Solar tie – mobile phone charger (you can’t make this stuff up)

22 09 2008

A colleague sent me this while I was on holiday in August and I have been meaning to blog it ever since but the catch up from holiday is only just reaching a conclusion. You really can’t make this stuff up and I simply love the photo that goes with the story.

Image of solar powered tie mobile battery charger

Image of solar powered tie mobile battery charger

Basically a bunch of engineers have designed a tie that contains a solar panel that charges your mobile phone. As you can see from the photo this is a very stylish piece of clothing that would not look good on anyone.

The link I was sent that covered the story was www.engadget.com. What I like most is that if you didn’t know the url and just read the story you would know that this is a gadget website, written by IT guys. The first time you are alerted to this possibility is when you read that researchers have made wearable technology “slightly more discreet”. I am not sure Armani would agree but lets go with it. However, if you are still willing to believe this is a possible fashion item then the researchers solution to the problem of tieing the knot caused by the solar stitching process will finally convince you of the target audience for this particular garment. Apparently “a clip on tie would solve the problem”.

Finally they conclude that combining the clip on tie with “a special pouch for carrying your cellphone, and you’ve got a combo that can’t be beat”. I suspect it will be.


Comments : 1 Comment »

Categories : Customer Experience, General Comments, Mobile, Usability

Mini Laptops will change the world

31 08 2008

Last week I had the opportunity of getting up close and personal with four of the new mini-laptops that have recently been launched. I won’t go in to the brands as they are not relevant to the point of this post suffice to say all are well known and all use open source or non-Microsoft software. And it is this that captured my interest.

I have hankered after one of these devices for some time but being a fan of Dell I am waiting to see what they come up with before jumping in. What I have seen so far makes me believe that they will be worth the wait. For blogging, watching movies and keeping in touch while mobile I expect to get plenty of use out of it and avoid damage to both my back and  my eyes!

What I hadn’t realised was that these devices are going to change the world. I realise this is a big claim but until you get close to one their potential is not immediately obvious. It is not the hardware size that is going to be the game changing aspect of these devices either; it is the software.

Mini laptop

Mini laptops, or compact laptops as they are also referred to, are going to change the world in two ways. Firstly they will facilitate the growth of the open software movement within a consumer base and secondly they will allow laptop manufacturers to differentiate their product by competing with Microsoft in the software the devices use. The driver for both these changes is the cost of production which is necessarily being driven down. When prices for laptops get to just a few hundred dollars the main barrier for further cost reduction is the operating system (OS) and the desktop applications.

All the products I looked at used open office for the desktop applications. Most users, particularly home based consumers, would not consider open source (OS) open office and would instead select to have Microsoft products preloaded. However the target market for mini-laptops is consumers looking for a second, more mobile laptop computer or the education market. In both cases they are either spending their own hard earned cash or budget in short supply and may well choose the lower cost, Linus/Open Office models. By gaining familiarity with these free software products they are pretty quickly going to start wondering why they are paying so much for Microsoft products in other areas. Once this happens they will start influencing the companies/organisations they work for and the snow ball will start to gather momentum.

With the edcation market the influence is even greater, albeit over a longer time period. Students will get used to OS software and in doing so will not select to buy Microsoft as they get older and they will be happy with OS products when they start work. As adoption rises Microsoft will be forced to reduce the price of its products and specialise in more niche desktop software, or get into hardware. And this is not the only threat Microsoft will face.

As manufacturers develop their own applications, as they are already doing, they will slowly begin to mirror and compete with Apple and achieve the greater margins associated with the delivery of a product which they are almost 100% responsible for putting together. As mini laptop margins outstrip their bigger siblings, and consumer pressure for Microsoft products diminishes, we will see OS software and manufacturer software become more prevalent.

So there you have it. The world is about to change enormously and the good news is that the consumer is going to benefit at every step. I look forward to writing future posts on my new device and will comment on the usability when I can.


