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. 

Has Internet advertising peaked? Not according to figures recently released by Morgan Stanley. In fact, far from being saturated, the online advertising market represents an unrealized opportunity.

Figures collected by Mary Meeker, managing director and leader of Morgan Stanley’s global technology research team, draw comparisons between the percentage of time spent by audiences perusing particular types of media, and the percentage of advertising spend devoted to those media. You can watch her presentation of these stats at the Web 2.0 Summit 2010 on YouTube.

One-eighth of the US audience’s time is spent reading print media, and yet a quarter of the advertising spent goes on ink. 31% of the audience’s time is spent watching TV, while 39% of advertising dollars are spent courting these viewers, representing yet another oversubscribed market. Conversely, 16% of media consumption time is spent listening to radio, while only 9% of advertising dollars are spent there, she said.

But internet advertising represents the biggest disparity: 28% of media consumption time is spent online, but only 13% of advertising dollars are spent there. According to Meeker, this equates to a $50bn global opportunity.

This post first appeared on Orange Business Live!

Some people go to great lengths to get away from it all, including climbing Everest. But now Swedish operator TeliaSonera and local player Ncell in Nepal have built a 3G base station at 5200 metres – well within altitude sickness territory. The goal is to serve climbers and residents of the Khumbu valley.

Here’s a vid of a climber talking about how useful 3G will be, compared to broadband satellite.

This does raise some issues though – with such thin atmosphere, will the signals travel for billions of miles? How do you get a steady power supply at that height? Will the snow impact performance? Will data roaming costs be sky high (ho ho), and most importantly, will excessive use of Foursquare and iPhone videoblogging from basecamp bring the network to a standstill? Answers please….

Little nugget I stumbled upon: 90% of the world’s population is now covered with a mobile network. And the airwaves are being sopped up – back in February, a report stated that two-thirds of the world’s population were mobile subscribers.

So that leaves roughly one-third of the world (about 2.2 billion) without a mobile phone. Two thirds of the unconnected live within a mobile network coverage – so they could be a long tail for the mobile communications industry?

It’s hardly likely. According to the World Bank, 1.3 billion people lived on under $1.25 a day in 2005. We’ve had global economic growth since then…and massive economic meltdown so the likelihood is that billions are still too poor to download a $1 iphone app, let alone purchase a $30 handset. Countless more people live within the next band of under $2 a day.

Whether super poor, that probably lack adequate nutrition, sanitation, healthcare and property, will ever be an attractive market to service providers, remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure: those that do get access to mobile communications have a much better chance of improving their health and wealth than those without, as this recent Ericsson research of the impact of mobile communications in the Millennium Villages illustrates.

The world’s leaders met in New York at the Millennium Goals Summit this week to discuss poverty reduction. Top of the agenda was the role that broadband (fixed or mobile) plays.  The Broadband Commission report posits a universal access programme with advice for how governments can implement it. As always with these things,  the public sector must create the demand first and then the private sector will come up with supply. In my view, governments do not have deep enough pockets to be able to fund this through to critical mass – but what they can do is focus on deregulation and licensing.

The cost of new fixed and mobile telecoms infrastructured is amortised over many years, which means service providers need a stable regulatory environment. They need to know which technology they can invest in, what competition they will face, the tax regime and that licenses cannot be revoked by warring political parties. Getting the balance right is extremely tough and way beyond my ken. If you want to dig a little deeper into it, try Impact of taxation on the development of mobile broadband by Telecom Advisory Services for the GSMA.

And even if the networks get built, and services rolled out, will the poor be able to afford them? According to current broadband costs, its likely that the poorest will be punished most, as my colleague Ant highlighted in a recent post on the disparity in broadband subscription costs in poor and wealthy countries. So prices will need to be regulated….just not too much.

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• Half of the World Population should Have Broadband Access by 2015: UN (taragana.com)
• ITU calls on governments to drive broadband (v3.co.uk)
• The Value of Information and Communications Technologies in Meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals (prweb.com)
• Internet users in BRICI countries set to double by 2015 (nextbigfuture.com)

We’ve just finished a interesting assignment covering Orange Business Services’ annual customer event Orange Business Live! as part of a team of internal and external bloggers from France, UK and Belgium. The idea of the coverage was to show that interesting things happen at shows like this by publicising it to the outside world in real time. Stories,photos and videos were published to the Orange Business Live! blog and to the Orange Business posterous page. I wrote a round up of some of the stories that the bloggers wrote in this post and the social media presence was so successful that the new Orange Business Services CEO Vivek Badrinath came and checked us out himself.

