It’s good to be back.

I decided to take a summer holiday, of sorts, retiring myself from the pressure of writing these articles. If you know me, you’ll recall that I’ve pretty much not had a holiday since I started my professional life—much to the consternation of my family. So I decided to take a little time for myself this year. Being that this year has been, er, rather unusual to say the least, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity.

These articles are a labour of love and earn me absolutely nothing in monetary terms, so I have to work at the same time to earn a living in my day job, putting pressure on the time I have for this writing. I really enjoy the writing and hope to make it a significant part of my professional life in the near future.

Speaking of which, I have a small favour to ask of you, my dear readers. I’m running a small study about the ICT industry in the eastern Caribbean and have concocted a short survey to give me an overview of the market. If only half of you respond, I’ll be well on my way to having useful data to work with. I’m sure you can be that half :)

It’s not all one-way either. The better the data and the more data I have, the more I’ll write about the results here directly to your inboxes. You give, I give. What could be fairer?

You can take the survey here:

Quick Survey

Thanks for your help.

Disrupting Intel

Last year I wrote about Intel’s intention to ignore the threat of disruption to its core business if it continued to follow, virtually to the letter, Clayton Christensen’s Disruption Theory. From that article:

If we follow DT to its conclusion, it is possible to see the risks Intel poses for itself, namely being innovated out of business. I’m clearly not suggesting that Intel will fail next year, but I think the long-term future is at risk if there is not some kind of reaction, with Intel creating further opportunities.

I wrote at the time, that the fact that Intel was concentrating on moving further up the stack to increasingly more profitable zones, avoiding the threat of the lower-end processor makers like AMD, Pohoiki Beach was designed to ensure Intel’s prosperous future.

It was a good strategy on the face of it. Desktop and laptop chips were increasingly under better-than-ever competition, something that was not the case when Intel was in its heyday. The real threat, Advanced RISC Machines’ ARM designs, were only beginning to poke their head out from the development studios, and whilst they had ambitions of capturing a small percentage of the market (10% if I recall well), this together with AMD provided real pressure on Intel. Intel had to react, and it did by going upscale and upping margins on those products because of reduced unit numbers.

The thing many people don’t understand is just how phenomenally expensive it is to design a CPU. It takes months of research and prototyping, and each iteration and innovation adds substantially to those costs. As CPUs are designed using smaller and smaller transistor sizes, costs go the other way, and exponentially. Costs of design are often dwarfed by the costs of tooling too. Tooling is the process of the building and bringing online fabrication plants to build the processors. Marketing is another expensive cost centre. Intel has famously pilled millions into elaborate marketing campaigns to get the public to think that laptop chips only come from them. 

Other factors influence the costs too. It should be noted that CPUs are defined not only by their speed —something that has mostly been maximised today, in that we can’t get the electrons to move any faster or for long periods without breaking the silicon— but are now defined by the transistor size in nanometers, or nm. When you look at processor specifications, they will talk of 14nm, 10nm and smaller. Looking at the following chart from International Business Strategies will give you an idea of the estimated costs, and how they have multiplied as semiconductors have reduced in size:

Source: IBS

In the beginning, when it was a simple arms race of raw processor speeds, Moore’s law —i.e., the number of transistors on a dye will double every 18 months or so— meant that Intel could produce faster and faster chips for their target markets, namely desktop and server devices. The server-specific chips came further down the road after Intel saw the opportunity to custom-design and build what was essentially desktop-class chip to supply a burgeoning market of businesses that saw the need to store documents and applications centrally. It followed the second-level of the Digital Transformation model I wrote about in Issue 4: The Digital Transformation model in detail:

Internal Exploitation

The second level, Internal Exploitation, is defined by the process in which organisation attempt to integrate the different silos of information systems and datasets with the aim to produce a ‘whole’. Integration is difficult, slow and often results in failures when starting out from a base that is not adapted to integration. Just how do you get the Accounts, Stock, HR, Sales systems integrated?

There are two types of integration, technical and business process interdependence. According to the model most enterprises spend more time on integrating on a technical level than on the business processes.

Since then, the battle has become more technical and has required close coordination between the designers wants and the builders’ capabilities. So far Intel has been outpaced by the likes of TSMC in reducing the size of its transistors who have become world leaders in producing the most densely packed systems-on-a-chip. TSMC is not the only one either, Qualcomm and a couple of others are also at the forefront in the production of ever-tinier devices year in, year out.

The keen-eyed among you will note that I switched from talking about CPUs and processors to systems-on-a-chip (SoCs, pronounced Socks). That is where the most prominent battleground is playing out currently. Not on pure CPUs but on chips that contain several previously separate ancillary systems on the same dye. Graphics, memory and other components are being reduced in size and brought physically closer to the processing units. In these minute devices, even a fraction of a millimetre can wield significant gains in data-exchange, or processing.

Intel seems to be having trouble developing and manufacturing smaller transistors reliably, which in part, explains the reason for multi-core and multi-processor CPU designs from them. Their designs don’t need to be too concerned with size, power and heat dissipation requirements. A desktop or a server is plugged into an infinite power source for all intents and purposes, and the cooling systems put in place in server rooms or the space in an office affords all the heat sink required to ensure stable operation. 

