Leigh Marriner leads Cheskin’s business consulting and market opportunity assessment work and has an impressive background in technology, as well as consumer packaged goods. Leigh has worked with a variety of companies including Microsoft, Apple, Kodak, Paramount, zing.com, Maxis, Symantec, Hewlett-Packard, Rand McNally, LucasArts, Children’s Television Workshop, Weather Channel, Discovery Channel, and Prodigy. In addition to her role at Cheskin, Leigh co-taught the Entrepreneurship course in the MBA program at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley during 2002-2003.
14 February 2010
It’s no secret that online social networking is growing rapidly. But did Twitter and Facebook spring up from nothing, like Athena bursting fully formed from Zeus’ brow? Or are there general social trends which helped birth social media?
24 January 2010
Google's Android operating system generated 27 percent of mobile ad requests from U.S. smartphones in Q4, according to mobile advertising network AdMob's Mobile Metrics Report for December 2009. Apple's iPhone yielded 54 percent of U.S. smartphone requests in the previous quarter.
One of my co-workers at Cheskin Added Value said, “Thinking about Google’s biz strategy, it makes sense to put out phones not for the sake of selling hardware or truly innovating in the mobile OS space, but for the sake of generating more traffic to their search engine, the cash cow.”
17 January 2010
Most of the buzz on the new Google phone is about how sweet the display is, and how the number of Android apps is far behind the iPhone but on a steep growth curve. But the real impact of the Google phone will be its upset of the traditional US mobile carrier control of which phones consumers can use. In many countries phones are “unlocked” and unsubsidized and consumers can buy the phone they want and then sign up for a plan with the carrier of their choice. In the US carriers have fought this model, forcing consumers to only use phones provided by the carrier and locking them into two year plans in order to recover the cost of the handset subsidy.
5 January 2010
Japan has been a leading edge adopter of mobile phone activities for the past decade, in large part based on its early i-mode platform for mobile-internet services and fast cellular networks. Now they are talking on their phones less and using mobile data services (e.g. texting) more. The Economist reports that in 2002 the average Japanese mobile user spoke on it for 181 minutes each month, about the global norm. By early 2009 that had fallen to 133 minutes, half the world average. Whereas worldwide in early 2000 an average user spoke for 174 minutes a month, and by early 2009 that had risen to 261 minutes.
Are the Japanese the canary in the coal mine? There are reasons that the Japanese talk less on mobile phones, one being the strict cultural morays against talking in public places including commuter trains. But the Germans also talk less than Americans, only 89 minutes per month, although perhaps this is because of cheaper land lines and overtaxed mobile networks.
Americans talk an average of 788 minutes per month, almost 10x the Germans and 6x the Japanese. Will we see talking replaced by messaging, as phone bills increase, public annoyance with loud public talking increases, networks become overloaded resulting in dropped calls, and more questions can be answered more easily by social network and internet queries?
4 January 2010
It was only 6 months ago I blogged about why industry pundits don’t include virtual goods and microtransactions in their lists of up-and-coming business models. And six months later AdNectar ( a small company with 9 employees) announced that it has reached 2 billion virtual goods served from its platform for clients ranging from Gillette and Funny or Die to Jelly Belly and Snapple/Dr. Pepper. For example, over 1 million Malibu Rum branded drinks were sent in two weeks.
Microtransactions are one of the few areas (along with subscription gaming) where consumers have shown a willingness to pay for online content. Microtransactions remove barriers to entry. They don’t feel like a commitment.
23 December 2009
Cheskin AV has spent a lot of time thinking about how to help clients create meaningful experiences for their customers. Meaningful experiences range from economic experiences through functional experiences and emotional experiences up to the highest level of meaningful experiences, such as wisdom. The most powerful brands offer higher-level experiences that people seek to make their lives meaningful.
CVS recently bought Long’s Drugs in my area. Long’s offered an acceptable functional and economic experience – I could get the job done. It wasn’t a meaningful experience, such as patronizing Elephant Pharmacy might have been if I were heavily into expanding the role of natural cures, but it was OK. Now CVS has managed to actually deliver a negative emotional experience, making me regret every time I shop there.
