Mapping change in Technology, Media & Telecoms.
Future-proof capital returns on media and technology investments via rigorous research, and due diligence for PE, VC & corporate strategy teams.
The Hunger for Digital Media & Culture Is Driving Change in the TMT Sector
Our web environment has less than 50% human activity; a vital trend to monitor as we enter a world of AI-scraped & AI-generated content.
We help you keep up.
Tech & Operations Assessment
Technical evaluations inclusive of code reviews, Technical architecture checks, scalability & skillsets.
Market Assessment
Addressable market quantification and threat maps. Opportunities from regulatory shifts and competitive moves. Marketplace and business model assessment.
Data Quality
Data strategy and Risk management. Cookieless solutions. Data clean room. Privacy & Compliance.
Run by Technology, Media and Telecoms Industry Experts
FUTUREPROOF TMT, led by experienced operators Shailin Dhar and Scott Thomson, builds on their success at MMI Inc., where they pioneered bot-detection and ad-verification solutions that optimized over 10 billion monthly media transactions on global ad platforms and exchanges.
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Tools
From FUTUREPROOF TMT:
RobotsMapper
From Our Friends:
Electricity Maps
Submarine Cable Map
About Us
Run by Technology, Media and Telecoms Industry Experts
FUTUREPROOF TMT was founded by Shailin Dhar and Scott Thomson — industry experts and authors at the forefront of the Technology, Media, and Telecommunications (TMT) sectors. As globally respected experts and operators, they lead a team of developers, data scientists, and market researchers with an academic network that empowers our firm to specialize in navigating the intersections of these evolving industries offering unparalleled insights and strategic guidance. In conjunction with the content from their first book, FUTUREPROOF TMT also has a team of learning specialists and video editors, allowing us to help develop tech capabilities and team talent skill sets.Our Core Ambition: Futureproofing Investments in Technology. The core ambition of FUTUREPROOF TMT reflects our multifaceted approach and commitment across our holding company: Futureproofing Investments in Technology & Media. This mantra encapsulates our strategic focus on capital & resource deployment, innovative data solutions, and fervent dedication to research within the TMT sector. Our mission is to anticipate the immediate future of technology and help actively shape it, ensuring sustainable success for those we serve.Our roots: Innovation and Integrity. Our roots run deep in the TMT landscape, born from extensive hands-on experience as operators and trailblazers. Dhar and Thomson's previous venture, MMI, Inc., stood at the forefront of innovation in bot-detection and ad-verification, pioneering the recognition of data centers as the primary source of non-human traffic—an approach that shifted industry paradigms and practices with methodologies that are now common practice across the industry. Since 2016, we've introduced revolutionary web traffic measurement and validation approaches, impacting over 10 billion monthly media transactions on major ad platforms and exchanges worldwide. Our patented technologies for swift, non-invasive, non-human traffic detection, leveraging GPU and graphics rendering pipeline verification on client devices without ever compromising sensitive personal information, underscore FUTUREPROOF TMT’s unwavering dedication to innovation and integrity.Empowering the TMT Sector. Infrastructure requires a long-term view, operational plan, and capital strategy to be protected from damage from waves in the market: Future-proofed. We leverage our unique insights, additional proprietary technologies, and comprehensive industry experience to empower our clients in navigating the TMT sector's dynamic challenges and opportunities. We bring an infrastructure expert lens to clients' research and analysis work-products. Our commitment to future-proofing investments and guiding technological advancements helps empower our clients to shape the trajectory of technology, media, and telecommunications markets.
For more information:
Connectivity, Culture and Capacity
Mapping change in Technology, Media & Telecoms.
This paper is first of a three part series from FUTUREPROOF TMT, outlining core issues for the TMT sector 2024-2025.
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Here is your copy of Connectivity, culture and capacity: Mapping change in Technology, Media & Telecoms.
This paper is first of a three part series from FUTUREPROOF TMT, outlining core issues for the TMT sector 2024-2025.
The Unique Importance of the Flow of Media Content, Information and Data
(April 8th, 2024) Source
The interconnectedness across TMT verticals, and the pivotal role of media, has only accelerated in recent years.
To illustrate this, we can take any form of media delivery, such as radio, and map its historical trajectory.
Let’s look back at the democratization and proliferation of AM and FM radio from 1950-2000.
| Decade | Tech Device | Media Content | Telecom Infrastructure |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1930s | By the 1930s 60% of households had a radio device | Primary Source of News and Entertainment. The Golden Age of Radio. | Wireless telegraphy led to the birth of radio. Amplification and modulation improvements lead to mass adoption. |
| 1950s | 90% penetration of household/Shared devices | Secondary source of News and Entertainment after TV. | WW2 & Post-War Era. Lots of radio infrastructure was built and used for news and national security. |
| 1960s | Transistor & Cars | Growth in show variety leads to a boom in all advertising. | Household and community coverage was widespread, creating a reliable consumer base for content and ads. |
| 1970s | Proliferation of Portable Radio (Receiver innovation) | Music dominates FM. News/talk dominates AM. | FM pro liferates because of higher audio fidelity with music/entertainment. FCC allocates more bandwidth for FM radio. |
| 1980s | Stereos/Boomboxes (Speaker innovation). Walkman & Portable Radios. Peak cassette tapes. | Specialized channels and personal audio consumption lead to targeted advertising. P2P content storing & sharing changes. | Higher consumption of FM than AM leads to he avier investment in FM infrastructure. |
| 1990s | Personal Computer and Home Internet. The first portable MP3 players. | National Syndication increases and Content Segmentation Continues. Content storing & sharing changes again. | The Telecommunications Act of 1996 removed barriers and restrictions of ownership and led to consolidation in the market place. |
| 2000s | Satellite radio in cars and homes. | Internet & Satellite Radio. | HD Radio & Satellite Radio introduced. The Digital Revolution heralds the power of digital broadcasting. |
| 2010 | Smartphones. Birth of the iPhone. | Proliferation of long tail of digital audio content. | The birth of the 5G standard for cellular networks. |
| 2020 | The rise of streaming apps, smart-speakers, and smart devices. | The rise of audio streamers and the move away from content ownership. | Data centers exist as the backbone to our digital media world. |
The need for long haul communications existed before radio. The telegraphic cable existed
before wireless telegraphy. Technology is an enabler, and telecoms an accelerant. They
deliver the media, information and data that we demand.
