Digital and New Media

I chaired one of the two sessions on Data last night at Denton's in the City. My panel included: Dr Rob Reid, Which? Steve Taylor, entrepreneur Donna Whitehead, Microsoft and Nick Graham, Lawyer @ Denton's We tried to help the packed audience unwind whether the existing legal framework was fit for purpose (it isn't). There will be a fuller account (!) on the BSAC web site at www.bsac.uk.com.

"This is to Certify that Mr Derek Wyatt a Freeman of The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists was admitted and Invested with the Livery this eighteenth day of January, two thousand and twelve" And so it came to pass......

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/913043d4-d221-11e0-9137-00144feab49a.html#axzz1juD5pjWo

For the past two years BSAC - the British Screen Advisory Committee - has given me free membership. As they put it to me "You have a different way at looking at things and we need that voice"...... Yesterday, I attended a Q&A chaired by Richard Hooper who has been charged with examining the feasibility of a Digital Copyright Exchange and has called for Evidence. So our session was to see what exactly he wanted from our members. I spent much of the two hours just...

Published in The Guardian 26.12.11 Dear Sir Why isn't it possible to pay for anything online by an automatic transfer from your own account to the account in question? There are no charges this way. It's probably out there somewhere but if not, maybe there's an opportunity for a third party to offer such a service via an App. Yours etc Derek Wyatt

I have now tried over 30 times to make an order on the River Cottage web site but each time it refuses to accept my voucher number..........

I was a guest yesterday lunch-time at a rather good gathering of engineers where we discussed "Smart, Fast, and Mobile" for the best part of 2 hours. www.theiet.org

I was on the UofCA entrpreneurs panel at Coin Street Neighbourhood Centre on Friday afternoon. I spoke about the need to create a national micropayment bank.

I met AP Parigi in Mumbai in 2008 when he was CEO of Times of India; we met again later in the year when he visited Parliament to tell me about Absolute Radio which they had purchased from "Virgin". And then as so often happens, we lost contact.... except except...... On Friday we had lunch at the newly refurbished Sanderson Hotel and chewed the fat free vegetarian Malay menu. AP has moved on and we plotted how we might work together.  

In 2006, I approached Helen Milner, CEO of UK Online, with an idea I had been trying to find a home for, for over five years but had seemingly been defeated by endless Secretary of States of the "Good project but why not find the funding elsewhere?" mentality, the BBC and Ofcom. She loved it and we set about finding a date in 2007 and looking at what it would entail. One Digital Day for the Nation was repeated in 2008, 2009 and 2010 but this year it is much more ambitious and will be...

I had a pre-order for Julian Assange's autobiography but on Thursday Amazon sent me an email telling me it was no longer available notwithstanding the serialisation rights in The Independent and the mountain of books already in Waterstones. Then, I went back on the site to see that it was available afterall..........   Anyway, it has been a hard read and hardly a page turner. I think it a muddle of a book and that is probably because of the haste in which Canongate, the...

We had quite a beano at Oxford over the past two days: first with five celebratory lectures at the Said Business School on Thursday for two hours, followed by a dinner at Balliol College and then a Board meeting on Friday morning. We inaugurated two award ceremonies: (i) Internet & Society Awards for the Public Good and (ii) Internet & Society Lifetime Achievement Awards which were well received.  I started the ball rolling on the Oxford Internet Institute

Paul Allen is the lesser known co-founder of Microsoft (the name is derived from microprocessor/and software) who has had poor health on a couple of occasions and in the first instance it led him eventually to a parting of the waves with his schoolboy friend Bill G. Most of the first half of the book has been documented by Bill G so it was good to read the other side. The second half of the book is as illuminating. Paul gradually some of his stock in Microsoft and has probably stopped...

BSAC organised what could almost be described as a "private viewing" of Stephen Carter, now resident in Paris. The former head of NTL and Ofcom before taking a peerage and writing the Digital Britain report which was then embarrassingly pasted by his own government in the wash-up just before the May, 2010 general election. Stephen was in outstanding form.

The red hot news tonight was that the hot red top News of The World has offered an unconditional apology to a number of politicians and celebrities for having hacked their personal mobiles. NewsCorp cannot be allowed to own BSkyB outright until the whole truth about these cases have come to court. Meanwhile, an independent investigation into the Met Police's relationship with NewsCorp must be announced tomorrow morning.

I was a guest last night at the LG sponsored YouTube film: Life In A Day which asked people to film their lives on 24th July 2010 and send them in via YouTube. Hundreds of thousands of people replied and the team led by director Kevin MacDonald has been busy putting this extraordinary film together.

Rupert Murdoch is about to be given the green light by Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State at DCMS, to buy the remaining shares in BSkyB which he doesn't already own. The matter will NOT be referred to the Competition Commission despite Ofcom's and the beleaguered Vince Cable's recommendations when he held the brief. So we all have a lot to thank the two Daily Telegraph journalists for screwing this up following the release of their tape recordings of Vince at a confidential advice...