How did they do it? By printing out miles of coupons with every cash register tape, most of which expire within a couple weeks. CVS has managed to introduce a sense of anxiety into the simple process of shopping at a drug store. Do I need to read all these coupons? Will I remember to carry them with me? Did I miss another expiration date? Now every time I shop I feel like I am wasting money, instead of saving it. This is brand marketing gone awry.
22 December 2009
Does it make sense that online ad revenue is calculated based on the number of clicks on a site? That is frequency. But doesn’t stickiness on the site make it a more valuable site to advertisers? If a consumer spends 5 minutes on a site rather than 2 seconds, shouldn’t that mean that ad placement is more valuable? I am not an expert on this area, but the current pricing structure apparently doesn’t take the time a consumer spends on the site into account.
Some types of online sites are more sticky than others. Consumers spend more time on social networking, email, and some individually specified pages (e.g. news, traffic, personal blog, etc.) Shouldn’t ads on these pages be more valuable, if consumers tolerate those ads?
21 December 2009
Once again, this group has given us an excellent, thoughtful analysis of why this change to the mobile internet is so significant – the Mobile Internet Report. The ideas that most impressed me are:
1) Ten years of usage and monetization models in Japan provide one roadmap for the rest of the world.
2) The US has grabbed leadership after being a mobile laggard for years.
3) This is an epic transformation which will shift the face of computing and communication on a similar scale as Windows and the iPhone. The drivers are adoption of 3G, awesome mobile devices, social networking, video and VoIP. We should expect many current leaders to falter (but not Apple because of the depth of its app ecosystem and user experience).
4) Apple’s mobile device/ecosystem ramp has been the fastest in history.
5) Smartphone penetration will stress carrier data networks (subject of my blog last week). Offloading to WiFi will play a big role as will tiered data pricing.
6) More users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.
21 December 2009
The biggest problem I have with trying to use the social web is how to filter the massive realtime stream. I have recently drastically cut the number of people I follow on Twitter because I couldn’t filter out enough junk to make it worth spending time on Twitter. Robert Scoble may be a “friend” for his comments on technology, but since I don’t actually know him, I’m not interested in his comments on who is having a baby.
Edo Segal published an important guest blog in TechCrunch entitled “Beyond RealTime Search: The Dawning of Ambient Streams”. He is hypothesizing a vision of the future in which technology will be able to sort through the noise and clutter of the current social web and published information, to feed us the information we want when we want it. He points out that augmented reality apps are a small step toward that goal. But although AR is hot right now, it’s only a small step in the direction of having a technological sixth sense. William Gibson outlined some of the potential of jacking his consciousness into cyberspace in Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson did the same in Snow Crash. It’s exciting to be at the point where we can see how the SciFi vision actually could become reality- maybe without brain implants.
10 December 2009
It’s not all that often that you can point to published predictions you made as they are fulfilled, but it’s a warm feeling. In August 2008 we put together a mobility POV in which we predicted that bandwidth would become scarce. Although the iPhone was launched in July 2007, this was still before everyone you know owned an iPhone.
For years, mobile operators had been telling their investors that data usage charges would make up for declining voice revenue, but as of two years ago, that data revenue still wasn’t showing up. Mobile carriers were unsuccessfully trying all kinds of services to entice consumers to pay for data – mobile news, streaming video, photo sharing. Then the iPhone with its unlimited data plan and easy web browsing, photo sharing, and watching TV/videos became successful.
Today AT&T is warning that customers should use less of the company's all-you-can-eat data service. So the predictions are beginning to come true.
24 November 2009
My current thought about how Cheskin AV can continue to leverage the skills of Customer Insight, Design Thinking, and Business Consulting on innovation projects is to try to increase the involvement of people with different kinds of learning styles. Since much of what I understand is Design Thinking involves approaching problems from different points of view and feeling comfortable applying different sets of tools, integrating people on a project who are inherently comfortable in different approaches makes sense.
