The BBC struggles with concept of 'tech bubble'

An interesting bubble

Generally in finance circles, people are very good at avoiding previous bubbles. There are exceptions. But it does hold true in many cases. The interesting thing here is that the darlings of the Web 2.0 era aren't managing to get IPOs running, which means that the general investing public are skeptical. The only money they have got is from VC and companies trying to get on the bandwagon.

I expect to see a bubble bursting, but with nothing like the ferocity of the dotcom bubble.

Ignorance?

Is the reason that even Newsnight is providing bland, cheerleading comment, that the journos concerned simply don't understand? Or are too young to have really experienced the last bubble bursting?

In fact can anyone name a regular journo in the newspaper or mainstream TV (Auntie or commercial) that a) gets it and b) is allowed to make their views known?

Great stuff

Echoing the comments above, a good article, but focussing solely on the BBC is perhaps a little narrow in scope. It's simply baffling that Facebook has valuations of $70bn thrown around, Twitter a few billion, Groupon similarly, and yet there isn't so much as a peep from media channels that should really know better. They watched the tech bubble and burst 10 years ago; they've seen the (lack of) revenue stream for some of these businesses; heck, somewhere they must have a single contributor who questions how much Facebook is dependent on fads - and why it's different from MySpace of 2004 - and yet still nothing.

I've seen one mention, in a headline roundup, of Fox News (Fox News!?) asking timidly whether perhaps these valuations might spell a bubble, but little else. Which I guess is how bubbles grow...

Bar barian

I live in Shoreditch and work in IT (although, not in a tech start up, but I do get to write in trendy Python occasionally) and I hadn't heard of this bar...

Then I realised it was made up. Fail.

(I've had quite a few pints already)

Eureka ....... Failsafe Code to Capture Top $Market Capitalisation

The problem with the BBC is, Andrew, that they struggle with the concept of reality, and arbitrary third party changes and zeroday alterations to scheduled status quo programming of puppet and muppet performers. .......... and do conspire very badly to avoid revealing the new virtual paradigm which leads and governs the future and humanity ...... with Immaculately Conceived Source Code from the Mother of All Lodes.

And Andrew, you're surely smart enough to know that that aint no April Fool Trick or Treat .... IT's the Real Thing reduced in AI to Singular Entanglement with JOINT Venturing Virtual Strings.

And there is/is there a curious symmetry and/or empathy/cold fusion between all that you now know of here, and here, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/08/ms_patch_tuesday_april_pre_alert/ ...... and here, http://heddinout.com/?p=2140

All your computers belong to us? ..... Legions Anonymous? :-)

The remarkable stealth that guarantees and delivers invisibility and impunity arrives with one's failure to believe what is freely shared and which you might begin to suspect is perfectly true however improbable your own programming would deem it to be, and then try to dismiss it, to not be.

As a recurring APT though, is it proven more likely to be exactly as it says that it is, with one's disbelief no barrier or hurdle to its existence and therefore likely media presentation to disprove the negative that closes off one's mind to the real possibilities which exist in virtual spheres of animal husbandry. ..... and virtual machine management and development ..... and global operating device maintenance and repair.

BBC not doing tech. Really...

The last two radio 4 editions of Unreliable Evidence have had me screaming. The first one (about patent law) passingly said "maybe, in some sciences, people might invent the same idea" (laugh at preposterous idea) while completely ignoring how patents are fscking the computer industry (populated with people employed to solve the same problems). The most recent seemed to be claiming that it's impossible to define a coherent set of rules for tax legislation - something I suspect an industry full of people used to encoding very specific behaviour might be able to handle. Radio 4 quiz shows consider an in-depth knowledge of 18th century poets to be trivial but the Fibonacci sequence or placing electoral candidates in order of preference to be a dark art.

BBC TV struggles to get science past the basics of Horizon, and generally seems to consist of trying to get me to seek out and punch Brian Cox. I maintain that the average school child these days has vastly more scientific, computing and mathematical background than the people tasked with making programmes (possibly because they all did arts degrees...) so it'll take time for real life to intervene. It's only because enough actors grew up in the 80s and someone noticed that you could use computers for email that we've got people actually using keyboards properly.

