New portable displays will transform mobile data and video
I’ve been interviewed a number of times recently about the future of mobile devices, both for media and also in financial services. I always emphasize the importance of the new generation of displays that are going to make viewing and interacting with mobile devices a great experience. People go on about how no-one wants to watch video on the screen on a mobile phone. In general, that’s true. But as soon as you can get larger screen experiences, everything changes. I’ve written before about the transformative power of video glasses, which I believe will become big over the next five years, and the role of e-paper. However the most likely candidates for broad mobile use are rollable and foldable screens, once they are in affordable commercial forms. Up until now most of these types of screens have been prototypes. One of the most exciting releases at the massive 3GSM conference in Barcelona was a rollable display from Readius, a spin-off from Philips. It gives a 127mm diagonal display that rolls out from a pocket-sized case. It has a high-quality screen and 10-day battery life. It won’t be commercially available until later this year, but we can expect competitors to come to market at a similar time, finally beginning to open up the doors to a rich mobile experience for all. As I’ve written before, one of the implications is an extraordinary surge in demand for content. This really will be transformative.
Source: Crave CNET.co.uk
Announcing: Web 2.0 in Australia
Oh well, information sometimes flows a little more freely than intended… I wasn’t going to discuss this publicly until after the event, since it is invitation only, but since word is already out, I might as well start talking about it.
Future Exploration Network is kicking off the Future Exploration Network Series, a series of focused events that bring together leading thinkers to examine key business and technology issues. They will be attended by senior executives in business, technology, media, and government, and top journalists, by invitation only. The intention is to bring to life our organization’s tagline: Connecting Ideas and People at the Edge of the Future. The events will be extremely participatory, creating focused, relevant conversations between the highly selected attendees.
The first event will be titled Web 2.0 in Australia, and will be held in Sydney on 22 May, for just 2.5 hours over lunch. The preliminary information document, intended for sponsors and partners, was created this week, and given only to a very small group of potential sponsors. I also sent a copy to Brad Howarth, the journalist in Australia with probably the deepest understanding of this space. He posted the document on his website with some commentary, and as a result we’ve already had quite a bit of attention, including enquiries from additional potential sponsors. Since this is now in the public arena, here are more details.
The event summary:
The set of technologies and innovations described as Web 2.0 have transformed the internet, triggered an array of new business models, shifted internal communication, and provided powerful new marketing opportunities. This invitation-only senior executives forum will examine the state of Web 2.0 in Australia, including:
* Frameworks for thinking about Web 2.0
* Why progress has been slow in Australia
* Current leading examples of Web 2.0 in Australia
* Implications and opportunities for corporates, start-ups, and marketing
There are in fact two good reasons to make the event public now:
Sponsors and partners
Let us know if you are a corporate, start-up, media organization, or association who would like to discuss getting involved. There is already strong interest in the two major roles, so sooner is better.
Showcase participants
Part of the event is a showcase of five of the best examples of Web 2.0 in Australia. We’ve already had quite a few suggestions, and of course are familiar with the more prominent examples. If you’d like to submit a company, technology, or implementation, please let us know. We will select what we believe are the best examples, which each will be showcased in a 5 minute presentation – there is no fee for participation. We are only interest in examples that are truly Web 2.0. A key element is that broad participation results in collective outcomes. We are keen to include enterprise applications as well as consumer and new media sites. We will create and launch a strategic framework for Web 2.0 in the lead-up to the event, which will clarify what we think is exciting in the space (or you can look at my thoughts on the Web 2.0 Revolution) . All suggestions and submissions welcome.
Search is the interface, but who controls the relationship?
An article in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph says that a consortium of major mobile phone companies – Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia, and Cingular – are planning to meet in secret to discuss creating a mobile phone search engine. The last five years have shown that one of the most powerful places in the online space is search – that is many people’s primary interface to the wonderful world of the web. And you can make very good money from it (Google’s most recent quarterly operating income was $1.06 billion on revenues of $3.21 billion). So as attention shifts to the mobile world, there should be no shortage of players keen to challenge Google’s intentions of transferring its dominance in the internet into the mobile space.
