James Fowler
Hispano-arabist, tech evangelist and strategy analyst
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Info
- Experience
- Mar 2012 - PresentStrategy Analyst / Telefonica Digital
- Jul 2010 - Mar 2012Strategy Analyst / TelefonicaI was among the first intake of Telefónica Europe Graduate Programme where I joined the B2B Product, Portfolio and Marketing Strategy team in Telefónica UK. I then went on a 6-month secondment in Global Strategy team for Telefónica S.A. in Madrid, reporting to Group CEO, where I worked on a number of initiatives, including the global organisational restructure and the strategic planning process
- May 2009 - Nov 2011Founder and Director / sotolive.com- Single-handedly built and ran local events & businesses portal for the Sotogrande region of Spain with over 2000 followers through social media channels and hundreds of visitors each week. Sold in November 2011.
- 2009 - 2009Social Media & Online Marketing Intern / Victor Chandler- Responsible for developing and executing the company's social media strategy - Assisted in the company's online relaunch, in web development and graphic design
- Jul 2008 - Aug 2008Legal intern / HassansComposition, editing and translation of legal documents, publicity & correspondence in Property division
- Jun 2007 - Sept 2007Volunteer / Centro Cultural Islámico de ValenciaAwarded the Anthony Edwards Prize by St. Catherine's College Oxford to conduct research into the perception of muslim immigrants in the Valencia region
- Aug 2006 - Sept 2006Hispanic Affairs Intern / Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Education-
2006 - 2010University of OxfordBA in European and Middle Eastern Languages
Activities: Oxford University Judo Club (Committee member, Men's 2nds Captain) -
2007 - 2008Institut français du Proche-OrientArabic language, literature and politics
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2001 - 2006Shrewsbury School
Additional Information-
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Tweets
- Awesome-looking tool for managing your investments Going to have to check it out http://t.co/lI5SacCA #wayraMay 24, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Handbook for the effective young professional: #2 Networking http://t.co/9pLQe1XS How to be a horrid human being!May 23, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- All the tube lines now have their own twitter feeds. Very useful, now following @bakerloolineMay 23, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- I have just invested in a fund managed by a Superstitious Automated Robot that will trade the FTSE 100 for 1 yearMay 23, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Handbook for the effective young professional: #2 Networking - Beyond doubt, networking is one of the most... http://t.co/HW9ueWfq
- just followed all the prompts and installed new #fb messenger app for Windows. nope, still not turning chat on.May 18, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Right, decision made. No #facebook stock for me.May 18, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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Posts
- Handbook for the effective young professional: #2 Networking
Beyond doubt, networking is one of the most important pastimes of the effective young professional. Every party, social gathering, happening, meeting, shindig and encounter should be seen as an chance to snare unsuspecting individuals within your web of connections, from which you can then pluck the juiciest and most nutritional specimens to devour at your leisure.
Gotta catch ‘em all
Like a series of Pokemon or Top Trump cards, you should position the people you meet along a series of scales: Knowledge, Power, Connectedness and Datability. Interestingly, a high score for Connections does not necessarily indicate high social skills, as Knowledge does not automatically imply interesting conversation, so both of these factors should be considered as subsets of Datability.
As an indicator, Datability captures the natural affinity you have with an individual and spans from people you would nod to when passing in the corridor, to those with whom you exchange friendly banter to those who you might attempt to lustfully engage. But beware, it should not be used as the sole metric for determining who to include in your social circles as people who are physically and/or emotionally repellant (and therefore score low on Datability) can also be useful. Look no further than Dobby the house elf (low on Datability, but high on Knowledge and Connections), Gollum (high on Knowledge) and Mr Collins, the pompous clergyman from Pride & Prejudice (being a man of property, relatively high on Power, and his name dropping of Lady Catherine de Bourgh would also give him a middling Connections score).
Assessing potential hunting grounds
For casual gatherings, it may prove difficult to obtain specific information and the non-committal nature of Facebook RSVPs may hinder any attempt to predict the guest list, but, generally speaking, when assessing an invitation, you should be looking to achieve the highest possible return on invested time and to discard the rest.
