He will be inviting his friends and other entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, New York, Spain, Germany and of course, those from the island itself. We will be there. Will you?

This year the event takes place on 24th June, in the form of a series of improvised debates on technology and innovation that will take place from 4pm to 8pm. This event is free, but if you want to join you have to register here by emailing menorcatechtalk@gmail.com. Places are limited.

If you are coming, we highly recommend arriving a few days earlier so you can also enjoy one of the island´s most spectacular equestrian fiestas taking place in the town of Ciutadella on 22, 23, and 24 June. So visit us for a healthy dose of technology, networking, gin, fiestas, horses… oh, and this:

Contact us for further info.

Levels of concern about the internet have fallen substantially in the UK over the past six years, however some users are still willing to take risks over their internet security and privacy settings, new research by Ofcom reveals.

UK adults’ concerns about the internet have dropped steadily since 2005, falling from seven in ten (70 per cent) users to half (50 per cent) by 2011, with confidence online at high levels (84 per cent), according to Ofcom’s Adults Media Use and Attitudes report. The report is designed to give an accessible overview of media literacy among UK adults aged 16 and over, and its purpose  is to support people working in this area to develop and promote media literacy among these groups.

The fall in concern comes as people are spending increasing amounts of time on the internet. The average user now says they are online for over 15 hours each week, an increase of five hours since 2005. The internet is increasingly part of people’s everyday lives wherever they are, and eight in ten adults (79%) now go online on any device in any location – up by 20 percentage points compared to 2005.

Social networking continues to grow in popularity and three fifths of adult internet users (59 per cent) say they now have a profile on a social networking site. However, the increase has slowed, with a rise of five percentage points since 2010, compared to increases of ten percentage points in 2010 and 22 percentage points in 2009.

For those with a profile, social networking is increasingly becoming a part of their daily lives, with two-thirds (67 per cent) saying they visited the sites every day – up from one-third (30 per cent) in 2007. Accessing social media on a weekly basis via a mobile phone has almost doubled in the last year – from 15 per cent in 2010 to 29 per cent in 2011. Amongst smartphone users this increase is even greater, up from 39 per cent in 2010 to 55 per cent in 2011.

Online privacy

However, while internet usage and social networking is becoming commonplace some users are still willing to take risks online. A quarter of social networkers (26 per cent) in the UK say their personal information, such as their date of birth or hometown, can potentially be seen by people they do not know.

Furthermore, about one in six users (16 per cent) of social networking sites say they share their contact details with anyone or friends of friends. Three in five (61 per cent) only allow their friends to view their contact details, and a further 13 per cent say they don’t have this information on their profile.

This report is the fifth full report since the Ofcom survey began in 2005. Ofcom has a statutory duty to promote media literacy. Media literacy enables people to have the skills, knowledge and understanding they need to make full use of the opportunities presented both by traditional and by new communications services. Media literacy also helps people to manage content and communications, and protect themselves from the potential risks associated with using these services. The core focus of Ofcom´s research work in this area is to understand the usage habits of UK adults, and their attitudes across TV, radio, internet, mobile phones and games.

For more information, contact us.

Ofcom has invited contributions to its review of ATVOD´s Designation. ATVOD (the Authority for Television on Demand) is the co-regulator of editorial content included in video-on-demand (VOD) services, responsible for the implementation of UK law as it pertains to the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMS). The Designation, which came into force in March 2010, is subject to formal review by Ofcom after two years. Contributions to the review from stakeholders must be made to Ofcom by 31 May 2012.

For more information, contact us.

Our newest creative partner Squeaky Carrot has launched its website, aimed at professionals who need a good, clean, brand identity, online and offline. Lluc Pallejà is the Barcelona-trained designer and entrepreneur behind Squeaky Carrot. The company delivers design services, specifically focused on brand identity. That means help clients differentiate their businesses from their competitors so they can increase the confidence of their clients and win more business.  A website is probably the most important visual identity piece for any enterprise. Squeaky Carrot produces not only the graphic visual identity part, but can also custom design and implement full websites ranging from simple presentations to complete e-commerce sites with back–end integration to payment gateways.

