Future Case

Economists based in Google have predicted that an Internet boom in the UK could open as many as 365,000 jobs within the next five years, with the Internet accounting for a fifth of the regions GDP growth, The Telegraph reports.

Google’s European Vice-President and chief of search operations Philipp Schindler believes that despite European businesses fighting to remain afloat during a period of economic uncertainty, Internet-based or Internet-related companies that use the web successfully were still growing strongly.

“A study by McKinsey has shown that in France and in a mature economy like the UK, the internet is responsible for a fifth of GDP growth. In the UK, given the rate of job creation that economists associate with a rise in GDP, this translates into an expectation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs thanks to the internet,” he said.

“And I think that is on the conservative side. That is what could be achieved by putting a focus on this sector. That feels to me like a sizeable number.”

Schindler is in the UK to help drive Germany’s mid-sized sector, helping to drive the amount of goods exported by businesses in the region. He noted that for every pound that is imported, the UK exports “close to £3 in e-commerce goods and services”. He adds that the “UK is already doing relatively well in that sector but the ratio could be significantly higher”.

via Google predicts the Internet could create 365,000 new UK jobs by 2015.

Libya’s internet connections appear to be slowly coming back online after a six-month blackout.

The state-run internet service provider (ISP) carried a message on its website that said: “Libya, one tribe”.

However, local people have reported patchy reliability with connections coming and going.

Internet traffic in Libya dropped to almost nothing in early March when Colonel Gaddafi’s government pulled the plug in an attempt to suppress dissent.

With Tripoli under siege, and the rebels reportedly gaining the upper hand, the authorities’ stranglehold on net connections appeared to be loosening.

Both Google’s web analytics and Akamai’s net monitoring service showed a spike in traffic coming from the country early on 22 August.

Akamai’s director of market intelligence, David Belson, said that internet activity had increased almost 500%, although it had declined again later in the day.

Both Akamai (top) and Google (bottom) recorded a spike in web traffic on 22 August

Writing on the blog of internet intelligence firm Renesys, chief technology officer James Cowie said that Libya’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing appeared to have been taken down briefly, effectively making the country’s internal networks disappear from the internet.

The BGPs were later restored, although local ADSL broadband connections then became unavailable, wrote Mr Cowie.

Web monitoring companies conceded that it was difficult to know exactly what was going on inside the country to make the internet connections sporadically available.

However, it appeared that Libyans were making use of their newly restored connectivity – when available – to chronicle fast-moving events inside the country.

Groups such as the Libya Youth Movement posted Twitter messages giving regular updates on attempts to capture Colonel Gaddafi’s compound.

via BBC News – Libya starts to reconnect to internet.

By Mathew Ingram Jun. 15, 2011, 3:45pm PT 

After being celebrated by some as the future of money in a digital age, the virtual “peer-to-peer crypto currency” known as Bitcoin has taken some serious hits in the past week or so. Among other things, it has been criticized as a scam — based on economic assumptions that are described as “laughable” — and has come under fire from the U.S. Senate for the ease with which drug dealers and other subversive elements can make use of it. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, a user now says he has lost the equivalent of almost half a million dollars in a Bitcoin theft. The virtual currency could be the worst of both worlds: easy to steal and impossible to trace.

To recap, Bitcoin is an attempt to create a distributed, open-source form of virtual currencythat relies not on gold bars in Fort Knox or the monetary policy of a central bank for its value, but on a computerized ecosystem. The project was started by programmer Satoshi Nakamoto (although that may or may not be his real name) in 2009. The Economistdescribed the process quite well in a recent post, as did Stephen Chapman at ZDNet, and there is more information on a wiki devoted to the concept. There’s also a fascinating discussion of the criticisms about Bitcoin in a thread on Hacker News.

In a nutshell, Bitcoin generates currency at a predictable rate (which reduces the chances of an inflationary spiral like those that have occurred in countries with traditional currencies) through a computer-intensive mathematical process known as “Bitcoin mining.” However, since the currency only exists as ones and zeroes in a computer program — not unlike most of the money we use via credit cards, etc. — it can also be stolen by hackers, as one user hasclaimed that his Bitcoin bank account was.

Not just Apple likes Twitter, Sina Weibo actaully wants to compete:

TechWeb reports that according to informed sources, Sina Weibo is “actively preparing” to release its microblogging platform in English to go directly head on against Twitter, in about 2-3 months.

Earlier this year, Sina announced its plans to monetize its hugely popular microblogging service and since then has been very active with rolling out new features. Probably the most conclusive piece of evidence to support the rumor is the introduction of an English version of its iPhone app last month.

This will make Sina Weibo one of the first Chinese social networks to be launched in the U.S. in English. As of May, Sina Weibo has reached more than 140 million registered users and expects to top 200 million users by the end of the year, making it one of China’s hottest social networks today.

It will be interesting how Sina Weibo will apply the mandatory China censorship to other countries, especially ones that are protected by laws on Internet freedom, which require sites to be completely open.

Twitter, founded in 2006, has more than 300 million registered accounts globally. It is available in English, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Korean and other 9 languages, with 70% of traffic from outside the United States.

China has a huge Internet market capable of sustaining itself and despite the hardships for a Chinese Internet company to enter foreign markets, it looks like Sina Weibo has the best shot among social networks.

