inquiringeyes

Compulsively Impulsive 1.2

Seven years back I wrote something about impulse buying. The discourse hovered around apparel, fashion accessories, nick knacks, chocolates, confectionary items and frozen desserts. Those were the days when impulse buying was conditioned by shopper’s physical presence in the market. Impulse to buy used to strike when we were window-shopping, or when we were just walking down the street, saw a candy store and felt like munching something sweet  - for no particular reason.

 

Fast-forward to 2010. After waiting for almost 2 years, I think I can now write this. Today there are enough iPhones around me (+ there are others – Google, RIM, LG etc – all is trying to ‘App-Enable’ their devices). The app economy is real. But there is something more than the cute games and smart productivity tools that the App Economy has created. I call it Impulse 1.2. The App World has single handedly personalized & digitized our purchase impulse like nothing else had before it.

If the success of eBay’s mobile application is any indicator then personalized and digitized impulse has already reached unimaginable heights. Earlier this year someone bought a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder for $139,000!  If this example sounds like an extreme think about al the apps that are being bought on impulse. I know people who have bought almost $100 worth of apps in a year out of which not more than 10% are used actively. Sounds very similar to the many unused shoes in a woman’s cabinet!

 

Smart phones are doing to e commerce what SMS did to phone calls -Personalization, Spontaneity and Intimacy. If ecommerce helped people to shop from home, mobile commerce is helping people shop at the speed of thought (and feelings), from wherever they are. The collapsing of the time barrier between the desire to buy and the booting of a computer has lead to browsing & buying from the comforts of your couch. The time elapsed between knowing that the cushion behind your back is not comfortable or the flower vase on the table in front needs to change, and actually buying these has really shrunk. After reading about HiFi for many years ago, I finally begin to see it.

Market watches estimate that the global mobile e commerce business which was worth about $18 billion in 2009, would grow explosively and reach $ 119 billion in 2015. The statistic does not surprise at all. Our emotions are fickle; expect mobile commerce to ride our flickering feelings like no other business has ever done in the past.

Top 3 things iPad will do & Top 2 it won’t

We are yet to see an iPad here in Asia, but it is certain that going by Apple’s legacy – this new device will bring about a change in the way people interact with these kind of devices. Its physical design, social connotations, ease of use, price, and many other facts that we will perhaps discover only when we start using it, can potentially spawn a new economy like the iPhone did with its Applications and iPod did with iTunes.  Here is my list of what it would and won’t do in this part of the world.

iPad Will

      1. Usage of ‘Apple Services’ will expand exponentially: We have all seen how iPod and iPhone spawned an entire industry of accessories around them – especially products like speakers etc that act as docking stations etc. Now visualize iTunes, App Store and iBooks as three services that are spawning a range of products that help users utilize these three services. Do not view iPad just as a product; instead look at it as a bridge to bring in more users to the world of Apple services.

By bringing a superior experience to a portable entertainment device, Apple will be able to expand the franchise for its online stores like iTunes, App store and iBooks - exponentially.  This fits in with the industry wide trend of increasing revenues from content and data services and sluggish growth of revenues from mobile devices. (See chart 1)

Chart 1

Suddenly Nokia, Sony, Samsung, LG among others look under prepared to compete with this evolving model. (Ironically enough, even Sony  - the inventor of Walkman – the first personal stereo - is also one among the long list of names making accessories for iPods and iPhones).

2.    Light users will finally get a real option: Other than gadget enthusiasts and die hard Apple fans who will lap up iPads, like they have done with other new devices from Apple– iPad will give a real option to many light & mobile users. I can see frequent travelers and elders as two immediate potential user groups. The latter group would especially like the iPad for its ease of use, portability and most importantly – picture –cum-photo frame capability.

3. Will take Apple towards masses (Netbooks have a definite reason to worry!): At $499, iPad is still more expensive than most of the Netbooks and even some Notebooks. However, if the announced price comes to Asia, it will reach many more users than what iPhones & MacBooks have managed to in the past. Let us look at the approximate price gap between Apple and other products in three key categories. Observe how the price gap is shrinking continuously.

