From advertising to a direct dialogue with customers. Are you ready?

This note is aimed at brand owners, frustrated by the increasingly expensive and ineffectual advertising spending on traditional media and wondering how best they can get their message out. It suggests that today's disrupted media business is too frail to support the demands of brands wanting to advertise. This is no bad thing in itself because the advertising business itself is bloated, inefficient and outdated, and companies would be better off figuring out how to interact with and delight their current customers, rather than wasting money on trying to reach and influence non-customers.

Advertising heal thyself
Today’s advertising business is suffering from (at least) two major flaws. The first is the industry that the traditional media business can no longer offer an economically viable channel to allow brands to deliver their messages to a sizable captive audience. The second - bigger - challenge is that the concept of advertising is becoming less relevant in today's flat-earth world.

Challenge one: the advertising industry is overly reliant on a lame and enfeebled media business
The “traditional” media industry is fragmented, broken, confused and failing to deliver on one of its major tasks - to help brands reach people. (If you don't agree with this, read Bob Garfield's Chaos Scenario before reading on.) The media machine that is pulling the advertising load is to put it bluntly, knackered. Reaching non-customers is getting harder due to a proliferation of alternative media channels and consumer-side filters. Cheap tools and the Web as a distribution platform for connecting people allows anyone to be a broadcaster (or podcaster) resulting in massive fragmentation. Reaching 80% of US TV viewers used to require placing adverts on just four shows in the 1960s, today it would take over 100. Those who are 'formerly known as consumers' employ both hardware (e.g. DVR) and software (e.g. RSS) filters to give them control. Forrester says that 92% of people skip ads on DVRs, and half of US households are expected to have them by 2010. Ironically, brands have until recently been forced into paying ever more for in "upfront" fees for broadcast slots on US TV networks, simply because there was no other place for them to put their money. No wonder P&G's Jim Stengell says, "I truly believe, and I know many of you do, that today's marketing model is broken."

Further complicating the picture is the reality of “media multitasking” – no more the whole family sitting rapt around a television set or radio – today’s audience (kids in particular) will be IM-ing and gaming at the same time as watching TV and listening to the radio or podcasts. This plays havoc with those already creaky viewer figures. The result of this is that some brands are getting desperate, and “outsourcing” their brand to celebrities of various ilks, but these can be crushingly expensive and more importantly, unpredictable and prone to embarrassing PR gaffes.

Beware the siren calls of the search engines

So if traditional media is broken, how about the new media experience? Internet advertising is growing rapidly as advertisers move their money towards where people are spending their time. UK ad spending – up 40% year on year, now accounts for 10% of total advertising spend, and is typical of the trends here. Several flagship advertisers are now massively increasingly their online spending this year and scaling back TV spend. And happily for the brands looking for simplicity, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft account for a lot of the internet traffic, and claim the vast majority (appx 80%) of online ad spending.

So surely search engine marketing provides salvation for brands fed up with the old media offerings? Well, not really for a number of reasons. First, there's a long way to go before the demographics overlap - PC penetration is not TV penetration, in particular in the key markets of China and India. Second, the model itself has flaws – industry experts suggest that click fraud can account for up to 30% of revenues. Third, bidding on competitors’ keywords is now rampant and resulting in spiralling costs (though this practice is probably one class-action suit away from being history). And fourth, just when brands had been extracting themselves from a reliance on an expensive media middleman, the emergence of search engine as intermediary will cost them dear. Overall however, is the issue that search engines are still intended to deliver advertising messages to non-customers and attract them to become customers. Here’s the second major flaw in the advertising industry's model:

Challenge two: advertising itself is an increasingly outmoded concept
The second major challenge facing the industry is that advertising itself is an increasingly outdated concept in today’s transparent and connected marketplace. Influencing prospective customers is ever harder; people are increasingly immune and sceptical to the battering of thousands of commercial messages. Typical of the ennui in the market, the ad agency WPP found that nearly a quarter of US ‘baby-boomers’ are insulted by the advertising messages that companies are sending them. The emerging Generation C reject marketing gimmicks (and can smell astroturfing a mile away). They make purchase decisions based on their trusted advisors and require transparency from the companies they deal with. People it seems, now generally prefer word of mouth to word of the Man.

Consider how Barrons defines advertising: a “paid form of a nonpersonal message communicated through the various media by industry, business firms, nonprofit organizations, or individuals.” These concepts seem outdated – advertising, we are told, should be about a bunch of things which the web is making redundant: in particular paying intermediaries a lot of money for the job that you could be doing better yourself. The new opportunities of free, personalized two-way communication delivered directly to users sounds more like blogs and community forums. As Bob Garfield points out, the head marketer at P&G puts it like this: "What we really need is a mind-set shift, a mind-set shift that will make us relevant to today's consumers, a mind-set shift from 'telling and selling' to building relationships."

Forget non-customers – turn existing customers into your new sales force
So with the advertising channel broken, and the approach itself increasingly irrelevant, where next for brands trying to get the message out about their products? At issue is the need to refocus attention from advertising to non-customers to serving current customers better. Sounds obvious? If so, why aren’t more companies doing it? Making great products, informing, interacting with and delighting their existing customers, rather than prospecting for hard to reach non-customers should be the new priorities. In an increasingly confused consumer maelstrom, advertising to people who are not your customer still serves some purposes – brand recognition, credibility (wow, that startup can afford a SuperBowl ad!?) and general feel good.

Fine, but when it comes to shifting products off the shelves, getting product feedback and innovation suggestions, the relationship of business value to customer intimacy is I would propose, strongly positive, something like this:

The key here is how to meet the needs of a more engaged customer base without incurring massive costs or raising expectations. Creating and fostering an open dialogue with customers is a daunting but necessary exercise. This is one of my pet topics, and there's not enough room to expand at length here, but at a high level, I'd suggest the following elements to achieve this within a reasonable time and cost scale (presuming that you've already got a great product to get excited about):

• Make every employee an ambassador. This requires creating a mindset within the company that emphasizes openness, collaboration, speed and employee problem-ownership (presuming they're the relevant experts). It's also about installing tools such as wikis (shameless plug...) so that individuals not only feel empowered but are empowered to collaborate with others and take the initiative themseles. All the better for reacting when you...
• Engage in direct dialogue with customers. Interacting with customers directly, for example allowing them to subscribe to web-based feeds of product news and releases. The use of syndication (RSS, Atom etc) makes dialogue an asynchronous and therefore more manageable process - this is not about giving the CEO's mobile number out to every customer. Well managed, honest external blogs are useful tools for smooth information dissemination that arguably fulfills the role of what advertising used to do. An even easier way to foster dialogue is then to...
• Facilitate customer-to-customer dialogue. Forums and chat rooms are great examples here - apparently over 30% of HP Europe's customer queries are answered by the Q&A from message boards. Being a fly on the wall to these discussions is important, even if they're not on your own sites - tools such as technorati allow Dell to search for phrases such as Dell Hell on blogs and join the discussion if necessary.

These activities are now pretty much table stakes in the move from being a company that just doesn't get it to one engaged and benefitting from a richer dialogue with current customers. Of course, there will always be room for some old world advertising - somebody has to spend the expense accounts after all. But it may be a worthwhile exercise to look at your company and ask where along the scale between "advertising to non-customers" or "conversations with current customers" they're sitting, and whether they're moving in the right direction.

The final point, which takes us beyond table stakes and into the realms of the Truly Interesting, relates to the eventual primacy of the mobile rather than the PC as the way to interact with the web. I would dearly like to see a new mobile marketing paradigm that allows the mobile to be the platform to allow companies to carry out ongoing conversations with their customers. Mobile devices are the natural interfaces for receiving filtered and tailored customized subscription information from companies that interest then. Note, this is not advertising as we currently understand it; it does not involve any use of the hackneyed “30 cents off a Starbucks” cliché. And it certainly is not about unsolicited spam. It would be a foolish company that abuses extraordinarily intimate relationship that the mobile device can deliver.

No, this is marketing, or more accurately – business as usual. We used to talk about ‘Internet companies’ – but that now seems quaint, as we recognize that the Internet is embedded into every facet of a company’s operations and their customers similarly expect to use the web to carry on conversations with the company. I’m looking forward to a time when brands are able to dramatically improve the quality of service they deliver to their customers rather than wasting money on inefficient advertising campaigns, and they incidentally will use an internet-enabled mobile device as the mechanism for this.

