Consumer Technology Trends
Leigh Marriner — 12 August 2008
Mobility counts. In the future we will want always-on wireless broadband capacity to be sending personal videos/photos data and connecting to our social network while mobile all the time. Fast mobile broadband, whether Mobile WiMAX or 4G cellular network wireless, will be offered in the next year or two. This will make it possible to send and receive any kind of content while mobile. It will enable new behaviors. You won’t have to wait until you get home or to a WiFi hotspot to do things. Consumer electronics devices will have broadband connections built in and you will be able to play interactive games, exchange photos and videos and search the web while mobile, the same way you do now at home. Your personal content will be stored in the cloud so you can have access wherever you want.
Will mobile network providers compete successfully with wired broadband providers? They would have to offer close to the bandwidth and speeds they would be replacing, but this is looking more possible. WiMAX is an IP-based standard that will be operational next year, and has a 1-2 year headstart on the new US 4G wireless networks. With Mobile WiMAX, speeds of 10 Mbps at 10 km can be delivered, even if the 70 Mbps promised at 50 km is more hypothetical. Verizon and AT&T‘s LTE 4G wireless mobile broadband (LTE) promises to deliver 100 Mbps download speed next year, which is a lot faster than the 2.4 Mbps (EVDO) or 7.2 Mbps (3G GSM) US wireless currently delivered. The traditional wired US broadband providers currently offer speeds of 1.5+ Mbps and new offerings promise up to 3 Mbps. In the longer run, modern cities will have access to 100Mbps via fiber. But in rural areas and developing nations, wireless will probably be the backbone of the broadband infrastructure. And consumers need for mobile broadband may cause them to switch to mobile broadband, the same way many people have turned off their landline phones. Some experts say it may require on the order of 11 Mbps always-on broadband in the future to handle consumer data transfer needs, which any of these standards will be able to offer.
Leigh Marriner — 23 March 2008
Remember “The Year of the Internet”? It was predicted year after year until it became a joke. But look where we are now. Who could imagine life without the Internet? (I know that’s a little bit of an overstatement, but not much.)
Maybe we are at the beginning of the Year of Technology Simplicity. Or the Year of Technology Where Easy Trumps More Features. Here at Cheskin we’ve been telling our clients for years that consumers and workers want fewer features because technology is too complex and even those consumers who use the technology only access a minority of the features that already exist. And this year we’ve seen some simpler products that became big hits.
The Nintendo Wii expanded the market for video gaming to a whole new group of consumers who never played videogames, leaving most of the traditional videogame world wondering how they missed this opportunity. Hindsight is so useful, but prior to the release of Wii, most pundits predicted that Nintendo was going to continue to lose share because they were planning to introduce a product with inferior chip and graphics technology.
Then there’s the new Flip camcorder which was glowingly reviewed by David Pogue this week in the New York Times. Flip is a stripped down video recorder with a user’s manual one paragraph long which has taken 13 percent share of the camcorder market in the year since its release. I would venture a guess that the Flip hasn’t taken much share from the existing camcorder market but has expanded the market to a whole new group of consumers who would never have bought a camcorder before.
I’ve got a couple free suggestions for technology products I’d love to see simplified. What about a TV/DVR/DVD player set up that let’s the frustrated user in the home access the most basic features with only one remote control (turn on the TV, play a DVD, choose a show to watch). How about an easy way to sort and backup all your photos online, and send selected photos to friends? (A lot of companies are trying, but so far I don’t think anyone has succeeded in making it truly idiot-proof. I have friends who still buy a new memory card when they run out of space.) How about a car navigation system that can find the nearest Peet’s coffee in the direction I am traveling, instead of giving me the stores that are closest to where I am?
If you have a wish list for simpler technology, let me know.
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Lee Shupp — 22 February 2008
Bill Gates announced this week that Windows 7 would include a touch interface. (Windows 7 is the code name for the next version of the Window OS, reportedly coming in 2010.) This is big news, as it is the ultimate mainstreaming of the touch interface introduced to the mass market by Apple with the iPhone . Why are touch interfaces coming to the mainstream, and why now?
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Leigh Marriner — 12 February 2008
Esther Dyson’s article today on the Coming Ad Revolution talks about new online advertising startups using behavioral targeting to offer targeted ad services keyed to web sites users have visited. This raises the specter of Big Brother watching everything you do, but as Esther says, “The discussion about privacy is changing as users take control over their own online data. While they spread their Web presence, these users are not looking for privacy, but for recognition as individuals.”
The new, younger generation of social networking and blog users doesn’t have the same fears about privacy. Many aren’t worried about putting personal information online. They feel comfortable controlling access to their information by deciding which “friends” they give permission to. If someone they don’t want to interact with starts bothering them, they can cut off access – much more easily than in the physical world where it’s hard to shake someone who has your phone number.
Many over 35ers still think about online privacy in the context of protecting children from predators. But online privacy is a completely different issue for 20-something adults.
Leigh Marriner — 1 February 2008
The biggest change the iPhone will introduce will not be playing music on your cell phone or looking at photos, but a much greater US consumer use of the Internet from a mobile device. For the first time, consumers can experience a usable connection to the Internet – usable not only in terms of speed (which could still be improved) but also in getting the information you want easily. Apple once again looked at what the user wants to accomplish and then built an end-to-end user experience that was satisfying. As with iPod/iTunes, Apple wasn’t the first to offer a solution – they just built one that was easy and worked. Many SmartPhones have offered Internet access for years, but the interface is clunky, often you can’t find what you’re looking for in a tolerable amount of time, and web pages aren’t formatted for the small screen. Offerings like Yahoo! Go 2.0 have made a good stab at offering certain kinds of information, but are still limited.
The New York Times reported that “Google disclosed that it received more traffic from iPhones this Christmas than from any other mobile device, despite owning only 2 percent of the smartphone market and less than 1 percent of the overall mobile-phone market.”
So we’re finally starting to see the effect a well-designed mobile Internet connection can have in the US. People will be using their phones for activities previously done on their PC.
Leigh Marriner — 31 January 2008
There is a lot of hype suddenly about touch screens, as a result of the launch of the Apple iPhone. But touch screens have been around for a long time - pressing digital buttons on an information kiosk is nothing new. What really changes the consumer experience is being able to use natural gestures to interact with a computer or mobile device. Although they may sound similar, there is a big difference between the HP TouchSmart PC which allows you to touch a photo and drag it across the screen, and the Microsoft Surface. On the Surface you can gesture through pages of text or graphics, draw on the screen, or turn photos around with your finger. In a similar way, you can change the size of your photo on an iPhone or Surface by moving your fingers apart, a natural movement.
