Google better organizes our world –and sells us back the experience

This post originally appeared on my colleague Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy Blog

By Chris Silva and Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analysts at Altimeter Group 

Last year’s over hyped skydiving was replaced by down to earth by grounded product enhancements. 

We’re live from the Google IO conference in SF with 6,000 developers, press, and media in San Francisco’s Moscone event center. We noticed a lot of Glass Explorer units (which surprisingly was barely mentioned in the keynote) we’ve purchased two to test, and will write up a detailed post on them after we’ve done a thorough test.

Today’s Google’s announcements were a wreck; a series of products flipping in front of you, rather than a well laid out showroom.  To make sense of this patchwork set of announcements from a fragmented company, we’ve identified some top level trends:

Key Trends at Google I/O for the Executive:

Products enhanced and interconnected –no major new products announced.

• Google can coordinate across all of your screens, making multi-screen easier showing its ability to tie together all of your experiences across the Google-system.
• Ironically, Google did not mention Google Glass. We believe this is because it was overhyped last year, failed to meet production deadlines this year.
• Google+ had several enhancements including a new 3 column layout akin to Flipboard, deeper content with flippable content cards, Hangout now extended to multiple browsers, Google+ profiles have improved sign on capability–but no adoption numbers were touted in this flailing social network.

Google is virtually replicating planet earth, but “improving” the quality.

• Google maps is becoming a *Virtual World*.  3D experience with our uploaded photos. With virtual goggles like Occulus Rift you can walk through this virtual world, experiencing our world in just a few mouse clicks.
• The company announced the ability to use more granular location to allow better targeting of mobile users with apps and offers, finally bringing the inherently local capabilities to mobile that we’ve been awaiting.
• Retailers and hospitality should take note, Google maps now integrates photos of your stores from the inside. Internal decor matters to the search process.

Google knows what and who you love as we trade convenience for our data.

• Google announced that they could identify highlights of top photos in your albums, they were able to identify important photos based on facial recognition of your family, grouping these as important.  Google knows who your family is –and what’s important to your heart.
• Google is becoming more like a media company, music streaming (Google All Access,) photo editing, magazine-ing of the G+ stream. “Google makes the world better with data.” Google+ becomes like a magazine,
• Speech recognition across the desktop and mobile and bringing personal context to all of their services, doing things like making everyone’s view into maps personal, with their important landmarks highlighted.

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Unsaid contract: Google better organizes our world –and sells us back the experience

The big takeaway is Google is trying to let consumers experience as much of your brand before they buy it, for examples a search user can experience the inside of your store, the reviews, the photos and find the fastest way there –before ever leaving their chair.  As such, Google or their advertisers, may influence the purchase decision.

In mobile, It’s about the services, not the devices: While leading with mobile products last year to get people into their sandbox. In social the story focused on rich media differentiating the Google+ network and it became clear that social-first products like Hangouts and Google+ sign=in will make a broader play across more Google and non-Google products. , across data and search – whether maps or analytics – Google wants to up the ante in the tools it offers developers and, in turn, the companies and brands they empower.

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The Pithy Bottom Lines:

• For consumers, if you’ve bought into the Google ecosystem, expect the tools and products to get better but know you’re the product.
• For brands: If you want to play in Google’s sandbox, you’ll ultimately need to pay.
• For Google Competitors: As Google has entered media, any industry is up for grabs; they may be your competitor and just not have announced it yet.

The Phone Doesn’t Matter In #FacebookPhone

We all gathered amidst the rain and clouds at Facebook HQ, 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, CA to see what would be unveiled. A new flagship Android phone, tailored toward Facebook users? A new branch of the Android OS? A groundbreaking partnership?

Turns out it’s an application – a launcher to bring Facebook to the top of the Android OS on the devices it will run on and, in addition, some purpose-built hardware that will showcase the new Facebook Home integrated launcher and applications. Some will certainly label this a letdown, they were expecting more disruption, but here’s why this is the smartest move for Facebook.

• Facebook wants deeper engagement, more frequency of interaction from users. When you experience Facebook Home in person, you see just how front-of-mind the experience is. You’re device essentially becomes a billboard for interacting with Facebook when idle. Providing this at-your-fingertips ability to interact with the social network will drive more frequent and likely longer engagement with Facebook. Putting messaging at the core of its #home product. Integrating Facebook messaging as the layer through which SMS and Facebook messages are interacted with is a key example of driving more behaviors to the social network.
• The second half of the smartphone buyers in the US market are not looking for high-end devices. The first 50% of smartphone users in the US were buying iPhones and other top-tier devices. Many of these devices are largely used for business. The second 50% of the market, who are starting to come online now are younger, more price sensitive and gravitate toward mobile devices - specifically smartphones – for the social experience. Facebook’s announcement provides them with hardware that’s within their range, and centered on what they care about, and the apps extend to others who’ve already made an investment, its partnership with HTC and AT&T drive non smartphone users into the fold with a custom-built experience that matters to them because it’s based on social, and specifically, Facebook.
• Facebook wants to deliver an immersive experience.  Facebook does not need to create a fork of the Android OS or build a phone from scratch to do this. That said, to create an immersive experience, they did need to focus on Android to start because it offers a much deeper level of integration. “We wanted this to feel like system software, not an app you run,” according to Zuckerberg. The open advantage of Android in this announcement is not to be underestimated. What was announced today is not – at least yet – possible on any other platform. The key to Android’s differentiation may lie in others making use of it to provide new, novel experiences. This is a best case example of what Google intended when making Android open source, and other platforms should take notice.