A good return on invested time would result in either deeper or broader relations but, as we will discuss shortly, it is important to be even-handed, keeping both your existing network well-oiled and spreading your patronage evenly, not giving any one group too much of your attention. Investing in deepening existing relations is clearly a worthwhile pursuit, as you may uncover people and topics about which they may be able to provide greater knowledge at a later date, but this should not be at the expense of simultaneously finding new waters in which to fish. The decision to attend an event should be based on your response to the following set of questions:
1. Do you already have a close relationship with this friend/group of friends? No - 2; Yes - 3
2. Do they rank highly in any of the networking scales? Yes - go; No - don’t go.
3. Have you seen this friend or group of friends within the last 6 weeks? No-go; Yes - 4
4. Does it conflict with another event or would the time be better spent in the gym/sleeping? No - go; Yes - 5
5. Will there be an opportunity to meet new high-potentials? No - don’t go; Yes - go.
On Facebook you also have the ability to cast a look at responses to gauge the potential of an event. Generally speaking, all responses can be scaled down by one: a ‘Yes’ becomes a ‘Maybe’; a ‘Maybe’ becomes a ‘No’; and both a ‘No’ and an ‘Awaiting Response’ are synonymous with general disinterest, although a ‘No’ betrays a slightly more aggressive recoil at the thought of still being ‘friends’ with the invitee, as though suddenly catching a whiff of vomit on public transportation.
Talent scouting
The happening itself is something of a formality. After identifying a pool which you suspect will be teeming with interesting new people, your job is to fit in and come across as both natural and entertaining. Should you find yourself stuck in a corner with someone who scores low on all counts, do not be afraid to move on in search of fresher meat, using excuses such as “I’m just going to go the bathroom,” “I’m just going to refill my drink,” or “I’m just going to stand over here now.” In the case of identifying anyone that scores from medium to high on one or more category, it is imperative that you retain some identifiable information about them.
Game on
This brings us on to ‘the follow up’. Having succeeded in retaining a mental list of the most pertinent individuals (or skimming through the friend list/guest list of the originator of the event for someone who’s name rings the appropriate bells) the next step is to weave them as subtly and completely as possible into your digital identity. If this is done too quickly, the ‘digital you’ may supersede the ‘real you’ in characterising your future relations with this person; that is to say, you may accidentally come across as an over-zealous stalking egomaniac. But, at the other extreme, do not be shy; like a vampire, once let in, you have been given license to extract your counterpart’s lifeblood.
Datability should be used as the base indicator of how quickly to engage your target in follow-up conversation. Highly-datables with good scores in other areas should be contacted by Facebook private message a few days after the initial friending. Wall posts are too public, and any other medium sets the wrong tone. Friends and potential friends sit mid-way on the Datability scale, and private message is also the preferred vector, although the platform can be chosen according to context. With all those that feature on the spectrum of Datability, contact is initiated with a view to organising future face-to-face encounters.
Neutral datability (‘Neutrals’) with high scores in other areas should be followed up with public posts, perhaps sharing information on a topic of mutual interest. It is very important to make regular, casual contact with Neutrals that score highly on Connectedness so that (1) future contact does not come across as disingenuous (2) you sit atop their consciousness and may yourself be contacted, giving opportunities to further extend your web. However, Neutrals that score particularly highly on Power should be engaged sparingly, in times of need. On the whole, you will be unlikely to need face-to-face contact to retain this relationship. Exceptions exist where the Neutral in question scores particularly highly in any one or more other area and the relationship needs to be managed in person to reach full potential.
As a closing thought, you should also be considering how you yourself will be perceived along these scales. In all cases, it is imperative that (1) you engage individuals on a periodic basis to keep the connection alive and (2) you let no-one slip through the net, that you catalogue even the briefest of encounters, as only then will you have sufficient evidence to support however you may choose to position yourself in future.
- The many and mysterious ways of wiping your bottom
We perform bathroom rituals multiple times per day, yet it’s difficult to talk about them without either receiving beration for the unpleasant choice of conversation topic or descending into the lower echelons of toilet humour.
I was speaking with a friend who had recently returned from India and, having spent quite a bit of time in the Middle East myself, my curiosity drove the conversation to bathroom etiquette. No sooner had we started comparing notes than my eyes wandered to meet the disapproving glance of a woman sitting nearby who was just about to fill her mouth with some hefty German sausage. In the interests of knowledge and science and truth, we continued, unpurturbed.
The first hurdle which confronts any intrepid defecator is the nature of the vessel in which the soil is to be deposited. In the UK, at least, the same force behind our inclination to queue and our deference for weather systems has also led to the standardisation of the lavatory, so as to avoid any awkward encounters or misunderstandings and ensure that individuals can go about their business, what ever that may be, with the least amount of interpersonal friction.
But, in many ways, there is no-one less well prepared for the challenges of the wider world than the sedentary crapper. As I am sure many women will attest, cushioning the seat before initiation is an impractical and rather ludicrous attempt to civilise a process that is no different to what dogs do when they spread their back legs and lower their bums to the floor. Rather, we should cherish such proceedings as opportunities to reflect on our mammalian roots and marvel at our incredible precipitation from primordial slop.