Since the beginning, Intel took the responsibility to design, make, market and ship the chips to PC and Server makers. This vertically integrated strategy served them well, so well in fact, that they became the de facto leader in the world for processors. Remember Intel Inside? But as recent news highlights, something that is a traditional force for an organisation can be turned into a weakness when disruption theory is well understood and utilised by competitors.

Intel has now shown that it is nearly a whole generation, or “node” as it is known in the industry, behind TSMC. As a result, they have stated that they are going to outsource some of their production to... none other than the company outpacing Intel in chip building. TSMC of course. From the FT:

“To make up for the delay, Intel said it was considering turning to outside manufacturers from 2023 onwards for some of its production — a plan that appeared to leave little option but to subcontract its most advanced manufacturing to TSMC. The shift raised the prospect of a change in Intel’s business model, according to some analysts, forcing it to consider abandoning more of its manufacturing to focus on design.”

Classic disruption theory!

Cementing TSMCs lead in processor manufacturing is another piece of news that may send shockwaves around the industry. No doubt most of you heard the long-awaited news that Apple, following a successful transition from PowerPC processors to Intel processors years ago, announced their intention to move its entire line of Macs to its in-house designed A-series processors. The same family of processors that power their iPhones and iPads and probably countless other items in their inventory.

These SoCs are currently world leaders in speed, power and cooling capabilities. For reference, the release of the iPhone 11 and iPad Pro showed that Apple-designed processors were faster than most of the Intel and AMD processors found in laptops of the day. Apple has successfully designed its processors using a small, relatively unknown player in the CPU market to produce a succession of world-beaters. That partner is ARM or Advanced RISC Machines. If you’re interested I could bore you with the in’s and out’s of the different philosophies of instruction sets in the CPUs — The RISC bit stands for Reduced Instruction Set Chip. They are all built by TSMC.

Once Intel lets go of this market, it will be all but impossible to get it back in the future. Don’t worry, they’re not going out of business anytime soon, and will undoubtedly record higher profits and better margins in the future as they shift their production away from a market that looks set to transition lock, stock and barrel over to ARM-designed processors and SoCs. Intel’s own mobile-focused processors are starting to get better, but it is too little too late in my opinion.

Blockchain, Schmockchain

Regular readers will know that I have been mostly sceptical of the utility of Blockchain in its potential to change the world. It is currently a big, slow database that complicates things rather than simplifying them. From Blockchain ≠ Cryptocurrency, I said :

... that it is a huge energy consumer and hence by definition is inefficient. That, sadly, is not its only efficiency problem. Blockchain is actually extremely limited in its speed and quantity of transactions and scales poorly. So much so that in 2016 several banks exploring the possibility of using the technology in the personal and business banking sector abandoned the work as blockchain was just too slow.

According to a detailed academic-style “peer-reviewed” study by the Centre for Evidence-Based Blockchain and reported in the FT:

... outside of cryptoland, where blockchain does actually have a purpose insofar as it allows people to pay each other in strings of 1s and 0s without an intermediary, we have never seen any evidence that it actually does anything, or makes anything better. Often, it seems to make things a whole lot worse.

Worse, the report repeatedly highlights that the technology is a solution currently looking for a problem. The antithesis to the Jobs to be Done theory that helps us better design and provide solutions. With over 55% of projects showing no evidence of useful outcomes, over 45% showing “unfiltered evidence” (i.e., next to worthless), it would appear that Blockchain is a belief-system rather than a technological solution.

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Today’s essay is a slightly longer one, it’ll take a couple more minutes to read than is custom for my essays. The subject is broad and couldn’t be condensed without losing some of the finer details. I hope you don’t mind.

This essay is based on a small presentation I did to talk about COVID-19 and how we could kickstart after the worst of the pandemic is over. This essay expands on the first part of that presentation exploring the themes in more detail. Look out for the second part in the near future.

Enjoy! Your feedback is welcome.

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The digital Caribbean

I’ve written here several times about the state of digital in the Caribbean, and I encourage you to read those earlier essays, you can find them all in the archives.

However, what I didn’t emphasise is just how connected we all are in the Caribbean, but only connected in ways that are mostly ephemeral. Out of the nearly forty-four million people in the Caribbean around 77%, that’s thirty-three and half million people are connected with a data-capable mobile phone. More than 26 million people connect to the internet using a computer. But critically, over 50% of us regularly use social networks, a percentage that is higher than most places in the entire world.

Which begs the question, why are our services, our stores and our governments not online?

It would appear that COVID-19 might be the impetus that finally changes that, and I think that we have more chance that this will change because of this pandemic rather than an earthquake or even a hurricane. I feel that we are in a big, forced experiment where the entire world is collectively conscious at the same time and that we all have some amount of control on our outcomes, which is entirely different from a natural disaster that a) we have virtually no control over our outcomes, and b) nothing works during the disaster event.