The Accenture Award-winning paper “Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking" by Sara Beckman and Michael Barry talks about it in this way: “Role assignments on teams might be best made based on learning style: Leader (concrete experience), artist (reflective observation), writer (abstract conceptualization) and speaker (active experimentation).”
There are challenges to implementing this approach. A skills assessment needs to include learning styles. Not all projects can support the overhead of having a large team, so we need to figure out how to move people in and out of projects on a part-time basis. We’ve made good strides toward this objective with our internal Brainstorming Sessions, that have proven so valuable. This will be fun to continue to work on, and will increase our understanding of the contributions made by the different disciplines to great client results.
22 November 2009
Carl Bass the CEO of Autodesk said that Design Thinking = Thinking in his Pecha-Kucha talk at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
This question is at the heart of many of the emotional hurdles Cheskin AV has had in developing an integrated approach to problem solving using the expertise of Customer Insights, Design Thinking, and Business Consulting. Since Cheskin AV tends to work on the tougher problems, and most of our practitioners are senior in their fields, we all apply sophisticated analysis and thinking to our recommendations. At first Design Thinking practitioners, in an attempt to describe what they do, described what they added to a project as integration of findings into a model, or a framework for analysis, or development of project insights. Naturally, senior practitioners are not willing to cede development of project insights to some other group of people. After all, insight is what we are paid for.
19 November 2009
Cheskin is ahead of the curve on thinking about what Design Thinking is, even if we are still working it out ourselves. Our approach building on the design literature’s four quadrant model to show how we move from “What Is” to “What Could Be” seems clearer than most of what I heard at the Pecha-Kucha talk at the Haas Business School at UC Berkeley on the Accenture annual award winning paper on “Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking," by Sara Beckman and Michael Barry.
A number of leading lights talked for 6 minutes and 40 seconds each on What is Design Thinking? Speakers included Carl Bass, CEO, Autodesk; John Edson, President, Lunar; John Jamieson, Design Lead and Dept. Manager, Design & Innovation, Clorox; Barry Katz, Professor, CCA and Associate Professor, Stanford Art Department; Peter Lawrence, Chairman, Corporate Design Foundation; Lara Lee, Principal, Jump Associates; Peter Merholz, President, Adaptive Path; and Elizabeth Windram, Senior User Experience Designer, Google.
No one on this panel agreed on what Design Thinking is, and several people said there was no such thing.
16 November 2009
There is a lot of confusion about what “Design Thinking” means, both among the design community and the broader business community. As a Boston Consulting Group-trained strategic business consultant, I have been struggling to understand what design thinking is and what it adds to solving a client’s problems. Cheskin Added Value integrates the disciplines of business consulting, design thinking, and understanding the customer experience in order to deliver innovation ideas, strategy and guidance to our clients. During my seven years here, I and many others have been working to figure out how design thinking and business consulting should be integrated in a firm that started as a market research firm 50 years ago, but now delivers innovation guidance which doesn’t stop at customer insight.
I have bristled at the used of the “design” word, because it sounded fuzzy and un-businesslike. “Design” conjures up graphic design or industrial product design – with the emphasis on how the product looks. I don’t think a CEO or division director cares as much about design as he/she does about producing results. I thought leading with describing ourselves as an innovation design firm risked setting up an initial hurdle that we would have to overcome by long explanations of what we meant by design.
26 August 2009
The iWise mission is to organize the wisdom of the world. It has quotes on every topic imaginable, and from many famous people, and a real-time wall of people adding quotes every minute. It’s a great site – fun to dip in and see what catches your eye. If you like to add signature lines to your Outlook messages, this is a great source.
Since Cheskin Added Value is all about change, I browsed through the change quotes:
Change before you have to. (Jack Welch)
What I said never changed anyone. What they understood did. (Unknown)
They say that time changes things, but actually you have to change them yourself. (Andy Warhol)
The site is a little slow, but it’s a lot of fun.