It’s the London Marathon this weekend, which will see over 30,000 people run or struggle through the heat for 26.2 miles. Good luck to them all. One part where technology will help them is in the timing systems which rely on RFID. Virgin, which sponsors the London Marathon has just got a new timing ship supplier, and all marathon runners will be wearing one of these on their trainers.

So when the runners go through the start a timing pad will pick up the fact that they have passed that point and will record their times. There will be pads positioned throughout the course that will give the runners their split times – i.e. how fast they have gone through each checkpoint – and at the finish. As well as offering vital information to the runner in their post race analysis, the chips also allow organisers to eliminate cheating as anyone who doesn’t have a chip spilt time has not gone over the pad and may have taken a short cut. Of course for runners whose chip breaks or gets lost, it is rather unfortunate as they will probably be disqualified and won’t get an official time.

All this info from the chips can also be used for real-time information as well. I ran the Paris Marathon two weeks ago and my split times were sent automatically by SMS to my supporters’ mobile phones, so that they could keep track of where I was during the race – and when I finished.

Sometimes we get the opportunity to stand back from our most pressing work commitments, and gaze across the technology landscape at the changing Internet. We are frequently told that social media is a work in progress, and is still its infant phase. So let us ponder where it may go in the coming years. What follows is idle future pondering, scenarios almost. Please do not take the following as a forecast.

Twitter will not last without a radical reinvention

The increasing openness between networks – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – will increase. Status updates on one will be seamlessly available to all, and also embedded in Microsoft Office applications, in collaboration tools, with SMS and so on. Status will be your thoughts, your retweets and @’s and also your car’s GPS location, and your appliances’ status (you’re washing machine will let you know when the cycle is complete). In fact the ability to display status updates will be as common a function as voice: completely commoditised.

Imagine a future Facebook interface which selects your real friends, the people you have interacted with on Twitter (or the like), or that have used common hashtags. Powerful algorithms will serve up only the status and conversations you are likely to find interesting. So what value in having an army of followers that is not listening to you? Will those that are currently trying to greedily acquire social capital now find their efforts were in vain?

I believe the effect of this evolution in social media interfaces (not the networks behind them) will help to cut down a lot of the noise.  In terms of which social media applications will dominate, the winning environment will be the one with the best usability and the best distribution because being a walled garden isn’t going to last.

Junk content will get worse before it gets better

Ever wonder what happens when you pay “writers” $1 for a 1000 word? It ends up as a How-To article on websites funded by Google Adsense revenues.  Many (not all) of these sites operate without any accountability whatsoever. What’s wrong with this? People are paid a pittance to plagiarise, cut corners or simply write with fake authority about subjects they know absolutely nothing about. Hundreds of millions of pages of junk content is clogging up Google. While bedroom publishers can build an economic model based on Adsense, don’t expect any self restraint.

This is not to say that How-To sites are the only ones manipulating or exploiting dubious online content to gain Adsense revenue. There are many technology sites doing this also, grabbing articles about popular brands and scurrilously twisting the meaning into something sensational. The best of the Adsense-funded sites are enthusiasts with not enough time to check facts; the worst simply don’t care at all about veracity. Their only interest is traffic because now they have a direct correlation between views and cents.

Eventually we will stop reading and the noise will quieten down

Looking further ahead – 10 years for instance – and the verbal diarrhoea generated by UGC and copy factories will be on the wane. As more and more of the content we will view becomes video, audio and spoken-word menus, our reliance on scanning stories for what we want to know will dissipate. Natural language-based search (sometimes called the semantic web) will make it easier for us to go direct to the information we want. Intelligent agents will learn our habits and interests and will interoperate with these search tools to ensure that each search is really, really targeted. And the widespread deployment of touchscreen interfaces – in work PCs, the living room TV, in-car computer and the home control panel – will gradually break our century-old connection to the keyboard. Intelligent speech, search, profiling and interfaces could combine to end the rule of the Word on the Internet

So which of these scenarios could come true? What other futures for media/social media can you envision?