Among those that embrace the true nature of humanity, the French are well known for their affinity with road-side ceramic squatting, the Russians favour a breeze block mounted straddle, whilst the methods employed by inhabitants of the countries in-between are as assorted as a box of chocolates (for want of a better metaphor). In fact, squatting actually opens up the recto-anal passageway and is less strenuous as a result.
The most fascinating part, however, is the after-party. I am often reminded of the film ‘Demolition Man’ in which Sylvester Stallone is defrosted to fight futuristic criminals but whose first foe is lurking in the water closet: “What?! You don’t know how to use the three seashells?” he is asked by an incredulous colleague. Whilst attending a Quran camp in the Atlas mountains I remember being lectured very specifically on the formalities of the Bucket method by a somber old sheikh with a pointy beard - (1) insert right hand into water-filled bucket beside pan (2) gently splash water from right hand to left hand (3) use left hand to cleanse self (4) rinse and repeat (NB) do *not* under any circumstances submerge left hand in bucket. With the darkness of my ignorance illuminated, only then was I truly able to relive myself.
Unfortunately no-one has yet been able to explain to me the approved technique for the Hose method (Syria, Jordan) nor the Sponge method (India), and numerous attempts and accounts suggest that the finer points of these techniques remain unconfirmed. At a time when we are constantly being encouraged to consider our environmental credentials, to save the rainforests by using iPads or to recycle every last scrap, it is alarming how reliant we have become on our bourgeois paper-based system, leading to utter bemusement when we find said paper to be lacking; the cause of calls of distress from women around the world (a massive generalisation, but men and small children tend to be more at home with their baser functions).
Surely the future lies with these alternative methods and we should be exploring them with more rigour. Imagine a world where everyone knew how to use the three seashells. In the meantime, with a shortage of research of which I am aware, all that I can say for sure is how grateful I am that I pee standing up.
- How I got fucked by my Buddhists
If you get too close to the alligators, you’re going to be eaten. Except, in this case, I’m going to replace alligators with a couple of 40-year old buddhist musicians living in a rather lovely flat in a posh part of NW London, and instead of eaten… actually, let’s keep eaten. I got eaten alive.
The woman seemed relatively normal. She stated the terms of the let, pointed out the appliances and issued a stern warning: “All I ask is that you are clean, respectful and tidy.” The public-school charm and British aversion to confrontation that had won me the hearts of friends’ mothers over the years would serve me well, I thought, and the long hours of my new job would allow me to keep interaction to a minimum. I just needed somewhere to sleep.
“We had to ask the last person to leave because they weren’t tidy.”
I pictured the the room I had just seen - big, white, high ceilings, bathed in light, straight out of an interior design magazine - smeared with faeces. I’m sure I can manage tidy, I thought. And there was to be no contract as it was such a short period of time, she explained. I was desperate for somewhere to live, so I took it.
Over the next few days I started to notice that this couple was a bit odd. The man had explained that, besides the 14 different jobs he had been fired from, he had also been a Buddhist monk for ten years so, when recounting their idiosyncrasies to people, I referred to them as ‘my buddhists’. I could forgive the strumming of a guitar or some late-night singing; it was quite nice to be serenaded to sleep. There were no bowls, but I could eat cereals out of a plastic microwave-meal container. They had no food in the fridge, but maybe they just ate out a lot. The TV disappeared at the end of the first week, the man’s bike at the end of the second. They spoke of kids, but there were no photos, no pictures, no personal artefacts at all, in fact. Just the bare white walls of an insane asylum.
One day, I reported on Twitter:
“Got a txt from 1 of my buddhists asking to tidy my room cus it had strange odour. explained that wet clothes on radiator often smell funny.”
They had no clothes line and no tumble drier, so I had draped my clothes over the radiator and they smelt like wet clothes drying on a radiator. My buddhists had been in my room, so they could probably see that there were wet clothes drying on a radiator too. In fact, my buddhists themselves were drying wet clothes on a radiator and they were emitting a smilar odour. I thanked them for their observation and promised to deal with it when I got home. That wasn’t the end to their odd behaviour:“my buddhists have now taken away all of the loo paper and replaced it with Caffe Nero napkins. it’s like bottom purgatory.”
“One of my Buddhists has just confessed to drinking my bottle of wine. I passive-aggressively swept crumbs onto floor to show displeasure.”
“today i paid the rent, one week early, and my buddhists went straight out and bought an electric guitar. can’t help but feel robbed.”
