Futurity Media

UPDATE: we have had an email issue over the last few days, so please resend any CVs to info <at> futuritymedia <dot> com

Futurity Media is a marketing content agency based in London. We help some of the biggest technology brands in the business communicate with their customers and stakeholders. Our clients include Orange, Alcatel, Siemens Enterprise Communications, SITA, VMWare and Juniper.

The work we do is varied, but is always focused on producing high-quality content for our clients. We write newsletters, whitepapers, reports and web site content, manage blogs, produce infographics and support marketing campaigns.

What we are looking for

We are entering a new phase of growth and are looking for a junior writer to help us across all of our marketing projects.

• Because our clients are in the technology space you will need to be comfortable writing about technology, in particular telecoms.
• However, this is not a technical writer role, because we primarily communicate with a business audience. Most important to us is that you are able to write clearly and succinctly.
• Any journalism experience is an advantage as we frequently write articles and longer pieces for customer newsletters and magazines. This is not an advertising copywriter role.
• We also play an important community management role for our clients on their blogs. This will give you the opportunity to learn skills in new media, including blog promotion, blogger management and search engine optimization (SEO).
• You will also have the opportunity to travel as part of the role. We are often required to support our clients with live-blogging at their customer events and industry conferences such as Mobile World Congress and Le Web.
• Languages would be a useful additional skill, in particular French.

What we offer

• A competitive salary, between £20k to £28k based on experience.
• Opportunity for homeworking once established
• 25 days holiday.

As part of the recruitment process we will ask you to write a short technology piece for us.

If you are interested please email your CV and any examples of writing to info <at> futuritymedia <dot> com. The closing date for responses is 9 February 2012. 

This is an infographic we created for Orange. It might be a little text heavy for some, but we like it.  Unified communications is going to be a key tech theme in 2012 as both execs and consumers struggle to cope the weight of communications noise, exacerbated by a plethora of social media feeds. More on that in my next post, from Le Web 11 in Paris.

Feel free to share,  but please link to the original at: http://blogs.orange-business.com/unified-communications/2011/12/infographic-unified-communications-collaboration-in-the-workplace.html. It’s a great blog, you should follow it.

If you would like Futurity to help you create an infographic, drop us a line.

We created this infographic for Orange Business Services because there is so much confusion around the term Cloud computing: to some people its apps, to others its servers, to others it just means “on demand”.

The truth is that is all these things and more.

The boffins in Orange Labs see a multitude of Clouds emerging so we want to show this vision, but also trace it’s history.  Cloud computing is not a revolution as such as you can trace emergence back to the first days of the internet. It’s really a story about how IT has evolved.

It was first published on the Orange Business Live blog here and there is a really cool version on Slideshare here. It interesting to compare the two formats.

Thanks to the designers who worked on the different formats, Rose Zgodzinski and Mark Jaeckel.

Femtocells, small cells, pico cells, metro cells…whatever you call them, we write about them. We’ve been contributing to a key femtocell blog for over two years, and probably know more about femtocells than most.  We think they are a pretty impressive technology that will be fundamental to how the mobile network is constructed in the future. And just to prove that we eat our own dogfood, as they say, I use a Vodafone Sure Signal femtocell at home, and it really does give me five bar coverage. When it’s unplugged from the router, my signal quality drops off a cliff.

Just as a taster of our femto market commentary, here’s a piece that my colleague Paul Golden recently wrote for Wilson Street….

A combination of more data-hungry devices and higher service expectations on the part of users has created a ‘perfect storm’ for mobile broadband providers, who are likely to look to small cells to address some of their network coverage and congestion issues.

According to the International Telecommunication Union, there were 872 million active mobile broadband subscriptions last year. Based on growth rates for the previous 12 months it is reasonable to assume that there are now more than one billion users worldwide.

The pressure this growth is placing on networks has been well documented. A survey conducted by YouGov found that 77% of mobile broadband users in the UK encountered some form of quality of experience issue over the last 12 months. More than half complained of slow speeds and 42% reported connection problems.

