I always thought it was BA Baracus, the iconic figure from 80’s TV show The A Team that coined the phrase "time is money". It turns out, like many other things, we owe this wisdom to the Greeks, in this case to Antiphon, an orator who wrote speeches for defendants in legal cases.

"The most costly outlay is time," he told his clients. Quite how right he was and how explicitly this maxim is now being applied in new business models he couldn’t possibly have imagined. Could he?

It now appears that the most valuable economic commodity in a world abounding in competing and distracting information, is our own attention, or our own time, and people are prepared to spend a lot of money to capture it. 

Welcome to the discipline of "the attention economy" that  advocates believe will be the dominant currency in new knowledge and information-based societies. This radical theory of value is focused on the relationship between advertising, commerce and societal behaviour. The current over-abundance and growing body of information that sprawls across various networks and devices is locked into a competition for the precious commodity that is our attention. This scarcity of attention has been compounded by the falling cost of transmitting advertising to consumers that has fallen to a sufficiently low level where more ads can be transmitted to a consumer than the consumer can possibly receive or process.

Technology has also played a role in producing this scarcity of attention. At one time the advertising model was relatively straightforward: find a big audience and speak to them, insistently and disruptively if need be, but ensure that your message is put across.

However, new technologies have facilitated the fragmentation of mass audiences to such a degree that advertisers - mega media events such as X-factor or the FA Cup Final apart - can no longer identify a mass audience, grazing like a herd of buffalo on the plain. The audience is hiding now, elusive and difficult to reach, on the internet watching YouTube, fast forwarding through adverts on their personal video recorders listening to their iPod’s and oblivious to billboards. To respond successfully to this paradigm shift in audience behaviour, businesses and advertisers will need to rely heavily on theories of attention economies.

So that’s the theory, but what does it actually look like? Well, in the formative stages it looks something like UK company Blyk, a free mobile phone network exclusively for 16-24-year olds entirely funded by advertising. Users signing up to the network receive no more than six advertising messages on their mobiles a day and in return are given an allowance of 47 texts and 243 minutes for free each month. In short, consumers are exchanging their attention to advertisers for an agreed set of services and products. Advertisers get access to an important and sizeable target market and can generate data and sales for brands from the dialogue they instigate with the consumer. This is a win-win and a notable example of how businesses are having to adapt business models in the face of falling revenues.

Now just think what you could have charged for reading this article… 

By Sam Ingleby 

Paulo Coelho is a publishing phenomenon: the Brazilian novelist specialises in a sort of quasi-philosophical magic realism that has struck a strong chord with those in search of something more. He has sold well over 100 million books worldwide and his work has been translated into 66 different languages. Perhaps his most famous work is The Alchemist  - the tale of a boy’s journey towards spiritual enlightenment.

It is perhaps surprising in the resolutely traditional world of book publishing Coelho is a progressive and voluble exponent of the benefits of the internet in dispersing and disseminating his work. In a recent speech he explained how the use of piracy helped spread the word  about The Alchemist. He explained how he had posted Bittorrent links in an effort to pirate his own novel, an approach that helped to radically increase hard copy sales and readership in different languages. He said that this new method had helped him interact with his readers in ways he "did not know were possible".

Since Monday he has also lead the way in a innovation coming from the publishing house Harper Collins. Readers who log on to http://www.harpercollins.com/ will be able to see the entire contents of "The Witch of Portobello" by Coelho as well as a host of other (US focused) titles including "Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy" by celebrity Chef Robert Irvine " and  "The Undecided Voter's Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose" by Mark Halperin. 

There are, of course, certain terms and conditions. These free electronic editions will only be available for one month, and control of the content is restricted as readers are not able to download them to laptops or to an electronic book reader like Amazon’s Kindle. The print function has also been disabled, so budding book-binders will have to wait a bit longer, but readers are offered links to retailers like Amazon.com to buy copies of the books they are sampling.

Jane Friedman, chief executive of Harper Collins said in her announcement that she doubted most people would read the entire versions online, but use it as a taster to see if they would like to purchase a full copy. She compared the initiative to "taking the shrink wrapping off a book" and also tackled the idea that the new digital editions would jeopardise actual sales. "We will know very soon if we sense any kind of cannibalisation," she said.

This is a shrewd move from Harper Collins offering a new avenue to access and purchase content while pulling traffic to its site. It also plays well with the consumer who is effectively getting something for free: if digital media has proved one thing, from music to video, it’s that the consumer likes this and has come to expect it as their right. Coelho, for his part, is relaxed about his content being available in this way: "I believe that generosity pays off," he said. In this, Harper Collins will hope he is proved right.

