• Citizen journalism through formal networks such as Demotix (which recently had a photo used by the Guardian on the newspaper’s front page in relation to the G20 demonstration)

• Informal video reporting by members of the public that are not looking for a story, but just recording an event. The American hedge fund manager who filmed Mr Ian Tomlinson being struck and pushed over by the police at the G20 demonstration is an example of such ‘accidental’ reportage.

• Video activism: Protesters using video footage as ‘evidence’ of alleged malpractice or wrongdoing – an example here is the video of protesters challenging a police officer to identify himself by his number at the G20 demo.

Citizen journalists, video activists, and people like you and me with a digital camera or a Flip are new ‘social’ media agents. What has empowered these groups are the simple tools to shoot and share video and the massive consumption of online video through video sharing and social networking sites with the default of course being Youtube.

Does this mean that old media is now on the sidelines? Far from it. In fact, all three examples cited above got into the mainstream and amplified through traditional media, especially newspapers such as the Guardian and the Evening Standard that broke them as stories in their print and online editions.

But what has changed is that front page news that can in a matter of hours change the direction of a major story is as likely to come from footage shot by a member of the public as a briefing from an insider. As the American hedge fund manager commenting on the impact his video had had on the investigation into Mr Tomlinson’s death said “… You needed something incontrovertible. In this case it was the video.”

The perceived role of the Media as the Fourth Estate acting as a check on political authority has been rightly challenged – Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent being a particularly strong mauling. However, I believe that the concept can have real weight when broadened to include not just traditional media, but the new ‘social’ media agents (citizen journalists, video activists and members of the public) who are out taking digital pictures and shooting online video of the events around them non-stop all over the world.

The pen being mightier than the sword always seemed to me to be a hopeful statement, rather than something borne out in practice. However, I am now thankful and relieved that the video camera is proving itself to be more powerful than the police baton.

All went well until I asked a business whether I could email some photos of my sofa to them for a quote.  ”Sure just use the email address on the web site”, came the reply.  When I pointed out that there wasn’t an email address listed,  the response was “bloody hell, I’ve been waiting ages for that to get done!” 

So here was a small business that had the wherewithal to advertise itself on Google and yet struggled to keep its basic contact information up to date on its principal web site.   

Which brings me to the new .tel top-level domain and its promise that businesses can “join a global online directory that provides you instant worldwide exposure…” and the ability to “integrate all your means of communication in a single place under your control…”

So will the .Tel TLD make life easier for SMEs?  At first glance it looks pretty useful in that it allows a business or individual to add all their contact data easily, control who has access to it and update it as they need.   

Moreover, .Tel is unlike other TLDs in that it stores a user’s information right in the DNS.

But so what? Going back to my search for a reupholstery service, as I didn’t have a personal recommendation to go on, I needed to find out more than just simple contact info.  That’s one reason why I went to Google and not a directory listings site … I wanted to look at company web sites or customer reviews to get some perspective on the businesses.  

In this regard, .Tel contact data would not have materially helped me at this stage of my search as a consumer looking for a business.  In fact it would have been no better than a standard directory listing, particularly as there is no reason why data accuracy should be any better for a self-administered listing on .Tel than a directory entry.  Looked at in this way, .Tel seems like the Net-savvy younger brother of the BT OSIS database which provides the backbone data for print and online listings in the UK.  Whereas OSIS uses the telephone number as the anchor point for its business and residential listings, .Tel uses the DNS … different technologies, same end point.

Another open issue in my mind is how the .Tel approach sits with the most recent developments in personal data/profile sharing from the likes of Google, Myspace and most of all Facebook which has built some serious momentum with Facebook Connect.   What these forms of data portability offer is not just sharing of singular contact information between networks, but richer contextual data about me and my contacts.  They deliver not just information but context about the information – i.e. the sort of added value I went searching on the Web for when looking for my reupholstery service.

Now .Tel could interface back into the social graph by supporting one or more of these data portability initiatives and this does seem to be on the cards.  Being able to keep a single set of profile information updated that would then feed into all my other online profiles and Web sites would be very handy indeed.  This is the sort of service a business like the one I spoke to Saturday would likely pay for.  However, couldn’t this service equally be provided by a profile/network holder such Plaxo or Linked In for businesses and a Myspace or Facebook for consumers?

