Category: Four pillars

[Ok, admit it. You were about to tell me that I’d misspelt apocalypse. Perhaps I should have said app-ocalypse instead, but then I’d have had an unsightly hyphen floating around the headline. And then you may not have read this far.]

A few days ago, the Pew Internet & American Life Project published an interesting report, titled The Rise of Apps Culture. You can read the entire report here, or look at the survey questions here.

The headline findings may not be particularly surprising to many of you, but are still worth noting:

• 35% of adults have cell phones with apps, but only two-thirds of those who have apps actually use them
• Apps users are younger, more educated, and more affluent than other cell phone users
• App use still ranks relatively low when compared with other uses of cell phones
• 29% of adult cell phone users have downloaded an app to their phone
• One in ten adult cell phone users (10%) had downloaded an app in the past week; 20% of cell phone users under age 30 download apps this frequently
• One in eight adult cell phone users (13%) has padi to download an app
• Among cell phone users with apps, the average adult has 18 apps on his or her phone

The findings above were based on a US-wide probability sample of 2,252 adults; the report also contains findings from The Neilsen Company’s Apps Playbook, which was based on a survey carried out in December 2009. It is also worth reading those findings.

I’ve been observing how people use apps on smartphones for some time now, learning by watching. And my initial reactions were somewhat sceptical; people seemed to use apps in faddish waves, then discard them and move on. The core group of apps used seemed to be somewhat smaller and stabler than it seemed. At least that was what I observed. A cynic might have said that the whole app scene was a bit like the Nigerian money transfer letter scam: you only needed a very small percentage of the target audience to be gullible enough to part with their money and you could be very happy indeed.

There also seemed to be some patterns in the nature of apps used; apps that were fundamentally executed solely on the device, which elicited few complaints; apps that needed to interact with servers, which had a higher likelihood of freezing the device, usually as a result of variable signal strength and the problems of state-knowledge. Although games transcended both types of apps, the more popular apps (news, maps, social networking, music and interactive games) all needed to move information between devices and servers, with the concomitant challenges.

Some time ago, I was very taken with an article written by Andrew Savikas averring that “content is a service business”. The views in that article influenced my perspective when I looked at the world of apps, leading me to believe that convenience, not content, was the driving factor in all things app.

So when I looked at the Pew study, I tried to test this theory.

The first place I looked at was the billing relationship, one of the big battlegrounds in the telcosphere. What could we learn from the study in this context? It transpires that downloaders prefer to pay for their apps via:

• Billing from their cellphone provider (34%)
• Credit card (29%)
• PayPal (18%)
• iTunes (12%)

Interesting. Score one for the convenience argument?

Having tested the billing arena, I then wanted to look at actual usage. How do apps do in the league tables for non-voice cell phone activities? Surprisingly poorly. In 9th place, after all the world and his wife: taking pictures, sending/receiving text messages, web access, games, email, video, music and IM all rank ahead. Which suggests again that the driving force is simplicity and convenience.

I’ve been aware for a while about the arguments to do with the “balkanisation” of the web via Rich Internet Applications, accusations piled against Flash initially, later Silverlight as well. You could argue that they are filling voids until HTML5 comes along. But you cannot argue that they have made impacts. The same accusations have been made against the app world, with suggestions that AOL-like walled gardens are emerging again in the guise of apps. But as long as people can belong to all the key social networks, as long as they can take, send and receive photos, videos, mail and text, as long as they can associate the data with location and presence where relevant and when they choose to, balkanisation is actually quite hard.

It all goes back to convenience. Findings related to the practice of culling unused apps bear this out; people guard the real estate on their phone screens jealously.

Data on the percentage of people actually paying for apps, along with the prices they tend to pay, are also very useful. I’ll leave you to read it in the report for yourself.

Incidentally, there was a second, similarly interesting report published by Pew recently, on cell phones and American adults. I was pleased to see confirmation that heavy adult texters also tend to be heavy users of voice.