So, in summary, the media business is in turmoil, but the future for brands is not to simply take their old advertising approach over to the Internet. Instead, the smart companies will recognize the need to shift their focus from non customers to current customers, and harness the power of the Web to deliver a personalized, direct interactive dialogue with customers, and then to start thinking about what that personalized, intimate experience would look like on the mobile platform.

Nokia hosts a mobile mashup in the Valley

Good to see this happening - an invite only event for Mobile2.0 movers and shakers in Silicon Valley on April 24:

Come ready to experience new, revolutionary solutions through various emerging technology demos from the Palo Alto-based Nokia Research Center, exciting third parties, and emerging start-ups in a "fast pitch" environment. Attend the 2007 Mobile Mash-Up and explore new products, services and ideas with Nokia executives as well as network with more than one hundred industry leaders in Silicon Valley

More attention, energy and executives' time is being spent in the Valley nowadays, and our new research center office there is helping to raise our presence. Am planning to attend - if any readers of this blog are planning to attend, let me know. Should be a interesting day.

Easter fun time: Ask Nokia...

I think Brad Feld's doing a great job at demystifying the somewhat perplexing aura of the VC world; today's post is a case in point. I guess some people have similar questions about Nokia - since we're not always as open as we could be. So, as we break for Easter, how about a small a small experiment in openness as a reward to my loyal readers. Ask a Nokia related question as a comment to this post and I'll try and do my best to find the right person in Nokia to answer it, and post the answer as a future post - if both question and answer are interesting...

No guarantees or refunds, and rather depends on the quality of the questions, and not expecting much about the standard off-limits stuff (future product releases, financials etc) which will just get boring answers. Of interest?

Flickr as a conversation

As numerous people have observed, Flickr (and other publish & subscribe photo services) can be thought of a subtle communication channel, not just content. Indeed, the fact that Nokia's core competence of connecting people is now carried out by just about anybody with an IP connection, a dollop of good looking code and an ounce of entrepreneurial flair is a well recognized challenge in the corridors of Espoo and minds of our execs (...er, shouldn't that be 'opportunity'? - Ed) .

Pictures are indeed worth thousands of words, but also (enter quantum theory for the first time on this blog) each interpretation is different depending on the observer. The same picture can have multiple meanings depending on the personal communication history with individual viewers. So if someone posts a pic of themselves with someone of the opposite sex looking like they're having fun on holiday, it could be an innocent postcard to colleagues, a look-at-me message to their friends, a screw-you to an ex and / or a don't disturb me am on holiday to any casual ('Flickr friends') who might be thinking of suggesting a beer down the pub. Many layers. Arguably written or spoken words can have multiple meanings (and I say this as an oft-misunderstood Brit), but the possibilities for nuance with rich media seem greater.

One the opposite extreme, I just saw this message below. Its novelty and abuptness stopped me in my tracks - like someone shouting in a library. Normally I would expect to see direct communication morph into indirect: kids sending empty texts, abstract images or dialling numbers then hanging up; hacking traditional channels. Here we are seeing direct communication enter by the back door - I wonder if there are other indirect communication channels that have become direct ones? Anyway, hack away Flickr users, and show us even more ways to communicate!

Sonopia: a hammer to crack a nut?

I was excited when I heard about Juha Christensen's new outfit - Sonopia. He's got a track record for thinking big, knows mobile inside out and this play is in the sweet spot for where the mobile meets the internet: creating and serving real life, not virtual, communities. Sonopia's mission is to "provide every organization, group or individual with the opportunity to create branded mobile service and build a unique mobile and web community of supporters and members". So the idea is that your community of interest becomes your (virtual) mobile service provider, and they take a cut out of your mobile phone bill. Given that few people care much for their mobile operators, you as a customer can then feel better about handing over wads of cash each month, as some of it goes to your favourite cause.

Exploring the communities on offer, I was intrigued by the Food to Go group in Northern California that is devoted to new dining experiences, and also tantalizingly offers the prospect of making friends and finding a dinner date. Food and relationships - sounds like the perfect community. I promptly joined the group, but since I'm not a US resident I couldn't really do very much with it. Nor could I, as a non-resident, set up my own group of worshippers and exhort my hordes of faithful acolytes to join up give me a slice of their monthly income. Shame really, as I'd always fancied leading a sect.

But I digress. Sonopia is a undeniably a bold and visionary move - a breath of fresh air into a space that has seen a lot of heat and not much light. My conceptual difficulty is wondering why the act of community affiliation - an ephemeral, will'o'the wisp flight of fancy, which can fluctuate like the summer breeze, is hard wired into the access and device offering. I can be a member of 100 of such groups, but will only want one mobile service provider. Surely this should be a services, not an access, play. OK, I can get a credit card from my university alumnii society, so why not a mobile phone plan? But what overlap does my interest in the worthy cause of saving the tuna have towards my mobility service needs? Are they somehow different from someone who wants to save the dolphin?

The initial motivation for Sonopia, according to their website is they "wanted the brands we really cared about to light up our mobile phones." If I'm interested in transport services I might engage a car company to provide me with an end to end solution that comes with seats, wheels and an engine. I might express my affiliation with the tuna lovers of the world by sticking on a wittily ironic bumper sticker, or having a pair of fluffy tuna hanging from my rearview mirror. But would I want the gear stick to be tuna-shaped? The steering wheel to be covered in the skin of unliberated tunas? Maybe, but the market size of this niche is rapidly diminishing to the sub-micro, and the handful of people with such passionate affiliations are probably serving time at her majesty's pleasure.

Maybe the job of passion and relationships is one for the top of the stack, something like this.

So, I applaud the concept to the extent that this is a canary in the coal mine for micro-segmentation of an end-to-end mobile experience bundle that can be tailored to specific groups, and that it shamelessly offers tangible benefits to community owners to act as a distributed sales force helping Sonopia to sell more minutes on behalf of Verizon and keep a cut. However, to me, community services are best managed at the higher level of abstraction - separating the tasks of providing connectivity with those of providing community. Given that more middlemen inevitably mean more people fighting for a margin out of each of your communication events, maybe if you do want to give money to a good cause, you'd be better off just sending them a cheque?

Taking the twit out of twitter

Until recently, Twitter passed me by. It just seemed so small. The delightful dull blog pictured provides dullness should you want it, but with irony and humor. But then the worm turned, and I'm now twittering with the best of them. The reason? I don't have a TV. And this is as close as TV for the web as I've seen.

I've never really been that much into online video, other than on the express recommendation from someone who's opinion I trust. Browsing YouTube is about as entertaining for me as scrabbling around in the trash among yesterday's newspapers - occasionally finding a morsel of interst, but the whole process makes you feel rather grubby.

TV - even in bite sized chunks - seems to me to be the wrong metaphor for the web. The brilliant Web2.0 video should eviscerate any lingering doubt that the web is a collaborative, social phenomenon. A TV show is made by one person or team, and we know now deep in our DNA that the one-way contributions of just one group can only get us so far. Reality TV is dull as it focuses on just one small group (of generally dysfunctional) individuals. Normal TV is made by a small group, but generally has higher production values. But this - the reality Web - is an all together different animal. How many TV shows do you know that have passionate developers pulling them every which way? Twitter shows you that the colourful texture of the web is composed of real people (ok, still slightly geeky ones at this stage). Heck, it's almost becoming three-dimensional. The fact that these twitterholics are alive, connected, and even occasionally interesting brings a tremendously human dimension to what has been all too often an all too solitary web experience. I hope it flies.

Jim, do you want cash or cheque?

Mr Griffin is one of the brightest minds in the business of reinventing the media industry. His insights spring from, well, just being damn smart. And from having spent the past two decades trying to drag the music industry kicking and screaming towards the money trough. I've been so persuaded (or maybe that's brainwashed?) by him that I find myself repeating, mantra-like, his arguments for flat fee music on every possible occassion.

Anyway, was rather chuffed when he singled this blog out as one of his favourites. All very over the top Jim, but thanks anyway.

Stephen Johnston's ThreeDimensional People, 3dpeople.blogspot.com
"Mr. Johnston is one of the brightest minds in the business of connecting people. His insights spring from working on Nokia strategy from London. The site focuses largely on the direction of the new economy and lets readers profit from the insights of someone whose job it is to strategize for one of the leading companies in new media. The site is useful for following the new concepts and themes that are driving Nokia and other companies to develop new products, open new divisions and traverse the space from product to service."

Salutory metaphor for Nokia

This is right on the money regarding the ever-present need for big companies such as ours to innovate:

Every company innovates until it finds a cash cow. At that point only innovation that supports the cash cow is promoted. Further, any innovation that threatens or does not support the cash cow languishes or is actively killed. Eventually, most of the true innovation ceases as the innovators leave and start new companies and the cycle repeats.