The Tablet PC never really took off, despite the wonderful ability to be able to write or draw on the screen and capture the data. I think the reason is more due to the fact that the laptops were too hot to rest comfortably on your lap, the file sizes were huge, and handwriting wasn’t convertible into editable text, rather than a lack of consumer interest in its functionality.
Whether the Microsoft Surface succeeds as a stand-alone product, I think we will see its functionality incorporated into PCs of the future. It’s far more natural to gesture on a screen than to use a mouse or click pad.
Kathleen Chattin — 24 January 2008
Observations from a whirlwind tour of CES this year left me longing for the “good old days”. That is, the days of the “big breakthrough.” It’s true that many companies deliberately schedule their big announcements outside CES to avoid getting lost in the clutter. And there are still some big initiatives going on in tech. But this seemed a year when the big stuff was an evolution of something touted in prior years (the digital home, wi-max, anywhere access, etc.). Not only did innovation appear to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but judging from the CES floor, the market has diverted much of its attention to accessories. It was the year of the “little stuff”.
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Lee Shupp — 26 August 2007
As you probably recall, I have started the Big Rip, converting my entire CD collection into 256 Kbps mp3s on a network hard drive. My original plan was to rip all of my CDs, starting with roots music that I use as a musician, then going to catalog rock, jazz, world and vocal and dance music.
Current size of music folder on network hard drive: 5 Gigs
I've encountered quite a few annoying little problems, and have developed some workarounds.
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Lee Shupp — 25 August 2007
I've been trying to describe the difference between my iPod and my Zune to people, and here's the best description that I've come up with. My iPod is like my model girlfriend, and my Zune is like the girl next door.
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Lee Shupp — 25 August 2007
I am beginning the Big Rip. That's right, I’m ripping all of my CD's and selling them. All of them. I love the convenience that digital media offers, and I’m tired of the clutter and confusion of CDs. As a musician and dedicated music fan, I literally have thousands of CDs scattered all over my house. I have CDs in my living room, bedroom, studio, car, and all points in between. I have no idea how many CDs I own. I’m tired of digging thru stacks of CDs in diffferent locations to find that obscure Hound Dog CD that I'm suddenly in the mood for. I realized that what I have is a big database problem, and that I can pretty easily have all of my music available wherever and whenever I want it.
Before you laugh at this megageek project, think about the big database problem that you have, or will have soon...
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Kathleen Chattin — 6 August 2007
The rural poor in emerging markets may or may not ever be able to buy their own PC…or even want one. But there’s an alternative, already developed by Intel, to provide a shared “Community PC.” . It was designed for a shared usage model, at a village “kiosk”, somewhat similar to the Internet cafés that are already a widespread phenomenon in many emerging markets. So there are technical and financial alternatives to the one-per-person model.
Low-cost PCs are ‘sprouting up’ all over, whether the $199 PC from Lenovo, or Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative, or Intel’s Classmate PC . There’s lots of goodness, people claim, in making PC’s accessible to everyone. But what’s good for short-term market penetration may bode ill for long-term innovation in the category.
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Leigh Marriner — 21 July 2007
CNET News.com’s article a couple days ago reminds me of how much we at Cheskin take for granted our insight into teen technology behavior. We’ve been watching teen use of email declining, starting in South Korea some years ago and then spreading eventually to the US. Teens declining use of email doesn’t seem like new news.
The real story is also not a new story. Social networks only work if your friends are using the network – whether that be the landline phone, the cell phone, email, MySpace, Facebook, text messaging or whatever. And teens are fickle and are followers as a characteristic of their lifestage – they’re supposed to be more open to trying new things, be less risk averse, and more connected to what their friends are doing. So fashions tend to move and fade faster with many teens than with other lifestage groups. [This is a generalization - Cheskin has done a teen segmentation which highlights which groups of teens personify this “typical” teen behavior.] And since being part of a social network is so critical for teens, we see rich development in networking behavior. Teen’s core behavior hasn’t changed, just their method.
Teens have moved away from communicating by email, except with their parents, colleges, work, and for shopping, because their friends aren’t checking frequently. An additional appeal of a social networking site like MySpace was that for awhile adults didn’t understand it and weren’t using the site – which made it like a private teen clubhouse. Part of the impetus to move to Facebook was that it was originally limited to college, and then added high school students, as MySpace became more broadly used.
There are certainly disadvantages to using social networking sites versus email – you can’t send attachments, you need to open a profile before sending a message, and some profiles load slowly. But those disadvantages aren’t determinative if Facebook is where your friends are. Facebook recently opened up to hooking in applications, so you can do things like pull in YouTube videos to your profile, which addresses some of the most important teen needs for attachments. And kids will continue to move as the next best thing comes up.
Leigh Marriner — 23 April 2007
I’ve been puzzled when I talk with teenagers and they say they’re not going out with someone – although they spend hours at each other’s houses and on the phone, go to the prom together, and stop to see the other one on their way home from the airport when they come back from vacation. But they’re not “going out”.
It’s a fascinating example of the way technology influences how people see themselves and how they perceive the world. We’ve all heard about teens hooking up in casual relationships, but “not going out” has nothing to do with hooking up. It turns out that a teenager is “going out” when they indicate on their Facebook page that they are “in a relationship”, and not before. The baggage that goes along with going out is that you have to officially break up at some point, as opposed to just letting things take their course.
In 6th grade, kids are “going out” if the boy asks the girl if she will go out with him and she says yes. And that is the end of the story. Nothing else required.
Cultural anthropology in our own backyard.
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Leigh Marriner — 20 March 2007
Yesterday’s New York Times had a story by David Carr about Assignment Zero, a new collaboration between Wired magazine and an experimental journalism site at NYU. The idea is to apply to journalism the same open-source model as Linux and Wikipedia. Very interesting, but this has been happening for several years.
The best Katrina photos and videos shown on major TV networks were user-generated. MetroBlogging is a wireless blogging service in 43 worldwide cities that lets bloggers post first-person accounts of news events, like the July 2005 London bombings. There is also an online newspaper in Asia that has been successful using only user-generated content. I believe readers vote on the content and payment is made for the most desired content.
Web 2.0 and user-generated content can edge out old media with the volunteer labor of amateurs who are rewarded by peer acknowledgement and the satisfaction of seeing their work used. Before Web 2.0, group communication was limited to geeks. We’re just beginning to realize how productive the hive can be and how powerful it is when it swarms in a particular direction. Take a couple examples: 1) Mash-ups are allowing people to weave applications together and create information that people want. E.g. Platial lets users create meaningful maps by associating information tags such as restaurant locations. Other mash-ups associate information with photos so you can look for a town in Mexico and see what others have liked there. 2) Social search is becoming a reality in many different blogs and communities that leverage recommendations from like minds. The challenge is finding the right communities, blogs and RSS feeds to target 3) The opinions of a large number of “normal” people can better predict outcomes than experts.
