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Qualcomm’s Internet Of Everything

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One of the many interesting technologies presented here at Mobile World Congress by Qualcomm is their section they dubbed the Internet of Everything. They are promoting their recent experiments with the AllJoyn platform, that allows devices using their chips to communicate easily with eachother. The AllJoyn project is an open source project, but Qualcomm has dived head first into supporting it. It is meant to integrate with many different types of platforms, including Linux, Android and Windows Phone.

In an imagined use case, you would buy a coffee maker and take it home. It would have the applicable Qualcomm chipset in it and would be labelled as supporting AllJoyn. Through a to-be-determined process, you would pair it with your phone or tablet, and then be able to control it. You could remotely order it to start brewing, tell it how strong to make the coffee, and alert you when it’s done. The coffee maker could also then turn on the TV when it finishes brewing or pull up the New York Times website on your tablet.

A brand opportunity could be to build a branded app that interfaces with these appliances. So for instance, Folgers could sponsor a special Coffee-control app that does something special and on-brand for them.

There are no devices that support this framework out on the market currently, but apparently there will be a couple home appliances launching sometime this year which support AllJoyn. In the meantime Qualcomm continues to push innovation with this budding standard.

Samsung Continues To Expand Its Ecosystem

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As expected Samsung did not announce a new phone today at Mobile World Congress, but instead teased a big announcement, presumably the Galaxy S4, coming on March 14th. It did however unveil a couple new products, including a new 8″ Galaxy tablet.

Another new product being showcased was their new HomeSync set-top box. Retailing for 299 Euros at launch, the box is touted as having three key features:

  • “Home Cloud” – You can tap your Samsung mobile device running Android Jelly Bean or higher to a paired HomeSync box and it will automatically copy over all your photos and videos for big screen viewing. The device includes a 1TB internal drive.
  • The Media Center – This functionality, which looks very much like the Google TV interface for selecting content, allows you to browse and buy video content for playback on your TV.
  • Screen Mirroring

    • – Wirelessly mirror whatever you see on your device screen up to your compatible Samsung TV

In keeping with another major theme of the week, Samsung showcased a couple NFC technologies. One was a soda vending machine that accepted an NFC tap for payment, though it was unclear what the underlying clearing mechanism was and whether it is meant to compete with or complement technologies such as Google Wallet or Isis. They also showed off a product called TecTiles, which are programmable NFC stickers not unlike the ones we saw from Sony at CES 2012. After you set up the tags, you can tap them to launch a particular app on your phone or change phone settings.

There was also an in-development 2nd Screen app tentatively called S Catch. Like Shazam or IntoNow it listens for video content audio and matches the content accordingly. It is envisioned that this could evolve into an effective platform for ads.

From the “not sure why it is at a mobile event” category, they also showed off a blood testing kit where you bleed into a modified CD with plastic grooves on it leading to test strips. Then you put it into this machine that looks like a photo printer and it spins the CD around for 20 minutes and produces a result.

The Way Forward For NFC Payments

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Today in Hall 4 a conference session was held to discuss NFC and the future. One of the key panelists was Ryan Hughes of Isis, the NFC payments initiative backed by AT&T, Verizon and T-mobile. They have been running trials in Salt Lake City and Austin this past year and discussed some of their findings during the session.

One of the major hurdles they’ve encountered from a usability standpoint is educating consumers on how the technology works, or even that they have the capability in the first place. On the backend side of things, they’ve overcome a great deal of complexity building out their infrastructure. They baseline threshold they’ve set for themselves is for a customer to be able to freeze their Isis account with one call to their carrier if they lose their phone. It sounds simple enough but getting all of the different systems to talk to eachother such that this functionality is possible has taken a lot of doing.

Mr. Hughes showed a 30 second spot for Isis, or at least what one could be like once the product launches wide. In it, we see a woman jogging along and then stopping to pay for things with Isis, to the point where she comes home from her jog with a mountain of shopping bags. Of particular note during this video clip was that at one point she sees a deal on a flyer, taps the flyer to load the deal onto her account, and then redeems the deal at a store. This kind of seamless functionality could go a long way to getting consumers excited about the technology. That said, the really big spike in adoption spurred by this may not hit until NFC-enabled devices reach a price point such that rabid coupon clippers can afford them.

In the meantime, he stressed that Isis does not capture spend data, and actually doesn’t know for sure whether a given transaction had gone through. So they are not collecting data for retargeting, and have no plans to. That relationship is between the customer and the bank.