A young company is like a thirsty animal in the desert, desperately sniffing and searching with all its might for a supply of sustenance that will allow it to survive the rigors of the market. If the animals energy runs out before it finds an oasis, or better still a river or a lake, then it dies. If it finds a source of water it survives. It’s all very basic and primal “circle of life” stuff.

If it finds an oasis in the desert can you blame it for not wanting to take another long open ended trek in the desert. The search for the initial revenue stream for a startup is strongly analogous. Once you find it, you don’t want to let it go. And therein lies the rub.

That very act of hanging on will eventually lead to stasis and then death.

The onus on us as a big company is to prove that we can still reinvent ourself, not to rest on past glories, and the cash cows of the past.

Suffer the children

Kim Cameron reports on a rather worrying situation with UK education - fingerprinting kids without their parents' consent. This from the BBC:

The guidelines, published next month, will "encourage" schools to seek consent before taking biometric data. The move comes after it emerged some primary schools stored children's thumb prints for computerised class registers and libraries without parental consent. The Department for Education and Skills (DfeS) says it does not have figures for how many schools are already using biometric data. However, a web poll by lobby group Leave Them Kids Alone, estimated that 3,500 schools had bought equipment from two DfES-approved suppliers.

Under the Data Protection Act, schools do not have to seek parental consent to take and store children's fingerprints.

Great. So, now the UK government is forcing children to sleepwalk into a privacy quagmire. No doubt these records will be handed over to some A.N.Other vendor, probably to get sold on the black market when that vendor goes bust. My two big problems with this are that you've got absolutely no idea to what uses that data could be used in some future time (so it is best to err on the safe side - aka the "negative option value" hypothesis), and that it is just bad policy making.

The first point should should be pretty obvious - we all know that these databases are never secure. It probably isn't good form to quote oneself (but heck, it's not good form to make death threats, so I think I can get away with it), but what I was talking about regarding giving away the keys to location counts at least as dramatically for your fingerprints:

In the same way that option value depends on the potential multiple uses of an asset, giving away generic and highly fungible personal data such as location can result in negative option value.

Second, this policy of sitting on the fence and "encouraging" schools to get permission is just annoyingly fudging the issue, and pushing the responsibility down to the overworked schoolteachers. I'm reminded of one of my favourite pieces by the late Nico Colchester, a former deputy editor of the Economist, who invented the science of crunchiness - keep things clear, else we'll all pay the consequences.

The humble contacts book: An object of perfection, or ripe for a revamp?

Whether it's at a dinner-party or late night foray into a strange bar, the fact that I work for Nokia is an easy ticket to talk. People generally have powerful reactions, as more often than not I'm working for the company that makes the product that gets them to work, connects them with who matters to them, and gets them laid. This is clearly quite a burden, but the company wears it well - with a well-deserved reputation for solidity, easy to use, reliability and the fact that the damn thing just works. (Sure there are often also comments along the lines of "why on earth don't you bring back that beautiful silver bullet phone [6310] - it was my favourite thing ever..." etc.) But the fact remains - we are still carrying a good deal of people's goodwill, and we mess with it at our peril.

And nowhere is this goodwill more obvious than in the trusty familiar contacts book. It has been going strong in a similar looking format for well over a decade (I'd guess, haven't been here long enough to remember that far back). Messing with the contacts book would be like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa - an act of vandalism, surely. Surely? Well, I'm not so sure. I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that things must stay how they were because that's how they have always been. Everywhere else the world around is changing upside down, and consumer communication behaviours are being re-written, one twitter at a time.

One of our recent Nokia speaker series guests (Stephen Messer, who had just sold his company for several hundred million dollars, so I listen when he speaks) put it like this - the telco industry has lost the opportunity to innovate in the contacts book, whereas the internet industry has come along and invented an entire new industry - social networking - to fill this innovation void. Hmmm, food for thought? This got me thinking anyway. Even though people do like their contacts book, are we missing out on realizing the full potential of the Internet to make an even better experience? Isn't MySpace just your contacts book with Internet-innovation added? Several ideas jump out at me: automatic backups is one clear missing feature that really should be widestream (and we're actually already, rather quietly, doing this in various places already). How about integrating other features into the phonebook - or perhaps taking some away. What would you like to see?

(I should probably point out that my position in strategy makes me far removed from the actual tech-heads who build this stuff (and maintain your trusty contacts book in its pristine state) so feel free to be as crazy and ambitious as you like...)

Mark Anderson speaks at Nokia

One of the fun aspects of my job is to organize informal "speaker series" sessions. These are opportunities for thought leaders, techno visionaries, business people and other really interesting people to come to Nokia House (just outside Helsinki) and present their ideas and have Q&A with Nokia folks. This has been running for a couple of years now, and we've had some interesting people - Joi Ito, Larry Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Chris Anderson (Wired, not TED). These people come to join us as friends of Nokia (a nice way of saying we don't pay them speaker fees), but generally seem to enjoy the experience, and often get into good discussions with some of our world class geeks.

Earlier this months we hosted Mark Anderson, who's the editor of the Strategic News Service and a widely followed strategy pundit. He gaves us his trends for 2007.

I attach below the vid the rough notes I took at the time.



-----------------

Mark's 2007 Predictions
1. ePhones: Phones will be used to pay for things
Japan already does this. Nokia has been testing this for years.
"Carriers have been the bottleneck" - but why wouldn't carriers do this. Qualcomm are investing in startup payments. Carriers are changing their mind about this.
Many technologies, but security clearly the main issue. Authentication is required.

2. Authentication everywhere.
ID theft is so important, that authentication will be required everywhere. Biometric will be big. Voice is one idea, would be great if it does work. Phones could have a bio swipe, and reduce theft - it costs about $9 to install. Could do this in conjunction with insurance companies - never worry about phones being stolen. This then would allow the phone to be used in conjunction with keys for phones. "Phone" is not the right term for what this is - it communicates more with systems than people. 50% increase in data.

3. Tesla-led - electric car will go mainstream year
Environmental factors going well. Elon Lesk (sp?) founded paypal, now started a startup called Tesla. It’s a plug-in car that charges overnight - 250m per set of batteries. 2-seat roadster. 0-60 in 4 secs. Sold out first 2 years of orders. Plan to move to 4 seater. Could basically replace today's US car and truck population overnight. Could use hydro and coal power.

4. Oil price rises further
Oil is a game, and does not obey standard rules of economics.

5. Mobile advertising takes off up 20-30% next year
Big concern about managing the experience - needs high resolution. Words alone will be ineffective. Needs a creative approach to this.

6. Dollar falls further against the dollar and the yen.
Dollar will weaken - Japan will spend 500bn - 1trillion in interventions. Japan is intervening and raising interest rates and will be dangerous. Carry trade is very dangerous - it's like having 'free money'.

7. New Russia emerges, and brings with it a new cold war.
88 journalists have been killed. Russia's policies wrt missile crises, energy policies.

8. XY (parallel) computing takes over
Easy to make parallel computers, but few people know how to program for these types of computers. Microsoft is unprepared for this. Grid computing - what roles could phones play as grids become more common. Something that Europe has an advantage in - e.g. CERN. Nokia should be looking at mesh networking.
Visual computing will be part of the programming process as input as well as output. E.g. training a computer to look for oil deposits based on visual learning.

9. Year of NAND wars
DRAM wars - 17 different production facilitites (FABs), big declines in flash memory prices. More than enough supply of memory, will accelerate new types of devices, and hasten move from fixed to mobile.

10. iTunes will begin to lose share to competitors with more general DRM approaches, unless iPhone materializes.
(note - he first made this prediction in Dec 06). iPod will maintain, Zune will be a failure. Since this was made in December, the iPhone has been launched and DRM has been attacked in Europe.

Key drivers
- oil - 87% negative correlation between price of oil and stockmarkets. Energy tax likely.
- cheap labour
- liquidity (cash from Japan)

Bad news in general
- Fed has lost control of the US economy in the past 12 months. Fed can't lower rates since they're concerned about inflation. They have to defer to the oil industry. Commercial banks have not been following the lead from fed rate, which means the Fed doesn't have a tool to control the economy.
- Schism between corporations and people. Less of a problem in Europe because of socialistic governments.
- GDP growth (US?) is declining. Europe going up.
- Latin America is a mess.
- Mid east - greatest allies are greatest enemies.
- Healthcare costs are bankrupting our economies.
- Pensions are going bankrupt.