As the iPad and similar devices permeate the space hitherto held by the smartphone, we’re bound to see significant change. Video will become more important, at least partly as a result of the form factor, both in the interactive sense as well as in the download sense. Every publisher worth the salt will attempt to create app-based walled gardens around their “content”, in the belief that there is a premium to be extracted there. Over time they will learn that the keyword is convenience, not content. Those with a broadcast mindset will enjoy the illusion of control for a while, only to be flattened in the path of the emergent interactives.

The first thing about app stores is they make it simpler for you to find something. Then they make it simpler for you to use the something, usually interactively, and to pay for the something. Period. Of course people will try and fragment the content, but that’s a losing strategy over time, one that has already been proven as flawed in every publishing sector so far.

Yes, it’s once upon a time time. Time for you to become part of Byte Night Bedtime Story, the world’s biggest bedtime stor, and help raise funds for the wonderful work done by Action For Children. Watch the bedtime story unfold via twitter, just follow @BNBedtimeStory. Share it with your children. Share it with your parents. Share it with someone. Everyone. But share it.

Tell people about Byte Night. Tell people about Action For Children. See how easy it is to make a difference. Be part of that difference.

At Byte Night, hundreds of us sleep out rough in order to raise awareness for youth homeless, and to raise funds to help them, via Action for Children. I will also be sleeping out on 8th October, this is something I feel passionately about. If you want to donate, here’s the link:

There’s been a lot of commotion on the web about a particular video going viral a few days ago. When I heard about it, my instinct was to do nothing; after all, there was a NSFW warning emblazoned right across it. So I forgot all about it.

Then an old friend of mine, Philippa Davis, pinged me about it via Facebook, all the way from South Africa. And she wasn’t the type to be sending me smut. So I took a look this evening.

And I loved it. Just the kind of thing that lets me see the art of the possible on the web. Over 4.3m views already.

I don’t want to say any more about it. Turn down the volume on your machine, make sure you’re by yourself, and then click here. And let me know what you think.

My thanks to Tochis for the wonderful photograph above.

A full twenty-six years after the eponymous year of Orwell’s dystopian novel, we are only just getting used to the idea of Big Brother watching us. For many of us, this sense of being watched seems to have been built around physical constructs, around the usage of devices such as cameras.

For the older ones amongst us, Big Brother may be less about devices and more about people: for people like me, the concept of a surveillance society may bring forth images more akin to the Cold War and to state control: twitching curtains, informers and spies. Even Spy vs Spy spies. Especially Antonio Prohias’ Spy Vs Spy spies.

My thanks to arkworld for the lovely tribute to Mad Magazine’s Spy vs Spy series above.

I get the impression that the post-Vietnam Space Invaders generation thinks of a surveillance society differently; they view things much more in a Star Wars kind of way, particularly in the sense of the Strategic Defense Initiative, so the attention shifts to a postmodern Military-Industrial complex. We all have our crosses to bear.

My thanks to Karf Oohlu for his fantastic creations above.

As we all know, those days are history. There’s a new game in town, where the surveillance is all digital. Where everything we do is monitored and recorded and analysed and used, ostensibly to help us. Ostensibly. A world of digital fingerprints.

My thanks to Caroline Bosher for putting the concept above together so elegantly.

We’ve gotten used to the idea of people “following” us in a digital world, subscribing to stuff we publish. Here we know that others are watching us. It is completely within our individual gift.

We’ve gotten used to the idea that when we visit somewhere, our web browsers may accept tiny little poison-pill cookies. While these beasties are capable of being used as spyware, we appear to be able to stop our browsers accepting them, we can clear them from our caches, we seem to be in control.

Some of us have even gotten used to the idea that we can keep rough track of the number of people that have accessed a particular site, what browsers they used, how they got there, where they went to, a whole pile of stats. Just take a look at an example of what StatCounter tells me about this blog:

It’s not just about where we go on the web, the metadata that attaches to our actions is pretty rich already. Take a look at what the Exif data holds for a normal Flickr photograph that I uploaded. If you’ve used flickr, you’ve probably done the same.