If you look at the islands in the North Leewards that suffered greatly in the 2017 hurricane season with Irma and Maria, and the Bahamas during last years’ terrifying and unimaginably tragic passing of hurricane Dorian, all islands affected suffered a complete breakdown of most if not all services, digital services included. With COVID-19 there has been virtually zero downtime and zero outages. Sure, many people could not work when their jobs were centred around physically being at work, but those who could work albeit remotely continued with relatively little effort —if we ignore Zoom fatigue that is— which is a real thing.

To answer the above question, I’m noticing more and more services coming online, like the recently announced online Immigration and Customs Form for travelling to Barbados. It’s great to see this move but it provokes the question about why it took so long. The real answer, of course, is the will or lack thereof. There are virtually no technical reasons in 2020 to not have most services online, it was even possible ten years ago. And even those services that cannot be completed fully online, a major component can be digitised to make processes easier.

Quite often, in the companies I consult for, I see multi-step manual processes in use, despite the company being willing to digitise its processes, for example, A ➔ B ➔ C. These processes cling on in manual form often because process A cannot be easily or successfully digitised despite B and C being eligible. The result is the abandonment of the digital process change. There are, of course, at least two ways to go about this. One is to digitise processes B and C, with process A being manually entered into the system for B and C to run the data. Or, as I tend to analyse, why not re-think the process from start to finish seeing if there is a way to digitise not only B and C but a part of A. It looks like this; A1 (manual) ➔ A2 (digital) ➔ B ➔ C. Going a step further the process can then be redesigned, considering the desire to eliminate manual processes; X ➔ Y ➔ Z, for example. XY&Z achieves the same goals but the data entry and data processing are reorganised to eliminate as much manual entry as possible. In this case, this new process no longer resembles the original process. I’m simplifying the work of course, but you get the picture.

 The digital reality

We’re living in a new “digital reality” and approaching an inflexion point where the majority of our lives will be online and those that fail to embrace and effect change will feel pain in many areas of their society. Which is why these first steps cannot come soon enough and why politicians and businesses need to start to radically change their minds to adapt to what is coming, not what is current.

So, how do we achieve this?

The first thing to understand is the current state of affairs, my writing on the current state of digital in the Caribbean goes some way towards this, but further research is needed to look further into the economic, socio-political and business world in the region. Again, I’m doing some of this and intend to do even more going forward, but funding is needed for this to be more widespread.

A few examples of my research can be briefly summarised here in five important categories; discovery, purchasing, payments, aggregation/uberisation and automation. Let’s take a quick peek at each of those in turn.

Discovery

In a world of virtually infinite information, content generation and a never-ending avalanche of information flow, we can extrapolate that the chances of information types we want do not exist are virtually zero, in other words, the information is there somewhere. The issue is in finding that information. This is initially where Google stepped in. Google understood that the exponential growth of websites on the internet would render the old model of listings and directories useless at best and dissuasive at worst. Google’s trick was to ignore the direct listings of names and URLs and concentrate on understanding the relationships between all online sites. PageRank was designed around this principle and was implemented to provide more “relevant” results to people’s searches. Up to that point, the internet had logically reproduced the physical Yellow Pages world.

As a result, a whole new industry was born around getting better visibility for businesses on the internet, it’s called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. A name born in the generation when Search was the primary tool used online. This name is already becoming redundant as the “optimisation” is not restricted to search engines, but relevant to all online platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc., which run their own in-house developed algorithms of their users’ content.

Purchasing

Purchasing habits were being fundamentally altered even before COVID-19 hit. Today’s purchasing can be easily resumed as a few words :

Buy online. Pick-up in-store.

According to qudini, a specialist SaaS Retail Experience company, in a recent survey, 76% of respondents said they had purchased items using in-store pickup after researching and evaluating online. This is only part of the story, as the online retail giants like Amazon are putting greater effort into reducing friction at the point of sale enabling easier and faster consumption. And, despite this, there is still room for the niche markets to be highly profitable businesses, simply because of the sheer scale of the internet. A niche on the internet is a misnomer.

Payments

There is an ongoing trend of mass democratisation emerging in the financial world. Banking is being disrupted, with online-only banks not only reducing friction to access your money but providing more timely services for a fraction of the cost of traditional banks. And as nothing exists in a vacuum, traditional banks are not ignoring this and are implementing new strategies to ensure survival, for example, pivoting some sectors as online banks using a different brand. Consolidation in the back end additionally helps capitalise on the opportunity to become the guarantor for the online banks.

Payments are being simplified and increasingly more integrated with online platforms from everything from membership systems to complete online marketplaces. Stripe is probably the most known and capable in this industry. However, more and more banks are starting to roll out their own online payments solutions. Not willing to let Stripe eat their lunch so easily they are hoping on keeping their clients in-house. They’ll need to be careful of hidden fees, simplicity and friction reduction to do this… something the banks have shown they are not very good at up until now.

Investing is also opening up and becoming easier for the public. Efforts like Betterment and Wealthfront are only the first step of a wholesale dismantling of the staid and exclusive boys clubs that are current investment bankers. Not only that, as we’ll see later, but their use of technology is also outperforming traditional investment experts:

Betterment portfolios outperformed average advised portfolios 88% of the time.