I think the challenge of journalism will become more a matter of editing and selecting the information to present from a wide range of sources, reporters being only one of them. What readers want from a newspaper or information site is intelligently presented sifting of the masses of information out there, coming from an identified point of view.
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Leigh Marriner — 15 March 2007
Will Marc Andreessen succeed with Ning, which plans to make it easy for anyone, including adults, to set up their own social networking sites? Is online social networking a function of lifestage or is Gen Y just introducing the other generations to a behavior that many of us will adopt?
Why do teens use MySpace and Facebook so heavily? These have replaced email and even IM to some extent, as teens’ preferred way to communicate with their social group and to find out what’s going on (hot new music, who was at what parties, etc.) For teens, the meaningful experiences delivered by social networking sites are Connection and Knowledge.
Adults may not have the same intense need for Connection with a large social group as teens, but easier access to a social network in an area of particular interest is appealing because it helps us wade through the growing morass of available information. And it helps people connect with people of like interests. Personally, I’d much rather get a San Francisco restaurant recommendation from people who are foodies than from Zagat, which may have started out that way but now publishes the scores from too broad a range of people to be reliable. To take another example, American parents who adopt a Chinese baby would like to share with others trying to raise their daughter in two cultures. Much of this kind of connection now happens on blogs, but I would expect the social networking tools provided by suppliers like Ning will make the experience more enjoyable and easier to navigate.
Adults will gravitate toward social networking sites, to a lesser extent than teens, but still in significant numbers. While the Korean social networking site CyWorld is used by 90% of 24-29 year-olds, it’s also used by 40% of the entire population.
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Leigh Marriner — 13 March 2007
Teens and young adults are leaders in almost all uses of consumer technology. Looking at the technology behavior of Gen Y (those age 6-26 born between 1980 and 2000), you can tell a lot about what will be mainstream in a few years. The big unknown is which of those behaviors are a function of lifestage (teens and young adults) and which are behaviors that the whole generation will carry with them as they age. Will Gen Y still IM relentlessly when they are 40? Will they use social networking sites? Will their primary use of digital photos be to have fun with an image in the moment as opposed to documenting an occasion the way Boomers do?
Consumer technology companies looking for innovative product and service ideas often ask Cheskin these questions since we have looked at this issue for a number of years across many different product categories. The key to the answer is - what meaningful experience is the consumer seeking? Meaningful experiences are those that evoke our sense of the value and significance of our lives - the types of experiences people value most.
At Cheskin, we listen to the stories that people tell with an ear for the underlying meaningful experience. Gen Y uses IM heavily because social life is the center of most teenagers’ world, they want to be constantly in touch with a whole group, and they use IM to make social plans. IM’s ability to indicate “presence”, or who else is available on the network is key because Gen Y invests heavily in maintaining a robust network of friends.
So is IM behavior only a function of lifestage, since participating in a wide social life doesn’t rank as high on Gen X or Boomer priorities? Certainly Gen Y will IM less as they age (or use whatever technology replaces IM in the future). But they will take this learned behavior into the areas of their life where it meets a similar need – e.g. staying in touch with a work group during a meeting.
We predict that IM use will rise in older age groups as the current Gen Y ages, but teens and young adults will continue to be the heaviest users. We would advise a client to look for ways to tap into the meaningful experience of Connection in those over age 25 to increase IM-type usage.
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Lisa Leckie — 10 February 2007
I remember a time not too long ago when traveling to Europe or Asia meant being transplanted in an entirely different landscape filled with new foods, products, advertising, you name it. There was newness everywhere and it was an incredible source of inspiration. I always felt like such an adventurer, scouting for the next big thing to share with my peers. Trendspotting tended to be focused around identifying stuff that was emerging, hot, different or just timely. It was easier.
The world is a much different, much smaller place today…
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Leigh Marriner — 7 February 2007
Dropping DRM (digital rights management) protection on music makes a lot of sense, as Steve Jobs is recommending. I saw the same thing happen with copy protection on gaming and edutainment PC software in the 1980s. Consumers found it so burdensome that they invested a lot of energy in getting around the copy protection (read: downloading free MP3 music files) and in breaking the copy protection algorithms (similarly, any high school kid knows how to download music from his friend’s iPod onto his PC). And sales of PC games took off after copy protection was removed.
Consumers hate DRM, and there will be even more of a backlash as time passes and people replace their PCs and find that they’ve already used up all their permissible legal copies and they have now lost all the music they’ve purchased. Or they backup up their collection and then try to download it to a replacement PC and find it isn’t allowed.
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Denise Klarquist — 2 November 2006
An ongoing conversation at Cheskin, as within almost any company, has been one of assessing and helping to improve productivity, quality and performance. A big question is what really contributes to and hinders our ability to perform our at our best. In a company where collaboration, creative processes and innovative thinking are an essential part of our DNA, there are not always obvious answers. One thing is for certain though - technology is an essential component.
As a company where a majority of the people here are on the road somewhere in the world almost 40% of the time, technology is essential - email, IM, cell phones, PCS connection cards for wireless laptops, Blackberries, WebEx, camera phones, digital everything - you name it. None of this is unfamiliar. Yet what is the tradeoff for this level of immediacy and information?
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Gary Feldman — 1 November 2006
We've done a lot of work on mobile devices and technology at Cheskin, and we know that different consumer segments often want very different things from their phone.
From capturing photos and video, accessing email and the web, playing music and games, to potentially replacing the PC (see my colleague Leigh Marriner's post about Symbian's declaration), cell phones keep pushing the envelope.
Yet, there are certain types of consumers who crave less, not more. Now Jitterbug by Great Call has launched a new service aimed at Baby Boomers and Seniors focused on a simple and streamlined user experience. Perhaps this positioning has an even wider appeal?
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Leigh Marriner — 18 October 2006
The company's chief executive, Nigel Clifford, told delegates that the dawning era of the smart phone represents a shift "as profound as the Internet and PC were in the 1990s." He suggested that the popularity of smart phones in the developed world and the "leapfrog economies" phenomenon in developing countries--in which expensive wired infrastructures are bypassed in favor of wireless--would create a situation where there was a "smart phone in every pocket.
We at Cheskin have been forecasting this seachange for years as a result of our observations about consumer behavior in Asia and Europe, and it's nice to see our predictions coming to pass! In Korea, where mobile broadband is ubiquitous, we hear things like: "My life has changed because of mobile broadband. It's essential to my daily business and my personal life. Even in the office I have instant access to almost any information or service without having to sit at my desk."