Why doesn’t the phone matter? It’s certainly a nice piece of hardware in the look and feel department and Facebook’s integration of system notifications alongside those from Facebook apps (not available if you install the Home app on your Galaxy SIII or other compatible device) is a nice example of tight integration but it’s a minor footnote to the story. Getting pre-briefed about the solution, I’d say the Facebook team spent about 60% of their time on the software with the remaining 40% on the device due only to my slew of questions about it.

“Our phones are designed around apps, not people.” – Mark Zuckerberg

In the end, mobile advancements for brands, social networks and imperative tools for us to get our jobs done are device agnostic. One of the questions I asked the Facebook team was why they were launching an app and bundled hardware at the same time and not staggering the launch. Their answer came in one word, “scale.”

“A great phone may sell only 10 or 20 million units, even if we did a great job with a phone… we’d still only be reaching a portion of the mobile community.” – Mark Zuckerberg

They’re also really excited to launch Home on tablets, devices with higher interaction times to begin with. Facebook will be launching Home for tablets later in the year. Lastly, using an app versus a new devicew or OS they’re able to iterate much more quickly, according to the VP of Engineering for the product.

Any mobile initiative that brands, internal mobile strategiests or others want to make waves have to go as broad as possible, that means multiple OSes, multiple form factors and multiple devices. We’re now buying mobile as tools and experience that make our lives better, not as pieces of hardware.

“Watch” Out For Mobile Evolution

It’s been barely two months to the day since the first Pebble SmartWatches started shipping and we seem to have a market for devices that didn’t exist six months ago. First Apple, then Samsung, Google, and now LG being rumored to be readying a smart watch. Really? Is there that much demand for the product? I find this enthusiasm surprising, though I’ve been known in my day to make at leas one prediction that was a bit off when  thinking about the future of new form factors.

Apple’s SmartWatch? Hard To Say… Image source Techcrunch

I’m not holding my breath to buy any of these devices this quarter, the devices are likely a long way off, if we even see products from all of the players suspected to be working on this idea. There is some immediate impact on the mobile industry. We’re facing the second 50% of mobile phone owners in the US migrating to smartphones, this market segment will come online much more slowly than the first 50% due to disparity in disposable income between the two groups, differences in the groups’ use of mobile devices and basic need for more complex devices. The players in the market realize that and are looking toward the trend of multiple devices ownership among that first, relatively price insensitive 50%. Accessories will be key to the bottom line for big names in mobile as smartphone demand slows.

Among those of us with smartphones, we’re also changing the way the we use our devices day-to-day. As we spend more and more time running our lives and jobs from smartphones and those tablet devices I decried as useless back in 2010, we’re spending less time shackled to our “traditional” computing interfaces. Good news, the mobile devices themselves are getting much more capable. Moore’s Law ever at work, our smartphones now stand in as scanners, high-end cameras, CRM systems, field service manuals, mobile office productivity suites and more.  There is a downside to the march of technological progress, though. As their complexity increases and we have more information filtering to us through our mobile devices users seek filters. Enter the smartwatch. Not content to rely on flashing LEDs or vibraton patterns to discern the wheat-from-chaff in the torrent of incoming information, we’re seeking simpler displays that give us a dashboard to our daily lives.

How does this ultimately play out? It means we’ll be carrying both more (in number) and less (in complexity) mobile gear with us as the technology matures.  Bear with me here, this leads to the likely obliteration of the smartphone. With more of our information in always accessible storage clouds, we’re able to interact with it on more and more types of devices. AS the arms race to pack more horsepower into smartphones rages on, our ability to process information remains relatively static. Why wouldn’t we, then, gravitate to use-specific devices, accessing just the information we need, and in the context we need it versus carrying ever more complex mobiles? Thus the emergence of cheap, simple task-centric tools is likely to take shape.

It’s not surprising to see this begin to unfold. Most technology takes this course from complex-yet-basic to commodity-and-feature-rich but the pendulum most always swings back to a honed set of skills that are more narrow that what’s possible but excel in their simplicity. There’s been a trend – its debated existence being limited to younger users - to have a backup phone or a device that’s just used for texting and calls when out and about. The positive reviews at CES around the launch of a device like Nokia’s 105 -  designed for the developing world but lauded by the first world - may indicate that purpose-built devices that skimp rather than splurge on features could be our mobile future.

Technology is all about pendulum swings, we wanted lap;tops that could do it all and replicate the performance of our desktops, then settled for netbooks, ultrabooks and ultimately tablets that did only what we needed on the go. Mobile devices – specifically smartphones – will see this pendulum swing too and it will be good for users’ concentration and a win for device manufacturers but before we get there, we’ll see a flood of accessories that get feeds of information from our smartphones, not replace their core functions.

Are you excited for SmartWatches and other accessories, or will you wait out the fad? Any plans for a simpler device on your horizon?

One Phone’s Intro Shows Signs Of Change In Mobile

I made the trip down to Samsung’s Galaxy S4 launch in New York City last week expecting the usual, some demos, lots of stats and an end to speculation on what came next in the chaebol’s smartphone lineup. What I came away with, instead, was an understanding of just how much of a threat to the Google Android ecosystem Samsung is, why the home is the next target for mobile, why OS matters less and less and why that’s all goodness. There’s plenty of coverage of the strangeness and potential offensiveness of the broadway-themed launch, so I’ll leave that to the reams of existing press – it was quite a sight to behold – and focus on the implications I see.

