A few months ago I was invited to speak on BBC Radio 4’s flagship consumer affairs show, You and Yours, alongside Professor Nigel Shadbolt, to discuss the government’s Midata scheme proposals The initiative is gaining significant momentum as consumer affairs minister, Jo Swinson, waded in on the debate by threatening to take legal action against […]
Pew Research Center has just released a new research study – Younger Americans’ Reading and Library Habits. It provides a fascinating look at the behaviours of young adults and their attitudes towards reading and libraries. On the face of it, this research may seem to be of little relevance to the UK publishing market, but […]
How Random House and Penguin should handle the imminent amalgamation of their IT systems. In a deal announced earlier this week, Pearson and Bertelsmann are set to own around 25% of the global publishing market when the publishers Penguin and Random House merge in the latter half of 2013. Random House owner Bertelsmann will own […]
It’s been a torrid year for RBS. A few months ago we blogged about its catastrophic IT outage, which threw the spotlight on to how many banks are reliant on antiquated IT systems. And earlier this week this issue edged back into the limelight with the announcement that Santander was stepping away from a deal […]
Last week, Amazon announced that it was extending its controversial e-book lending scheme Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to the UK. In its current state, Kindle Lending Library is a value added service to Amazon Prime, the premium delivery service for which the e-commerce giant charges £49 a year here in the UK. It allows users […]
O’Reilly’s Radar has just published a really fascinating interview with Marie Wallace, a social analytics strategist from IBM. She believes that social networks in search of a monetization strategy should turn themselves into data analytics businesses rather than concentrate on serving advertising to their users. It’s certainly an interesting thesis, but it also made me […]
There’s one sure fire way of telling that a technology has crossed the floor from being an intriguing idea to a future giant of IT – and that’s earning a place on Gartner’s Hype Cycle. This happened with Big Data last year, as Gartner added it to its hype cycle as a ‘technology trigger’ (the […]
Yesterday the UK government announced that it might force supermarkets and internet companies to release the personal data they hold on individual customers, in a shake-up of Britain’s data protection laws. The move is part of a new initiative called Midata which has some pretty ambitious aims. It proposes to make it possible for consumers […]
Earlier this week, Google gave us a fascinating insight into how the search giant sees its future when it announced it would be buying the US travel guide publisher, Frommer’s, from Wiley. The price tag on the deal is tiny by tech standards at only $25m (compare this to the $1bn that Facebook paid for […]
Pew Research Center has just released a new research study – Younger Americans’ Reading and Library Habits. It provides a fascinating look at the behaviours of young adults and their attitudes towards reading and libraries. On the face of it, this research may seem to be of little relevance to the UK publishing market, but […]