A framework that I described in my book Living Networks, and have applied in numerous strategy consulting engagements, is highly relevant here. In short, there are six key elements to the “flow economy” based on the flow of information and ideas. Any customer offering needs all elements. These elements are usually provided by different companies, though some companies may provide several of them, or work in alliances to provide them seamlessly to customers. The heart of strategy in the flow economy is leveraging your existing positioning to move into other elements of the flow economy. A great example is how Apple, through the success of the iPod, controlled people’s Interface to music. This enabled them to shift to delivering Content through iTunes, and thus to build Relationships with consumers (which is usually not possible through the sale of devices).
In this case, the mobile phone companies provide Connectivity, and have been striving to leverage that into Relationships, Content, and Services, with highly varied success. If they can use their existing positioning across the landscape to control the Interface, they can get far greater revenues. Standards are the foundation of the flow economy, and Relationships are where most of the value can be extracted. Yet Interfaces (and also Content) have proven to be the most powerful leverage points to create Relationships. So the mobile phone consortium, Google, and other players are all trying to get to the same place, but starting from different positions on the strategic landscape. It will be a very interesting battle. This paragraph is of course an extremely simplistic analysis, but the framework can be used to go into far more depth in developing effective strategies. I’ll post some more detailed examples of using the flow economy framework at a later date.
In other commentary, PaidContent calls the Telegraph’s story “very speculative,” bringing up the highly relevant issue of EU anti-competition laws, while SMS Text News doesn’t believe the mobile companies can create a search engine good enough to rival Google. This post’s title is “European Mobile Companies don’t understand they’re just data pipes.” That’s exactly my point above, however there exists a strategic possibility to shift beyond being just pipes to doing more, and they’d be very foolish if they didn’t make a good attempt to do so.
The magic of data visualization for everyone
Every day I am amazed afresh by the transformative power of the Web. Today I have discovered Many Eyes, a site hosted by IBM’s AlphaWorks. It combines open participation with a wonderful set of visualization tools. As such anyone can upload data sets, and then create sophisticated visual representations of those data sets, including scatterplots, tree maps, histograms, bubble diagrams, network maps and far more. Anyone can then either reuse the data sets, create new visualizations, add comments, or blog about the visualizations. To try it out I created in around one minute a bubble diagram representation of the frequency of words in the English language (See below for the non-interactive diagram – I won’t link directly, as I think generating the diagram is rather resource-intensive – have a look at the visualization gallery that includes it). In the first edition of my book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, which was published in 2000, I wrote about both data visualization and concept visualization (which uses visual representations to convey concepts rather than information). Both of these will be fundamental in a world in which we are swamped with information. While I haven’t spent as much time on visualization over the last years, I am shifting back towards this space, not least in facilatating clients in easily understanding and responding to strategic issues.
In Tim O’Reilly’s very interesting post about the site, he asked Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, the people who conceived Many Eyes, about their inspiration. Fernanda calls it ‘“social data analysis,” in which “playful, social exploration of data leads to serious analysis”. Martin says that their goal is to “democratize” visualization. These are seriously valuable tools being provided for free to the community at large, where one person can use the tools for their own purposes, then have their ideas be taken up and developed further by others. I’ve long used AlphaWorks as one of the best and earliest examples of open innovation. It’s great to see them both offering this kind of value to the community, and have this fully integrated into their business models. Note that another social data visualization site, Swivel, launched before Many Eyes – it doesn’t appear to have as rich visual functionality, as Brian Dennis notes, but has far more data sets uploaded for people to play with.
Open innovation in collaborative filtering
Netflix has just announced a $1 million prize to whoever can improve the accuracy of their movie recommendation engine. To enable people to design an improved recommendation engine, they’ve provided their users’ ratings of 100 million movies, an extremely valuable database. This harkens back to Canadian gold mining company Goldcorp’s initiative, whereby they publicly released the geological data on their properties, and set up a competition with prizes for whoever could give them the best recommendations on where to dig for gold. Other open innovation initiatives such as Innocentive match a whole series of people looking for innovation, again providing pre-specified rewards for meeting specific parameters. Some note that the prize will mean a lot of people work for free, and it’s arguable that if you can indeed do better than the other competitors, you’ll be able to make more than $1 million from it commercially anyway. The size of the prize indicates the value in enhancing the accuracy of collaborative filtering, as I’ve written about many times before. If Netflix can more accurately recommend a movie to its customers, the more likely they will stay with Netflix. For companies with other business models, greater accuracy directly impacts sales and revenue. More and more energy and resources will be going into this space. Netflix has chosen to combine two of my passions – open innovation and collaborative filtering – so I will be very interested to see the results from this. Details of the prize are at netflixprize.com, which will provide a progress chart on how the competing teams are doing.