It’s early days for .Tel and it’s going to be interesting to watch how it develops as right now it seems to be poised somewhere between a legacy directory model, Web 1.0 TLDs and Web 2.0 data portability.

For a good while now I’ve been thinking about buying a video camera and was settling on something like the Canon HF10 packed full of features and with a price tag at over £500. Then along comes Santa with a Flip Mino costing a little over £100 and with a feature set so limited it doesn’t come with a manual.

On paper these products are not at all comparable, but I now have a more usable and superior camcorder for my needs for a fifth of the price.  As a result, I think the maker of the Mino, Pure Digital Technologies, is disrupting the traditional digital camcorder business. More on that later, but first what’s the Flip Mino like?

It’s extremely quick and easy to get recording.  Press the ‘on’ button and then the big red record button on the back of the Mino and you’re off. You can zoom, but there are no options to change other record settings.  You get video at 30 fps and at VGA resolution and that’s it.   That’s easily good enough for the web (see video example I shot with the Flip Mino below) and not bad on TV playback either.

Getting video off the Flip is very straightforward.  Plug the built-in USB connector into your Mac or PC and use the Flip Share software to transfer or edit videos.  Uploading to video sharing sites is a breeze.

Any gripes? A couple. The touch sensitive buttons on the Flip are not that touch sensitive (!) esp. on zoom which can be irritating.  The Flip Share software runs slowly on my iBook G4.  That’s pretty much it on the negative side.

So why is this such an exciting product and is it going to disrupt the likes of Canon, Sony and JVC?

Well, the Flip Mino does fulfill a number of the key criteria for being a disruptive product as defined by Clayton M. Christensen, i.e  a good-enough, low-cost solution to a job that enough people are trying to get done that creates a new market at the low end of an established market. Specifically:

1. It creates demand from non-consumers (people like myself) who haven’t previously owned a camcorder.  The Mino is very affordable and simple to use and therefore accessible to consumer segments put off by the complexity and cost of the established camcorder market. On a related note, Adam Richardson has posted a good discussion of product simplicity and how it affects consumer adoption that also references the Flip.

2. It helps consumers do more easily and effectively a task they were already trying to do by other means.  In this case, record and share ad hoc moments online anywhere they want, when they want.  Before the Flip the three main options were:

- the limited video capability on a mobile phone or digital camera – available as a secondary or tertiary feature and often hard to really use

- the bulky, feature-rich camcorder that could be wheeled out for set-piece occasions

- or webcams that tied you to the computer.

Flip is not alone in this new market – Kodak’s Zi6 pocket video camera targets a similar set of needs.  But both Kodak and Pure Digital Technologies are new entrants in the camcorder business – the incumbents have not yet responded.  This is classic behaviour in markets experiencing disruption.  Sony, JVC, Panasonic and Canon appear content to continue competing amongst themselves on levels that are no longer or marginally relevant to most consumers, e.g. recording format, storage capacity, power of zoom and video resolution.  In so doing, they have missed the needs being addressed head on by the Flip and Kodak Zi6 in a different part of the market.

However, like all good disruptors, Pure Digital Technologies is moving up market by adding incremental innovations to its product set that pose a more direct threat to the established players in their mainstream camcorder market.  The new Flip Mino HD records higher resolution video (1,280×720-pixel) at 30 fps in 16:9 widescreen format, whilst at the same time retaining the ease of use, low price point and form factor that makes it so disruptive in the first place.

I just wish I had one of these new HD Flips.  But that’s OK.  When it’s available in the UK this year I can give the old one to my partner and keep the HD version for myself .  And this also shows just how much the camcorder market will change – it’ll no longer be just Dad who has one, but everyone in the family can have an affordable personal camcorder in their pocket.  If the incumbent consumer electronics giants don’t wake up to this new market reality (and massive growth opportunity) soon they will really suffer. Anyone remember DEC, the once dominant player in the mini computer market disrupted by the PC?

A text book case of new market disruption and the Innovator’s Dilemma I reckon.

Whilst companies such as Eutelsat and SES Astra went about growing pedestrian but very profitable businesses distributing digital TV to the Direct-to-Home and cable markets, billions of dollars were pumped into projects of truly galactic dimensions to build new global communications infrastructures in the sky.  The two exemplars were Teledesic and Iridium.  Although, these two projects targeted different markets (Teledesic was all about high bandwidth applications, whereas Iridium was global voice communications), they had many similarities:

1. Backed by titans from the high tech sector: Microsoft put $30M into Teledesic, and Motorola was the lead investor in the $5bn investment in Iridium’s network

2. A large dose of philanthropy: both companies exhibited a strong belief that satellites could bridge the digital divide and bring IT and communications services to the Third World.  But forgot that whilst the need was there, nobody had the money to pay for the services brought by these billion dollar networks!

