Martin Tripp Associates Technology Archives

Garbage in, garbage out: AI in recruitment

Eleanor Morum

Artificial, yes. Intelligent?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an incredibly powerful tool with many applications; but questions have been asked about its usage in our sector. We wrote about AI recruitment technology a few years ago, and the picture hasn’t changed much, except in its uptake: AI recruitment tools now proliferate.

For people who have entered the job market in the last few years, and especially in 2020, HireVue has become a dreaded part of application processes. Even pre-pandemic, competitive grad schemes relied on HireVue as a first stage filter to their applicant pool, minimizing employee time used, while maximizing applications slashed. The reasoning behind this is fair enough: Goldman Sachs receives 250 000 applications for their graduate positions, and the rate of offers made for the big players in professional services are famously in single digits.

No surprise, though, that this shortcut has drawbacks. A Cornell University study published this January titled “Image Representations Learned with Unsupervised Pre-Training Contain Human-like Biases,” found that the machine-learning models that AI tools used by products like HireVue are based on large datasets sourced from the internet for cost-saving purposes. The conclusion of the survey: “Our results suggest

Xbox Series X / S vs Playstation 5, value for money?

James Dodd

Console yourself

Sony and Microsoft have finally released their next generation consoles. With retailers selling out faster than they can put units on sale, the launches appear to represent success for all. But do they?

On the one hand, Sony and Microsoft have succeeded in bringing new hardware to market on time, and have garnered quite a lot of positive coverage in the press and social media. On the negative side, there are stories citing widespread hardware and software issues, exclusive titles are scarce if present at all, and the cost of new games to the consumer has skyrocketed. So, are early adopters getting value for money, or paying a premium for unfinished games and hardware? Let’s take a look.

Hardware

Let’s begin with a quick comparison between the three hardware components which are arguably going to make the most difference to gamers and developers. For now, we will just consider

The Gamification of Life and Commerce

Eleanor Morum

Switching to new horizons

Like many facing the prospect of several weeks (so we thought) stuck at home, the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons seemed like the best-timed launch in the history of gaming. As James reported recently, gaming has fared exceptionally well these recent months. But Animal Crossing has distinguished itself as a cultural force. As lockdown went on and Zoom pub quizzes grew wearisome, Animal Crossing continued to be a place to reconnect with friends, but without the pressure of trying to find something new to talk about. Instead, visiting friends on their islands was a chance to do something fun with people again.

Since then, other games have grown in popularity. In particular, Among Us has become the rival for cultural dominance as the game that not only is everyone playing, but also talking about. I found the game through internet chatter and played just to understand what made it so worth talking about. While Animal Crossing

Smart cities and smart thinking: the Middle East’s tech on the rise

Olivia Ogilvie

No middling tech

We are now entering a new digital era: the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (4IR). Suffice to say, technology evolves every day and changes the world along with it. Huge strides in technological innovation are made to meet and further propagate demands for faster information, transformation, and increased agility in both our professional and personal lives.

The First Industrial Revolution harnessed the power of water and steam; the Second, electric power; the Third, electronics and information technology to drive automation and efficiency. Building on its predecessor, this Fourth and current phase is

Is Apple entering the on-demand cloud video games arena?

James Dodd

Giving the gamers away?

It’s the question everyone is asking: is Apple entering the on-demand cloud video games arena? Or did they just force gamers to ditch iPhone and iPad for Android?

I write this as an Apple user of more than 20 years, with a passion for the games industry which spans a lifetime. There is much to be said for a desktop, laptop, tablet, phone and even a watch that work seamlessly together, take significant steps to look after user data, and allow access not just to Apple’s selection of software and services but also to those developed by third parties. In the days when I was co-developing and testing apps, it was also significantly easier to release a stable product on iOS, because the majority of Apple’s devices share a unified interface. Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry were a minefield of differing screens, button layouts and processors. So, if you’d asked me any time before last week whether I’d move from iOS to Android, the answer would have been an unequivocal ‘No.’