Interesting comments on this CNet article.
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Leigh Marriner — 19 September 2006
As corporate PC sales have slowed over the past few years, companies have focused more on opportunities to sell to consumers. Witness HP’s refocus on the consumer market and digital photography and Microsoft’s efforts in entertainment digital rights management (DRM) and the new Zune media player. But the playing field is shifting and the established players are in danger of missing a big opportunity because they are tied to their existing way of doing business.
Consumers prefer to bypass the PC altogether whenever possible and convenient. They want to transfer photos directly from their digital cameras to their printer, or send a photo from their camera to a friend’s camera or MySpace site. Although they store music on their hard drive, they prefer to trade playlists directly between MP3 players. For Gen Y, their playlist, like their clothing, is an important way of reflecting their identity and they display playlists on their device, not the PC. Microsoft’s new Zune portable media player is beginning to take advantage of these insights by allowing consumers to download songs directly to the device using WiFi and to beam songs to friends.
Still, the major players are weighted down by their “concrete shoes” which tie them to their existing way of doing business. Instead of assuming consumers will regard the PC as their base for digital entertainment, why not build products for an environment where the PC isn’t central. For example storing photos on the web and sharing and accessing them through a portable device (which has the added advantage of protecting family photos from disk crashes). Or tagging songs from the radio to download directly to the MP3 player, as Sirius is doing. The company that offers an easy ecosystem for digital entertainment which doesn’t involve the PC could be the next iPod-like success story.
Darrel Rhea — 19 March 2006
The ubiquitous use of RFIDs (Radio Frequency Identification Devices) is finally starting to show up on the radar screen of consumer outcry. It’s ironic that the latest hue is from Berkeley bibliophiles. Upon learning of the impending use of RFID technology in the Berkeley Public Library, protesters have avowed to boycott it. I don’t remember reading anything similar when San Francisco and Seattle discussed implementing RFIDs a few years ago, and not even when Santa Clara Public Library tagged all of their materials in 2000. Is it the Berkeley mind-set, or is it that the public is finally catching up to what is going on?
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Cynthia Chan — 13 February 2006
Tokyo, a forever exciting and energetic city, fascinates me in different ways. Aside from sashimi and authentic shabu shabu, its technology wows me all the time. Technology is advancing at full speed every single minute in a wide range of areas, including consumer electronics, robotics, automobiles, etc.
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Darrel Rhea — 29 January 2006
Everybody needs downtime. In the past – when I had the luxury of recreational time – my play of choice was either composing music or something physically challenging such as paragliding and white water kayaking. These days, though, I have to settle for getting my kicks by playing with a handful of tech toys. As a confirmed closet geek, I love ‘em all.
Below are my current five favorite tech products. Each of them actually exceeded my expectations:
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Terri Ducay — 24 January 2006
An Associated Press release that came out today was titled: Jobs to Become Major Hollywood Player.
I would argue that well before Disney/Pixar was a done deal that Steve Jobs was already a major Hollywood player.
After all, he singled handedly changed the music buying paradigm with the introduction of the Apple iPod and iTunes online music store. He went on to make a business out of video downloading and was also the man behind podcasting, which has basically been a revolutionary force, allowing anyone to produce and distribute content to a very large audience for almost nothing.
Not to mention setting the standard for animation at Pixar, credited with creating the first fully computer animated movies. And making great entertainment and hundreds of millions of dollars at the same time.
Does this not make Steve a major Hollywood player even without being on Disney’s board?
What is more accurate to say is that Steve is a major Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Global player. He is the only person brilliant enough to have successfully blurred the line between software and hardware, creating products that are not only technically solid and easy to use, they are fun and stylish.
Steve, you’re my man.
Leigh Marriner — 12 January 2006
We recently had a party and were piping the music from my husband's PC through his new Bose sound system. A friend tried to make a phone call from the room, but was stymied by how to turn down the music. There’s no obvious volume controls if Windows Media Player isn’t open on the desktop. I have several friends who don’t watch DVDs any more unless their kids are home (usually a long shot) because if the home theater was left on some non-standard setting, it’s too hard to figure out how to play the movie.
All this digital entertainment at our fingertips is great, but there is a large segment of the user population that just wants an on/off button, volume up/down key, and a Play Movie key. Some new cell phones have figured this out and come with a Save and Delete key for voicemail so you don’t have to remember which number to push on this system. Where is the iPod approach to the digital living room? Will it be the Google PC? With buttons for Get Email, Get Info, Look at Photos, Play Games, Watch Movie, Watch TV, Listen to Music?
He who has the most features at CES doesn’t necessarily win.
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Leigh Marriner — 8 January 2006
Working in the technology business on a daily basis, it’s easy to miss those rare glimpses of how all this technology really changes people’s lives. I have a friend who frequently circumnavigates the globe with several stops in 6 days or less, and has coped by taking sleeping pills. Well, his life has changed judging from the email I got yesterday.
“I am aboard Lufthansa 756 flying 37,000 feet over Karachi, Pakistan on the way to Mumbai, but since you just asked. I logged into our BofA account and found the money just arrived. Good news.
All this courtesy of Connexion by Boeing, a wireless LAN that bounces off a satellite and everything is going through our VPN.
BTW, I am also blasting The Eagles greatest hits through my Bose headphones that are plugged into my Dell which is sucking the tunes down live from the Rhapsody online music service.
This is the ONLY WAY TO FLY. What a world.”
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Christopher Ireland — 7 December 2005
Thanks to an old Microsoft buddy, Nils von Veh, I now have my own radio station. No FCC regulations to worry about, no advertisers to please, no unbearable DJ chatter. Just a simple website that streams music I like for free from any PC.
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Leigh Marriner — 10 October 2005
Ning: A Bionomic versus Command-and-Control approach to technology development
What is interesting about the new website Ning, from Marc Andreessen's latest company 24 Hour Laundry, is that they are putting out tools to see what develops as consumers use the site. This is similar to what happened with the original SimCity, where players developed their own cities and posted them for other to use. Or currently with Second Life where a real dollar market in the online currency Lindendollars was developed by users. It would be nice to see other developers take a similar approach in some of these areas – throw some things out and let them develop from the bottom up, rather than using a top down planned approach. This seems to be what Google is doing. In these cutting edge areas of technology, I don’t think anyone can foresee what will happen and which will be the “killer apps”.
Ning is described as a free online service for building "social applications." Company executives refer to Ning as a "playground" for creating content, such as photos and reviews, and sharing that information to connect with other people. The Ning site hosts these "social applications" and gives Web developers tools to make it easy for developers to build whatever app they want for any topic, interest, group, language, location or product, without a lot of effort. The first topics include a way to share book reviews, tips on San Francisco Bay Area walking trails and profiles of superheroes.