The survey suggests that the availability of time sensitive, data-heavy applications and services has created a generation of more demanding users, but this does not mean that coverage and broadband speeds are not a legitimate cause for concern. UK regulator Ofcom’s research into mobile broadband speeds published earlier this year found that network availability and performance varied significantly – even within small geographic areas.

Access problems everywhere

Access speeds are a concern in many other parts of the world. According to Pyramid Research, wireless networks in the US are already operating at 80% capacity and a new report by Strategy Analytics has found that mobile broadband speeds can have a major impact on consumers’ choice of service provider. Three quarters of smartphone users surveyed were attracted by faster browsing and download speeds according to the firm, which examined the advertising techniques and services adopted by network operators in the US and Europe and predicted that pricing innovations would accelerate as more LTE products become available.

YouGov recommends that mobile operators compete on service quality of experience to improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn. Yet one of the UK’s largest mobile broadband operators has claimed that without acquiring additional spectrum it could run out of network capacity in urban areas as early as next year.

An obvious solution is wider use of small cells. There is evidence that a more flexible approach to network development incorporating femtocells could ease congestion in towns and cities. A number of reports have identified the metro market as one of the driving factors in femtocell growth as operators use femtocells to provide fill-in coverage for congested metro areas and Ofcom has referred to the need for mobile networks to be designed intelligently, which is expected to translate into greater use of small cells to meet demand in specific areas.

Operators will have to work hard to manage customer expectations if the findings of speed tests conducted by broadband comparison service Broadband Genie are anything to go by. The data indicates that advances in download speeds have slowed, with most service providers struggling to reach 2Mb and speeds rising little over the last 12 months.

The UK government has pledged to improve access to mobile services by committing £150 million to install new phone masts in areas of poor or limited coverage. The procurement process will commence in 2012 and is planned to bring access to 99% of the UK. In the meantime, concerns remain over the roll out of LTE services. Spectrum auctions are scheduled to take place in mid-2012, but speculation is rife that operators will challenge the process and regulator Ofcom is likely to allow operators five years to reach 95% geographical coverage.

This article, written by Futurity writer Paul Golden, first appeared on Wilson Street, a femtocell blog from Alcatel-Lucent. To read more about femtocells, visit www.wilson-street.com

At Futurity we frequently write case studies, for clients including SITA, which provides technology for the air transport industry – encompassing airports, airlines and associated services. Below is an extract of a case study we worked on with the local marketing team based in Latin America to cover SITA’s work in Mexico. The case study involved speaking to people in multiple languages in multiple countries, including Brazil, Mexico and Switzerland – both from the airports and SITA. 

With technology solutions ranging from automated check-in to resource management, SITA works with airports across Mexico to help them compete for airline traffic, maximize efficiencies and improve customer service.

Mexico is the 11th most populous country in the world with an airport infrastructure to match. There are 35 major airports across the country and Mexico is a significant player in the international air transport industry (ATI). The country’s Mexico City airport is the largest in Latin America and moves in excess of 24 million passengers every year.

SITA has played an important role in helping airports across Mexico attract airlines and make their operations more efficient, with solutions ranging from CUTE (Common Use Terminal Equipment) and CUSS (Common Use Self Service) shared check-in infrastructure to airport management solutions (AMS) to optimize airport resources and operations.

SITA has been working with Mexico’s airports since 1993 and has successfully executed a number of high-profile projects in significant tourist destinations such as Cancun and Puerto Vallarta, and business travel locations such as Guadalajara and Mexico City.

Solutions deployed include an airport operational database (AODB) to automatically track movements for more accurate billing and reporting, a resource management system (RMS) to optimize the allocation of expensive airport resources, flight information display systems (FIDS) to improve customer service, and common-use check-in systems (ie, CUTE) to speed up passenger and baggage processing.

The success seen by SITA in Mexico has been driven by its proven results and presence on the ground, as Norbert Steiger, Sales VP, Latin America & Caribbean, SITA explains:

“We have a good track record in important locations such as Cancun, offer a good level of service, have dedicated people and proven capabilities,” said Steiger.