“For the last 2 days I have walked into the kitchen at 6am to turn on the hot water to find 1 of my buddhists sitting in the dark, wide awake”
“My Buddhists have replaced the contents of the fairy liquid bottle with shower gel. Now my food tastes like me :( “
Then I received a bill, slipped under my door, for £80 to cover “gas, water, electricity and other stuff”. After just over a month with them without internet, TV or anything else that could pass for domestic niceties slash necessities, I thought this was a bit steep. I questioned the “other stuff” and she said that it was “anything else they felt like”. Odd, but, in line with rule #2 (be respectful), I paid up.With three weeks notice, I finally told them I was leaving. They asked me to keep my room tidy so they could show people around. I had seen pictures of how the room looked on the internet and they had written what seemed like an appraisal on the bottom of my previous rent receipt - “v. tidy, respectful and clean” - so I felt pretty confident I knew what good looked like and I tidied accordingly. On Friday morning, running late for work, I got out of the shower and the man shouted to me that the vacuum was outside my room and could I clean my room. I put my shoes in the cupboard and squared my books on the desk, to put the cherry on the top of an otherwise tidy room before apologising that I didn’t have time to do a full vacuum as my train was leaving in 17 mins. I asked for more notice next time. He replied “There are going to be people coming every day”.
- Well, can you let me know the day bef..
- EVERY DAY. THERE ARE PEOPLE COMING EVERY DAY.When I got back at 6pm, I walked into the blank room that I had seen six weeks previously, now purged of any trace of its former occupant. There was a post-it note on one of my bags: “Your stuff is in the suitcase.” I sat on the chair and tried to work out what was happening. I set upon the following course of action:
1) Apologise for the misunderstanding this morning
2) Explain that I was very uncomfortable with them moving all of my things; tidy is one thing, but an empty room is something else entirelyOf course, my plan assumed that I would have an opportunity to speak. I didn’t. I asked her not to shout. She shouted. I said that I was a very reasonable person. She wouldn’t reason. Her rage grew exponentially the longer I stood there. First she said that I had to leave at the end of the month, that I couldn’t extend by the extra week I had asked for. Then, without taking a breath, she said I had forfeited my deposit. Then I had to leave today. Then she got her husband who started chucking my stuff out the door. Then they issued me with a 30-minute ultimatum.
“Get the fuck out”, “It’s my way or the highway”, “You haven’t done an honest day’s work in your entire life,” were some of the choice clichés that this unemployed ex-monk screamed at my face, shortly before joining his wife at throwing more of my possessions at my sister, who had just arrived and was calling the police. As they shut the door on both of us, I sat on their doormat for a further 20 minutes pleading with them to let me check that I had everything from the room. Through the letterbox I saw a hand push a speaker into the corridor and angle it towards the front door. “Hope you enjoy the music,” he said. It was the album playing that they had been recording for the last six weeks.
Standing in the middle of the street, surrounded by all my belongings, I realised that I had probably been just a little bit naive. I had been living without a contract in the spare room of some unemployed musicians who were desperately short of cash, and who were clearly looking for any excuse to keep my deposit and rent out the room again. Not only that, but they had pulled off the same scam with their previous tenant and others before that. What total fucking bastards.
- Handbook for the effective young professional: #1 time management
The rules of the 21st century dictate that if you’re not filling every hour with some sort of productive endeavour then you are a bad person.Besides work, you are not entitled to call yourself a ‘young professional’ until you have at least two side projects on which, like gym membership, you spend lumps of money to keep going and promise to dedicate more time to, but inveitably let languish until spurred on by occasional pangs of guilt.
To bring your waking hours as close to 100% efficiency as possible, you must develop an acute awareness of the passing of time. This means replacing limitless television couch-potatoism with fixed-length media consumption, enjoying foreign-language films (approx 129 mins) or individual episodes from series (45 mins), in additon to quantifying all other activities: jogging on treadmill (30 mins); commute (58 mins); making toast (4 mins).
With the drive and self-loathing of a hockey mom, you must ensure that your extra-curricular schedule is brimming with personal development tasks. Fulfilled or unfulfilled, it is very important that they are written down on one or more ‘to do’ lists. Breaking your self-imposed jobs into postit-sized chunks can be very helpful, as can minute-managing concentration techniques such as the 25 min ‘Pomadoro’, or positive reinforcement techniques like ‘Habit Judo’. Progress can be tracked in a Google Docs spreadsheet, the formatting of which counts as a productive endeavour in itself.
Next time: Networking
- Bring back the curtsey!
Why are the British incapable of greeting people? Kisses for the girls, handshakes for the guys. It’s very simple. Why do all the other Europeans seem to cope perfectly well when I find myself, time after time, hesitating to introduce myself purely because I don’t know how formal or informal, how gender specific and how continental to make my salutations.The upshot is that, at larger events, I end up in one of two situations: I avoid everyone until I have been formally introduced; like a Jane Austen novel, I loiter at the edges of a room until finally imploring the host, in hushed tones, to present me to a certain group, uncovering individuals’ rank and relation before settling on the appropriate course of action; or I charge around, catching people off guard as I thrust out my hand like a bayonet.