These are all things we’re getting used to.

But there’s stuff we’re not yet used to.

And it’s all to do with the concept of privacy. Whose privacy is it anyway?

If I upload something on to the web, and I want to know who sees it, do I have the right? Or do you have the right not to tell me you saw it?

Let’s say that what I “uploaded” is a blog post. Then it’s easy, you’re probably in your comfort zone. What happens if what you looked at is my music playlist? You’re still pretty cool about letting me know you saw it. So let’s make it a little harder. What happens if what you were looking at is my CV. Now sometimes you don’t want me to know that.

Whose privacy is it anyway?

Incidentally, sometime ago, I had to wait up for one of my children to get home. So I was idly looking at “watcher” statistics on Wikipedia, randomly trying to see what gives there. Who or what is watched the most. How do different groupings of people or things do? So here’s some of the highlights. First I name the article, then the number of watchers.

• Obama 2024. Bush Jr 1922. Bill Clinton 833. Hillary Clinton 778. Saddam 766. Churchill 760. Bin Laden 748. Palin 697. Blair 691. Cameron 248.
• Gates 901. Jobs 696. Berners-Lee 237. Zuckerberg 141. Page 94. Ellison 85.
• Gandhi 931. Lincoln 916. Martin Luther King Jr 858. JFK 747. Queen Elizabeth II 740. Mandela 603.
• Jesus 1483. Mohammed 1240. Scientology 977. God 920. Darwin 854. Hawking 715. Dawkins 599.
• Lost 1155. Simpsons 1149. Heroes 791.
• Manchester United 712. Liverpool FC 563. Chelsea 531.
• Google 1336. Microsoft 889. Facebook 766. Apple 673.
• Lady Gaga 496. Ashton Kutcher 129. Ev Williams <30.
• Abortion 697. AIDS 687. Climate change 258.
• Michael Jackson 1463. Madonna 734. Dylan 730. Lennon 724. Presley 676.
• India 2270. US 1658. China 923.

But the overall winner from about a hundred I tried?

Katrina at 2872. Even the September 11 attacks could only muster up 1337.

Many of the things we do are recorded, and we know about it. Many of the things we do are recorded, and we give permission for that recording to take place. Some of the things we do are recorded with our permission and we don’t understand enough about it.

So we need to know more about all of this. Which is something that the VRM people are working hard on.

A new kind of literacy is needed. Many are working on this, but we all need to think harder about it.

Incidentally, the millenials may be more clued up on privacy than we give them credit for. Their views are different, their values are different, they may start off naive and trusting, but they cotton on fast. So when you take the privacy settings on facebook, my gut feel would be that people under 28 would be more inclined to have sorted out their privacy settings to their satisfaction than people over 28.

Any views?

My thanks to Phillie Casablanca for the delightfully evocative notice above.

I was born a foreigner.

While my hereditary roots were from southern India, I was born and brought up in Calcutta, as was my father before me. And for the first 23 years of my life, I knew no other city. Never lived anywhere else. But my surname gave away my southern roots: I wasn’t a true Bengali.

I am one of five siblings. When we were young, we used to spend a good deal of time every summer in Tambaram, on the campus of Madras Christian College. My grandfather was Professor of Chemistry there. Though I had bloodlines traced back to those parts, my accent gave away my north-eastern roots: I wasn’t a true Tamil.

I was born a foreigner.

A somewhat privileged foreigner, born into a Brahmin family (and an ostensibly well-to-do one at that). A family that took multiple copies of the Statesman so that we could each do the Times crossword on an unsullied diagram. Using a pen, of course. A family that played billiards and duplicate bridge and scrabble and chess. A family that devoured the written word.