Aggregation and Uberisation

Aggregation is largely an internet phenomenon. It’s an extension of a well-trodden path from the powerful retailers using their muscle to keep clients coming back, thereby using that power to entice suppliers to prioritise their stores (being that the stores can guarantee customers), rinse and repeat. The traditional giant stores like Macy’s and Debenhams rode this wave for several decades. With digital distribution being essentially free, the value chain has been turned upside down meaning that those who integrate throughout the value chain and commoditise their supply generally increase their profit over the incumbents.

The uberisation of services is another trend that appears unstoppable for now. Uberisation facilitates a peer-to-peer driven business model enabled through the use of technology to simplify the on-demand delivery of physical goods and services. The growing use of mobile and the constant connection to the internet allowed Uber to deliver an application that works for both drivers and passengers, hooking them up without the need for a central taxi operator to get involved. The model has been further developed and exploited by food delivery services, interestingly Uber has just acquired Postmates on the back of a decreasing amount of mobility and an increasing amount of online ordering. It doesn’t take a giant leap to see how this could become a deliver-anything service.

Automation

Automation, more specifically Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are the last key element. Their democratisation by the Microsofts of the world (see Azure Cognitive Services), is allowing a completely new generation of software designs. Simple operations like the scanning and treatment of receipts direct-to-accounting software are freeing up administrative staff to be better used in more valuable roles. Even simple workflow systems like Microsoft Power Automate can tap directly into the APIs of these services and perform simple repetitive tasks as an aid to decision-making.

Which brings me to the availability of online automation products, of which IFTTT was probably the first to hit notoriety. If This Then That simplified the creation of fun automation that switched on your lights as you neared home or flashed the lights in the colours of your favourite team when they scored. It went even further by hooking into popular SaaS products allowing you to “join” together previously disparate systems. Zapier and Power Automate take this much further, with examples of users replacing no-longer-supported legacy software with modern workflows that are modulable and allow for data analysis, unlike the systems they replace.

The second step is to try to envisage what the future will bring. Easier said than done, but current affairs do give us a few hints at what the future may hold for the internet and business on the internet. In my research three factors come up time and time again. Regulation, health and information misuse.

Regulation

I like memes so I couldn’t resist:

The EU has restarted efforts on its Digital Services Act, a far-reaching proposal to regulate Artificial Intelligence and data collection. Even the traditionally Wild West US is hauling its biggest tech CEOs to testify before Congress in an investigation to determine if the AAAF (i.e., Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook) are using anti-competitive practices (they are). We can expect the end to the free-for-all that is the current posture in most countries. Regulation will affect not only the giants online but all the supporting systems and smaller operations. GDPR was only a first attempt but its implementation has given impetus for the next wave of regulation, one that will bite harder, there is no question.

Regulation will not just stop at competition and data harvesting, but it will also start to regulate what information can and cannot be published on the internet, much like how traditional media cannot publish absolutely anything. The days of self-regulation are soon over, as, just like the banks, the internet is incapable of regulating itself effectively. Regulation will be very difficult and full of competing ideologies pulling against each other. Just how we are going to shoehorn a global internet into the current state of political divisions around the world is still open to question for the moment. I suspect the EU will move first, and any businesses that are in some way reliant on the EU will feel the early pain, including us here in the Caribbean.

Health

When I discuss health, I’m talking about what is increasingly a difficult subject for parents and concerned parties like schools and businesses, that of Digital Health. Often reduced —incorrectly in my view to screen time— digital health will become a subject that every employer and supplier has to be cognizant of. They will be forced to take it into account when developing systems and processes to prevent people from being adversely affected.

Employers will have to better discern good screen time from bad, to ensure their employees are not overly exposed to bad screen time. But what is bad screen time? How do we define it? How do we measure it effectively? How do we control it? These and many other questions are starting to be debated the world over. Like regulation, it is only a matter of time before it becomes a central aspect of your digitalisation strategy.

Information misuse

The most prominent danger for those of us who spend most of our working and personal lives online is fake news. A phrase the short-fingered vulgarian in the White House likes to overuse when attacking his imagined foes. But fake news is absolutely real, and ironically often created and perpetuated by the likes of Mr Drumpf. It is the fact that it is easy to produce and distribute, making it such a danger to the world and contributes to making it difficult to regulate.

Another problematic innovation we’re seein g in currently limited use is that of deepfakes. They’re not completely indistinguishable to real photos, film or audio. But they are getting better, and with the use of machine learning their efficacy is accelerating. Legislation and regulation have not and likely will not catch up with these developments any time soon. It’s a disaster waiting to happen if it hasn’t already, and we just haven’t noticed it yet.

Interesting times

In summary, we can see that digital integration of business is evolving and accelerating, in part due to the current pandemic, and in part because of the natural changes in a society that is more exposed to digital than previously. Customers in the Caribbean are becoming more digital, although not for the reasons we thought they would —convenience and availability— but for reasons more to do with safety in the face of a virus we still know little about. We see business and structural changes brought about by investment or governmental and organisational willingness to face one of the most damaging crises we've seen to date.

