Digital Appendix

Products, digital and technology.

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Telefonica #28

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The Internet of Things is really complicated

Ah peripherals. Twenty years ago the preserve of a simple keyboard and mouse. If you were lucky perhaps a printer and an external disc drive.

In the world of the Windows PC, this was all a rather simple 1:1 connection. You connected your printer to your PC and printed things. Your printer didn’t really need an open API so that it could share its inner thoughts with your mouse.

Linear computer and accessory relationships

Now the things that we connect to our phones are not just extra hardware, they are increasingly hardware (like a wearable) working with software (one app with an API) within software (another app with an API) within software (iOS or Android).

Complex smartphone, app and ‘things’ relationships (almost too complicated to draw)

That is a big chain to maintain, particularly when increasingly the apps are not all written by the owners of the ecosystems (Apple and Google) but by 3rd party developers.

Take Jawbone for instance. It is a band with a bluetooth connection to your phone. Simple enough, right?

But it can be integrated with over 20 additional apps. Each of these embed themselves within the Jawbone app, drawing through appropriate information into your feed.

So if you go for a run, Strava or Runkeeper updates your Jawbone profile. And vice versa - Jawbone updates Strava. And the data comes from a device which is connected by Bluetooth. In combination with that, both apps are uploading the stats to Apple’s Health app.

Oh, and if you have an iPhone 6, your phone is also collecting data on your movement which it’s also cross-referencing with the data you’ve gathered from Strava and Jawbone.

Given all that is going on, plus the existing 30+ apps you have on the phone, it doesn’t feel that surprising that iOS 8 feels more buggy and crashes more often.

Some questions that this raises:

Do consumers stand even a remote chance of understanding what is going on here?

Are the existing ecosystems owned by Apple and Google under threat as they get consumer blame for underperforming, even though in reality many other firms are responsible?

We commonly think of the Internet of Things as a new Wild West, where companies are rushing to dominate an ecosystem - is that what is happening here? Or are the existing OS providers just losing control?

Is this brave new world simply too complex for human-beings to co-ordinate and control? Someone has to design all of these interactions - perhaps that is just too much to design. Particularly when there are partner companies involved that update their apps and hardware independently of the OS.

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Caught in the pincer: Many more wrist-worn fish in the wearable sea

The smartwatch / wearable race is increasingly starting to look like a product development arms race pincer. From one end companies are trying to make a smarter watch. From the other companies are trying to shrink the mobile phone.

This is a similar dynamic to the 2007 'Jobs challenge' - should the iPhone be a small Mac in your pocket, or a big iPod? A subtle difference but an important one.

Looking around the 100 or so colleagues I interact with on a weekly basis, around 10 of them have wearables. There is an eclectic mix, from memory I can count a couple of Moto 360s, a Pebble and at least 3 Jawbones. Perhaps there's a couple of Samsung Gears in there too.

Wearables may not yet be mainstream (and 10% of people in a technology firm is not a fair statistical assessment of popularity) but I can clearly see is that with lower price points people are starting to experiment, and more importantly to evangelise on certain benefits.

What I can also see is a lot of drawbacks, frustrations and questions from the people that are adopting them. 

All of this is interesting ahead of 'the' watch launch next year from Apple, but also some of the other big launches like Will.I.Am's Puls and Withings' Activite. What I can see from the people around me using wearables are that the devices are starting to form themselves into three specific groups:

1. The phone on your wrist - people that have a Gear S or Moto 360 describe a new relationship with their phones. It stays in the jacket pocket, there is less need to check for new notifications, and you only get alerted to the things you need to get alerted to. Typically they need charging every day and have screens that are like small smartphone screens. Some of them even have their own SIM cards. I don't personally find them appealing, but they certainly seem to be popular amongst the small group I can see using them. They are also expensive, typically at £200+. Only 11% of wearables are smartwatches.

2. Activity trackers - these are used more by people that have a concern that they are becoming overly sedentary and want to understand how they can make small changes to change that. They count steps, exercise and also track quality of sleep. They have a long battery life - at least 7 days, usually no screen, and increasingly look quite groovy. They are not that expensive, starting at around £50, and going up to £200. 40% of the wearable market is made up of fitness trackers, whilst an additional 26% are fitness watches such as the Garmin range.