A lot can change in a week…

Report from the museum

Eleanor Morum

Reunite at the museum

For the first time since early March, I bought a ticket for an exhibition last week. And weirdly, the experience wasn’t as weird as I was expecting. I bought a timed entry ticket the night before and remembered my mask. I was greeted outside the Barbican’s entrance and given a run-through of the direction to go and how the exhibition worked. Beyond that, the exhibition felt as normal. Everyone wore masks, of course – which now also feels normal.

There were arrows on the floor to guide people through the exhibition, but really that only felt like a formalization of a rule that’s always been there. In one respect, I liked the arrows as reassurance that I hadn’t missed any room or section of the exhibition. Frustrations with other visitors hovering too long were the same, but now, at least justified. At the end, I did rush past the tiny café and shop area, feeling that I was pushing my luck for spending that length of time indoors with strangers already.

While in the exhibition, I generally felt safe, like there was enough distance between me and others. Although it felt well-attended, I also didn’t struggle to find a space in every room for my own 2-meter bubble. Even a week before mask requirements came into effect in museums, I didn’t notice a single person not wearing one. As a result, my time in the exhibition was much less anxiety-provoking than the bus trip there.

Michael Dixon, the director of the Natural History Museum in London has said, “When people visit the museum over the next few months they are going to get a fantastic VIP experience because they will be able to see things without so many people around them,

Remote hiring and onboarding: survey shows managers receive no training

Matt D'Cruz

The majority of companies across the media, information, technology and entertainment sectors are still hiring during the pandemic.
But 69% of business leaders are finding it difficult to onboard new team members remotely.
The vast majority of managers (72%) have received no training in distanced interviewing, on-boarding or remote management.

Left in the dark.

Earlier this month we conducted an industry-wide survey of how business leaders were approaching the process of recruitment and onboarding during lockdown. We surveyed business leaders across a wide range of sectors – including consumer media, business media, research and information providers, education and training businesses, software providers and entertainment companies.

While the pace of hiring has slowed, organisations are still recruiting in key positions

We found that 69% of respondents were still making some hires, although the remainder had stopped recruiting altogether. 41% were recruiting less than they had been before the pandemic, and 24% said their pre-lockdown plans were unchanged. A small number – 3% – were actually recruiting more than previously, largely

The real cost of removing Huawei from the UK 5G roll-out

Martin Tripp

Huawei: the lads

Last week the government took the decision to ban Huawei from the UK’s 5G network. Whatever the reasons for the decision, no real attempt has been made to count the cost of this move.

We should stress that none of what follows is an argument for the inclusion of Huawei in the 5G network. There are any number of issues around that, from security to ethics. This is just a short attempt to delineate some of the potential economic consequences of the decision to first include, and then exclude, the company from the UK’s mobile infrastructure.

We think there are four principal ways of accounting for the economic impact.

The actual cost of removing and replacing Huawei kit from both existing and future networks.
The cost to the UK digital economy of an estimated three year delay in roll-out of 5G.
The likely cost of an out-and-out retaliatory trade war such as China is now signalling.
The costs to the UK’s economy of a weak position in future trade negotiations.

Corporate technology at home; balancing privacy and productivity

Eleanor Morum

Managing from home

My webcam is covered with a googly eye, but I’ve seen band aids, sparkly butterfly stickers, and purpose-made spyholes with sliding covers. For millennials and Gen-Zs, the idea of someone on the other side of the camera of every device we own is something of a given, to say nothing of the security of our personal data. For us, invasion of personal privacy by internet giants via our technology has been something to adapt to rather than eradicate.

But the pandemic has pushed many more of us to consider how closely we are being watched in a new sphere. Forced to work from home, many of us have brought corporate technology into our homes for the first time. And with many hailing ‘the death of the office’, it may be here for some time.

The supposed death of the office brings some benefits: less wasted time – both on the commute and at people’s desks, improved employee retention, and company savings on office space. Contrary to Boris Johnson’s belief that working from home is a ‘skiver’s paradise’, a Stanford study found that workers at home were 13% more productive

Big data trends 20/21

Olivia Ogilvie

BAD times.

Using data and analytics in efforts to digitise and transform business models is not a new phenomenon. Many of the most recognisable brands and companies today have relied on big data to transform and elevate their status and business model. Take Netflix, for instance. Netflix started as a DVD rental company in 1997 and, since its shift to a cloud streaming service, boasts an estimated 182.8m subscribers with a market capital of over $200bn.

