The future wasn’t meant to look like this. According to e-book evangelists, freeing the book from its paper format was going to herald a new era of reading. Physical book sales would wither and e-book sales soar as a new generation of reader, converted by the...
Another week, another publishing takeover. Yesterday McGraw Hill announced that it was offloading its education publishing business, though this time not to another publisher. The Private equity arm of investment firm Apollo Global Management will take control of the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