We also see that the very nature of the internet is about to change and change significantly. With more and more governments and populations favouring some form of regulation, it is only a matter of time before whole sections of the internet come under some framework of operations that have previously been rejected. Media, social media and sales of goods and services are likely the first areas regulated, but make no mistake regulation will follow for everything else soon after. The fact that the internet provides a scale of possibilities hitherto unseen, logically means that regulation will affect on a mass scale too.

Even without the pandemic, we were living in interesting times. Adding COVID-19 to the mix has been like pouring water into a boiling chip pan. Hold on tight.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I’d really appreciate it if you would share it to those in your network.

Share The Future is Digital

If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you on board. You can sign up here:

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Visit the website to read all the archives.

Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

Hello from a severe Saharan-dust-cloud-covered-Caribbean. A once-in-a-50-year event according to The Guardian.

COVID-19 has accelerated the use of digital throughout the world, the question is, is the Caribbean ready for the change and made the recent difficulties at Digicel a cause for concern?

Before getting into this week’s essay, I wanted to let you know that I got some pushback from my last article dealing with online and virtual conferences. I thoroughly appreciated the discussion I had, and I got some more exposure to other solutions to some of the problems I highlighted. Taking that a little further, I did some more in-depth research and found this graphic that highlights all the solutions surrounding digital conferencing. There’s a lot there, wow! The main point of the feedback was that I said that there weren’t solutions to the problems I mentioned. I was —sort of— wrong. There are lots of solutions as the graphic shows. But one thing that they all fail on is massive scale. I should have been more explicit in my essay, explaining that I was targetting large-scale conferences, conferences that typically have tens of thousands of visitors over a few days. None of these solutions scale to that level sadly. Let me know if I’m wrong again, I’d love to hear from you. 😀

Is the death of Digicel greatly exaggerated?

There's been a lot of ink spilt recently on the death of Digicel in the Caribbean. To paraphrase and to misquote simultaneously… the reports of Digicel's demise are greatly exaggerated.

Here's why.

To understand what is happening, it is essential to understand not only the history but the current context. If we look at it in detail, two aspects need to be taken into consideration; the offer and the usage. It is here we see the first signs of a strategy that is no longer in line or adapted to the current market and the emergence of a strategy targeted to the way we use mobile phones today.

The Context - Digital in the Caribbean

In the last several years, it is clear that three things have become increasingly important and more frequently used than at any other time in history; digital technologies, mobile and social media. With a global population of 7.7 billion, we now see more than 4.5 billion people use the internet. Social media boasts 3.8 billion users, essentially making around half of the planet using some form of social media. The COVID-19 pandemic has done nothing to stem that growth, if anything it has likely increased usage and signed up many more users that would have eventually got on board.

Interestingly, of all internet usage, mobile data usage will top 50% for the first time this year 2020, with the average time spent on the internet of 6 hours and 43 minutes. Basically a full workday is spent on the internet, either for business or pleasure, most likely a mixture of both. Of that time, users around the world spend on average 2 hours and 24 minutes on Social Media. Growing categories such as Ride-Hailing, Digital Marketing and Online Shopping are all being affected by the growth in access to data on-the-go. 

I previously wrote a brief piece about digital in the Caribbean, so it is pertinent to revisit this with the latest statistics I could research. As with the original essay, all data is from wearesocial unless specified otherwise.

Starting with literacy, which is table stakes when it comes to using digital technologies like computers and mobile phones, sadly, the Caribbean still has much work to get the population above 90% literacy in the region. Looking at the general breakdown, women’s literacy rates are 88% with men’s only slightly above at 89%. To look at this the other way around, over a tenth of the population are unable to read and write by the age of 15. How are they going to buy food online or use other digital services?

Internet penetration (the number of internet-connected people compared to the total population) is again, sadly, lagging even our closest neighbours. With 60% penetration in the Caribbean compared to Brazil’s 72%, or Central America’s 66%, that translates to roughly 17 million people in the region still unconnected. But it’s not all bad news, as growth in internet-connected users is a healthy 8.5%. Meaning that 100% connectivity is still more than a decade away, but it’s moving the right direction. If the COVID-induced recession is not as damaging as feared, I suspect that growth will accelerate. 

Devices are an important part of getting online and globally, only 3.3% of users have “feature phones” (yes they are still on sale in the region) that get internet connectivity, compared to 91% of smartphone users. The only reason to get a smartphone is to use the internet. This is corroborated by the fact that 53.3% of all web traffic is from mobile phones, an increase of 8.6% globally, at the expense of traffic from fixed devices like PCs and laptops, tablet devices and consoles, all reducing in usage; -6.8%, -27% and -30% respectively. Mobile connectivity as a percentage of the total population is currently 77% in the Caribbean. As a comparison, most of the “developed” nations run at over 100%. However, the distribution in our region is less than even. Antigua and Barbuda is third in the global table with mobile connectivity at 195%, just behind the USVI at 198%. The French West Indies (Guadeloupe, Guyane and Martinique) are at an average of 138%. All this drives an average of 7.2 GB of data per month, per mobile connection in the world, with Latin America and the Caribbean running at half of that, i.e. 3.6 GB.

