innovation playground Idris Mootee

Interactions Design Will Enable New Social And Cultural Behavior. How Do You Research These Emerging Behavior And Their Implications?

Back from London and a very productive week. Many are still sadden by the loss of Steve Jobs. I quote Ginsberg: "I saw the best minds of my generation... angelheaded hipster raging or the ancient heavenly connection, in the machinery of night...". The world misses Steve Jobs.

Apple said he had been "the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives" and had made the world "immeasurably better".VC and ex-Apple executive Jean Louis Gassee - who Jobs recruited to Apple - said that Jobs should have 'seven statues' built for him - 'One for the Apple II, one for the Mac, one for Pixar, one for coming back and reviving Apple and the Mac, one for the iPod and iTunes, one for the Apple Stores and one for the iPhone. This picture of Steve was taken in an emotional moment knowing this was his last keynote.

Everyone is obsessed with Apple and how to disrupt the master disrupter, but what everyone is doing is either copying each other or try to make small changes to Apple’s designs without the power of the Apple brand/user experience and the powerful Apple ecosystems behind them. Let’s say if your army has the same uniform, equipment and the same Hummers as the US military doesn’t mean you can compete with the powerful military intelligence system linking everything. Apple is a system with central command and control with highly sophisticated logistics system and deep R&D budgets. It is truly a textbook example of sustainable competitive advantage.

Most companies got it wrong when they believe 1/They think Apple is only about clean design and nice features 2/They think what they do is easily replicable 3/They think people are willing to save some money buying a non-Apple substitutes. Look around how many MP3S out there and how cheap they are, anyone buying them? The same can be said about tablets.

We’ve spent a lot of time on researching the future of ‘devices’ or ‘personal technology’. It will be the single largest growth opportunity for the coming 10-15 years and will eventually be bigger than the PC business. It is the next game. I am not talking about mobile phones, smart phones or tablets. I am talking about a convergence of these portable devices that utilizing haptics, gestures, facial, biophysical, voice, movement or any combinations that could create novel ways of interacting with a devices or entertainment appliances.

There is simply no way to predict what would become the dominant interactions paradigm of the future and which one will prevail and which one is transitional. Is multi-touch transitional or something will come and leapfrog this intereaction paradigm?

Apple is milking everything ‘multitouchables.’ One of the latest idea is the Apple's Magic Mouse may include multitouch display. Earlier this year Apple filed a patent application on a multi-touch mouse that can display information and allow users to input directly from the mouse such a number keypad. The screen would then change to a different functionality for each application when they're switched between active and non-active and depending on whether you’re play games or chatting with friends. I think the next one would be a multi-touch Macbook cover that let you do things without opening the laptop. That would be a nice crossover to bring some tablet functions to a laptop. If I want to play music with my Macbook I may not need to open it.

And Apple is getting close to offering cloud-based movie streaming,working with Hollywood studios to get movies streaming through iTunes. LA Times this week said that Apple was hoping to get that service off the ground by the end of this year, or early next year. Apple now streams TV shows and movie to devices like the Apple TV, but Apple TV has small penetration. This would add that feature to purchased content, and widen the range of devices that could stream and most importantly iPads.

Functionality available through the input device is something worth exploring. When we do research work on how devices (or tools) from both an anthropological and design perspectives evolve and how they shape our everyday interactions, we see emerging complex cultural artifacts that connect different kinds of social and cultural practices.

The increasing emerging interactions and sociability makes the behavior hard to research using conventional research approach. The three main central affordances of the personal technologies for social actions are 1/the very personal nature of these devices (at least more so in the west) and getting more personal with increasing access to critical information and 2/ the idea of anytime anywhere always on, everyone and always connected 3/ the sensing and reacting capability of future devices. Like many I carry my Blackberries around in the office, at home and everywhere I go. Many of us are tied to our iPhone/iPad/Android phones/Blackberries and must carry a functioning smart phone at all times. For our research, we focus on how multitouch can interact with geospatial information and on how other modalities can be combined to enrich the interaction with spatial differences. We have a lot of very interesting findings. I may share some here next week.

We Have Proved Once Again That Brand Marketing Can Drive Social Change, Further Customer Engagment And Build Brands. And Won A Gold Award For Best Financial Service Marketing.

Aviva Canada just announced winners to Aviva Community Fund with half a million dollars payout to programs across the country. This is the second year of a very successful campaign created to use brand to drive social change. The Aviva Community Fund, a unique competition designed to lead, empower and support positive change in communities across the country, was first launched in 09 when we presented the idea to the client.

The idea is an open source idea platform for people to submit and decide how to use the money to drive real social change and provide positive impact to their communities. We are grateful to our client's team who worked with us side by side and our design and development team working day and night to accommodate the evolving needs of the program. This is year two and we won a gold award for this campaign. Great work team!

The sustainable impact of the idea or campaign is another proof to show that the world has changed so much since the early days of advertising. The events of the last decade and the Internet has made us aware of the challenges around us.

Advertising has always been the primary mechanism to create awareness and build brand equity, but it is not a question of which 50% of the money is wasted, it is a question of why 80% of the money spent is not building brand equity and merely creating awarness?

Our research shows that 79% of consumers are willing to change the brands they buy or if they believe their actions contribute to making our world a better place, and over 67% would help a brand “promote” (by using Facebook or other social media) if a good cause were behind it and is credible. Also, 73% of consumers (under the age of 35) said it is their mission to contribute to a better society and environment.

