Watch out!
Like a lot of people I’ve given up on wearing a watch during the working day, replacing it with glancing at my phone, tablet or computer. So all the current noise about mooted smart watches from Apple (immediately dubbed the iWatch), Google, Samsung and now Microsoft puzzled me. Why would anyone try and replicate the features of a smart phone on a tiny screen on their wrist – particularly when they were probably carrying their phone in their pocket?
Take the Pebble watch. It essentially syncs with your smartphone and reminds you about your latest tweets, emails and phone calls – a cute accessory but hardly game changing for most people.
But a bit more thinking unlocks why the tech titans think there’s a market out there. The only time I actually wear a watch (except on the few occasions I want to appear smart) is when I go for a run and I use GPS to measure where I’ve gone and exactly how slowly. Essentially I’ve got a wearable sensor around my wrist, rather than a time keeping device.
That’s where the interest will be, not as a smaller second screen for your iPhone, but providing a way of measuring where you are, what you are doing and your vital signs. After all a watch has the benefit of being intimately connected to your person – few people are going to hold their phone to their wrist to measure their pulse. With an aging population, and increasing desire to manage our health, this is where the mass market will be. Add in the Internet of Things and you can see a connected web of wearable sensors managing our lives.
Thinking of the smart watch I’ve come up with five applications where it could be used – from the basic to the far fetched.
- Patient monitoring – both in hospitals and more importantly at home, the watch can send back vital statistics to doctors and monitoring services, raising the alarm if issues occur
- A smart wallet – why get your wallet or Oyster card out when you need to buy something? The watch automatically debits your account as you pass through ticket barriers or pick up that latte.
- Obesity control – measuring calories burned is standard on sports watches, so combine this with a camera and an electric shock buzzer. Not burnt enough calories and reaching for a doughnut? Cue a mild electric shock to remind the wearer of their diet
- Getting your dinner on the table. The watch senses when you’re half an hour from home and sends a signal to your oven to switch it on. Get stuck in traffic and it changes the heat so your dinner isn’t burnt to a crisp
- Surveillance. Very 1984 but just imagine if every smart watch could be tracked by governments – not only allowing them to see where you are but your state of health and everyday activities. Obviously the most far fetched application of all (we all hope)…..
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Being too casual
Video games are big business. Whether you measure it on the £1 billion contribution to UK GDP of the industry, or the amount of time my children spend playing Angry Birds, the impact is enormous. In Cambridge alone companies such as Jagex and Frontier Developments employ hundreds of staff, an estimated 10% of the UK’s games developers.
But the era of the blockbuster console game is coming to an end. Despite the recent announcement of the Sony PlayStation 4, more and more games are now played casually on smartphones, tablets or simply online. As the current furore about the in-app charges
run up on iPhones and iPads demonstrates, all of these small payments add up to a big (and ongoing) windfall for developers. Rovio, the creator of Angry Birds, and king of the casual game companies, is allegedly worth as much as fellow Finnish tech company Nokia.
Handheld consoles have suffered – now analysts predict it could be the turn of the big budget gaming devices such as the Microsoft Xbox or Nintendo Wii. Ouya, a new Android-based console is now shipping at the knockdown price of $99 following an $8m Kickstarter funding round. As any gamer/parent will know, it isn’t just cost of the console, but the price of the games that adds up. And the Ouya’s games are expected to be low cost apps as seen on Android devices but beefed up to use the power of the console. Ouya’s not alone, with UK-based PlayJam launching its own portable GameStick Android device.
But there’s a big marketing challenge for these low cost consoles. Casual gamers with a tablet or smartphone need persuading that they should shell out for a separate device, as well as investing in new games, particularly as many already have a PC. Serious gamers will look at the quality of the games available compared to the blockbusters available on big brand consoles while children (a key market for games) want to be able to play the same games as their friends. Additionally the likes of Microsoft and Sony have been working to turn their consoles into home entertainment hubs, acting as the bridge between the living room TV and the internet to try and cement their position in the market. Essentially it is chicken and egg – people won’t buy a console until they know there’s sufficient games available, while serious developers won’t invest until there’s a big enough target market.