Bill Gajda, the head of mobile for Visa also spoke. He highlighted that 9 of the top 10 device makers are shipping NFC-enabled phones (no mention of the one holdout). Also, more positively, most new merchant Point Of Sale systems hitting the market today support contactless payments. This is a particularly critical development, since retailers tend to upgrade their equipment once every several years.

Mr. Gajda went on to make an announcement that an agreement had been reached for all nextgen Samsung smartphones will ship with Visa PayWave app for NFC payments.

He went on later in the session to map out the future of mobile payments in the developing world in particular. He speculated that emerging markets will likely leapfrog over traditional fixed line payment systems to mobile terminals that are multi-modal; they can accept card swipes, card taps or NFC taps. These types of devices, if they are affordable to merchants, could rapidly grow in markets that currently operate primarily in cash because of the cost and hassle of traditional POS solutions.

All of the speakers reflected on how for yeas it has seemed as though NFC was right around the corner, and it’s been slow going. They still have enormous faith in the technology and feel as though the industry is getting its ducks in a row for much larger adoption in the coming year.

FirefoxOS … Why?

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“That’s probably our most frequently asked question”, said the Mozilla rep at the Firefox booth when I asked him why as an Android user I might prefer FirefoxOS.

For those who haven’t been keeping tabs on it, Mozilla is launching a new mobile device operating system in Q2. Although based on Linux like Android, FirefoxOS is stripped of much of the rest of the layers Google adds to Linux and is meant to be even more “open.”

It’s slated to ship in Q2 of this year in Eastern Europe and Latin America. It is free to carriers and runs on relatively cheap low-energy hardware. The demo unit I saw was by ascendant Chinese manufacturer ZTE. Mozilla itself is a not-for-profit organization – their only source of revenue for FirefoxOS is apparently small payments they will collect from Bing, Google and Yahoo for referring search traffic. The topic for their MWC keynote is “Connecting the next 2 billion”. So it would seem as though the primary technology it’s meant to replace isn’t Android or iPhone per se, but feature phones.

Apps on FirefoxOS are all based on HTML5, so essentially everything is a web app. They thus like to say that the platform can support “8 million apps”, referring to their estimate of there being roughly 8 million websites. From the home screen you can swipe over to a pane called “Dynamic App Search”. In the demo I saw, you can type in “U2” and it pulls up “apps” like YouTube and Soundcloud. By tapping an app from this screen, you can “sample” it, basically using a simplified version – effectively a mobile-optimized website. If you long-press on it, you can add it to your home screen and then use a richer full version of the HTML5 web app.

There’s a Firefox marketplace to help with app discovery, and Mozilla validates apps to ensure they are not malware. If cleared, these apps are given lower level access to the core phone APIs (camera, storage etc.)

But you (or a brand) can also make their own app market, invoking your own standards for apps and your own pricing structure and billing setup. It’s just like on the web, where different websites offer a variety of shopping and purchase experiences.

So FirefoxOS is indeed fundamentally different from Android (and iOS for that matter). It is more open and flexible, and is likely not onerous to code for since it is built deliberately around the HTML5 standard. I came away feeling like there very well could be a role for it in the larger mobile ecosystem, particularly in developing markets that are stepping up from widespread feature phone usage.

Telefonica Presents Global Mobile Research Study

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This morning at Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona, Telefonica (the Spanish-based telecom giant) presented an interesting market research study covering mobile in 54 countries consisting of over 50,000 interviews. Among the highlights:

    • Atitudes towards the role of mobile in one’s life vary more than you would think around the world. China, Brazil, Africa among the areas with highest optimism. Western Europe has particularly less enthusiasm.
    • The countries that are the most open to mobile advertising are Brazil and China. Latin America in general appears particularly less averse to mobile advertising.
    • Latin America in fact now has more mobile lines than people. Prices for devices in the region have been falling significantly. Feature phone ownership is plateauing, smartphone penetration ramping up. Argentina and Brazil over-index on daily smartphone usage vs. rest of the world. They also over-index on mobile shopping.
    • Europeans tend to be more hesitant to incorporate mobile into all parts of life. They under-index on using mobile for business – they prefer to mostly use mobile for their private lives.
    • In response to the survey question: “Can mobile devices improve your potential at work?” the global percentage that agreed was 50%, in Western Europe in was only 22%.
    • A hypothesis was presented: demography matters a great deal on attitudes towards mobile. Essentially, mobile has its biggest impact on populations hungriest for upwards mobility. As per capita income rises, the emotional value placed on mobility decreases.

In india, mobile Internet has already passed desktop internet usage. In Asia, brand love mobile advertising is more successful than in Europe. In Europe, users expect more utilitarian ads offering deals. There’s more creative latitude for brands in APAC.