Among all respondents, “helping others and contributing to their communities” was cited as the second-most important source of personal contentment, after “spending quality time with loved ones.” Over 54% respondents are not fully convinced that corporate social responsibility advertising is credible when they cannot associate that with real action. The power of PR is diminishing when the program is not designed to engage consumers. This study was part of our ongoing research to look at how social causes can help brands which are low involvement in nature to drive engagement.

One interesting take away point, 67% of consumers are comfortable with the idea that brands can support good causes and improve our societies and make money at the same time. When is Wall Street ready to factor in a second or third bottom line into their valuation of companies? It is time.

Adorno Refuses To Choose Between Music And Philosophy. Now Idea Couture Refuses To Choose Between Design And Business. We Wanted Both.

My dining room as well as other 6 rooms in the house are now turned into back office and soon we will move in the SAP servers. Between my work, hobby and personal projects my life is a mess and I really have no time to eat and sleep. The paper monster is taking over the house and the kitchen is the last defense…not for long.

On another note, I am very excited to recieve the advance copy of my magazine M/I/S/T which will be in newsstands in London, Germany, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney and every Barnes and Noble and Borders in a few weeks. I love the cover design and it stands out among other magazines. Why another magazine? I don’t know but I think it is just a good idea. What's next after a magazine? I have another idea.

I wanted to see a design-thinking magazine that talks about design and business as one. Design and business is part of our culture. Question for myself is if I have to ask Therodor Adorno what magazine should I publish, I think this is it. M/I/S/C is a about ideas, it is about culture, it is a magazine about business innovation and design thinking.

Every issue the content are organized around four key concepts: Movement / Intuition / Structure / Complexity (I jsut thought of the name one night while having ice-cream) The magazine original idea was originally devised as a straightforward collection of random thoughts around innovation, design thinking, business, culture and technology. It is for exploration of creativity, collaboration and co-created meanings that sits at the intersections between the culture of art, design, business, filtered by an unique editorial lens.

When it comes to media, I think I belong to the Frankfurt School. It has been more than 20 years since I last read the English translation of Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (1947 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno). The English title is called Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.

My favorite part of the book is what Horkheimer and Adorno called the culture industry. It was their contention that the culture industry was the result of an historical process that with an increase in technology (including mass communication technology or social media of today if you wish) there was an increase in the ability to produce commodities, which then enabled increased consumption of goods.

The consumption of mechanically reproduced cultural products—predominantly magazines and film—led to formulas of producing them for entertainment purposes, and it did not occur to consumers to question the idea that the entertainment presented to them had an ideological purpose or purposes. Consumers adapted their needs around these cultural products, and in doing so no longer knew of anything else that they might desire, or that there might be anything else they could desire. While we’re all part of the Facebook culture and occupied with media streams from everywhere, we don’t even notice that we are being manipulated (maybe there is a better word) and in fact even our lives are going through a commodization process.

According to Thomas Mann, Adorno refused to choose between music and philosophy throughout his entire life, believing that he was pursuing the same objective in two disparate fields. Sometimes I think about myself, I have been pursuing business and design my entire life and for a long time I kept them separate as two disparate fields. Now I realize it is one. Business is not just about the economies or making money, it is a great part of our culture, just look at Fast Company or better Monocle. Now business, design and technology are co-producing our culture and it is to be debated whether we’re destroying authenticity or promoting it. For Adorno, popular culture on film and radio did not bother to present itself as art. They were instead a business, and this in turn became an ideology “to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce”. Can we say the same for social media?

In 2012, Facebook Will Give New Meanings To 'Social Services' And Will Pass Yahoo In Revenue And A Key Player In Mobile Space.

A week away from Christmas and we're not slowing down yet. Still plenty of things going on and I plan to spend the next 5 days in the office (a first in a year). This is the time I usually make predictions and I am working on a long one to share with our clients. Give you some ideas of what I am looking at:

At the end of 2012, there is the mass push to the clouds and consolidation will happen and India will probably own 25% of the world’s market. Not finished with my spreadsheet models, 25% is close.

At the end of 2012, the idea pf 'customer engagement' will finally emerge as a disciline that sits on top of all CRM, direct marketing, brand activiation or social media marketing activities. Big agencies continue to struggle as they are far behind the curve.

At the end of 2012, social innocation will hit a new high as corporations come to realization that CSR needs to be more than just corporate public relations. It is about issues management, stakeholders dialogue and social empowerment through emerging technologies and interactions design. True experts will emerge to help corporations to navigate this landscape.

At the end of 2012, Yahoo will not exist as a public company and will reach the end of a slow death; its valuation would dropped drastically and ultimately get acquired. The shareholder value destroyed over the next 18 months will be significant and they wish they’d sold it earlier.

By the end of 2012, smart phones/pads will significantly take away from PCs as the most common Web access device globally both from consumer device sales and usage.

By the end of 2012, someone will figurte out how to use iPad as a platform for education. It is a school for everyone and everywhere. Earn your credits or even degree with just your iPad. And free iTunes music for high score students?

By the end of 2012, Facebook will be a key player in the mobile space. What’s the big idea? They will have a platform that includes hundreds of standalone cross-platform applications for iPhone, Android and Blackberries. They would provide mobile developers with tools and support to create and push new 'social' apps.

Today Facebook generates only a little less than $3 per user per year in revenues while Google generates about $25 per user per year (more than $25 billion in revenue from about 1 billion users). Facebook has plenty of rooms to rethink and create new “media” space to capture some of that money. Facebook targeting potential is more attractive and it is an always on for many user (including me) already, it is far better than TVs.

But the bigger disruption is outside the 'media' space; it is payment and shopping – FB social shopping and payment mechanism. Imagine if they plug in product targeting (with what they know about you) and allow users (to be categorized as searchers/opinion shapers/advocates) to use some form of Facebook money to pay for it. Do the math here: FB Shopping + FB Mobile + FB Money.