While it’s been a trend for some time, it’s still on the rise. And quickly. By 2022, Gartner expects that 90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical enterprise asset and analytics as an essential competency. To ensure that your business is keeping up with the latest in big data, here are five trends that we expect to continue throughout the second half of 2020 and into 2021.

The increasing demand for Data Scientists and Chief Data Officers (CDOs)

The Harvard Business Review predicted in 2012 that the role of Data Scientist would be the sexiest job of the 21^st Century. Has their prediction come true; is it sexy? You can decide that one, but it’s certainly lucrative.

More businesses are uncovering the value

Psychometric tests and quality recruitment

Sophia Garibaldi

Thinking outside the box-ticking

At all levels, recruitment can be costly and time-consuming. As such, employers understandably aim to maximise the benefits and minimise the frequency of the recruitment process. For the same reasons, improved staff retention is one of the highest priorities for our clients. For recruiters too, it is a sign of a successful hire, since strong retention strategy starts at the recruitment phase when companies look for compatible values in candidates alongside role-related skills.

Core competencies are the focal point during most recruitment processes, tested through competency-based interview techniques or by the assignment of practical projects. However, an increasing number of companies, particularly larger ones, have started

Habit: a formula for success in tricky times

Martin Tripp

A roadmap to success…

Over the last few weeks we have had the opportunity to talk to hundreds of business leaders to understand how they are adapting to the current crisis. These range from global corporates to early stage start-ups across media, information, technology and entertainment – or MITE. Even with such a broad range of organisations, there’s a common thread that unites them.

It sort of works as an equation – and though it may not offer a panacea, it may be a predictive shorthand for which companies will come out of the crisis strongest.

We think you can boil it down to this: Community + Content + Delivery = Habit.

(Reductive, we know: but this is a blog, not a book, and we only have a thousand words.)

First, let’s start with the right-hand side of the equation: the answer.

HABIT

All MITE businesses depend on habit. We need people to have

Unreal Engine 5 and the future of games and film tech

James Dodd

Whether you realise it or not, you probably already know Epic Games‘ Unreal. It is the engine behind ‘The Mandelorian’ on Disney+ and a plethora of games on mobile, PC or console.

Epic’s latest iteration of the engine – Unreal 5 – was revealed this week. Via a tech demo running in real time on a Playstation 5 dev kit, the world finally got its first look at what the future of gaming really looks like. Along with many, I witnessed something I’ve been dreaming of since I was a kid, and something I’ve been hearing about a lot, lately.

Epic Unreal 5 Tech Demo

I have spent the last couple of years talking to games industry leaders around the world. Our conversations have covered everything

Mental Heath and Wellbeing during and beyond lockdown

James Dodd

Steps to help you deal with remote working and social distancing.

Since the outbreak of Coronavirus began, we have been speaking with business leaders about how they are dealing with the sudden need to change the typical working practices of their businesses and their employees.

While the logistics of remote working are challenging, the real challenge lies in ensuring the health and wellbeing of home-working employees. It is important not just for their own mental health, but also to ensure your business stays productive. With this in mind, we have been attending webinars organised by our friends at Thrive, the mental health specialists. As a result, we were able

How Netflix has changed comedy forever

Chris Sutcliffe

There’s much to be said for Netflix’s data-led commissioning system. Being able to draw circles around shows its users watch, and then commissioning new shows based on where those circles overlap, was an innovative approach to creating content a few years ago.

Barring one or two shows that seemed like home runs but failed to find audiences – namely BoJack Horseman stablemate Tuca & Bertie – Netflix’s television output is as prodigious as it is popular. Recent figures demonstrate that while its film catalogue has shrunk by 40% since 2014, the amount of TV content has increased by 37%.

Telling funny stories.

The reality is that television, by nature of the amount of time it takes to consume a series compared to a film, provides Netflix and its competitors with content that is ‘stickier’ and keeps people coming back for longer. While this isn’t always to the benefit of the show (recall that Netflix’s collaborations with Marvel were criticised for feeling bloated and each being a few episodes too long ), it keeps people on the platforms for longer.