The Guardian's Media Section every Monday used to be a must-read in the Communications industry.....but not any more. It is limp, behind the times and needs a revamp or a shelving.

I attended the NESTA debate on their new report: Creative Clusters & innovation yesterday at Portcullis House. The report is published at: www.nesta.org.uk

Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy by David Leigh and Luke Harding (Guardian Books). The Guardian was one of five papers - El Pais, New York Times, Der Spiegel (a weekly) and Le Monde - to eventually agree a deal late last year with Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, to release secret US tapes covering Iraq and Afghanistan and much else besides. Wikileaks is the first of maybe half a dozen books which will be out over the next three months which...

I am back in India on business with Tribal with visits to New Delhi and Mumbai. I first came to Bombay, as it was then, en route to Hong Kong in 1955 on SS Chusan where we were to spend three idyllic years as children with my parents (Dad was in the Royal Engineers). We came back in 1958 on the last troop ship and again stopped off in Bombay where my Grandfather had been with the Royal Artillery. After our voyage home (4 weeks on a floating hotel) troops to the Far East were...

I attended the BSAC Council Meeting yesterday - www.bsac.uk.com. When an MP I was invited to attended as an Observer and now I am not they invited back as a Member.  I really enjoy the meetings which are well attended and usually consist of  a number of different presentations across the industry under Chatham House rules.    We heard from Creative Scotland and Creative England and had a session on Micropayments. All good. 

On Monday, I spent the day in Copenhagen with Jim and Kathryn from www.designit.com (UK branch!). We visited their other working halves to discuss the Internet Policy Institute and their work on the web site. We travelled Easyjet for just under £50 return..........

I went to the RSA for one of its many lunch time debates and/or discussions it has held every year for the past couple of decades. These last just an hour so many Fellows and friends are able to pop in during lunch-time to hear a current topic being thought through by a couple of experts. Today, there was a lecture followed by a Q&A by Evgeny Mozorov entitled The Future of Wikileaks - you can catch it on www.thersa.org/events/listen-live. Evgeny has written a book: The Net

I have asked Ed Vaizey, the Culture Minister, to step in and save these papers for the Nation should they be sold to an overseas bidder: From Christie's web site: "Lot Description TURING, Alan Mathison (1912-1954). A collection of Alan Turing's offprints formed by Prof. Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman (1897-1984), 1936-1954, comprising: TURING'S FIRST PUBLISHED PAPER: 'Equivalence of left and right almost periodicity.' Offprint from: Journal of the London Mathematical Society, vol....

Vince Cable was right to ask Ofcom to look at the bid by NewsCorp to buy the remaining shares of Sky which they do not own. Ofcom has given a deadline of 19th November to register views on the proposal. I wrote to Vince Cable last month asking him to refer the bid to the Competition Commission.

I'm back in Cairo after a 13 year absence. When I last visited I came with CAABU and some legends as Jon Trickett MP, now almost back in the shadow cabinet, and Phyllis Starkey. This time it is a visit for the Tribal Group where I work as an Associate. We've businesses across the Mid East - in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Jordan and Syria - and we're actively pursuing others. We're here to examine opportunities for Education which is one of our three specialisms.   The...

I said on 23rd August on a piece about the BBC that the Licence Fee should be able to be accessed by C4. At the GMEITF in Edinburgh yesterday Michael Grade commented: "The BBC should compete for a share of the licence fee with Channel 4."

On Friday, the great and the good from the television world will gather again for the Edinburgh International Television Festival sponsored by The Guardian. Because it is sponsored by that newspaper, other media have become more reluctant to report it and as a result it has become less important in the television year for the "Suits" to attend. This year, the head honcho at the BBC, Mark Thompson will explain why his salary is three times larger than the PM's and why his Pensions and...

Wednesday 6th October 2010 9.00am to 4.00pm Venue: Rich Mix. 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA Digital Unite are sponsors and delivery partners in a Government event called See IT in Action. Places at this event are free for representatives of local authorities and their civil society partners. We are also presenting one of the workshops, so if you register please come along and see us. It is a must-attend day for all those who commission or manage local public services,...

I have been writing and speaking about the need for an Internet Policy Institute since April, 2010. Subsequently, I have had a number of companies and individuals who have offered to help me in thinking this through. This afternoon, I am meeting another group who represent major clients in the internet space and I am hoping we can move forward to a meeting of Internet interested organisations in the academic, business, political and consumer space within the next six weeks. If you

Apple iPhone 4 executive quits Mark Papermaster is no more - well, no more at Apple. He was Apple's senior vice-president of, wait for it, devices hardware engineeering............

RIM, the makers of the Blackberry, have caused a desert cloud in the UAE if not beyond. When it was formed back in the mid-1990s, RIM created a Network Operations Centre (NoC). These are hosted in Canada for the Americas and one in Europe to cover Europe and Asia. Any company that wants to use the Blackberry has to install its software which can then communicate with one of its NoCs. Consequently, RIM's security is better than anyone else's especially when it comes to email with...