3. The clever watch - no-one I know owns a traditional-style watch that has been adapted to work with a smartphone like the Fossil smartwatch or an MB Chronowing. In fact I'm not 100% convinced that this sub-category even exists yet, but it will do, especially if watch manufacturers see new revenue possibilities. These are currently very expensive, but are also largely made by designer firms which are adding big premiums to the devices.

The downfall of the 'phone on your wrist' type watches is that as well as low battery life, the use case is undefined and the designs are still clunky by fashion standards. And you could criticise them for trying to do too much, when smartphones are already doing the same things. I am unconvinced that there is mileage in this type of device until they are better executed and have clear use cases. There are already many articles about the number of these kinds of devices that are being abandoned because they do not get past the initial novelty stage of ownership.

Elements of 2 and 3 can be built into the same device and are compelling for people that want a watch plus a little bit more. Withings is already demonstrating that it's possible to have a great looking 'normal' watch that is also a fitness tracker, without the need to recharge every 1-2 days. I am already starting to glance at my Jawbone thinking it might tell me the time, and occasionally questioning why it is not capable of doing that.

People that want notifications, texts and e-mail available on their wrists instinctively feels like a smaller market than people that want watches plus a little bit more. This feels to me like the type of device that will win in the wrist-wearable market.

Particularly as the 'watches + more' group could be catered for by companies that have existing expertise in what looks and feels good on the wrist, whereas the phone-on-the-wrist tends to come from a technology company.

Read more about the race for wearables:

The Drum: Wearable tech deemed too expensive for target demographic

The Drum: 800,000 Samsung Smartwatches sold in first 2 months

The Guardian: Why aren't wearables taking off?

Ben Thompson: Apple Watch: Asking Why and Saying No

Ben Thompson: What I Got Wrong About the Apple Watch

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9 reasons that the Self Ordering Fridge will never happen

The internet of things fridge that automatically orders your food is a zombie idea that has existed for years.

It is a classic example of a technology solution looking for a problem that simply does not exist.

Here are 9 reasons why it will never happen:

1. Ordering food is complex - people don't order the same things every week.

2. Lifestyles do not allow for systematic food ordering - people go on holiday, eat out, work late, watch football.

3. People eat food when it is past its sell-by date.

4. Not all of your food is kept in the fridge.

5. There's no way for your fridge to know what's in it unless the food is tagged, or you scan it. The benefits for food producers in tagging it are minimal, the likelihood for people to scan their food is very low.

6. Looking inside your fridge is a very good data gathering technique for understanding what is inside it. The design is smart enough to allow for the inside of the fridge to fit almost perfectly in a human beings field of vision, allowing our data gathering tools (eyes) and analysis functions (brains) to assess its contents very easily.

7. Food ordering is a complex value chain which fridge manufacturers have no interest in restructuring. Or any reason to do so.

8. Fridges are cost-competitive consumer goods. Adding an internet connection makes them more expensive.

9. Fridge manufacturers do not want calls from people who cannot remember their Wifi passwords.

Read more about the Self Ordering Fridge here:

The Guardian: Smart Fridge? Idiot fridge more like (2012)

Daily Mail: The hi-tech fridge that will tell you what to have for dinner (2010)

Independent: Forget the shopping list, let the fridge order the milk for you

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The messy human reality of the Internet of Things (Part 2 of 2): What to do about the thing in between the screen and the product

Connected Cars and Homes will face many of the challenges that online retail does now - how to minimise the bits where humans are involved, and how to upgrade existing creaking infrastructure...

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Online retail is in overdrive. An iPad and a credit card is enough now to almost effortlessly order anything. The number of clicks to order anything you want is reducing to almost one.

We browse, we pay and we order in perfect harmony between finger and touch screen. And then...

...then dirty, sweaty humanity enters the process. Boxes are put into vans, schedules are booked, boxes are taken out of vans and given to couriers, couriers attempt to deliver boxes to the people that ordered them. The people that ordered them are sometimes not in, sometimes they don't hear their doorbells, some don't have doorbells, some are sunbathing in the garden, some have forgotten that they even ordered anything. You get the idea.