Social media usage in the Caribbean runs at around 51% of the total population, an increase of 11% since 2019. Some of our islands make it to the top ten list, with Aruba and Cayman Islands coming in 6th and 7th with social media penetration rates of 90% and 89% respectively. Looking further into the data, eligible users are defined as children 13 years and older, which puts the Caribbean above Europe in the use of social media, 64% compared to 62%. Incidentally, Aruba tops the chart when it comes to Facebook eligible audience numbers, a full 96% of 13+-year-olds are available on Facebook. We’ve never been more connected.

What are we all doing online? Well, according to the data, 90% of users watch online video content, 70% are streaming music, and 47% and 41% listen to online radio stations and podcasts respectively. Mostly, entertainment services make up the bulk of internet usage, goodbye traditional TV and Radio seems to be the order of the day. Looking at the apps currently used, it is chat (mostly WhatsApp), social networks (Facebook), video apps (YouTube), shopping and (Google) maps, when looking at global usage. Unsurprisingly, social media makes up the lion’s share of that usage; in fact, a full 50% of the 3h40 minutes is attributed to social media. This usage is also corroborated by the top three most visited websites (globally); Google, YouTube and Facebook coming in third place. Interestingly, and something I’ve noticed for quite a while, the younger generation, Gen Z, are the least interested in Facebook, with only 3.1% of males and 2.5% of females on the site, only the over-65s have less presence!

The History - The offer in the Caribbean

If we ignore the smaller players that are primarily localised to a specific market like the Dominican Republic or the US Virgin Islands and Porto Rico, there are two leading operators, Digicel and Flow. Flow is the incumbent and has been in the region in one form or another since the early twentieth century, as this map of the Eastern Telegraph Companies network shows. Digicel is a newer entrant, but by no means unique to the region. Digicel launched in 2001 in Jamaica and has quickly spread across the region and into other overseas territories in the Pacific Islands region in 2006.

Source: Wikipedia

Both operators are well implanted and serve the wider Caribbean with mobile phone, data and other services such as broadband and television. Digicel has recently got into the mobile money transfer business with Digicel Mobile Money launched in Fiji in 2010 and is looking to expand around their markets.

Without taking on exhaustive research to compare offers, services and pricing (which is incidentally about as transparent as mud), it is difficult to get a detailed picture across the region. Complications such as currencies and fluctuations in exchange rates only further obfuscate value comparisons. Suffice to say though, that if you live on an island that has a small population you are likely to get less for your money! Broadband pricing ranges from an average of 25 USD per month for a broadband fixed-line connection in Saint Martin (French side) to an average 179 USD per month in the British Virgin Islands, that’s according to cable.co.uk, a firm dedicated to researching broadband pricing globally.

But that’s not the real issue, as far as I can tell, most offers are geared toward the old-reality of the internet. That is to say that once upon a time we were entertained by television and would communicate with friends and family using a phone. The current offers are squarely aimed at that, with classic triple-play deals; TV, telephone and (limited) internet. Note that the internet is last on the list!

The Future - The way we’ll all be using the internet

Source: Apple

Habits on the fundamental way we’re consuming entertainment are changing concurrently with the way we are communicating. As more and more streaming opportunities coming online, people have got used to watching what they like, when they want, not when a TV station dictates. There’s no surprise of the rise of Netflix and the up and coming services like HBO Go, Disney+ and Apple’s own attempt, Apple TV+. In this reality, content is king, and the internet providers are reduced to simple data pipes, shipping IP bits backwards and forwards at the demand of both the customer and the content creator/owner or platform. Their bread and butter is being commoditised and the value being sucked out. A reality that they are undoubtedly very uncomfortable with, which is why the triple-play is still so prevalent as it ties the user into one service where profits and losses can be spread. When evaluating the worth of one supplier over the other, I’m sure you’re no longer interested in call quality over a landline, you Skype, you FaceTime or WhatsApp with better voice quality than many operators can supply using POTS. 

However, what the new generation wants is entertainment, social networking and ephemeral communications. In other words, what they want is data. Data is the backbone that supplies them with YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and all the other services that are so far outside the purview of traditional media, and it is mobile! Looking at mobile data costs, the French West Indies comes out on top with average GB pricing lower than the rest of the Caribbean with prices at around $2.5 US, compared to $23 US for the Cayman Islands. More and more is being done on mobile, whether it is in the home or on the go. The mobile phone or tablet device is the item on which people are being entertained, checking the bank balance, buying stuff and communicating. Fixed broadband is being deprecated by people’s real-world use.

But here’s the point, unlike the other operators, Digicel’s Wizzee brand in the French West Indies has done something different, and it is that something that is probably going to be part of the future of mobile operators. Currently, mobile subscriptions in the Caribbean are either data limited or so expensive as to radically limit the amount of data used (see above). With the world moving to more data-only services, music, television, video conferencing/chats (thanks COVID), and even plain old voice calling replaced with FaceTime voice or WhatsApp calls, networks are going to have to rethink their inadequate data allowances to evolve and allow their traditional cash cows to starve. As the state of digital in the Caribbean above shows, how services are being consumed is fundamentally shifting. Bits are taking over, and the younger generation are only going to get hungrier for more bits and more mobility, eschewing satellite, cable and other essential services.

