill in
2. is the "no market for 7" tabs" debate irrelevant, as our experience of tabs will be big tab, small tab, multi-tab, or is this just a one-off
3. can we do this with all the useless picture frames in the world and finally have a use for them... oh, no, I forgot, they have no connectivity, intelligence or anything... and picture frames are still a lamentable waste of a screen and an SD card slot...
4. Have mobile operators found a new way to up their tablet sales - get four tabs for for three and a few "adaptimount" :)
5. can you do this with your old smartphones and 
6. what software is used to synch them - I want!
7. Is this further proof of what I have long been a believer in; using your tech for marketing, get it out there, use samples for PR as Nokia did in the good old days, its cheaper than above the line, and gets real experiential marketing...

The original sources of this info for further reading below:

• Slashgear
• Techradar

CES sparks the end of the PC tower?

I have just watched BBC Click's second instalment from CES. BBC click is part of my weekly must consume media, and I often have to watch it a couple of times as I get distracted by some of its content half way through (I also watch it the first time during the weekend when a siesta has been known to occur...)

The opening scene was a very amusing spoof of a PC tower being buried in the middle of the Nevada Desert Interesting spoof, and an interesting feature on towers and computing trends, however i do not
agree with their view that we are all going tablet this and ultrabook that just because there were no PC towers on the CES floor and as such PC towers will disappear. Moreover, the view was that you may still see them in offices.... which I think is the first place they could all but disappear! There are a few reasons for this:

1) we heard the same with the netbook, it was going to replace PC towers and of course hit low end tower sales, but all netbooks did was diversify and actually increase overall PC usage and add more users in a household - However they did not, and would never have the power, storage, expansion ability, or screen size; pound for pound that would keep people coming back to PC towers.

2) tablets, ultrabooks, and CES are all still very high end - And require the high end knowledge of cloud and NAS and a networked home to use properly, back up and stream to and from. Many people still plump for a 15", 17" laptop and a desktop with storage to back up to.

3) The trend is also going ssd, further putting pressure on storage and a big desktop with ssd boot and a meaty hdd..

4) high end is getting tech savvy, running 2 or more OS , running media servers and more, developing for two or more environments with VMware... All of which needs memory: 12gb of memory to run for an i7 desktop costs £60... For ultrabooks 12gb is impossible or expensive

4) hd slrs, hd cameras, 20mp cameras... They all create massive files that cannot be edited via NAS let alone the cloud and are easiest done on a meaty desktop with a huge screen

5) screens are getting bigger and cheaper, everybody will soon have a spare 22" tft, 32" hdtv, etc and for everyone that gets an apple tv or a ps3 plugged into it, a lot will go to video, audio and image editing duties


6) Geek chic: PC Towers are still in the ford model T era, with some modern tuning... there is plenty of mileage in the personal computer in various guises, from personal supercomputer to personal hoarding computer, just like the scooter, bike, train, plane and segway, chronic overcapacity or overpricing have been able to spring the demise of the car...

Finally, to my "moreover" point; if the tower disappears anywhere, it will first be in the office! With more travel and home working and outsourcing / contracting plus the huge trend to 'bring your own pc" i would say the first place they would disappear would be offices... And with it IT staff will finally get people to stop using local storage, back up, etc, etc.

Apart from that, all that is left is to go to iPlayer if you can, or the video on the site ... other video acquisition method (ahem) if not, and enjoy the montage in the dessert, and a very pleasing geek fix on BBC click.

Moving over to Blogger

Well, it has been fun, moving over to blogger from custom blogging pages...

I had been looking to move over for a while, and reading great, complex blogs like DC Rainmaker's excellent Blog made me realise blogger was probably the way forward. I did however have one major issue, and now two.. (more on that in a bit).

My major initial issue was that all the blogs I liked used 3rd party templates which look great filled with content, but not that great in the transition, adding a template is also not as straightforward as it may seem, as you have three ways to add them, each with their pros and cons, and then you may well lose support for other upgrades, etc. A key example of this is the new mobile templates - if you use a custom template you can only have the "default" mobile template which will not match you full blog. Additionally there were elements from some I wanted and elements I did not want, by the time I had messed with a 3rd party template I made the call to start from scratch!

The clincher for me was the new blogger templates, which are customisable, have a mobile specific pages and allow you to customise the template. So, using templates I liked as a guideline I set to customising the template by:

• First off was removing the Nav bar, yuk, there are just a few lines of code
• Enabling the mobile option
• Changing layout to have a navigation menu at the top, three boxes at the bottom
• Adding an image at the top
• Adding a favicon
• Adding the gadgets at the bottom to populate the layout elements
• Remembering to save!