Yesterday, Sam Wolfe, of FOSI (she was working for them in DC but shortly she'll be working for them in Paris) came by my house to collect me and my crutches to make sure I made it to the House of Lords for the launch of their GRID see: wwwfosigrid.org.   I was glad she did. I had said to myself that I wouldn't go back to Parliament until October but hey this was the penultimate day of term so what the heck. The GRID is the brainchild of David Miles, the EMEA Director of FOSI,...

For a company that have a hold on the letter "i" - as in iMac, iPod and iPhone - I watched from the sidelines with amusement when Apple set a hare going on their new "tablet" a year ago. I gave up on the number of classy pundits who guessed wrong. I called it the iFad and in the end was only a letter out.  The iPad as it is better known has been another Apple phenomenon. It might have happened 20 years ago when Apple played with a hand held device called the Newton but then the...

MyMP relaunched today with three MPs from the three main parties (well 2.2) now added with a further 17 expected to be up and working on the site between now and Christmas. I went in search of a company that could do an App for me last June, 2009. I already knew Jo Shaw in another existence and when she said she thought her new company - PublicZone - might be interested we were on for it!! From June till December, we worked on the design and content model and eventually launched it in the

Cloud Computing has been with us for five or so years; its the computer's world equivalent of off-shoring. First we had the call centres (a lot of which have since returned to mainland Europe from India); then we had people off-shoring with companies relocating to where they could gain a competitive tax advantage like Dubai, Dublin or Delhi and now we have the whole infrastructure on the move with servers and their ilk physically moving "off-shore". This is happening without much public...

Steve Jobs meets Jonathan Ive, the main designer at Apple, at least twice a day. I wonder how many FTSE 500 company CEOs do the same. Though Steve Jobs is a stickler for design, he is so lucky that he has as his co-partner, the slightly shier Jonathan Ive. They couldn't be more difficult. In 2006, I asked the Cabinet Office to give Jonathan a knighthood. In the dying days of Brown's premiership, I tried to persuade No.10 to award an honorary one to Steve Jobs. I failed on both counts.

The Family Online Safety Institute (www.fosi.org) had a couple of previous incarnations before it moved from the UK to Washington, DC four years ago. Its current CEO is Stephen Balkam and he and his staff here in London and in DC have done a pretty fine job in raising the profile of matters to do with child safety on the internet. They've run three excellent conferences in DC, two in Madrid, two in Paris and one more recently in Bahrain. More are mooted with the next European conference...

Financial Times Global 30 Computing, Media & Technology Companies 2010                   1 Microsoft USA      2. Apple USA   3. China Mobile Hong Kong   4. IBM USA   5. Cisco USA   6. Google USA   7. Oracle USA   8. HP USA   9. Intel USA   10. Vodafone UK       11. Samsung South Korea   12....

It is a rare event for any UK newspaper, especially one as old as The Observer (www.observer.co.uk), to dedicate most of its Editorial to the subject of Privacy and for much of that to online privacy.   I wrote to The Editor on Monday asking if The Observer would begin a national campaign to change the law but as yet I have had no response.   My view is clear, it is wrong of Facebook and Google and all the other online companies - though these two seem to be in danger of becoming...

The BBC was founded as the British Broadcasting Company in 1922 and was renamed the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1926 once it had obtained its royal charter; it was delivered through the General Post Office both resident inside the Home Office. It was essentially a radio (wireless) service with naturally the Home Service (now Radio4), the quaintly named Light Programme (Radio2) and the Third Programme (Radio3). Today, the BBC receives over £3.5 billion a year for its increasingly...

I find it hard to reflect on copyright without also examining its brothers and sisters which include intellectual property, digital rights and patent law. I no longer think you can discuss copyright in isolation. I have been a huge fan of the work of Larry Lessig at Harvard University; he has successfully sought to add a very substantial formalisation of copyright under a creative commons licence. I hope he can hear my standing ovation for his magnificent efforts. I regret we have such...

The world needs a place to foster more informed debate on Internet policy and regulation.     1. Why is it needed?   A number of events have coalesced over the past year or so to make me think that the world – its politicians, its governments, its businesses, its charities, its academics and free thinkers, its people - needs a place to identify and discuss best practice:   Google in China Digital Economy Bill in UK France’s three strikes and out for illegal...

Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) and the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) inaugural conference in Bahrain www.tra.org.bh/online-safety    This morning, the TRA-FOSI conference began its two day conference on child safety online, a first for the Arab world. The original conference had to be postponed in January and with the Icelandic volcano threatening air space last week it was touch and go whether the 20 or so speakers from the USA and UK would make it. Happily...

Given my interest in all things digital which stretches back to 1992, it would seem perverse of me not to do a weekly blog on the subject.   At the moment, I’m nearly no longer an MP (6th May 2010) and so I have a kind of luxury – some spare time to think, no salary and a diary which seems to fill up at an alarming rate……   Anyway, here’s what I’ve been up to this past week or so:   1.    ...