And then suddenly we saw the rise of complexity in the value chain, with the rise of the Demand Side Platforms and Supply Side Platforms and various hybrids of the two. With this came Programatic Buying, where mobile ads were purchased by computers using increasingly sophisticated algorithms. In turn, this allowed Real Time Bidding (RTB) to emerge as a potent force.

RTB, in layman’s language, works like this. The consumer clicks on a link to a mobile web page, which triggers a request from the publisher to an Ad Exchange to provide an ad. The Exchange, in turn, sends out requests to multiple sources to supply the ad and asks those sources to bid to supply it, at the same time. The highest bid wins – simple as that. This not only happens instantly and in Real Time, but millions of such requests are handled simultaneously.

It’s clear that this is the future for mobile advertising, as the efficiencies of the system push more and more publishers and more and more advertisers into this direction. Today, latest information from the excellent eMarketer seems to indicate that this market is expanding fast and that tablets as well as mobile handsets have joined the RTB ecosystem.

Watch this space.

Interview: Hacking Media – Taking Creativity Beyond the Creative | FT Events | FT Live.

HT to Simon Andrews’s Addictive newsletter – my must-read mobile catchup of the week. Sign up here.

You can order your book here, or see a Preview copy and this was my contribution.

MLOVE, the Future and Liminality

Have pity on Charles Duell. He’s often remembered as the Commissioner of the US Patent Office who came up with the memorable quotation “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Unfortunately for Mr Duell’s place in history, there’s no evidence that he said anything like that, though a similar sentiment was expressed by a predecessor, Harry Ellsworth. Harry seems to have got away with it though.

But it’s a great story and serves very well to illustrate how difficult it is to understand technology change when you’re living though it, as well as our natural tendency to think that we’re living at the end of history – whereas we’re very probably just arriving at the very beginning of humankind’s real journey.

I’ve both spoken at MLOVE and written extensively about the power of exponential change driven by technology and how this can build very slowly – and suddenly overwhelm us in the final stages. Such change is going to lead to the mobile taking over as our main digital device (the PC is dead), to the Post-Mobile Era (in 25 years, the mobile will be 1 Billion times more powerful and the size of a red blood cell) to the Singularity itself, when computers take over from us – forecast to be about 2045. Ray Kurtzweil’s recent appointment as Engineering Director with the mighty Google goes a long way to making this a self-fulfilling prophecy.

All this indicates an era of unprecedented change for humankind, our cultures and society structures – not the least gifting our citizens with characteristics that would be regarded as superpowers by our parents. We’ll have enhanced intelligence, telepathic-like skills, life-spans extended by many times the natural period, instant access to all the world’s information and superhuman physical assets like strength, endurance and speed will be available for all.

However, it’s not as simple as that, as no one can really know exactly how and what will all play out. Instead, we’re in a state of liminality. Liminality is a useful word, first coined by anthropologists and refers to the threshold experienced in rights of passage rituals (often drug induced), where the participant was between their old state and before they were fully aware of the new. If you’re an MLOVEr, you’re in the privileged position of being in that state of liminality before the rest of the world catches up with us. We know that there’s some fundamental and revolutionary change arriving in the next decade or so, but we can’t tell exactly what they might be.

However, the beauty of the state of liminality if that while we don’t know the details, a mere awareness of what might be possible is going to influence the outcome. So let your imagination run wild, think about the world you’d like to see next and start making it happen. Your ideas are just as valid as everyone else’s and for me, that’s what the spirit of MLOVE is all about.

She came up with a great recipe for How To Write a Request for an Intro, that I thought I’d share.

By way of context, when you’re mentoring teams like the Springboard ones, the meetings often conclude with the mentor making an offer to make various intros to others that the teams would find useful. All the teams are great at following up and reminding you of your promises and I’ve been guilty that, despite best intentions, I haven’t got around to following many of these up.

Bindi’s advice is to take the pain away from the introducer by sending them an email that they can simply forward on to their contact, with no more explanation that a “hope all’s well at your end” type of personalisation.

As an example, if I want Bindi to introduce me to her old boss, Bill Gates, the wrong way to do it would be:

Hi Bindi

Great to meet you last week. As we agreed, it would be great to get an introduction from you to Bill Gates, at some point.

Many thanks.

Russell

Now the onus is on Bindi to remember who I am, why she offered the introduction in the first place and figure out how to position my company to the great man.

Instead:

Hi Bindi

Great to meet you last week. As we agreed, it would be great if you could make an introduction to Bill Gates.

My company invests in early stage startups in the mobile area and I think Bill might come across such companies from time to time that could benefit from our hands-on approach to nurturing companies in this space.

There’s more information at www.ballparkventures.com.

Many thanks.

Russell

When Bindi receives this, no thought is needed – she just forwards the email on (or not!). So you have your speedy intro and Bindi mentally classifies you as a useful person, who makes her life easier.

And if this sounds obvious, why does no one do it?

I’m thinking about putting a link to this post on my business card!

In those days, there was a price for keeping all our photos, documents, energy bills, letters (what they used to call email), music collections and bits of string too short to be useful – and that was all the space they took up. Those who never quite mastered the art of managing all this stuff, rapidly ran out of room in their houses and had TV programmes (what they used to call YouTube) made about them, with titles like “Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder” and “The Jeremy Kyle Show”.

Sometimes these programmes would feature a lugubrious psychologist, who would explain that these hoarders were merely suffering from syllogomania and outlined some of the simple treatments that could help them, which normally involved “throwing stuff away” and “organising the rest of it”, to use the recognised medical terms.

However, in this exciting new digital age of ours, there is no such disincentive to keep things under control. Digital storage space is essentially free and even the very worst Acute Digital Syllogomaniac isn’t betrayed by symptoms like not being able to open doors or being crushed to death underneath tottering piles of newspapers.

The problem is made even worse by the amount of “stuff” the average person has to store in their digital world. Take photos, as an example. In the old days, the price of the film and subsequent printing of the photo provided a natural curb on the amount of photos that were taken. Add that to the phenomenon of a camera in every phone and it means that nowadays, 6 times as many photos are taken than back in 1990. Google Glass, when released, is rumoured to have a setting that automatically takes a photo every 30 seconds, so it’s clear that the amount of photos we need to manage is going to grow …. exponentially.

For some media formats, ADS is pretty manageable, even without an incentive to progressively chuck stuff out. Trying to find that email you wrote to your bank in 2008 isn’t too hard, even among all the spam we’ve been storing since back in the day. And finding a specific music track on Spotify couldn’t be easier in comparison to rifling through a pile of vinyl or CDs. But for others formats, such as photos and voice records, it’s not so simple, even with tagging.

I think that there’s a whole new industry evolving to help an ADS society, with the first wave emerging around managing photos. Companies such as Lifecake offer a central storage space to manage all your photos, but also encourage you to select and share your favourites as you go along. Your future self will thank the current you for completing this simple on-the-fly editing as you’ll subsequently be able to find the best photos in your collection, without wading though all those that shouldn’t really have survived at all.

And if you’re thinking about changing to a fairly future-proof career, might I suggest that the new field of Syllogomania Consultant might be worth a look? Helping companies and individuals to manage their data so that they find the good, relevant stuff.

All you need to figure out now is how to pronounce your new profession.