Back from a tiring transatlantic trip, I delve in to how Facebook collects data, an update in the ongoing newspaper media failings and a surprise profit-making store related to digital media
I got back late Sunday night from a trip to London to take in the wonderfully tasty Curry Houses that are everywhere there, but most importantly, to participate in the Microsoft Ignite The Tour Conference. I’m preparing a show report for the newsletter, but I haven’t finished it yet. Meanwhile, I thought you might be interested in the data practices of Facebook and an update on what’s happening to the newspaper industry in the Caribbean.
Have fun!
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It won't come as much of a surprise that Facebook tracks you on its platform—that's why it can resurface your birthday photos from five years ago—but you might not yet realize the scope and the depth of its tracking all across the internet.
Of course, if you signed up and actively use Facebook, it will come as no surprise that the mass surveillance capitalism machine collects information about you. What most don’t realise however, is that Facebook collects data on anyone on the Internet and creates what we call “shadow profiles”.
Shadow Profiles are like vaccinations rates. Let me explain.
With the invention of vaccines, we quickly understood that a 100% vaccination rate in the target population was not necessary to provide community immunity. In fact, a percentage of something like 95% for measles (it is not the same percentage for each disease) offers sufficient protection for all persons purely from the statistics that show an unvaccinated person is unlikely to be exposed to a porter of the virus. Thus the term “herd immunity” was coined.
R being the reproduction number and S, the proportion of the population susceptible to infection.
Facebook Profiles, too, work like this. Facebook wishes a maximum of the populate to have a real profile, for it to extrapolate all the non-users of its services and create profiles of these people to monetise them, in the same way, signed up users are.
Facebook is not quite there yet, but they are putting a lot of effort to get there. The purchase of Instagram, WhatsApp and other “initiatives”, have one, and only one goal. More users with profiles on the grand database of personal information, and by extraction, more people in the non-users database.
Wired’s article goes on to explain what data is collected and how you can limit the collection of data — limit, not eliminate. It’s the deal for signing up with the..., er, Facebook — to prevent hyper-targeted advertising and Facebook knowing your most private information. However, as I inferred earlier, much of what Facebook collects has nothing to do with Facebook directly or at least is not the collection of data from sites owned and operated by them.
Facebook has developed and extended involved and deep relations with a multitude of marketing and ad agencies, essentially paying them to give up your data for their monetisation purposes. True to form, Facebook offers a tool called “Off-Facebook Activity” that dissociates the collected data from what you do on the site or in the app.
Note, they do not stop collecting data, that only unlink it from activity.
Note also, that using the technique I mentioned above, despite not having a Facebook account, your data is still collected by systems like the Facebook Pixel. Its egregious activities don’t stop there either. Even if you have disabled location tracking in the mobile app, Facebook still notes your approximate location by using IP addresses, data which is allegedly stored in the profile for later use.
One other technique used by the likes of Facebook and Google is the dissemination of Polls and Surveys that ask basic questions such as your Star Wars Age. Unwitting users fill in the information in online surveys only for that personal data to be harvested and used, yes, for advertising.
I want to clarify a myth that persists concerning what Facebook does with the data (your data) it collects; Facebook does not sell the data. It’s more nuanced than that. What Facebook does is harvest as much information as possible and then make that data available to hyper-target advertising. What that means is that the back-end data stays with Facebook, but users of Facebook advertising systems can see the number of people that would receive an ad based on the attributes requested. Demographic information, of course, but also purchasing habits, interests (when you fill in what you like you’re feeding this table in the database) and a whole host of other information.
Unlike my experience in many companies around the Caribbean;
Although there is some dispute in the reality of the phrase, with some reasoning that it’s not, the phrase holds true for many businesses looking towards digital transformation. Businesses produce data all the time, but it is mostly lost, stored but not accessed or downright under-exploited. We are data-rich but analysis-poor, and it’s to our detriment.
Facebook is possibly one of the best organisations that are using and monetising data, excepting perhaps, Google. It’s interesting that they use it for such shady purposes sometimes.
If you think about it, their resource is the data they collect — data being the new oil. If Facebook sold that data and thus gave up on the possibility of reselling it to the same party again, it would very quickly be left with no resources to market. The fact that advertisers come back time and time again to punt another product, matching it to their target audience using the matching tools of Facebook is entirely the reason Facebook makes $22.1B from a revenue of $55.8B according to CNN Money.
Is Emmanuel Macron about to save the newspapers in the French West Indies?
On the 2nd of August a tender was issued to find a buyer for the failing media business, and its close date is in less than two weeks. Currently there are no offers on the table and there may not be any serious long-term buyers either. For what its worth, I think they’ll find a buyer, but it’ll be a short-term, utterly-ignorant-of-the-reality-in-the-digital-world benefactor that will continue to (try to) sell what is essentially free information printed on dead trees.