Ever wondered how Google search has joined up all bits of your life that you previously needed a secretary, PA and office assistant to accomplish? Well check out this 1 min ad – featuring the awesome band The National. Watch, learn the lyrics, buy gig tickets and plan your journey within a minute. In truth, think I need at least a whole album to plan that much, a lot of procrastinating along the way….

Google says “Every search is a quest. Every quest is a story. These videos show that anyone can do anything when paired with the power of search.” They’ve showcased some other amusing ads here. Not sure about Kerouac’s On The Road powered by search. It would kind of undermine it wouldn’t it?

My apprehensions about the #Likeminds social media event was that it would be a love-in among insincere folk selling sincerity services. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Nearly all of the people I met over the course of two days in Exeter were genuine, enthusiastic and passionate about social media.

And I learned a lot from the sessions – about Chris Brogan’s jealous Followers that need regular loving, to Olivier Blanchard’s discovery of disconnected organisations that are listening to social media but unable to channel listening into doing; and debates about the future of journalism, paywalls, bloggers and brand advocates.

And the networking and discourse (a true Socratic symopsium?) at an event like this was far more informative and vibrant than any of the hundreds of technology conferences I have attended in my working life.

But the lasting thoughts that I left with is that of noise and the inability to filter it out. Every moment of the Likeminds event was caught on iphone camera, on Kodak Zi8 and of course the ubiquitous Twitter tap tap tapping. A multiverse of content was generated on this most sociable of days. Ok, as a consumer of this data (rather than producer) I can dip in an out.

But how much juicy content am I missing? Fear of this, and a desperate desire to taste everything, as it happens, means that I am monitoring social media streams 24/7.

It has to stop. The noise has to be filtered out somehow.

The future of publishing, of blogging, of social media, will depend on some way to filter.

I’m thinking about how I can do this with my own work – Futurity produces up to 1000 articles are year, with ideas inspired from a vast array of sources. I need to organise and filter this, and in doing so, capture underlying trends.

When I trained in Futurology (a dumb term, I know), we learned how to think slowly, see real changes behind the vapid. But it’s getting harder to do this since the advent of the social media. So how can we learn to filter?

Your thoughts please?

#stewartbaines

Normally, we like to post finished articles, but in this instance, I’m going to post my request-for-information.

I’m writing article for the good people at Silicon.com on the pains and barriers of deploying social media in the enterprise. I have a number of issues that I am struggling to deal with. So, in collaborative writing kind of way, have you got any answers?

Either leave a comment at the bottom of the post, or send me a tweet (#stewartbaines) or email (stewartbaines at futuritymedia dot com)

1. Can enterprises truly engage in social media then they are “anti-social” organisations (argues Benjamin Ellis). Is this true? Is the profit motive inconsistent with sharing (which is intangible)?
2. Should enterprise social media stay under the radar (with small projects) until you have an ROI and then roll-out extensively?
3. How do you identify social media champions in an organisation, how do you motivate them (without financial rewards)
4. How do you get those with the most knowledge to share their knowledge when they are increasingly working to time sheets with minimum no. of billable hours? Surely those with “knowledge capital” are disinclined to convert this into “social capital”
5. If you can’t demonstrate ROI, will participating in social media ever be written into a job description
6. What happens to social networks in the enterprise, when you remove the champions (e.g. they move jobs) – do the networks collapse? (I’ve seen some evidence to suggest this does happen with immature networks.)
7. How do you measure the value of enterprise social media in terms of marketing/PR terms, particulalry in B2B space? My point is that traditional B2B marketing was all about segmentation based on job title, location etc. Social media is so scattergun, and your audience typically doesn’t fit the segmented target audience (i.e you can hire an agency like Futurity to be your social media mouthpiece but what are you getting back for that, in terms of increased sales, or raised profile in your target audience.

Your thoughts, comments, corrections or criticism very welcomed.

UPDATE: I am going to be at Like Minds social media conference in Exeter on Friday 26 February. If you, or a client, is going to be there and has something interesting to say, I’m happy to meet up.

#stewartbaines