Lord Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web?

There is a rumour circulating around the Internet that the man who invented the world wide web, Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is going to be given a life peerage if the Conservatives win the next General Election (1).

It was only yesterday that Murad Ahmed, writing in The Times suggested (2):

"Many have argued that he would have been awarded the Nobel Prize had his discoveries been spun out of traditional sciences"

Which honour would you rate as the higher of the two I wonder - Life Peer or Nobel Lauriete?

Notes

(1) The Local Democracy Blog http://lgiu.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/democratise-the-house-of-lords/ accessed 15 October 2009

(2) M Ahmed (2009) A worldwide waste of time...web creator admits those double slashes were a mistake, The Times, 14 October 2009

The free digital content debate goes on - draft

Libby Perves, writing in a recent edition of The Times (12 Oct 2009), argues that "the internet generation has grown up believing it can enjoy other people's hard work for nothing." She suggests that this must stop. She points to the 'backlash' that is underway in the music and newspaper industries. This backlash has been documented over recent weeks in The Times newspaper.

A major move in this direction was the plan announced by the Government to strengthen the measures outlined in the Digital Britain report to reduce illegal file-sharing. Creative industry chief executives backed this plan (The Times 1 Sept 2009), stressing the economic implications (just like Purves):

" as our film, television, publishing, music, sports and entertainment retail businesses go digital, their ability to invest in creating high quality content that millions can enjoy is fatally undermined by illegal filesharing. This has a direct impact on current and future employment opportunities for the British creative workforce, the promotion of emerging talent and on innovation in new digital content services."

Musicians, such as James Blunt and Lilly Allen sent letters to The Times supporting the proposals:

Musician James Blunt wrote a letter to the editor of the Times offering support to this viewpoint (The Times, 21st Sept 2009):

"I want to put my hand up in support of Lily Allen (Thunderer, Sept 16). She's asking British musicians to galvanise over a serious crime: the death of a great British industry - our music business.

The world over, people are stealing music in its millions in the form of illegal file-sharing. It's easy to do, and has become accepted by many, but people need to know that it is destroying people's livelihoods and suffocating emerging British artists."

Let us examine their argument. File sharing is rampant. As a consequence it is destroying the music scene and stifling innovation. Musician Tom Robinson (The Times 16 October 2009) counters both of these assertions. He feels it is 'derailing the gravy train' of the record companies, but songwriters "operate in a far more favourable environment...."

Is there evidence of innovation and creativity in the digital free economy? He thinks so. "You now need little more than a laptop and a good pair of ears to produce high-quality recordings at home...distribution on iTunes [costs] £30 ....Best of all, music and visuals can be 'broadcast' worldwide on Myspace and Youtube at no cost at all. You'll no longer make afortune but you'll certainly earn a living."

The best things in life are free

In Free: the Future of a Radical Price (2009), Chris Anderson predicts that games will soon be 'free'.

He writes (p 145):

"Games are one of the last digital products that are mostly sold [in stores] and that model is nearing its end. Just as music and software is becoming primarily an online market, so will games. And once you move from shipping atoms (plastic boxes and discs) to transmitting bits, free becomes inevitable. Over the next decade, this $10 billion industry will shift from primarily a traditional packaged goods business to an online business built on entry prices of zero."

The first step towards this zero entry price was reported yesterday in The Times[1]. The latest version of the football game, Championship Manager, has been made available for a month online for as little as 1p. This is an adaptation of the innovation introduced by Radiohead last year, when they invited their fans to pay what they wanted to download their "In Rainbows" album.

How can this make economic sense? The business strategy being employed by Eidos, the supplier of Championship Manager, is what Anderson has called "Freemium". The basic game is available at 1p+ for anyone who wishes to use it. But, those who wish to keep up-to-date throughout the season will have to pay £5 for the six downloadable updates containing "all the latest statistics, scores, competition standings, player transfers, player stats, bookings and major injuries plus much more from the 10 leading countries in Europe"

The marginal cost of distributing digital product approaches zero. The costs are all associated with producing it. But by giving the game away for nearly free will probably boost the take-up of the game and, correspondingly, the number paying for the premium service. It is also likely that there will also be cross-subsidies. Enticing players to use this free game might encourage them to purchase other products from the company. This is was how Radiohead made their money from Free.

According to Anderson (p 154), In Rainbows became Radiohead's most successful album. It sold 3 million copies (some of which were physical copies); they made more money from the downloads than they made from the previous one; it was followed by their best-selling tour with 1.2 million tickets sold.

Notes

[1] King I (2009) Honesty is the best policy, The Times, August 18 2009

[2] The title is a quote from the song "Money (that's what I want)" released by the Beatles on their 1963 LP, "With the Beatles". The full verse is: "The bset things in life are free, but you can keep them for the birds and bees, now give me money, that's what I want".

Love is free, free is love

Chris Anderson, in his new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, argues that people under the age of 30 no longer expect to pay for news, music, TV, films or social networking. He suggests two models for digital media businesses to adopt if they are targeting this age group: 'freeconomy' and 'freemium'.

Businesses operating the freeconomy model, such as Google, provide content for free and generate revenue from advertising on the site. However, Anderson acknowledges that this model has lost its appeal since the onse of the credit crunch. He states "From the middle of 2008, it became clear that advertising was going to be limited. It was not going away, but it was not going to float all boats."