Why the name? You´ll just have to click through to the site to find out.

Click here to visit.

Sojournposse is a creative consulting agency consisting of a team of designers and storytellers who aim to make a difference in the community. As creatives, they believe in developing relationships and promote understanding by making things together. There are a lot of problems in society, such as social imbalance, that need to be addressed. We debate and write news articles about them. We discuss them at higher education seminars. And then what?

Sojournposse focuses on using its design, journalism and digital anthropology skills to create programmes that have empowering and lasting impact on for stakeholders.  In other words,  solving problems through design and social sciences. The aim is to encourage positive behavioural change within the community.

Founders Zarina Holmes and Salina Christmas have been commissioned to deliver projects such as the coverage of a fashion show in a conflict region, multimedia campaigns for NGOs and multi-faith groups, storytelling and publishing workshops for international and UK students, and engaging design workshops in collaboration with big corporations and academic institutions.

For more information, contact us.

New Challenges are ahead for Not on the Wires, the multimedia storytelling team. ¨Both this ambitious topic – the world – and these ambitious methods, are quickly changing, and the future is full of ever more opportunities to explore both.¨ The site will remain live as an archive of the stories produced by the project´s collaborators.

Former editor and co-founder Dominique van Heerden is now a digital producer at CNN, Creative director and co-founder Marcus Gilroy-Ware is planning a new digital storytelling platform, DeeperStories, Alex Wood, co-founder is launching Kikai, a lifestyle site in June, and current editor Emanuelle Degli Esposti is working towards the launch of a Middle-East focussed site.

We wish them well, and look forward to their upcoming announcements.

This is yet another great cartoon from The Oatmeal, that deserves wide attention. How can the industry ever address piracy when the process of honestly buying the content is so labourious for consumers, who even if they make sincere efforts to be honest, are rewarded with nothing but a run around? Visit www.theoatmeal.com

The Australian Law Reform Commission has published a review of the censorship and classification systems currently in place and has made a number of recommendations including the creation of a new Classification of Media Content Act.

It has been 20 years since the last review, and the report provides an overview both of the policy framework and of the recommendations made in the report Classification – Content Regulation and Convergent Media which can be accessed here.

The eight guiding principles and 57 recommendations contained in the report set out to address deficiencies in the current classification and content regulation framework, described as ¨an analogue piece of legislation in a digital world¨.

The recommendations call for a new classification scheme fit for the convergent media age which includes: being platform neutral, defining clearly what types of programmes and computer games must be classified, restricting adult content, enabling greater participation by industry stakeholders in the classification process (subject to regulatory oversight), a role for the classification board in benchmarking and reflecting community standards and putting in place a single regulator with primary responsibility for regulating the new, replacement scheme.

The net effect of the recommendations means the establishment of a new National Classification Scheme that:

•applies consistent rules to content that are sufficiently flexible to be adaptive to technological change;
•places a regulatory focus on restricting access to adult content, helping to promote cyber-safety and protect children from inappropriate content across media platforms;
•retains the Classification Board as an independent classification decision maker with an essential role in setting benchmarks;
•promotes industry co-regulation, encouraging greater industry content classification, with government regulation more directly focused on content of higher community concern;
•provides for pragmatic regulatory oversight, to meet community expectations and safeguard community standards;
•reduces the overall regulatory burden on media content industries while ensuring that content obligations are focused on what Australians most expect to be classified; and
•harmonises classification laws across Australia, for the benefit of consumers and content providers.

The report also addresses how content should be marked, packaged and advertised to consumers, and for content that must be classified, content providers will be obliged to display the classification. It also recommends the harmonisation and consistency in the development and implementation of such codes.

The context for this report is that it is one of several reviews taking place in Australia, including the Convergence Review that was conducted in 2011 by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. This effort was aimed at looking at current legislation pertaining to media and communications in the context of convergence. This report will be released at the end of March.

The developments in Australia are interesting because they acknowledge the need for consistency and harmonisation of content signalling  (programme descriptive metadata) as a benefit to consumers. They allow for the future development of industry codes that will address how to enable this information to be made available to consumers using the various data-driven interfaces (eg, EPGs and evolving ´content navigation´ systems) but the manner in which this is to be achieved is as yet undefined.

