Standard Class

Thanks to Lucy C for some great tips for dinner in Madrid, I only had a couple of hours so she sent me to a great Tapas bar, Vinotech in Plaza Santa Ana and we then had supper in a nearby restaurant El Lacon. Well worth a visit if you get a moment.

If you want to be in control of your media consumption, you need this service from BE. Enough capacity to stream 2 HDTV channels, who needs broadcast? Who needs a landline? give me the content I want when I want it!

American express seem to be moving fast, historically dinosaurs who have made themselves irrelevant in the UK with high charges seem to be listening to customers, love them and they will come back, thanks influxinsights for this

Remember consumers consume the media, where, when and how they want it, not when broadcasters want to send it. Direct to mobile TV is just the start of the trail, it is not great at the moment but given another few months and we will see much more of this.

Thanks james for pointing me to an interesting piece in the Guardian by Jeff Jarvis, his quote;
"There is the real revolution in media: The one-way pipe that was broadcasting is giving way to an open pool that everyone owns, where anyone can play. The end of the network era isn't just about losing audience or revenue or profits. It's really about losing control."

is spot on, the winners will be those,that own the means of production and gather open source opinion, how can any news gatherer compete with that, however large the budget.

Peter Bazalgette of Endemol made an interesting comment in the telegraph commenting that advertisers must be allowed to migrate out of the commercial breaks towards the programmes. At least programme makers are understanding what is only just dawning on advertisers, the PVRs of the fast forward generation are here to stay, messages need to be integrated into entertainment or broadcast television will die. Wait for the advent of narrowcast niche programming, advertising free paid on subscription delivered when and where audience want it.

The BBC are still trying to wrestle with an impossible problem, how do they continue to produce a growing quantity of extremely high quality programming on a huge variety of channels with shrinking budgets? The official line is business as usual, the reality is producers are doing everything they can to keep the machine moving and if that involves using props provided for free so be it. This however is only the tip of the iceberg, the BBC is certainly not alone in an increasing use of third party produced material paid for by interests or corporations rather than broadcasters. This is a matter of necessity rater than desire and it only the start of a conversation about what is acceptable.

It always amazes me how many companies hold on to their email servers like small children with soft toys, unless your business is of a certain size (huge) what is the point of hosting your own email? Tom Peter's pointed me in the direction of this piece, it seems that at long last some companies are seeing sense. If you are not the best in the world at a particular task outsource it and concentrate on what you are good at.

Google has become even more omnipresent with the launch of Google Blogsearch, it got me thinking what is the most useful function on Google at the moment? For me it has to be the alerts but maps, answers, news and image search are all good, come on guys launch the browser and be done with it!