Not that it's just the BBC. It's taken years for film studios to make a passing concession to the kind of science that a ten year old wouldn't call out as bogus (it doesn't help that the last guy to suggest they try to make it make sense carelessly tried to put rulls on it, and then got laughed at by the media who, of course, can't tell science from fantasy; that put the kibosh on anyone trying to make a reasonable point about gratuitous deviations from plausibility). CSI this week had someone find a "resistor" (fair do, it looked like a resistor) from a bomb, which "delayed the flow of electricity through the wire, by a minute in this case" and nearly caused a fatality as I choked on my supper.

The BBC doesn't seem to have got the idea that you shouldn't drag in the guy you think is an expert, at least on tech - you should ask someone you think is an expert who *they* think is an expert, and repeat until you loop. The media (tech media mostly excepted) need to accept that there's a significant proportion of their audience who know a *lot* more than they do. All the kids who spent the 90s playing computer games have grown up, and they (along with us hard core geeks from longer ago) can spot a journalist - or writer - being an idiot. And we *do* mind.

BBC Journalists

Too interested in the arts, or occasionally sport. Technical ability generally pretty poor, in fact most consider having to deal properly with technology beneath them. They'll be first in line for an Apple iPad / iPhone but only for the pose value.

Consider: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/07/bcc_mps_report/ - what a waste. Engineers in the BBC used to have a route to the senior management, no longer. It's now top filled with ex-journalists (Thompson) or accountants with no understanding of the systems and support needed to create and deliver content. No understanding of what they've agreed to buy from Siemens or the various transmitter companies.

How to spot a Bubble.

As soon as the pundits start saying it isn't a bubble, and explaining why this time it really is different, then you know that the bubble is well under inflation.

If Rory v Spinvox is the best the BBC can do...

...then it's worse than we thought. So to help, I thought I'd add the following BBC journalist-friendly explanation...

Spinvox works like the BBC tech newsroom. People call in with stories (voicemail messages) which the tech reporter (computer based speech recognition) attempts to convert to news packages (text messages) without necessarily having any understanding of what each story (voicemail message) is about.

However, unlike the BBC tech journalist, the Spinvox computer speech recognition system was smart enough to recognize when it didn't understand parts of the message and would hand it off to an expert (ie, human being) for validation. The decision of the expert was then fed back to the automated speech recognition system in order to improve the quality of future results. I guess the tech newsroom equivalent would be like asking a domain expert for comment on the story - and then actually learning from the response in order to improve the quality of future reporting.

So Spinvox were busy trying to build a technically challenging hybrid speech recognition and expert system, and all Rory could latch onto was the fact that there were quite a lot of humans being used in the training loop, which to him meant that....

ALL UR TRANSLASHUNZ ARE DUN BY HUMANZ

And Rory's super secret source for this story? Maybe the fact that the use of human beings in the training context was already fully documented on the Spinvox website.

There are lessons to be learned from Spinvox - just not the ones Rory was so obsessed with. The main failings came from the huge pressure from investors to scale up far faster than the business could cope with. The lesson to take home from this is not to let the VCs take control of your business. They're only any good at creating bubbles - not viable tech businesses.

FAIL - because it was.

Television and technology

As AC has pointed out, technical staff are no longer accepted into the upper echelons of the BBC.

However, there is another reason for TV production teams' failure to grasp science and technology: the people who work in them see pictures as the main means of storing and passing on human knowledge. Since they work in a visual medium, that is, after all, what they need to provide.

This also explains why audio standards in television have dropped: production teams don't _see_ the need for high-quality recording.

It's difficult for lowly-paid, inexperienced, junior researchers to appreciate that not everyone perceives the world visually (or at least that others can perceive mathematical formulae, statistics or even elegant language), because they move among visually-orientated colleagues. Producers, directors and the like should have more experience, but it has usually been gained by going in ever-decreasing professional circles: if anything, their _view_ of the world is even more restricted.

If you want analysis, don't look for it from television: talk radio and the printed word are much richer seams to mine.

Buy the man a pint.

"A focus on the web means the journalist can avoid all that complicated stuff like science – some of which, apparently, smells quite unpleasant. Far easier to mystify it."

Well said. The same attitude permeates all science programmes on every channel in the UK. Lots of "Gee whizz wow" and no hard facts or complex reasoning. As for kid's shows, watch "Nina and the Neurons" to see just how bad it can get. No wonder our children are useless at the hard sciences.