“Delivery of our services is handled by SITA Global Services, which is evolving into a unified services team with a global helpdesk. We also have people on the ground to help with project implementation, such as technicians in all the large airports.”

Industry picking up

After a challenging couple of years in the wake of the influenza epidemic and economic downturn, the Mexican ATI is picking up again, according to the latest figures. Over 24 million passengers travelled in Mexico domestically in 2010 and the country also had 22.4 million international visitors in the same year, served by both international and national carriers.

Read the case study in full at: http://www.sita.aero/content/mexico-airports

What does the modern CIO need to succeed? Much is made of the need to be a strategic partner rather than an operational bean counter. Elevating yourself to that role means recasting yourself as an insightful leader. To do that effectively, you need to be heard. To be heard, you need to increase your public profile. How can you do that? Here are five ways to increase your influence in the tech community.

1. Get a cause

Have a single cause that you are passionate about, and make it your ethos. Most of what you say should be in support of that cause. That way, instead of becoming just another CIO who blogs random thoughts, you’ll be the person people listen to when they want to know about effective security governance or how to do service-oriented architectures properly.

2. Get a personal voice online

Maintaining a blog means more than just writing a post every once in awhile. It means finding vibrant, refreshing content and presenting it in an innovative and useful way. Look for the stories relevant to your cause and create a new spin on them using maps, timelines and other embedded presentation tools such as slides and video to help you to make your blog stand out from the rest.

3. Market yourself online

However, good writing is not enough. Building a loyal following requires characteristics such as consistency and regularity. It also requires that you market yourself by publicizing your material on other channels such as Facebook and Twitter, and by engaging other blogs. Cross-publication agreements where you partner with other blogs can help go a long way towards building your profile as a blogger.

4. Speaking at events

Speaking at prestigious events helps you to get quoted and recommended by many more people in your audience. Look for mavens – those people with lots of connections in their professional circles and with lots of influence – when choosing where to speak. This form of networking, which is more physical than social, is a great way to impress your personality on people and convince them of your speaking skills. Check out the speakers at TED conferences online (http://www.ted.com/), for good examples of the energy and skill that an enthusiastic and talented presenter can bring to an audience.

5. Be the press

Courting the press for coverage is one means to expanding your public profile, but why stop there? The commoditization of writing by the spread of online media has left industry publishers with less money and more space to fill. Many of them are turning to industry commentators such as analysts and CIOs rather than journalists for a proportion of their content. The more that you publish, the greater the momentum that your public profile will experience. Ideally, you will be able to land a regular column with a notable industry publication.

But don’t forget

Before you do any of this, you need your company on board. Talking to your compliance team and your colleagues is crucial if you are to express yourself without treading on any toes. Broadening your profile is great – but not at the expense of your job.

This story was written by our writer Danny Bradbury for the Orange Business Services publication, Real Times. You can read the original version here: http://www.blogs.orange-business.com/realtimes/technology/cios-top-5-tips-on-raising-your-public-profile.php

We wrote an interesting white paper with our client Orange Business Services this summer. We looked at six tips on how enterprises can cope with the influx of consumer devices, platform updates and rogue applications. Below are some extracts from the six tips:

1. Mobile policy: “A mobile usage policy is a framework that defines who the users are and what devices, platforms and applications they can and can’t use. The Yankee Group suggests that, in addition to policies regarding payment and reimbursement of services and what applications users can access via personal devices, enterprises must also clearly define who controls the data on devices, whether it is business or personal data.”
2. Inventory asset management: ”Implementing a robust (and regularly updated) inventory management system is a vital component of any mobile device management strategy… Businesses that maintain an accurate mobile device inventory have much better visibility into their telecom environments and, therefore, more reliable information on which to base critical business decisions.”
3. Configuration: “Employees may have entry level handsets, iPads or Android tablets; they may work from multiple locations and own some of these devices themselves. The sheer volume and variety of mobile devices used in the enterprise environment makes the configuration process extremely challenging. However, when a device is enrolled with a mobile device management server, a configuration profile, manually defined by IT admin, will implement the configuration profile, which enables the device to interact with enterprise systems, sending commands over the air that contain instructions telling it how to act. These commands can be signed and encrypted to ensure settings can’t be changed without authorization.”
4. Security: “Data encryption is a powerful tool for securing data on mobile devices, but there is evidence that a worrying number of enterprises are yet to embrace it. A survey of IT security administrators conducted by Check Point found that 70% did not use data encryption to secure their business laptops and 87% did not encrypt USB or portable media devices. In addition to encrypting data, enterprises should inform workers about the risks of failing to comply with security protocols. There is considerable evidence to suggest that mobile employees are much less security conscious when off site compared to when they are in the office.”
5. Applications: “With the majority of IT managers planning to implement new mobile applications over the next 12 months, protocols for deploying new applications and maintaining or updating existing applications are key features of any mobile device management strategy. Given the rapid growth of the mobile application market and the blurring of the distinction between consumer and enterprise applications, enterprises might be advised to consider appointing a chief mobility officer to manage applications across call centers, customer service, marketing, e-commerce and IT functions.”
6. Training and end-user support: “A relatively small percentage of the overall functionality of the average mobile device is used on a regular basis. With devices becoming more sophisticated all the time, users could end up massively under-utilizing functions that are at their disposal and for which they have effectively already paid. As a result, most enterprises would benefit from providing user training delivered in a multi-channel environment, combining online demonstrations, interactive instruction and hands-on tutorials.”

 The white paper is available in full here: http://knowledge-center.orange-business.com/?mod=download&category=15&id=178

I should use our blog more often for this….I’m looking for some input for an article that I’m writing for The Guardian on social media security. Could you provide some useful input?  Either comment on the blog or DM me @stewartbaines.

Facebook: Friend or Foe? Employees using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media services incorrectly can divulge sensitive information about their employers, and can also make statements reflecting badly on the companies that they work for. How can organisations stop this from happening, especially when many employees are doing this on their own time, from home?  Are the solutions to this problem purely technical, or should they include a human element?

My questions to you, and will hopefully spark a debate, are:

1) I am looking for examples of when employees have inappropriately shared confidential information / or damaged brand by using their own or their employers’ social media account. They can be anonymous but I want a real world example of what happened and what was the impact.

2) Are there technical tools for preventing this happening or monitoring what employees may be saying (even if they don’t mention company name)? Or do you need you social media managers to be “watching”.

3) Opinions on the impact of social media training or handbooks – how much do you need to educate staff on responsible use? Can you realistically educate all staff? What can you do as a small company and you don’t even get social media yourself.

 4) Should companies be more relaxed about how employees use social media? After all, you adopted social media to be bring a human face to your company. Can you complain if the humans do not always behave in a corporate way?

 5) As a last resort, what are the legal aspects to social media slander, brand defamation etc. Are they any different to print/web? Can you/would you prosecute?

Please either comment on the blog or DM me @stewartbaines.

While Android has continued its steady climb up the smartphone OS pecking order, opinion is divided on the extent to which its market influence will continue to grow

Most recent industry reports make encouraging reading for Google. Smart phone market data for Q1 2011 released by Canalys showed that Android led the global market for the second quarter running and increased its share to 35%, shipping 35.7 million units. HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson drove Android shipments in the first quarter, with each vendor shipping well over three million devices, stated Canalys.

Gartner is even more upbeat about Android, indicating that its market share jumped from 9.6% in the first quarter of last year to 36% in the first three months of 2011. Over the same period Gartner reckons iOS recorded a much more modest increase (from 15.3% to 16.8%), while Symbian’s loses underlined the challenge facing Nokia – down from 44.3% in Q1 2010 to 27.4% this year.

According to Gartner, Nokia will aggressively lower average selling prices in markets where communications service providers control the sales channels in order to maintain shipments of Symbian devices while waiting for its first Windows Phone 7 devices to reach the market. “This will precipitate a competitors’ rush to capture Symbian’s market share in the midtier,” said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst.

However, the Appcelerator-IDC Q2 2011 mobile developer report suggests that interest in Android has plateaued as concerns around fragmentation and disappointing results from early tablet sales cause developers to pull back from their previous steadily increasing enthusiasm for Google’s mobile operating system.