In contrast, for example in Europe, there are national classification schemes in place for every member state, and self-regulatory efforts in the UK, for example, that do not as yet recognise any need for consistency. Instead they stress that individual content providers would take the responsibility to decide for themselves how to communicate the content of their programmes to viewers.

This approach is not workable or sensible taking into consideration the evolving content navigation systems that help consumers find and decide what content to watch, especially considering a range of other ongoing challenges to accessing consistent descriptive metadata about programming to drive new applications.

Chris Dawes, a former UK Government official working for the Department of Culture Media and Sport, spoke about this issue in the recently published European Audiovisual Observatory Report, ¨The Regulation of On-Demand Audiovisual Services: Chaos or Coherence? (click here), saying ¨will we depend on initiatives such as the UK´s Good Practice Principles on Audiovisual Content Information? Or will we want to be more automated, needing a drive to more standardisation of metadata?¨

In the EU, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMS) continues to be implemented by Member States, with European governments taking action on a national level to ensure appropriate safeguards for children as well as complying with various other signalling requirements.

It is already apparent that EU member states are coming up with various symbols, codes, and conventions for signalling sponsorship and product placement to consumers. So it is easy to forget that such labels must also be accessible to consumers from the various text-driven content navigation tools from which they make their viewing choices.

Consistent labels -  whether they are intended for age-gating, the presence of product placement, or signalling accessibility and a range of other features for public benefit – all need to be additionally transposed into consistent descriptive metadata that can be easily ingested into content navigation systems. This is a real requirement far beyond the ´every man for himself´ approach, and it will be a big challenge for content providers to come to a common agreement. In the meantime any steps towards recognising the need for more harmonisation and consistency in the form of descriptive metadata to signal content to consumers are to be commended, even if they are just beginning to take place on a national level, as in Australia, for now.

In a speech that applauded cable´s investment in broadband infrastructure, Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, announced this week the Commission´s intention to launch a policy paper on connected TV by the end of the year. The speech took place at the annual Cable Congress in Brussels on Thursday, 8 March. She said is also preparing the Commission´s strategy for cloud computing, which goes hand and hand with next generation broadband infrastructure investment.

¨We know people are already happy to pay for high-quality TV services. What if they could combine their favourite TV programs with the best of the Internet, or indeed special on-line services? With features that are interactive, on-demand, or social?¨said Kroes. ¨Well, you won’t have to wait long to find out: within 2 to 3 years, 90% of TVs sold in Europe will be internet-connectable. 90 per cent. So later this year we’ll be producing a policy paper on Connected TV, to make sure we’re ready to let this market flourish.¨ Kroes also said that we need to support cloud computing because that´s where the future will be, but that to use the cloud effectively there must be robust broadband networks in support.

The full text of her keynote speech can be found here.

On 21st March 2012, Forum Europe will host the European Cloud Computing Conference in Brussels with professionals from the technology industry, EU policymakers and other stakeholders debating the current state and the future of Cloud Computing in Europe. Conference link here.

At the end of 2011, the European Commission will report for the first time on the application of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. The Commission’s letters to member states asking for information in this connection were unusually long and detailed, thus indicating the difficulties experienced in incorporating the Directive into domestic law. These difficulties mainly arise with respect to regulating non-linear audiovisual media services.

For this reason, in April 2011 the European Audiovisual Observatory and the Institute for European Media Law invited 25 experts on audiovisual media law to a workshop at which an assessment was made of the situation with regard to the regulation of on-demand audiovisual services. The principal questions for discussion were how the new provisions on the scope of the Directive have been incorporated into domestic law and how member states have handled the possibility of promoting the self- or co-regulation of on-demand audiovisual services.

The papers on which the workshop was based and a detailed report on the discussions that followed the various contributions are summarised in this IRIS Special and form a comprehensive overview of the possible regulation. After reading this IRIS Special, the somewhat provocative question in the title, “Chaos or Coherence?”, can probably be answered by establishing that the regulatory landscape in Europe is characterised by both chaos and coherence.

You can access more information about how to purchase the report here.