A Broadway Show… About A Phone. Image CC License Chris Silva, 2013

Sure it was a bit much to sit through for an hour, and my mind did wander, which is why it wasn’t until after the event that something struck me. This was a launch of a flagship Android smartphone and the word Android was barely uttered once, and in fact only appeared on the last slide shown as we were filing out to clamor for a glimpse of the smartphone from afar. Samsung in its launch showcased software capabilities in software and ecosystem features to paint a picture of Samsung as a go-to provider for all things mobile and cutting edge.

• S-Translate: Anyone who’s used the Google Translate app has marveled at the ability to speak or type a phrase in one’s native tongue and read or hear the translated version in one of 64 languages. It’s a great application of cloud-based intelligence for local tasks and in my experience came in quite handy when needing to translate to Costa Rican landlords that my water heater was on fire, but I digress. Translate is a core offering of Google’s mobile apps and well executed on Android. S-Translate from Samsung just introduced the capability as if it’s brand new, and invented by Samsung. 
• S-Beam: Not a new one from the S4 launch, but a nice branding of otherwise overly-techy NFC capabilities that allow the sharing of photos, contacts, web page links and more by bringing two devices into close proximity. Once again, Samsung has chosen to re-brand an existing and relatively common smartphone feature, marketing it as a unique, Samsung-only offering. This has been offered on Google’s Nexus devices (one of its more recent one made by Samsung) since the 2010 launch of the Nexus S.
• S-Health and Home Sync: Announced initially at CES, Samsung is pushing the value of a family of connected devices which use the smartphone as the primary means of data processing – in the case of S-Health the S-band tracks body motion and sleep metrics to allow users to participate in the growing trend of quantified self. Fitbit, Nike and others have long ago trod this ground, but Samsung is marketing an integrated experience with its own hardware. Similarly, with the advent of Home Sync, media sharing that begins on the smartphone can tie into other Samsung devices in the home like SmartTVs or other sets hooked up to their Home Sync appliance. Today’s news of the company working on a Smart Watch continues this expansion. Beyond simply selling more handsets, Samsung is looking to tie together its many touchpoints in our lives to increase tighten user engagement. It’s a smart play for a company with an existing presence in many rooms in many homes that it’s looking to grow.

What does this mean for Google? It’s great news in that shipments of Android devices are being greatly increased quarter over quarter in part due to Samsung’s marketing machine. At the same time, Samsung’s brand becomes intrinsically linked with the features and capabilites above, none of which are truly unique. Bad news for Google and other Android handset providers who just took a backseat to Samsung who’s frankly doing a better job at marketing these capabilities in a way that resonates with buyers.  This diminishes other partners’ ability to market similar features. Many of these tools and features are rooted in the Android OS and available to any device running it. Google is in a tough spot being in the hardware game as well as having to play the impartial role of ecosystem owner but needs to clearly delineate what’s special about Android as an alternative OS vs. what’s specific to any given handset. My gut tells me that Google will try and re-distribute the marketing “juice” in the ecosystem so Android stays a powerhouse in its own right with a rotating spotlight on various players, not least of which will be Motorola.

What about implications for the mobile as a whole? I was asked post-event whether I thought that Samsung would ultimately abandon Android and go its own route for a smartphone OS. I can argue both sides of this, on one hand Samsung would stand to lose a great deal of marketing and user-base momentum by switching to a new OS for its smartphones. It’s widely recognized that, as of the Galaxy S4 Launch, Samsung’s approach to the market is looking at lot more like Apple’s iPhone strategy – incremental innovation to a willing customer base over massive re-designs – a new OS would throw a spanner in those works. On the other hand if Samsung continues to distance itself from Android branding when debuting products and features, the OS becomes less relevant.

In the end, the mobile OS will matter less and less, eclipsed by what I can do with my device and across how many other pieces of kit that I already own or will buy. I can imagine a future where a phone is truly marketed for its capabilities, not the OS it runs. We’re already seeing some major brands in the space toy with porting apps from one OS to another, if this trend holds, we’ll be buying our smartphones on hardware and features  regardless of what they run in the kernel. look at the iPod, a truly revolutionary device that has, in large part, become a feature of a whole new slate of items we can’t seem to get enough of. Expand this device-turned-use-case model to something that connects to everything in your home and it’s plain to see that winners in this market in 5 years will look a lot different than they do today. Maybe it’s Samsung, maybe it’s another vendor as-yet still not in the market.

What’s your take on Samsung? Flash in the pan or smartphone powerhouse about to steal the crown in this market – at least for a little while?

Altimeter’s Take: The Technologies That Matter from SXSW 2013

This post originally appeared on Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategist Blog

By Chris Silva and Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analysts at Altimeter Group

Technologies are Emerging at an Increased Rate –Making Tracking Harder than Ever
SXSW is no longer about disruptive technologies being launched, instead, it’s a mainstream, it’s a mainsteam festival, actually) and digital leaders at today’s large corporations are already present, and you should be too.  In fact, the amount of data created about the topic had nearly double year over year.   Altimeter Group was well represented with 9 analysts or researchers at SxSWi this year, with a large team in Austin tracking what’s disruptive. Long known for launches of big names such as Twitter and Foursquare, as well as those with more hype that long-term staying power like Highlight – would be past its prime and recycling yesterday’s news.    If you weren’t able to attend, Altimeter has captured the salient highlights to showcase here:

Major Festival Themes

• Hardware was king.  Hardware was king at an event long vaunted as a software and service launching ground, as evidenced by long lines for keynotes by Makerbot founder Bre Pettis, and Tesla, SpaceX founder Elon Musk who spent a lot of time devoted to how hardware-based endeavours like the recent Dragon rocket launch can disrupt an industry as complex as space and airline transportation.
• Android curiosity is getting the better of early adopters. We had many conversations with current iPhone users who were openly discussing their desire to “try the other side” and get an Android device. Interestingly, this curiosity was based more on their gripes with iPhone than with specific Android features they sought. Further, most of the users we spoke with were not working for organizations that had adopted Google Apps for Enterprise and were hoping for tighter integration, they simply felt that, as one person put it, “it has to work better than this thing,” while shaking a shiny new iPhone 5 in the air. Granted, as screen sizes on Android devices continue to trend up, Samsung’s battery-wielding bike messengers may be a needed accessory to make it through a day of SXSW with our new Android handsets.
• Software innovation continued, but mobile enterprise was a star. Software was not forgotten altogether, and from the festival that’s brought us many a fun app and game, this year the interest was in work. It seems the developers and mobile-centric brands are finally on-board the billion-dollar-bandwagon that is enterprise mobile development. Crowds lined up around the block to hear about mobile apps for major brands and to help people do their jobs. The era of Angry Birds millionaires while not quite over, is waning and the future is better tools for work that act like the toys we all enjoy on our mobiles. I’ve never been to a conference in a yoga studio – Austin’s Wanderlust Yoga played host to a packed Mobile Saturday event – no less one that’s populated by contorted bodies and over 100 degrees all due to the high demand.
• Brands were at SXSW in force –followed by the vendors who seek to cater to them.   A number of brands were present, with sponsored pavilions or lounges including Samsung, Pepsi, Oreos, esurance, GE, American Airlines and Chevy.  While many early adopters criticized the infusion of large brands, this event has gone mainstream as every company is a digital company.  To cater to these brands, there were a number of enterprise software vendors present who had sessions, parties, lounges and concerts, including Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, PR agencies, and social software startups including Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Spredfast, Expion, UrbanAirship, MutualMobile, Dachis, Bazaarvoice, Gigya, ExactTarget, and on.

The Technologies That Matter from SXSW 2013

Technology Showcased	Example	Disruption	What it Means
Our rating system includes: Watch, Experiment, Invest, Ignore.	Who’s doing it today?	Who will be impacted by this new technology if it comes to fruition.	Insights and forecasts from our perspective.
Gesture Based Interfaces. (Leap motion, Microsoft Kinnect)Our Call: Experiment	Leap Motion, a small, $79 USB device launching in May allows users to control their computers using hand gestures in mid air. It’s able to sense individual finger movements for fine manipulation of objects and apps on screen	Leap controllers have the potential to change the way we interact with our computers and will launch for Mac OS and Windows, immediately making the tech available to a wider audiences than Microsoft’s Kinect. Being able to physically interact with the digital will disrupt many software markets.	They key to this disruption taking hold is developer support. High levels of developer support, though, or a major buy in from a CE vendor like Samsung for TV use will make or break Leap. Expect to see heavy interest from software vendors in the creative space like Adobe; Corel was running live demos at the event.
3D Printing and Replicators (Makerbot, Factory.org)Our Call: Ignore	A number of 3D printers were on display both in the demo hall, and including one brave entrepreneur who wore one on his neck at parties while it was successfully printing.  Among the vendors include MakerBot, Factory.org and others.	Every brand involved in electronics, consumer package goods, transportation, packaging, supply chain and beyond will be impacted as consumers start to act like producers.	Although Altimeter is investing in a demo unit to trial, this market is still very young.  We’ve identified business model opportunities for brand marketers, IP creators and owners of CAD diagrams, and supply chain of the composite and plastic materials needed to print. We believe a significant ecosystem is required before this is a ready market.
Proximity Based Communications, Near Field Communications (NFC, Samsung)Our Call: Invest	Austin was awash in proximity based interaction points this week such as the Samsung tectiles; one can imagine that these same pieces of real estate were occupied by QR codes in years past, though the QR was also readily present this as well and not dead. NFC-enabled badges, stickers and posters were everywhere.	NFC, due to the potential for quick, almost passive interaction with a mobile device means potential for higher uptake, the problem? Not many devices yet support it and fewer users know what it does. This is still education time.	Companies with NFC-enabled products hawked them hard – see Samsung entry below – but users’ have yet to process the idea that, beyond payments, using NFC as an event control point or trigger can usher in instrumented environments. This is a key Android differentiator that we’d like to see more manufacturers support.
Collaborative Economy (Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Sidecar)Our Call: Experiment	Sidecar, Uber, and Lyft were in full force in Austin this year showing how shared resources can make getting around. A great deal of attendees we spoke to used AirBNB to find local rooms and houses to rent, as many Austinites skipped down to avoid the fray.	Austin, traditionally short on taxis and public transit – not to mention woefully unprepared for 20k+ visitors, is a perfect market to breed affinity for these tools. These services are disruptors to the taxi service, and hotel and hospitality space.	We’ll see many, many more of these services before the market shakes out. If transport, a leading industry in terms of getting to market early, is an indicator, users will have more and more need for distinct value props as many more “me too” services come online.   At SXSW Tesla made motions to offer their car as part of the Uber fleet.
Android’s Rise (Samsung, Google)Our Call: Invest	The Samsung marketing machine was working overtime at SXSW attempting to show that a superior experience is possible to the still-ubiquitous iPhones many were carrying. This is good for Samsung and arguably drives Android awareness and interest.  Samsung demo’d their TV and Phones were interconnected.	The awareness and interest in Android is great news for Google except that it comes from Samsung and, therefore, muddies the Android brand. That said, when users are shown extremely high levels of service – to wit, bike messengers delivering fresh batteries to Samsung device users – it’s hard to argue with this approach.	The Samsung brand is beginning to define Android. This will be difficult for other brands playing in the Android ecosystem like HTC and even Google itself. We can see why there’s some concern from Mountain View around Samsung’s reign in Android. Not investing in Android as an app player or a hardware concern is no longer an option.
Space Exploration (SpaceX)Our Call: Ignore	One of the highlights of the show was Elon Musk’s keynote where he demonstrated the privatization of space flight.  His famed quote resonated throughout the event: “I want to die on Mars, just not on impact”	The obvious disruption is the impact to commercial airlines as well as government space programs.  That said, the technology is out of reach for all but a very few, though the promise is inspiring.	The featured Grasshopper had VTOL capabilities meaning these space capable vehicles could land and depart from regular airports. While exciting, there’s little brands can do to interact with this trend, unless you’re a direct partner.
Augmented and Virtual Reality (Google Glass and Occulus Rift)Our Call: Watch	We had many discussions about Google Glass and its implications with many individuals at SXSW. Main concern? How will it work and what will the etiquette be?	Everyone from mobile device manufacturers to the purveyors of content on those devices will have to figure out how to play in the AR realm, we have not talked to anyone yet, either mobile developer, hardware player or content magnate that has a plan in mind. Too soon, they all say.	We’re bullish on Google Glass and, while we’ve not yet received our Explorer units to demo, we think the market will be very receptive to technology that augments daily tasks and does it in a lightweight way. We see a market emerging for AR-centric content and interactions and brands should be ready to play.
MicroMedia Video (Vine, Memoto)Our Call: Experiment	One emerging technology, that could grow is the Vine app that enables iPhone users to create 6 second video clips and share online.  To experience this yourself, see this real time gallery. We also saw a lot of discussion on the Memoto camera.	Now that journalism has extended to all consumers and citizens, the simple addition of video can extend a rich media format to micro communications.	Expect marketers to enable Vine related campaigns and marketing to condense from the 30 second spot, to the 6 second spot.  Then again people may simply adopt it as a way to “lazy tweet” as videos are so short. Twitter’s backing will certainly help
Quantified Self (Google Shoe, Nike)Our Call: Watch	Last year Nike debuted FuelBand at SxSW, this year the technology was everywhere, including a show that quantified activity tracking and encouragement, including a hotly discussed show by Google Shoe that gave recommendations on your fitness activity.	The traditional athletic manufacture industry is now inundated with tech companies getting involved. To a lesser degree, health and fitness services and facilities now find that consumers are self-managing their health by using Google.	We think this market is real and growing, but, much like we see in the enterprise space, a lot of data is getting created and the use cases for that data are lagging behind; further, this is a series of walled gardens that don’t talk with one another yet, and require user-lock in.  Right now the data is dirty and not being aggregated into a way that can be digested.
Memes (Grumpy Cat, Harlem Shake, Meme Generator)Our Call: Ignore	Grumpy Cat live appearance, a number of meme generators, popular from the website Reddit.  In particular, Edelman exec David Armano was prolific.	Traditional marketing communication may not resonate in the high churn of digital conversations.Harlem Shake, pretty much over with this hip cool kid crowd. Our take?  Good riddance.	Real time marketing, while a buzzword, requires modern communicators to morph, bend, and make topics of the moment their own through curation or creation.