Telefonica also presented their vision for targeted relevant mobile ads. They have launched several opt-in programs for SMS ads, citing that globally feature phones still dominate, thus limiting th potential reach of richer formats at the present time. Their value proposition includes their access to Customer’s names, home addresses, location (via cell tower for feature phones), and interests (past location).

The idea is that targeting based on this valuable data makes their mobile advertising offer particularly compelling. It was acknowledged that in many cultures this could be perceived as invasive, but they stressed that the value proposition of each campaign should be made strong enough to overcome this barrier. While the campaign results presented were impressive (e.g. 10% offer redemption), they did not cite how many customers had opted in to begin with as a percentage of their vast user base.

As an example of a value exchange with consumers, the company mentioned its Netzclub program in Germany, which offers free data usage to consumers who agree to view one targeted video ad per day.

Barcelona, “Mobile World Capital”

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Greetings from Barcelona where Mobile World Congress 2013 will be kicking off tomorrow. Having arrived today I have already taken note of a couple first impressions.

Upon landing one of the first things I noticed were special courtesy information booths at baggage claim for Chinese device makers Huawei and ZTE. Maybe it’s because of a major theme I took note of at CES this year, but I got the feeling that the Chinese handset makers are going to go big at this year’s MWC. At minimum it would seem they are flying in enough people to warrant special staffing at baggage claim to corral them all.

Also at baggage claim was a person in an Android outfit:

Android Guy

Not especially remarkable, except if you look on his/her lower left hip, you’ll see an Intel sticker. This has probably got something to do with some big chipset announcements they are rumored to be making this week. It could be interesting to see how much emphasis Intel puts on Android vs. Windows Phone.

As I waited for them to finish cleaning my hotel room I popped down into the nearby Metro to orient myself with the system. In doing so I discovered this scene:

IMG_1339

 

There had apparently been some sort of public NFC tap-point here. The vending machine offers tap-based payments (along with traditional credit card swipes) and dispenses cute mobile accessories.

In general there are supposed to be MWC-related NFC tap-points springled throughout the city. If I find more interesting examples I’ll share them here.

This initiative is part of Barcelona’s partnership with the folks behind MWC, in the hopes of establishing it as (per the signs all around the airport) the “World Mobile Capital”.

Privacy For Sale: The Currency Of The Future Could Be Our Identity

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The barriers to most innovation in the lab are not what you may expect.  Typically what is possible is less framed by technology but by society. We now face problems that come from legislation and from privacy more than from hardware and software.

This is not for one second to undermine their importance, but I often find privacy to be a force that few are willing to tackle and yet some are oblivious to it.

We now live in an age with extraordinary amounts of data being captured. Our phones alone ( and this is a common theme of mine) know more about us than our best friends combined , increasingly they will capture more data, share more data and remember more data. Our phones ( and this is another theme) will soon be a hugely powerful enabler of an easier life. Data increasingly comes from more places, and whether it’s Target knowing you’re pregnant before you do, or your car insurance knowing how you drive it’s increasingly powerful and pervasive.

With all this information comes the opportunity for brands and services to be more accurately targeted, to bring you offers and to be able to add more value to your life. As services like FreeMonee, Google Now, and better eCRM evolve it will soon become clear that the more you share about your lifestyle and spending, the better suited and the more generous offers can be. I think soon we face an interesting value exchange where by opening up ourselves will lead to a much better experience in all that we do. It’s where our personal data becomes a form of currency to exchange.

This is not a new phenomenon, Tesco launched the Clubcard in 1995 and soon after 15 million people in the UK we rejoicing at money off, special “club” treatment, and money back, mostly unaware that they had opened the door to the retailer ( anonymously) collecting vast amounts of data about their shopping behavior that they could sell to many providers for huge sums of money.

But despite the relative age of this debate, it still seems there is a huge disparity between attitudes and it’s mainly split along the age divide. My sense is that the older fear data being collected, they see it as a sigh of intrusion, they feel violated and vulnerable. They expect to be able to keep hold of their data and that people who access it will inevitably misuse it. I’d love to show them a website like Spokeo and show them the degree to which they have already lost the battle to maintain secrecy.

Younger people realize the horse has bolted and the fight to maintain privacy is lost, they now behave in an open broadcast fashion, sharing all manner of details voluntarily on social media without any concern. It’s not like they don’t value their privacy, it’s just they’ve never had it, and don’t long for it.

So the next few years should be interesting, with Google Now able to offer an almost concierge like service that provides us with constant recommendations, who will be able to resist the temptation to cash in some privacy for a little help, everywhere they go.

Superbowl Ads From The Eyes Of A Brit

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Watching the Superbowl as a Brit it was hard to escape two overriding feelings.