When meeting female friends of friends, I am totally lost. I go in for a single left-hand-side kiss, stretch out my arms for the casual embrace, before upscaling my ambition with a Spanish twin-cheek plus sound effects. My shot at gold inevitably falls short and I end up molesting a semi-stranger. To overcome this, I have started narrating my actions - “Let me shake your hand!”, “I’m going to come over and give you a hug!” - much like you would do when dealing with old people or mad people.
Even with male friends who haven’t quite reached the ‘man hug’ stage, I start with a handshake that, if successful, awkwardly morphs into a ‘bro shake’ with back pat, but more often ends up in me tugging back and forth on their wrist. Sometimes, to avoid the stress, I just wave at them, as though the half metre separating us were actually a very wide and busy pedestrianised street, or start including them in the conversation as though they’d been there the whole time.
There are multiple forces responsible for this chaos: at work we behave like gung-ho Americans, with their symbolically-charged power shakes; at home we are open-minded Europeans who are happy to display their bonds of affection; but at heart we are overly-reserved prudes from the 18th century. It’s just not cricket.
So how do we solve this problem? How do we overcome this national identity crisis whilst maintaining sufficient distance from people so as not to seem inappropriate? I think it’s obvious: we need to make curtsies and bows cool again.
I’ll let you know how I get on.
- What makes the perfect pad of paper?
This is no trivial matter. I am convinced that the type of paper I write on directly influences the quality of ideas that are produced. Some of my best thoughts have materialised on the back of a white, rectangular envelope. The torn edges remove the pressure for perfection demanded by a pristine sheet of starch-stiff printer paper. The narrow channel helps direct the flow, but the trickle invariably dries up before the idea has a chance to well up and burst its banks. And the little plastic window makes a distracting noise.
Moleskine notebooks are something else entirely. Their elastic strip reminds the owner that only the finest thoughts are permitted to cross their threshold. Pertly bound, they have an arrogant air of entitlement; the chosen vessel of Picasso and Hemingway, they give the distinct impression that they would rather remain closed and not have to put up with any more of your drivel, thank you very much.
Post-its? Loyal companions, but hardly a complete solution. An iPad? The lack of friction is disconcerting, there’s no requirement to wrestle with your imagination in order to refine your words and determine which ones deserve to take physical form.
The other day, whilst browsing for stationary, I thought, at last, that I had found my perfect writing partner. A transparent cover for protection, delicate grey lines which didn’t appear too constraining, a slight ocre tint to take the edge off. It was solid, yet accommodating, but it turned out to be a little too capricious. The pages crumpled, fell out at random and, in the end, it just couldn’t hold its own against the contents of my bag. It was not meant to be.
And so my search continues. Any recommendations would be very much appreciated…
- Why I hate flying
I have travelled 19,566 miles by air so far in the last 11 months, according to my Kayak account. Besides the usual stress of queues as long as a silk-road caravan, orgy-like invasions of personal space and having to haul around a suitcase which I have packed so full that closing it takes more time than the act of packing itself - with more shirts than a Uniqlo store and an insufficient supply of underwear - the knockout blow is landed by a bun-sporting airhostess demanding nasally over the cabin tannoy that I be denied my only source of escapism.
You want me to surrender my phone and/or kindle and/or iPad and/or music? Seriously, what the hell?
A 60-a-day habit
I’m a data junkie, I know that much. Like the other 27% of the UK population who own a smartphone, disconnecting me is like taking away my cigarettes mid-puff whist I’m successfully sustaining a 60-a-day habit. At least smokers have the concession of fake cigarettes and nicotene patches.Worst of all, the airlines don’t even explain why. I’m already herded up, bundled into a metal container surrounded by terrified strangers with all my possessions removed, subject to the sadistic whims of uniforms clones for an unknown amount of time, tortured aurally with incessant sales pitches and the low drone of the engines. Forcing me to cut off my last link to the outside world pushes flying from mere sensory deprivation torture to a verifiable crime against humanity. In fact, the CIA should seriously consider outsourcing the extraordinary rendition of terrorists to Ryanair.
The American dream
Over the pond, however, citizens are living the American dream, or at least my vision of it. On Virgin America flights all passengers are granted their unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness thanks to a generous helping of on-board wifi, and Australia’s Quantas has their in-flight entertainment system hooked into iPads which they hand out.
It’s my party…
I decided to try and get to the bottom of this by reading the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s report on personal devices in airplanes. There are two different categories: first are ‘intentional emitters’ like phones. They basically conclude that the only way to work out how much of a threat intentional emitters pose to airplane communications is to test them all, which would be next to impossible. Then are the ‘unintentional emitters’, like laptops and ipod touches or kindles, that are souped up with wifi. Similarly, there’s no way of knowing how much interference is coming from unintentional emitters because they’re emitting different waves all over the shop, but they’re probably not going to be broadcasting much and they’re very short-range, so let’s leave them be so long as they’re in ‘airplane mode’. As to switching off your music etc. at take off and landing, well these are deemed to be the most ‘sensitive’ parts of the flight, so they just want to make sure that you’re paying attention.
With so many different configurations and potential (but unproven) threats I guess that explains the blanket response; it’s the regulator’s party and they can cry if they want to. Having said that, those planes on which you can make calls and facebook-stalk your friends as you pass over their houses are specially equipped to protect systems but costs lots to equip, so that’s a different story.
The solution? 1) push for more wifi-friendly airplanes by co-ordinating a mass of strongly-worded letters to airlines 2) convince phone and device manufacturers to test all their devices on airplanes and create some sort of regulatory standard for doing it or 3) leave your phone on and hide your headphones when the air-hostess walks past, cus the chances are that it’s not going to make the slightest bit of difference.
- QR Codes are Genius
A friend posted this message on Facebook the other day:
SERIOUSLY! What is the point of QR codes? They are difficult to scan, and they only ever have a URL. Why not just write the URL? Fad much?
And everyone seems to agree, QR codes are crap.Technology journalists hate them
As my friend’s comment and the ensuing Facebook debate demonstrates, techies hate them. Just check out the huge number of articles posted on tech blogs to see what ‘people in the know’ think of QR codes, like this article on Antisocial Media’s F**k you Friday.No-one scans them
They’re really difficult to use. Let’s pretend we were misguided enough to actually want to scan one:- See QR code on advert
- Open camera app only to realise that it won’t scan (15 secs)
- Open App store and search for QR code scanner (15 secs)
- Download app. You’re probably in a busy area where lots of ads are placed, so the download will take a while (1min 30)
- Open app
- Mess around trying to align the code with the camera (15 secs)
- Scanner finally recognises code and opens browser window
- Browser loads very slowly as you’re still loitering in front of a billboard in the same busy area (30 secs)
- Regular website appears, or perhaps a promotional website designed for a computer, not a mobile
- You put your phone back in your pocket.No wonder only 6% of people even use them and they’re all young men anyway (which makes me wonder why churches are putting them on their ads. Must be an American thing….)
They appear in ridiculous places
Not only are they difficult to use, but they appear in the most ridiculous of places. My three favourites examples are (1) the London underground, where there’s no network signial for most of the journey so you wouldn’t be able to visit the linked page anyway (2) on a Facebook advert where, rather than enduring the laborious process detailed above, I’d probably rather just click the link and (3) on the back of a moving bus.On top of all that, they now even give you viruses.
An advertiser’s wet dream
Despite all this, QR codes seem to be appearing more and more frequently, spiralling out of control, like many internet fads, precisely because they’re crap (think Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black). But if you think about it, the mere fact of putting a QR code on you advert pretty much guarantees you attention. Apparently, 72% of smartphone users are likely to recall an ad with a QR code, even if most of them never actually scan the thing. Basically, they’re an advertiser’s wet dream and I think it works like this:
Techies spend more time looking at the ads just to rant about how rubbish QR codes are, so that’s a win for the advertiser. After all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Non-techies think the company looks more ‘digital’ and ‘down with the kids’, plus it reminds them of their shiny new smartphone – we’re talking about the sort of people who work in marketing departments/advertising agencies and probably requested them on the advert in the first place, much to the disgust of the techies.
The techies tell the non-techies how rubbish QR codes are, so the non-techies end up spotting them when they’re out shopping and coo over them, perhaps even spending the extra 2mins 45 trying to scan them, thereby perpetuating the cycle.
So, as much as I hate to say it, you can’t deny that QR codes are kinda brilliant.
- Confessions of a Data Junkie
Yes, I’m an addict. I see that now. It’s taken me years to get to this stage, to finally acknowledge that I have a problem. I get cold sweats at the thought of losing coverage when I go on the London Underground. I twitch nervously when, sitting in a meeting, I feel the buzz of a message arriving in my pocket and my mind darts around as I imagine the world trying to reach out to me. I’m desperate not to miss a heartbeat, a nanosecond, a byte. Unable to resist I take my phone from my pocket, light up the screen and draw deeply on the raw, unfiltered data. I become serene as my cravings are suppressed by the dense cloud of information. The Internet has become the unrestrained dealer of my insatiable desire. I’m a data junkie.
