KleinBritannien

I was thinking today about the 700bn promised by the US government to help avert further meltdown of the financial sector.  It reminded me of the carnage in the web world following the dot-com crash.  According to wikipedia, the fall-out of these events wiped out 5 trillion of market value.  Nobody knows how much the credit crunch will end up costing.  In march this year Goldman guessed at 1.2 trillion.  But then Goldman cashed in their chips today in order to take advantage of the US government’s generosity as lender of last resort, so they’ve probably since decided that they underestimated a little.  In the DotCom meltdown there was no lender of last resort, you went bust, wiping out any money you had invested in your firm and all your shareholder’s money with it.  But of course, this isn’t just about the initial losses.  Killing the financial system has the unpleasant side-effect of making it difficult for other parts of the economy to carry on functioning.  After the DotComs went bust, money could be diverted into safer havens like, say, into property…

But this post isn’t directly about the banks or about real-estate, it’s really about another form of negative equity.  Bailing out the banks has another unpleasent side-effect, namely that of ploughing tax-payer’s money into city bonuses.  The government rescue plan ends up looking like some kind of regressive taxation or reverse robin-hood income re-distribution.   It’s really an extension of what George Bush started with his tax-cutting programme a few years ago.  The average annual income of the top 1% of earners in the USA recently passed the 1m mark.  Among those 1%, there are undoubtedly many who will welcome the intervention of the US Treasury, not only on the grounds of its being the right decision for the country’s economy, but also because that 700bn is effectively heading their way (ok, I’m exaggerating a bit, but it isn’t that far off).  This top 1% also account for roundabout 20% of the overall household income (at least this was the score a couple of years ago).  I read some more detailed data on Friday which was forwarded to me by a colleague (he forwarded it because it showed that digital media consumption in the top 20% income bracket now surpasses traditional channels like TV).  But the point which is relevant to this rant is that according to the data, there is segment in the US which consists of peope with average earnings over 850k a year and liquid assets were in excess of 3.5m.  And this segment contains around about 1m people.  In other words, this lot are worth 850bn a year, at least.

Now, if I was an american, I would be thinking, “Hey, I’m a fan of free enterprise and I hate regulation and beurocracy as much as the next man, so guys, lets just do us a deal here.  We’ll use our collective spending power of more than 8 trillion a year to bail out the system in the short term but you’ve made the best of this system in the past, so really, you should be paying over the odds for keeping it alive.  You pay us back at 10% a year for the next 10 ten years and we’ll call it quits”.  In actual fact, all they need to do is reverse the cuts that George handed out to 1m+ earners a few years ago and they’re done.  Actually, this has quite a nice symmetry to it. 

We have been doing a lot of work in the last 6 months to improve QS processes in the agency.  One of the things we started on last year was using the Selenium test framework to automate functional and regression testing.  We use it to complement automated unit test suites by batching end-to-end tests via a web browser.

The thing is that even with browser-driven tests, you can’t check the accuracy of the visual layouts as represented in the full range of OS/Browser combinations commonly used.  We have been working on an app which allows you to do just that.  The app was developed by one of ND’s lead developer’s Martin Preis and it can help at every stage of the development lifecyle: from template build (using it’s own lightweight templating engine) through to live regression testing (via integration with Selenium).   Here is a white paper explaining how it works.

Surface is getting very hot right now.  I met with Briand Sanderson from the Surface team last Friday and we talked about how to bring the technology into the digital marketing space in Europe.  There are going to be some big announcements from Microsoft very soon about Surface availability, which will surely heat the already fiery interest on this technology.

Aside from digital marketing applications of the technology, I was talking to none other than my dad the other day about possible use-cases in the maritime environment (he works for the UK maritime charting agency).  It seems to me that Surface might well end up as the must-have for the Roman Abramovic’s of this world (to say nothing of Paul Allen).  If you are the owner of a superyacht - your chart table has just gotta be a Surface computer I reckon.

You can now create your own synths using MS Photosynth:

http://photosynth.net/default.aspx

Also interesting is PhotoZoom which allows you to use Silverlight’s deep zoom technology (formerly known as Seadragon and the zoomy part of photosynth):

http://photozoom.mslivelabs.com

It’s only a matter of time before these all get merged into Virtual Earth so that 3D models are tied to their geographic locations and can be browsed via Silverlight.  Actually a pretty good answer to Google’s Street View I think.

I recently put together a laundry list of technical trends in the digital marketing space.

I’ve been giving some thought to a concept which might try to demonstrate some of these ideas.  The plan is to develop a Surface application which mashes up social media, the multitouch UI paradigm and some mobile technologies.

I will hopefully have something to show along those lines in the next few weeks.

Problem:

You want to change the user experience based on a user’s profile.

Solution:

Define a set of alternative templates which reflect the different layout, structure or style variations you need.  Tie these template options to specific profile data via rules.  Don’t forget to define a default.

Examples:

Forces

Data: Define the user profile data attributes required

Options: Define possible attribute values (preferred values)

Presentation: Define possible template outputs

Rules: Define logic/rules linking values to template definitions

Limitations:

The template selector concerns itself only with the switching between various different layout options.  It does not allow for selection/rendering of content.

The Brigitte Young Miss community went live last week, check it out.  The community is based on the concept of a collection of virtual flat-shares.  Technically, it is most interesting for the front end work: lots of Flash and AJAX.

Problem:

You want to play back to the user some information that has been previously saved.

Solution:

Define the information you want to show.  Define decorators for formatting this information.

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I’ve worked on a few web projects involving personalisation.  One of the hardest parts is building a consensus across interdisciplinary teams about what personalisation is, and how it should be applied within the context of a specific site.  Creatives, technologists, business analysts and marketeers all come at the problem from different angles and the lack of common language makes defining requirements a nightmare.  In this kind of situation, a “pattern language” can help.  By referring to commonly understood design patterns, different stakeholders can interact with oneanother to specify requirements and design appropriate solutions successfully.

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Denise Leonard from Oliver Wyman recently invited me to take part in a study they are doing on content targetting.  Their focus is mainly on identifying opportunities for raising CPM via targetting digital media, but it got me thinking about how personalisation and behavioural targetting are enjoying something of a comeback in web projects these days too.  Back at the turn of the last decade, personalisation was hyped as the next “killer app” (remember those?) and people talked a lot about how marketing would all be 1:1 in the digital future.  As with many of those early-day prophesies, it has taken a lot longer to come only somewhat true.

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