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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.

How can you turn that into an application?

While going through a recent edition of Businessweek, I came across a story on how publishing houses are trying to put up a front to counter the rising dominance of Amazon ( Trying to avert a digital horror story ). There is a mention of how people are interested in paying for a variation on the standard book viz. a single chapter or a searchable database. As a result some of the publishers are now considering bringing out iPhone applications for some of their books. 

This is very fascinating. First books transitioned into their paper free avatar –the eBooks and now they are going one step further – into applications.

 

There is a mention of a book called “What to drink with what you eat” which the publishers are now trying to turn into an app that is like a ‘virtual sommelier cum food critique’, featuring food and wine pairings and tutorials and flavour balancing.

This signifies a shift in the way publishing houses think and has impact on the way information would be packaged in the future. The example of a book turning into an application shows how knowledge is being turned into applied knowledge. It seems that just the way there has always been a market for knowledge from books, the market for the application of knowledge from that book will become bigger and bigger in the future. Being able to use the things that we read in a book - when we are in a meeting, or having lunch or when we are traveling, offers a big opportunity for books to expand their relevance and impact. 

 

‘The application mind set’, as I call it, can potentially turn almost every idea, every bit of information into a byte-sized tool that is always on tap. Thanks to effective miniaturization of technology - the future of knowledge and information will go more and more down the application path.

“What can be the iPhone application for this idea?” is a question, that can help us unlock the potential of any good idea that crosses our mind in the future. 

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..

Your MP3 player is ringing & my gaming device is downloading your song!

I have always believed that the iPhone is just another iPod that makes calls and can surf the web. This perhaps is one of the reasons why the iPod sales have been slowing down, ever since the iPhone was launched in 2007.

In November of 2008, almost a year and a half after the iPhone came to the market came the latest version of Nintendo’s hugely successful handheld gaming device - Nintendo DSi. Unlike the earlier DS versions, Nintendo DSi is not a revolution, however it does have something that I believe is revolutionary (although lack of robustness might prevent us from acknowledging it yet).

Other than additions like a camera that you can play around with, the DSi is WiFi enabled.

To me, this is the point of departure. If I were to look at this development in the context of Wii’s plan to stream content for its users to their consoles, then the DSi is following a very similar path. To me it seems that through both of its products, Nintendo is trying to enter the content & applications space – rather than just selling hardware, which it has done so far. This transition is similar to what makes iPhone and iPod sexier than many viz. the presence of iTunes and the Apple App Store.

However this transition acquires greater meaning when we look at the next question that it raises. “How many devices will I carry when DSi’s WiFi function stabilizes?” or “What all would I want to carry, when games on the iPhone start matching the sophistication of titles on DSi?”

This question about convergence keeps haunting me. Would it really be one device? If I were to look back (and I hope I am not looking back too early) I do not see it happening:

1. Mobile phones have failed to become notebooks – and thus we have Netbooks filling shopping shelves!

2. Notebooks could never become elegantly mobile – thus came Netbooks!

3. The TV could never become the PC and the PC could never become the TV!

Also, click here to read about the new roles that the TV is about to play, beyond entertainment!

The above three are interesting because the MP3 (iPod) player did become the mobile phone (iPhone). So – is it about consumers not being ready for one product or most of the companies not being able to come up with a compelling design and function that can motivate them to buy ‘that one device’? I suspect it is the latter. 

Tomorrow- Mobile or Computing? Part Two & Concluding

Mobile computing has some fundamental challenges that it needs to overcome before it can actually attempt to replace desktop computing. Some of these challenges have been briefly mentioned above, however it might be a good idea to look at these more closely now.

1. Display – small display makes it difficult to be able to everything on mobile handheld devise viz. watch videos/movies, write documents/presentations, read books etc among others (unless we do something with our eyes that makes it very easy to view anything big or small or we develop an embedded a projection device inside every mobile hand-held device. The latter might lead to new kind of challenges around need for privacy while watching content on the go, as we move around in public spaces!)

Please note that any attempt to make the present day mobile display larger, would tend to make the mobile computing device bigger and consequently ‘less mobile’. So a larger display leaves us with what we started with – just a computing device instead of a mobile computing device that we are actually trying to achieve!

2. Keyboard: So far we do not seem to have an idea as to how could we possibly make our fingers adjust to smaller keyboards. Keyboards cannot go smaller beyond a point. The way I look at it - we have already reached that point where the size of the keyboards in mobile devices can’t be shrunk much further. Even if the keyboard were of touch screen variety – the keys would require a minimum size.

In addition to this, the keyboard needs to be more comfortable to use than it is now in many of the present day mobile devices. This would be needed because unlike smart phones, when we begin to use mobile computing in its complete form, we would need to use the keyboard much more than the way we do now. We would be having our fingers pressing against those keys for much longer than we do writing short text messages or e mails.

3. People Mobility – I am not sure what percentage users of computing devices in the future would be always on the go. In other words “‘full’ computing capability on the go is perhaps not for everybody!”  So there would be a lot of people who would not want to do everything on the go. This would perhaps hold true only as long we do not altogether become a different ‘animal’ in the next 3-5 years!)