Technologies on Life support
So what’s going away? We found that QR code will quickly be disrupted by NFC.  While we saw a few QR codes  present for marketing giveaways, we don’t believe this will persist year over year.  This year, wifi and cellular networks were able to stand the high demand of network, as a result the stunt to make homeless wifi spots, will not re-occur.  Location based apps, such as Highlight, Sonar, and Banjo were not the talk of the town, unlike the year before.

Next Steps
Altimeter identified a number of new technologies and tried to centralize in one comprehensive document.  We will continue to follow these technologies and reference them in our upcoming research of disruptive technologies, for additional coverage, we found the coverage from Verge, of the highest quality, see their 2013 greatest hits.  Companies who want to leverage and take advantage of these new technologies should do the following:

1. Assemble teams to review the preceding list
2. Weight, re-rank and rate the technologies as they may apply to your company
3. Integrate into your existing roadmap for marketing, customer experience, and product roadmap
4. Don’t try to do it all; many of these technologies will have a long “watch” period, some may never matter to your vertical. However, if you’re spending budget making office Harlem Shake videos, perhaps it’s time to re-allocate some budget to R&D on these new disruptors. Only, of course, if you’re interested in being ahead of what’s new.

We’d love to hear your point of view, what technologies and trends did you see that could matter, let’s start a dialog.

 

Monolithic Mobile, Will You Buy In?

My colleague Brian’s blog is abuzz with comments about mobile strategy, so key to success he urges readers to “[f]orget about social media,” at least for a moment. Brian’s comparison of social to mobile is apt, both began as fragmented, bootstrapped efforts, then social got the attention of the CMO. Now, it’s mobile’s turn; it’s unfortunately common to come across companies with solid customer mobile initiatives and little happening to serve internal constituents or vice versa. It’s still the exception to see an organization winning in mobile inside and out, and big software vendors see this as their golden opportunity. Enter IBM…

Back in December, after getting an advanced look at IBM’s new mobile suite, I wrote a post entitled “Can Watson Save Siri?” that contemplated the idea that IBM and other large, enterprise software vendors could lend some serious muscle to enterprise mobile application efforts.  These vendors, with their expansive mix of “big iron” servers, services to reach customers on the web and systems to run the innards of business take a “cradle to grave” approach to mobile.  In press coverage of the announcement, executives at Big Blue were quick to point out the need for more integrated mobile solutions to drive true productivity and business benefit. Their tone implies that efforts to-date have either been tactical, one-off solutions to enable a single business goal – like collaboration – or disconnected from enterprise systems that contain business processes and data. This is true in some cases, but I think enterprises are getting a lot more savvy about how to either adapt processes to harness mobile tools or add mobile-first tools like mobile BI vendor Roambi into the mix to unlock enterprise intelligence.