The survey found that while iOS interest remains high with 91% of developers saying they are ‘very interested’ in iPhone development and 86% expressing similar levels of interest in developing for the iPad, reported interest in Android phones fell two points to 85% and interest in Android tablets fell three points to 71% after increasing by 12 points in the first quarter of the year.

According to IDC, these falls are consistent with an increase in developer frustration with the operating system. Nearly two thirds (63%) of respondents said device fragmentation poses the biggest risk to Android, followed by weak initial traction in tablets (30%) and multiple Android app stores (28%). Other findings indicate that while the promise of an Android tablet is appealing, the reality of currently or soon-to-be shipping devices is disappointing to developers.

“Android remains an exceptionally strong OS but the cumulative effect of unresolved issues with its ecosystem is taking a toll on developers,” noted report series co-author Scott Ellison, vice president of mobile & connected consumer platforms, IDC. “The challenge for Google will be to better align app developer momentum with the momentum of Android device shipment numbers.”

From a developer perspective, both platforms have pros and cons – Java-oriented Android’s multivendor strategy but lack of interoperability with Microsoft Exchange versus the single version of iOS with its highly controlled app store. However, acccording to Forrester Research analyst Mike Gualtieri, developers will simply support whichever mobile operating systems are used by the most people. “The technical differences don’t matter – adoption matters.”

There are some aspects to Android apps that may benefit from femtocells’ location awareness. Consider how Angry Birds on an Android is a free app, paid for by advertising. This could be location-based advertising if the femtocell API is shared among developers. On the iPhone, Angry Birds is a paid-for app, with no embedded advertising. Are operators missing a trick?

This article first appeared on Wilson Street, the blog dedicated to all things femtocell. It was written by Futurity writers Paul Golden and Stewart Baines.

Why has performance management become such a key issue in cloud computing? Well it’s simple: there is little point in moving to a cloud solution if end users can no longer use their business-critical applications effectively. We spoke to Orange Business Services expert Jean Critcher to find out about the four key issues you need to address when looking at application performance in the cloud.

1. build application performance into the business case

An assessment of application performance needs to happen at the very outset when you are building a business case for cloud computing. Application performance is a key factor in helping you choose what applications to move to the cloud. For example, if your main criteria for cloud adoption is costs savings, then any performance issues that slow your business processes or damage productivity could virtually eliminate any savings made.

2. determine how to judge success

To be able to effectively judge application performance you need to identify your key performance indicators (KPIs). These will also need to reflect the impact of different deployment approaches, such as public or private cloud. As a guide, a survey carried out by Orange in application performance KPIs found that application response time is the most common (93%), followed by availability (72%), transaction response time (68%), latency, jitter, packet loss (68%) and server response time (66%).
Monitoring KPIs should be an ongoing activity – even once the application has been deployed in the cloud – because they give you valuable information on how your applications are reacting to changing business and technical conditions, such as the impact on availability caused by a wider rollout, for example.

3. set your service level agreements

Your KPIs should also play a part in forming the service level agreements (SLAs) that you have with your service provider. Our survey found that application-oriented SLAs came in first place (69%), followed by managed network services (56%) and business service or systems management SLAs (27%).

The approach your service provider is taking to application deployment can have a big impact on how your applications will perform. Even the way the application is virtualized can make a big difference – by virtue of how customers are partitioned in the shared infrastructure. Because resources are not unlimited, the actions of another customer could have an impact on your own application’s performance. This should be reflected in your SLAs.

4. don’t do it all at once

Application performance in the cloud can suffer if you try to do too much at once. You need to take a phased approach to cloud computing, so that you can see how well your cloud application performs and work out the implications to your contingency plans and what it means to your business continuity planning (BCP). Once your application has been tested and is stabilized in a live environment, then you can look to add new applications to the cloud. Governance is a key part of this exercise. It gives you a framework for how applications are distributed, replaced and upgraded to prevent any changes having an impact on performance and availability.

This article appeared first in Cloud Computing Insight, it also appears on the Orange Business Live! blog.