As evidence of quite how valuable television content is for streaming services, remember that Netflix paid Warner $100 million to keep Friends on the platform throughout 2019, and it was seen as a bargain. The reason? When it comes to streaming services, exclusive shows and films are the jewels in the crown, and when a service doesn’t have those proven, guaranteed hits, it has to try other things.

Console sales cycles may just have changed forever

James Dodd

While all eyes have been on Google’s forthcoming Stadia, it may actually be Microsoft who have just completely upended the traditional console sales cycle model.

Since the introduction of

Streaming is the future – but not for all media

Martin Tripp Associates

Streaming content is the natural endpoint for entertainment content. The many conveniences that come from streaming outweigh the concerns about a lack of ‘ownership’ for the consumer of the media they consume, data throttling once net neutrality is a distant memory, and the quite justified concerns over subscription fatigue due to the sheer amount of streaming services on offer.

The reality is that ease of use trumps all of those, particularly for casual consumers, and as infrastructure and internet penetration improves further the proportion of people using streaming services will only grow. Last year Ofcom reported that nearly half of UK households now have access to at least one television streaming service, as the number subscribing to the most popular services “increased from 11.2m (39%) in 2018 to 13.3m (47%) in 2019”. That doesn’t take into account the number of households that also subscribe to a music streaming service like Spotify, either.

The Google Stadia proves streaming works for games – in precisely the right circumstances

However, that isn’t to say that streaming is necessarily a good fit for every medium. It works well for low-data, passive mediums like audio and television. Even Netflix’s ambition Black Mirror special, Bandersnatch, which was effectively an experiment in interactive television content in the vein of an adventure game, was possible through Netflix’s infrastructure. But the reality is that the technology and infrastructure to stream many video games isn’t there yet – despite some serious investment from big players.

Sex sells: The smutty side of internet publishing

Chris Sutcliffe

Sex has always been a cornerstone of publishing. From Tijuana bibles to Page 3, we’ve always known that erotic content is a huge draw for audiences. Just as the porn industry choosing VHS reportedly led to Betamax losing the format war, publications like The Sun in the ’70s and its red-top competitors used sex to sell their papers in direct ‘racy’ competition with one another – The Sun even had a dedicated Page 3 website.

So ingrained was it as a practice that The Sun flip-flopped on retiring the practice of putting topless women on Page 3 until January of this year (with The Daily Star following suit in April 2019). The reality of the matter is that, while Page 3 was a hopelessly outdated practice and rightly toxic in 2019, sex and pornography aren’t going anywhere in the West – it’s simply moved online.

A big part of the appeal of sites like Tumblr was its NSFW content – until it wasn’t

Sites like reddit, despite nominally being brand-safe environments, have a huge undercurrent of not safe for work (NSFW) content on the site. Even Twitter, which rightly has a reputation for being political journalism-heavy, has a subculture of people who use the platform to promote their own personal adult services

Mixing it up: the problem of platform choice for publishers

Martin Tripp Associates

No sooner does a platform reach the mainstream than it’s potentially on the way out. For a few years, Twitch was in the ascendancy with its audience growth, direct interaction with live viewers, and diversified revenue generating model convincing a few of the most well-known media companies in the world to experiment with the platform. Two years ago, the features of the livestreaming platform were even a pivotal plot point in the first season of the Netflix original show American Vandal. Since then, however, the platform has been hit by a sense that it is repeating the mistakes of its direct predecessor YouTube, in not fairly rewarding its content creators, and by the departure of one of its most-viewed users, the Fortnite streamer Ninja, for pastures new.

Let’s Twitch again, like we did last summer…

That new platform – Mixer – offers much of the same benefits of Twitch with greater out-of-the-box opportunities for audience interaction. Where Twitch makes the ability for a streamer to chat directly with their audience its key selling point for both – and not coincidentally one of its central tenets when it comes to talking to advertisers – Mixer offers far more options for interaction, such as on-the-fly polls, stickers, interactive minigames and more.

Can location data be the powerhouse of digital advertising?