Remember, France-Antilles, and other newspaper publishers around the Caribbean have been slow and downright ignorant of the reality of the digital world for a long time.
Three major factors have led to the current situation; ads have become easy and cheap to set up using the online platforms — with feedback obtained from the online platforms out-manoeuvring what a static mass-market ads could ever achieve —, the distribution of bits rather than atoms became essentially free and the targeting and the quality of information naturally decreases with abundance.
Easier, better and cheaper will always win out over difficult, inferior and expensive. The ad market for newspapers was completely disrupted and was only noticed by the industry when it was too late.
These two images tell us everything we need to know:
Source: mondaynote.com
Emmanuel Macron has hinted at the possibility to help the press in the overseas territories with aid for distribution or specific political measures.
It is a sad state of affairs that a government feels the need to intervene to prop up a failing business model, notwithstanding the risk of being accused of government bias in future articles; Quid Pro Quo? Now let me make it very clear, I am not suggesting that there is or will be any such agreement, not for an instant! But it leaves one open to accusations, and in a world where accusations are multiplied and legitimised by social media at the speed of light, both the newspapers and the government need to be careful.
Currently, in an equivalent of Chapter 10, France-Antilles should know its fate on the 30th of January, although this too is not sure, being that previous decision deadlines were extended. Not only that, but the proposition that is likely to succeed is none other than the same group that spectacularly failed the newspaper with its lack of vision, foresight and digital transformation.
It has secured pledges of 3M€ from the state, 3M€ from investors and is currently looking for another million or so to get their proposal off the ground — which incidentally, cuts staff from 236 to 125. They’re putting a plaster on a broken leg, and in the plans’ current guise and without radical change, it is doomed to fail, and I’ll be writing about it in a couple of years, if not sooner.
Digital publishing is doing something it hasn't done en masse since the dawn of the Internet: make money.
Perhaps this falls at just the right time for France-Antilles and the rest of the industry in the Caribbean.
According to Axios several measures relating to copyright, new mediums becoming more popular (Podcasts, I’m looking at you) and monetisable are contributing to the inflow of cash to digital media companies. But it is not just that, privacy or at least visibility and control over what companies can do with the data coupled with the fact that these market places are murky and inscrutable for businesses to properly asses advertising costs, has provoked a drop in their use and the favouring of using direct-to-customer advertising from the digital media companies.
Copyright rules have cut off at the tap the wholesale “piracy” but the big tech giants republishing works from online sites like the Times, Guardian, etc., and funnelled that money to the media companies, contributing to their 1st-time profits in the digital media space. The war is not over yet, and we’ll have to watch to see what happens in the future, but for now, it is an encouraging sign.
The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:
I wanted to get this out earlier in the week, but I’ve been busy finishing off projects from 2019, preparing 2020 and flying out on a trip. I’m in a technical conference next week and my plan is to report back on what I learned over the coming weeks.
On to the subject of the day… I spend a lot of time researching and writing about Digital Transformation and its immediate impacts on business. I thought it would, however, be a nice change of pace to talk about some of the more social aspects of these new technologies and the way we work with them.
I thought I’d focus on collaboration, and particularly, how it is becoming the new standard interface for knowledge workers, first line workers and backend operations. Home users are also becoming more ad more enticed by their charmes and possibilities, to the point that their overlay supplants the importance of the traditional operating systems like Windows, Linux and macOS.
There are two big shifts in personal and business computing currently taking place. These changes are not just limited to computing but are now touching almost every aspect of our lives. Firstly, Digital Transformation is changing the way we interact with the everyday services we rely on, changing the way we even live and work. Secondly, Collaboration is fast-becoming the new norm for generations that follow on from Generation X.
Collaboration didn’t start in productivity focus groups, in fact, as humans we’ve been collaborating for thousands and thousands of years. Looking more recently, if we look at how music is produced these days, we find that many artists in today’s popular music are collaborating with other artists, and these are the type of artists that would be considered competitions or rivals in the early 70’s and 80’s. Just look at the list of singles on Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube and you’ll see that it is one artist featuring or “&” another. Maître Gims & Sting, Shawn Mendes & Camilla Cabello to name a couple.
Music was previously sold in Album form and was a bundled package of several products (songs). You purchased the album because it was both cheaper than buying the individual tracks and the product often had a added benefit of a poster or a lyrics sheet. Some took the concept to the extreme and produced highly curated artwork to incite the buyer with the promise of a collectors item. This incentive supported the solo artist or the group as it rewarded artists uniquely from sales numbers. The collapse of profits going directly to artists has forced groups to tour, sell merchandise and club memberships amongst other revenue streams.
