Archive for the ‘Horizon’ Category
Mother Earth Gets a Central Nervous System: 1 Trillion Sensors
What if the Earth could Twitter you? HP is lacing the earth with over 1 trillion advanced sensor nodes and interconnecting them into an immense environmental network. Called Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE) project, HP Labs plans to cover cities, towns and key environmental sites with specialized, very small sensors that collect a myriad information ranging from vibrations, movement, light, sound to air quality. Each of these bundles of sensors (nodes) are connected to each other, casting a virtual net over the earth.
The applications for an environmental sensor network are almost endless. Imagine a system that could identify structural damage on buildings before they fall, find pathogens in the air, warn of earthquakes or track outbreaks in real-time across the globe. HP says it could put about 10,000 of these nodes on the Golden Gate Bridge to monitor its integrity and warn of any potential disasters. HP is already partnering with Shell Oil to create a wireless sensor network to measure high-resolution seismic data that will more effectively map the subterranean topography and search for pockets of oil. “This project is designed to gain a competitive advantage for us onshore.” said Wim Walk, manager of novel geophysical technologies for Shell.
Peter Hartwell from HP labs puts it best, by stating “With a trillion sensors embedded in the environment – all connected by computing systems, software and services – it will be possible to hear the heartbeat of the Earth, impacting human interaction with the globe as profoundly as the Internet has re (more…)
Dawn of The Zombie Cookie: The Virtual Undead and Your Privacy
The Real Cookie Monsters
Your computer needs a diet. It used to just load up on cookies every time you hit a website. Now it’s gobbling up super-cookies and “PIE,” allowing companies to track your web movements and making you more vulnerable to cyber threats. What the heck is a super-cookie? How could anything named PIE be bad? Let’s start at the beginning…
Cookies have been around a while. They are small text files automatically put on your computer that contain tags (string of code) to identify you as a unique user. Inside these files, all sorts of information is stored, such as which pages you visited, when you last visited, and any voluntary information you gave the site. The site that gave you the cookie has complimentary file with the same tag ID. That way, it knows who you are when you come back. There is a nice write up about cookies on WiseGEEK, if you want to know more.
Cookies can be very convenient. If you ever went back to a site where you put in a password and it “remembered” you, that happened because of a cookie. Website preferences, online shopping carts and wish lists are all possible because of cookies. Cookies, however, have other functions. Websites collect cookies to gain information about usage. They track things like traffic flow, page popularity and how long visitors stay on a site. This information is usually anonymous and aggregated. Some say the major reason for cookies is advertising. They allow websites to track how many people come to the site and click on ads, which is how they get paid.
Where things start to get scary is when the marketers start getting involved. When you visit a website, it triggers past logs of your actions and calls up information about your surfing habits. It also associates any volunteered information about you (name, address, phone number) with that log. These “profiles” hold a lot of marketing value, since they can show what you like, where you go, and what you purchase on a site. Some advertisers place ads on many of the most popular websites and then pass your cookie information across the web. Tracking you across multiple sites provides them much more data about your preferences and habits. They then can serve you more targeted advertisements and make more money. As creepy as it sounds, this is a 100% legal business practice. However, cookie profile information can be hacked to reveal your personal data. Identity thieves and hackers can then use this information to mimic you online. (more…)
Social Media Policy vs. Social Media Strategy
Recently I have seen some blog posts that use the terms social media policy and social media strategy interchangeably. Don’t do this – know the difference. You could conceivably have a policy without a strategy. But more usefully, you should have a social media strategy that follows a company social media policy. Confused yet? Well here are the differences.
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Digital Exhaust – Leaving Your Bits and Bytes Across the Internet
Digital exhaust. That’s what they call it. It is all the bits (and bytes) of information about you left across the Internet. Marketers, hackers, identity thieves, social networks, people finders and even governments scour the Internet for this exhaust to learn more about you. Put the right pieces together and they can find out where you went to school, where you lived, who your friends are, where you vacation and even where you are right now. It’s a pretty unsettling thought for most of us and we have lots of questions: How do they know so much? What can they do with it? What can I do about it?