Good news in general
- Medicine is changing - "evidence based medicine"
- High oil prices act as incentives for people to invest in energy efficient solutions.
- Today there are more naturally occurring forests than there were 10years ago.
- Higher broadband availability.
- Education - cause for hope (Mark's new company is called Project Inkwell has 40 members (Msoft, Intel, AMD, Gateway…) and is creating education focused solutions for schools. Wants Nokia to join.

Other trends
- Moving from residential to commercial real estate
- Moving in US from 1party to mixed party government
- River of money will fund online ad sales and drive economic activity. 200bn annually is slowly moving.
- IT spending will be up 12% as long as no major issues
- Moving from refinancing homes as a source of cash
- Few IPOs - Clearwire one of the few.
- Year of Microsoft - shipping of vista etc. will be be v. important

Phone specific issues
- Location based services - voice driven directions. Mark is not a believer in location based advertising ("hey, your favourite shoes 20% off in the next mall"). But would prefer to know where his kids or wife is.
- Recreating the nuclear family in a new way using technologies to replicate intimacy.Technology does not stop intimacy - it provides more opportunities to meet people. Phone creates more opportunities for social interaction.
- Mesh networks need to happen - e.g. to help in Katrina-like emergencies. E.g. emergency only activation.
- Changing business models - e.g. Somebody coming to Helsinki and putting wimax and Intel together.
- iPhone - iRiver Clix device. That and iPhone indication of a move towards all -programmable device.

Back to the drawing board for free energy

Ever since Wired had the "cycling machines as energy generators" as an Artifact from the Future (can't find the link) I've been intrigued by the possibility of getting the gym goers to replace the nuclear energy plants. Oh well.

Via venturebeat:

Does all that gym peddling create usable energy? -- No. It's been bandied about by crackpots over the years: Generate electricity by tapping into all that energy people expend in the gym -- on bikes, treadmills, weight-lifting. San Ramon, Calif. company 24 Hour Fitness invested $15,000 to test this. Turns out, if all 13 machines in one Hong Kong gym were in use ten hours a day every day, it would take 82 years to generate enough electricity worth the $15,000 investment.

Patent spending

I wonder if / when Friendster's business model will transition from advertising to IP enforcement?

San Francisco - Online social network Friendster announced this week that it has been granted its third social networking-related patent, this time for a "system and method for managing connections in an online social network."

The company says the patent covers adding friends, personalizing a profile through arranging, ordering and classifying connections made in an online community, and managing these connections at will.

[...] The company did not address whether it intends to pursue licensing or infringement actions against others in the social networking space.

What in the world is WAYN doing with their signup?

I like the idea of WAYN - a location based social network built around the concept "where are you now?" - though from the loud, garish site, and mulitple flashing ads I guess I'm probably double the age group they had in mind. However, I just tried to register to check it out but it wouldn't let me continue without requiring that I fill in my gmail user ID and password! The idea is so that I can see where my gmail contacts are and invite them to use the service. I'm sorry, but what on earth is that all about? I feel bad for people who sign up to services which then spam their entire address book, but I generally also feel that those people get what they deserve. There was nothing in this service that suggested that experience wasn't going to happen to me, and no way to bypass that requirement. I then had to shut the browser down, and when I went back to the site, it had registered me, and took me to the next stage of offerings. Very odd. By that stage I was jaded. Sorry, WAYN, but you've lost me before I even started. But as I said, am probably not the target demographic.

One bomb could switch off the Internet in the UK?

This could be fairly nasty, as more and more of our critical functions - not just emailing powerpoints around - rely on web connectivity.

According to an article by David Leppard, Scotland Yard has uncovered evidence that Al Qaeda operatives were going to blow up Telehouse Europe, a large colocation facility in Britain that is the country's largest Internet hub. Suspects who were recently arrested had conducted reconnaissance against Telehouse and had planned to infiltrate the organization and blow it up from inside.

Losing my Biz Week cherry

I guess it's not good form to toot one's horn, but as this blog is also increasingly my aide memoire, I'd mention here my first appearance in Business Week here. OK just a few comments about our deployment of wikis, and not exactly the front cover of Newsweek like my friend Rajesh.

Where are the British rocketboomers?

I thought I'd create a short video introducing some of the latest web services as an introductory item for some our managers that are too busy doing their day jobs to spend time surfing the blogosphere. Then I thought it'd be much better to have somebody nice to watch for our execs rather than me - my british mumbling would not make for a particularly enjoyable viewing. I immediatley thought of who I'd like to have do this, and thoughts turned to Joanne Colan, Amanda Congdon and Lindsay Campbell - all savvy, well-known, attractive presenters who know more about 2.0 than is good for them. They're all based in the USA (Joanne being a transplanted brit), and probably out of my league for this little project, which anyway has a deadline of next week.

Have I missed any UK-based digital divas that are doing something similar? Do you know anyone who could be the next rocketboom, given half a chance (or an N93)? How about any existing Web2.0 video blog intros that I can use?

Presence: a red herring?

[What follows is a bit rough, but if I take the time to try and polish it up, I'll never get round to it. Thus here, true to the blogger code of conduct, is a semi-formed rant...]

The need to incorporate presence information into the mobile experience, has been something of an assumed holy grail in this industry for the past few years. (By presence for this discussion, I'm talking about an icon or message along the lines of that we have with IM clients, that indicate the current state of the user, taking e.g. current location as the standard example.) Multiple worthy studies have been done and large expensive boxes have been sold that purport to deliver this functionality. Unfortunately, they're usually not plugged in, so customer facing presence start with the need to enter settings. DOA.

I've recently realized that the odd feelings I've been experiencing when the "presence" discussion comes up are not just coincidental indigestion. The ability for others to see what you're doing now is perceived by many in the industry to be just the inevitable evolution of our increasing interconnectedness, and the visceral negative reactions generated when 'normal people' hear about this ("but i don't want that") dismissed as the quaint yelps of a luddite. If sharing intimate personal details automaticlly is good enough for Japanese school girls, so the lore goes, it's good enough for the other 3bn mobile users; just give it time. If that is the case, then I guess I'm in the luddite camp. Here are 3 reasons why I think presence as it's currently envisaged, may be a red herring.

i) Unbounded data gives unlimited negative option value.
Your location information is fantastically interesting information for all manner of people and companies. In the same way that option value depends on the potential multiple uses of an asset, giving away generic and highly fungible personal data such as location can result in negative option value. I may have no problems with my friends knowing where I am, but I may not want my enemies to do so. If you do not limit the type of data shared, then you have to limit the recipient list. So that leads to the next problem:

ii) The high transaction costs of limiting the data set.
Are you really going to ascribe certain people the right to see certain types of your data? In theory, you should be doing that at a granular level, so that each time any element of your presence chances, you have the option to change who receives that information. Is "family" or "friend" a useful way to subdivide presence sharing? Enough said.

iii) Context not publisher-centric
This means you are a hostage to your state - regardless as to whether you have your presence information set to be update automatically or update manually. If it is the former, then you have no control over the information that is published. The minute you enter the pub, the world (or the subset that you have laboriously scoped down) knows you're boozing. If it's the latter, then your context is going to be out of date unless you decide to change it - so it's even dumber. You have to perform manual labour, and have no choice in the matter. This matters because you have not been given free reign to publish something of interest according to your terms - they have been dicated according to the context of the application.

So, from this rather esoteric discussion, 3 principles for "non-red herring" presence emerge:

- Limited data set. In the absence of certainty about where your data will end up, and trying to limit who will receive it (painful to implement), it's easier to limit the type of data that you're sharing to application specific things. This will ensure that the benefit to me for giving up my information far outweighs the potential cost (negaive option value) of doing so. This is generally not going to be the case when I am publishing generic information (such as location) that can have multiple uses that I do not control, unless that information is captured and only used by that service provider. Limit presence information to be bounded by a specific application or service - e.g. the music I'm listening to or the books I'm reading. I'm more than happy that anybody sees my last.fm profile because a new band or a friend who likes the same music is much more valuable than the potential privacy cost of people knowing what I like to listen to.
- Zero effort. Remove the transaction costs and make it aligned with what I do everyday. Automaticaly updating is part of the story here, but don't make me have to think about do I want that automatic update posted.
- Asynchronous. Switch from updates that are forced by context to subject specific (see i) updates; this is asynchronous publishing when it is convenient for me (the publisher) rather than you the technology or the context.