Physical goods are no longer offered and hence the competition is not the same. Bands collaborate all the time where previously they would compete. Collaboration is feasible today compared to yesterday, because the unbundling of music as promoted by Apple in the early 2000s, developed new business models for artists that sell their personal brand, regardless of how it is consumed.
What this means in simple terms is that a new generation of the young working population that have inherently different ideals around competition and collaboration. This generation prefers to share its work as evidenced by their prolific use of social networks.
The foundations of collaborative software
Collaboration really began a long time ago, as I noted above, but collaboration in today’s guise is a modern take on old ways born out of the industrial revolution and the subsequent deployment of computers in virtually every organisation. As more and more processes were being digitised, the need to integrate processes so employees could efficiently work together on large projects required a shift in computing paradigms. Paradigms that have only just started to look feasible.
In the early computing days mainframe terminals started life out as single user interfaces to the processing capabilities of the machines. Eventually processor power and architecture design allowed multiple terminals to use the same central computer simultaneously. That’s not quite true however, as the original shared mainframes like the VAX, only gave the illusion of concurrent use. They, in fact, time shared the processor out to each terminal fast and efficiently, making it all but imperceptible to several users that they alone were using the computers back in the IT room. It took only a few lines of code to break that illusion, slowing the mainframe enough to show up its trickery. I had much fun in those days doing this at University.
At this stage, computers were essentially processing terminals with rudimentary applications to code, calculate, email and sometimes help in writing term papers. The next evolution came when personal computers (PCs) started to become ubiquitous in offices and small businesses. The democratisation of the PC enabled businesses to benefit from their efficiency, and enabled software houses to push the boundaries of what coud be accomplished on a computer. And it is here that the first attempts at collaboration software got started.
However, before we get into the weeds, It would be remise of me not to talk about collaboration in isolation of productivity. One of the main reasons for implementing collaboration is to increase and enable better productivity for business. They are inseparable in this context, even if they are two different things. Because we couldn’t quite get to the dream of realtime interactive collaboration in those days, much of the focus was on productivity, and it was out of this desire that the first wave of “Office” type applications and suites were developed.
The original productivity application was VisiCalc — it was a huge success, and gave rise to the moniker “killer application”, i.e., an application that is so useful, it literally sells the computer in order for the user to get a hold of the application. VisiCalc is what we call a Spreadsheet today. At its introduction, minds were blown. That it could automatically and instantly recalculate rows and columns and totals by adjusting one cell was pure science fiction until then. It helped businesses produce accurate financial information for better decision making.
Not too long after that, another killer application category emerged, the Word Processor. Again, it was staggering that an application could help you write multiple pages of text and allow simple edits, and in somes cases provide pointers for better spelling and grammar. Previously one would have to re-write the text, or try to white-out and type over the top of mistakes to produce a final copy. Major mistakes required complete re-writes. The Word Processor eliminated this, and as a consequence, allowed the sharing of the document to multiple parties allowing them to either add content or edit and control content. So although these applications were primarily aimed at productivity, collaboration was a natural result and a natural evolution in use and hence a target for software developers to explore.
Bundled together, these applications came to be known as Office Applications. Email and Presentation software joined this group soon after they became institutional in business.
The early collaboration platforms
Once basic office-type applications were widely used, software giants of the time, like Corel and Lotus, noticed the potential to further develop collaboration and efforts were quickly directed to realise that vision. Lotus Development Corporation (subsequently purchased by IBM), most notably, developed and marketed what was ultimately the first real suite of collaboration tools with its release in December 1998 of version 1 of Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes comprised of collaborative tools to help workers use the existing office-type applications, providing services such as email, calendar and contact control and a rich client/server database engine that was programmable by experienced engineers. This provided substantial benefits to international corporations as they were able to now communicate and collaborate on projects the world over in a simple but efficient manner. The programmable database system also allowed corporations to build and deploy line of business application within their business units and many small and independent consultant businesses were created and fed handsomely on this new opportunity.
As Notes grew in popularity (changing its name to Domino by IBM in 1996) its core differentiating services became commoditised and simplified by software giants like Microsoft. Which is where we found the next wave in collaborative efforts, email. Email is derided today because of scams and spam, but in the 1990s email was the must-have collaborative tool. Now you could email ideas, documents, pictures, just about anything you could imagine all in the search of better productivity. For a while this worked great, as email is an asynchronous medium, meaning the other end doesn’t have to be logged on for you to be able to send a message to him or her.