Chris Sutcliffe

One thing modern marketers aren’t short of is user data. All the efforts over the past few years to encourage users to hand over their user data – just in time for GDPR to potentially upend those advantages – have paid dividends. It’s been true for a few years now that accurate user data is effectively just table stakes for any marketer worth their salt, and media companies have been espousing the value of their first-party data even more vehemently since issues of fraud have become table talk.

Take me to your Lidl

But for marketers in particular, there has been much investment in data and less in a framework that can tie all their data points together in an actionable way. It’s been very possible to use reams of user data to target them with offers and ads in their email inboxes, and even to prevent them from taking actions like cancelling subscriptions, but in terms of actually using it to boost the effectiveness of digital marketing, there’s always been one step missing.

Now it’s looking increasingly like location intelligence data, paired with real-time information about everything from traffic and weather and combined with that existing user data, might be used to deliver on the promise of mobile advertising.

The interactive future for theatres

Martin Tripp

Virtually engaged

In 2019, experience trumps product. Retail outlets are retooling their spaces to make the experience of shopping, the so-called ‘retail journey’, as attractive to the consumer as the items they hold in their arms as they leave the shop. Many media companies are attempting to emulate Time Out’s food market success and transition into events and experience businesses, the better to appeal to the Millennials and cash-rich Boomers who prioritise making memories.

A lot of that is driven by the rise of consumer technology that enables brand new experiences, from portable 3D printers that let you take away a physical model of your own face at the end, to venues dedicated entirely to esports, to the ever more interactive experiences offered by theme parks. Many savvy media companies and retailers

Who is investing in esports and why?

James Dodd

The play’s the thing…

Global esports revenues are expected to hit $1.1bn this year. Over $155 million in prize money was awarded in nearly 3,500 esports tournaments last year, playing games like Dota 2, League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offense. $11.47m of this prize money went to just one team: OG, a European professional team which is famed for playing Valve’s Dota 2. With teams like Team Liquid racking up overall earnings of over $26m, and global esports viewers projected to total 453.8m this year (representing a year on year growth of +15%), competitive gaming is becoming a money-making phenomenon for both players and investors. So where is the money coming from, who is investing and what’s in it for them?

Esports is still in its infancy, comparatively, so the medium represents a new, current and exciting opportunity for traditional investors, looking for growing areas, to maximise return on

A Pessimist’s Guide to Podcast Growth

Chris Sutcliffe

Sound thinking

Recently there’s been a lot of noise made about how podcasting is about to break into the big time. We’ve heard that before, of course, and have been hearing it for well over a decade, but now there are financial reasons to believe it might actually be true. Slate has announced it is expecting nearly half its revenue will come from its podcasts this year, after making significant investments in audio last year. It did so after reportedly seeing a significant uptick in overall advertising and membership revenue off the back of its podcasts, which is also one reason given by the NYT for their overall subscription success off the back of its podcasts including The Daily.

According to the latest Infinite Dial report from Edison, the average time per individual spent listening to podcasts has been steadily ticking up over the past few years, with 32 percent of the US population expected to have listened to a podcast monthly. Better still, research from Acast demonstrates that 76% of podcast listeners exposed to an ad took some form of follow-up action on the ad.

The revolution is coming: the future of PropTech

James Dodd

The property market has not gone digital at same rate as other sectors, like shopping and taxis. This is visibly demonstrated by the state of estate agents, where it is still clearly the land of fax-machines, whiteboards and post-dated cheques. Where there are landed assets to maintain, investing in the future digital direction of the business does

The Final Frontier of Advertising

Chris Sutcliffe

Advertising gimmicks are ten a penny, with attention-grabbing schemes deployed and abandoned as soon as they’ve received enough attention from the media. In February this year, though, soft drinks giant PepsiCo announced plans to advertise in a completely new format – in space.

Here’s looking at you

The partnership with Russian start-up StartRocket would have seen a cluster of cubesats (effectively a miniaturised commercial satellite) deployed to form an ‘orbital billboard’. At the time of the announcement PepsiCo’s spokeswoman Olga Mangova wrote “We believe in StartRocket potential. Orbital billboards are the revolution on the market of communications” in an email seen by Futurism.

However, last week PepsiCo confirmed that plans had been shelved, telling space.com that StartRocket had performed a single, exploratory test of the technology and that there are no current plans to roll out a fleet of space-borne billboards.