Digital Exhaust Is a Fact of Life
We’ve always collected a lot of information, but as we began to digitize it to make it more manageable and then interconnected it to make it more convenient, we started to pump out digital exhaust. Every click of a mouse, every clack of a key creates digital exhaust. But, it goes way beyond that. Go through a tollbooth. Use an ATM. Swipe your grocery card. Make a phone call. Walk into an airport. You’ll be creating digital exhaust. It’s every electronic transaction, digital video, people counter, sensor or record about you.
You don’t even need to make your own exhaust. Your friends post pictures about you and “tag” you on Facebook. That convention you went to lists its attendees. Your Alma Mater creates an alumni page. All of these create information linked to you. In fact, you are part of the public record. Have a driver’s license? Got married? Bought property? Went to court? You have a digital trail.
Things are becoming more digital. We went from “snail mail” to e-mail in a quick click; getting an actual mailed letter today is quite a treat. GPS, Mobile Apps, Google Maps and Texts are second nature, and we’re starting to adopt facial recognition, biometrics, and even “Smart TVs.” Heck, my phone, with its accelerometers, gyroscopes, temperature gauges and cameras is more self aware than I am.
Simply put, digital exhaust is the natural byproduct of living the information age. (more…)
OTH: Customer Service and Social Media
A recent study profiled by Research Brief provided some though-producing statistics. The study, done by American Express, found:
- 91% of Americans consider the level of customer service important when deciding to do business with a company, but only 24% believe companies value their business and will go the extra mile to keep it
- 81% of Consumers are far more likely to give a company repeat business after a good service experience, while 52% are unlikely to do business with a company again after a poor experience
- 48% feel companies are helpful but don’t do anything extra to keep their business
As I mentioned in my last piece, the objective of social media for business should be relationship building. The American Express study leads me to add a touch more to that opinion…social media for business should be about building a strong customer service relationship.
Think about it; isn’t social media—from social networking, to micro blogging, to chats—the perfect medium for helping a customer believe a company values their business? The investment by the company can be pretty small (it’s certainly less than a 30 second spot in prime time telling me you are all about customer service!) and the potential interaction with the customer powerfully intimate.
For example, say I buy a shiny new LCD TV from Best Buy. On check out, instead of asking me to go to Bestbuy.com to fill out an online survey on my experience today (you bet!), maybe the clerk gives me the address (or signs me up!) for a chat group where I can get real-time help during set up. Or, maybe she asks if “Sally” from Customer Service can contact me via Facebook, Twitter, Tick-it or some other forum to see how things are going. If I accept an invitation from “Sally,” the brand-customer relationship has now moved from the immeasurable to the measurable, the catalyst being my interest in customer service via digital means.
As marketing staffs thrash about trying to create the perfect campaign for social media—one with a measurable ROI of course!—why not take a second to ask what your team might be able to accomplish with social media that shows current customers you value their business and demonstrates your customer service is tops among your competitors?
Hang On To Your Id…Here Comes Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality is looking to explode into our lives and change how we experience…well…almost everything. But the real power will come when Augmented Reality converges with other emerging technologies.
If you can barely handle the reality you have, you better hang on to your id, superego, and basic hold on the world. Here comes Augmented Reality and it looks to change a how we relate to everything around us. At its core, Augmented Reality isn’t that weird of a concept. It basically means that you take a real video or image and you overlay computer generated images. We’ve seen this in movies, commercials and advertising for years. Heck, I can do this on my Mac without too much trouble.
Where it starts to resemble something that would have made Gene Roddenberry proud is when you start adding technologies like mobile, GPS and the power of the internet to give you instant, personally relevant information. For example, a company called Layar created an application that lets you look at city streets through the view finder in your mobile phone and overlays icons of local shopping, restaurants and point of interest. So, if you’re hungry, pull out your phone, pan the street and look for the pizza and hamburger icons to lead you to lunch.