As change management predicts, once a user gets used to the new thing expectations are reset and tolerances are lowered giving rise and desire for a new faster and better thing. And indeed it came, in what is possibly one of the most revolutionary tools in modern business that has been totally ignored by analysis of its impact; Instant Messaging or IM for short.
IM started life in the non-business world and was popularised by AOL with their AIM platform. Hours per day were spent by teenagers with unlimited dialup telephone lines chatting about their life over this new medium. Businesses were slow to adopt this new form of communication and it wasn’t until Microsoft implemented it for free in their wildly popular Exchange Server (an email system) that businesses started to see the benefits. You see, communication and collaboration are not one dimensional things, different mediums of communications are suited for different scenarios and different contexts. The one size fits all of email just doesn’t work for mature modern collaboration.
Collaboration today
Which brings me to the state of collaboration today. What we’re seeing today is specialised collaboration and productivity being developed that take us away from the general purpose collaborative apps we have now. There are myriad applications for collaboration, but the two most popular and most known are Slack and Microsoft Teams. If you want to know more about them, search for reviews online. Suffice to say that both claim several millions of Daily Active Users (DAUs).
Image: Microsoft
These apps are immensely popular in business and are very advanced collaborative platforms in their own right. When implemented well, they take a central role in the day-to-day interactions for people on their computers, and Microsoft literally stated that its Team app is where work starts and ends. Both Slack and Teams provide messaging, calendar integration and the usual list of emoji support, upvoting, GIFs and the like.
Image: fastcompany.com
That being said, they still only provide basic omni-communications channels of discussion. Integration is limited to applications in the same ecosystem or third party applications (always SaaS) that provide APIs. And whilst that list is growing, we aren’t quite yet in the situation where the circle has been completed to allow communications and collaboration universally.
It’s important to note that businesses, whilst getting on the SaaS train, are not quite there yet. Many of the organisations I work with use software that can only be described favourably as “legacy”. And while others are more advanced using online systems like Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365, most of their backend operations software is either locally stored on Windows/Linux servers with no API access available or any way to bridge to the application from thees online services. Most worrying too, is the fact that often when you choose one ecosystem, the competing ecosystem does everything it can to lock you out of collaboration between these systems. Both short-sighted and customer penalising!
Why collaboration software works
In my role as a consultant I’m finding more and more business use cases for the wholesale implementation of collaborative software in operations. The new platforms, being open, allow for a simple and easy-to-use window towards getting work done efficiently. More over, getting that work done through collaboration.
Great collaboration, as several studies seem to suggest, leads to better outcomes. Is like diversity in your organisation, it automatically generates the environment that challenges the status quo, allowing better visibility from all angles, leading to better solutions.
Further explanation is required, I’ll get to this at a later date. Thanks for reading.
The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:
Digital Transformation in training, decision-making and modelling, using 3D, AR and VR
Let me first start by wishing you a very Happy New Decade, The Twenties! Finally, we can call it something intelligent!
In this edition, I took time with Nicolas Augustin of DevOxyz here in Martinique, to ask him about his work, the challenges and how Digital Transformation is helping his clients. It’s an appealing look at how small businesses can use digital tools to not only create products and services but serve the globe from a small island in the Caribbean. I hope you enjoy it.
My gratitude to Nicolas for lending me time for the interview.
Note: I have lightly edited Nicolas’s answers for clarity.
On to the interview:
DevOxyz, a digital company with digital products, built for a digital world
Can you introduce yourself to let us get to know you better?
I’m Nicolas, owner at DevOxyz since 2008. We design and develop bespoke serious game applications helping our professional customers leveraging the power of Real-time 3D, Virtual and Augmented Reality to solve their decision making and training challenges.
Tell me a little about your background and how you got to where you are currently?
I have a computer programming training with a computer graphics programming specialisation. Between 1998 and 2008 I was part of a great team in a company called Virtools (acquired by Dassault Systèmes in 2005). As solving professional challenges using 3D is a real and deep passion, I started DevOxyz in 2008.
So you started DevOxyz in 2008, and you are looking to extend your reach more globally — currently, a majority of clients are overseas, but you’d like to do more, I understand. Can you tell me a little more about what you do and what it is you’re trying to achieve?
DevOxyz has been focused on international development from the start with final clients like Procter & Gamble, EDF R&D and Le Musée du Louvres. We constantly look for niche markets where 3D technologies, 3D storytelling and training can help our customers. We actually search for customer pains in various traditional domains (industry, architecture, safety, ...), everywhere there could be “I did not see it like this on the paper blueprints” or “this could better be understood if our employees could experience it and train beforehand” issues.