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Leigh Marriner — 6 October 2005
IDC just reported that 1 billion IMs are sent every day between 28 million enterprise users. Growth in the enterprise segment is all thanks to IM crossover from consumer use. MSN Messenger and AOL IM have been widely used for years in the home. We’ve seen the same thing happen with digital cameras. Here at Cheskin we now use our personal digital cameras for recording what’s written on the whiteboard after a brainstorming session, or for snapping shots of the culture while we travel abroad and sending video-postcards to our clients, or for posting visual data on a project site using our internal Sharepoint portal. We're seeing it happen in gaming as companies use videogame technology and experience to develop training tools and even in scientific research to simulate how people will actually behave during a viral pandemic (e.g. the recent World Of Warcraft virus).
It’s always important for a tech company to monitor what's going on in the consumer market. Too often consumer technology is relegated to stepsister status and not considered real hardcore technology. The crossover phenomenon is real and can dramatically change the business market.
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Leigh Marriner — 5 October 2005
I went into a Verizon store last week to switch my cell phone number over to a different device. My current phone broke and I want to buy the Motorola Razr Q when it comes out in January. So I brought in my old phone as a temporary replacement. I thought it was identical to the simple phones my kids still use, except that mine’s black instead of a cool silver that lights up blue when a call comes in. But Verizon wouldn’t hook it up. Why? The government no longer lets them hook up a phone unless it has GPS. This must be the best kept secret around. If your cell phone is on, the government or law enforcement can track where you’ve been. That’s creepy.
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Leigh Marriner — 28 September 2005
There have been a flurry of conversations about whether Google is supplanting Windows as a consumer PC platform. Some of the interesting blogs are:
The Web is on an equal footing with Windows for Microsoft now. From Read/WriteWeb.
From OSNews.com. Maybe they are on a collision course, but the scenario, you need to see fleshed out a bit, to believe it would have to specify what is going to happen to revenues. If you're MS planners, you're looking first at OS revenues, which are closely tied to PC shipments. Now, do you believe that Google is going to affect the number of PCs shipped?
THIS MISSES THE RISK THAT CONSUMERS MAY IDENTIFY WITH GOOGLE MORE THAN WINDOWS AND TURN TO GOOGLE FIRST, BRINGING AD REVENUE WITH THEM. IT'S NOT JUST OS SHIPMENTS THAT ARE IMPORTANT. CONSUMERS ARE A HUGE MARKET AND THEY NOW IDENTIFY MORE WITH THE WEB AND THEIR MOBILE DEVICES, THAN WITH THE PC. THAT COULD MAKE GOOGLE THEIR FIRST CHOICE FOR PAID SERVICES AND COULD MAKE A WINDOWS CONNECTION TO MOBILE DEVICES LESS MEANINGFUL.
From Slashdot. I'd wager we have a while to wait before the Web-as-platform paradigm really takes off.
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Leigh Marriner — 27 September 2005
It’s true that the telecos are rapidly cutting prices faced with new competition from cell phones and VoIP. But when I look at my historical Quicken budget for telephone services, I was spending a lot less four years ago. Instead of spending $70/month on a landline phone, I’m now spending $20/month on a landline including all long distance calls, but I’ve added $100+/month for my cell phone, not counting the data services which I’m about to add.
There is cause for hope as competition puts pricing pressure on the mobile operators. Right now, mobile operators charge 3-5 times as much as fixed operators per minute. As dual function mobile VoIP/wireless phones become a reality, travelers will use WiFi connections in airports and hotels to make free or low cost calls over the internet. Phones which can switch seamlessly between the mobile wireless network and VoIP calls on the internet will even allow users on the move to switch the call to the internet when in range of a WiMAX or WiFi site. In addition, the mobile operator’s new 3G wireless networks which offer high-speed internet connection will bring pricing pressure to bear as customers are able to place calls at lower data rates.
So maybe I’ll be back to paying $70/month in a couple years. Not counting the kid’s cell phones.
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Leigh Marriner — 12 September 2005
There is an interesting shift afoot in the PC industry. Google wants to bring consumers into its ecosystem as soon as they open their PC, and completely bypass the Windows desktop ecosystem. In this model, the PC and Windows are just a conduit to the web, necessary only to manage the hardware and peripherals, and Google is akin to an internet operating system. Google is following an integrated model offering many services in one place (not unlike what Microsoft did with Office on the PC) so a home PC user can do most of what they want to do from the Google platform. Google uses each of its services to promote its other services – search, mail, blog, social networking, photo management, shopping, TV and movies, etc.
Handling photos is a good example. Consumers are confused over what software to use to save, edit, organize and print their photos. Google offers Picasa for free and positions it as the place to start when downloading digital photos. Then consumers can use Hello to photo-share and chat, or Blogger, or attach a photo to an email. Google may be able to monetize this consumer traffic by passing consumers on to printing sites for a share of revenue, plus they get advertising revenue on their site based on number of eyeballs.
This scenario could end with consumer’s primary emotional attachment and brand identification on the PC being with Google. Will we see a $200 Google PC that accesse the web, supports email and IM, manages photos, schedules and online shopping and integrates with your mobile phone?
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Darrel Rhea — 7 July 2005
Someone just asked me what I thought the value of blogging has been for Cheskin, after our launching our corporate blog some 30 months ago in 2003. My take is that it’s been an entirely valuable exercise for us. Blogging connects our organization to the world in a way that is tangibly different from other forms of communication. This is probably true for most serious (regular) bloggers. Revealing yourself engages you in a broader discourse; you become a participant in the world in a different way. It’s a subtle attitudinal change that has us show up as more responsible citizens.
The other thing about blogging is being humbled by the power of words. While they can enlighten and inspire, the same words can offend. Blogs are personal, yet quite public when thousands read them. Again, it forces us to be responsible for the “listening” of others.
Christopher Ireland — 23 June 2005
OK, I admit it. I'm in love with another man. Despite the headache this may cause me at home, the adoration I have for Thomas Friedman is beginning to take on signs of true romance. Granted, he doesn't know I exist, but he sends chills up my spine nonetheless.
His NY Times column is always my first read on Sunday. I loved The Lexus and the Olive Tree which gave great insights on globalization, and his latest book, The World is Flat, (a deadly accurate assessment of global competition and innovation in the coming decades), simply knocked me out.
This is not an adolescent infatuation. He's a pleasant-looking guy, but his biceps have nothing on his brain. What really does it for me is how boldly he thinks--and that he has the courage to speak loudly and decisively. Like his June 17 NY Times column titled "As Toyota Goes"...