Web 2.0 and user filtered content
Tomorrow I’m heading off to the Influence conference run by Phil Sim’s Mediaconnect. The event brings together media and other influencers (I believe I’m labelled a “new media influencer” there) and corporates, discussing current trends in key technology sectors. I’m on the Web 2.0 panel tomorrow, so I thought I’d briefly capture here my introductory comments, on my chosen topic of User Filtered Content.
The user filtering landscape
+ The primary focus recently has been on the explosion of user generated content, with Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube and many others just the vanguard of an immense wave of content creation, unleashed by accessible tools of production and sharing. We are moving towards a world of infinite content, further unleashed by the vast scope of content remixing and mashups.
+ With massively more content available, we need the means to filter it, to make the gems visible in vastness of the long tail. Fortunately, Web 2.0 is in fact just as much about user filtered content as about user generated content.
+ As far more people participate in the web, as technologies such as blogging, social networking, photo sharing and more become easier to use, the collective ability of the web to filter content is swiftly growing, and will more than keep pace with the growth in content.
User filtering mechanisms
Clicks indicate popularity of specific content within a site (with many caveats).
Links are stronger and more valid votes on the value of content.
Ratings provide explicit opinions on quality.
Tags describe content with words, locations etc.
Web-wide and site-specific filtering
There are two primary ways of implementating user filtering: taking data from across the web, and from within one site.
+ Google’s PageRank is a seminal example of web-wide user filtering, where people’s aggregated linking behaviors enable people to find relevant content. Technorati more explicitly shows how many blogs link to other blogs or blog posts, to indicate their authority. Techmeme draws on the timing and relationship of new links to uncover current conversations.
+Amazon.com’s book recommendations kicked off site-specific user filtering, notably by identifying related titles. Slashdot was for several years the primary site that enabled communities to select stories and rate each others’ commentary.
In two years Digg.com has reached over 1 million daily visitors with its core model of user filtering of content. Copycats or similar sites such as Reddit, Meneame, and Shoutwire have abounded. Finally AOL-owned Netscape launched a Digg copy, providing mainstream media endorsement of the model.
+Content sites such as YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, and Odeo all embed user filtering as core features of their services.
What’s next for user filtering
+ Effective user filtering will have increasing value, and there will be more plays in this space. Network effects will apply strongly to site-specific filtering, however this will not preclude new players with better models gaining traction quickly. The move by Netscape to hire active raters away from Digg is an attempt to accelerate shifts.
+ Social search engines such as Eurekster and Yahoo!’s Search Builder indicate the next level of sophistication of search, enabling filtering aggregation of specific communities rather than the web at large.
+ Tools such as Last.FM and Yahoo!’s Launchcast will, with permission, use extremely detailed personal taste profiles to provide content filtering for individuals.
+ New mechanisms will emerge that draw on people’s web activities, tagging, specific communities, and combine these perspectives in various ways to create more refined user filtering. This filtering will increasingly be designed to be relevant to people with particular interest profiles and individuals.
Microsoft’s Zune player enables social networks for music
News is just out that Microsoft’s Zune mp3 player, due out before Christmas to compete with Apple’s iPod, will have social networking capabilities, in addition to its core features of a 30GB disk and a 3 inch screen. Zune users will have the option of using the device’s inbuilt WiFi to send and receive music, playlists, videos, and photos to up to four other players. They can either broadcast these to any Zune player within range, or only to those of their selected friends. If they have the broadcast feature switched on, anyone permitted within range will be able to listen simultaneously to what they’re listening to.