We are also looking for international partners to handle customer detection and customer relationship. On several projects, we generally have a middle-sized company (our client) who have a good relationship with a much bigger client like Siemens or Microsoft. We wish to streamline this way of working having region partners that have access to key accounts.
I’m interested in diving in a bit more about solving customer pains. As you’ve noticed in my writing in this newsletter, I have a big interest in the idea that products and services can be deliberately designed to resolve pain points and reduce friction. Can you describe a project that really got to the heart of this? What pains did the project resolve, how did you go about discerning the pains? What was the final measurable outcome?
Well, sometimes the pain is inherent to what the project is about. For example, in the VR Driver safety application, I did for a client, we could not, of course, create actual car accidents in training. The client had to come with a solution that would keep the trainee safe but also immerse him/her in a vivid experience. As you can guess, we wanted to avoid the classic presentation-based training with trainees just listening and taking notes, at best. Virtual Reality was the perfect solution for this: the trainee is immersed, living the training and we could create road danger situations and car accidents that we could not have done in real life. Here the outcome was that VR allowed living this that are not possible living otherwise.
Sometimes the pain is clearly explained by the client after discussing his process hurdles with him.
But sometimes, while exploring a technical subject the client and I find an improvement, an added value, like this time I had to convert a 3D file format to another with a pre-processing step and I discovered that the pre-processing step was not mandatory and that I could convert the 3D file format in real-time. The outcome here was automation: we have removed a step in a production process using code.
What would you say have been or currently are the main challenges?
Well, there are 2 main challenges: find niche markets customers and find international partners that can relay our offer.
Can you expand on that? The niche market is obviously difficult to enter as much is based on reputation and word of mouth, do you specialise in any particular niche?
Yes, I focus on 3D data and metadata conversion plugins into industries: PLM/CAD and AEC/BIM. For example, I recently created an Autodesk Revit export plugin to a client custom 3D file format. I constantly make efforts to add special ingredients to what I deliver. In the Autodesk Revit case, I focused on converting and exporting Autodesk materials to the client's PBR (Physically Based Rendering) materials. With the client giving me access to its BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) code, I could really deliver bespoke conversion code. I feel I just got carried away there for our non-technical readers, but in a nutshell, I constantly look for the high added value that would make my client happy, beyond basic requirements. It's just like I'm constantly looking for the niche in the niche.
No, no, that’s great. Get as technical as you like 😀. Getting back to you looking for international partners. What is it you’re specifically looking for in potential partners/clients?
I'm looking for Business developers that have close relationships with companies that already use real-time 3D technologies to solve their challenges in the PLM/CAD and AEC/BIM industries. I came to a realisation that most technical 3D challenges can be solved but there is a missing link, someone that can "hunt" for technical challenges. Using my 3D math, 3D data structure and real-time 3D skill sets, I can help final clients quicker than they imagine.
The final client is often a big company whose decision-making process is time-consuming. My added value here is based on development time flexibility and high-quality 3D code.
In terms of structural challenges, what have been the most difficult to overcome, and how did you overcome them?
Our main structural challenge is our location. While we have the technical and Internet-based tools to produce 3D applications remotely, most of our clients are located in the USA and in Europe. We have to reach these clients and maintain good relationships.
The main challenges are not technical as one may think (our more than 20 years experience in 3D and linear algebra helps a lot here) but rather in terms of customer identification and relationship. However, this challenge is turned into a competitive advantage: we constantly make efforts to deliver the best possible technical products to our niche markets customers. We generally solve this challenge by being recommended by clients.
Financially, getting a startup off the ground not only takes a lot of time and passion, but finance is clearly needed. How did you start out?
One word here: bootstrapping. Using that method forces us to choose customers to maintain the best possible profitability and customer value. At one point, we may look for private funding to move the company to another level.
Haha! I feel exactly the same thing. I’ve bootstrapped my business for the simple reason I wanted complete control and to be judged early on by my quality. I developed a unique business model in consulting to avoid the wet and dry seasons as it were. How do you price and bill your projects, is it on an ad-hoc basis?
Our bespoke 3D development service rate is generally between €600 and €750 per day. This rate can vary depending on the project since we perform an in-depth evaluation for our customers to get the best service at the best price.
One of the difficulties in providing “virtual” services is the justification of value. Can you tell me a little more about your experiences?
I generally have clients who are aware of the technical challenges I address because they are tech-savvy. For those who have less understanding of what development is, there are 2 cases: the first case is that they kind of freak out because they don't understand how it works and this induces tension in the business relationship. In the other case, a trust relationship exists between the client and the contractor. This trust is key. It's our responsibility as a service provider to demonstrate that our solutions solve their customer pains or needs.