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Darrel Rhea — 16 June 2005
Recently my son asked me to read an article in Discover Magazine , on the positive effects of video gaming. My concerns as a parent of a preteen (and several post-teens) about the effects of popular culture on youth influence many of my decisions about allowable activities, or duration of participation. Maybe, according to the many studies cited and various writers’ testimonials in Discover, gaming actually does have positive effects on shaping cognitive thinking -- and perhaps I should view gaming as important to shaping my son’s critical thinking as, say, reading or joining the debate team.
It seems that the addictive nature of games (the good ones) occurs not only because they are entertaining, but because they are challenging to the gamer at the appropriate level every step along the way, thereby taking the gamer to his/her point of “Flow” or what cognitive psychologists termed “regime of competence.” This is a core principal of learning: as the gamer (learner) becomes more proficient, the activity, characters and subcontext become more complex and rewarding.
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Lee Shupp — 8 June 2005
Steven Johnson has just written a very interesting book called "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter" The book argues that many of the activities that we consider "bad," like watching network TV shows or playing video games, are actually good for us. Johnson utilizes the approach pioneered by media observer Marshall McLuhan ("the medium is the message") who focused upon the forms of media rather than content.
Focusing on form reveals many interesting insights. Take TV.
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Lisa Leckie — 6 June 2005
Today’s speculation is about TOLERANCE. My sub-conscious, flying-at-an-imperceptible-latitude kind of radar for picking up popular news and other patterns within the media says tolerance is a hot idea, and worthy of more attention (uh huh…even more than it’s received to date).
I would argue tolerance is one of the key differences between younger and older generations today. We do a lot of work at Cheskin that aims to understand these differences relative to fashion, technology, retail, etc. And, while this isn’t a direct insight from our work, it’s a presumption I have about the state of the world and how it’s changing. Tolerance is also a function of a more media rich and global economy.
Here are some hypotheses I have about how tolerance is appearing in our daily lives (and more readily appearing with younger generations):
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— 12 May 2005
Malcolm Bricklin is living my dream. He has founded a start-up car company. From offices in New York, Bricklin’s Visionary Vehicles has arranged a number of strategic partnerships with suppliers around the world, including Italian design firms Pininfarina and Bertone for vehicle styling, American architecture and construction firms for designing and building retail facilities, and an automobile manufacturer in China, Chery Automobile Company, to produce the vehicles. Visionary Vehicles is effectively a virtual car company.
Visionary Vehicles’ mission is “to bring an exciting new brand of aggressively priced, beautifully styled, high-quality vehicles into North America.” But the significance of the company is greater than just being a low-cost producer of cars. It has the potential to return the industry to the days of individual entrepreneurs building cars that reflected the founder’s character.
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Darrel Rhea — 7 May 2005
Cheskin is big on collaboration, and we are always looking for new ways to enhance our communications. That’s why I took notice when the people who run Sun Labs showed off two of their new products to me at Sun Labs Day. Given that Sun has invested over $8 billion in research over the last 4 years on the coolest future technology, getting an invite to this small event is a privilege. To call their open house (held at the Computer History Museum) a “geek fest” is an understatement. I found myself in conversations about metacircularity, acoustic resonance spectrometry, and squawk technology. (It should go without saying that I understood nothing about these, but used the opportunity to refine my intelligent, sincere nod –- it’s all in the eyebrows.)
The first was “Office Central.” The goal of this system is to provide remote workers some of the social advantages that workers in a central location enjoy.
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Denise Klarquist — 29 March 2005
Shortly after Sarah Jessica Parker turned 40, GAP announced her replacement - 17 year old Joss Stone . A few days later I hopped on a commuter flight and was seated between a man giving a presentation in Oakland and Bethany, an 8 year old visiting her grandparents in Seattle. As soon as we were situated, the first (and only) of us to flip down the tray table and flip open a laptop was Bethany. That would be a pink Barbie laptop . This, after visiting my sister where my 4 year old niece declined my help to launch her favorite CDs on the Mac and navigate through the games and stories.
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— 26 January 2005
What internet search engine do you prefer?
Yahoo, Google, Lycos, Altavista...?
Have you tried clusty? It may help us all be more productive.
Disclaimer: This is not a paid advertisement nor is the blogger a paid endorser. :)
I have always looked for crawler-based search engines that provide both comprehensive coverage of the web along with relevancy in the search results they yield. Yet this morning I came a cross a different type of search engine (or is it?)
Over coffee, as we were talking about cool sites we knew, my brother (he holds a Ph.D. on Cool Science.) suggested I try clusty... And I did.
When you get to Clusty.com there seems to be nothing particularly unique or appealing about this site/search engine. Still I went ahead and tried it. I typed a search related to what interests me such as "Hispanic top 10 markets". The results obtained were not very different from what I would obtain at Google or Yahoo, but... Besides providing plenty of relevant results, clusty also clustered the results into categories! These categories were neatly displayed on the left, next to the main results andwithout interfering. It looks like this feature is going to save me time!!! I typed in the same search on Yahoo and Google, and these sites did not provide this feature.
I love the categories feature because it is a shortcut. I can choose the results category I needed directly. In this case there was Top 10 Hispanic Music, Top 10 Hispanic Demographic markets, Top 10 Hispanic Media, Top 10 Hispanic Radio, etc... I no longer have to scan 100s of results to find what i need.
I guess the problem with search engines is that they provide too many answers. This may be "too much of a good thing" I feel clusty is a search engine that helps me be more productive and I appreciate their thoughtfulness in trying to categorize results. I invite you to try it. Hope you find it useful.
Also, I would not mind if they found a name that was as cool as the site actually is.
Miguel Lyons-Cavazos — 4 January 2005
We’ve been talking about the convergence of data for years now (see our POV piece Designing Digital Experiences for Youth). As in, convergence is all about getting your data (music, video, games, etc.) from multiple devices in multiple locations and long ago stopped being about the silver-bullet, all-in-one device.
Some recent events are very interesting in the realm of video as it relates to convergence.
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Leigh Marriner — 27 December 2004
Forget shelling out $.99 per song. Monthly subscription to digital music is easier and it matches the actual behavior of teenagers and young adults, who share songs widely, passing playlists around their circle of friends. And our research shows that many adults who consider music an important part of their life love to discover new music and share it with their friends – and what better way than having unlimited access to a library of 900,00 songs on Napster, Rhapsody, etc.
All that is missing is a company ready to invest in promoting subscriptions to consumers. Yes, consumers fear “losing” all their music if they stop their monthly subscription payments. But there are ways around this – e.g. give subscribers ownership of x songs with a one year subscription. Steve Job’s opposition to subscriptions for iTunes is missing the boat. This is a golden opportunity for someone like Walmart or Sony or Microsoft to jump onboard.