	Category	Apple Product	Competition (Approx.)	Approx. Price Difference
1	Mobile Phone	iPhone 3Gs (16GB) USD 694	NokiaE71 Smart Phone USD 276	USD 218
2	MP3 Player	iPod Touch (8GB) USD 202	Creative Zen V 4G USD 47	USD 155
3	Netbook	iPad USD 499*	ASUS ePC 1000 USD 375	USD 125

* Assuming same price as in the US

Although the price difference between Apple’s latest product and the competitors continues to be significant but the lower unit price of iPad will make it much easier for a prospect to own it.

 

This is a dramatic shift in Apple’s marketing stance. No more can Apple said to be a designer’s ‘designer’ choice and average Joe’s fantasy.  It is now becoming a smart and efficient choice. In this way, I see Apple becoming more like Google than continuing to be the Apple from the past. The only big difference still being, Open Vs. Closed source outlook.

 

This need to address a wider consumer group is perhaps also aimed at building a broader ecosystem of OS based devises as a countermeasure to Android’s increasing presence in devices beyond mobile phones. (See chart 2)

 Chart 2

iPad Won’t

  1. Notebooks need not worry (yet): iPad has not been designed to be a mainstream personal computing device. Lack of USB port, no CD/DVD Drive, limited memory, no LAN Port etc means that Apple does not want this thing to mess around with its own Notebook Sales. 

  2. Replace Kindle: Serious readers will stick to Kindle. It is not just about the battery life (10 days vs iPad’s 10 hrs) the iPad screen is better suited for watching movies and pictures than reading books. A serious reader will not hazard the strain on eyes because he wants a more beautiful thing in his hands. (But expect Kindle to respond with a better Kindle sooner than before.)

Personally, I foresee, eBooks gaining traction, movie watching coming to the lap not just in airport lounges but at home as well; Casual gaming becoming more engaging; Laptop bags making way for iPad folders; Photographs coming to life more spontaneously and in entirely new ways; Speakers and other home theatre system accessories spawning a whole new iPad ecosystem, among others.

In his presentation Steve Jobs stated “Apple is now the largest mobile devices company”, I would add by saying that Apple is a consumer electronics company that is increasingly making other consumer electronics brands look like manufacturers of ‘peripherals’. 

I sincerely hope that the rise of Apple also leads to the birth of a worthy competitor.

Divergence 2 (Concluding)

The scenario of Divergence that I talked about in the last post is probable, however its probability hinges on some basic consumer factors. There could be more but I would start by outlining three: 

1.     What percentage of the total users would like to have separate portable devices for functionalities like taking pictures, navigation, music, games etc?

2.     Within this group, what percentage of people would like to upload, download pictures instantly after capture, or play music and games online and on the go?

3.     And finally how many people from the second group would be prepared to pay for wireless connectivity services that enable these activities?

Conventional logic would perhaps make us believe that such consumers might be very few. However I believe that adoption of such new gadgets and services might not follow a linear course as we saw above. A lot hinges on the form and experience factor of these new gadgets and these wireless services. (Future surprises us all the time – it was difficult to imagine that people would always want to carry all the music that they liked. But as we saw with the success Apple iPod – they did, and even paid a premium for it!)

The other set of questions that these gadgets and services raise are to do with operational factors like industry standards and interface. What would be the application software in these devices so as to be able to interface with the Internet? Which operating system would they use?

I remember reading Everyware, by Adam Greenfield, last year. Greenfield offers a sneak peak into the questions that ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) would raise in the future. The book looks at the ecosystem of the wirelessly interconnected devices of the future. Greenfield goes on to talk about the importance of finding common standard for all these things to be able to interface effectively. AT&T’s pursuit that I discussed in the last post would l make this need even more immediate.

What might be exciting to visualize is that if this is going to happen in the future, what would happen then. In other words what could be the social impact of these technology developments and how could it potentially impact our behaviour in the time to come?

Questions from our future are heading our way fast!

Divergence

(It has been a long break (again). I guess too much of work at work is not the best thing for a Blog. Hope to be more regular from here on..)

Digital camera, game consoles, e books readers, GPS devices etc, are all familiar gadgets of everyday use.

Now imagine all these devices having the ability to hook up to the Internet on their own.

• I mean the camera does not need to wait to be near a computer to transfer pictures nor does it need to be attached to a mobile phone to share
• The mobile game console can surf the net in wide area - wirelessly
• The GPS device does not need to be attached to a mobile phone to get its quadrants right
• The specialized e book reader (largely like the Kindle of today) hooks up to the Internet on its own, wirelessly.