In that process, humans are providing so many random, changeable elements, that the experience breaks down. What was a shiny webpage offering to make you as attractive as a Gap model has become a sequence of events handled by human beings in all of their forgetful, rushed, crazy existence.

It is no wonder Amazon is testing drones to deliver parcels, and Google is experimenting at driving without drivers.

The battle over connected homes and cars faces many of the same challenges. We can imagine new cars and homes with connected thermostats and dashboards, but what about the millions of existing cars and homes?

As the Internet of Things battleground forms, right in the centre is not the home, or the car, or the device, but the human-being.

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The messy human reality of the Internet of Things (Part 1 of 2): Building a better mousetrap v2.0

Nest CEO Tony Fadell recently said he hates the term 'Internet of Things' when used to describe Nest:

"The 'internet of things' is a term for this audience [the CODE Conference], not for consumers... We're not an 'internet of things' company... We make a thermostat and we make a smoke alarm'.

In that statement, he poses a massive challenge to technology companies seeking to take advantage of the Internet of Things revolution:

In your equivalent market, can you make a better thermostat than anyone else?

In the complex value chain of the Internet of Things, tech firms providing connectivity, platforms, hardware and components find themselves with a valuable horizontal offer. These firms are seen as enablers to great product design.

But how many have the expertise to build a better thermostat? Even in the largest, most well-resourced tech firms, does the knowledge exist of what makes a good thermostat?

We can sit and dream up Internet of Things ideas all day long, but how many companies can execute the level of experience necessary to actually get consumers to use these products?

To demonstrate this point in really practical terms, think to yourself - "which do I like more?"

My matching kettle and toaster...

...or my wireless router?

You probably use the kettle and toaster five times a day, you may have spent several hours choosing them and the colour. They might match your microwave. It's possible you may have deliberately shown them off by placing them in a prominent position when your friends came round. If you are a real perfectionist you may even have visited a store to look at them in person.

The router on the other hand is an ugly little box that you have tried to hide along with its various awful wires that do not match the colour of the decor.

Companies with expertise in some very specific verticals are going to become incredibly valuable to technology firms as design partners. Those companies could exist in some rather unglamorous areas - washing machines, kettles, cups and mugs, fridges, hoovers.

Look at the progress that Philips is making in lighting - once it was about length of bulb life, now its about how lighting can create drama, accentuate experiences and create great products.

You name it, if it's in the home and you can build a better one using the technology that's out there, there could be huge value in it.

Welcome to building a better mousetrap v2.0 - the connected, electrically spring-loaded version that counts the number of mice you've exterminated, reports the number back to Rentokil and gives you a household cleanliness score whilst replacing any broken mousetrap parts in the process.

[digitalappendix]

In sandwich shop terms, what is a proposition?

When ordering my chorizo chicken wrap at Leon last week I was struck by how clearly Leon restaurants reflect some of the key areas of Sales and Marketing in their layout.

As well as the usual suspects - Sales and Service (cashiers) and Operations (sandwich makers*), the Propositions are absolutely front and centre.

Effectively as a customer the Leon propositions are the only thing that you look at as you come in. As a new customer it is highly likely to be the thing that makes your mind up as to whether a Leon wrap is the right thing for you or not.

As I was ordering, several people wandered in, looked at the propositions, decided Leon was not for them and went elsewhere - a pretty clear indicator of how important the customer proposition has become in the way consumers interact with products.

Anyway, here's a picture of a Leon, with my interpretation of what's going on:

* No offence intended to Operations Managers, or indeed Sandwich Makers.

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3 years on: What 'Ready Player One' gets right about the virtual reality internet of the future

In Ready Player One (written in 2010) a socially connected virtual reality service called 'the Oasis' (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation) is the single dominant technology.

Worth £240bn, the Oasis has come to be synonymous with the internet - it is a web technology so large and pervasive that it has effectively taken over the internet as a single destination (sound familiar?).