Comments : 3 Comments »

Categories : Customer Experience, Economy, General Comments, Multi channel, Usability

Will online sales benefit from high oil prices?

14 07 2008

The Economist this week (The Economist July 12th 2008 ) reported that driving behaviour had changed as a result of higher fuel prices. Garages report that there has been a 5-10% drop in in fuel sales and this is as a result of fuel prices rising at their highest rate ever in June. The Economist also reports on data from Footfall, a research firm that tracks customer numbers, that indicates visits to out of town shops have fallen and at a higher rate than the drop in visits to town centres.The suggestion is that consumer behaviour is altering as a result of fuel price inflation.

At the same time Internet Retailing, an online retail website, reported increased sales to online grocery websites. Value retailers have experienced growth of between 30 to 40% in the four weeks to June 7th and visitor numbers for both Morrisons and Asda were up by more than 48% for the 3 months March to May 2008.

Meanwhile on June 30th 2008, ASOS, the UK’s largest online retail store attracting over 1 million visitors per week, were reported by Retail Exec, an online publication aimed at Retail Executives, to have achieved a 90% increase in revenues to £81 million and post pre-tax profits of £7.3 million up £3.4 million on last year.

I was asked to contribute to a book recently called “winners and losers in a troubled economy” and to offer my views on whether ‘online’ would be effected by an economic downturn. The answer to me is clear: Not if executives take on board the data available to them about changing consumer behaviour and the benefits the online channel offers. Having done so, they need to determine to make their online property best of breed.

Not everyone will do this of course and it is easy to predict that in 18 months time when the down turn is becoming a recovery there will be a number of high profile casualties that did not make the right investment decisions and were not able to maximise the opportunity that a down turn presented to their business.

We have all learned over the past decade or so, sometimes painfully, that the Internet is not the answer to all of our problems. However, where the case is dropping high street sales due to altering consumer behaviour as a direct result of high fuel prices there does seem to be a strong positive correlation and maybe this time, it is.


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , ,
Categories : Customer Experience, Economy, General Comments, Multi channel

Don’t mix friends, family, and business contacts.

3 07 2008

The Daily Telegraph (a UK broad sheet newspaper) recorded a story on 16th June 2008 about a High Court ruling that requires an ex-employee of Hays to hand over his business contacts built up on the social networking website LinkedIn. The story has been picked up in various places including Brand Republic and Computer Weekly but none raise the obvious more expansive question of what does this mean to the rest of us? Computer Weekly does make reference to a legal specialist that advises employers to add clauses to employment contracts and to ask employees to set up business only networks but I think this misses the point.

Social networks are just that – social. The dictionary definition of ‘social’ is “living or preferring to live in a community rather than alone.” The networks don’t have boundaries and certainly don’t separate colleagues from friends. In many ways, if they did it would defeat the object. But for many, the level of transparency is unnerving.

I had lunch with a customer recently who talked about her younger sister connecting with her on Facebook. I have a similar scenario where I am connected to my niece and nephew. They have very different interests and circles of friends to me being as they are about 25 years younger but what is my alternative – deny their existence or compartmentalise them?

Only five days earlier (11th June) the Times Online ran a feature that advised people to keep their social and business networks separate. This is an interesting idea and there were various suggestions made by different people – all in recruitment (or Talent Management if there is a difference). One suggested he uses a nickname on Facebook that only his friends know, and uses LinkedIn for business contacts only. I don’t see how this can work. There has to be crossovers and what happens when a family member or close friend is also in business or vice versa? The article finally ends up with a suggestion that soon software will simply track you down by making connections between you, friends and colleagues and bingo – your profiles are connected for all to see.

What this really means is we have to get ready for a time when virtually everything we put up online will be attributable to us. Potential employers will be able to see our connections with dodgy friends and family members and start judging us across a wider set of values. Is this good or bad? I am certain, their will be losers as there always are but I think this is akin to businesses getting used to corporate blogs – which many have yet to do.