RSS feeds from Nokia press releases

A new way to keep up with Nokia press releases, for those with an unhealthy appetite for Nokia stuff.
Our Comms guys are starting to get pretty 2.0... :)

http://www.nokia.com/pressrss/rss.xml

The shift in focus from non-customers to customers

I sloped off skiing for the past week, so light posting, but am back refreshed and ready to roll. I currently have a "relationship" bit between my teeth, and am finding my thoughts dominated by one seemingly simple sounding proposition: that non-customers are getting less important than current customers. As people insulate themselves from marketing messages and are influenced more by what their friends say than what expensively produced marketing materials say, the trick for companies to shift their wares is to convert current customers into their evangelists. All very Cluetrain 101. However, what strikes me odd as how badly companies manage their current customers, preferring instead to focus on non customers. This pic and post in Creating Passionate Users sums things up better than I ever could:

Don't stop paying attention. Don't stop being kind. Don't gain 50 pounds. Don't stop flirting. Stay passionate, stay sexy, stay caring. Answer their calls. Unfortunately, too many companies are all candle-lit dinners, fine wine, and "let's talk about you" until the deal is sealed. Once they have you (i.e. you became a paying customer), you realize you got a bait-and-switch relationship.

Put that together with Doc Searls' latest thoughts on relationships, and I'm led inevitably towards my thesis - advertising for new customers is not as effective (depending on product, geography yadayada) as it was, but the simple key proposition to is to manage and delight the current customers. However, the current tools that we've got for companies to manage them are pretty minimal. In particular those tools that allow customers to interact with brands using their mobile. This is an area that I'm thinking about quite a lot, so would be interested to hear about solutions already out there aimed at improving the lot of the embattled current customer.

Yawn. Vodafone partners with MySpace.

Perhaps I'm a bit cynical but is this deal the best that we in the mobile space can do?

Vodafone starts MySpace service: Vodafone customers will now be able to access and update their MySpace websites from their mobile phone. Social networking website MySpace said the tie-up with the UK's largest mobile phone company was its first extension into Europe's mobile sector

Have PC Internet services won the social networking battle. Are we going to be confined to just bringing existing web services, with all existing players and control points, to a smaller screen? I've no idea how the client will look or what extra functionality it will have (it will apparently be preinstalled in future), but I do hope it's a bit more than dumbing down existing content.

To my mind, MySpace is what happens when you take a contacts book and add web innovation on top. We already have a contacts book in the device that people love, so how about some mobile-optimized innovation on top of that? What integration will there be with your existing contacts book, which presumably already contains most people that you actually care about, rather than these other world friends, who exist in some netherworld between real and imgainary.

DRM-free content, data-loving subscribers: the beginning of the end of the mobile darkness?

For those of us looking forward to a grown up internet experience on mobiles, two pieces of news struck me as significant. First, the big increase in the likelihood of a new approach to digital music. Steve Jobs thumbs his nose at DRM. No surprise that he thinks that, but breaking rank so publicly with a long-held industry consensus is ballsy. We must remember that nowadays, when Apple sneezes, other industries catch terminal pneumonia. I imagine there's been conversations for some time about when the final shove will be needed to push the broken business model over the cliff - to claim credit for being a successful customer-centric champion, but not to unnecessarily antagonize your key business partners when they're still delivering your cash cows. (Any other industries we can think of that this might be true?). Warner's deal with LastFM is another signal that change in attitude of the music rights holders themselves is underway.

The second is this remarkable stat from Helio - $100 ARPU. Actually, just getting 25% of that from data does actually seem low, given that it's a data-centric story. So, with the possibility of unlimited amount of sharable music sloshing around, together with some very real interest in mobile data, perhaps the message is getting through that you need to let go to have any chance of holding on?

Well, I never. It looks like we may well be becoming an "Internet company" after all...

I've just returned from what what should have by rights been a tedious day, holed up in a subterranean convention bunker on the outskirts of a blizzard ensconced Helsinki, participating in a strategy meeting of our HR group. This kind of stuff, I thought to myself through gritted teeth, was what I get paid to do. Fair 'nuff.

However, after a 13 hour day brimming with powerpoints I've returned bounding with renewed energy for my job, and belief in this very Finnish, very unique company. The day was dominated by discussions around the transformation that our CEO has, with his characteristic bluntness put as "we're a mobility company, now we're also going to become an Internet company". (As to what this means exactly, for our purposes it is closely tied up with the shift to services, and in general, like porn, you know it when you see it.) The fact that Internet issues pervaded our discussions is no great surprise - what gave me the shot in the arm was the universally positive attitude in the room of appx. 100 people - almost by definition not the early technology adopters in the company - that major change was inevitable, we were going to deal with it like we had dealt with other major issues in the past, and we were going to do it damn well.

Letting go of control, embracing uncertainty, welcoming failure, sharing not hoarding, external openness, beta-level iteration, understanding and innovating together with end-users: these were all alien concepts to this company when I joined 3 years ago, and I felt out of place in an environment of highly skilled, disciplined, telecom enginneers, who designed complex solutions to complex problems. Before this gig, I had been coordinating trade policy networks in Brussels where the only way to get things done was informal collaboration, and I knew nothing of telco technologies (and, as a edge-ist didn't want to learn). Now, even in the 12 months that I've been working on these 2.0 and innovation related issues I've seen a major change of approach, both at the top and increasingly in the all-important middle layer. And today I felt on the same wavelength as most of the HR management, who have their tentacles in every nook of the company, and hold the levers to change that all important 'mindset'.

So, will it work? Who knows. It's certainly going to be a long journey as we start to roll out our consumer internet services and explore new business models and partnerships. However, the real sense I've got from today is that we're reached the crest of an uphill struggle for hearts and minds to focus on this issue, and the long winding road of Internet transformation is now looking that bit less daunting. Am looking forward to sharing more specifics as they emerge.

Future competitive advantage: Provenance?

Brad Burnham discusses the shift from hardware and services to data:

Later, it shifted to systems software, then applications software, and then networks. As more software functionality was delivered to a browser over the internet, the basis of competition shifted from features to service level metrics like reliability, accessibility and security. I believe that today, at least in the area of consumer web services, we have already moved on to a new focus of competitive differentiation based on data.

And then suggests that's not the end of the story, but the next elements "in the stack" could be governance, values and ethics. I like this approach, and would add one of my favourites to this pantheon: provenance. Provenance is about the place where things come from and the history and values associated with it. In answer to Brad's question, perhaps provenance is really the end of the line, since a company's history is pretty much impossible to commodify. How it uses its history as an asset is therefore up to them.

Oddly enough, on my first day at Nokia in November 2003 we had a brainstorming about future competitive advantages, and one of my suggestions was that in an era of commodification, the unique provenance of Finnishness could be an asset for Nokia. There is something unique about Finland's highly educated, disciplined workforce, the remarkable integrity and decency of its people, the bias to openness and transparency (if you see a car in the street you can find out the owner, address and how much tax they paid last year for the cost of a phone call), and the charming, empty, clean, open countryside. In a hectic world which in which the ultimate luxury is conversational currency and the ability to switch off, this could be rich seam. And in a world in which every technical innovation is replicated in the blink of an eye, this seems fairly defendable.

Backup: who pays whom for data storage?

From the mobile monday email list comes a new service: Mobyko. From their site, the immediate offering is free backup. This makes sense for the mainstream users, who have had to cope with the pain and frustration of lost numbers on top of their lost or replaced phones, and is a service that our industry has been amazingly remiss at making work better (not having any phone numbers makes it hard to spend money calling and texting people, let alone the more prosaic data charging possibilities for over the air backup). So operators are cottoning on and There are others in this space too, such as Fusion, Sharpcast, 02 reportedly rolling it out as an automatic feature, and Shozu adding it to their photo backup offering as a freebie.

I guess my two questions for this kind of service is: why you little startup and not the big, trusted brands with their existing networks, and what will be your business model if you're not going to take the data and sell it to 3rd parties?

Not long ago, people would have paid for this service (in fact people still are), in the same way that some people are still hiring a phone off AT&T with a monthly charge (something like $5). Now it's been offered for free by startups. Next step? Customers being able to auction off their data? I imagine this is something that the Root founders would have in mind. It's not just that the data could be used to target you for spam / targeted ads, it's the insight about people in general that can be gleaned from the information contained, such as the number and type of companies in the book. This is a tricky issue, and I'd be surprised to see a service thrive that does not either big brand recognition, or allow the user to control and benefit from their data in an innovative way. Will be watching with interest...