To build that trust, I tend to build a "before/after" scheme, by showing them what they had before my service VS what they have after my service. Maybe it's easier in computer graphics because they see, on-screen (or in a VR headset) the result of the work.
Another way to build trust can sometimes be splitting the project into small units to demonstrate value. In a nutshell, for some difficult clients, it's our responsibility to build trust.
Can you tell us more about the technical aspect? How does it work?
To keep it simple, high-end video games, CAD software, Architecture and BIM software all use the same technological low-level layer (3D APIs). Therefore, the same programming and mathematical techniques can be used to fight a giant spider, have a stakeholder review of his new plant organisation, train to a new safety procedure in a high-risk industrial site.
As for the application subject itself, we interview experts to build the actual interactivity, “injecting” knowledge and information in the bespoke 3D application. The application can then be used on a desktop computer screen, on a mobile device for Augmented Reality or in a VR headset for Virtual Reality applications.
Yes, and about Virtual Reality, how can professional challenges be solved using it?
VR is now the best way to experience 3D. Hardware costs of VR headsets have dropped along the years. This is the perfect time to leverage something particular with VR: full body and mind immersion. The “trick” here is that the stakeholder or the trainee is inside the 3D world, he/she can look around and move around inside the simulation. After only a few minutes in the VR world, the user is totally focused on the experience or his task. There is a kind of direct access to his mind as his/her 3D vision system (otherwise known as eyes and brain) and his entire body are implied in the experience at real scale. There is no better way to review a building, train to a procedure or treat a phobia, for example.
That’s great stuff, Nicholas. Your work highlights an aspect of Digital Transformation that is both practical in many uses, but also very tangible for clients to understand the benefits of using those digital technologies. It goes without saying that the fact you can be based in Martinique and work internationally without too much of an issue is a real benefit of the digital world.
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions, I look forward to following up with you in the coming years to see how tomorrow’s developments have helped you grow. Best of luck!
The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interesting in learning about Digital Transformation and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:
It’s nearly the end of 2019 and the end of a decade. It is a year that has witnessed many changes for me. As is wont, this is the end of the year review issue.
On to the update.
As I said, a year of lots of changes for me. I finally got my business up and running and will be profitable in the first year, yay! I have 6 clients this year, with a couple of sizeable projects, and others that I work with regularly, earning recurrent income. That’s pretty much how I envisaged it going this year, or to be fair, how I hoped it would go. Next year brings new objectives for me, fingers crossed it will happen.
Getting back to this Newsletter, it had been a significant undertaking and one that requires a lot of time to produce. As a reader, you might not see just how much effort is needed to write each article. There’s research, discussion, drafts, spells and grammar checking, layout and the publishing. These all take time, with each piece requiring something like 10 times the amount of time necessary to read at an average speed.
Much writing goes nowhere too. I get ideas all the time, some of them make it out the bin, others stay there for weeks, months or never see the light of day.
In all, I’d just like to say a heartfelt thank you to all of you who read my writings, especially thanks to those of you who have taken the time to write back and give me precious feedback. It’s been an entertaining journey and one I intend to keep doing.
An analysis of the year
As I’m obsessed with digital and particularly data, I thought it would be a great idea to give you a few statistics related to this publication. Let’s dive in.
Not including this article and the last article of the year I’m hoping to get finished, I’ve actually written 50 newsletters. That’s an average of 1 per week, which was my initial (personal) goal, so I’m super-pleased to have achieved it. One article a week is probably the right cadence. However, I’d like to write a bit more now and again. I started the Considering the first article was published on the 6th of February, it is actually a little more than one per week, but we won’t split hairs 😉.
Those of you who were with me from the beginning, you’ll remember that I had initially promised to publish on a schedule, Friday mornings if my memory serves me. I wanted to instil a routine, hoping that it would promote readership over time. It did nothing of the sort in the end. Most people received the email, then read it as and when it was possible for them, work and personal commitments preceding - completely normal and understandable.
It took me a while to realise that it actually didn’t matter when the email was sent — give that email is an asynchronous medium — as people would open and read when it was convenient for them. Regardless, I am incredibly grateful for even one set of eyes to read my stuff 😀.
At the end of 2019, I’ll have written and published over 82000 words at an average of over 1500 words per email. I’m quite pleased with that amount as it falls precisely in line with what I’d hoped for. I’d had feedback that the newsletter was long and wordy, and the other newsletters are more pictorial and flashy and that I should do that, but that is not what this newsletter is intended to do.
The intent is to inform, discuss and delve into detail on topics surrounding digital technologies, their use in transforming business and society. Simple infographics and meme-able images just can’t convey the necessary subtitles in this changing world. There are newsletters and other mediums for that; I chose not to go down that route. It’s why people buy books instead of reading pithy 3-line quick takes on essential topics.