Facebook will give new meanings to 'social services' and create new shareholder value. Facebook’s value (currently privately held valued between $35-$50 billion) would surely surpass Yahoo’s (publicly held current valued at $21 billion with operating margin at 12%) revenue by end of 2012 and Facebook can get a margin of 37%, multiply that by a moderate 14X P/E and you get a sense of what’s Facebook worth.

If you're interested in trends and forecast, here's a company TrendHunter that produced a good general trend reports and used by many firms. Will provide a review of some of the themes in the next two weeks.

I Miss Bruce Nussabum's Business Week's Innovation Pullout So Much That I Decided To Publish A Magazine Focus On Design And Innovation.

I was having a casual dialogue with a friend/client in London about strategy making and paradox of resources management between investing in today’s business vs. tomorrow’s business. As usual I went into explaining the 50 reasons why innovation is so hard for larger organizations (and the 50 tactics to deal with each of them). There is no simple and quick answer to that question; it is like asking how a company can become more profitable. The answer is growing your top-line and control your bottom-line. That doesn’t help. The same for innovation, the quick answer from consultants is separate the business and treat it like a new venture. Well yes and no. If only if it is that simple.

The answer lies in how strategic planning is being carried out today and company quickly ignore any of non-quantitative and non-financial data. And there are a lack of tools for them to collectively imagine the futures and sense-making of massive data in large organizational settings is another challenge. And how different organizational designs can allow the strategic agility needed to cope with external shocks. There are so many things in our current management practices that are outdated and even business schools are behind. 

My friend was complaining that he didn’t find magazines such as Harvard Business Review useful or interesting to read anymore. For me, I stopped reading that about 3-4 years ago, especially after they switched to monthly from quarterly or bi-monthly and the quality of the editorial was not as good as before. At least 90% of the content are not of interest to me anymore. Not sure if it is me or it is them. But I am sure they are doing well from an advertising revenue perspectives as well as circulation, it has gone mainstream and mass market and did a great job optimization every revenue opportunities from the content. But it is no longer a publication for senior management at least that’s not what I think. But it is a solid publishing business with a healthy bottom line.

On the other hand, MIT Sloan Management Review and California Management Review have not been able to get beyond being academic journals but produce very high quality academic content. Both are more managerially friendlier than the other 100 plus academic journals basically catered for small academic communities.

Strategy+Business is the shinning star and has remained to be extremely relevant for senior corporate managers and the editorial and layout design is far better than HBR and others. I think it is the only magazine that circulation was still growing last year.  I think they get it right. I personally like the editorial direction, design and the format. There's a very consistent senior management perspective across all issues and riogr in editorial selection. And it is not academic, very practical in everysense.

Rotman’s magazine offers a lot of fresh ideas and has the most up-to-date ideas on management, although the design is pretty bad from a readability perspective. It is just difficult for me to read. I suspect their circulation base is very small.  LBS' Business Strategy Review has gone through a completely redesign and not sure why they decided to go for a smaller size, but it has become less academic and more managerially relevant, always there is a seriousness in it the LBS style. Very global in nature and almost aims solely at the C-suite and policy makers.

And then there are Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes and Business Week.  Other than Fast Company, all are very traditional business magazines and other than Fast Company, everyone is getting a bit boring. I don’t have time to read magazines, but I always love having a copy of Fast Company lying around and occasionally pick it up and scan for 5 minutes. There are also a dozen of local magazines un the UK, Netherlands and Australia on design and innovation, but they are very local in nature.

In view of that, I decided to publish our own magazines.  Here’s what I think is needed: We need a magazine that talks about innovation including design, art and business, which have traditionally been viewed as three totally different domains. There is no innovation magazine out there, Business Week used to have an innovation section which I like so much when Bruce Nussbaum was still there. That should be the future of Business Week. They missed that opporunity big time. Unfortunately Bruce left and there was a big restructuring. So far, only Fast Company is the sole business magazine that bridges the gap between design and business.

The idea of this new magazine is bring design and business together - the d-shool meets b-school idea. I want to see a magazine that is easy to read, non-academic and professionally relevant, provides alternative concepts and ideas on design, strategy and innovation, blurs the boundaries of design and business, talks design not in technical sense or as a craft but as a way of problems solving, introduce new innovation frameworks and processes to power up strategy, illustrated by contemporary photography and delivered in a cool and edgy editorial design. Some one mentioned it will be Wallpaper plus business and innovation and minus furnitures and fashion. Interesting. I do want a nice cover that makes you want to leave it on your coffee table. That’s kind of the implicit goals and will probably take us a few issues before we get it right.

Here's a frist glimpse of the cover, the cover pic was shot in Milan and the cover model was chosen from a dozen of models to best reflect elegance. The magazine name MISC stands for Movement/Intuition/Structure/Complexity. The name just came to me one night while I was talking on a conference call with a client, but I like it. First issue in newstands late Jan/early Feb 2011 in UK, US, Canada, France, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. Here is a preview of the different cover designs. I am excited about it. And I really need to get some sleep.

 

 

 

What Blockbuster Should Be Watching Now? "Repo Man"? “Die Hard 4" ? May Be Just “A Series of Unfortunate Events”?

It is nice and sunny in SF. have 18 people to interview and 2 other business meetings. So Blockbuster is finally I have been expecting this for 6-7 years and it finally happened - Blockbuster filed for chapter 11. No surprise for many and it doesn’t take a business strategist to tell you no one is driving to a store and rent a DVD. It will cost about 20 shares of Blockbuster to rent one DVD if you do have the share certificates. If you return late you have to provide another 5 shares. May be you will never have any opportunity to return it at all, because the stores closed.