I can see two ways for the likes of Ouya to get round this dilemma – and it’ll take bravery and a bit of radical thinking. Firstly, adopt the same business model as casual games themselves – give away the hardware and charge for anything beyond the basic, either as a one off or on a subscriber basis. Risky, but it gets consoles into people’s houses and if they then take 30-40% of each £1.99 spent on a game they will build a subscriber base and some revenues. The second way is to partner with companies with a big brand to bring the hardware prices down to under a tenner. Whether it is a telecoms company (Sky, BT or Virgin Media), a retailer (Amazon, Tesco) or actually an Angry Birds-badged console it would widen the audience beyond the early adopter. The worry here is that as we move to a cloud-based future traditional console makers will go down the same route and already have major brand recognition.
However the gaming wars play out, the old market of monolithic consoles is under serious pressure – now is the time for new business models and smart use of subscription and cloud-based ideas if new comers are going to emulate Rovio, rather than follow the likes of Atari into bankruptcy.
Mapping the world
Since time immemorial accurate maps have been crucial to attaining and keeping power. Navigational maps helped first the Portuguese and Spanish, then the English to reach (and annex) new territories across the globe. Later colonialism literally redrew the map of Africa, creating countries where there were none before. Maps are critical in battle and to take stock of your resources and population.
So control of maps brings control over your subjects. As we move into a mobile device dominated future this explains the enormous battle to command mapping in your pocket, using the power of GPS and network connections to find out where you are. Nokia spent $7.7 billion on NAVTEQ, while Google StreetView has seen the search giant survey the world at a granular level. It explains why Apple ditched Google and launched its own ill-fated Maps app on the latest iPhone – the company simply didn’t want to give up control of such vital data to a third party.
Essentially knowing where you are enables companies to better understand your behaviour and target offers that fit your location and background. And that’s the positive news – it now only takes four location data points to identify a mobile user according to new research. Something that law enforcement agencies (and criminals) are no doubt very interested in.
But for all its benefits GPS isn’t as accurate as mapping companies (and advertisers) would like. Particularly in large buildings, such as shopping centres, it doesn’t give pinpoint positioning. Which is why Apple has just paid a reputed $20m for indoor mapping specialist Wifislam, which uses ambient wifi signals to offer maps accurate to 2.5m. With this level of data clever marketers could target you with an offer for Costa as you walk into Starbucks while the police could place you (or at least your phone) at the scene of a crime in a crowded city.
Apple isn’t alone in looking at indoor mapping – Google now features 10,000 floor plans submitted by businesses while Nokia’s Destination Maps product has more than 4,000 locations in 38 countries.
I often bang on about privacy and how marketers need to tread a fine line between providing targeted offers and respecting personal space. And the move to indoor mapping, combined with ways of interacting such as QR codes, augmented reality apps such as Aurasma and Near Field Communications (NFC) mean that the possibilities of tracking, understanding user behaviour and tailoring marketing could become ubiquitous. Except in the countryside, where poor mobile coverage means that if you are lucky it tells you what village you’re actually in.
The future is hyperlocal and mobile – marketers need to embrace this, but make sure that they’re getting buy-in from customers or they risk a privacy backlash from both individuals and regulators.
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Celebrating Cambridge design
Good design is at the heart of successful products – just look at devices such as the iPad and iPhone.
Image via Wikipedia
And when I say design it isn’t just whether it looks pretty or cool but something that delivers a good user experience – essentially creating a product that is simple and intuitive and delights the customer every time he or she uses it. Not an easy thing to do, but get it (and pricing) right and you have a timeless classic.
A new event aims to showcase some of these classics that have been designed in Cambridge and had an impact across the world. Design Icons: Cambridge Innovation Festival will celebrate the design talent in the area by highlighting some of the key products of the last 40 years. The range of products is incredible, stretching from the well-known, such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro computer to those with less obvious Cambridge connections such as the Dulux PaintPod and the Proprio prosthetic foot.
The event, organised by Creative Front Cambridgeshire and backed by the Design Council, will take place throughout February 2012 combining a high profile exhibition and design-related events across the city.