Another statistic. According to Ulysses — my writing app of choice — it would take the average reader over five and a half hours to read this years’ posts. I’ve basically written a books' worth of content in 12 months.
But here we are, living in an attention economy, and the only real statistics that count are the ones that are least interesting (in my view)… To wit, 'views' and 'open rates'.
My newsletter is read all across the Caribbean, and several thousands of views have been registered. That’s a pretty good start and one I hope will expand in the coming months. The newsletter commands an open rate of around 40%, which is double the average. Mailchimp reports open rates of 21.33% on average, with Consulting and Tech newsletters receiving rates of 20% or below.
To finish off this short post, take a look at the word cloud image below, it was produced using an export of the text data and running it through Microsoft’s venerable data visualisation tool, PowerBI. It represents the frequency of the words I wrote this year. Unsurprisingly, Digital and Transformation come out on top, followed closely by data, business and Caribbean. That’s what I expected for my newsletter. It is going to be interesting to compare this with next years’ graphic, will Digital Transformation be the dominant subject going forward in the industry… I doubt it.
This issue was more of a historical reference issue, the idea, to give context to what we experience today and show how businesses have been transforming themselves digitally for years with varying degrees of success.
The issue also tried a new idea, that of critiquing a local app/platform, in this instance Bodio.
This article was the starting point to explaining Digital Transformation and hence a profoundly historical document in content. It allowed me to express and explore the past of digitisation and send out markers for where the newsletter was going. I was delighted with the results.
An immensely successful article that wrote up the findings of my research into the Caribbean digital infrastructure landscape. It really resonated with readers and was republished on other blogs around the Caribbean (with permission).
I wrote the title to provoke a reaction, and I got one. One unsubscribe from a media agency! Unsurprising really, as I kind of hit out at the pithy and shallow exploitation of the term Digital Transformation in business today, mainly as a result of media agencies hijacking the name to mean digital marketing. I don’t have any issue with that apart from the fact that it makes my job a lot harder to explain what I do…, that’s a good thing to be fair.
I had grand ambitions for this series, as I’d had some feedback from people requesting concrete help and outlines on how to “do Digital Transformation”. Despite my efforts, it didn’t quite go as I’d hoped.
I’m guessing the reality of doing it in situ is a much harder pill to swallow. Laying bare the excruciating dullness of it exposed the real problem we humans suffer endlessly; we don’t realise we don’t want it until we’ve actually got it, then it’s too late!
I was surprised this one didn’t get as much traction as I’d hoped as I thought the subject was entertaining and one that had some great pointers for businesses in the Caribbean not necessarily streaming. I didn’t prove to be the case. You live, and you learn!
Takeaways
It would appear that I have a talent for writing both factual and historical articles that inform and put into context how we have got where we are today. They are the most read and appreciated articles I write. I intend to continue down that route and see where it takes me.
It stands to reason to be fair. For years I’ve written Tender response documents and documentation. I’ve also written research findings documents, and it is something that while painful and off-putting for most, I actually love doing them.
I love the research challenge, the understanding and then the ability to express that in a concise but captivating manner. I’ve recently had the opportunity to write a research paper (not affiliated to a University sadly, but I’d love to) at over 17K words of which I loved every minute. Let me know if you like to have more information.
All this to say, thank you so much for your support in this, my first year of regularly publishing a newsletter. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you keep reading and passing on the articles (hassling your friends into subscribing too 😉). I intend to carry on and plan to do a few new things next year.
Have a great holiday, and I’ll see you in the new decade.
The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:
They’re not always for good. It's more complicated than that.
Reports of my demise (writing for this newsletter) have been greatly exaggerated.
On to this weeks’ briefing.
If it is not apparent, I am quite positive and reasonably optimistic about digital technologies and what they can do for us in business, but also what they can help us with for society. Steve Jobs once said that computers were like bicycles for the mind. He referred to a study done for Scientific American, where the Condor was outclassed by a human using a bicycle in terms of efficiency (distance travelled versus calories used). Humans classed well blow average without the bicycle.
But like any tool, digital technology is neither conscious nor sentient and is entirely amoral, as in without morals. Here are some tales of the negative aspects of digitalisation in our lives.
I put them here for discussion, and I make no judgement on them for the moment. I’m hoping to write about my complicated feelings on the subject and what we as individuals can do when we have issues of cognitive dissonance built up by using digital tech. Bear with me.