Can Big Blue serve you in mobile?

IBM, Oracle, SAP and their competition have been building mobile into their corporate offerings for some time making acquisitions in mobile application development, mobile device management and overall data and business intelligence tools. IBM’s MobileFirst announcement, is less a product launch and more re-branding the many existing pieces IBM has had in place for some time. It’s also designed to highlight the integration the vendor offers across the whole compliment of mobile services, creating an holistic offering from application design to mobile data analytics integration. Here’s the thing; now that IBM formally launched their mobile competency what sort of companies will bite?

“The question that customers ask themselves is, Can I bet the farm on this platform?”

- Peter Graf, EVP Product Marketing, SAP 2006

There seem to be two types of mobile strategies afoot inside of organizations. These are the common organic approach with multiple vendors creating an enterprise-wide mobile strategy approaches and a monolithic, single-vendor approach. IBM’s play is the latter and, while promising, I’ve not seen anyone embrace this route fully to-date. There’s no question that a monolithic mobile approach all coming from one vendor will work extremely well for getting more out of mobile applications and allowing mobile apps to feed the rest of the business with big data.  However, for many, choosing this path requires a rip-and-replace of existing mobile tools that work well and – in many cases – are not all “owned” by the same entity within the organization.

Making a bet on a single vendor to create all aspects of a mobile program in these instances can have significant drawbacks and my clients are right to be circumspect about the potential cost and complexity of taking the big leap to a single vendor. The most common concerns I hear are whether middleware to make the motley crew of tools sing a common tune and  compatible servers and standalone applications are required to make data stores accessible.

Many of the organizations I hear from regularly have chosen what can best be described as a polyvendor approach when it comes to mobile. A top design firm for customer-facing apps, the best-in-breed mobile device management solution, and still another to handle collaboration and data sharing that’s nimble enough to serve all comers, mobile or not. Now, as large software vendors, security vendors and enterprise systems concerns eye the fragmented mobile space with their checkbooks out, mobile leaders have two choices, 1.) start fresh with an end-to-end, single vendor solution that you know will work but comes with a potentially painful and costly changeover or wait out your polyvendor mix to see where leaders emerge – or 2.) decide under which enterprise software hegemon you’ll ultimately live. The latter seems a cynical view on the world, but past technology trends, from web servers, to security and client management tools to  wireless carriers has borne out the hegemony hypothesis over and over again.

Which path will your business choose, and why?

The Snow Day: Yesterday’s Perk Is Today’s IT Failing

I was fortunate during last week’s snowstorm here in the NorthEast not to have lost power, desipe 28″ of the white stuff (and much more in drifts) encasing my home and home office. Others were not so lucky and with a number of schools still closed, I’m also still seeing reports of “power just back this AM” as recently as today.

Snowstorms are kind of funny, because I think for many they represent a moment of youth recaptured instead of the potential massive disruptions they represent. I saw countless posts of “snow day!” on my various social streams and it made me laugh. I work from a home office, I have a fiber link to the outside world, it’s a rare day there’s a “snow day” for me or for most home workers.

Mobile and Remote Workers Only Get A Snow Day When The Lights Go Out, Then There Are Bigger Fish To Fry Than Email.

Three-and-a-half years ago the H1N1 flu pandemic represented a serious IT challenge – ensuring capacity in remote access systems Employers, realizing that they had to provide for long periods of time where workers where not physically at work, scrambled to build out IT systems to support this temporarily mobile workforce. Sure, some needed some prodding (which I happily provided) but it seems that we take for granted that workers can “keep the lights on” by dint of smartphones, tablets and email and files in the cloud.

I was fine during Superstormblizzardmageddon Nemo partly due to luck and also because I’ve got a) control over my own infrastructure and b) a relatively nimble organization who chooses its tools for maximum access efficiency. I am the minority. I’m curious how many of you who were affected by the storm fared as well, take the poll below and let me know how it went.

If you had the chance to work remotely, please answer the following two questions:

I’ll be following up with a post on the results, and why I expect my hypothesis that those who weathered the storm did so despite, not because of, their company IT policy.

Context City Limits

Headed to Austin this March? Are you ready to brave the crowds and – if it’s anything like last year, the rain? If you’re going to SxSW, as I am, you’ve likely got some expectations of what you’ll see. My big expectation? This will be the year we see the formation of a context economy.

SxSW, How Big Will It Be This Year?