25 August 2009
As the discussion of whether Twitter is a waste of time rages on, the genre is evolving in ways that show it can be useful. Words Move Me, a new Twitter-like site from Sony built to market the new Sony Reader, is a micro-messaging network centered around sharing quotes from books. As a voracious reader, I love this idea. There are many nights I am reading in bed and come across a wonderful quote which I will forget by the time my book group meets, or won’t remember accurately enough to share with friends in casual conversation. It’s like music – sharing is half the enjoyment. But it’s much harder to do with books. I love giving books to my friends, but that doesn’t help me share the parts I loved the most.
22 August 2009
People at University of Washington are doing some really cool work with data visualization. (I saw more of it at the FiRe –Future in Review- conference.) Take a look at this video of the Zoetrope Project. It allows users to go back in time on web pages and analyze the data. The example on the video shows how you can go back in time and track gas prices and link them to news events happening at the time. As a person who loves to analyze data, I find this incredibly cool.
It’s amazing what individual people develop on the web. It once again reinforces the belief that the ecosystem works much more efficiently that a command and control/top down approach. No one company could have thought of all the great iPhone apps. And it’s no surprise that a spectacular data analysis app like the Zoetrope project came from an independent party. We live in a wonderful world.
9 August 2009
A designer quit Google because every decision was made according to what design changes tested the best. The NYT published this provocative article last May, with a subtitle of “ Should Design be Held Back by the Tyranny of Data?”. Although I am part of an innovation and design firm, I support listening to the data. Google is in the fortunate position of being able to test almost everything, with very little investment. They can try out 3 alternative designs and see which ones generate the most clicks, in one day. Most businesses would love to be able to get actual consumer data that easily. Companies pay lots of money to services like BASES to get forecasts of what consumers will buy. We had a client that was able to do similar tests by trying out products at home shows and changing the value proposition and labels in response to actual consumer sales. It’s rare and valuable to be able to see what consumers will actually buy (either with $ or their time), instead of judgment or projections.
9 August 2009
Electronic mobile phone money makes mobile gift-giving possible in S. Korea. "Someone can check into a mobile carrier’s online shop, buy an icon depicting a Starbucks Frappuccino and send it to his girlfriend’s phone. She can then go to the Starbucks, show the icon and get the drink. Each day, 70,000 mobile gifts — from Dunkin’ Donuts and pizza to underwear and cosmetics — are delivered through SK’s networks."
I love hearing about what's going on in S. Korea, so I'll know what will happen here in 5 years. I gave a speech at Microsoft 4 years ago, urging product planners to go to S. Korea for a week and sit in cafes and buses and watch, so they'd get ideas.
9 August 2009
When Apple released the iPhone, I’ll bet they never thought that it would be the App Store that eventually gave the iPhone a competitive advantage over Blackberry, Android phones, Palm and other smartphones. That’s what it’s come down to now. Blackberry and Palm phones both have solid advantages over the iPhone (better phone connectivity, better button touch, better networks), but it’s hard to argue against an iPhone enthusiast who’s going on about all their favorite apps. Not to mention the free publicity for iPhone apps that keeps people coming to the iPhone.
Everyone talks about the touch screen, and the design and the easy internet browsing. But I don’t think that’s why most people buy an iPhone now.
5 August 2009
The New York Times says the U.S. is 17th in the world on high-speed broadband. And some of what the U.S. calls hi-speed is not. US official FCC statistics confirm “broadband penetration” for a ZIP code area if a single user has a only a 200Kbps connection.
The Communications Workers of America found a median actual download speed in the U.S. of 2.3Mbps, vs Canada 7.6Mbps, and a median Asian download of 63Mbps. The Finns have 9x speed of the US, and France has 7x.
4G mobile broadband (WiMAX and LTE) at speeds of 100 Mbps will mean many Americans will have much faster mobile broadband access than fixed broadband access. As is true in many emerging markets where fixed broadband was never built out. Still, there are a lot of web searches that are hard to do from a mobile device screen, unless we all start carrying netbooks or connecting our PCs to the mobile network.