Ready Player One brings an enticing (and dystopian) vision of what may become of Oculus Rift, FaceBook and the Internet of Things - a world where there is no internet, just one single access point to a virtual network of people and things owned by one company.

This is what the book gets right:

The 'Oasis' business model is based on freemium access - everyone gets access to the virtual worlds. Anything that involves status increases or differentiation is charged for. People pay for the hardware, but access to the software is given away for free. That is likely to be one of the conditions of widespread virtual reality access.

The combination of virtual and social has never made more sense - the selection of an avatar, the ability to share contact details and the relentless pressure of image and attraction of anonymity are all familiar concepts.

An acknowledgement that a socially connected virtual world has social benefits. In the case of the main character Wade, it allows him to go to college, despite not being able to afford to go in the real world.

The owner of the Oasis is quite unashamedly modelled on John Carmack, lead programmer of the Doom games and founder of id software. His business partner is also quite clearly John Romero, also of id software. But it is also a model for the designer and owner of an ambitious company that seeks to connect everyone in the world and then own and control that connected space.

Innovative Online Industries (IOI) - is a pantomime villain of an Internet Service Provider, concentrating on network control, enforcement through contracts (including incarcerating people if necessary).

Fist-chewingly awful 80s references aside, is this an indication of the virtually-enabled social internet that we are hurtling towards?

Read more about Ready Player One here:

Forbes: Ready Player One Author Cline believes in Facebook's Oculus

Ready Player One website

Ready Player One Spotify soundtrack

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B2B Marketing - 'innovate or die' is no longer about organisational efficiency

The British economy is recovering. There is debate over whether it is recovering in the 'right way', but no doubt over which direction the figures are headed in.

Business-to-business marketers have played on the doom and gloom of the last two years, creating suites of products that save businesses money, create efficiency and make workers more productive. In many cases these are long-term plays by technology organisations which seek to demonstrate how an initial investment in reducing inefficiency can defend an organisation against a sharp reduction in income.

Statistics show that despite 2 or 3 full years of focus on productivity and efficiency, businesses are no more productive than they were before the recession. Perhaps it's simply not possible for businesses to become more productive.

But now it feels like the marketplace for efficiency-generating, productivity-increasing products is becoming crowded and dull. Many of the organisations that have weathered the storm are those that invested early, or saw that consumer spending simply could not continue indefinitely and invested before the recession.

Meanwhile, the giants of technology and retail, particularly those whose base is online, seem to have hardly noticed the recession. Earnings are up by 30, 40 or 50%, even in areas that are highly exposed to lack of consumer confidence.

We are about to enter a world where companies that failed to invest in new technology are now effectively two years behind those that did, having used their reserves to make it through a period of lower consumer spending. As if emerging from hibernation through a particularly cold winter, they are shaking off the frost and looking around at the organisations they are now competing with. 

Those organisations look scarily lean, rich and technologically capable. They are not preaching efficiency and productivity, they are already bloody productive and efficient. They are preaching competitive advantage through technology - serving customers faster, better, more.

Online firms have built huge customer bases by giving away highly valuable products and services which they are now selling directly into. They are launching products into new areas where they have no indication of whether they will return their investment.

'Innovate or die' - that is still the message to firms emerging from recession. Except now it is about becoming an engine of growth, not doing more with less.

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How Game of Thrones killed non-event television

*Contains a mild spoiler for Game of Thrones Season 1*

If you believe the commentary of some parts of the media industry, the television rule book is being ripped up and re-written.

This excellent address by Kevin Spacey (who surely must get some international prize for contribution to culture soon) highlights how Netflix and House of Cards sought to fundamentally shift the old model into the new world of on demand, any time services. We are entering the 'third golden age' of television.

Some commentators believe that television as we know it is dead.

But look again at what is happening to television. Major event shows are drawing as many simultaneous viewers as ever. The diversification of messaging and interaction is only adding to the attraction of large groups of people watching major shows.

Whilst we might binge on box sets and recorded series we've missed, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, the X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing and major sporting events are becoming major national events, shared and discussed quickly (link has spoilers for virtually every Game of Thrones episode).