Digicel’s Wizzee is the first attempt, and a pretty good one at that, of moving to a data-only world. 50 GB per month for €10 clearly emphasises data. When you look at the offer, you pretty much don’t care how many minutes or SMSs you get (does anyone still use them?). Wizzee is essentially a data offer with voice and SMS thrown in for free. As GenZ gets older, and a newer even more data-hungry generation comes along, the pressure to provide data-only services is going to grow, not diminish. 

COVID-19 has given us all a glimpse into the future of data communications, and some would say communications period, and it is that world that operators need to start to pivot their offers towards. For what it’s worth, I think that the Digicel brand in the French West Indies will disappear with Wizzee disrupting its parent. It will continue steadfast in the rest of the Caribbean but will need to pivot to primarily data-first services to survive.

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I look into the conference bundle and how the digital twins stack up

I’ve had a tough time being productive over the last few days. The events around the world currently are a lot to process, and as I’ve said before, I’m not the type to react instantly with hollow missives. I need time to think about it, reflect upon it and do some research to know more about it. I’ve struggled over the last few days to come up with a response here for this newsletter, to try to fully come to terms with what some are only just waking up to acknowledge. I’m fifty years old now, and have lived through a few life shocks —I don’t need to bore you with the details. Suffice to say, what is currently happening is deeply troubling to me and I’m starting to form a bigger picture of where the world might go in the future, and I’m not comfortable with it.

On to administrative matters. I’ve decided to simplify the delivery of this newsletter and narrated podcast. There will now only be one email that contains both the text and the podcast version ensemble. You do not need to do anything to continue to enjoy it. If you prefer reading, the full text is in the email and if you prefer listening, keep pressing play as you’ve previously done. For those that pick up the episode through your podcast player, the show notes contain the full text as well. It’s to make it easier for you to consume these essays. Additionally, in the event of another interview issue, it’ll allow you to follow along with the conversation while listening by browsing the show notes.

DM me at @tfid_newsletter if you want to know more. The door is open.

On to this weeks’ essay.

The Conference Bundle

Last week’s issue was a little, shall we say, unstructured. I apologise. There was a reason. I wanted to write down what it is that makes a conference. I probably could have done a better job at explaining what the constituent parts of a conference are for starters. So I thought I’d expand upon those initial thoughts and try to give it some structure.

The conferences we know today were developed in the pre-internet era. The earliest reference I could find was the Convention Nationale of 1792 in France. The assumptions made during this development have applied to all conferences since. Get a bunch of people in the same city at the same time, mix it up and see what good comes from it. For conferences to become digital, those assumptions will be ignored, and a new digital conference template will emerge, one that is based on internet assumptions.

Looking at conferences (or conventions if you prefer), several parts are common to all meetings. Firstly, there is content. Content is delivered in different forms; presentations, Q&A, etc., the content is also an opportunity for marketing to spread its message to the attendees. Additionally, conferences rely on the physical structure and cognitive separation from day-to-day work, providing opportunities for attendees to meet, chat and learn. Many sales-oriented attendees are present simply because they know that potential clients will be in the same city at the same time. At large conferences, people often don’t even attend any of the content provided; their expectations simply targeted to compress several months’ worth of meetings into a multi-day conference. It saves on travel expenses and not least, time away from the office and family. Packaged together is the social aspect that tries to engineer meet-ups and new introductions —like side meetings, social evenings, corridor chats— in an attempt to enlarge the ecosystem and the potential for business for the conference hosts and sponsors. Some conferences even attract attendees to the host city without having any intention at all to attend the meetings. WWDC is an excellent example of this. The conference is typically limited to 5000 attendees with several thousand more present in San Jose during the week it is on. Again, the aim is to take advantage of the gathering of the people they need/want to meet during the conference. Lastly, most conferences have at least some expo capacity. Tens if not hundreds of vendors set up shop and promote their wares for the duration of the conference in the expo hall. It’s a convenient gathering to browse and scout out new products, services and businesses.

So if you think about it, a conference is a bundle of products, and much like Microsoft 365 is a bundle of solutions for productivity or your triple-play TV/Internet/Phone service is a bundle for entertainment, the conference will appeal to different needs for different jobs to be done. And like all bundles, not all users will use all the products and services included during the week. The trick for conference hosts is to provide enough of a value for each attendee profile. I detailed the Conference Bundle in the diagram below:

Matthew Cowen

Looking closely at each part of the bundle, it’s not difficult to see that pretty much the only part that has been solved for the digital and online world, is that of content. In record-time, many conferences across the globe pivoted to “virtual” meetings very quickly. Some of the biggest and most prestigious conferences, like Microsoft Build, the WWDC as mentioned earlier from Apple, or VMworld have all shifted online, simultaneously avoiding cancellation (unlike Google’s I/O) in offering more than before. I’ll get to that in a little bit. The proximity problem of side-meetings has also largely been solved, in that it is easy to schedule individual one-to-one meetings during conferences. Again knowing that your colleagues and friends are attending allows this, but how is that any different than planning a one-to-one outside the conference? Does the conference itself bring value in that instance?

