To sum up this little role, I wrote:

So, trying to draw this together in one cogent theme, I’m planning to spend the next 10 years helping the UK to become a world class part of the tech scene and one which regularly produces mega-successes like the next Twitter, the next Facebook or the next Amazon. There’s plenty of reasons why The Valley has the advantage over us – early stage funding and a huge natural early adopter market, are my personal bugbears. But if we think big and harness the creativity and talent available, I believe it’s a realisable dream.

I’m delighted to say that I’ve been offered the opportunity to help realise this vision on a more macro-scale, by joining the UK Government’s Venture Capital Unit. The remit of the Unit is to help UK companies attract funding from abroad and thus help resolve the funding gap I was writing about above. My focus will be on tech companies, though the Unit as a whole (headed by veteran entrepreneur Chris Wade) embraces Clean Tech, Life Sciences and Hardware.

To be quite frank, it is the only job that anyone could have offered me that I would have accepted at this stage in my career. It fits perfectly with my personal mission, so when I was approached about the role it didn’t need a lot of thinking about and I find the opportunity to make a real difference to the UK tech scene very exciting.

In the first instance, my focus will be on developing a portfolio of the very best UK tech companies to showcase what a fantastic place the UK already is. And in time, my new colleagues and I will use our best efforts to help find overseas investors, to complement the UK investment community, to help these companies flourish. If you run such a company, or know of anyone who should be on this prestigious list, drop me a line here Russell AT mobhappy DOT com and we’ll get the ball rolling.

Exciting times!

And then suddenly we saw the rise of complexity in the value chain, with the rise of the Demand Side Platforms and Supply Side Platforms and various hybrids of the two. With this came Programatic Buying, where mobile ads were purchased by computers using increasingly sophisticated algorithms. In turn, this allowed Real Time Bidding (RTB) to emerge as a potent force.

RTB, in layman’s language, works like this. The consumer clicks on a link to a mobile web page, which triggers a request from the publisher to an Ad Exchange to provide an ad. The Exchange, in turn, sends out requests to multiple sources to supply the ad and asks those sources to bid to supply it, at the same time. The highest bid wins – simple as that. This not only happens instantly and in Real Time, but millions of such requests are handled simultaneously.

It’s clear that this is the future for mobile advertising, as the efficiencies of the system push more and more publishers and more and more advertisers into this direction. Today, latest information from the excellent eMarketer seems to indicate that this market is expanding fast and that tablets as well as mobile handsets have joined the RTB ecosystem.

Watch this space.

Interview: Hacking Media – Taking Creativity Beyond the Creative | FT Events | FT Live.

HT to Simon Andrews’s Addictive newsletter – my must-read mobile catchup of the week. Sign up here.

Need I say more than this?

Congrats to the Palringo team!

You can order your book here, or see a Preview copy and this was my contribution.

MLOVE, the Future and Liminality

Have pity on Charles Duell. He’s often remembered as the Commissioner of the US Patent Office who came up with the memorable quotation “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Unfortunately for Mr Duell’s place in history, there’s no evidence that he said anything like that, though a similar sentiment was expressed by a predecessor, Harry Ellsworth. Harry seems to have got away with it though.

But it’s a great story and serves very well to illustrate how difficult it is to understand technology change when you’re living though it, as well as our natural tendency to think that we’re living at the end of history – whereas we’re very probably just arriving at the very beginning of humankind’s real journey.

I’ve both spoken at MLOVE and written extensively about the power of exponential change driven by technology and how this can build very slowly – and suddenly overwhelm us in the final stages. Such change is going to lead to the mobile taking over as our main digital device (the PC is dead), to the Post-Mobile Era (in 25 years, the mobile will be 1 Billion times more powerful and the size of a red blood cell) to the Singularity itself, when computers take over from us – forecast to be about 2045. Ray Kurtzweil’s recent appointment as Engineering Director with the mighty Google goes a long way to making this a self-fulfilling prophecy.

All this indicates an era of unprecedented change for humankind, our cultures and society structures – not the least gifting our citizens with characteristics that would be regarded as superpowers by our parents. We’ll have enhanced intelligence, telepathic-like skills, life-spans extended by many times the natural period, instant access to all the world’s information and superhuman physical assets like strength, endurance and speed will be available for all.

However, it’s not as simple as that, as no one can really know exactly how and what will all play out. Instead, we’re in a state of liminality. Liminality is a useful word, first coined by anthropologists and refers to the threshold experienced in rights of passage rituals (often drug induced), where the participant was between their old state and before they were fully aware of the new. If you’re an MLOVEr, you’re in the privileged position of being in that state of liminality before the rest of the world catches up with us. We know that there’s some fundamental and revolutionary change arriving in the next decade or so, but we can’t tell exactly what they might be.

However, the beauty of the state of liminality if that while we don’t know the details, a mere awareness of what might be possible is going to influence the outcome. So let your imagination run wild, think about the world you’d like to see next and start making it happen. Your ideas are just as valid as everyone else’s and for me, that’s what the spirit of MLOVE is all about.