We reported earlier that Sina Weibo is bigger in China than Twitter is in the US but it’s still hard to compare since they are two very different markets. Being made available in English will certainly even out the playing field that we might be able to tell which microblogging platform is superior.

via Sina Weibo preparing English site, to go head on against Twitter.

Last Tuesday, secretary of state Verhagen (economic affairs) decided that carriers may not charge consumers for the use of certain Internet services on their mobile phones. Originally, the purpose for these charges was that it would guarantee ‘net neutrality’. Effectively, this means that consumers would not be allowed to decide what Internet services to use or not use.

Dutch national broadcaster NOS reported May 25 that KPN, Netherlands biggest mobile carrier will continue to develop ways of charging extra costs for the use of free phone and SMS services such as Skype, Whatsapp and Viber.
Apparently this report caused a riot in the delicate political arena in The Hague. PVV, Netherlands’s right wing majority-granting party (were said to be furious about the cabinet’s point of view. They say KPN should be stopped in their endeavors to develop extra charge systems. Alas, I agree but for complete different reasons; for me free is free. Period and regardless of any form of political absurdities. I truly dislike PVV’s ideas).

According to Valery Feltmann, “Mobile communications and next generation wireless networks emerge as new distribution channels for the media. This development offers exciting new opportunities for media companies: the mobile communication system creates new usage contexts for media content and services; the social use of mobile communications suggests that identity representation in social networks, impulsive access to trusted media brands, and micro-coordination emerge as new sources of value creation in the media industries. In the light of this background there are two different viewpoints on the development of mobile media: from a competitive strategy point of view it analyzes the extension of cross-media strategies and the emergence of cross-network strategies; from a public policy point of view it develops demands and requirements for an innovation policy that fosters innovation in mobile media markets.”

Good and great and highly relevant. I would like to recommend the Dutch carriers and politicians in particular Feltmann’s important study from which the previous was quoted.

Meanwhile, a spokesman of KPN stated that all was based on a misunderstanding: “KPN will continue to develop new forms of subscription that are planned for this summer. The Hague’s decisions will be taken into account”, for what it’s worth. One may think of more expensive Internet subscriptions in which data limits are regulated. And as Skype uses a lot of data, the subscription will be more expensive.
KPN is looking for extra income as people telephone and SMS significantly less. For the reason of less income, KPN will headcount four to five thousand jobs soon. Apparently VodaFone, Holland’s number two or three is contemplating new ways of making money and T-Mobile has no plans for Internet charges on specific services.

U.S. online ad spending in 2010 is projected to have reached a record $25.8 billion, up nearly 14 percent from 2009. This is the first year that more money was spent on online advertising than in newspapers and leaves the online industry second to television in terms of annual ad spend.

Advertising growth online is fueled by audience trends and ROI, and the statistics show that consumers are spending an increasing amount of time online and using mobile devices, as Colin Knudsen and Chris Ensley report in their column in today’s Mobile Commerce Daily. Read and comprehend the dazzling figures from the US and just imagine what the numbers for Europe might be.

Originally posted at www.crossmedialab.nl on 16 May 2010. I have added the comments.

Originally posted on 23 September 2009 at www.crossmedialab.nl.

According to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) 97% of the population of men and women between 12 and 75 years have used the Internet in 2008. That is an amazing number, I’d say. 20% uses the Internet at somebody else’s place, like at a friend’s place, 47% uses the Internet at work and 18 % in school. 6% uses the Internet somewhere else, meaning in an Internet café, hotel, etc. So, what do these figures tell us? To be frank, I wouldn’t know.

These statistics tell us that Holland is extremely well covered with infrastructure. The Dutch are superbly interlinked with the rest of the world through the wonders of the Internet. But my core question is whether the Dutch are literate enough to deal with such formidable connectivity. The sole question is whether people can actually deal with all of these goodies from technology.

A couple of days ago, I read an article in ‘Parool’, our nation’s one and only city newspaper, about the number of illiterate people in The Netherlands. I was astonished that over 1.5 million (out of approx. 16.5 million) Dutch citizens are not able – or hardly – to read, let alone write. I had always thought that Holland was a country of cultivated culture with suburb (and foremost) writers, painters, documentarists, intellectuals, merchants and bankers, all in all, literate intellectuals. But roughly one out of 10 ‘Dutchies’ simply don’t know how to read and write! Yet, these assumed dumbos do something with the Internet, I presume, at least according to statistics. Are they only looking at pictures, or what?

As a pedigree marketer, I wonder what can be made out this latent paradox. Is it so that a fast minority of Internet users is literarily illiterate? And if the issue of illiteracy is a common yet taboo-sized issue, can it be altered? And, should it be?

If we compare the amount of visuals used in all different kind of media today with the amount of, say, twenty years ago, we observe an astonishing growth of pictures. For me, this trend raises associations with walking in medieval churches and looking at all the fine paintings on the walls. They show stories to an alleged illiterate audience (those old time comics were planned for the people then, not now).

In my marketing lectures I often say that the common medieval guy saw less visual messages in his entire life than a modern person sees in a day. Pictures are important nowadays. But pictures are not text. And people need understanding of text if they desire to write a SMS, an email, a blog entry; any form of participating in response facilitating media requires literacy. Yet, with apps like Twitter, how much text does one actually need? The answer: 140 characters. The rest is picture. But then again, every picture tells a story. Paradox revisited.