Imity: through a looking glass darkly

Are you the same person online as you are in real life? I'm not talking about the 43 year old geek guy pretending to be a 15 year old girl, but the more subtle question about whether you use the web to support or substititute for real life. This post won't be relevant for the latter category. And in fact, it might give you pause for thought: soon, everyone will know you're a dog.

Nokia's Sensor app is/was a rather cute bluetooth-only social networking solution. People liked it but commented how much better it would be with an online component too. Well, thanks to a chat with Nikolaj at DLD, it seems that the team at imity (as in proximity) have done pretty much that: take the sensor concept to the next level, and allow you to interact with people whether they are in the real world, or your online world.

So, what does it do? It combines blueetooth scanning with online social networking, so it can tell you if there's someone in the same room as you who reads your blog or other online site. Or you can see if there's someone visiting your blog who you were with in that bar last night. Here's a deck from last year's Reboot when they were still closed beta. The new site's only be open to registrations for a week or two.

It's interesting that the digital traces we leave as we meander around the web (e.g. MyBlogLog) are becoming real world. So, think twice before you write that rude blog comment; you might find yourself on the sharp end of a non-virtual fist.

I imagine before long they will extend the model to the other dimension: to allow you to trace the shadows of your Second Life pesona and their respective interactions with others. In fact, they ask for a SL name on sign up, so this is probably already underway if it's not out yet. I hope they allow you to automate the meta-matching, so that as you / your avatar / your online surfer passes others, you can tell whether they share your taste in music / movies / books / locations etc. with federated output data of lastFM / Netflix / Amazon / Plazes etc.

As a rather boring 'supplementer' I find the collision of these worlds very exciting. In its current format, it probably won't be that attractive to those who want to maintain the shroud of alternate reality. I'm looking forward to a S60 3.0 version, a critical mass of local users to make the bluetooth scanning work, and the surfacing of many really interesting questions and services that we've not even begun to think of yet.

Have an N73 or E60? Work for us. For free!

***Updated: oops, my typo - should have been E61 not E60 as previously put. I will leave the title as it is else the links won't work. But it's E61s that we're after***


I'm helping out some colleagues of mine at Nokia who are looking for some informal pre-release testing on one of our forthcoming consumer internet services. Criteria would be:
i) London based (easier for me, but not that important)
ii) you already have an N73 or E61
iii) willing to provide feedback in return for, say, a beer?

We don't need real mobile or tech experts, but a sense of humour would be good, especialy regarding the foibles of alpha/beta level stuff. If we get enough people, we could do a meetup for drinks and feedback on the company tab. Testing period wil just be a few weeks. If interested, leave your details in the comments, or email me at stephen dot johnston at nokia dot com.

DLD social networking panel to mobiles: Sorry, you're not invited

One of the ironies of today's social networking services is that the device that can deliver these services directly to the users wherever they are, and has access to the kind of information that could be Royal Jelly to the providers, is shunned and relegated to a poor relation. Not to my surprise, today's high-profile panel on social networking had little to say on the subject, but contained some interesting tidbits nonetheless. The panel was moderated by Jamba-founder and one of Germany's entrepreneur-wizz kid brothers Oliver Samwer, and consisted of Matt Cohler, Strategy VP at Facebook, Lars Hinnrich, founder of Xing (formerly OpenBC), Erik Wachtmeister, founder of aSmallWorld (aSW), and an old-world-business model legend, Arend Oetker.

Mobile industry: need not apply
The only reference to mobile was made mid-way through by the eminent Dr. Oetker, who seemed to say that 'handys' were obviously not compatible with these kinds of service, because emotion was so important and emotion was clearly impossible on the small screen. Cue my rant from yesterday about not even needing screens, although to be fair Dr O. was the self-styled non-technologist on the panel. The deafening silence on the subject of mobile throughout the rest of the session was a telling indictement of our industry's ability to reach out and enable these services in a more meaningful way than basic WAP links. The lack of a great mobile client for aSW seems particularly problematic for the users (given their openness for real-world interactions), and something like an updated version of the bluetooth-optimized Sensor could make a whole lot of sense for them. Time ran out before I was able to ask the question about 'what is stopping you from having great mobile experiences of your services', but I'm sure the answer would have been the same as when I asked it during the social networking panel in last year's Next Web Conference. The answer then was high and non-transparent charges, which I expect is still gripe #1.

No new business models
There weren't many breakthrough insights re business models (nor were we expecting any). Business models were generally advertising subscription fees or commissions on ecommerce (aSW has 265 yachts on sale, together with thousands of job listings, though no detail was given of the amount of fees charged). Admittedly, Xing noted that they had revenues from day 1, and have recently been floated (valued at $160m). At this stage, Dr. Oetker's baby-food-and-things-you-can-touch business model is looking the healthiest.

aSmallWorld: real world exclusivity brings real value to members
It was interesting to listen to Erik W. in person - he's clearly a bit of a legend for the 100,000 aSWers whose glitzy lives he has helped make glitzier. As a proud member (though not one of the glitzy ones) I can attest to the value of the site - it provided the chance to meet some fascinating and friendly locals during recent trips to Morocco and Miami, providing a much richer experience for the itinerant traveller. That kind of welcome wouldn't have been likely by trying to connect with MySpace members (yikes), and is testimony to its focus on real-world, trusted social relationships. aSW is unique among these services in terms of its rather paternalistic approach - 6 webmasters moderate the community, and can ban misbehaving members (sending them to aBigWorld) for such crimes as trying to 'conect' with cute Swedish women you don't actually know (this is dubbed the 'Italian syndrome'). Erik's presence here seems indicative of a new activities brewing: he announced they may bring in subscription charging soon and will be bringing out a new version of the software to allow groups.

Helping people make the web more manageable, and real.
One interesting idea was Erik's response to the 'next big thing' question. He said there will be lots of opportunities for helping people bring order to the chaotic nature of the web (one of his major USPs for aSW). This theme is echoed in a piece in yesterday's NYT:

Get ready for a lot of opportunities to join all kinds of networks — and, one hopes, some appropriately Webby new way to politely say, “No, thank you.”

This alludes to the Danah-esque annoyance with these clumsy social structures - the inability to bring the same nuance to online social networks that we can use in real life (for example, feigning that you've forgotten your business card / have an important telephone call or are stricken with a tremendously debilating and infectious disease).

Faithful to their customers or their community / market segment?
Esther Dyson asked the best question (as she generally does) to Facebook: Are you going to mature your service offering as your customers grow, e.g. graduate from college and become young professionals. The answer was a bit vague, but this is a fascinating issue. What proportion of sites are designed to facilitate better interaction of predefined communities (e.g. golf club, company networking tools) rather than individuals (with aSW and MySpace being clear examples)? And what attributes should a community-focused network have compared to an individual-focused network?

From real-world communities to online, rather than vice versa
Although not really dicussed in this session, I'd suggest that the natural evolution of things seems to be taking us down the Long Tail - more niche communities created to align with existing real world communities. And I'd doubt whether any of the existing mass networks are the place to start for this. For example, I'd love to have a more powerful online community component to my sailing club, but it's unlikely that any one of these networks will have critical mass in these real world communities to be feasibe (MySpace is not big in Suffolk). The real-world community itself will determine the technology connectedness of its members, and 99% of real world communities have no internet presence. So, presumably there's a viable business opportunity for a multi-platform community-service provider offering community services to these communities. If I was a betting man, I'd suggest that enabling these communities will be the next disruption to the bloated mass market social networks that are already showing signs of churn.

The web's next trick: to disappear?

Am in Munich at the DLD Conference and will try to do some posts from what is shaping up to be an interesting - and heavily oversubscribed - event. One of the comments in the opening future-orientated session (by Caterina Fake) alluded to the concept that I've been mulling over a while. She said we're going to see the end of the web as we know it - in short (my summary of her comment) a shift away from the traditional PC experience, and portals in particular, towards more modular web-services broken up and delivered to the user in whatever way is convenient to them, whether it's on the mobile, the TV or wherever. Conversation then moved on, but this idea of a disappearing web seems worth exploring. In a nutshell, I guess it refers to mobilization of the access layer with 'deportalization' at the services layer. This stuff is bread and butter for most Mobile2.0 advocates, and visionaries such as Rajesh Jain, but I'd interested to hear about how others have structured this, and whether these elements hang together.