If AT&T were to have its way – we could soon see a mobile service provider selling subsidized cameras, GPS devices, E-Book Readers, hand held video game devices and more (BusinessWeek July 2009). The motivation for a company like AT&T is quite simple more the number of wireless connections, greater the usage and thus higher the revenues.

So what’s the big deal? Two I think:

1. “‘Master Gadget’ Never Really Came (the wait is forever?)”

This indicates that the device approach to the definition of convergence (one device does it all) is not coming out to be true. Somewhere corporations have realized, that it is not worthwhile to wait for that ‘one device’ that people would start using as their master gadget (i.e. make calls, surf web, take pictures, read books, listen to music, get directions, play games, etc etc)

Why has it not come? Well, it is debatable.

Corporations would prefer to say that majority of consumers are not ready to switch to and pay for that one device.

Consumers would say – there is no worthy device that can deliver satisfactorily on even half of the desired functions well.

I guess iPhone or iPod Touch, are examples of devices that have managed to come close to the desired multi-functionality

2. “The real war for standards (operating system etc) is perhaps about to begin”

Which OS version and Internet browser would these many different devices (made by manufacturers spread across the world from Tokyo & Seoul to Shenzhen in China, use? Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari or Opera? Netbooks going the Android or UNIX way or Nokia building Symbian as the Mobile OS standard etc are not the real news. The real news would perhaps be who among Microsoft, Nokia, Google etc ends up holding the majority of the Operating system and Application software sky.

I would follow-up on some of the thoughts here, in the next post..

Television 1.2

I remember – it was a weekend in 2005 and I was in India – reading a news story about Videocon (a consumer durable major in India). It was about the company launching the first Internet TV in India. I also remember the media and expert noise around this launch. They were all talking about how innovations like Internet Television and (large screen) computers, with high-speed broadband access, would ultimately replace the ‘classic’ television.

It has been almost 4 years now. Desktop computers have traversed a journey from standard CRTs, to large size flat screen CRTs, to slim LCDs. And the laptops have traveled from 12” micro sized notebooks to large 17” machines and now super small and ultra light Netbooks.

The computer has become faster, more graphic rich etc etc. but the size of the display unit (screen/monitor if you like) despite moving in all directions – size wise - has remained more or less the same - average size in the neighbourhoood of 15” (based on my personal observation).

While the computer screens have remained more or less the same size – the Television screens have been expanding in size. We might need to check this empirically – but the average size of a television screen is definitely much more than the erstwhile average of 21”.

If I were to hazard a guess on the average size today– it could be anywhere in the neighbourhood of 25” to 27”. Why so?

Other than the fact that television companies want us to buy larger, flatter, slimmer, clearer TV sets (because that’s where the margins are!)– the unifying force behind TV buying is family viewing. Members of a household still tend to converge around the television. It is easier to justify purchase of a big and expensive television perhaps because it is a ‘household item’, as compared to an expensive computer – which can be seen to be more personal.

While a lot of people, especially young and single individual households have started using their laptop or desktop as their entertainment hub (Movies, Music, Communication etc), those living in a family, continue to converge around the TV.

Given this - it does not surprise me when I see Television in yet another light. I understand that a company like Cisco finds an entirely new meaning for the classic TV! (Cisco is staking a claim in the consumer electronics space, with its new line or products based on home networking technology).

With its newly acquired companies, Cisco is now in a position to offer videophone service that has the Television at the heart of it. For example when a Flip video camera is connected to a set-top-box, the cable connection and the Television – one can get the videophone experience that we used to see in Startekesq Sci-Fi TV serials.

However – what amazes me even more than the home videophone technology– is the fact hat this experience is being visualized around the TV screen instead of the computer screen.

To me this is almost as if Television were now offering a unique experience in the communication space – just the way it has classically offered a unique experience in the entertainment space.

The stereotypes that come to our mind when we think of web chats viz. – a man peeping into a computer monitor while video chatting with his parents /girlfriend on his computer screen, might just be about to make way for the same happening on TV and with a larger number of people doing this together.

In my view – if we humans as a community continue to derive greater meaning from our interactions with other people than we do with things – then I foresee newer a much wider application for the Television in the future.