By Sam Ingleby - Digital Communications Programme Manager

Arsenal football club’s new Emirates stadium sits imposingly among the well-appointed streets of Highbury as a sort of monument to modernity. The club moved there from their former ground - known in football circles as ‘The Highbury library’ because of its Grecian pillars and rather fusty atmosphere.

In 2006 with the new ground is the identikit modern stadium: aesthetically pleasing, easy to access, and at ease with its surroundings. All in all it seems an apposite choice of venue for the first meeting of the government co-ordinated Convergence Think Tank, which the avid Arsenal fan and former Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) James Purnell established.

The venue captures something about change from old models to new, and manages to frame the debate in terms of the consumer, some 60,000 of whom choose to spend their Saturdays (or whenever the games are played in the Sky-dominated Premiership) there in the decidedly analogue world, cheering on the Gunners. Change, from analogue to digital, and eventually to a converged set of services and devices, and how the consumer will manage this change are of course, some of the biggest issues to emerge in the convergence debate.    

James Purnell’s good friend, Everton fan, and successor as Secretary of State Andy Burnham opened the event and outlined what he wanted the think tank to examine. He began with a wry remark about his beloved Everton’s Goodison Park, and the contrast with the corporate sheen of the Emirates before stating that convergence is something that, first and foremost, is being driven by and affecting consumers. As such when the priorities of the think tank should concentrate on its impact on consumers. It will look to encourage open markets, empower consumers and citizens and allow universal access to high-quality content. Legislation may occur as an output of the think tank but is not a direct aim.

This is Burnham’s second stint at the DCMS. The first time he was a special adviser and in his opening remarks he recalled sitting in his office back in the late 1990s imagining a future where everyone was using their TV to send and receive emails. It is a useful motif of how far convergence has come already but also how difficult it is to anticipate which services consumers and citizens will really value and adopt. 

After Burnham came the big beasts of the media jungle, among them Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom, and Mark Thompson, director general of the, BBC both of whom spent time talking about issues of access for consumers and the fundamental difference between access and participation. Thompson read out a short letter he had recently received from a user.

‘Dear Mr Thompson’ it said. "I am a technophobe but can just about work Google. I googled ‘BBC’, ‘Iplayer’ and ‘Damage’ and there it was. Well done." That’s what is happening and that is what is expected, he said.

The think tank is a bold initiative by the government and has been warmly welcomed by industry. There are anxieties regarding its scope, scale and what it can realistically achieve, but to talk about the challenges this rapidly converging part of the world is presenting to consumers, citizens and government is clearly the right approach. This first session at the Emirates may have kicked off something significant. 

By Sam Ingleby, Intellect Programme Manager

Late on Sunday evening, stood on the thick pile of the Ballagio Hotel under the fake grandeur of an enormous chandelier, Slash, the former Guns and Roses guitarist stalks past with his entourage, conspicuous in his trademark Victorian top hat and dark sun glasses.

Minutes later, a bookish Bill Gates and a rather more healthy looking group wander past discussing the success of his keynote address. What single event could bring these two characters together? It could only be the 2008 Consumer Electronics (CE) show, an enormous annual industry jamboree and feeding frenzy hosted in Las Vegas and attracting some 150,000 people to America's playground over a week of keynote addresses, product releases and policy debates.

In CE product terms the event has been dominated by a return of the size wars. A number of leading manufacturers are exhibiting new TV sets that are all defined with the superlative. Appropriately enough, in a town as outlandish as Las Vegas, there is no such thing as average here: all of the major announcements seem to end in 'est'.

Panasonic have the 'biggest': a whopping 150-inch high definition plasma screen that has attracted crowds consistently. The demonstrator was dwarfed by its presence. All eyes were drawn to its truly impressive stature and picture clarity. Pioneer has the 'thinnest'. Project Kuro 1080p is only a third of an inch thin, less than an Apple iPhone. And Sony has the smallest and clearest. It's 11-inch OLED - organic light emitting diode - screens, with near perfect picture quality and a screen only three millimetres thick.

Amid the noise of innovation and celebration you can detect a note of caution. The Consumer Electronics Association is projecting growth of some six per cent in the sector in 2008, yet there seems to be some general worries that the effects of the credit crunch will be felt in consumer spending patterns on electronics.

This is Vegas though, and optimism is the order of the day. Now where did they say Slash was playing?