So where does all this lead us? What could mobile computing actually mean and do in the future?

By stacking-up the events from the past and adding a little imagination to it, I can foresee a few things which I would like to share at this point.

To me Mobile Computing seems to be heading in a direction where we would still see and use it more as mobile & less as computing device.

Let me explain what I mean by this.

I can foresee (as long as we do not have a breakthrough innovation in display technology) that a mobile handheld device would have the capability to compute the way our desktops/laptops do today – and may be even better! However we might not engage the device to compute viz. write presentations, read analyst reports, process spreadsheets etc, while we are on the go* - walking, sitting in the subway, being driven to some place, sitting by the beach, or looking outside the window while sitting in an airplane.

Why would we not engage the device to compute?

Partly because the device neither has a great display to show us everything that we want to see, nor does it have a good enough input mechanism to key things in.

Also, I am not sure if we would be prepared to think and DO so much, on the go! If we want to achieve this extent of productivity on the go – a lot of rest of the things - that we do to make our way around the physical space – would need to be on autopilot, so that we can free up our faculties to focus more on what we are thinking & doing and not as much on where we are going or if the coffee that we are holding is actually about to spill!

I foresee ourselves asking the mobile computing device to do small tasks for us viz. find some place/somebody, tell some fact etc. We can say that this is not the future because we have already heard that the mobile devices can do all this in the future and I would say well may be you are right!

That brings us to one of my favourite questions “So what would be the point of having a capable computing device in your pocket, when you are always going to be under-utilizing it?”

To me there would always be a big role for a mobile computing device because in the future it could almost be something like our external hard drive is today.

What do we do with the external hard drive today? Well, we carry it around and plug in when we need to go back to all that we have on your desktop or al that could not fit into our laptop. The difference/next stage could well be - in the future we could be carrying an external computing device which we plug into any larger or worthy display and keyboard wherever we find be it home or office or airport or anywhere in between.

I can foresee the internet zones of today morphing into display and keyboard (peripheral) zones of the future. Just plug and play!

To use a present day analogy it would be like pocket laptops without a display as big but they can match (if not better) the processing capability. Also, our desk or our wall or roof could well be the display that we plug our device into!

And we plug in with wires? Well, I am not sure..may be not!

Exciting times ahead!

End Notes

*Assuming that in the future we would still need to physically move from one place to another and these travel modes still exist.

** I believe that the innovation timeline would pass through a plug and play mobile computing device much before it passes through a truly mobile computer because advancement in miniaturization of processing power is moving much faster than that of display or input technology. We do not need to see how the processing happens (so a microprocessor can become smaller and smaller up until it becomes invisible to the human eye and it would not bother us even one bit. However we need to control the input (keyboard/mouse/other touch sensitive input devices) and ‘see’ what the processor gives as output (display devices).

Tomorrow - Mobile or Computing? Part One

Everyday media churn out reams of information about the fact that the future of mobile phones is mobile computing.

Like many of us, I tend to believe that too.

However what is worth pausing and pondering over is “what do we mean by mobile computing?” Does it mean computing in the palm of your hand raised to the power of computing in your present day desktops or laptops? That’s a lot of computing power for a small device – it’s almost like having a small car with over 150 brake horse power (bhp) & coming with 4-wheel drive!

If this is what mobile computing means, then I am equally curious to know - what is the future of desktop & laptop computing? If mobile handheld devices of the future become all so competent, then would we still need desktop personal computing, the way we know it today?

To find answers to such questions about the future, it might worth looking into the past. Looking back into the history of innovation - more often than not – many of the new products have acquired a supplementary or complimentary role instead of completely replacing the older products.

• Personal Stereo vs. Home Stereo System
• Television/Broadcast Content vs. Internet Content
• Home Entertainment vs. Cinema Halls (a very interesting story indeed!)
• Desktops vs. Laptops
• Still Camera vs. Video Camera
• Camera Phone vs. Camera
• Gas Burners vs. Microwave Ovens
• Paper vs. Computer Screen
• Box Files Vs. Hard Disks
• Facsimile vs. e mail/Speed Post (yes, speed post is less of a technology but none the less something that competes, in some way, with facsimile!)

This by no measure is an exhaustive list of how new devices live with older ones. For example when we look at Mobile Phones vs. Fixed Line Phones or Film Roll Camera vs. Digital Camera - we immediately see how the number of examples mentioned above is not sufficient to make that point.

To know the future of desktop and laptop computing it might be worthwhile to look at what, in the first place, makes a mobile computing device mobile.

To me it is a smaller screen, smaller keyboard and lighter (and less powerful) battery.

(I am not saying connectivity because connectivity is not longer unique to classic mobile devices (like mobile phones). Even a notebook PC can be connected on the go!)

If this is what makes a mobile computing device – ‘mobile’, then I find it difficult to convince myself, that future mobile computing devices would be able to erase laptop or even desktop computing.

(This thought would be followed-through in the next post..)