Monday 28 January 2013

Safeguarding children online.


Are the risks of being online overstated, in comparison to the opportunities? Aren’t any risks too great when it comes to safeguarding children?

I’ve been reading Dr Tanya Byron’s report from 2008 on safeguarding children online, and her update from 2010. In online terms, a small eternity has passed since she was first commissioned by the UK government, and there has been some progress, but much more is needed in how e-Safety is taught. So far, the comment that has stuck fast in my mind is that the generational divide between us parents and our children, has had a profoundly negative effect upon our children’s interaction with technology. Because we, as parents, do not understand the technology that our children are exposed to, and because we, as parents, are fundamentally risk-averse when it comes to our children, we are denying the opportunities that technology can provide, and overstating the risks.

Take the video games = violent children debate. The media coverage I’ve read consistently conflates correlation with causality. This kind of attitude informs how we let our young engage with technology. As a technologist, I’m appalled that even though we have the sum of the world’s knowledge in our smart phones, we are afraid to share it with our young. As a parent, I’m appalled that the sum of the world's knowledge is available to our children, without judgement and without conscience.

So what should I do about it? I don’t think I’ve read a convincing answer yet, so I’ll keep reading. Perhaps that’s the key. I think it’s inevitable that my children will outstrip me in technological prowess. After all, I’m not as bright and shiny and new as I used to be. Moreover, it is my hope that my children will be brighter and shinier than I ever was.

I think my job, as a parent, is to remain sensitive to the way the world is opening up to my children, and learn as they learn. By doing so, I can help them develop the key tools of critical evaluation and self-regulation. After that, I must trust that they will use these tools to keep themselves safe, and not only on the internet. Much as I desperately wish to, I’m not going to always be there, to make everything alright again.

Thursday 17 January 2013

Death of the High Street. Yawn.


Poor Play.com has announced that it will no longer fulfil orders itself, giving up the fight to be Amazon. Instead, it will act as a marketplace, enabling small vendors to reach Play’s customer base. Over 250 jobs will be lost, and what’s to stop another internet brand fading into obscurity. Is this a business model where Play.com doesn’t actually add any value to the value chain, looks identical to a hundred other alternatives, and so the customer base inevitably searches for the next (cheaper) zeitgeist? Yawn, next.

It turns out that next is HMV, a venerable institution that was recognised around the world as the finest purveyor of recorded music. In recent years, it diversified to selling movies, books, electronics, t-shirts, concert venues, tickets and even digital downloads, all linked by the theme of popular culture. This diversification wasn’t enough, the 2012 Christmas peak wasn’t enough, and its credit line wasn’t enough, so it called in the administrators.

Both of these companies are casualties of the same trend, the changing High Street and the rise of the online High Street. HMV tried to be a more complete bricks and mortar High Street, just when its consumers were abandoning bricks and mortar for online shops. Play recognised this, and is trying to build an online High Street, rather than wasting its efforts actually making (re-selling) stuff. Despite this change in strategy, I don’t think it will be enough for Play. In time I fully expect Play.com to be just one of many places to buy commodity widgets at rock bottom prices, competing with increasingly diversified supermarkets, super-e-tailers (Amazon), and consumers themselves (eBay).

The high street is changing, as it needs to in order to continue to attract shoppers, but it isn’t dying. Nostalgia as a business model is being brutally swept aside by economic realities, but there are still shops open and thriving. These are the ones that offer something more than just widgets. These shops connect with shoppers, offer advice, decomposes their needs into widgets, and make sure the widgets work together to give the expected outcome. Shoppers are starting to expect to pay extra to go to a High Street, because it will be a customised, curated experience. The opportunity is to create a hybrid, a local e-marketplace, one where the cost savings from the online High Street is combined with the service from the bricks and mortar High Street.

Thursday 10 January 2013

Predictions for consumer tech in 2013.


Everyone gets to make predictions at this time of year. My geek cred isn’t on the line either, as most people get New Year predictions wrong, sometimes hilariously so, like the one predicting that the internet will never catch on. So what are mine?

My first startling prediction is that 2013 will be a lot like 2012. Still no hoverboards, no replicators, and no 3DTV, at least none that I will want, or can afford to buy. I think I’ve reached a bit of middle-age spread when it comes to technology. I’ve never been one to rush out and buy the latest thing, just because it was the latest thing. I’ve always managed to convince myself that the latest thing was exactly the thing that I needed at that moment, so being an early adopter was a happy coincidence.

The difference is that now, I truly think that most of my tech is good enough. I mean, is an iPhone 5 really £600 better than my current iPhone 4? Is the gameplay on the Wii-U better in any way than my current Wii? It strikes me that much of this year’s new tech suffers from this same problem: it’s not significantly better than last year’s tech. But there are exceptions.

2013 will be the year that I will finally stop buying physical content regularly. It was vaguely depressing that as soon as we installed fancy new shelves into our new home, we discovered LoveFilm, Spotify, iTunes, Nintendo eShop and Kindle. Some of our DVDs are five years old and still in their shrink-wrap. This is the year that even the £3 CDs from Sainsbury’s will cease to be a bargain, because I can just program the same content into my playlist there and then, for no additional outlay.  And the monthly fees for these streaming services will seem like a bargain to me.

Perversely, I can confidently predict that I will spend more on physical content. The content companies have seen me coming. I’ve been accurately demographed as the type of person that loves box sets, and the more ostentatiously deluxe the box set, the better. The content companies have realised that the ownership of the thing vastly outweighs the actual content, and that people like me are prepared to pay more for fewer titles, just so long as there are fewer people who can claim the same. However, even I can see that this is the last dying grasp of an industry futilely wringing out the last drop of profit, before fading into obscure irrelevance. I just can’t help myself.

I fully expect to be wearing some form of wearable tech in 2013. I experimented with a SonyEricsson smart watch a few years back, and still love its combination of style and function. The watch lived the full tech lifecycle, from leading edge geek cred to trailing edge obscurity, within a matter of months, and is now being resurrected by a homebrew effort, so there is hope that it will be hacked to work with my iPhone by a suitably talented and dissolute programmer.

Though a smart watch is the most obvious piece of wearable tech, it’s not the only example. This year, I fully expect to be modelling a device that harvests my biodata, in the hope that measuring me will fix the bits of me that aren’t working as well as they did in 2012. I’ll worry about what to do with all that data later.

My final prediction is that I will invest in energy monitoring devices, and this time I will know what to do with the data. I will obsessively spend my free time in the evenings tracking down that last vampire device sucking down sweet, expensive electricity, and berating my increasingly disapproving family for having the temerity to leave on the single low-energy light bulb in the room.

Happy New Year!