One- The Superbowl doesn’t really seem to be about the sport, instead all those people clattering into each other are rather background to the whole thing, people talk over the action, nobody really supports a side with any vigor and people come and go as the event goes on. The whole thing seems more about sport as an excuse to get together, chat , eat and talk about ads.

The second realization is that for a nation that spends it’s entire year doing everything it can to avoid ads, this seems to be this one curious window where people actually like ads, scrub that, they LOVE the ads, they talk about the ads, they laugh at the ads, they may even listen to them and remember them. For months it’s like ad agencies have rubbed their hands together knowing that for this one time, people will actually be watching and actually may care about what you have to say. That’s rather puzzling to me.

It’s not like this in the UK. While we don’t love ads, we have a curious relationship with them, they are at worst tolerated and at best, beloved. We have TV shows in primetime that celebrate the best ads from around the world. And you can understand why, most TV ads in the UK are rather gentle and sophisticated “films”.  They are often creative narratives with pleasant storylines, feature nice plinky plonky music, they cajole and entertain, and smuther you and endear you. It’s not like that in the US, and I understand why most US ad breaks with their shouty patronizing interruption are not welcome.

It did get me thinking, how is it in a world where we now have no attention span, where we do several things at once, where so many people skip ads on DVD’s and if they do view them, they do so in the context of frustration, why on earth do we still have ad “breaks”?  What rationale is there behind stopping the thing we want to watch, then taking 7 mins or more with the entire screen removed of the thing we were paying attention to, and either force people to put up with “paid interruption” or more likely, tempt them to put on the cooker or do something else for a bit.

What’s the need for the break? Would people not pay more attention to the screen and therefore the ad like message if they were not on together?

Why have we not more found ways to embed messages within the broadcast simultaneously and maybe as a way to add value and meaning?  Sure we have “sponsorships” and logo’s and wardrobes provided (seemingly always by Ralph Lauren), but why not feature more things akin to banner advertisements, or branded utility, and do away with the entire concept of a “ad break” .

I’d love to do some research at the lab and find out if it’s better to get half of someones attentions while they are watching the show, or to take up the full screen when they are not. I’d love also to think of creative ways to get ad content and viewing content blended together in ways far more sophisticated that current techniques like sponsorship and product placement.

 

Joining The Dots

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I think sometimes we look at things in a lens that is too focused.

For many years we’ve looked and laughed at internet enabled fridges and tweeting plants but to make sense future thinking people have  taken a step back and had the imagination to see the whole ecosystem of the connected home, a world where you can turn on your cooker from work, or check to see if you have left the garage door closed.

But I still think these use cases are rather pathetic, relatively fringe and certainly not providing enough value to make the $15k investment in an entirely connected home worthwhile.

But when you really take a step back, where you vision includes things that seem rather peripheral,  you can begin then to  join a lot of things together that show how amazing things could happen.

I don’t think we are far from a world where the world of advertising starts becoming less the use of creativity to get brands and consumers to connect and engage, but a world where creativity is used to allow brands to provide value to consumers. The process of agencies like the IPG Media lab will be to have the imagination but also the knowledge of fringe technology to join the dots together and to do so in the context of business and brands.

We are talking of a world of both creative business models and branded utility.

I think in less than 3 years a connected home will include a fridge that knows what products we like, what food we have, when it is about to turn bad, where we are going to be that week, who we may expect to have come and visit.

This may seem rather out there, but it’s a simple question of taking in some of the utility that apps like “Slice” provide now, advancing it a little, and then pulling data from your google calendar, location and other sources to help suggest solutions, or as we like to call it, the world of “anticipatory computing”

In a world like this, an online grocery company could subsidize the cost of your fridge by ensuring that it will only be able to order goods from their own site.

You may find that you never run out of milk because it’s ordered before it’s about to go bad or run out.

You may find ads for food products that sync with your fridge and tell you what else you need to order to make a suggested recipe and order it for you.

This is world far removed from the now, but not because the technology is so advanced, but because our attitude towards “advertising” shifts away from technology as an enabler of better brand messaging, but technology as an enabler of better brand solutions.

Netflix And YouTube Working On Open Second Screen Protocol

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Netflix and YouTube are taking a crack at an open second screen protocol called DIAL. DIAL hopes to power second screen experiences for connected TVs, content services and app makers. Unlike Apple’s wildly successful Airplay, DIAL will not simply mirror your mobile display, but instead can detect and launch applications on your TV. From there, the specific use cases are up to the app makers and device manufactures. Expect a ton of new features coming to connected devices from big players like Sony and Samsung in the future.