This is a story about enabling innovation at the services level, rather than the display level. It would suggest that AJAX, gorgeous multi-touch UIs and the browser itself are less important than figuring out how to get semantic, federated data working on any internet accessible device. And, while it's an impressive technological feat that we have a fully featured, best in class web browser on our devices, this line of thought would make that mute. Of course we need to offer the best experience of browsing today's old 2-dimensional web pages, but this would be just 'hygiene'; context rather than core. The disappearing web is a fragmented, modular, data-centric place, in which RSS and widgets rules supreme. Btw this post from the ever-sharp software abstractions blog has more about RSS aggregation and filtering, deportalization and semantic web as top disruptive technologies for 2007.

I would like to think that we could do away with the browser alltogether and the need to navigate portals on either the mobile or PC, because it is a fairly clumsy analogy of a reference library. Please technologists, don't ask me to dive into a strange other dimension that you call the web but looks to me like just links. I want the web to wrap itself around me, a warm blanket of comforting connectivity. And like all good blankets, I want it to be seamless, easy to understand, effective at simply delivering what it promises, and no sharp, bulky edges.

Hence my frustration with people who ask me how on earth a mobile device with a small screen can possibly be an effective Internet device. Gosh darnit, if the next version of the web was any good, you wouldn't even need a screen. I don't want the distractions and infinite choices presented to me by services that abdicate their ability to serve, constantly nagging at me for my input to dumb questions that it really should have the answers to already. I want answers to problems that I either have or am about to have, delivered as pure signal, no noise. I want my phone to buzz silently when I'm in a meeting to indicate that the London flat I've been looking for comes on the market at the right price. I want it to send a painful electric shock when I'm about to eat that sticky donut that, according to my health-care provider who knows my medical and consumption history, will prove fatal with 99% probability given my current heart condition. I want a very subtle glowing icon to indicate that one of my trusted contacts is driving past my house on the way to the airport, meaning I could save a £50 taxi fare by hitching a ride. None of these involve big screens; just smart signals delivered in a multi-sensory way that makes sense to the particular context. All of these require interoperability at the data layer (the semantic stuff), but it's the business and social interoperability (getting companies to open their processes, and for consumers to trust them) that's the harder task. These require a realization that human experiences and the applications and services that serve them live in three dimensions. And the data from these three dimensions deliver vastly more opportunities for service innovation, rendering many of today's 2-dimensional portal-based web experiences outdated, if not redundant.

What this blog is all about

I love the Internet, but am more interested in how it can help you live a better real life, rather than a different one. Via Boingboing.




And in a similar vein...

iPhone - come on in the water's lovely

Been in Miami all week at conferences so light posting, and glimpsing the sun outside the conference window (arguably worse than no sun at all). Now in the BA lounge on my way back to grimey London, rife with its religous tension (both in Big Brother and on the street), worst storms for 17 years, and constantly shoddy transport system. Anyway, I digress. I was going to address the question made by my regular (only?) reader from Nigeria, pumba, who asked what i thought about the iPhone. Well, even though this is just a personal blog, and I'm anyway not a spokesman about such things for Nokia, my views are fairly inline with the company's view, which is that it validates our 'worldview' of mobile multimedia internet enabled devices: the most important computers going forward will not need to be permanently plugged into the wall.

The unprecedented levels of exposure for this launch have planted the seeds in millions of people's minds (especially in the key US market) that computing and the internet needn't be about PCs. Until people believe this and start using mobile devices as full members of the Internet, and web developers know this, the promise of an Internet that is dramatically more usable and relevant for people will not be realized. It's as if we've been building cars for a while, but the Americans haven't found a compelling reason to make the leap from horse-drawn carriages. To the exent that Apple - and its slick marketing machine - is joining in and validating the market for cars rather than horses, I'm grateful. The idea of the next Web is going to be the topic of the next post that I've been meaning to write for a while, and if my middle seat in cattle class actually allows me to use the keyboard, maybe I'll get to it on the flight.

Before I leave the topic, would only add that in many respects this is not really a phone such as we understand the category, but a cellular-enabled PDA, that doesn't look like it'll be operated with one-hand, and doesn't have GPS (unlike e.g. N95). So, even if Apple succeeds in validating the market for such a category that hasn't existed until now, it doesn't mean that other manufacturers will be able to repeat the trick.

Democratizing the hardware

Given that we have so many smart people, and worse, smart networks all trying to add value in this business, it's surprising how many simple opportunities to improve the customer experience seem to be overlooked as people rush to emulate the Next Big Thing. The ever-original Martin Geddes is a source of endless creativity:

Here’s another product I want, but nobody wants to sell me. I hardly dare call
home when away because my kids are erratic sleepers at best, and it’s far too
easy to get the timing wrong. I could text her mobile, BUT that makes a
pointless beeping at inappropriate moments. [..] I want a big LED
display I can put on the wall, and send text messages to. And a row of
buttons to acknowledge receipt and return an pre-canned SMS. “Yes”, “No”,
“Maybe”, “Yes, I still love you.”, “If you’re not home by 5.30 I’m going to
murder them all by myself.” And that’s it. [...]Not everyone spends their day
tethered to a PC screen, or is big enough to even reach the keyboard.

I think his solution would cost about $3 to make in Taiwan and could retail for $100. Clearly this kind of solution would work in an IP-world. So what's stopping this? Maybe it's not that easy for a no-name OEM to interface with the SMS infrastructure?

Service lessons from a jumbo prawn

Despite being the land that invented service culture, I'm finding that Americans seem to be losing their edge. I just had lunch in the hotel overlooking the beach - cue surf sounds, and when I asked about the size of the 'jumbo prawns' I was told you get 4 wopping prawns that are each about 10 times bigger than standard prawns. Salivating at the prospect of these gastro-crustaceo delights that I guessed were wriggling with freshness, I duly ordered them.

But lo! When the plate arrived (carried by a different waitress) there were just three podgy pink prawns smiling up at me. When I queried my original waitress about The Missing Prawn (accounting for a quarter of my dish) she apologized and came back in a few mins with a solitary prawn delivered in a bowl. No attempt to compensate for mental anguish, such as giving me a couple more for good measure. (I guess there's still a fat margin on the hefty $14 cost.)

A second learning for me was Not To Blame Someone Else. The waitress passed the buck onto the hapless kitchen staff, saying that their "apprentice" didn't know the drill. This hardly made me the customer feel better; merely conjured up the image that they have a scruffy youth on work experience slopping dishes together with dirty fingernails.

Well, a trivial point, but I've noticed the correlation of declining service standards with the shift of the tip on the bills from "optional" (in theory at least) to it being automatically added (17% in this case). The even cheekier bit is the a line asking for "Additional gratuity". Another couple of prawns might have even bounced that tip into overdrive, and made me a convert.

Sometimes you just got to stop innovating

I had the most beautiful ergonomic, rounded, shiny silver presenter gadget made by Targus (Google images only finds the new ugly version), which I lost. It had a specially satisfying feature whereby the USB key would slide right into the handle when not in use. Obvious really. Tried to get a new one today in Office Depot, and was confronted with a barrage of overspecified pointers. The one I unwillingly got in end was by Microsoft and it is just a classic example of that Apple vs. Microsoft design philosophy video doing the rounds last year.

This ugly ducklying is bigger and heavier than necessary, has a raft of features which I had to consult the instruction booklet for advice on how to use (dual mode between mouse pointer and clicker, mouse controls, on/off switch, buzz-alert timer...) and most annoyingly of all (don't people do competitor research before launching stuff?) it has a separate USB dongle that does not fit together with the clicker, but gets its own pocket in the natty little leatherette case that comes with it. Of course I'll now lose just one element, and the remaining twin will taunt me.

One final thought, I'm disappointed they didn't put a little belt loop on the cover, so that corporate flunkies such as me could strut around with this gadget on our hip, nestling next to our phone pods, like an emasculated Rob0Cop put on parking duty.

OK, this is just procrastination. I really should be reviewing my notes for the presentation I'm giving tomorrow on Social Networks. Right, off to work...

Innovation goes west: Benin the new Nigeria?

It seems that Benin, a West African country that I was not particularly acquainted with before, is in fact a hot bed of 2.0 social networking innovation. Just got a friend request on the real-world bookmarking site Flagr from a polite sounding gentleman who is urgently waiting my contact details for profitable business. I wonder if friend requests are a new communications medium of choice? So many questions. Is there a higher takeup rate as people assume we're all 'inside the beltway'. And why Flagr? Surely MySpace and YouTube would provide richer pickings than its savvy geeks...

"Dr. Mark James, the newly appointed Director for Foreign Operations at
Financial Bank of Benin (FBB.). I am urgently waiting for your message, I have
very good and profitable business for you just email me with your full address
and phone number ok."