15 July 2009
We’ve speculated about why teenagers share their personal experiences on Facebook, and whether the next generation has different privacy concerns. I just came across an interesting perspective from a 16 year old. He doesn’t trust Twitter.
“Twitter is a different type of social network than Facebook. Facebook is about connecting people, and sharing information with each other. The way my friends and I see it, Facebook is a closed network. It’s a network of people and friends that you trust to be connected to, and to share information like your email address, AIM screen name, and phone number. You know who’s getting your status messages, because you either approved or added each person to your network. With Twitter, it’s the exact opposite. Anyone can follow your status updates. It’s a completely open network that makes teenagers feel “unsafe” about posting their content there, because who knows who will read it. Sure, you get emails notifying you when you have new followers, but that doesn’t compare to the level of detail you get when someone on Facebook adds you, and you get their information.”
It’s interesting that our speculation that teenagers don’t care about privacy may not be true. As a parent, that’s somewhat reassuring. Facebook seems to have a more dedicated community than Twitter. So community matters. And teenagers have moved beyond the in person community, although most of their Facebook friends are also physical friends.
13 July 2009
Angel investor Ron Conway spoke at TechCrunch’s CrunchUp day about his top 10 monetization opportunities, none of which included micropayments. I’m continually perplexed by why micropayments don’t get more attention. These could be virtual goods priced at $1 or less (e.g. a Facebook heart on Valentine’s day or gifting a sticker to put on a CyWorld page in Korea), or inexpensive apps for the iPhone ($3 versus $39+ on other mobile platforms), or paying $1 to get a copy of a news article a month after it was published or paying $0.99 for an iTunes song rather than having to buy a whole CD or buying a sword on World of Warcraft, or a pair of designer sunglasses on Second Life.
Consumers show much greater willingness to pay for things that cost a little bit, even if multiple purchases in the end it end up costing quite a lot.
30 March 2009
Currently most broadcast TV shows are free online and most cable shows are not. Many content creators have been taking a wait and see approach while people were only watching on their PCs. But now that more and more people are viewing online content on the TV set using devices like AppleTV or Roku, or by connecting their PCs directly to the TV, content creators are becoming worried. Boxee, a software startup that lets people move online content to the TV set, had to remove the Hulu website TV content under pressure from Fox and NBC. Hulu had seen a 42% jump in viewers in January.
The New York Times reports that television executives are developing a different model in which only subscribers to traditional cable and satellite services would be able to access the full breadth of shows online, out of fear people will turn off their cable services and get their content for free online.
Somehow content creators will have to monetize their content, or the quality will decline.
9 March 2009
Many people think of social networks as posting photos of the latest party on Facebook or “tweeting” about the sandwich you just ate. But there are many other great ideas for harnessing the skills and energy of a group of people online.
The Economist this week reported that The Institute for the Future, a non-profit research organization used an alternative reality game to evaluate future scenarios with the help of thousands of players. In 2007’s “World Without Oil”, for example, players worked together to determine what humanity would do in a severe oil crisis. (Many of its conclusions were validated when the oil price spiked in 2008.) Last September the British Red Cross launched “Traces of Hope”, a game with 7,000 active players and a storyline about a Ugandan teenager searching for his mother during a civil war. The purpose was to raise awareness about the people affected by civil wars in Africa.
I see an opportunity to build great interactive games, more akin to a good popular novel than to current videogames, written by good writers, with deep character development, and focused on a social goal.
4 March 2009
We’ve been discussing how the worsening world financial situation may affect people’s behavior and the meaningful experiences in their lives. Cheskin Added Value just completed a European leisure time trends study and one finding was about people switching to lower budget entertainment alternatives. Rather than going out to a play or game or restaurant, people are making a regular occurence into a party. Our Added Value office in the UK has coined the term “eventertainment”. I.e. Having a dinner party around Gordon Ramsey’s Celebrity Cookalong on a Thursday night – drinking some wine and cooking along with the TV screen, and then having a dinner party with friends.