So I didn’t really know much about being discriminated against. But, as Einstein reminded us, common sense is the collection of prejudices one collects by age eighteen. And I’m sure I had my fair share of prejudices. With three sisters, a bevy of aunts and a truly matriarchal grandmother, it was somewhat difficult for me to inculcate gender bias into my prejudice collection.

Which was probably a good thing, since the first boss I had was a woman, and since the person who gave me the job, her boss, was also a woman; I wrote about them as part of my Ada Lovelace Day pledge some time ago here.  [Incidentally, some of you may be aware of this recent incident in my life, which somehow made it into the Times City Diary, and thence into syndicated journals far and wide. Including one in Hong Kong. Which led to my getting back in touch with the woman who started me off in my professional career.]

That first job was a great job, and I learnt a lot. A genuine meritocracy; the nearest I came to any form of discrimination was when it came to publicity shots for the firm; a small number of us, foreign in origin, skin or gender, used to get wheeled in for all such occasions. It was done in such a spirit that we didn’t really consider it tokenism.

I soon learnt a little bit about discrimination the hard way, when my skull and forehead made repeated contact with some fairly large Doc Martens belonging to a group of young gentlemen with very short haircuts, and the resultant coma kept me quiet for a short while. But that was a rare and aberrant event, and all of twenty-seven years ago.

When I look back on the last thirty years, I tend to think of the industry I work for as fairly inclusive; perhaps it had more to do with the firms I worked for. BT, where I’ve been for the last four years (how time flies), for example, has an exemplary record on diversity and inclusiveness; people like Sally Davis, CEO of BT Wholesale, and Caroline Waters, director of people and policy, lead by example. Caroline was recently awarded an OBE for services to diversity and equal opportunity.

In many ways, the industry is itself designed to be inclusive: it’s about brains, not brawn. It is possible to work in an office as well as remotely. Shiftwork is possible, and there are opportunities to work in or with many timezones. The industry is just barely old enough to become ageist, so we’ve been able to avoid doing that. The work we do helps people use computers and communicate regardless of  physical or linguistic constraints; in many cases computers can be used to overcome those constraints.

Which brings me to the reason for this post: the recent debates about Women in Tech.  Shefaly Yogendra has done an excellent job in bringing together the different strands of argument and discussion, while providing us with the origins and context of the debate here.

Anyway, a number of people, including @shefaly, @thinkmaya and @freecloud, wanted to know where I stand on this issue.

So here’s my two-penn’orth:

We can all argue about the why, but there’s no disputing the what. Women are underrepresented in a number of dimensions in the tech world, and this is noticeable in conference line-ups and in start-up founder lists. This is particularly odd because there are a lot of talented women in this space: I am privileged to count many of them amongst my friends. There are many possible reasons for this phenomenon, and many possible ways of fixing it.

I think we need to make sure that one possible reason is dealt with, because it’s the kind of reason that could overlook. An anchoring-and-framing kind of reason. Let me give you an example.

Take The Indus Entrepreneurs, TiE in short. Many of you must have heard of them. While TiE is an inclusive network that advises, supports and mentors would-be entrepreneurs, its origins were different. I believe TiE was created to ensure that people of South Asian extraction were given the funding opportunities they were otherwise being denied. There was general acceptance of the engineering excellence of such people, but for some reason question marks were raised about their ability to run companies. Which meant that the “engineers” never got funded when they went forward with business plans.

I think we need to make sure that something similar is not happening here, in terms of unintended consequences as a result of anchors and frames. We need to make sure that we eradicate prejudices that go along the lines of: Women don’t code. Founders must code. So women can’t found startups…..

Generalisations, like comparisons, are always odious. Many parts of the industry are open and inclusive and meritocratic. Nevertheless, the numbers don’t add up, the evidence suggests we have a bias somewhere, and we have to do something, do whatever we can, to correct it. So I’m all for what people like TED and DLD are doing.

Systemic problems often need systemic solutions; awareness-raising initiatives can often provide the quantum energy required to remove historical biases, particularly subtle ones.