Kittens – babies – sunsets – flowers – Life online

According to Time magazine Canon is considering moving to robot-only production for its cameras. This follows on from news stories last year that gadget manufacturer Foxconn was considering a similar move. Both are motivated by the need to reduce costs, whilst I was excited that the science fiction future of my youth seemed to be coming a step further to reality I was concerned by two things:

• Would this move to having robot workers turn out products as bad as the Italian car manufacturer who promoted robot made cars in the late 1970s?
• What would happen to all those PR people involved in employee relations? Would they be made redundant in the face of a drastically reduced work force, or would they be saved by a HR department revolt to banish robots ruining their own power structure?

Looking at US publications this weekend one of the biggest stories was the vilification of Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook who is probably best known to people through the film The Social Network. Saverin is a Brazilian by birth who left San Paulo for Miami as a child.

Saverin left the US in 2009 and renounced his citizenship before the Facebook IPO, mostly for tax reasons, but also because his business interests are now based in Asia and Brazil. The vilification is for a number of reasons:

• Saverin is part of the one per cent dodging taxes
• The US ‘made’ him what he is
• He is challenging the American Dream myth

The last point is something that I find the most interesting. I have had a number of friends who where told by investors in their start-ups that they had to move to Silicon Valley, despite the fact that they had done all the hard work outside the US – because the Silicon Valley valley sub-set of the American dream mono-myth has that tight a hold of the tech sector. It explains the hub and spoke operations of lots of businesses from Kraft to Apple since American pre-eminence and expertise is pre-ordained if you buy into the American dream.

Saverin is a high-profile version of another archetype that is developing; migration by immigrants away from the US; for exaqmple Robin Li worked in the US for Infoseek before returning to China founding Baidu and beating Google in the middle kingdom. What Li and Saverin have done, so are lots of other smart professionals who have an immigrant identity with a steady stream of people going back to Brazil, China, Hong Kong, India and Korea.

Part of this is the process of moving on from an American century to an Asian century and part of it is rejecting a challenge to a core part of what it means to be American – the American dream.

Being Irish, I have immigration in my blood, my Mum and Dad came over to the UK before I was born and I went back and forth to the home country. I have family in South Boston. What was interesting about the current financial crisis is that my young well-educated cousins have not gone to the US where they would have assistance from the wider family bedding in; but to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Dubai. The US wasn’t seen as part of their evoked set of desirable countries.

Which got me thinking, if the American dream is no longer alluring, how should America change the message around it’s country brand?

More information
What Eduardo Saverin owes America. (Hint: Nearly everything.) – Pando Daily

Before Stephen Elop arrived, Nokia had done a lot of work with Intel on a promising mobile operating system called MeeGo. You probably won’t have seen it as Nokia has deliberately only sold the Nokia N9 that runs it in markets were it wouldn’t have cannibalised sales of their Lumia range.

After Nokia walked away from MeeGo some of the elements went into a related project called Tizen run by Samsung and Intel. Early developer versions of the operating system running on a reference platform are now out and look like a competent if not outstanding looking system since it lacks the polished user experience of the iPhone or the stylish features (notably the keyboard) of BlackBerry 10.

As the largest maker of Android phones this was a curious move for Samsung, but it allows the company latitude to operate without Google and the ancillary problems that brings: Google and Oracle’s lawsuit over software APIs, the fact that Google is marginalised in the world’s largest handset market (China) and Microsoft’s licence fees for technology patents that Android apparently violates.

One of the most interesting aspects of the platform for marketers is that applications can be developed in HTML5, which should /could reduce development costs as this work could be an adjunct to building modern interactive web experiences. The key question I have is whether Samsung and Intel can make this development model work. HTML5 applications contributed to the poor performance of Palm’s WebOS, though it didn’t help that the hardware was also less than ideal in terms of performance.

Tizen is one to watch over the next few years as it could be a relatively cost effective platform to develop for backed by the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer.

Disclaimer: doing this suggestion may put your computer and your company’s network at risk of attack – follow that advise at your own risk; you have been warned.

Ok so PR agencies have a reputation for making do and mending when it comes to technology and you may find yourself working on older systems than is the norm. With that in mind, newer versions of applications may run slowly, so why not get a version of the application that matches the computer you run on more closely? Oldversion.com keeps older versions of many of the applications that you already use.

So why the disclaimer at the top? Older applications are often patched or upgraded to deal with known security issues such as security vulnerabilities or susceptibility to malware.  Running an older version of the software, whilst being faster on your computer doesn’t benefit from subsequent security improvements.

I was reading a post on Diego Basch’s blog about the downfall of Inktomi. For those of you who can’t remember the web without Google, Inktomi was a search company that powered a number of prominent websites and Hotbot – the Google before Google came along.

A key part of it stood out:

…there was one huge red flag: engineers at Inktomi were starting to use Google as our search engine

That really resonated with me. When I worked at Yahoo!, myself and my colleagues used Google most of the time for search. I heard from other people that Microsoft periodically had internal drives to try and encourage their employees to develop a Bing habit.