90 products have been nominated, but only 20 will make it to the exhibition. 19 will be chosen by a panel of industry experts with the public having the chance to have their say and nominate the People’s Choice. Voting runs until 31st December 2011 so log on now to www.camdesignicons.co.uk and make your selection. My money is on the sleek, elegant and completely impractical Sinclair C5 electric vehicle….
Making it real
Image by ciscommunity via Flickr
In an increasingly virtual world it is easy for inventors and start-ups to forget about the importance of good physical product design, and treat it as an afterthought or the packaging for the clever stuff.
And yet I think people have never been more discerning about the whole design of a product, demanding not just that it looks good but that it is intuitive to use and simple to understand. My 3 year old son quickly grasped how to navigate round my iPhone, leading to some unplanned phone calls, but providing a good example for designers to aim at. And the tools are now here that marry product design with innovation, through CAD/CAM systems and photo realistic rendering that creates stunning visual representations of a great idea.
So it is good to see James Dyson, a man who has shown the power of innovative product design to disrupt traditional markets (whether vacuum cleaners or hand dryers) putting his money where his mouth is with his own student design award. Built on a simple premise – design something that solves a problem – it runs in 18 countries and the UK winners have just been announced. What impresses me is a combination of the breadth of the ideas – from a portable room divider for hospitals to a bike seat designed to be more comfortable for women, and their real simplicity. These are products that can be easily understood and used without reading a 100 page manual or undergoing special training. And it looks like a competition worth winning – the global victor (announced on 8th November) is in line to win £10k and gain a real foot up on the ladder towards getting their idea into production.
While it is all well and good for the likes of David Cameron to push for the UK to create the next Facebook, it is vital that we don’t neglect the creation of physical products that are well-designed and fit a market need. After all, one of the key reasons that Apple has become the most valuable company on the planet is through good design across its entire product range. So I think the next generation of start-ups need to heed Dyson’s advice and design something that solves a problem rather than expecting customers to grapple with advanced, but user-unfriendly technology. Make it simple and they will buy.
Related articles
- Engineers always do the business, Lord Sugar | James Dyson (guardian.co.uk)
- Dyson’s new product still shrouded in mystery (guardian.co.uk)
- Product designer gives patients privacy in hospital (telegraph.co.uk)
- Student inventors battle it out for Dyson award (telegraph.co.uk)
Short changing the customer?
There’s been talk about using mobile phones to pay for stuff for a long time, but until now it has been pretty much confined to Japan.
But now the technology seems to be very much coming of age. Last week Orange and Barclaycard announced the UK’s first Near Field Communication (NFC) service, where consumers simply swipe their phone over a reader to pay for low value items. And now Google is poised to announce its own NFC platform, while Apple is reportedly planning to include NFC in the iPhone 5.
The idea is a strong one – why carry around a pocketful of jangling change when you can just wave your phone and buy things? However I think adoption will be slower than predicted – while analysts Forrester predict that 40-50 million NFC equipped phones will be sold in 2011, how many will actually be used in practice? For me, coverage has to be total – if you still need to use cash in your local newsagent you’re not going to leave your wallet at home.
And moving beyond early adopters the biggest fear is going to be privacy – the data you give up on your buying habits will be invaluable to retailers (and the likes of Google). For many people these fears will outweigh the ease of use that NFC brings – remember the protests that greeted the attempted introduction of RFID chips by Tesco and Gillette?
Time for the retail and telecoms industries to be proactive, put in place a code of conduct and head off consumers’ privacy fears before they reach the front page of the Daily Mail……..
Related articles
- Google to show off mobile wallet (bbc.co.uk)
- Google to finally lift the curtain on its mobile payment plans (venturebeat.com)
- NFC is the future of everything (dgui.wordpress.com)
2011 Tech Unpredictions
- Image via Wikipedia
As well as ill-thought out resolutions, January traditionally brings a slew of predictions for the year ahead. Rather than join the tech soothsayers, here’s my view on the five things that won’t happen in 2011 – but would be amusing if they did………
Queen joins ChatRoulette
Following on from her successful debut on Facebook, Queen Elizabeth pushes the social media envelope by moving onto Chat Roulette to meet her subjects. After encounters with a naked student, guitar-strumming Americans and an OAP that looks suspiciously like Prince Philip she abandons the site as being too close to reality.
Google buys Belgium
In a bid to outflank its competitors and to stop the EU investigation into its business practices, Google buys Belgium for a mixture of cash and shares. Very few people outside the country notice. Facebook use is immediately banned and everyone forced to switch to Gmail and Google Docs from Microsoft Office. It could be worse – at least they don’t have to use Wave.
Steve Jobs launches iClock
Seeing a market opportunity after the iPhone alarm clock storm in a tea cup (how exactly did that make the BBC News at Ten?) Steve Jobs launches the iClock. Stephen Fry buys twelve. A snip at $499, it promises a completely new timekeeping experience with downloadable apps available via iTunes. However in a launch glitch the alarm function only works on Pacific Standard Time, now renamed Apple Time and patented by the company.
Government abandons technology
The combination of shrinking budgets and rising unemployment means it is cheaper for the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition to swap manual processes for technology. Tin cans connected with string replace desk phones and flocks of carrier pigeons carry documents instead of email. Young people are trained to read barcodes to process incoming forms as an alternative to mainframe computers. Productivity rises.
Met Office joins the Cloud
In an innovative public/private sector partnership the Met Office and IBM launch a new cloud computing service. Utilising real clouds to store and transport data, satellite based technology downloads information as and when needed across the UK. Difficulties arise when the country swelters through its warmest year since records began, with high temperatures and cloudless skies from May to October. Well, you can but hope………..
Related articles
- Predictions for Apple in 2011 (cultofmac.com)
- Steve Jobs’ New Year’s Resolutions for 2011 (macstories.net)
2018 World Cup – the digital dimension
So after what feels like years of campaigning, the hosts for the 2018 football World Cup will be announced this afternoon in Zurich.
Given that voting rests with the 22 men of the FIFA Executive Committee, you’d think that wide-scale marketing doesn’t have a large part to play in bid success or failure. But aside from glad-handing the FIFA dignitaries on a one-to-one basis, building a long-term marketing campaign that reflects brand values is going to be essential to the winner.
Witness the incredible effort that has gone into the digital side of the England bid. Designed to provide an opportunity for fans around the world to show their support and interact with the bid, it is integral to the bid premise “England United, the World Invited”. I’d say the stats alone show it has done an amazing job – over 300,000 fans from 170 countries have joined its Facebook group, 2.2 million have registered their support and 6,000 follow the bid on Twitter. And that’s ignoring the downloadable iPhone app, wallpapers, YouTube channel et al.
It really delivers on the key aim of showing FIFA the depth of support for England’s bid both at home and around the world. Let’s hope that at 3pm today, all England’s efforts, on- and offline, will be rewarded…………
Related articles
- World Cup 2018 and 2022 decision day – live! | Paul Doyle and Steve Busfield (guardian.co.uk)
- England ‘will host first-class Cup’ (mirror.co.uk)
- Prince William to make final plea to Fifa executives in bid for 2018 World Cup (dailymail.co.uk)
Apple, Antennagate and brand
- Image by Victor Svensson via Flickr
The public and media storm about the iPhone 4’s antenna issues is an object lesson about changing brand perceptions and how companies need to evolve.
Like most companies, Apple has created some duff products in its time. And many of them have been down to design winning out over substance. The perfect example is the round mouse shipped with the iMac and Power Macs. Design wise it looked gorgeous and fitted in completely with the style of the product. However it was virtually impossible to use, leading to a storm of complaints and forcing customers to buy replacements.
But at the time it didn’t really matter. Macs were a niche product and users (mostly designers) weren’t going to defect to Windows over the issue.
Roll forward to the iPhone 4 and again a gorgeous design compromises the ability to actually use the product. But rather than just affecting a relatively small number of Apple fanatics, we’re talking about millions of mass market consumers. Big difference, hence Apple’s eventual issue of protective cases and heartfelt apologies.
But it took a while for Steve Jobs to stand up and admit the mistake (sort of). As it moves more and more into the mainstream Apple will need to learn to react faster if its brand is going to retain its lustre and appeal. Oh, and checking that the antenna works before shipping would also be a good idea…………
Chris Measures
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