No, I did not come up with that all on my own and actually last year began to show us some rough hewn examples of how mobile’s next step will be toward context. Context is the hot topic, there are books being written about it as we speak and we’ve been talking about it for a long time – see friend and co-context conspirator Nicholas Scibetta’s piece on CNBC from last February on this. I think, however, this year, context and what we can do with it (other than stalk people in an airport) will get real. I expect to see a lot of activity around the following topics:

• Using our mobile as a conduit for connected systems. If Fuelband and Fitbit are the forerunners, a network of technology on and around us is about to come to life. Much of it will be designed or powered by scrappy startups that debut at events like SxSW. This is the infrastructure of the sentient world and I expect we’ll see quite a bit of it in Austin. 
• Using sensors for good, not just creepy. Last year’s emergence of tools like Highlight showed us what’s possible when we unleash the network of sensors on our devices. It also showed us just how quickly such a use-case can turn creepy. This year, more pointed, purposeful use of sensors, along with (hopefully) a whole lot less battery drain thanks to use of things like Bluetooth 4.0 ultra low power will provide us interesting context that makes us say more than, “wow,” quickly followed by, “eww, please leave me alone.”
• Orchestration of services. OK, so not a technology in its own right, orchestration will be a major force that shifts context from interesting to useful. In order to truly have a dialogue among the things within and around us, services need to use open standards and have ways to invoke one another. The winners in the context battle will be open, the walled gardens will go the way of WebTV. Startups that have my attention will be talking (real) APIs and demonstrating a network of strong partnerships. They’ll look a lot like Box does on the enterprise cloud storage front. Know your strength and know better those than can extend it. 

Altimeter will have some solid representation at the event, and we’d like to hear from you what you think of this context economy, how it impacts your use of social, development of content and affects your marketing. I’ll borrow from my colleague Rebecca Lieb’s post some of the details of where to find us while in the lone star state.

Come find us and tell us what you think of the context economy, here where we’ll be, officially:

Saturday, March 9th

• Professions Go Social with Rebecca Lieb, Courtyard Marriott, Rio Grande Ballroom, 11:00 – 12:00

Sunday, March 10th

• Data & Gamification: Value to the Enterprise with Jeremiah Owyang, Four Seasons Hotel Ballroom,  5:00 – 6:00

Monday, March 11th

• Brian Solis interviews none other than Shaquille O’Neal, Long Center for the Performing Arts, 12:30PM

Tuesday, March 12th

• Advanced Social Media Monitoring with Susan Etlinger  (RSVP required) 3:30 – 6:00 PM

Links and abstracts courtesy RebeccaLieb.com

You can, of course, always Twitter stalk @Altimetergroup or me personally @802dotchris to find us in Austin. I’m looking forward to catching up amidst the throngs at SxSW!

Beyond Mobile: The Connected Workplace

This post began as a predictions post late last year, but I’ve decided that the emergence of the connected workplace is not a prediction, it’s a natural and unstoppable side-effect of the maturity of mobility, collaboration and organizational openness. What does it mean? I’ll begin to explain here.

We often talk about the changes being brought about by the influx of smart phones, wireless networks and tools that are consumer-first and business second. The fact is, once these tools and devices have been let into an organization, they fundamentally change it over time. In many cases mobile devices, specifically tablets, are the tipping point for this change as they bring about some of the key factors that lead to a truly connected workplace. There are 3 factors powering the emergence of the connected workforce afoot right now:

• A malleable market place of tools: Led by the shift from traditional vendors due to the needs of mobile computing, we have more diverse tools from a larger pool of providers than ever before. In the past, enterprises bought software from a small set of established software vendors. Mobile changed all of this by introducing users to app providers’ tools – previously unknown – that are critical to getting work done. How many IT managers had heard of Dropbox three years ago? Not nearly as many as today. This consumer-led adoption of tools has sped the time to change work flows in many organizations and forced legacy software providers to iterate more quickly with a broader product set. Changing the way we do something is no longer a massive overhaul and investment, it may be a one-time $0.99 purchase, or a small monthly fee payable by credit card. The business – led by its users – is taking control of what defines a proper toolset and who provides those tools.
• Ubiquitous connectivity: We’re increasingly connected, with most users working within range of a WiFi network these days, we’re increasingly hard-pressed to find “offline” time, even airplanes boast reliable connections.  Pair this ubiquitous connectivity with the mobile devices that we are carrying – either smart phone or tablet – and we have access to computing power, data and networks that follow us almost everywhere and present themselves as needed, across the multiple devices we use for various tasks.  Increasingly few users are willing to go without these tools, as a result they are bringing them to the office themselves and expecting support unwilling to wait out a lengthy ROI analysis on always on, always connected devices. More than half of incoming members of the workforce carry smartphones today, expect demand to continue to grow and the number of connected devices per person to rise as well.
• Constant communication: Network transcend those that our device connect to, though; employees are connected to one another as friends on social networks outside of the organization and some organizations are beginning to connected these same people inside the organization through adoption enterprise social networks.  What makes these networks attractive is the rapid messaging tools, virtual face to face interaction and effortless knowledge sharing. The cat is out of the bag and users are looking to social networks – sanctioned or otherwise – as the quickest route to solve problems, reach colleagues (and friends) and disseminate information.

The connected workplace, image courtesy The Gowanus Lounge

These three drivers set the state for new ways to work, but need support from upper management to reap benefits. As with any decision in mobile, policy and governance should precede technology. While much of the tactical work around managing each of the above elements has focused on responding and re-calibrating management approaches, embracing these disruptors can lead to great changes in what and organization is and does, all for the better.