The Metanet
Internet watchers, particularly business types involved in marketing, have been predicting that the Internet will become more tribal as it becomes more pervasive. The parallel might be the rise of Industrial Age cities: people left their local communities and moved to big anonymous cities, but then the cities got so big that people organically developed boroughs, gangs, neighborhoods, etc. The social internet of the old usenet days is the pre-city world; Facebook and Twitter represent the megalapolises. And now we the citizenry are self-organizing into tribes.
Tyler Newton thinks this will happen now, in 2010:
The tribal Internet–Social networking and Internet content will evolve into networks of sites and information streams focused around common interests. Whether it’s for work, hobbies or issue advocacy, interest groups will form virtual “tribes” online, sharing content, ideas, opinions, advice and information among themselves. Magazines, blogs, e-mail newsletters and video content are already interlinked and shared and promoted via RSS feeds and social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Because these tribes are built around natural affinities, in many ways they will have a more powerful hold on us than our existing groups based on schools and location. Marketers will not be successful with old-fashioned advertising that interrupts this flow of content. Successful marketers will be those that are able to join and gain the trust of the tribes, where people WANT to receive the marketing message.
You know how billboards are different depending on what part of the city you’re in? You’ll see that with tribal-based marketing. But aside from marketing, what does the tribal internet mean?
Organic Organization. Information will organize itself around the tribal centers that produce and consume it. If you want to find out about Iranian politics, you’ll go to the Iranian dissident tribe. This has been the case for a while, but it will become more explicit and become the shared understanding of the internet denizens. This should make it easier to find information and sort the wheat from the chaff; something’s going to need to.
This also means that in future internet, news finds you. Your tribe will act as a filter and aggregator, sort of a Google Reader on steroids. Rather than matching a search string you’ve set, actual humans who know you (at least a little) and are like you (at least a little) will throw information your way.
Working Topically. Wikipedia and the USG’s Intellipedia have long been proponents of this. Rather than organizing information by, oh, which academic institution did the study, which journal published it, or which author wrote it, the pedias organize information by its topic and let you see the sources of the data. Mainstream journalism has been opposed to this, since their bread-and-butter is getting people to go to them, the source, and take what info they provide. With the decline of that business model, a few traditional media outlets are partnering with Google on the Living Stories project, which provides the news topically, the way tribes want it.
Other tools for working topically including tags, social bookmarking, Twitter lists, and hashtags.
Metanet. The population of the internet has hit the point where we can no longer lump everything and everyone together as “the Internet.” There’s the internet of things, as more and more devices come online of their own accord, and more and more sensors are added. There’s the cloud, where data is stored and processed, there’s the commerce internet, there are the walled gardens of intranets and private instances, and there’s social media, now the main way people interact with the internet. I’m starting to call these the metanet, the macronet, the micronet, and the me net. Just like you travel a city differently if you are considering its architecture and structure, if you are attending class or doing business, if you’re shopping, if you’re having a private club meeting, or if you are going out with friends, you’ll engage with the internet differently. Transitions from one net to another will usually be transparent, but just like going through an airport or into a government building, there will be areas where you will still have to show your creds and leave a lot of your gear behind.
The metanet is the overarching concept – the grid, the net, the feed of cyberpunk – while the macronet is the public world of commerce, education, and business. The micronet is your neighborhood, your regular stomping ground. The me net is your intimate group of trusted friends and family. By the time content is filtered through all these layers, it will be pretty well targeted to you.
Boob-Tube No More: Smart TVs will Make Us Rethink Home Entertainment
TV and the Internet have been flirting with each other for years. Yet, these two crazy kids haven’t quite been able to get together in a way that would make it worth tuning in. That’s all changing, and there are some very cool Internet powered TV (also called Smart TVs) applications coming soon to a living room near you.