Take a look at some of the Game of Thrones fan sites and Instagram accounts - far from destroying television, the digital world is augmenting it, raising it above the level it was previously at.

There is now a fundamental gap - there is event television, which is alive and well. And non-event television, which is as dead as Ned Stark.

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Is the King business model morally wrong?

Video games have been using sly methods to create addiction amongst users since the birth of Pong in the 1980s. We are compelled to play them through a combination of risk and reward incentives and clear entry paths that tie us in.

The King IPO and success of Candy Crush Saga, which makes $800,000 per day from users, has raised the new 'freemium' business model to the national consciousness. This model, and the huge distribution potential of mobile apps, has started to raise questions about whether there is a moral issue with the financial model behind Candy Crush Saga.

We are collectively scratching our heads and asking how it can be that a brightly coloured fruit-matching game is generating nearly a million dollars a day from its user base with a valuation of $7bn?

Let's start with the game design. Despite queries around the addictive impact of the design of Candy Crush Saga, there is absolutely no difference in the techniques used by King to those used by the very first games designers to get us playing and keep us playing.

In traditional game design, designers use addictive techniques to demonstrate to us that we have made the right choice in buying their games. You pay up front for a full (legal) copy of a game, and your faith is repaid with an extended playing time. This is still the model used by the blockbuster games industry, with new titles fetching as much as £60 or £70 as an up front cost.

The very best games have extensive hidden levels, additional characters and rewards for people that explore the entire game universe - Grand Theft Auto being the modern example, Super Mario and Doom the original proponents of this technique. Social elements in games like World of Warcraft have been blamed for creating a sense of social obligation on players.

Just like Candy Crush, traditional games (including fruit machines) also stack the odds against you to stop you winning too often. Candy Crush is able to do this with great ease - it randomly allocates the candy on each level, giving it an ideal opportunity to stack the game and stop you winning, regardless of how good you think you are at the game.

What is new is the idea of entering the game for free, and then effectively being charged for your new addiction. Players of Candy Crush Saga will be familiar with its constant requests for extra cash to beat new levels, extend playing time and buy special items. It's most devious technique is to stop you playing completely - if you lose all of your lives on Candy Crush Saga, you can either wait 24 hours to start playing again (the agony!) or pay for more lives. For an addict, that is pure exploitation.

The moral question is two-fold:

1. Isn't this the model used by heroin dealers?

2. Is Candy Crush Saga as addictive as heroin?

I have deleted Candy Crush Saga from my phone just in case the answer to both is yes.

Read more about video games, addiction and business models:

This is what Candy Crush Saga does to your brain - The Guardian.

The Incredible Success of the King IPO - Forbes

World of Warcraft like crack cocaine - The Mirror

At War with World of Warcraft - The Guardian.

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Telefonica #28

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Samsung S5: Towards a consumer understanding of the Internet of Things

Machine to Machine, Cloud Computing, The Internet of Things. Who actually cares about these ideas? Certainly not people outside of the technology industry. Anyone who has had the misfortune of trying to explain what the Internet of Things is at a dinner party will understand.

Take a look at this diagram - the innovations have generated huge advances in technology. But the capability underpinning them is boring to the person in the street. 

One of the reasons it's so tough to explain technology like Cloud, M2M and IoT is that traditionally they haven't really underpinned things that people care about - they exist in a corporate world inaccessible to the public.

And even when consumer do care about them, often the technology is attributed to something else - I like Amazon because it recommends things for me and remembers who I am, not the Cloud-based infrastructure that supports it. I like FaceBook because it allows me to share photos with my family who are halfway around the world, not the concept of Dynamic Social Engagement.

The Internet of Things is the next meaningless (to the consumer) term in the evolution of horizontal capability. Like Cloud and Social Networking before it, explaining what it can do for someone is difficult, until they see it in real life. Once you've seen inside a Tesla Model S, you know that connected cars look amazing. Once you've seen a British Gas advert for smart metering, you know that smart metering is updating creaking infrastructure. To date these  are mainly b2b plays between operators and customers that are then handed off to the consumer by a brand that takes the credit.

Samsung's S5 is the first handset that starts to put Internet of Things capability in the hands of the consumer. In combination with its smartwatch and fitness devices, for the first time consumers will start to understand the power of linking 'things'.