3. Some very costly experimentation in new technologies – LEOs and MEOs for the interested (whereas we at Eutelsat made do with the old faithful GEOs)

4. Complete failure – Teledesic wound up before getting a satellite off the ground in 2002 and Iridium went bankrupt in 1999 (although it came back to life in a different form in 2001)

Google’s adventure is remarkably similar.  $20M contributed so far into a project estimated to cost $750M to launch 16 LEO satellites into orbit to bring Internet services to the “other 3 billion” people in the Third World. umm …

As JFK said: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard“.  I wonder whether a similar sentiment has taken hold in the Googleplex.  Could this be hubris from a cash-rich tech behemoth at the apogee of its market dominance? They have after all remade the planet as Google Earth, so now let’s look to the stars … And will this well-intentioned project burn up on re-entry as the fundamentals of the business model unravel?  I really hope it succeeds, but fear that like its predecessors it’s destined to fail.

Connections between people are given meaning by their social context. The connection per se is devoid of meaning. This case has been eloquently made by Jyri Zengestrom in his discussion of social objects. To paraphrase his argument, social networks are effective when they bring people together around a shared object, e.g. in Dogster this could be the like of a specific breed, in HMV’s Get Closer it could be a shared experience at a gig. Social networks are less effective when the shared object is weak or absent – which explains at least to me why networking sites, such as Linkedin, Viadeo or Xing, feel quite sterile.

What has all of this got to do with the rash of recent announcements from Google, Myspace and Facebook regarding ‘portability’ of social network profile data? Well, for starters, the commentary thereon has been largely focused on whether these announcements constitute a new reign of openness in social networking or a continuation by other means of a walled garden strategy – Dare Obasanjo and Marc Canter’s posts are good reads here. However, I believe its necessary to evaluate these moves by Google, Myspace and Facebook on terms broader than data ownership (is it our data or their data?).

A more fundamental question is whether the profile data contained in one social networking site can be ported in a meaningful way to another? Of course I could take my basic profile information anywhere (and mechanisms to make this easy are to be welcomed!), but the richness of a social networking site is determined by what’s been invested in the shared objects between linked individuals. So whilst I could take my photos with me from Facebook and expose them on any site I chose to, what will happen to the tags, comments and associations that bring them meaning? Will this meaning be carried over to other sites? Also on the question of data ownership … the photo is mine, but is it still just mine when it functions as a shared object? Will the friends who tagged the photo and commented on it be happy for me to share this data with other networks of people?

My gut feel on these questions is that the answer will often be no. Rich profile data can’t necessarily be moved from site to another and retain meaning. The connections created in one site around shared objects may not be sustainable if those objects are not present on the new site.

And that makes me think that in the worst case scenario Google’s Friend Connect, Myspace’s Data Availability and Facebook Connect might herald the Web 2.0 version of spam as we indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages to our ‘friends’ about things they know little of and care less about.

Why turn over Apple’s prime online real estate to a message that is principally not B2C, nor even B2B, but A2D – i.e. Apple to Developers? The language used on the page, e.g. ‘software roadmap’ is clearly oriented towards a tech industry audience and the eye tracks directly to the acronym ‘SDK’.  For a consumer brand that has built its success on making technology simple, easy to use and understandable this is puzzling at first glance.

On reflection, Apple’s home page take over is a bold statement by the company that reveals not only its appetite to take a real marketing risk, but also the seriousness and confidence in driving forward its strategy to turn the iPhone into the company’s next big platform play. Apple knows to do that it needs to market itself to developers. What better way to open that engagement than by demonstrating how serious it is by dedicating its hugely-trafficked home page to the task?

Many companies are rolling out their own APIs and SDKs for third party developers to build services upon – for example BT has a great SDK for communications services. However, to date Apple appears alone in realising that its core corporate marketing vehicles are tools to be used to engage third party developers to support key growth areas.

Apple has clearly ‘thought different’ about how to use online marketing to support business strategy.