• We will experience a fundamental shift in the definition of “workplace.” As teams and department relationships give way to those between individuals, roles inside of an organization become less defined. This isn’t a bad thing; we see organizations learn to focus on individuals’ strengths, and their ability to complete tasks allowing the right individuals to take on various aspects of a larger project with a “best of breed” approach to staffing. Teams form and dissolve more quickly. Work tasks become less linear, and work gets done when and where possible by the best candidates available.  Mobile connectivity, ubiquitous networks of data and flexible tools make this possible, and work gets done more quickly and efficiently while employees experience less repetitive fatigue and burnout.
• The ideation process will open up. As roles and task assignment allow workers to assemble thoughts and input on a project when and where they are able to, ideation processes become more flexible and expand to include more members of the community. The outcome of this? More members of the community playing an active role in ideating new products and services generating new products and services with greater differentiation, faster innovation thus changing competition fundamentally. The expanded conversation that enterprise social networks are fostering is beginning to re-shape information gathering and ideation processes but central streams of information (the heart of most ESNs today) will give way to providing the ability for members of an organization to create and re-tool processes; networks like Podio (now part of Citrix) are making this possible today.
• Competition will fundamentally change. While we don’t expect to see big brands working hand in hand with one another anytime in the near future the way that a company goes to market may look quite different based on the connected enterprise idea. As collaboration and openness extend to partners and customers (we can consider social media presence, monitoring and conversation activity as the first salvo in this war) managed exposure of  existing and open capacity will allow companies to take part in markets in an ad-hoc, transactional fashion. The idea of turning excess capacity into a marketable commodity is nothing new, but it is increasingly becoming the core of certain businesses. Resource sharing companies such as Zipcar on the consumer side or Amazon Web Services on the enterprise side are examples of the change in how we buy things.  A new class of consumers is emerging that looks to take advantage of a given product or even a single feature when they need it, for a limited period of time and then move on and organizations that can act quickly to serve that type of consumption will be the brands with staying power.

I am currently working on research to explore the ways in which connected workplace is taking shape inside of organizations. I’m looking to understand – beyond salespeople with iPads instead of laptops in the field, which is interesting, but a story we’ve all heard – how any or all of these factors are changing at the core of its culture or in terms of workers’ roles an entire company. Know someone? Please send them my way.  The research will be publishing in late February or early March, and I’m having conversations now. I’m looking forward to sharing the results with you.

What examples have you seen to-date in your own company of these changes? Share in the comments below.

Can Watson Save Siri?

Attending two days on executive overview from IBM leaders may seem a strange place for a mobile analyst to be spending time. But wait, didn’t they buy a company called Worklight? What about MDM, don’t they have a play there? Both are true, but it’s not a single product that’s big blue’s big idea in mobile. They’re looking at the platform.

Fact is, IBM is working to make their plethora of tools one, contiguous base from which they can sell business solutions. Sound familiar? If you’ve bought a PC in the last five years, it should. When’s the last time you went out and bought memory one place, a processor at another, hard drive at a third and so-on? The days of piecing together commodity components to create a tool are gone in the hardware world. Sure, you can still do it, but who would? IBM – and, to be sure, their large software rivals – are seeing the impending commoditization of mobile. It’s not about playing nice with the top 10 platforms, or having apps in every mobile app store, it’s about the mobile device playing two, critical roles in business; the first, the endpoint on which users will consume information and access tools critical to their job, the second role it plays is a sensor. Approaching the design of mobile business process should start with strategic planning and governance ahead of technology adoption. To date, companies have done just the reverse.

Create the plan, then adopt the technology, unless you like high support costs.

Whether smartphone or tablet, iOS, Android or Windows, IBM sees its role as providing the tools to take processes mobile and gather insights from all of the information that mobile users generate. That big data, in turn, can act as a feedback loop to continually improve workflows and drive more efficient business, or, to use IBM’s favorite adjective, “smart” business. ,When dealing with mobile, companies have traditionally parceled out the infrastructure that makes up our mobile management tools and customer- or employee-facing apps to many different player. It’s true that a company needs a mobile control plane made up on many parts, but those parts are beginning to converge and IBM is betting on a mobile future that depends on being able to harness an integrated platform of tools that follow a business need from application design and development, through management, security and deployment and through to the analysis and data yielded by those mobile tools.

One vendor, one integrated set of tools. Sound like a big buy? It is, at the moment. The company is not shy about sharing that it’s got some holes to fill in fleshing out its solutions, and it’s not in any hurry. The calculated approach takes into account that we’re still in the early days of mobilizing business. We’ve moved from simple, standalone mobile tools, on to mobile-centric tools but have not yet reached a state where we have tools and processes that adapt on the fly to whatever device we’re using, and take advantage of that device’s capabilities.

Take the example of an insurance adjuster in the field, traditionally, “mobilizing” these professionals was all about giving mobile-formatted access to certain tools email and PIM functions, perhaps the ability to look up data on a company intranet, but the information was static, being pushed to mobile. In many organizations, taking this a step further has meant using off-the-shelf tools from mobile centric providers to foster collaboration. The result is a more functional set of tools that are mobile friendly, but often require a migration of data, come from net-new vendors and don’t yield any data back to the company on usage. The unified mobile platform from a large software provider would center on customized or from-scratch apps built with compatible libraries to access existing assets (everything from reporting tools to data protection and ID) be managed by MDM tools that can also facilitate publishing of apps to devices and provide detailed data from the use of those mobile apps. The result? When the adjuster goes to the scene of a car accident and gathers data (images, audio testimonials  GPS-tagged notes) all elements of that information is managed and secured and ported back to existing company databases along with macro-statistics on how the adjusters are using the app, when, and with what data.

Few companies have their mobile ducks in a row yet to be able to “plug in” this sort of mobile development, but IBM and others in enterprise software are building their arsenal of tools when the existing stack of multiple-vendor, off-the-shelf solutions start to teeter under heavy use. IBM has made a business out of taking the uncategorized, large data sets and making sense of them (think Watson) applying this rigor to mobile could mark them as a strong player in taking the next step toward truly valuable business applications, but it will mean revisiting a lot of past tech adoption decisions.