Mark Zuckerburg, or ‘Zuck’ as he’s apparently known to his friends, is the chief executive of social networking web site Facebook, and one of the poster boys of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. A Harvard graduate and at 23 already worth unspecified yet undoubtedly vast amounts of money, he comes to work in flip-flops and gives interviews in jeans and hoodies.

He’ s a hot commodity and Facebook is hotter. Already the seventh most visited web site in the world this year and on the rise, it has over 55 million active users, and claims a daily new user average of a staggering 250,000 people. A typical user spends about 20 minutes a day on their own or friends’ profiles. Understandably this a statistic of considerable interest to advertisers. In a 2006 study of the college student market in the US, Facebook was named as the second most "in" thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and sex and losing only to the iPod, which neatly captures both its absolute inanity and its addictiveness.

All of which makes this weeks mea culpa from Zuck the more remarkable. In an effort to start monetising users' time on Facebook the company introduced a system called Beacon that tracks web shopping on partner sites outside Facebook and then sells adverts to the social network based on purchases. It was initially offered as an opt-out service but after 50,000 Facebook users signed a petition complaining about an invasion of privacy, Beacon has been changed to an opt-in facility.

In a statement posted on the Facebook blog, Zuckerberg said: "We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologise for it."

He added: "I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better."

Has the Facebook brand been damaged by this brazen attempt to start selling users digital data? Probably a little, but certainly not irreparably, and the way Zuckerburg quickly and decisively dealt with consumer dissatisfaction shows how seriously he takes the user base.

What is perhaps of greater interest is this ill-conceived attempt to monetise users time on Facebook. In October, Microsoft invested $240m (£117m) in the site in exchange for a 1.6 per cent share of the company. That nominally values Facebook at $15bn. Many observers believe this to be a spectacular overpricing. The big beast of the media jungle Rupert Murdoch said that the price would have to come down considerably before he would invest because “no one knows what the scene is going to look like in five years’ time. It is the Wild West out there.”

So what were they playing at? Facebook relies on advertising to make money with integrated adverts appearing when you open your profile. All that time that users spend on their Facebook profile is an incredibly valuable commodity for advertisers, not just because of access but the rich personal data that is recorded. With this information tailored, user-specific adverts could be delivered to a captive audience. Could someone devise such a system – something like Beacon for instance?

This is the classic case of privileging what technology is capable of doing, over what the consumer wants.  In the converged world revenue models for social networking sites and advertisers alike are still in a state of flux and the possibilities of getting closer to the elusive consumer that technology affords means that risks are being taken. As always technology offers solutions but the application of these solutions is a prickly and uneasy thing. Just ask Zuck.

By Sam Ingleby
Digital Communications Programme Manager
Intellect

This may be an unusual way to start an article, but put your hands in your pockets and pull out the contents. What do you have?  Some loose change, your house keys, a wallet or purse, probably a mobile phone or some sort of handheld device. If you live in London you’re very likely to have the small plastic card that is the Oyster: the smartcard which makes buying and using transport tickets easier.

That’s quite a lot to be carrying around, a fact acknowledged by mobile phone manufacturers who are looking to lighten the load by embedding the Oyster swipe card used by London commuters into a mobile phone, with a trial set to start at the beginning of next year.

This is part of a wider strategy from phone manufacturers to move away from only pushing entertainment functions onto phones (think music, ring tones, games and some video content) to offering more practical functionality on their devices. In this case, transport, but also banking. The Economist recently announced ‘The death of cash’ and there have been calls to abandon coppers in both the US and the UK as detractors say the coin is obsolete and costs more to make than it's worth.

To this end the Oyster money scheme has already included credit card functionality that facilitates small purchases in around 1,000 shops and cafes - mainly in the City of London and at Canary Wharf. In these shops customers can use their phones to make payments of up to £10. On top of this a number of high street banks are allowing customers to check bank balances and top up mobile phone accounts on their handsets.

M-commerce, as it is known, has not been as rapidly adopted in the UK as in the Far East where there is a very mature market, or even in Africa where mobile banking is revolutionising transactions and the transference of cash in the shape of small loans and payments. This is helping to promote growth on a continent where infrastructure provides a number of barriers to the flow of resources and money. 

So then, from lugging around a ramshackle collection of coins and cards in your pocket, the perfect converged handset could consolidate all your consumer needs into one place. UK citizens are slowly growing accustomed to cash less payment; witness the dominance of chip-and-PIN, and swipe as methods of payment. One device for all your transport, banking and communication needs. What’s not to like?