What has not been solved, however, is the organically generated social nature of large gatherings that attract like-minded and open-to-learn individuals cooped up in the same room. Something that, by circumstance, breeds the kind of interactions I attempted to highlight in the last issue, i.e., the impromptu lunch meetings, the corridor conversations, the sometimes-awkward socialising over vendor-provided drinks. These interactions, however brief or however staged, are part of the experience, in that they add to the value of your presence. How do we solve for that in the digital world?

Outside of the presentations and social interactions, exists the show floor, or the expo hall. This element of the bundle doesn’t currently have a digital equivalent. Wandering around the expo hall, fulfils two jobs to be done. One is the exposure to new products and services, and the other is access to technical staff or to C-suite execs of companies you may be interested in learning more about. It’s quite efficient when you think about it. If of course, you take advantage of it. But how do you transfer that discovery experience into digital, an experience that solves the jobs to be done puzzle?

This change in the nature itself of conferences provides some insight and ideas on their future. The most significant difference during the pandemic is not the fact that some conferences have become cheap or free, it is that their reach has widened to such an extent that the potential audience for a popular conference is now up to 4 billion people! It is also interesting to learn that even niche conferences may develop into international affairs.

Looking at the expo hall, it is entirely possible that in some instances an online expo hall could take on some of the attributes of a contemporary massive online multiplayer game like Fortnite or PUBG. The Marshmello concert in 2019 and the more recent Travis Scott show directly in Fortnite taught us that entertainment in an online setting had the potential to be just as enjoyable as in a typical concert venue. It provided a glimpse into the future of online events. You may be recoiling at the thought of this, but there’s no easy way to put this, our time on this planet is limited. The generations following on from us are growing up with entirely different frames of reference, ones that are based on internet assumptions. Organisers of conferences of the future will also have those frames of reference and not 18th-century shackles in which to operate. This will free up their imagination, and when they design future gatherings, the contemporary conference will be a completely different beast.

Taking that a step further, the interactive nature of a conference, and if I’m continuing the comparison with online MPGs, players (you can substitute attendees) already use multi-channel communications in realtime. When kids play Fortnite today, those with a PS4 create a “Party” and invite each other to join. The non-PS4 players join the game too but interact using WhatsApp or FaceTime. What you get is a realtime interactive tissue, where the common interest is the game and different branches of communication join the participants. It should give designers of future conferences encouragement to be more ambitious and organic in their development.

From one of my presentations

With more and more people now meeting and dating online, interestingly doing so without third-person intermediaries, is it too far-fetched to believe that this could provide a model for online conferences also? Many of the social taboos surrounding meeting on the internet have all but disappeared where dating is concerned, why not for business meetings? Perhaps future conference software may include an attendee directory that, when browsed with the relevant filtering, you could swipe right to set up a meeting?

What about Virtual Reality? For what it’s worth, I don’t currently believe for a second that VR will take an essential role of this new wave of online conferences. In its current form, it is just too restrictive and too cumbersome to be used in that way. The friction required to enter the virtual world is too significant, it is too uncomfortable for prolonged use and too illness-inducing for many for it to be a serious consideration. Virtual reality sickness is a real thing and cannot be ignored.

As a side note, the imposed shift to digital has, interestingly, enabled a rethink of the tariffs and reach of all conferences. Conferences are traditionally an exclusive club. The investment in time and money is too much for most people and most small organisations that would benefit most from them, and the returns on that investment too small all things considered. The opportunity cost is just not high enough to for that audience. That’s why it is encouraging to see more online conferences that are either low-cost or free. WWDC, for example, is open and no cost to all registered Apple Developers. That’s a 100$ per year subscription that replaces the previously stiff price tag of 1599$. Microsoft Conferences, like Build, were somewhat exclusive too. Covid-19 opened the doors to all comers, for free. A full 48-hour content package was deployed in a way that was easy to jump in and out of as needed. The benefits of a much wider audience for Microsoft was duly noted. An estimated 100 000 people took part in this years’ conference. For comparison, its offline event last year attracted only 6000!

For now, I think I can safely say that in-person conferences are not a thing of the past and that pretty soon many of us are going be on a plane flying off to a convention in some far off city. But I do think that the conference experience has changed forever, and that in-person conferences will include remote participation simultaneously with in-person content, with new smart ways for us to communicate together. I can imagine a Microsoft conference that holds 10-20 thousand people in a convention centre in Florida for example, with another 100-150 thousand connecting from around the world. A convention where in-person you get to see in realtime, and dialled-in you can follow time-shifted to your preferred timezone or follow live if required, all while feeling like a full participant in the event.

Until we meet again.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in digital technology and how it affects business. I’d really appreciate if you would share it in your network.

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This is the belated narrated version. I also fixed a few typos on the original article.

Evening all. Today I’ll dive a little into the forced change that is taking place in the Caribbean and show how we still have a long way to go, and I start an analysis on digital conferencing, firstly by looking at what exactly conferences are for and why they exist using a model I’ve developed to help explain this. In another newsletter, I’ll get into the discussion about what digital conferences can and can’t offer and what the future might hold.

Enjoy.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I’d really appreciate if you would share it to those in your network.

Share The Future is Digital

If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you on board. You can sign up here:

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Visit the website to read all the archives.

Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.