Yes, the S5 has all of the usual incremental product innovations for us to be unimpressed by. But what it represents is the first step in the mobile handset becoming 'the remote control for life'.

The next hurdle for wider consumer understanding of the Internet of Things is whether use of devices like the S5 will be too complex for people to understand. There is a lot of existing capability in smartphones that techies find very exciting (like mobile hotspots, or mesh networking) that most people have no desire to even understand, let alone use.

If handset and app designers can find ways to make the link to other connected devices seamless and fun, for the first time we will see applications for the Internet of Things driven not by Corporates looking to streamline processes, but by Consumers. Already in specialist areas like personal fitness, linking devices to your handset is commonplace. With its direct link into a portfolio of accessories, the S5 could move us a full step forward into a connected consumer device.

If Consumers understand the Internet of Things, the level of innovation will increase exponentially as the online and mobile industry scrambles to address the opportunity.

And that is where the next explosion of connections will come from.

[digitalappendix]

The birth of the digital General Electric

The acquisition of exciting new firms by firms that have made serious cash in digital has been an interesting new stage in the development of the digital and social industries.

Google acquired Nest for $3.2bn, giving it reach into the home. FaceBook acquired Whatsapp, giving it a mobile communications platform, and Oculus, giving it a virtual reality product. Serious questions are being asked of Apple - is it going to spend its cash pile on an organisation that can extend its product into new areas?

Where will this leave these organisations in 20 years time? If their investments pay off (which is a big 'if') we are looking at organisations with portfolios as diverse as communications, digital media, device development, driverless cars, virtual reality, home heating and security.

In his autobiography, Jack Welch describes GE's core capability as being the management of businesses - a suitably broad platform on which to build what was once the world's biggest company, grown by acquisition into Health, Money, Travel, Insurance and Manufacturing.

And now FaceBook, Apple and Google are acquiring in areas that Jack could never have imagined. Whichever of these three businesses has the strongest capability in digital product portfolio management will make it the new GE - a behemoth of business that can potentially dominate for years.

[digitalappendix]

Telefonica #26

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The 'Spotification' of music - will search kill the album?

"I never buy, or rarely buy Greatest Hits albums any more. Because Greatest Hits albums... okay you get their best songs... but they never quite fit together because they're all from different periods. Whereas if you buy someone's album, it's a slice of their creativity over the space of a few months. And even though not all of the songs are as strong, it kind of works as a unit."

Frank Skinner, 2006, comparing the England football team to a Greatest Hits album.

There is a wonderful series of podcasts by the comedians Frank Skinner and David Baddiel recorded in 2006 at the World Cup in Germany. If you like international football, the episode after England's exit is very poignant, cutting between the despondent post-match Frank and David with real recordings of them at the match [warning, link contains grown men crying, swearing and being politically incorrect towards the Portuguese]. The 2006 England team, known as the 'Golden Generation' are described as being like a Greatest Hits album - lots of individual highlights but no cohesive whole. Essentially a group of individuals with no collective soul.

The 'Spotification' of music is leading us to a point where curation of music collections is becoming a serious issue. In the space of barely ten years, we have moved from very well-understood formats with clear slices of musical creativity, to delivering individual tracks by their millions organised by a single search bar. Let me give you a personal example:

In 1997 I used to walk to work with my Sony Discman with 5 CDs in my rucksack. To get this music, someone had recommended it and I had gone to buy it from a record store. I chose the CDs from the CD rack in my room before leaving the house. In many cases I grew to love this limited selection of albums as I was essentially forced to listen to them again and again.

In 2001 I left the house with my Apple iPod (the video one, 3rd generation I believe). I uploaded about 3,000 songs to my iPod from a choice of about 20,000 on iTunes. Although the choice was pretty extensive (about 200 albums compared to my previous 5), I found that I grew to love many of the albums, and that the playlist function helped me to make my own digital mixtapes of good new tracks.