If video telephony catches up I can foresee our Televisions becoming still bigger in size and even more important than before. The entertainment equivalent of pod casts might upstage broadcast, or other forms of personalized entertainment-on-demand, but the TV set does not seem to tuning off anytime soon. We seem to be heading into the world of Television 1.2.

Keep watching!

Two worlds collided - 2

(Continued from the post – Two Worlds Collided)

As we mingle in these two worlds parallely – it is interesting to note how protocols & conventions from the physical world are being selectively carried forward into the online world. Here is how:

1. Space: In the physical world we prefer to keep our belongings with us – so either at home / office, or where we are. The only thing we do not mind stashing out of home (given that we feel that it is safer or wiser to keep it there) is our money. It sits very conveniently in banks and we almost never complain about it not being safe.

However when it comes to storing our information/data online – we are still very cautious. Observe how individual users still prefer to keep their information on personal external hard disks that are owned by them and usually kept at home. In a country with seamless Internet connectivity, this is definitely not the most efficient way to access information – however it is still preferred over the more accessible online storage.

2. Time: It is very strange to ring friend’s door bell at 12 midnight or call him or her at 1 am, but it is perfectly Ok to chat on an instant messenger though the night.

It is strange to buy things in the market after 10 – but it is perfectly ok to shop for cosmetics or gifts online 2 am in the morning!

3. Expression of emotion & thought: More often than not, most of us are much more expressive in the digital world than in the physical world. It is very strange to flirt with a married man in the office but it is Ok to get intimate & talk about anything with him in a chat room.

Perhaps because of the fact that the online world offers an opportunity for us to be able to say things and not bear the consequences as directly as it is in physical world. (“we are less shy, when we do not need to look in the eye..”)

4. Social Protocols:  While the convention for greeting in the physical world is all about reciprocity, we are very comfortable not reciprocating similarly in the online space. Leaving a friend alone at a bar table, without telling him is considered odd, not replying to something that your colleague is asking you across the cubicle wall is considered rude – however it is common to leave an instant messenger chat without intimating others, it is common not write a thank you mail to someone for the help that was received from him through email.

5. Attention to detail: It is ok to have a letter or email or text message without worrying about the grammar, capitals and even spellings – but it definitely is not a good idea for a hand written document or any a typed document that would be printed!

 

What I have outlined here, are just some of the many protocols that we have subconsciously consented to follow or ignore.

On the surface I am left curious wondering why on some occasions we choose to follow the protocols and ignore them on other occasions?

However what challenge me even more are some fundamental questions that this user behaviour raises

1.     Semi Anonymity:

As the digital world expands to acquire a role bigger than that of the physical world of today (Read more about how the physical world could be upstaged by the Digital World) no one would perhaps really know our true identity – what would be the meaning of privacy then?

2.     Space:

What would be the meaning of ownership when things would no longer have to be physically located near their owner?

Two worlds collided

Today we do more and more things online & large part of us lives in the digital world.

We,

• Email, chat (to communicate)
• Twitter update our thoughts/emotions (sharing/communicating)
• Mining, Sharing, Uploading, Downloading Information (for work or leisure)
• Blogging our hearts and minds (sharing/communicating)
• Networking (to socialize)
• Gaming (to entertain ourselves)
• Online avatars (for a Parallel Lives/entertainment)
• Shopping (for Leisure/Value)
• Buying/Selling/transacting cash (Commercial goals)

And many more..

 

If we were asked to think of things that we couldn’t accomplish online - they would mainly be those that involve a necessary interaction with the physical world of atoms. Most of the other things can be accomplished online.

This engagement with the digital world is manifested when we look at the three key ‘time zones’ in everyday life viz. home, work and commute - we see that our engagement with the digital is the physical world is illustrated even better.

Home Time

At home especially if the family is small without kids etc- the online behaviour is not much different from the office. We are either online – updating Facebook profile, organizing pictures on Flickr, reading a book online, or offline engaged in domestic chores, buying the stuff from super market, going out for work or socialization, taking pictures etc.

Work Time

At work, we are predominantly engaged either with the digital world (email, web conference, web surfing, chatting, preparing documents etc) or the physical world – talking to a colleague, going for a ‘physical’ meeting, having lunch, smoking, walking up to a colleague’s cubicle, so on an so forth.