Google Maps goes Incognito
Google Maps on iOS has finally introduced an In Cognito mode. In Cognito, for those that don’t know, is a mode whereby the product, in this case, Google Maps, no longer permanently stores searched, GPS data and other personally identifying information on Google’s servers via the signed-in Google Account. Great news for lots of reasons, mainly ones that involve gaining a little privacy in one’s movements around the globe. It does, however, beg the question of what Google has been doing with data in the meantime. That’s for another day.
However, it doesn’t come without trade-offs. Any personalised features, like restaurant suggestions based on historical location data, no longer work. Google is indeed a digital company, and by that, I mean binary. It is either on or off. You either get privacy or none.
Announced in the same blog post, Google will provide a tool to bulk delete places you’ve visited through Google Maps Timeline feature.
With bulk delete, you can quickly find and delete multiple places from your Timeline and Location History all at once. You’ll still have the ability to delete all or part of your Timeline by date range from your Location History settings.
Make no mistake. These features are a result of pressure from impeding cases on privacy violations amongst others, around the world. As Venture Beat put it:
The search giant’s renewed focus on privacy features follows several high-profile headlines over the past year, such as the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data scandal. A Wall Street Journal report last summer revealed that Google+, Google’s social network, failed to disclose an exploit that might have exposed the data of more than 500,000 users. Following the news, Google announced that Google+ would formally shut down for consumers in August 2019, following a 10-month wind-down period.
The exit to the left-of-stage of co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have left some to speculate that it is an abdication of responsibility ploy to avoid direct involvement in any future punishment. It’s hard to tell, but it isn’t outside the realms of possibility.
DNA, Genealogy and getting locked up
Wired reports that Verogen has just purchased an obscure genealogy website called GEDmatch. On the face of it, it seems innocent enough and not much to cause worry. Until, that is you understand about its history and recent events.
GEDmatch was an unknown site competing with the giants like Ancestry.com and FindMyPast.com. GEDmatch was a free site being run by a couple of men that are particularly talented in writing algorithms that ostensibly helped people find their relatives. Popular, in that it had around 1 million users, it was privacy by obscurity.
This all changed in April of 2018 when police used the site to identify a suspect in the 40-year-old the Golden State Killer cold case. Using the crime scene DNA in a rape case in Ventura County, police uploaded the DNA profile to GEDmatch. The site listed 10 to 20 distant relatives, whom all shared the same great-great-great-grandparents. After more investigation and elimination, police finally arrived at two suspects and ruled one out by a further DNA test, finally identifying the suspected culprit who is currently being held awaiting trial — a positive outcome
Verogen is a forensics giant and has a longstanding reputation of working with law enforcement to solve violent crimes using proprietary familial matching algorithms. This is where some conflict is brewing on the use of this technology when it is coupled with, for all intents and purposes, innocent user’s curiosity to build their family tree. Oblivious to the reality, family members a being dragged (with our consent) into helping identify suspects of crimes. In some instances, it is no longer what you’ve done that gets you caught, but what others are doing around you.
Some genealogists are already protesting and withdrawing support for this type of intrusion. Others are more hopeful that better policies and regulations surrounding Verogen will ultimately secure the database from abusive investigative powers.
It nuanced, isn’t it!
Any data, it seems, has value
In the US, California’s DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) is selling drivers’ personal data for 50 million dollars.
From Motherboard:
DMVs across the country are selling data that drivers are required to provide to the organization in order to obtain a license. This information includes names, physical addresses, and car registration information. California’s sales come from a state which generally scrutinizes privacy to a higher degree than the rest of the country.
In a public record acts request, Motherboard asked the California DMV for the total dollar amounts paid by commercial requesters of data for the past six years. The responsive document shows the total revenue in financial year 2013/14 as $41,562,735, before steadily climbing to $52,048,236 in the financial year 2017/18.
The widespread abuse of data from each State’s DMV has ended up in multiple DMVs cancelling and restricting access to personal data. In California’s case, the requesters and buyers have not been revealed, but speculation has put LexisNexis on that list. LexisNexis is a data broker, and the final resting place of that data is not likely to please some. Some speculation suggests that data is also being sold to private investigators, one of which specialises in finding if spouses are cheating.
I’ve not come to a conclusion yet
I’ve highlighted a couple of instances where digital technology causes problems rather than saving them. And, if I’m honest, we all believed in those early days of the Internet, that things would be used only for positive means. That looks a little naive nowadays, much like how we were naive in thinking that nuclear science would only be used for the good of the people.
I have a complicated relationship with digital tools. On the one hand, they’re my bread and butter and the reason I have a job. I owe my life to them — I once sold a car to buy a computer, preferring to walk and catch the bus as long as I could compute. But on the other, I realise the danger of them, and how some take technology to produce the worst in humans.
I’m still working it out. Let me know your thoughts.
The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:
