James Fowler
Hispano-arabist, tech evangelist and strategy analyst
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Info
- Hispano-arabist, tech evangelist & strategy analystTelecommunications | Madrid Area, Spain, ESExperience
- Sept 2011 - PresentStrategy Analyst / Telefonica- Member of Corporate Strategy team reporting to Telefonica Group CEO
- 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.
- Jul 2010 - Sept 2011Strategy Analyst / Telefónica UKStrategy Analyst in Product & Portfolio Strategy
- 2009 - 2009Social media and online marketing / 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 2006Intern / 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-
Websites:
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Honors:Late scholar of St. Catherine's College, Oxford. Late academic scholar of Shrewsbury School, Shrewsbury.
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Photos
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Tweets
- “Designers are the future of product creation,” not engineers. http://t.co/FZgQ2Hk1Feb 22, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- This idea made me smile. Home cooked food delivered to you by the chef. http://t.co/EJTOFC2X Going to try this as soon as I get home.
- According to #RescueTime I spent nearly 7 hours last week inside Powerpoint. That seems quite restrained, really.
- It's a Friday night. What better time to appreciate the new Windows logo. http://t.co/GxTZvvrn
- New Spanish govt declared end to random public holidays mid week to increase productivity. After 2 month review, they are changing 1 day.
- Would Apple ever buy Twitter? Would solve Social in an instant and would def help them out with Advertising... #WhatIdBuyWith100Billion
- iMessage for Mac? Can we *please* have a #WhatsApp equivalent, and switch the phone number for a username?
- Thanks Reed Hastings for listing a whole bunch of pirate video sites, i've not tried some of those (Check out Slide 38) http://t.co/U79RFXYz
- Know what would make me buy an HTC? make phone look good and kill Sense UI. Wait, or just do what Samsung did and copy iPhones.
- Read that HTC is working on a Spotify rival. First Beats headphones, now Beats audio too? http://t.co/1GJ4Oo3p
- Just downloaded #Clear for iPhone. UX reminds me of Windows Phone. Really slick to use, but not sure it can replace #WunderList.
- would help if i gave the right URL http://t.co/NmKj2GmD #NicestPlaceOnTheInternet
- long day at the office, valentine's day plans postponed. this really cheered me up. def the #NicestPlaceOnTheInternet http://t.co/Raj9Zsuv
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Posts
- 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 F**king 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.