The other 'free' business model is freemium, in which the basic service is free and subscibers are encouraged to upgrade and pay for additional services. Fickr, the photo sharing site, adopts this model. Basic subscribers can upload images for free, but they are restricted to 100mb storage a month and access to smaller-sized images. Premium (pro-account) subscribers pay approx £17 per annum to store an unlimited amount of photos and are able to download images in their original resolution.

Spotify, which has been discussed in this blog twice previously, is an interesting case as it mixes both models. Subscribers can stream music for free, with ocassional adverts between tracks. But, by paying £10 per month, they gain access to the premium service and can listen to the music uninterupted by adverts and can also use Spotify on mobile devices.

Of course, the major battle that has raged over recent years, as a result of this changing social demand for free digital media, has been between the companies who own the rights to popular music and the generation which is using BitTorrant sites to share free copies of the music. Pirate Bay, with 20 million users, has been at the forefront in this battle. In April this year, its founders were jailed for breaking the music copyright law. Would this event signal defeat for free file sharing? It appears not. Pirate Bay has just been bought by Global Gaming Comapny for £4.7 million and has devised a new free business model. More of that next time.

Note:

The title is a line from the John Lennon song Love from the Plastic Ono Band LP (1970)

Public sector skunkworks

Last week I had a meeting with a council chief officer to discuss innovation within his authority. He characterised the council as having a 1980's culture, being very risk adverse, with a hierarchical structure and a command and control approach to management. He repeatedly used football analogies to make his point. In the innovation league, this council was mid-table.

How does an organisation such as this set about becoming more innovative?

Another chief officer in the same council suggested an approach that she has now twice tried in two different councils. This is to set up an innovation incubator, a sort of research and development unit for public sector innovation. This incubator would operate in a different way to the rest of the council. It would be more entreprenural. It would have its own culture, distinct procedures and be empowered to experiment with new technologies to the council.

This is the skunkworks approach. The term was coined at Lockhead, the US aircraft manufacturer. In the 1940s, the main factory at Lockhead was assembling bombers for the British forces. They were approached by the US military to develop and build a jet fighter capable of combatting the perceived growing threat from Germany. A small team was put together, working in secret, separate from the main organisation, with the authority to take risks and make some decisions without referring to the line of command.

According to Wikipedia, skunkworks is "widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects".

The public sector skunkworks was an interesting organisational innovation to observe. In its three-year life it gained a number of national accolades for its technological innovations. But its distinct culture and private-sector approach caused many tensions within the council which eventually led to its demise. The Lockhead skunkworks has survived for many decades. Why did this public sector version fail so quickly?

No-one will be watching us, why don't we do it in the road

"We live in a surveillance society." states the Government's Information Commissioner.  He believes there has been a worrying rise in what he calls "dataveilance", by means of CCTV, credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card.

One "best practice" example of the surveillance society was recently identified by the Guardian newspaper.  It reported that operators in Westminister council's underground CCTV control room are able to watch any London street. The article continues:

"Using the latest remote technology, the cameras rotate 360 degrees, 365 days a year, providing a hi-tech version of what the 18th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived as the "Panopticon" - a space where people can be constantly monitored but never know when they are being watched."

Leeds-based sociologist  Zygmunt Bauman, in his book Liquid Modernity, suggests that the panopticon arrangement requires both the watched and the watchers to be tied to a physical space.  In Westminster case, the watched are on the streets of London and the watchers are housed in close proximity beneath the streets.  Bauman proposes that we are now entering a post-panopticon stage in history.  The watcher is " no longer bound, not even slowed down, by the resistance of space." 

Google has contributed to this post-panopticon future.   Through the medium of its new Street View product, we can all peek into other people's streets, initially in major UK cities.  For instance, it is possible for anyone using a computer or web-enabled mobile phone to obtain 360 degree views of some 22,000 miles of streets.  The mapping of Leeds Metropolitan University's Headingley campus, for example, took place in the summer as the graduation tent was being erected.  

Street View has proved controversial.  People caught on camera have complained.  Others, such as former Prime Minister Tony Blair are reported to have demanded that their property should be blanked out and hidden from view.  The post-panopticon camera it seems knows of no digital divide, it watches both  the citizen and the elite who would have previously inhabited the control-tower, overseeing the activity of the watched.

Footnote

In October 1968, on the White Album, the Beatles could tempt my generation to "do it in the road," because no-one would be watching.  If they were here today, in our liquid modernity, surrounded by dataveillance, this song would probably not have been written

I'm on the pavement thinking about the government

Once again today there is another story about the failure of public sector innovation.  This time it is the national offender management information system which was set up to provide 'end-to-end offender management'.  This aimed to share information between prisons and the probation service, replacing separate stand-alone systems.  At its inception in 2004, the estimated lifetime cost of the system was estimated to be £234M.  By 2008 the expected total cost had more than doubled.

The National Audit Office review, published today, highlights the following failures in this project

1.  Senior service management did not monitor the project sufficiently.

2.  There was no clear governance structure in place.  Roles and responsibilities were blurred.

3.  Poor programme management - the lack of an overall project plan;  poor change control and inadequate financial control

4. The need to perceive major projects as IT-enabled business change rather than technical IT projects.  The 42 probation services all had individual ways of working.  Trying to accommodate these led to requirements drift.  Processes should have been standardised and simplified.

5.  Poor supplier management.  This is an outsourced development, but it was not tendered for.  The development progressed on a time and materials basis, racking up the costs as requirements grew.