There are countless examples of businesses gaining stronger brands as a result of honest information about them going up on blogs. They are measured by how they respond to negative comments about poor performance and people realise that no business is perfect and actually, if you can see them warts and all you tend to trust them more. The same will surely happen to individuals and I think it will be refreshing.

I predict that the transition will be ugly, but when we get there we may see a levelling of the playing field on a scale never seen before.


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags:
Categories : Brands, General Comments, Social Networking, Web

The Future (of digital, of media, it’s been one of those weeks!)

20 06 2008

One week and two conferences on the future of stuff. The first on Wednesday run by eConsultancy and opened with the normally upbeat and insightful Ashley Friedlein with words along the lines of “when I thought about the future of digital and this years conference I realised there wasn’t much to talk about, we haven’t moved on that much and this year is more about execution”. Clearly by this point the audience was beside themselves with excitement and thankful that we had paid the full fee to be there. But as it happened, unusually Ashley was wrong. There was lots going on and whilst an awful lot was about execution the main thrust was about organisations doing things others had not already done.

Thomas Cook in particular, whose presenter Russell Gould delivered his presentation by video due to the imminent birth of his second child, demonstrated just what was possible if you have big ideas and in particular a big budget. Travel of the future is truly a multi-channel world with interactive store fronts, video catalogues and, thank the lord, no more welcome meetings – well video welcome meetings but presumably they come with a fast forward facility.

The panel that followed however seemed to miss the point entirely about the competitive threat the Web2.0 future presents. Prior to this session on travel we had heard, at length (the panel barely had time to go up on stage) about the pressures on the increasingly commoditised insurance business. The pressure is coming from aggregators who add value by offering the consumer choice. The products which are ultimately commodities are price differentiated and it is only the total confusion that consumers have that keeps them loyal. (That isn’t true I just made it up). It may as well be though with the amount of inventive thought flying around the room.

We were told that insurance policies are priced for a 3 to 4 year lifetime value and at the same time that consumers are bored with organising insurance and treat it as an annual chore which they detest. This makes it open season for aggregators as they can at least price check. It surely won’t be long before we sign up with an aggregator for 5 years and they simply provide an annual report of their market sweep and tell us which provider we will be insured with next year? This must be an opportunity for insurance providers also if they can convince their underwriters.

Surely the travel industry is going to suffer from the same problem, as technological differentiation dissapears faster than our holiday money on fuel supplements? All the travel companies tried to make out they differentiate because they sell “an experience”. What they sell is convenience – from a consumer perspective they simply will not care if an aggregator provides that convenience rather than the agent. The game was somewhat given away when one travel agent admitted they sell anothers product because “they can make money out of it”.

As Seth Godin reminds us in his blog this week “there is no such thing as price pressure”. The price you charge is based on the value you offer – as perceived by the user/customer.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Customer Experience, Economy, General Comments, Multi channel

EDM2008 Monday 9th June

11 06 2008

I attended EDM08 on Monday which was coincidentally the 8th year the conference had run. It is a fairly small affair with perhaps 100 people (max) but they travelled far and wide to be there and on my table were people from the US, Nordic area and mainland Europe.

EDM stands for European Directories Marketplace and the event is run by Whitaker Associates. It is fair to say I had no idea about how the connection with directories worked before attending but it is of course to do with the delivery of information services and hence this years theme: mobile.

The keynote was delivered by Dr Mike Short Director of R&D at O2 and a man’s whose credentials in mobile are extensive. He is Chairman of the mobile data association (the mda) amongst other things but has spent 20 years in the mobile/telecoms industry. He shared plenty of stats and insight to research that O2 will publish in July both of which I have summarised here in a few bullet points:

  • there were 2.95bn mobile subscribers at June07
  • 3.3bn are forecast by end 2008 (source: The mobile world)
  • There is 115% mobile penetration in the UK which equates to 69 million handsets
  • There were 57 billion sms sent in the UK in 2007
  • 449m picture messages were sent in the UK in 2007
  • 17m accessed the mobile internet in 2007

From O2′s research:

  • Most people would rather leave home without their wallet than their mobile
  • Research that trialled combining mobile with Oyster and Credit card (separately and together) using near field communication technology (NFC) resulted in a greater degree of success when sim and oyster were combined than sim and credit card. It will be interesting to see what conclusions O2 draws from this as it seems to me that it is a moot point. Ultimately won’t they all be combined anyway?