This social networking feature, together with the device’s WiFi capabilities, is the only really significant feature difference to the iPod, and it is one that actually could shift users to the Microsoft player. Particularly for young people, music is fundamental to their identity and relationships, and sharing music is truly at the heart of their social networks. Sharing around musical preferences was the initial premise behind MySpace, and while it has gone quite a bit beyond this, it was the seed and still is at the centre of the largest human social network ever to exist. However I have a few concerns about how the feature is implemented on the Zune. One is that broadcasting to four people is not enough to really enable true social networks. It makes it a little bit more a gimmick than a feature to have it so limited in scope, though it can still act as a social glue for smaller groups. Another issue is probably related, in that WiFi is very energy-hungry. I have not seen any figures on battery life with WiFi turned on, but I suspect that the device won’t be able to last very long while it is broadcasting music, making it far less mobile. It may take, sometime down the track, the use of fuel cells or alternative wireless technologies for this kind of music social networking to be a broadly used application. A final issue is that, given this is Microsoft, we know that there will be solid Digital Rights Management (DRM) in place. In fact the release specifically says that people will be able to share “promotional copies” of songs, which will be just a fraction of what people have available on their players. Given these factors, the question remains whether this feature will prove to be a key differentiator for the Zune here in an extremely competitive marketplace, but I don’t doubt that mobile musical social networking will get massive uptake at the right time, when it’s done right.
Microsoft kickstarts the Live brand
Microsoft has just launched Windows Live Spaces, replacing MSN Spaces, its social networking and blogging site which has over 100 million visitors monthly, and offering a substantial facelift and new features. While Microsoft has had a wide suite of Live offerings in Beta for many months now, this is the first Live product that has been launched as a working product on a large scale. Live Messenger is out of Beta, but it has not replaced MSN Messenger, and is for now running in parallel with it. Given the breadth of MSN Spaces’ usage, this launch is the most powerful way Microsoft can kickstart the Live brand, and start gradually moving its array of Live products into the market. Ray Ozzie, now Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, spoke to financial analysts last week about Microsoft’s vision. This is well worth a read, as it provides a coherent view on how committed Microsoft is to web services in the broadest sense. Windows Live is absolutely central to Microsoft’s shift to web services, and the launch of Windows Live Spaces is just the beginning of what will be a major blitz on the Windows Live brand and product suite over the next couple of years.
Mobile traffic data will pressure local radio
Google has just released maps for use on mobiles, that indicate traffic congestion with four color levels from green to red, across 30 US cities. This is one of those applications that has been obvious forever, and it’s only been a question of time until it’s implemented well (which is not quite yet). When people are navigating traffic and choosing alternate routes, they have until now been guessing which way to go, having available at best a trickle of information in from the radio. In fact, traffic information is one of the main reasons that people listen to local radio. Once you can get far superior traffic information from other sources, you might as well go to the radio that gives you your preferred music or talk, which is unlikely to be local radio. Next steps include not just current traffic intensity, but also predicted traffic intensity. As I wrote in my book Living Networks, UK company Applied Generics has a product called RoDIN24, that anonymously monitors the movement of mobile phones relative to cell towers in order to provide extremely detailed and live views not just of where traffic is slow (mobile phones moving slowly), but also where traffic is converging to. Beyond that, computers will be able to predict reasonably accurately how long different routes will take, enabling drivers to make route choices without gazing at screens too much. Of course, these predictive devices will play off against each other – if every one made the same recommendation to their drivers, that route in turn would become congested. But in the long run, in congested urban traffic we will see the different possible routes taken even out, so that it takes a similar time whichever of the major possibilities you choose. Resource Shelf gives an overview of other traffic data resources. The US dominates, with some services also in the UK. As with good GPS mapping, there will be a several year lag for effective mobile traffic services to reach most other developed countries. As with many of these applications, it is the cost of mobile data that is a key driver. Cheap mobile data in the US is driving these kinds of applications. In countries where mobile data is very expensive, including Australia, it will, unfortunately, take a long time for mobile applications such as traffic data to take off.
Being in two places at the same time
I really like this. A Japanese researcher has created a lifelike doppelganger robot of himself, which he uses to do lectures at a university an hour’s drive away from his home, thus saving himself the commute. He is the live voice of the robot, and can see through its eyes. Pickups on his mouth and lips control the movement of the robot’s mouth while it is speaking. Apparently the robot looks very human – certainly the photos are hard to pick as a machine (though the machine does look less friendly than the man). While the cost of creating this kind of robot will never get very low, as every one must be custom-made, the implications are staggering. If the robot really is good, this is a big step beyond videoconferencing, and arguably even teleimmersion. Robot duplicates could be put on airplanes in lieu of people to go to distant meetings, for example. I will definitely explore the possibility of using one of these for keynote speeches I’m asked to deliver in distant lands, though I suspect it will be a good while before I have a duplicate of myself, unfortunately. Who hasn’t dreamed of being in two places at the same time?