Although there are security implications associated with losing your single device, just like when you lose your handbag, as is technologies wont, this potential problem will only provoke a solution. Disposable or destroyable data cards can’t be far away as well as more sophisticated ways of locking or tracking lost devices.  Handset manufacturers are realising that entertainment systems aren’t the only additional features people are interested in using on their phones. By integrating these very practical functions on to a phone, they will also attract a different market share. Where will convergence take us next?

Amazon’s founder Jeffrey Bezos was on stage in New York this week announcing the imminent release in the US of what he hopes will be the new ‘killer’ handheld device: an electronic book-reading console called Kindle.

Whilst not as aesthetically pleasing as the iphone, Kindle is still an intriguing proposition: long and slim, with electronic ink that mimics the appearance of paper -  if not the feel - and with a back lighting facility that allows you to read in any light, Bezos believes its introduction could herald a step change in our consumption of books and newspapers. Retailing at about £200, users will be able to download books over a wireless connection accessing the extensive Amazon back catalogue of over 90,000 titles for about £2.50 a throw.

Newspapers and magazines subscriptions from the likes of the New York Times and The Wall St. Journal will also be available and in total Kindle will be able to hold around 200 books. Bezos believes we are heading for a brave new world: "Why are books the last bastion of analogue?" he asked.

At this point the technological sceptics amongst you may be moved to remember the old anecdote that describes how during the space race, NASA spent over $20 million dollars trying, ultimately unsuccessfully, to develop a pen that would work in outer space. The Russians took a pencil.

To be fair to Bezos he did acknowledge what he called the ‘highly evolved and well-suited’ status of the book – perhaps not the most obvious expression of praise -  and went on to detail the dilemma he felt the Kindle presented to him personally. "The book lover in me often has asked the nerd in me 'is there a way to get the emotions and experiences I love from books, but combined with the possibilities of advanced technology?"

The Kindle cannot hope to replace the dog-eared, annotated, wine stained books that so many people keep as reminders of things past. Readers return to and revisit old books. The cover designs and the colour and feel of the pages all have a special resonance for the reader, as they conjure up the time and place of reading. The relationship that readers can have with a well-loved text relies on the physical and tactile nature of books: an electronic device, regardless of its usability or down load speed, will never be able to replicate this.      

But everyone at Amazon will know this and Bezos own professions of love for the book will make him well aware that the book is as enduring an artefact as a sculpture or painting. The Kindle then, will be a complimentary offering to books rather than a competitive one. What Amazon believe is that there is an opportunity to provide compelling content on demand over a reliable device. From the ipod to facebook, what web 2.0 has shown that if you are capable of doing this, be it in music, film or search, revenues will follow.

What is also apparent is the potential for this device to be adopted by the global jet-set or the have-yachts, as they are sometimes known. A busy business executive can save time and space and most of all, can exercise choice in his or her reading habits, when using Kindle. In this it looks like a sound offering.

A note of caution. In a world of converging, multi-function and competing handheld devices (take your pick from blackberry, mobile phone, iphone, laptop, pdas etc) is there the consumer appetite for something that however slender, is another thing to carry around? Amazon may face the problem that all other device makers are facing; you must be able to perform more than one function well for adoption of the device to reach significant levels.

The death of the book is a traditional topic for publishers and writers alike as they struggle to reconcile themselves with a new digital age. The Booker prize winner Margaret Atwood was recently in London speaking about such a death. She defended the book as the "most perfect technology ever, needing no energy source; tactile, efficient, even beautiful." They will be around for some time yet.   

By Sam Ingleby, programme manager at Intellect

The sad loss of four firefighters in Warwickshire last week highlights the timeliness and importance of at least one application that is under development for the upcoming wireless communications technology ultra wide band (UWB).

UWB uses a transmission power level that can be described as being ‘below the noise floor’. Put simply, that power level is so low that it is almost undetectable, other by a suitably-designed receiver.  Even most wireless test equipment has difficulty picking up the very low-power signal.

The application that hopefully will assist in future situations where firefighters and other rescue workers may be lost inside buildings allows their position to be shown via a display screen, and identifies who is who on that screen using codes pre-assigned to the person or their function. For example, the display could show different icons for different kinds of personnel. In addition, every fireman who has entered a building will have an alarm button they can press.

Although the overall effectiveness of the application depends on a range of external factors, including the building configuration and construction for its overall effectiveness, it seems that it is accurate  to between 20-30cm when detecting people,and has a range of up to 1km.  The application could also be used in a forest fire environment.