The speed and nature of those demands, in turn, are formed by those technologies. “Personalization” has grown in tandem with the prevalence of personal devices. “On demand” grew only when it became possible
and became the norm. “Streaming” is replacing locally stored ownership of content; only as
persistent availability comes from trusted sources.
Parsing Investment Opportunities in AI
(April 10th, 2024) Source
The primary focus of market attention and surrounding coverage is currently on user facing GenAI tools and LLM’s.
There are however enormously valuable secondary and tertiary markets growing in parallel with this gold rush.
The often-quoted quip towards secondary market attention goes something like “in a gold rush, sell shovels.”
We at FUTUREPROOF TMT encourage investors and operators to pay attention to the secondary and tertiary markets rising with the likes of the hyperscalers and their GenAI offerings and partnerships.
Google’s Gemini, Amazon’s Anthropic, and of course Microsoft’s OpenAI.
Some of these parallel markets will include innovative companies in the following categories:
Web Crawling & Data Scraping: The consumer market is becoming increasingly comfortable with non-human generated text, image, and even video. There is a palpable increase in the prevalence of automated browser agents, data scraping, and context logging tools available for business and personal use.
Data Collection and Sourcing: The demand for data to train models is yet to peak and difficult to assign limits to. Any vendor or marketplace of data that is abstracted from its source or sources, is to be scrutinized.
Data Quality and Integrity: Any emergent enterprise focused on assessing the value of the raw materials of LLMs - source training data.
LLM and SLM - Implementation MSPs: Managed Services for guiding and implementing corporate strategy of LLMs for enterprises and SLMs for small/medium businesses. There will also be adoption at companies with franchise models; implementing LLMs at the corporate level and SLMs at the franchisee level.
The enormous potential around ‘compute’ reselling marketplaces: An overhanging trend across the primary, secondary, and tertiary markets around AI’s impact on the TMT sector, is the virtually unlimited demand for compute that is forecasted by even the biggest hyperscalers and LLM operators. (ref: Sam Altman/OpenAI)
What We Can Expect in 2024-2025?
(April 12th, 2024) Source
Media:
The Essential Content
| Automated Scraper Tools | TO GROW | Significant increase in non-human web traffic, as the commercial market for web- crawlers, data-scrapers, and autonomous browsing agents has exploded. |
| Bot Detection | TO GROW | Increase in investment by digital media companies and site/app owners on identifying and preventing unrestricted bot visits, as the incentives have changed from being supplementary traffic (ad-revenue) to being a threat to IP and content integrity. |
| Content consumption | TO GROW | Human attention via digital media is no longer the default denominator and must be calculated as the numerator of online media engagement. |
| US Data Consumption | TO CORRECT | Decline in affordable internet access in the United States will change the data consumption habits of millions of American media consumers and advertising recipients. |
| Media IP Rights | TO GROW | SAG, WGA, and other creator unions are pressing production and distribution studios. |
| Enterprise Model Training | TO GROW | Multiple businesses will look to build and train models. There will be an explosion of AI-infused corporate tools with varying degrees of quality. |
| Data Integrity & Quality | TO DECLINE | Increase in enterprise data purges, malformed web data & unreliable/misleading synthetic data. |
| GenAI & LLMs + HLMs | TO GROW | An explosion of use in consumer and enterprise markets. Lots of uncertainty and posturing around companies stated use of LLMs or GenAI tools. |
| Regulatory pushes | TO GROW | Growing anti-trust initiatives, cookie deprecation, & regional privacy laws. All are accelerating in 2024. |
| Media Market Ownership | TO CONSOLIDATE | Paramount and warner bros, MGM and Amazon, Tech companies reduce media spend. |
| Media Measurement | TO CONSOLIDATE | Nielsen competition is narrowing for the final contenders for the coveted media currency provision contracts in the US. |
Telecommunications:
The Delivery Network
| IoT Devices & API Networks | TO GROW | 5G and Fiber maintenance and expansion - ships/anchors and sharks are regular physical threats to tangible internet infrastructure | |
| Connectivity coverage | TO GROW | Rural Connectivity | innovation in rural 5G connectivity and use of bandwidths like TV White Space (TVWS) for digital data in rural/remote areas. |
| Data centers builds | TO GROW | Hyperscale and colocation data center growth APAC + MENA. |
Technology:
The Access Points
| IP Address Data usage | TO DECLINE | IP Address is no longer functional as a unique identifier in media and advertisement targeting. It’s losing ~50% of its functionality. Geo-targeting & IP based mapping data services and API’s. |
| IoT device expansion | TO GROW | A wider breadth and depth of devices will come with built-in sensors. |
Blog Posts
Bite-sized pieces of our thought process. For more see our White-paper
(April 8th, 2024) The Unique Importance of the Flow of Media Content, Information and Data
(April 10th, 2024) Parsing Investment Opportunities in AI
(April 12th, 2024) What Can We Expect in 2024-2025?