In 2014 I leave the house with my iPhone 4 and Spotify Premium. I am carrying 20 million songs with me. The equivalent of carrying the whole of an HMV store in my backpack. In the moment I go to choose something to listen to, I am researching, buying and playing all in the space of about 10 seconds. It's an overwhelming feeling, as noted by people in countries where Spotify has launched.

Spotify does not help me with this dilemma. It does not have an iPod-style way of transferring your favourite albums and tracks to a place where they are easily to categorise. It has only playlists or search. A gaping white bar with a flashing cursor in it, asking you what you want to listen to. Or a pre-defined set of your own choices or someone else's. Music fans: try not to panic.

Although Spotify collates music into albums in the way the music was originally released, it does little to help you organise these albums as you would have done with your vinyl, tapes, CDs, iPod or iTunes. It seems to have little respect for the formats that music has grown up in.

This appears to be unique to music in its digitalisation. Despite overwhelming choice in what to watch, TV programmes are still half an hour or an hour long. Box set series have not been shortened. We do not find ourselves watching one episode of Game of Thrones to the exclusion of others because it happens to be more exhilarating. And the format of films remains the same. How is it that music has been reduced to a search bar and some recommendations?

And is this downplaying of the album format an oversight, or are we witnessing the "Spotification" of music - a deliberate ploy to disrupt the formats we have been used to listening in?

Read more on Spotification:

The Spotification Diaries on Cyborgology.

Spotify and its discontents - The New Yorker

Hypebot Round table: How has Spotify changed the way we listen to music?

[digitalappendix]

Is the unified device dying a slow, slightly annoying death?

It is the morning of Boxing Day. You are out on your family Christmas walk - the sky is clear with the most spectacular low Winter sun. One of your children is jumping in a puddle of clear water. With the light behind you and a chance to capture a perfect Christmas image, you pull out your phone to capture it.

You have to take off your gloves to use the touchscreen.

You press the Home button.

You have two notifications from eBay that tell you something is selling soon. You're tempted to look to see what price they are.

You quickly remind yourself that you are here for a family walk, not for online second-hand goods trading.

You try not to slide over the eBay notification, but your numb fingers accidentally slide the Lock slightly too high.

Gah! Your phone loads the eBay app.

You frantically try to press the Home button, still hoping to capture the cute puddle picture.

It slowly responds (probably trying to back up your Dropbox over 3G at the same time, should never have installed that).

You press the camera app.

It takes about 5 seconds to load. It's on the 'video' setting. Child is still splashing in the puddle, although taking an interest in a wet dog about 50 metres away.

You slide up to 'camera' instead of video.

The shutter closes.

And them slowly, very slowly, opens again. Why does it do that? Surely it's the same shutter, right?

You point it at the puddle, whilst also trying to remember if this is the Camera app that lets you press the volume button to take a picture, or if that's the other one.

To be on the safe side you try to press the button on the screen instead. You miss and try again.

Or did you press it, but it just didn't show up on the screen?

You press it again.

About 60 seconds later you have taken a photo of a child running away from a puddle towards a blur that could be a wet dog.

You consider throwing your phone on the floor and stamping on it. But it cost a bit too much for that.

In summary, an iPhone does not make a good point and click camera. I am increasingly beginning to think that it doesn't do anything well.

This Wired post - "Three big ideas for post-smartphone design" - brought a number of thoughts together that have been troubling me for some time about smartphones. 

The 'unified' or 'multi-function' device versus single-use devices is one of those trends that comes in waves - like teachers focussing on core skills such as maths and reading in schools, or centralising or de-centralising the NHS - every time we reach one end of the spectrum we start to move back to the other. Then that end of the spectrum disappoints us and we start to move back again.

When we have too many single-use devices, we want them to be combined to save on clutter. But when working with one device that does lots of things, we find that it's generalist design limits it's capability.

Over the Christmas period, I realised that I couldn't trust my iPhone to take a decent video of my children's Nativity. I also realised that it is terrible for playing games on, and that it is incredibly slow and clunky when dealing with any form of content like music, audiobooks or video. It constantly interrupts me with notifications and seems overloaded with bloated apps (including its own operating system).

It's starting to feel like a single device for all of this is just unmanageable - perhaps we need to get back to basics again?