I worked as a freelancer on Motorola and remember transferring my SIM out of a Palm Treo 650 and into a Motorola handset at the height of the RAZR’s popularity and wouldn’t have seriously considered moving phones to a Motorola handset.

Back in the 1980s Hewlett-Packard came up with the touchscreen computer called the HP150 that did away with the mouse, you touched the monitor instead. One of the signs cited by writer Bob Cringely that the HP150 was doomed to failure was that the engineers refused to use the touch function on the computer screen, prefering to use the cursor keys to move around the screen via the keyboard (this was back before GUIs so the tab key was a key navigation tool).

You know your product sucks when the team, when given a choice, won’t use it.

More information
A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi – Diego Basch’s blog

The on-ramp is a phrase that I heard a number of American colleagues use to indicate a point at which a customer starts using a service. Presumably it comes from freeway junctions were one gets on a freeway. Anyway back to PR; when I started PR online advertising meant display advertising. Search advertising didn’t exist in any meaningful way, social networks were forums and chat rooms that were the preserve of the most internet savvy and e-commerce wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now.  For many businesses, after a Yellow Pages advert, direct mail drops and printed yearly calendars or mugs given to clients and prospects – PR was the big step into grown-up marketing.

I often used to come across small and medium sized businesses that described PR as free advertising. The dot com bust and subsequent growth of Google disrupted PR alongside other disciplines. It looks like technological disruption is about to strike again with Yahoo! Small Business announcing a free reputation management and marketing measurement dashboard for small businesses that would disrupt a lot of entry-level social media and SEO work sold in by PR agencies.

More information
Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard.

I have followed the reporting saga of LG and their relationship with Windows Phone operating system with interest. A good while ago LG looked to reduce its reliance on Windows software on its smartphones and make more Android based phone systems because the Windows Phone eco-system is smaller in terms of market share and purchaser interest (at least at the present time). A Korean executive did an interview with the Korean Herald to this effect last week, talking about ‘taking a step back’ from Windows Phone and putting focus on Android devices, but that interview was interpreted as LG pulls away from the Windows Phone platform completely.

This misinterpretation came right after Nokia’s financial results were announced painting Microsoft’s smartphone platform in a more precarious position than was actually the case. LG still sells Windows Phone devices and hasn’t said that it will stop selling them at any point, just that it doesn’t have new phones in the pipeline that it would be willing to talk about.

All of this brings home two things:

• Messaging is hard, it doesn’t work well with the subtleties of business; like the LG situation
• The social web makes a mockery of messaging because there is little chance of message penetration in the echo chamber let alone control of the message

More information
Microsoft, LGE may hold talks on smartphones – Korean Herald
Not so fast: LG not ditching Windows Phone 7 – Pocket Lint

That might be the case if one looks at Ledbury Research’s survey of CEO confidence, much of this seems to be down to a changing attitude of Chinese consumers towards luxury brands, so maybe less Louis Vuitton being sold in Selfridges?

More information
Luxury CEOs reveal fears for future

Airports and delays go together like pestilence and plague, but are not necessarily a surprise for the frequent traveler. So I read a piece on the Guardian about the UK Border Authority trying to minimise a public backlash to excessively long queues that recently got coverage.

Measures apparently outlined by the UK Border Authority included stopping the BAA from advising customers about how to register dissatisfaction and interestingly a bid to stop photography in the arrivals areas as pictures like these:

This image speaks a lot louder than many news reports.

Two things struck me about the social media clampdown:

• It would be almost impossible to enforce and perhaps the members of staff involved would be better off trying to process entry into the country instead? Though I am sure the UKBA is probably likely to trot out a terrorism / national security / monsters under the bed excuse
• It is part of a wider trend within the public sector to try and censor social media. From police officers arresting photographers to a more muscular government approach to control. Surely things haven’t got sufficiently bad in the UK that they are afraid of a homegrown version of the Arab Spring phenomenon?

More information
UKBA accused of covering up  airport delays – The Guardian

The Wall Street Journal talked about the phenomena of pivoting that is now common amongst technology start-ups. In times gone by, a start-up founder and his team would work away for two years or more and then come out with a fully-formed product or failed.  For online based start-ups in particular new programming tools and techniques allow product creation to be done a lot faster bringing the time down to a few months with the right team, roll the product out and if it doesn’t work try one or two other options. Pivoting seemed to come to prominence as a concept over the past couple of years although there are examples that go back right to the start of web 2.0 companies.

Image sharing site Flickr was one such pivot, originally a feature in a massive multiplayer online game the Ludicorp were building; Flickr was eventually launched as a standalone product as they needed to ship something and to bring money in.

All of this challenges PR consultants working with clients in this space:

• How do you message it?
• How do you handle the second or third pivot and keep the media interested?
• How do you get clients to plan for a product that bombs in the marketplace before launch?

More information

‘Pivoting’ Pays Off for Tech Entrepreneurs – WSJ