As with most addictions, it took someone on the outside to force me to take a good, hard look at myself. On a work trip to Germany my iPhone was stolen from my pocket whilst walking through the airport. I was left stranded. No Google Maps to locate the police station, no email to check the address of my hotel, no phone book to call for help, no Twitter to broadcast my despair, no Facebook to receive condolences and commiserations from friends. Alone in a foreign land, far away from home, I was cast into data exile.
I now know what it must be like for an abstaining smoker, or even worse, a herion addict who has been abducted by the men in white coats and subject to sensory deprivation in the blinding-white cell of a rehab clinic. Over the course of my three-day business trip I was forced to give up my 30-a-day habit (megabytes, that is) and go completely cold turkey.
First came the disorientation, confusion and a consuming rage. Where is it? Why haven’t I felt it vibrate? Rather than enjoying the usual pleasures of executive hospitality or getting a good night’s sleep, my mind raced over every person I had met, spoken to or even brushed past that day, sure of identifying the culprit. ‘I’m going to kill the bastard’, ‘I NEED GODDAM INTERNET ACCESS, FOR F*CK SAKE’, I screamed inside, wanting to bash my head against the wall in the hope of seeing the twitter birds circling my head.
Then came depression and withdrawal. Reaching for my pocket to pat the reassuring bump of my iPhone yet again. A friend commented that I had lost my mojo. Without the 24-hour tickertape feeding directly into my brain, I no longer had anything interesting to say, no jokes to make, no chit-chat to make, which heightened my sense of isolation and depression.
Then on the third day I started to emerge from the tunnel. No longer did I sneak every available opportunity to feel for my pocket and dowse the roaring dragon of my addiction. I started to notice people on the tube; gaze out of windows, letting my imagination run free; I could enter a room without my eyes darting to find the nearest power socket; no longer did I strain to gauge the width of the walls and the topography of the area to work out if I’d have enough signal to survive. I felt my blood pressure lower and I could already concentrate better. I was finally free.
The next morning, jumping off the plane in London, I went straight to the phone shop. My insurance covered the theft. Phone in bag, I walked out of the store and headed home. I pulled out my laptop and plugged in the USB cable. Just then, I realised I had a fundamental, possibly life-altering, choice to make: You click on the blue iTunes icon – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. I could impose digital amnesia and live my life controlled by the machines. You press the red ‘cancel’ button – you stay in Wonderland and see how deep the rabbit-hole goes, take a chance, make a dash for freedom, live a life free fr…
… BOLLOCKS. Auto-sync.
- Road rage on the information superhighway
In 1911 London traffic went at 8 miles per hour. In 2011 it still goes at 8 miles per hour. True, we may have well-surfaced roads, sophisticated traffic control and significantly faster cars but, at the end of the day, we’re not getting anywhere fast. In fact, the only thing that’s changed is that we expect to get there faster, so we get all the more angry when we get held up.
So I started to think about how the Internet, the great information superhighway, is exactly the same. For as long as I can remember, it’s been about speed: how fast can I get to my destination? In the early days it was just grateful to have a car. Sure it was slow to get around but, to be honest, there weren’t very many places for me to go so I was pretty content. Traffic was light, but my ride couldn’t have gone any faster if I wanted it to.
Fast-forward ten years and I’m driving a digital Aston Martin. In fact, most of my friends are driving Aston Martins too. The government has committed to spending millions on making the roads wider and utopia, they say, is around the corner: super-fast lanes that everyone can drive down whenever they want wherever they are and wherever they’re going.
But it’s a big fat lie.
Everyone knows that no matter how wide you make the roads (bandwidth), they’ll always be full and the more people that want access to one particular road, the slower the traffic becomes (contention ratio). It’s true that if we didn’t broaden them, then we wouldn’t be able to take any more cars anyway, even if we wanted to. As more people flock to the cities of the Internet, without expanding out the network, rush-hour traffic would only get slower for longer, ending up in one god-awful jam that stretches for miles and lasts for days, like Beijing’s 9-day tailback in summer 2010.
In fact, the more people promise me faster and faster speeds, the more likely I am to lash out at someone, or mow down an innocent pedestrian when the stress gets too much (some poor Starbucks customer at the moment).
What’s the solution? What about a congestion tax. It didn’t work for London, which, in 2003, imposed a charge on vehicles entering the city centre during peak hours and, within months, reverted to its customary 8 miles per hour as people got used to paying.
What about toll roads? Great for those willing to stump up the cash, tempted by the prospect of being able to drive as fast as you like on big empty roads, but not so much for the rest of us and not really scalable. If all the roads were toll roads, then we’d all end up paying and we’d have the same problem.