Imagine sitting in your rec room, watching the big game but having to run off to the in-laws. You peel yourself off the couch, wave your mobile phone in front of the TV and “grab” the game while in mid-stride towards the door. You catch the rest of the game on your phone while riding in the car – no logging in, no special equipment. Just wave and go (also good for bathroom breaks!). When you get to the in-laws, you “flick” the phone and send the game to their TV. This is the kind of stuff you will eventually be able to do with Smart TVs.
Think about how the Internet changed cell phones…oops, I mean “mobile devices” – they no longer like it when you call them cell phones. We now have armies of iPhones, Blackberries and Androids that scour the web and deliver us countless useful little apps. They’ve changed the way we work, play, flirt and kill time (see our post about the App-A-Lanche and how much we’ve changed). Yet, TV has been relatively untouched. Sure, there’ve been a few fledgling attempts to merge TV and the Web. Apple’s first foray into this market, a device called Apple TV, has been around since 2006. It was expensive, quirky and didn’t do anything that made people want to rush out and get it. By 2008, Steve Jobs started to refer to Apple TV as “a hobby.” Some gaming systems, such as Wii, let you do some rudimentary web surfing, but those are pretty clunky. (more…)
Over the Horizon: Social Media, Relationships and the Sales Battlefield
A client in the financial services sector recently asked me for my thoughts on how trends in social media will affect the way their sales force engages and closes a deal with a new customer. After pondering the question, I offered the following scenario:
It is just as likely the customer-agent meeting will take place at a local coffee house as a traditional office. The potential customer will have done some comparative shopping of products, looked at comments or recommendations your current customers or competitors have posted on the web, and will have searched the virtual fingerprint of the agent via LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, etc.
Sitting down to a fully-personalized beverage (I get to have it exactly as I want it, all life should be that way!), the customer will be connected to the internet via a handheld device and able to confirm, refute or clarify their own info, and the inputs or comments from the agent, within moments of the need to do so. The customer may even provide a running commentary about the meeting live to friends and family—via Twitter, Foursquare or Facebook—or record it in a public forum like Yelp.
Bottom-line: the engagement will be on neutral turf; the customer will be armed with information that may or may not be your messaging; and, the customer’s take-aways from the encounter have the potential to be shared with an un-calculable audience in seconds. (more…)
Making Sense of the App-A-Lanche
Three short years ago Apple changed the rules when they opened up their phones to the universe, letting third party vendors write programs. Although there were technically apps before that, developers and companies were free to develop their own, branded apps on iPhones platform (something virtually unheard of at the time). Since then, over two hundred and twenty five thousand of those handy little programs are in Apple’s App Store alone (and that’s not counting places like the Android Market and Blackberry App World). The market isn’t slowing any time soon. According to a recent Nielsen report on mobile apps, smart phones are expected to overtake feature phones in the U.S. by 2011. You can now do anything with apps from manage your bank account to put a voodoo curse on your boss. I can almost see Apple’s campaign slogan “There’s an app for that” on a Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture edition. At first, this just looks like an “App-A-Lanche” of mind boggling amounts of new programs crushing into the market. But take a closer look, and you can see that there has been a impressive evolution in the app world.
Early apps were very simple. They were like single-cell programs, letting you calculate a tip or see what time it was in China. Not many frills, and conventions were still being hammered out. Developers were like nervous teenagers on a date, not sure how far to push things. Should they charge for apps? Should they give them away for free? How complex should they be? Apple had given them they keys to the iPhone Ferrari, and they weren’t sure where to go. As developers got more comfortable with this new medium and companies and start-ups started waking up to their potential, these simple apps soon began to multiply. Apple also helped things by opening the App Store in July 2008 and allowing users to download apps directly to their iPhones (ten million apps were downloaded the first weekend the App Store was opened). From July 2008 to January 2009 the Apple App Store went from 500 apps to 15,000. (more…)
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