At least they tried to accelerate the death process. How?  An obsolete business model renting DVDs orchestrated an unsolicited $1 billion bid for then a near dealth computer and electronics retail chain. Blockbuster went after Richmond, Va.-based Circuit City in December 2007. There is no benefit of two dying together, other than savings on funeral cost.

How about movie downloading? Yes, they wee talking about a special movie download kiosk that can be placed in stores. But why do you have to go to a store to download? Something is very wrong here. These Blockbuster executives were not sleeping on the wheels, it was not the case that they didn’t see the threats or not acting at all, so what went wrong?

Their business model was under attack by technology innovation as well as low cost competition. $1 a DVD at Redbox or download it somewhere. Yes you can download popcorn, but you can stock a big box at home from Costco. Blockbuster did match its competitors and launched mail-order, Internet, kiosk, and cable distribution, that was a smart move but only when you have their overheads. Your competition did not have the legacies of carrying those hefty retail and operating expenses. Strategic assets suddenly became strategic liability. Cost wise, Blockbuster paid out on average 35-40%of its revenue to Hollywood and Netflix paid under 25% of revenue and Redbox paid even less 20%. How do you compete with them? That’s typical the challenge with established players.

Blockbuster acquired movie download service Movielink a while back, I am guessing it costs them south of 30 mil. Not bad since more than $100 mil was sunk into the company from some big studios building the company, so it was a bargain. Well, depends how you look at it. Movielink has a very broad library of movies, but heavily DRM’ed and the prices were not competitive.

Not only Blockbuster is underthreat, even cable and broadband companies that offer movies are not better. Consumers are all thinking and talking about cutting-the-cord with Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV are pushing forward closer.

And for many young people, their laptop is their set up box. And the iPads of the world? That $65 to $100 monthly cable bill is looking less and less attractive to many, when Netflix mails discs and streams movies all for $9 a month. Cord-cutting is real and will accelerate particular for the 20-30 year old segments.

What’s the next episode for Blockbuster? The company hopes it can re-emerge a more streamlined entity capable of competing in a digital world. I don’t think they can just copy Netflix, they have to play a “new game” and do what Netflex did to them. Amazon, Google, Apple and some start-ups are all going to offer IP TV and not questions it's going to become ubiquitous. There will be plenty of shareholder value being created and destroyed. Ready for more innovation?

Interaction Design Has An Important Role To Play In Our Future, It Has The Power To Transform Cultures.

There is two articles on IC today, one on Inc. magazine and the other in Globe and Mail. We're getting some good press coverage and we need to continue to make our story heard. In the meantime, we continue onto my journey of building global capabilities. Interaction design (IxD) will be a core focus, and I don't mean just web or mobile interactions. IxD will be one of the most important strategic capability for companies to build meaningful engagement and sustainable differentiation as part of their enterprise level experience strategy.

How would interaction design change in the next 10 years? It is a relatively new area of practice, beyond traditional GUI design or web interface design. Interaction design go beyond just the clicks and links and is becoming an indispensable aspect business design, product design and service design. Interaction design is traditionally define as the study of devices with which a user can interact, in particular computer users or screen related. The practice typically centers on "embedding information technology into the ambient social complexities of the physical world. I think the word 'device' will eventually become irrelevant. I think IxD is about to take on a larger mission -- empowering communities and transforming cultures.

Here's my point of view, traditional industrial design focuses on a product’s form and function, but interaction design requires very different perspectives and approaches for increasingly complex business and design problems. Think media industry, it is transforming itself from a traditional broadcast medium to an interactive one and this change will accelerate faster and faster extending their ubiquity and interactivity to devices, objects and spaces. Rapid technological development is introducing new types of functionality, for example to sense, feel, control, monitor, connect, search, respond and transact for different types of applications.

I am talking about the circle of influence with interaction design. How does interaction design transforms culture; it begins when a small networks of people simply start sharing ideas, feelings, hopes and frustrations etc. and that is when culture emerges. Their behavioral patterns, mindsets, emotional responses as well as aesthetics, rules, norms, and values that are being shared influence culture and as a result produce certain artifacts.

These 'virtual artifacts', through people’s interacting with them, influence cultures and facilitate emergence of new culture. Interactions then become transformative social mechanisms whereby these ‘virtual artifacts’ are made accessible or shareable through networks of communities further facilitating more connecting and sensing, their creations are further linked to specific interactional, locational, cultural and economic context.

The ‘virtuality of our everyday life’ as a result of the interactions powers up new creation and distribution of culture never before in the modern history of mankind. This is where the real disruption is for marketers and media producers. It is hard to distinguish one’s role at the complex juncture of creation/production and consumption in our everyday activities. Interactions of our everyday life take on new meanings. Interaction designer have bigger jobs to do.

My favorite French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) gave us the tools to understand the media society and counteract the total assimilation into capitalist overproduction. Truls Lie finds a previously unpublished interview he made when Baudrillard visited Oslo in 2000. "Disappearing", says Baudrillard, "should be an art form, a seductive way of leaving the world. I believe that part of disappearing is to disappear before you run dry...." An idea for all interaction designers, make sure you include a 'disappear' function in all your designs.

What Do You Know About The New 3G? Girls, Gaming and Gender. Look Out For The Sony PSG (Playstation For Girls)

Gaming is mainstreaming these days with average gamers over the age of 34 years old that has been playing games for 12 years. The average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 40 years old. Surprised? And many are women.