Priority lanes for cars which run on a certain type of fuel, or car-sharers or ambulances, or police cars or something – that is, prioritise certain types of traffic which fulfill certain conditions? Hmm… that could work, so say those who are arguing against ‘net neutrality’. But, given that this is a global network were talking about, how will we ever agree on what to prioritise and who has the authority to police it? What about corrupt officials who decide to flout the system? Or mafias that work out how to hack the network and can bump you up the queue for a fee (I’m looking at you, broadband providers).
Ok, i’ve probably exhausted that metaphor, but the point remains: we may get told that next generation fibre networks, LTE, 4G or whatever will be the golden bullet that solves all our capacity woes, but the truth is that as soon as there’s greater bandwidth we’re just going to fill it with HD films, live TV streaming and video chat. The future may look bright, but the sorry truth is that it’s going to be just as congested as it is now.
- Search, Social And Serendipity: Internet Anarchy Goes Mainstream
Obvious statement number 1: Facebook and Google are at war. They’ve taken the fight global, enlisting the help of hundreds of millions of users to determine who will own the Internet.
For Google, it’s all about search – indexing the world’s information so that you and I can find the tiniest needle in a 13.7 billion-straw haystack (the estimated number of indexed webpages as of February 2011, according to WolframAlpha).
Since Facebook’s launch, it has subtly morphed from “a tool that helps people understand what’s going on with the people around them”(Mark Zuckerberg, 2006) to the cornerstone of the social web, where people can discovering information “not just through links to web pages [a la Google] but also from the people and things they care about.” (Zuckerberg, 2010)
This is a battle between the search algorithm and the social graph over how we sort information and, with the world now being documented in real-time, the question of how we overcome ‘data overload’ and sift through everything to extract the nuggets we actually care about is fundamental.
The mind of the collective
The outcome of all this is that it’s becoming easier and easier to find exactly what you’re looking for. Not only do algorithms learn your preferences to return the best results, but every search and piece of identity you part with contributes towards the mind of the collective, so that election results can be accurately predicted before voting has happened and work out your chances of catching flu before you’ve even sneezed. Day by day, we are perfecting our ability to see the future. So Eric Schmit chillingly put it, “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next” (Wall Street Journal, 2010)The third ‘S’
But where’s the fun in that? As everything becomes more and more ordered, whether through search or social, a new world view is emerging – a third ‘S’ – which is gaining massive momentum: Serendipity.Internet anarchy is nothing new, in fact it’s as old as the web juggernauts that are so keen to impose (and monetize) order. 4Chan, launched in 2003, is the closest thing to net Darwinism. Completely random ideas swill around its forum pages until one grows, bulges and finally spills over, flattening entire urbanizations made up of respectable internet organizations. The 4Chan army, Anonymous, wreaked havoc on YouTube by uploading vast amounts of porn disguised as children’s videos; they knocking Visa and MasterCard offline; and, most recently, they took down the entire PlayStation network. Digital thrill seeking has gone to new heights as people try to assert their individuality and break out of these automatically imposed organisational structures, but it has always been the naughty outsider. Of course, the only reason these companies have got so big is because of the enormous returns they can make, which poses a bigger question: how do you make money out of randomness?
Hunger for Serendipity
Now it looks like Serendipity has finally come in from the cold; it’s found a way to go mainstream. Nowhere is the hunger for serendipity more obvious than in the explosive growth of Groupon which, after only 18 months of existence, became the fastest growing company in the world and is now valued at $25 billion. Its newly announced ‘GrouponNow’, a mobile app that matches deals to your exact location, doesn’t try to answer questions like “where’s the nearest sushi restaurant?” (Search) or “who kno
ws where I can get sushi?” (Social) but, instead, revels in randomness. How else would I have found myself with a booking next weekend for champagne and sandwiches in a 5 star hotel, or have gone for a fish pedicure? And, of course, Groupon is taking 50% of every penny I spend.
At the same time, Wired magazine described Badoo as ‘the biggest social network you’ve never heard of’, with an equally meteoric upwards trajectory. Rather than trying to connect you to people you know, it does the ex
act reverse. Like Luke Rhinehart in the cult classic ‘The Dice Man’, you put your faith in the dice (a little button at the top of the screen) and see what opportunities pop up. You can then pay money to improve your chances.
This cake is split three ways: Search, Social and Serendipity. Although Google has desperately tried to make it’s slice a bit bigger, its failure to buy Groupon for $6 billion back in December 2010 is exactly the same as its failure to ‘do’ social – its vision of the world is just too blinkered. Google wants to index the world’s information; Facebook wants to make it more social; the rising agents of Serendipity want to throw all that in their faces, and they’ve now found a way to make fistfuls of cash in the process.