The Trouble with Flow

The always readable and delightfully colourful Creating Passionate Users blog wonders what comes after usability. To that question I'd say, nothing. When you have it, that's it. You've won. Collect the prize and go home. However, I think that the end state of usability -- 'flow' as depicted in her graphic here -- is getting harder to achieve.

What strikes me as we go up the stack from red to blue that the focus moves away from the product and towards the service layer, and then above that, to the uniqueness of every individual's own data. Can a product in itself deliver flow? A BMW M5 perhaps, or a well sharpened axe. Presumably it's easier to create flow with a service, such as an opera. But what if the user doesn't like opera? It's harder than ever to get into flow, when niches themselves are fragmenting, and, in the spirit of HSBC's brilliant campaign, one user's Bach is another's Beastie Boys.

The SIMply frustrating reality of the lost phone

Foolishly, and most irritatingly, I forgot my phone on a flight on Friday. I can picture exactly where I left it (the seat pocket) and went straight to the BA desk (picking my way carefully through the 100,000 pieces of luggage and mewling babies and parents) in the luggage claim area. After waiting best part of an hour and checking with them a few times, they told me that they had finally sent someone out to check the plane, and couldn't find it. Having recently spent 2.5 years living in Helsinki where wallets full of cash left on the street are returned, this came as a shock. But as someone said to me yesterday, this ain't Kansas, Toto.

Anyway, this little exercise has brought home to me the utter frustration caused by the most useful component of my identity being the subject of the twin tyrants of i) a physical form factor (the plastic sim card) and ii) intermediaries who control "my" identity. I had to report its loss via an internal corporate service desk, fill in a replacement SIM card form, and then hope that at some stage that intermediary connects to the Vodafone intermediary, so somebody somewhere can flick a switch somewhere that will rekindle my life.

The last couple of days have been a complete social wasteland for me (the extent to which the phone's loss is responsible is however debatable), my travel plans have been skewered and I have no insight into when I'll be back in the land of the living, or what the process is. How much easier would it be if i) I controlled my communication identity and could change it at will ii) i could access it at from any web connected device, grabbing a physical device as needed, and otherwise just using my Skype as an OK approximation of my cellphone, able to send and receive messages and calls. Hmm, will take a while I guess, and meanwhile, idiots such as me will continue making work for paper and plastic pushers the world over.

Improving the performance of social networks with real world data

Today's online social networks have done wonders in connecting you with what matters to you, given that they have very little data to go on. And this data generally requires you to painfully input it at each site, resulting in a proprietary lock-in. We manually add our friends and interests in a binary fashion that ignores the glimpses, hints and nuances of reality. What might be useful here would be to have a 'friendly fly on the wall' - watching you, and allowing these services to understand you better and therefore serve you better. (Note: this would be primarily of interest for those of us who are realists rather than the escapists.)

As far as I see it, there are two types of data that could be useful to capture to improve the performance of these networks: digital and analogue. Google is already doing a rather good job at capturing the first type - starting with your web-browsing clickstream and moving into your email and documents. They are starting to sniff around the second type of data which is naturally harder to come by, with Checkout. However, this is where their exalted web-only existence puts them at a disadvantage against the relative neanderthals with desktop presence and the and the positively jurassic players in the telco space. Desktop apps are much better at collecting non-web data such as what iTunes is playing, and mobiles are the ultimate fly on the wall for capturing and brokering the real life data stream (we've been using the term "Lifestream" for this).

Mobile devices could come closer to improving the equation - they know where you go, who you speak to most, will know what you listen to (if you believe Tomi), what you watch, and the list goes on. In short, they have a better chance of knowing who you are than yet another social network service that is about as smart as a new born chicken. So, what irony that these are the most successful social network services -- making do without access to these multiple rich data streams, but with crumbs from the user's desk.

I've being using this rather crude sketch to illustrate this irony -- by integrating mobile-generated data into social networks, the services could be better. (Btw - this ideal of implicit data is to my mind more of a feature than a new paradigm of the web.) So, while in the PC world I am sitting alone at my desk trying to figure out who are my top 8 friends, a social networking service that I allow to have access to my implicit location, purchase, media and communication service (privacy issues being resolved with a wave of a magic wand...) could do a lot more heavy lifting on the back end and act as a broker to my actual, rather than imaginary friends. Naturally, all the implicit or supplementary data that could be relevant for such a service does not have to be mobile, it's just that much of it is likely to be.

An ohmygod moment I had today brought this home to me. I saw LastFM's events tab -- populated with concerts in London over the next couple of months, most of which i'd really like to go to. Far from this being some happy coincidence, it was purely the result of their site connecting their listings with the filter of my recently scrobbled music. I was immediately drooling at the possibilities -- what else could I listen to, watch, see, and who, could I meet. Hey, life's complicated and busy enough already, and I'm more than happy to outsource short-list making to experts, if they have enough information to go on to make good decisions.

So, what interests me now is how to move from painful, limited, proprietary data entry into every online YASN towards an open model whereby you own your data, and can plug it and to different service providers. Things need to change from the telco side (APIs, walled gardens, data & location tariffs, richer and easier developer environements...) but also greater adoption of microformats, open APIs and clearer transparency on data policies by online sites would be helpful. Will the mobile move from wireless telephone to best friend supplement - a broker to help me navigate news stories, purchase suggestions, places to go and people to see?

Cleaning out my closet; reheating old visions

Taking advantage of the semi-annual quiet time, I've been cleaning out my flat and unearthed my business school application that I made almost exactly 7 years ago. That fact alone is pretty scary. It's always fun to look back and see what one writes on these things. Happily, we're not held accountable to these flowery missives, constructed to flatter and to please - after all, the forward looking statements about ones own future are anything but modest. Heck, this is an American school I was applying for, so darned if I wasn't going to big it up with the best of them.

Anyway, what has struck me as odd is the way that the vision that got me excited way back in 1999, is still pretty accurate as a description of my goals, and is actually getting closer. I bought the URL Global-eye.com, and had the idea of an interactive visual / geographic search engine that would let you zoom around the world and then 'rightclick' on a person or place to discover more info, and that would [abracadabra] solve world peace. I wasn't very specific on just how it worked or led to world peace, but the remarkable thing to me is i) that I would still sign up to this vision if I could, and ii) we seem to be very close to reaching it.

Here's what I wrote, as an intro to the "career aspirations" section.

10:00am, Feb 23, 2010
Flying back from New York to London, I receive a call from my 6 year old daughter to my Geva (Global-Eye Virtual Assistant) who shows me her latest toy. Global-Eye, the company I started three years after graduating from Harvard has just reached a partnership agreement with AmericaOnTime - another information company. We have just launched Eye to Eye - a project that promotes understanding and economic development around the world. Citizens, handily equiped with a Geva handset, have unlimited access to data or people, using an interactive visual search engine linked to the virtual world.

I hope that sick bags were provided in the flight, cos it is rather slimey (and that's after I edited out the bit about coming top in my class. Yeuck.) And this shows that I'm clearly failing on the social and professional goals (no kids, no startup, no Big Deals) that I set for myself. But more interestingly, perhaps they're still the right ones. I do find it amusing that I've ended up working on how to innovate around Internet services on mobile devices, and of course creating my own startup, and having kids is still part of the Grand Plan. Up to this point I had absolutely no technology experience, had been working in trade policy for the previous 5 years, and Nokia meant nothing to me apart from a Japanese sounding phone company. I think I'll check back on this aspiration on a regular basis as the time comes for yearly evaluations of my own progress.

Mashups need microformats

Mash potatoes need bangers like mashups need microformats. Ok, not the best analogy in the world, but still. Mashups hold the much-vaunted promise of personalized, tailored services that might conceivably actually be what people want to use a particularly large problem on the mobile. These two posts clearly demonstrated to me the importance of structured data in enabling mashups, and the non-coincidental fact that most mashup examples show Google Maps since the address format is ready structured.

With that in mind, two more promising areas to go next with mashups in my view would use existing structured data: music (CD metadata is abundant) and people (telephone number as contact, until FOAF or similar makes headway). On top of that, general support for open microformats should clearly be seen as an elevated priority.

Making your work seem like the customers' fun

Google's ImageLabeler is a cute game that exploits people's competitive nature - racing to tag an image with the same words as your online partner - for some spurious reward (to be on a score sheet) and results in improving Google's labelling of images. Very smart. In a similar vein, LikeBetter lets you work to divine your true nature for the promise of them acting as an online horoscope reader. In return, they can probably extract tons of useful data about personality types.