Leigh Marriner — 24 August 2004
Apple offers an option within the DRM (digital rights management) protection in iTunes called "share my music," that lets users make their playlists available to any other computer running iTunes on their local network. By clicking on someone else's shared music within iTunes, users can "stream" the music to their PC, playing it without actually storing it. Since most colleges have fast local area networks, this has become standard procedure at many colleges. In dorms you can click on the network and see 40 or more music libraries. And programs are widely available that use iTunes as a conduit for illicit music downloading.
Once again Apple has created a cool factor around its products by making it easy for users to showcase their personality and taste by posting their personal playlist. So what’s wrong with allowing sharing on local area networks?
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— 18 August 2004
I guess there have been other attempts at IT for teens (I'm thinking Cybiko) but the Hip-e is the first fully functioning computer that I have seen claim teens as its primary target.
And it is about time. Teens have long been power-users of personal computers and extremely important influencers in the purchase of IT for the home, but have been making do with product designed for their parents. I know from my experience developing new products and services for the youth market with AT&T Labs that teens want, at minimum, the ability to make their stuff their stuff. Hip-e recognizes this.
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Christopher Ireland — 14 July 2004
It has been far too long since I posted to this blog. I managed to write several entries in my mind, but never found the time to make them real for anyone else. This bothered me. Not the "I really should be doing this because I'm a team player" type of bother, but rather the "I need a quick fix" kind of bother. This is an addicting medium.
Many are thinking and talking about blogging and its psychological impacts. My colleague, JJ Valera, sent a very interesting link by Gordon Gould on the topic of who blogs and why. He references a number of other sites and can send you on a pleasureable, interrelated reading journey for quite some time. Try it--you'll like it. Trust me.
Lisa Leckie — 2 July 2004
Cheskin was recently asked to provide some insight towards an article in the New York Times News of the Week in Review section. The topic we needed to address was the future of the television commercial---specifically, how do teens view and embrace television commercials? What are the predominant influences shaping teens’ interactions with TV? Is the television commercial likely to evolve, and if so, how will teens engage it? What role will it have within their television experience? Their lives? We culled our thoughts, and came up with the following hypotheses:
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Davis Masten — 8 June 2004
Reason magazine created 40,000 custom covers to illustrate the editorial focus of their May issue. The image below is an example of what subscribers received: an aerial photo of their home right on the cover. This exercise underscores the powerful article Database Nation inside, which speaks to the benefits of living in a data-mining world. While the free market/Libertarian point of view is clear in the article, it also is a good overview of how much is publicly available about each one of us.
As someone who has studied trust/privacy issues for years, I found the article to be chilling but also refreshing. The amount of easily accessible data available is growing every day and truly frightens me.
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Darrel Rhea — 31 March 2004
Cell phone penetration in Spain is 94%, and text messaging is so common that it is noticeable. I’m in Barcelona now and people walk around reading their phones like they used to read newspapers. At a park bench or bus stop, people contemplate their phones. On the metro, they share the view of the tiny screens. While I see some of this at home in the US, it is at a different scale here.
Reading of the recent events in Madrid left me wondering how a government could be toppled in a matter of hours. One of the answers seems to be the pervasive use of text messaging. While demonstrations are not officially allowed 24 hours before a vote, text messaging volume soared in Spain as all sides lobbied for spontaneous demonstrations and certainly influenced the high 77% voter turnout.
While email and internet use are a growing part of our election process, I can’t see it having the same immediacy as a device people carry with them like a cell phone. As watches, phones and PDAs become more wired; it is only a matter of time before our society becomes more volatile and reactive.
Good that democracy might be more participative -- Bad that misinformation and rumors will certainly proliferate at the speed of light. The Spanish government-owned media is now being blamed for disseminating misinformation about the Basques, and in this case it seems that the population caught on fast and reacted to counter that effort. Technology is unleashing some serious forces here.
Stuart — 26 March 2004
Last Sunday, I read an article in the NY Times Magazine, The Honesty Virus, which revealed "we fib less frequently when we are online than when we are talking in person." This made me start thinking about other recent data points that have indicated that the forms of social interaction are changing.
In a recent project that I just completed for a large retailer, we interviewed "teen experts" and found that although teens are still heavily influenced by their peers, they now have access to a much larger pool of peers around the world. Unlike previous generations, current teens are able to compare prices, products, quality, and services at the click of a button. With access to tools such as e-mail, chat rooms, cell phones, and instant messaging, information on products that teens' value is quickly disseminated, creating brand loyalty quicker and market share faster than ever before seen.
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Denise Klarquist — 16 March 2004
I discovered a new word today, SNAM, which refers to email networking spam. (thanks to Geoffrey Gonzalez whose blog referenced the term and got me investigating). Each time I'm invited to join or add someone (frequently unknown to me) to my Linkedin network, or asked to update my contact information via Plaxo (again, usually by someone I barely know) I wonder how far my online social network extends. And how useful it really is. I'm still intrigued and excited by the possibilities of online social networking. But I'm hoping to see more of the benefits before the noise dampens my enthusiasm.
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Christopher Ireland — 26 February 2004
I'm at the TED conference this week. I've been attending this conference since 1992, and I can honestly credit it with a series of "ah ha's!" over the years. It was at TED that I first learned of the "world wide web" and Mosaic, well before they hit commercial early adopters. TED introduced me to nanotechnology, biocomputing, flying cars, blogging and a host of other "truth is stranger than fiction" concepts. Thankfully, this conference balances science with highly creative music, art, poetry and humor.
Check out the speaker list and other info on the site, or read more of what's capturing my interest at this TED....
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Denise Klarquist — 10 October 2003
As Christopher mentioned, we've been doing some talking internally about grassroots marketing and social networks. A recent article made its way around about Nokia's efforts using blogs to create visibility for its 3650 camera phone. Nokia worked with Project Blog to target bloggers who could potentially market the product.
Project Blog (by Richards Interactive) is worth looking at. It's very upfront about how they interact with bloggers to help market products. They don't hold anything back about the potential value they place on the a blogger's social network and the nature of the transaction. And they don't tell the blogger what to write. This all raises a few questions:
-- Could this result in better products? It takes guts to place a product in the hands of anyone who has a penchant for talking too much to groups of loyal readers and has nothing to loose by trashing your product (except maybe more free stuff) .
-- How do you target the right blogging network and leader? Is it volume or variety, as discussed in a recent Reveries Cool News article.
-- Will bloggers become suspect and blogging just another jaded form of online marketing?
On this last point - I hope not.