Social gaming is become a global phenomenon, last year was a breakout year for virtual goods in the US which had been only an Asian thing. The virtual goods industry in Asia generates about $7B a year in revenue, seven times the US, this means major valuation differences between Asia and US with China's nine largest public online game companies valued in the $50B range compared to the top four US companies that are valued in the $22B range. Expect to see continuous growth and new competitors, Apple will eventually join the party, may be 2013.

Many still think gaming is a boy’s things and I think this is worth challenging. Historically speaking, probably yes. Women and video gaming doesn't sound like a fit. In Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering work (1949) on women, The Second Sex, created impressions of girls at play with their dolls. After the French Revolution then came the eloquent denunciation of housework. Then in the 60s, women in the US pushed liberal feminism that the pre-1914 period never done before. If you looked at the advertising between 1950s and 11960s you will know what I mean. Femininity has come a long way.

There are still a lot of mystique on femininity, these mystique transformed doing housework, bearing children and shopping into almost a religion, a lifestyle many women accept or reject. Consumer ideology continued to reinforce this mystique. Do women like this whole package or it is the ideal lifestyle projected onto them by advertisers and marketers? Did marketers and male media executive try too hard to fool women into paying for a femininity they did not need at all. Or was it a good thing after all? I don't want to get into this debate. But I do have a POV.

No question men like video games. Or there are simply not enough titles that are designed for women? I think women equally like video games. Columbia College Chicago hosted high school girls in a summit focused on gaming and gender equity. What they did was bringing together female game designers and academics to look at the female voice in the digital gaming industry. It is called the 3G Summit, like the name? The Future of Girls, Gaming, and Gender.

It was a four-day event that engaged young women from Chicago-area high schools in a series of discussions about young women’s place in the gaming culture. Video game is rapidly evolving and now delivered over smart phones, iPad and social network sites as part of social connectivity, consumer engagement, and cultural expression.

I think the women’s gaming market is largely untapped. Many games are beginning to look like interactive movies. Where is the equivalent of “Titanic” for video games? I can’t think of any video games that are built around romance. May be the 2008's Prince of Persia, but there's no player involvement, you simply follow the story along and the attempt at non-linearity makes the development of the relationship muddled and mostly nonexistent. I can’t think of a RFG that has a strong romance and sex theme. Here is a screenshot from a sex scene in the God of War.

Sex (not romance) is now part of many popular games, gone are the days when Mario and Luigi were jumping around looking for magic mushrooms. Some video games allow the player character to have sex or romantic relationships with NPCs, wonder how the logics were built behind those romantic relationships. I guess it comes down to enough talking and pick up some good weapons; they will start to like you. I am looking forward to see the first person romantic video game designed by women for women… the PS3 free online feature will proof to be very useful, the age of video gaming romance is here.

It Is Time That Google Needs A Reset. Now Facebook Places. Next Facebook Faces. Then Facebook Realtime Mobile Directory?

Here's Simon and Ashley as part of a team working on a social strategy for a very cool company. Part of the mission is to look at their competition and coopetition. In the world of business strategy and competition, friends can become enemies overnight. Google is definitely not happy with the idea that Facebook is sitting with 500 million users with 50% very active. What can they do?

Back in 2002, Google was competing with Overture and other search engine for shares. Overture was the search leader and was mining 3.2 billion pages, roughly 70 mm more pages than Google. Shortly Google climbed to 3.3 billion pages and continued to extend the gap. Soon after Overture bought the Web search assets of AltaVista and Fast Search and Transfer (including AlltheWeb), to compete with Google head on.. and the battle began...

Google won AOL business away from Overture; and Overture won Freeserve away from Google. We will be seeing the same battle all over again when this time Facebook is the rivalry? Google is the place to find anything and that is extending to places with Google Map and Street Views. “Local” is still hole in the Google world. Facebook Places is an innovation to fill that hole with a social-media twist. Facebook users can now "check in" to an existing list of nearby locations from their mobile phones or add new listings themselves, sharing that activity with their friends.

Facebook will potential become a platform for local business search listings, the same strategy that Google, Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, and a few others that are fighting to get local advertising dollars. Facebook Places is the latest example of how information access is empowering new behavior.

We don’t know if these behavior will become mainstream. It is not difficult to imagine that I will be able to use my Facebook app on my mobile device to find local business. I won’t have to open my laptop and Google a restaurant if I can just use my mobile device, with added comments and suggestions from my social networks. Facebook's decision to add location data to its product instanly creates a Google-scale competitor overnight. With so many businesses already have Facebook pages, it is easy to pay and extend that into Facebook local search. So pages + places = Yellow Pages + instance update on products + prices right in your pocket.

Today, 100 million people a month are using Google's Maps for Mobile product but it doesn’t mean much in terms of barriers for entry, at least not for Facebook. Google knows very little about me other than what I search but Facebook knows my friends, communities and what I am passionate about. Google needs a reset. Buy FB stock if it goes IPO.

Is The iPad An Evolutinary Product Or A Revolutionary Product? Will It Revive The Print Publishing Industry Or Turn Them Into Zombie Business?

The iPad is cool, almost as cool as the ACE Hotel. I really like this place and it is becoming the place to stay for me in NYC. Forget the W, it is so boring. They were running out of room on my last day of stay so they switched me to this special room with bunk bed. Very cool.

The question is whether the iPad is an evolutionary (jumbo iTouch or iPhone) or a truly revolutionary innovation that can transform industry? Compare to other eReaders, the iPad experience is many times better, not to mention it is an Apple product. Apple is not slowing down anytime. I think Apple will design a smaller iPad, or iPad junior with a 5 inch screen, may be this Christmas or early mid Feb, it will be priced under $400 targeted for those who use it as ebook reader and iTunes movie player. I think there is 80% chance this will happen. And then next summer iPad will get an upgrade. I will write about what it could be next week.