So, how did it go:

Ups:

1. first came this blog, simple, easy to set-up, populate and customise (see customisation below)
2. This blog DNS (once worked out, see "downs" below) was sorted in minutes

Downs:

1. Forwarding the custom domain was not as simple as it seemed, as my web hosting and domain hosting are separate (standard practise) and the domain host's DNS functions do not play ball with google (even though google's FAQ seems to think they do) and so I have my web host doing the funky stuff DNS wise.
2. Forwarding of my second blog to port over, Mobile Virtual Network Operator, was not as simple, with the DNS unexpectedly taking the full 48 TTL hours vs less than an hour with this blog...
3. Blogger's handling of 404 and old domain links is dire and not at all what you would expect from the master of slick but simple software and services.. none of my links that have been SEO'd for ages can be mapped over, even if i name the page as per the old page as blogger names the pages x.html, original links in x.htm, x.php, etc will not work

The verdict:

Adopting any new technology is a balance between the benefits vs. the pain of adoption, as analysed by many, but probably best Pip Coburn in his book the change function. However, not all decisions are made on the spot, and even once a decision had been made, there is always a cooling off period and there is always ebay to dispose of products that become a pain over time. This post period is also when you will advise others to not adopt a product or service. Hence my view below of pain of adoption vs benefits over time. The result: adopt, am now changing over all my blogs

The result: Adopt - The benefits over time exceed pain of adoption

MVNO Networking Paris Congress Chair Digest

The MVNO networking congress was a great event, and a very successful one two, just the week before Jayme contacted me to let me know ...

 

MVNO Networking Paris Congress Chair Digest

We have moved...

I have moved the old custom blog site over to blogger as I was spending more time maintaining the site than blogging, and the recent blogger updates have made it more like a basic CRM system that can be used for blogging that I originally wanted when I started my various blogs over half a decade ago...

I will slowly be adding the other blogs onto the blogger platform, so there will be an array of archived blogs with a recent date, but I am leaving the original posting date as I import the old posts, unless of course it causes havoc with searches, in which case i will rethink... hope you like the new format!

MVNO Opportunities

My other rant from the linkedin MVNO Industry summit group discussion board (see other below) is defining MVNO opportunities and being honest about the opportunity. There are simplified MVNO dichotomy is that the MVNO pipeline is full of either:

a) big brands, with distribution, but no defined / differentiated product to set it aside from the MNO, which already has a brand and a non-differentiated product thank-you very much

b) the great ideas that do not have the distribution, and even then, cannot focus their product enough around the opportunity.

This is outside those that are MVNO in a box potential, who also grossly underestimate the term "in a box" to mean mvno=easy... and then forget to differentiate and simplify the product...

... the rant was sparked about people talking about the power of mobile to bring customers to a supermarket, and how mobile can supplement their database: supermarkets have an age-old ability to bring customers in, its called the threshold or catchment area of poor buggers who have no alternative if they want to eat... and supermarkets know more about their customers than it is probably better to be aware of if you are of the pelican brief persuasion!

originally posted by Christian Borrman 28:50pm 08/03/11

MVNO in a BOX

I have just been through the MVNO Industry Summit Linkedin group and been on a rant! Why? The first was someone asking if anyone if anybody had an MVNO in a box solution. OK: the MVNO has come a long way, the first one took several years, and to be honest, my shortest engagement on an MVNO has been 6 month, and that is when I have joined at least double that time into the process, and I have managed to accelerate the process by at least 4-5 months. MVNOs, along with app stores, are the single most complex products you can launch in mobile, and the technical parts working are just the start. Forget "in a box" and think, what is my box that I will tick in the market. At present, if you look at the mobile consumer as a whole, probably only 5% to 10% of mobile consumers could actually buy a product "in a box" The most part buy a mix of device matched with an almost bespoke tariff, term, contract and other extras, bolt-ons and more, let's not even begin with accessories, ring-tones and the like. Therefore, if you want an "MVNO in a box" think more about if your product that is simple and relevant enough that i would enable a significant market of consumers to buy your product "out of the box". you will then be of enough interest to the market and an MNO that your "mvno solution in a box" worries will practically go away!

originally posted by Christian Borrman 18:50pm 04/03/11