— 2 September 2003
The emergence of flash mobs has created quite a media stir over the past few months. Now that they have occurred in many of the world's major metropolitan areas, some reflection on the hyperbole is in order. Opinions about what flash mobs mean or might mean are as varied as the ideological axes each commentator has to grind. Some see it as performance art, symbolic disruption, general goofiness, social movement, biologistic metaphor, information decentralization, Situationist tool, to name a few. I have to say that I take exception to the notion that flash mobs mean anything more than what they are in the moment - a random game of duck, duck, goose, overwhelming retail environments, spectacle, and public displays of seemingly random behavior. Historically, the power of technology (when considered in apart from its social context) has been vastly overrated and astonishingly misinterpreted. I can already hear the far off din of frenzied theorizing shifting into overdrive as I write this. Objectively speaking, flash mobs are largely a middle class, cosmopolitan, technocratic conceit, leaving the majority of the planet's inhabitants far out of the loop. If the global lack of food and potable water got as much media coverage as flash mobs the world would be a far better place. Indeed, the backlash has already begun. One of my favorite screeds about the overwrought interpretations of flash mobs can be found here.
Christopher Ireland — 10 August 2003
I spent the last week with 35 or so close family members at a small lake near Yosemite. I could blog for hours on the pure pleasure of hanging out with people you've known all your life, but that's not content for this site. However, while I tried very hard not to think of work, there were a few observations I couldn't miss:
--My 22 year old neice was sending messages to her boyfriend on her cell phone while watching TV and talking with the rest of us. She had no trouble engaging with all three mediums.
--My 19 year old neice took her laptop with her on the boat. When she wasn't on the water, she'd often sit reading a book, while listening to songs on her laptop with earphones.
--My son and his young family introduced me to the Oblongs--a very bizarre look at popular culture that makes Bart Simpson look dated.
--My 16 year old neice asked me to find a Starbucks so she could download some MP3 files.
--My 13 year old nephew was stunned to be in a house that didn't have a broadband connection. He couldn't understand how anyone could live that way.
I know from the studies we've done on youth populations that these are very normal kids. It was fascinating to see how easily and comfortably they integrate technology into normal activities.
Christopher Ireland — 23 July 2003
I was not surprised to learn that Barbie has her own blog. At the risk of enraging business women every where, I'm going to give Barbie credit for being an early adopter and having some positive influences.
Maybe I was just more open to interpretation, but the first Barbie I had suggested possibilities to me that I hadn't considered. For example, she had her own house without a husband. She had an outrageous pink convertible. She was capable of being an astronaut, a doctor, a movie star or a librarian. In fact, she could be all of them. At the time, she had more options and greater freedom than any real woman I knew. I had no problem looking up to her.
Did her influence skew my development in some perverse way? Maybe, but I don't have giant fake boobs, I don't wear stilettos, I'm afraid of blue eye shadow and I never wear short skirts. On the other hand, I'm quite capable of buying my own house and my own car, and my job performance depends much more on brains than looks. So if Barbie wants to blog and share her point of view with my 10 year old daughter, I'm not going to protest. She's no worse than Bart Simpson and arguably far better than Lara Croft.
Christopher Ireland — 28 May 2003
Today I got to play. Well, granted, it was scheduled play, but I'll take what I can get. A group of us met in the Mission district with an outfit called The Go Game. They gave us cell phones and digital cameras, a brief introduction, and we set off in pairs on a highly digital form of a savanger hunt. Our clues came to us as text messages on the cell phone. We ran all over the Mission, tracking down locations, composing photos, and shooting videos to the amusement of most who saw us. Fortunately, alot of people in this neighborhood have a weak grip on reality, so we didn't stand out too much. Everything we did was transmitted back to a server (via cell phone input), so at the conclusion of the game, we all were able to review each other entries--and to top it off, we used the same cell phones to vote on the winning entries.
This was fun. The technology was a perfect match to the game--not too intimidating or complex to spoil our enjoyment, but unique enough to add a novel twist. My team mate and I were spurred on by periodic phone messages letting us know we were in first place, no...second place, oops, we dropped to third, back to second..... In sum, it offered the flexibility and real time feedback I love from computer games, with the fresh air, human beings and real environment I love from my childhood games.
Christopher Ireland — 20 May 2003
Time is definitely not on my side. I have the strong impression of being on an accelerating train, and what used to be a view has become a blur. I'm a really organized person, but the tools I've used in the past are failing me in this new warp speed. I don't have time to open Word and decide on a format. I don't have time to check equations in Excel. I certainly don't have time to play with animations in PowerPoint. I barely have time to keep up with my email, and I sure don't have time to store each in its appropriate folder.
Don't worry, this is not a Ludite rant. I have even less time to deal with my scattered paper notes and voice mails to myself. So far, I've only found one tool that "might" be a very good fit for work at the speed of light. It's a funny little app MSFT is beta testing called OneNote. Simply put, it's a scrapbook built on a matrix framework. It's extremely flexible, but stays organized. And I don't have to think about it (it saves automatically and does a bunch of simple tasks that make it highly intuitive). To be fair, I have to disclose that we work extensively with MSFT, but we would never endorse a product because we were told to--i really like this little guy.
Christopher Ireland — 7 May 2003
Ok, now I'm really going to please Denise because I'm writing twice in one night... I was in a client work session today when someone posted the provocative statement "youth culture is dead." Several people gasped, while others nodded their heads solemnly. The explanation of why this could be true were rational, but it illustrated to me the importance of getting a very broad view of your customers. For this particular client, youth culture may well seem dead. There's very little difference between what a teen buys from them versus what an adult buys from them. But if you look at how young adults and teens are relating to computing technology, the generational divide is startling. Computing is part of their expected infrastructure, just like the phone, the TV and the car. It's integrated into their socializing and it's essential to their sense of entertainment. What makes this important to grasp and understand is not their current buying or usage patterns, but the effect it will have on their lives as they mature. They won't feel the need to separate computers from their home life as many Boomers do. I'll bet they won't even feel the need to separate computers from their bodies. Eventually, all those who thought youth culture died in the late 20th Century will be surprised to find it was alive, growing and transforming the world--just not in the way we expected. How rebellious of them.
Christopher Ireland — 9 April 2003
One of my favorite speculations is to think about the topics I wish someone would hire us to study. High on my current list is "magic." Not the bunny in the hat type of magic, but the type of innovation that makes people gasp and smile. They don't know how it works, and don't really care--they just want it because "it's magic." I'd love to understand how this works. It's beyond rational or logical thought. It's not really emotional. It's both subtle and overt. Most of all, it's massively powerful at promoting change. There aren't many "magic' products around right now--wireless networks are probably the most obvious. But once nanotechnology takes off, I think we'll be surrounded by it.
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