For some, that news will come as a relief. The commercialisation of space in any form, whether that’s asteroid-stripping or establishing hotels on the moon, is contentious. This particular scheme has received criticism for potentially adding to the vast amount of ‘space junk’ that is already orbiting the earth.

How programmatic is driving internal change at media companies

Chris Sutcliffe

Finding an easy way in

Programmatic dominates the digital advertising landscape. By eMarketer’s metrics it is set to account for 90% of all total digital display adspend in the UK by 2020, with the vast majority of the growth coming from mobile programmatic. It also estimates that video programmatic spend is set to account for 43 percent of total programmatic display in 2019, double the amount in 2016.

That’s despite the obvious challenges facing digital advertising: rampant problems of viewability, out-and-out fraud and unsafe ad spaces, to say nothing of the dominance of the Duopoly of Google and Facebook.

For those people working in the trenches of digital advertising, however, often the real challenge is inside their own business. Getting buy-in from senior people within the business who don’t necessarily have the time or the understanding of the fast-moving world of programmatic can present an obstacle to the actual advertising experts.

Women will be the future of technology

James Dodd

Female founders got just 2.2% of Venture Capitalist Funding in 2018, the same percentage as in 2017.

Okay. TimesUp, Starting Now.

This woeful figure is actually an increase on the 1.9% offered to female founders in 2016, and comes despite female founders raised a record amount of VC funding, at $2.3bn in ten months. This is an issue on both sides of the table: 74% of US Venture Capitalist firms have no female investors. These figures are a stark reminder that whilst the tech industry looks to the future, its decisions are being made in the historical, male-dominated model.

Female-headed businesses have a real potential to make societal change in ways perhaps different from those headed by men. Whitney Wolfe founded Bumble after leaving Tinder and filing a lawsuit against Tinder for sexual harassment. Bumble, where women have to make the first move and start the conversation, has led a revolution in how modern women go about dating, making

Why challenges to China’s video games industry matter in Europe and the US

James Dodd

Your Tencent’s worth?

China’s video games industry is experiencing its slowest growth in at least a decade and a half, despite evidence that the country’s gamers are spending more of their time playing games (see graph below). The world’s largest games market, worth some $32.5bn a year, is in the midst of a huge shake-up. Beijing has sought to limit the industry, alluding to growing concerns

Have Amazon, Facebook and Google learned anything from cases of data misuse?

Chris Sutcliffe

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier in the year, you’d expect that platforms like Facebook would be rather more careful about how it exploits user data. Research has shown that consumer concerns over misuse of user data is one of the primary reasons why people choose to use ad blockers, and since user data is effectively the commodity on which the platforms operate, any further scandals are likely to have a cooling affect on their business models. Earlier this month a study from Pivotal Research Group found that people were spending less time across Facebook’s platforms (though it couldn’t say if that was specifically due to associaion with Cambridge Analytica).

Unfortunately Facebook has now been implicated in yet another potential misuse of user data: It registered a patent that uses geolocation to provide friend recommendations to people who are physically close to you. Or, as Lisa Vaas put it for Naked Security, “Facebook wants to reveal your name to the weirdo standing next to you.”

Video advertising: future models, previous mistakes

Chris Sutcliffe

No doubt you’ll have seen the latest Facebook controversy (no, not that one): the social network didn’t let news publishers know about a bug that discounted people who watched less than three seconds of video, thereby artificially increasing the statistics around how long people were consuming videos on average. As a result, some people are claiming that Facebook effectively created the pivot to video that saw newspapers and magazines shed tons of editorial roles in favour of video teams, to cater for this new audience demand for video content. Some are even suing Zuckerberg’s brainchild over it.

Due to all the broken promises and missed expectations that came with news publishers’ rush into video, it’s easy to forget that the reasons behind the drive to produce more digital video were sound: consumers are viewing ever more video online across OTT services like Netflix, user-generated-content platforms like YouTube, and livestreaming sites like Twitch. Even if the figures around view time were skewed, the trend is undeniable – one of the worst affected companies, Mic, even claims that the inflated metrics weren’t even a consideration in their own change towards digital video.

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Category: Technology

Hardware