Can the iPad save the print publishing industry and in the process creating a value migration and pushing content to the bottom of the value chain? Can the iPad perform CPR for magazines or simply turning them into zombies (the living dead)?  A side story. Even Steve Woznisk (Apple’s co-founder) had to wait in line for the iPad. An Apple engineer showed his iPad to Wozniak for 2 minutes just hours before the device went on sale on April 3. The engineer was later fired. Bazaar.

The iPad is both an evolutionary and revolutionary innovation, depending how you look at it. The user behavior is still emerging and I don’t think we truly understand where it is going. Apple has sold one million iPad in 28 days, comparing this with the 74 days that it took to sell a million iPhones. The naysayers are buying too. The iPad also violates many marketing and design rules. It does not have a targeted segment; people from all walks of life are buying and using them. It is also not design to do one thing really well, you can argue it is a media device, but in fact it has the potential to do a lot more. I think we should not narrowly see this as a media device. It is not a phone and do a lot more than what a phone can do due to its size and lack of permanence. We switch phones too often.

The print publishing industry has no clue of what to do. They are embracing the digital form as the inevitable future, but struggle to find a strong customer value proposition for their content beyond just being content, and fail to redefine what’s ‘value’ means to the digital readers. These are not your typical magazines subscribers who receive your magazine one or twice a month and read them.

A rethink is needed to look at the roles of physical magazines, digital magazines and service design. For me, I am buying way less books and magazines. 5 years ago, I subscribed to roughly 50 magazines and purchased 8-10 books a month. Yesterday, I’ve spent an hour at Barnes and Noble and realized there are so many garbage books out there that are not worth the trees killed and paper they are printed on. The problem is with the publishers. I have not seen many decent newly published book for a long time.

For all other ebook readers, with the exception of Amazon Kindle may be, no one can survive. They will all surely die. But there are no shortages of brave companies who want to take a shot at it. We all agree that we shouldn’t kill any more trees and the whole idea of carrying many books in a device is a great idea. Not to mention all my photos and music. For the music, it is a little funny when I used it on a plane just listening to music, and Nora Jones’ photo appeared on the screen like a digital photo frame. It feels like an overkill and I switched back to my little iTouch.

I think the book industry will be in big trouble soon. I don’t see any reason why I should continue to buy books, that is if I find a good one which is a bigger problem in the first place. The economics of book production doesn't make sense today.

It is interesting to see how things play out as publishes and device/distribution negotiate their share of profits. In the book industry, there was a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business. That's funny. No matter where consumers buy their books, they expect digital media should cost less. And they should and will. Can publisher and writers still make money? Authors don’t make much these days and don’t have much to give up.

Have a great weekend.

CRM Is Just A Fancy Name For Customer Data Management System. CRM Don't Do Anything For Most People As A Customer. Now CRM Needs To Get Social.

Remember 8 years ago every VCs were pouring money into CRM (Customer Relationship Management), I never liked that word. It is a fancy name for some overbuilt customer data management system. What does it do for me as a customer? Nothing. Amex is worst, when you talk to them on a call center, I can predict what they are about to say. I might as well do a chat online. But what do I care?  Siebel built a $5 billion company (and making a few people rich along the way), its market share peaked around 45% in 02. And in 05, it was sold to Oracle for $5.8 billion. Siebel is now a brand name owned by Oracle Corporation.

Then came Salesforce.com, an on-demand CRM Company that came as a disruption for all CRM players. A very smart company whose value proposition is you don't need big software, just pay a few hundred dollars a month. They killed all the mid-market players which shouldn't be funded in the first place. Salesforce.com is the first SaaS provider to hit $1 billion in annual revenues. They didn’t stop there, this month they rolled out private beta of Chatter, which is basically “Facebook for the Enterprise” or whatever it means. I think this is a big winner.

Chatter has integrated a lot of Facebook’s elements into its layout and configuration so FB users will find it very familiar. There are user profiles, status messages (where you can leave your status on a current project or make a request for information), groups and individualized streams that you can customize to feed information. But is is not a social network, probably fair to call you an enterprise knowledge collaboration tool. It is Lotus Notes all over again?

What about CRM for social networks? One start-up got it right. What this 4-year-old FanBridge does is pretty simple: help musical connect with their fans. It connects tens of thousands of artists with more than 50 million registered fans, sending out close to a million emails per day (and adding nearly a million fans per week). You can collect mobile info from fans and send last-minute show reminders or live updates from backstage with our mobile text messaging platform. You can even schedule text messages to automatically send in the future, so you can always stay connected with fans.

They serve 200 fans garage band or  2 million fans up-and-coming rock band. This is a very smart idea when my friend mentioned this to me over dinner in NYC a few weeks ago. His son Spencer Richardson started this company 4 years ago and it is flourishing. And there is a reason.

The second smart thing is in order to compete big guys such as ReverbNation, FanBridge borrowed a page from Nordstrom and Zappos, service is the key competitive advantage. Typically an artist will convert after four months, to plans that start at $7/month and run all the way up to $250. Very stable revenue model and they are getting angel funding in March from Dave McClure at the Founders Fund, Jeff Clavier and Chris Sacca.

I think this idea has legs, imagine going beyond musicians to include motivational speakers, cosmetic surgeons, celebrity chefs, social enterprises, fashion designers, interior designers, architects, published authors? The value proposition is strong and clear, technology is generally pretty easy to implement and pricing structure is very friendly. The latest feature that they launched SocialStats, a new feature that will allow you to easily monitor your key social network statistics. With Social Stats, you will get a clean dashboard of the total number and weekly change of your fans, friends, followers, plays and pageviews on the most popular social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Last.fm, PureVolume, iLike). Watch this one.