The loss of the firefighters in Warwickshire serves as a reminder of the need to protect and equip these brave men and women to the highest possible degree. UWB is just one example of how technology could provide new ways of doing this.

Professor Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the one laptop per child (OLPC) project, author of the acclaimed Being Digital, brother of the US Secretary of Defence and all round mover and shaker, holds  up the lurid green $100 laptop his charity makes by its corner and tells his audience: "I’m telling you now, even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.”

He has flown into London from California to address the Parliament and Internet conference about the laptop - compact, robust, childlike and bright green - that is being passed around the room by MPs and industry experts with a mixture of awe and disbelief. The project aims to give 100 million of the laptops  to developing nations by 2009.

The idea behind the scheme is simple and despite the emblematic green laptop, is expressly not about technology, but about education. Negroponte believes that experimenting, collaborating, and problem solving on a computer is the quickest way to learn. It is he says, the purest way to experience "thinking about thinking at a young age". 

By giving students in developing countries – Nigeria, Afghanistan, Cambodia and Peru amongst others – a means of education, the mega-challenges facing the world now can be tackled. "Whatever big problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education.  We need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self-driven learning. The laptop is one important means of doing that,” he said.

Some details on the laptop itself: The children own the computer to take home and use, and this has facilitated some exciting child to parent tuition. Hand cranks attached to the side of the laptop provide power; a child suffering from malnutrition can still generate the two watts that the computer requires. Parents or stronger children can produce up to 10 watts. The laptops themselves have wire meshes in the top corner of the screen (Negroponte calls them ears) which allows the laptops to talk to each other as a form of messaging and all laptops have internet access which allows children to chat, share information on the web, gather by videoconference, make music together, edit texts, read e-books and enjoy the use of collaborative games online.

It is an inspirational speech; lucid and passionate and it excites many in the audience. Negroponte hopes to introduce a "give one get one" element, starting on 12 November in the US, where if you buy one laptop another is donated to a developing country. If successful, this will be replicated in the UK. Negroponte says that he always tells the governments in the developing nations  he is dealing with that he is selling them a Trojan Horse. Its potential is huge.

For more information on the OLPC project and how you can get involved visit http://www.laptop.org/ 

This week I've been looking into writing a report on how digital convergence has transformed the lives of everyone living in the UK. This got me thinking about role of new, convergent  technologies  in shaping the marketing industry, and in particular advertising.

Advertising, like any other communication method dependent on the media, has been subject to massive disruption by the arrival of digital convergence.

At one time the advertising model was relatively straightforward: find a big audience and speak to them, insistently and disruptively if need be, but ensure that your message is put across. However, new technologies have facilitated the fragmentation of mass audiences to such a degree that advertisers - mega-media events such as X-factor or the FA Cup final apart - can no longer identify a mass audience, grazing like a herd of buffalo on the plain. The audience are hiding now, elusive and difficult to reach, on the internet watching Youtube, fast forwarding through adverts on their digital video recorders, listening to their iPod’s and oblivious to billboards. How will businesses and advertisers respond to this huge shift in audience behaviour? Could technology, the initial cause of the disruption, also provide the solution?      

What about the opportunity that audience migration to a variety of digital technology offers to advertisers? For some, the compression of time between the delivery of the message and the potential fulfilment of purchase that digital convergence affords, either on the internet or on mobile phones, is more than capable of compensating for the loss of mass demographics. For instance, big spikes in music downloads were being seen on mobile phones after targeted delivery of adverts to small groups. 

Others see opportunities in a blurring of the distinction between content and advertising - already seen in advertorials and product placements - as being the surest and most effective method of reaching and influencing consumers. Yet others still see location coming back into play, as a key method of reaching the audience: micro-sites, and sponsorships of specific places, times and days would provide the targeted experience that was the most successful method of selling. And there is the argument that the mass-media model still eventually works.

The data that would truly transform the market, and show the where the greatest opportunities really are, by revealing audience behaviour is already out there stored on Sky boxes, mobile phones, Oyster cards and loyalty cards, ready and waiting to be interrogated. So what are advertisers waiting for?

While convergence has opened up many new opportunities for the advertising industry, it has also created new threats. Brands can be broken by one misjudged or overtly intrusive campaign. What would consumer reaction be to the exploitation of personal data by a large retailer? Or to stealth advertising on social networking sites that sent targeted ads after monitoring user content? While the prospect of losing influence and trust remains, aggressive use of this data is unlikely.   

By Sam Ingleby, programme manager at Intellect