Transit Time

Even while we are in transit – a time when we are expected to be in the physical - we see people absorbed in their mobile phones – reading novels, or comics, viewing video clips, talking, playing games, texting so on and so forth.

To me it is much easier to understand our preoccupation with these digital interfaces when we look at them not as a PC, a Mobile Phone or a Laptop & instead look at them as elements of a new world that is taking shape.  I call it a world because a large and growing part of the population is doing more and more things online. One possible way to evaluate the significance of the role that this world plays in our lives would be to visualize one month without it! Even if it is gone for 30 minutes, most of us feel lost without Internet at work for some of us it is true even at home!

 

The popular activities that people engage in when they interact with the new Online World have 3 key defining characters. (There could be more – but let us start with three.)

 

Semi-Anonymity:

The online world turbo-charges our reach. Although we continue to know a select group of people but our set of acquaintances grows multifold and the people who we interact with but might not know much about, grows even more. This vastly expanded network but relatively shallower understanding people in the network, (and thus weaker bonding with people in this network), gives us what I can be referred to as semi-anonymity.

Expression free from context:

I usually summarize it thus – “we are less shy, when we do not need to look in the eye!” The online world offers all of us a unique context because more often than not it does not make us think much about the context. It is much easier to say something personal, private, provocative or even intimate, and do this much sooner, in a relationship (or even when there is no relationship), when one does not need to do it in person.

The online world offers this chance! It frees the personal expression from the context in which it is being said – thus stakes seem to be lower.

Digitization of Physicality:

Unlike the physical world that operates in on physical dynamics governed by space – the online world collapses physicality. This makes the online world offer an entirely new paradigm to its users.

In the next post – I would attempt to illustrate how the above three characters of the online world impact our behaviour in different situations. How we make subconscious choices to carry forward the offline protocols and how sometimes we switch to new protocols. 

Google Life

Google Android debuted on Oct 22^nd, riding on the HTC G1 handset. However you might not have heard too many people raving about this new software for mobile devices. Most of the people have compared it to the iPhone interface and they have been left disappointed or at least not particularly elated.

Although I have not tried the Android on G1 yet but from what I read in Stephen H Wildstrom’s review in the BusinessWeek, there is something interesting that Google is doing, which I do not know how many of us observed, but if one is using the device, one would have experienced and perhaps liked too. As Stephen mentions in his review “If you are in phone mode (while using the HTC G1) – the default state if no programs are running – then typing, initiates a search for contacts. A list of matches is thrown up as soon as you start to type and is refined as you add letters”. Needless to mention that when you are in browser window, it will open the Google window to help you search whatever is that you are looking for. However what intrigues me is the way Google has very smartly embedded the “Google way of searching” even in the ‘offline/non browsing” context. This is a great way building habit of searching for information in a certain fashion – be it ‘offline’ from contacts in your own phonebook or ‘online’ as one looks for the nearest Indian restaurant on Google Maps.

We all know that increasingly people are accessing internet on their Mobile devices and not just PCs.

So, in the time to come, the stage of primary interface device might shift from the PC to the mobile device. And even in the journey towards the mobile becoming the primary device for Internet access, there would perhaps be this intervening period when the rising dominance of the Mobile Interface Usage would influence the offline interface that PCs use. I believe that Google has foreseen this and is taking steps that slowly nudge the user in that space.

Google does not rule the offline (PC) application software arena (yet!) – Microsoft is the big daddy there – however by making people become used to a certain way of searching for offline/online information on their phones - Google might be (subtly) priming them to become used to a certain way of ‘looking up’ for anything – online or offline, mobile or PC.

This sure could be a grand plan to stoke usage of present & soon to arrive, Google application software for the PC.

Ultimately we are creatures of habit and we develop habits so that we can be on auto-pilot more often and so that we do not have to think about basic things again and again. Once ‘the Google way of searching or working becomes the habit we just might be living the Google Life! The way today, irrespective of how much we might rant about it, we live the ‘MS Office life’!

Copy Paste

Just to take forward the observations from the Hiding behind the Internet – it would like to illustrate, in greater detail, the “Something about Everything and Nothing in Particular” behaviour.

