From a post we’ve just written for Orange Business Live…..

IPv6 has been talked about for so long without widespread adoption, you might be forgiven for thinking that it is a solution in search of a problem: but nothing could be further from the truth. Vint Cert, co-creator of TCP/IP and currently chief Internet evangelist at Google, recently reminded us that the IPv4 addresses will run out next year or early in 2011. Its not just computers, servers and mobile devices that are gobbling up all of the existing address space: increasingly devices like the Amazon Kindle, M2M sensors and TV set-top boxes are searching for their own address.

IPv6 enables a whole spectrum of new applications across several vertical sectors. For example, cars using IPv6-enabled sensors could know, in advance, about traffic threats on the road, patients can be monitored in real time by their doctor and businesses can manage their supply chains and optimize them for maximum efficiency.

As well as allowing objects and sensors to interact with the world around them, IPv6 applies some very specific network control advantages that enhance the experience of anyone using them. Primarily, IPv6 is built to be more robust than its predecessor and this is apparent in its ‘always on, real time’ traffic delivery capabilities. Another IPv6 advantage is its support for more robust ad-hoc networking support where objects and sensors in different geographies could be moving on and off the network at any given moment, such as during a war or disaster recovery.

Network operators such as Orange have begun rolling out IPv6 support by upgrading their networks in advance of the proliferation of devices that will have their own address and a more interactive purpose in life. Industries including healthcare, automotive, manufacturing, environment and transportation are best positioned to take advantage of the efficiencies that IPv6 brings.

To read our top 5 applications, go to the Orange Business Live blog: http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/2009/11/top-5-next-generation-apps-for-ipv6.html

Recent figures from In-Stat suggest that hot-spot usage surged in 2009. In-Stat predicts that usage will increase 47% in the year to 1.2 billion – presumably it means sessions, although that isn’t clear in the release. The analyst says that the turnaround for the market has been driven by mobile operators who are looking to offload browsing traffic from their 3G networks onto Wi-Fi. In some Wi-Fi hotspots smartphones already account for the majority of sessions. In the UK, mobile broadband networks such as 3G and HSPA overtook Wi-Fi as the most popular way of accessing Internet on the move back in September 2008 – according to Point Topic.

So why are we looking to Wi-Fi again for browsing on the smartphone? Part of the reason is simple usability, because it is much easier to access Wi-Fi network on the new generation of smartphones. But there is also a network reason: new mobile internet browsers – such as Safari and Opera – are also much more multimedia rich, which puts strain on available network capacity. Although HSPA is becoming increasingly widespread, coverage is still very patchy in rural areas and browsing the Internet or downloading email over GPRS is truly a painful experience. You could, therefore, consider the surge in Wi-Fi use as an indictment on the  quality of 3G networks, because operators have been forced to offload traffic. Essentially, however, the underlying network technology should be irrelevant to the user. Operators just need to make sure that they provide the necessary bandwidth by whatever means if they don’t want their users to churn.

I’ve been having a ponder over the Good Enough culture. It was sparked yesterday by a flittering debate on Twitter – obviously not the best tool for discussing such an ephmeral idea – about the closure of the Guardian’s technology supplement. The tech editor asked, rather tongue in cheek, would we be prepared to translate our collective grief about its demise, into cold hard cash – would we pay for the supplement on an iphone app or on Scribd. My reply: too few people want to pay for quality content anymore, what’s happening with media is the same as what is happening to technology. Excellence is no longer required, we want “good enough” culture.

I’m not sure it there’s any research on this – but it seems to me to be a confluence of Flat Earth News (the expose of just how low British journalism has fallen) and an article on Good Enough technology from Wired magazine back in August.

We consume online because it’s free, it’s quick and its convenient. Buying a newspaper is no longer as quick and convenient. Advertising pays because we are not prepared to, which means we are prepared to accept “good enough” content.  (The same is happening with the London free papers, which have admittedly struggled of late. They are proof that you do not need to invest heavily in content: you recycle, tap news feeds, and churn out celebrity pap. Investigative reporting is expensive – even writing off-diary pieces is an exception these days).

That’s not to say not to say that the Guardian, or any other successful media site, is destined to collapse (though on the wane it maybe). We’ve been through the debate about news aggregators, and the complete disintermediation of the news creators already, and to an extent this has come to pass. Some people do consume their daily news from Google Alerts, Google News, news feeds into Yahoo and MSN and so on. With aggregation, you can be the  editor, creating your own  news agenda. But most people will not be quite so dynamic, hence the online success of news from the BBC, the Guardian, New York Times etc.

So what’s the idea of Good Enough?

Well, simply put, there is not enough advertising spend to fill all of the competing media, whether that be mainstream news, tech publications or golfing mags. This is excerbated in the downturn when advertising contracts. The FT’s IT technology supplement has shrunk because there are no ads to sit next to the features; the Guardian’s tech supplement suffered a similar fate (and undoubtedly, surveys of why readers where buying the printed newspaper showed that the tech supplement was not a significant reason anymore).