Finally Mike described the phases of mobile, starting at phase one with voice and text, up to present day phase six which is the ‘Content’ phase. Mike believes that phase 7 is the ‘application’ phase.

Following the keynote there were a range of presentations and discussions and I am not going to blog them all. There were some really interesting debates and opinions that I would like to record.

There was some debate around the importance of mobile compared to pc and James Levey of Amdocs suggested that click through rates online were currently at about 2% on average but that he predicts mobile will achieve 4% click through rates in the near future. In terms of search, mobile search currently represents 2-4% of desktop search globally, where China is an exception with mobile search representing 25%. Google predict that the cross over point where mobile search overtakes desktop will be within 4 years and that not long after mobile search will double desktop search.

To put some more context on this it is worth mentioning stats presented by Russell Buckley of Admob. Admob started business in 2006 and are already the worlds largest mobile ad marketplace. Russell talked briefly about global page views on mobile and which countries had the largest global share. Currently he estimates that there are 3bn page views per month on mobile [correction: which Admob see on their network and on which they serve ads on today]. The largest contributors to that number are:

  • US = 50%
  • India and UK = 10% each (total 20%)
  • South Africa = 5%
  • Indonesia = 5%

Interestingly all the above are in English language!

Other presentations delivered nuggets such as ‘in 10 years you will be able to access the knowledge of humankind from a mobile’ and the fastest growing age of penetration of mobile phones in the UK is 7 to 8 year old’s. All exciting stuff. But then I was blown away by Simon Grice of www.Ideas.org.

Simon rattled off more concepts and ideas in 10 minutes than I have in a decade. The few I caught hold of were “Information is the new pollution”. IN a conference focussing on information services and directories he argued that in the future this will be too much and humans won’t be able to deal with the flow of info. Search will become useless because the range of results will be too difficult to filter. Simon suggests that when people get bogged down with information they ask people they know for advice and in this way sites like Twitter and facebook become the information services networks of the future.

Simon also talked about discovery as opposed to search. Search is fine if you know what you are looking for but what if you don’t? For example your local pub is holding an Italian night. If you don’t search for that you may not find out so you need to be told or have a way to discover it that is not necessarily advertising. Location based services have a role to play but it is not clear what role at this stage.

These ideas are worth exploring further, which is what I intend to do.


Comments : 1 Comment »

Categories : Economy, General Comments, Mobile, Multi channel

NMA 01.05.08: Letter to editor

5 05 2008

This weeks NMA included an editorial by Justin Pearse about how UK Digital Agencies tend to be “domestic and tactically focused”. This, suggests Ian James, head of digital for Barcadi.com, is raising the concern that “clients’ needs are outrunning their agencies capabilities”. Perhaps this is true of digital design and build agencies but it is certainly not true of digital customer experience agencies. Our engagements have covered areas from global customer research to international websites, prototypes, mobile technology and even the tablet PC.

Foviance carried out it’s first international project back in 2001 working with grocery retailer Otto through their partner major FMCG brand owner Proctor and Gamble. Since then we have worked with a variety of major brands including Microsoft, Sony, Nokia, and Dell, and some less well known ones (such as Victor Chandler) on international consultancy engagements from Madrid to Macau.

In many cases, due to both time constraints and local market expertise, major brands are using local agencies for design and build; and so we work closely with these companies to help them to ensure they have the hard facts needed to create a consistent brand experience across multiple markets. We are frequently the only constant in a global project beyond the brand employees and link with our own ‘Foviance alliance partners’ to bring in these large, international engagements. Foviance is not alone in being a customer experience agency that works internationally; many of our competitors also do – either through formal partnerships or relationships built on practical experience.