One would expect that while searching for information, the user would actually make a folder on his computer where he would be saving all the information that is downloaded. Upon having downloaded all the information that is needed – one would actually proceed to go through all of this downloaded information, for to be able to take out the more relevant bits, and more importantly build his own argument or on top of this downloaded information.

However, this group of people actually skip the intermediate step, and there is no folder that is made – no documents that are actually downloaded. There is just one final output document. The documents thrown up by the search results are only ‘viewed’ online and the more relevant bits are copied into the final output document in ‘real time’. It is not difficult to guess the extent of thinking – beyond copying and pasting - that is going on while all this is happening.

Alarming!

It reminds me of the John Serale’s Chinese Room experiment that proved how machine intelligence (AI) is inferior to the human intelligence because it does not really know what is the meaning of that what it is doing. For example a calculator can do great arithmetic but it does not know anything about mathematics. Deep Blue can beat Kasparov at a game of Chess – but it does not know anything about Chess or even the fact that it has actually won! (Does it need to? Well, that is another topic which needs a separate context for to be discussed.)

I do not mean to glorify human intelligence here – because the pace at which machine intelligence is evolving – we might be trumped soon. However I am alarmed and saddened by the prospect that a lot of people among us are becoming more and more like their machines. Inputting and outputting without conscious thinking about what their point of view is; what do they believe in; what they are actually doing; are they learning anything? How come they gave up the option to think so easily?

No wonder, many a times when these people are confronted with questions like “so what did you do today?” or “what are you doing now?”, or “what did you learn today?” they usually draw a blank. To be this is mainly because they are doing a lot but ‘nothing is really registering’! Surprising but true.

Hiding behind the Internet

We used to have libraries. And whenever we had to do a project at school, in college or even at work, we used to go to the library and ‘refer’ to the books, journals, papers etc there.

There was effort needed to access the knowledge in the library and perhaps a little more persistence to be able to find what was needed. Persistence is what signified a good search! And persistence was linked with interest. The greater the interest the greater was the desire to find out!

And then, one fine day we were handed over the ‘keys’ to the world wide in the shape of the search engine. The search engine was a place that you went to search (instead of the usual visit to the library) and you could access anything and everything – including many libraries!

There was no more walking around the aisles in the libraries– no more reaching to the top shelf on that ladder – the persistence was not needed any more, at least not as much. With the need for persistence gone – almost everybody could find something on almost everything. Knowledge access was a no-brainer reduced to the search string in your favourite search engine.

This is good – in fact it is a revolutionary achievement. But other than the fact that Internet is actually inspiring a lot many under-privileged farmers to be able to get the right price for their crops, other than the fact that it is making people, separated over thousands of miles, meet in virtual chats, Internet is spawning a new community –a group of people who I call ‘Something about Everything but Nothing in Particular.’ These are the people who do not have the answer to the questions you are asking but thanks to their internet surfing skills, they can deftly ‘cook’ something up that ‘looks like’ an answer but is definitely not it. They know how to hide their lack of understanding behind the volume of information that they generate through Internet.

I see more and more of them. They are the people who do not want to know, do not care to know but can always talk. If you take away their Internet connection – they are likely to be paralyzed - work wise!

To me this is the biggest side-effect of the rise of Internet. People who are mediocre in their understanding of things and also lack the passion to understand things are riding on four horses of search engines, cutting, copying and pasting and have create what I call a circus of pseudo-knowledge. All this, not just in a casual context like this Blog (which also might offer a lot of bullshit!), but even in formal business situations!

While there is this growing, ‘Something about Everything but Nothing in Particular’, tribe – there also is a set of people who are actually utilizing internet very smartly. For them internet is a way to connect with and reach out to the kind of people they want to work with, interact with. For them Internet is a way to energize their career through knowledge share and networking. I describe them pretty much the same way that Peter F Drucker did just that I’d like to add the ‘networked’ property to them. To me they are the ‘Network Knowledge Workers’.

Like any tool – Internet is also just as good as the hands it finds itself in. However the tool is being misused much more than otherwise. In many ways, the Internet is not bridging the knowledge divide; instead it is creating this haze that is making nonsense look like something worth going through. To me the day in not far when the online space would require higher order search engine that can separate works of ‘Something about Everything but Nothing in Particular’ from that of ‘Network Knowledge Workers’.