And yes we are happy to consume “good enough” content – which you might otherwise call churnalism.

I’m in the content business – I’ve been writing since the early nineties and seen the rapid decline in the status of the journalist. We work with many very skilled, knowledgeble journalists who know how to research, how to form an opinion, how to translate complex messages.

But these skills are not so sought after anymore, or at least not by traditional media. Not when you can procure articles at $1 for a 100 words from sites like Elance. Copy factories in Asia, stay at home moms in the Midwest and so on are benefiting from disintermediation of the media (which in itself is not a bad thing). They can create copy for a client which will be syndicated on web sites searching for SEO; it can be syndicated over multiple news sites; it can be used to drive traffic to sites that are porn or drug outlets. And there is the blogosphere, where publishing has become democratized – inevitably some opinions are worth hearing, others little more than pub chatter.

So how do you seperate the wheat from the chaff? Have you collected favourite sources of info, or go to sites where you know content has been investigated and researched? Maybe you have, but are you paying for these sites or contributing to their upkeep? Unlikely.

Rupert Murdoch may seem an unlikely champion of of quality content, but he is fighting a losing battle.  We skim, we flip between sites, we have very short attention spans. Futurity manages some very successful blogs with thousands of readers. We believe we are writing some genuinely interesting and useful articles but dig down to into the web site stats, and you would probably be surprised how little time is spent reading a post. It’s fleeting (so you probably haven’t read this far). Our content is not at fault, I hope. It’s that readers have found what they want in the first few paras and moved on. Content is just “good enough”.

We are all suffering this – the creators, the content owners and the concent consumers. I wonder where it will all lead?

#stewartbaines

News from IDC that 6000 technology marketing executives will have lost their jobs by the end of 2009 is hardly a surprise.

You only have to glance at the recent figures from Gartner about 2009 IT spending to see that those that are responsible for marketing, branding and selling kit are going to be in for a rough time.  They paint a picture of the IT industry’s “worst year ever”, with worldwide IT spending falling by 5.2% during 2009,with enterprise IT hardest hit, with a fall in spending of 6.9%.

IT services declined during 2009 by 3.6% to $781 billion, global telecom spending was down 4% to $1.9 trillion, software spending fell 2.1% to $197 billion. The biggest kicking was felt in hardware (servers, storage, network equipments, computers, printers) with sales falling 16.5%, to $317 billion.

(Please bear in mind that this time last year during the worst of the economic crisis, Gartner estimated that the worst case, global IT spending would grow at 2.3%. If you don’t remember this bullish optimism, check it out: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=776112 )

So it’s not the fault of marketing departments then? Well, according to IDC, they have contributed to their own demise. Yes, IT vendor marketing budgets will have declined by 8.3% during 2009, the first decrease in year-on-year marketing spend since the dot-com bust of 2001-2002.

But what money has been available has often been poorly spent, with inefficiencies from product-based marketing not being aligned with brand, sales and corporate marketing. IDC recommends more thematic marketing campaigns, and shared services to remove redundancies.

Over the past decade, we have worked with many of the world’s largest (and smaller) IT organisations, and we’ve experienced these inefficiencies first hand. Many of our clients really do understand integrated marketing, and are a pleasure to work with, but others (ex-clients) can be ingredibly disorganised with product, brand, corporate and PR pulling in opposite directions, with completely different messages and timescales. Projects get abandoned because they are not cleared, audiences recieve mixed messages and marketing is the first to be cut when lean times begin. It’s a pretty simple rule for success though – recognise that sales and marketing are inexorably linked, that your brand must be apparent in everything you do, and be committed to communicating your messages when times get harder. Now, more than ever, your customers need you to be confident.

Long fans of automated vending machines for just about everything and unusual parking arrangements, the Japanese have come up with yet another technological solution to a long-standing problem in cities – where to park your bike safely. In Japan apparently they have a big problem of bicycles being parked ‘illegally’, so they’ve come up with an idea for an automated bike store, as described in this Guardian video: Bike tree. Basically you buy a season ticket for the facility, tag your bike, and use a smartcard to store and retrieve it. The manufacturers of the solution – a steel company bizarrely – outline their idea here.  Could be worthwhile investigating in London, where a couple of train-based bike stores are already emerging, such as the one at Finsbury Park, which can store 125 bikes. Compare that to the nearly 6,400 bikes that can be stored in the Kasai Station ‘Cycle Tree’ in Tokyo!

After what seems like an awful long time in planning, we have launched our new web site. We will be updating the site regularly with advice articles on technology and marketing, blog entries on topics that interest us, and also bring together material that we have published elsewhere. We already include three advice notes to kick you off – on Twitter, SEO and Google. In addition we’ve been doing more audio and video work and will publish some examples of our interviews on a range of topics including vehicle telematics, application acceleration and service management. Please feel free to contact us on any topic at anthonyplewes@futuritymedia.com and stewartbaines@futuritymedia.com.