There are fundamental differences with the way users interact between countries and continents, with variations caused by cultural, social, economic as well as obvious language differences (such as there being no word for “Lucky Dip” in Asia). While it maybe ideal for clients to have a single international digital agency, without the support of traditional advertising or media networks there is no way that UK agencies can develop this expertise without a process of trial and error. International growth is dependent on expertise and experience – and is yet another reason why independent, expert research and consultancy partners will have a major role to play in the continued growth and expansion of the UK’s digital industry.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Customer Experience, General Comments, Multi channel, Web

The global economy

25 04 2008

I attended the Real Business Entrepreneurs summit last week where the focus was on the possibility of recession, when it wasn’t on the the Governments changes to CGT! There were a number of take-aways worth sharing as many people face their first slow-down whilst in employment. Once again the “Born Multi-Channel” generation have something some of us older folk don’t have!

So what should companies do as they head toward the impending doom? Firstly we need to get things in to perspective. This is not a recession it is a slow down. GDP growth in the UK for 2008 is forecast to reduce from 3% to 1.7% according to the CBI with 2009 no better. Also, unlike previous slow downs, what is happening has not been caused by the economic cycle is has been caused by a credit bubble. This is the most concerning aspect in many ways as the outcomes are unknown.

With the backdrop of uncertainty companies should focus on the following areas and opportunities:

  • Focus on profits and cash: no big surprises there but some companies have been known to increase rather than reduce gearing which increases the likelihood of failure particularly with interest rates unstable and the Libor rate high.
  • Competitive strategy: competitors who are more leveraged will struggle. You need to consider your price policy for commodity products so that they generate either profits or market share or both.
  • Recruitment: there is an opportunity to convert owner/managers of competitors to employees.
  • M&A: look for M&A opportunities in related but recession hit sectors. Also for early stage companies that may be short of cash and therefore cheaper.

As Gus Hedges of Drop the Dead Donkey fame would say “problems are the pregnant mother of opportunity” and this is true of the situation we are entering. Keeping the balance between inward and outward focus correct is probably the biggest challenge owners face.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Economy, General Comments

Usability vs. Creativity

8 04 2008

Last night I read an article about poetry – not a subject I can claim to have very muck knowledge of at all. It described the creative process and referred specifically to the the structure of a sonnet. A sonnet is a poem that follows strict rules on length and specific structure. By the thirteenth century, a sonnet had come to signify a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme. This structure did not inhibit the creativity of the poet, it merely provided a framework within which to operate.

In fact some of the most famous works that even un-poetic people like me are aware of are sonnets. Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 that begins “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” is perhaps the most famous but there are many others. To me all these seem incredibly creative despite the rigid framework within which they have to operate.

As I work in an online business that focuses on usability I found the analogy irresistible. A myth (or at least what I believe to be a myth) exists that says usability consultants and/or usability practices stifle designers creativity. I have felt for a long time that this simply cannot be the case and that the creative people that I have met deal with far bigger issues through technology, brand and proposition than usability could ever create. Perhaps by comparing the restrictions web designers face with those of the poet we can understand that true creativity deals with the barriers that are present and finds a way to overcome them.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : General Comments

It’s not about the technology

2 04 2008

Carrying on the theme of Ken Robinson’s excellent book “Out of our minds – learning to be creative” a colleague sent me a link to an interview with Gartner Researcher Tom Austin who talks about the evolution of technologists. It is bang on and explains the reality of what Ken Robinson believes that the needs of business are changing and education is not necessarily keeping pace. The interview talks about technology leadership roles becoming the domain of social anthropologists, and not just them. As the less traditionally referred to ‘academic’ subjects are required more, our view of intelligence and educational needs will have to evolve. The trouble is Governments move more slowly and they set educational strategy.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : General Comments

« Previous Entries Next Entries »


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.