By The Standard Of The Late Leo Burnett, Many Of Today's Big Agencies Should Have Taken Their Founders' Name Off The Door. Here's A Tribute To The Loney Man Who Spent A Lifetime Behind His Typewriter To Come With The Big Ideas.

This week I was invited to speak on branding and marketing to group graduate students who are studying towards a master degree in branding. I shared part of my Advanced Branding Masterclass material, which covers the future of branding in the world of social technologies and connectivity. Their instructor (an advertising veteran who had a long agency career including Leo Burnett) raised a very interesting point, 20 or 30 years ago advertising agencies were in the business of selling “ideas”, today many are becoming audio and video factories. And he realized that our success is all about ideas. That is very true, who are the creators of “ideas” these days? Idea Couture is exactly about ideas, not only communications but strategic ideas…. be it brand, product, service, interface, interactive, and retail experience.

We have a good chat about the agency scenes in the 80s. I always remember the self-advertising of Leo Burnett in those days. I still keep copies of them including the one I scanned and posted here.  This is one that I really like is “When to take my name off the door” – Leo Burnett 1967. It was elegantly written. He was not only a great craftsman, but understand how to create a strong organization culture. “Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun. Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean there cannot be fun in business.”A lesson I learned from him it is always important not to take the fun away from work.

A while back I was invited to a private event involving top 30 global executives of an agency group. There were so much fear and unknown among them about the future of their business or industry. They struggle with the legacies that they carry but at the same time they know they are too big to adapt flexibly to the fast changing media scene. Media is being redefined on a daily basis and brands no longer have passive, anonymous audience whose behaviors are predictable.

We are moving to "cocoon of rich media experiences that follow us from one place to another and from morning till night. The penetration of iPad will be accelerating the “cocooning” and the open up creative possibilities of building longer pauses into our entertainment mix to allow for double screening or triple-screening. Imagine if future TV production adjusted to the reality of multitasking during long boring bits. This is exciting for many.

Agencies need to throw away these out-dated paradigms of CRM, direct marketing or public relations etc. And forget about integrated campaign and start from a clean sheet of paper. Advertisers were getting MTV lazy for a long period of time as they relied on sexy bodies, sound bites and spectacular effects and forgot about the big idea. Not that those 20 secs sight and sound are not entertaining, but we need more.

Tools change, technologies advance, new behavior emerges, media outlets proliferate but objectives don’t’. We need to engage, intrigue, connect, persuade, amuse, empower and entertain. Advertising agencies need to partake in extensive therapies to cure their MTV laziness and deflate their egos. This problem is systemic.

Agencies don’t understand strategy. They keep hide behind “brand building” and fail to understand the economics of customers and marketing. They overcharge for the execution and incapable of giving clients real strategies to engage customers and create customer value, both tangible customer value and conversational value.

Almost all big agencies only pay lip service to digital and don’t understand social media beyond throwing buzz words around. For them, they are just another way to broadcast their messages. They hire and a few digital thinkers who have no real authority, no resources, no real work, and use them as PR figure in front of clients. They farm out the work to little mom and pop development shops that undervalue themselves and lose credit for the work.

Agencies need to put communications aside for a second and start opening up their minds on new creative ways to build long-lasting human connections, between brands and individuals and among individuals. Everything that matters in the future of advertising begins and ends with three things: people and their communities and purpose. Go to slideshare to see some of my slides presentation on this topic. Big agencies need help.

Who's Twittering You? The Big Ben, Great Wall Of China Or The Pyramids Of Egypt?

I read somewhere that Big Ben can now twitter you for the time and guess how many people signed up? Over 50,000 and I guess there are lot of people don’t trust their watches. The Great Wall of China will soon be sending you messages saying how many people were up there in any given day or the US federal government sending you at a given time how big the deficit is and how much it is costing you as a tax payer or how much debt every new born baby has. Or North Korean government to use Twitter to announce how many soldiers or missiles they have at one given time.

White House was using Twitter to keep the momentum going and keeping track of which Democratic lawmakers had changed their minds and decided to vote in favor of the bill. That’s a creative use. Politicians fully understand the power of Twitter's ability mobilize grassroots support for their legislative agendas.

With the advances in a host of technologies like RFID and NFC, a lot of smart interactions and data can now be transmitted anywhere with minimal integration. There are some interesting experiments like BakerTweet, a system made by UK. agency Poke that allows bakers to dynamically send out tweets to customers alerting them when a fresh batch of buns coming out from the oven. Not sure how valuable this is.

We can expect to see many interesting use in the next 12 months. Any physical objects could become a real-time visualization tool for anything.   A company called Violet, which makes Mirror, an RFID reader USB-attached mirror that enables any computer to react to the presence of an object. he Mirror’ is one of the coolest gadgets I’ve seen in a long time. Hook the $60 plate up to your Mac and get ready to read some RFID tags. The set includes Ztamps (basically RFID tags) that you can stick on objects and assign actions.

For instance, say you attach one to a toy car. When you put the toy car on top of the The Mirror by Violet, it could open up your browser for you to read your favorite car blogs. There can be so many creative applications, there are the three that I can think of such as tagging of your computer’s mouse so when it is placed on certain spot on your desk it will trigger an application, like playing Monopoly.  an example would be placing the mouse on a particular spot will inform your company to activate your Skype to talk to you buddy. Or tagging your car keys can trigger your G-mail account. Tagging your afternoon tea cup will activate your PC to launch a browser with your favorite Power Point deck. Can you think of more?

Social Media Is Very Complex And Social Relationships Online Are Messy And Erratic. But It Works When You Know How To Use It.

Remember the saying about advertising that “I know half of our advertising spend is wasted, I just don’t know which half……” I first hard about this quote 20 years ago and I think it is from 19th Century merchant John Wanamaker. I think I can comfortably say “I know 80% of my advertising spend is wasted, I just don’t know the alternative….” The problem with TV and print advertising today is that it informs rather than sells, it rarely engages with consumers at all. Online ads are worse and currently lacking in brand advertiser value and the creative formats are outdated and ineffective.

What about social media? Consumer perceptions, social relationships and human behavior are messy, erratic, and maddeningly unpredictable. The debate on the effectiveness of social media to build brand and provide effective reach is ongoing. When marketers want to reach and engage audiences of social networks such as Facebook, they have two choices: buy advertising or start a social media viral campaign. Advertising on FB is of limited use we all know it. How often you read or click on any ads on Facebook. But we read the wall, we click in the links published by friends and go to Cafeworld to pick up gifts. These connected worlds are like new found oil hotspots. It is not only important to understand who influences purchase decisions in online communities but also the degree of impact. I don’t think we can use a broadcast paradigm if we really want to understand what is means.

Idea Couture’s senior interactive designer Jackie Siddall was featured in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. A WSJ writer discovered her story in our Noodleplay site and decided to publish her story. It is an very interesting one. It is about how Jackie was prompted by a Twitter post by the retailer that led to her purchase of a folding kayak for $1,900. She doesn't use that go to work, she rides a bike...summer, winter or fall.

The vessel was one of about just 600 sold in 2009 by Folbot Inc., a small retailer in Charleston, S.C. "You can't buy that exposure," says the firm's co-owner, David AvRutick, who claims the incident speaks to the value of using social media for marketing when he was interviewed by WSJ. Mr. AvRutick says he dedicates about an hour a day—could also go to waste.

Mr. AvRutick says he regularly searches Twitter for tweets that mention kayaking and then sends messages to the people who wrote them. He connected with Jackie, the blogger who credited Twitter for exposing her to Folbot, after she posted a tweet that mentioned she wanted a kayak.   Jackie later asked Mr. AvRutick via Twitter if he would send her some photos of her folding kayak being made, and he provided about 20. After it arrived, she says she decided to write a blog post about the whole experience.

Let me see if this works for me. I am looking for a Leica M8 so I will be posting that and see of anyone would contact me through Twitter or Facebook. Many brands are embracing social media. One success story is Starbucks. Starbucks Official full time Tweeter is Brad Nelson and Starbucks isn’t just any brand on Twitter, with Brad at the helm, they’re doing many things right. A former barista, Brad is now manning the Twitter ship and he’s responding to questions or mentions of Starbucks, trying to help customers find resolutions to their problems, and putting out fires left and right. Twitter will soon be part of a company's call center,,scary.

How To Use Your IPad As A Flirting Device And Make The First Move. I Am Releasing The Instruction Ahead Of Apple's Launch In Three Weeks.

Here's how to turn your IPad as a flirtation device and find the dream nerd that you've always wanted. It works particular well with nerds but can also work with other segments I think. Flirting and dating with nerds is a challenge unless you also work in one of those environments you simply don't understand them. Being nerdy can be cool. Although they have a particular style of dressing and you have to like it. If you see a nerd that you like and want to make a first move the first thing is you need tools. In a few weeks, you can get the iPad, a perfect tool to get a conversation started with a nerd. I am providing with the detail instructions, all for free.

For those girls that don’t like making the first move (I don’t know why), here’s some advice of how to make a nerd to make a move on you. They probably started the conversation with some small talks; you need to treat that carefully. Don’t show any signs of showing “oh you’re such a nerd”. Respond with a smile and you don’t even need to answer that question. Ignore the question and move to step two. Stay calm and ask him a question of how to use a certain feature on your iPad. He can definitely help and make sure you have a book opened there, preferably a novel. Like a suggestive skirt or small-T, a suggestive novel can be powerful. You definitely should not be reading Wall Street Journal or New York Times. While he is fiddling with your IPad, ask him what does he do and talk about the novel. This is a proven flirtation technique and they will talk non-stop about their work, most likely a software engineer or interface designer.

What’s the best novel for this? I suggest to you Gloria Vanderbilt’s (the 85 year old mother of CNN Anderson Cooper) new novel, “Obsession: An Erotic Tale.” Joyce Carol Oates, who calls it, “a remarkable tapestry of human passion — an interior world of highly charged erotic mysteries that teasingly suggest, but ever elude, decoding.” It is the story about Priscilla Bingham, the widow an architect who, after his death, discovers a cache of letters, wrapped in magenta grosgrain ribbon, revealing in considerable detail his secret, kinky sex life.

Nerds are a lot more selective than the average dude. They have specific requirements on what they like and all the time care a lot about the look and feel but in a non-mainstream way. Being choosy is a core characteristic of nerds. They don’t like Barbie Dolls or princess type. They like cool people. . Don’t try to end his obsession with, say, robotics, Remember you have to love a nerd for who he is. 

 After 15 or 20 minutes into the conversation, please don’t talk about fashion or hairstyles, you should now pull up your Facebook page and then ask him to type his name on it. Click add friends.

IPad will soon have an app for this, a short-range radio system to flirt with other in a coffee shop. The idea is to use frequency hopping, meaning they hop to a new frequency after transmitting or receiving a packet of information. They can communicate with others within certain distance what you are reading or music you are listening to. That way, it is one step simpler to apply my strategy.