The changing financial situation is opening up opportunities for people to get back in touch with some meaningful experiences in their life.
1 March 2009
Last week it was a chipmaker announcing the Android OS for netbooks, rather than just a mobile phone. This week it is Nokia announcing they are seriously looking at entering the laptop industry. We gave a series of talks at Microsoft 4 years ago warning of the fact that mobile phones were already replacing the PC as the platform of choice in many areas.
So convergence is happening from many directions. 1) Operating systems and players are beginning to converge. PC players like Microsoft and Google sold cell phone operating systems, but now the cell phone-based systems are moving onto computers. 2) Cell phone manufacturers are moving into selling PC hardware as well as phones. 3) Casual games are moving more and more onto cell phones. 4) Consumers are moving to doing more of their daily activities like non-voice communications (photos, social networking, messaging) and searching on their cell phones rather than the PC. 5) In developing countries, millions of people have their first Internet connection on the phone.
Where once Microsoft could focus on business and win the OS wars, it is no longer the case.
21 February 2009
I guess we should have seen this coming. Chipmaker Freescale announced this week it aims to sell Google Android Netbooks. I’ve been thinking of Google’s Android as only a cell phone operating system. But as cell phones increasingly provide easy mobile access to the Internet, Android is a natural for netbooks - inexpensive computers made for easy Web browsing on the go. Netbooks have shown huge growth in the last year, and may be the way the Android OS achieves bigger market share.
Google is making Android available to device makers for free -- hoping the investment will eventually pay off in advertising revenue.
Android presence on netbooks is a direct threat to Windows, not just Windows Mobile. Since netbooks are inexpensive, manufacturers are looking for any way to save costs, and Windows is more expensive. Windows currently has about a 70% share on netbooks, which is lower than its share of the overall PC market.
Android is predicated on letting consumers rather than Google or a mobile carrier decide what services they have access to while mobile.
8 February 2009
The living room of the future is taking shape a lot faster than most people think. Almost half of US broadband users watch TV shows online , and 40% of them would like to watch those TV shows on their living room TV, according to the Diffusion Group. For years technology and communication companies have tried to bring entertainment content from the PC or Internet into the living room. But most of those products have been clunky, difficult to install and use, slow, and have limited content available – think WebTV in 1996 and the Apple TV set-top box now.
But there are many new products coming onto the market.
12 August 2008
Mobility counts. In the future we will want always-on wireless broadband capacity to be sending personal videos/photos data and connecting to our social network while mobile all the time. Fast mobile broadband, whether Mobile WiMAX or 4G cellular network wireless, will be offered in the next year or two. This will make it possible to send and receive any kind of content while mobile. It will enable new behaviors. You won’t have to wait until you get home or to a WiFi hotspot to do things. Consumer electronics devices will have broadband connections built in and you will be able to play interactive games, exchange photos and videos and search the web while mobile, the same way you do now at home. Your personal content will be stored in the cloud so you can have access wherever you want.
Will mobile network providers compete successfully with wired broadband providers? They would have to offer close to the bandwidth and speeds they would be replacing, but this is looking more possible. WiMAX is an IP-based standard that will be operational next year, and has a 1-2 year headstart on the new US 4G wireless networks. With Mobile WiMAX, speeds of 10 Mbps at 10 km can be delivered, even if the 70 Mbps promised at 50 km is more hypothetical. Verizon and AT&T‘s LTE 4G wireless mobile broadband (LTE) promises to deliver 100 Mbps download speed next year, which is a lot faster than the 2.4 Mbps (EVDO) or 7.2 Mbps (3G GSM) US wireless currently delivered. The traditional wired US broadband providers currently offer speeds of 1.5+ Mbps and new offerings promise up to 3 Mbps. In the longer run, modern cities will have access to 100Mbps via fiber. But in rural areas and developing nations, wireless will probably be the backbone of the broadband infrastructure. And consumers need for mobile broadband may cause them to switch to mobile broadband, the same way many people have turned off their landline phones. Some experts say it may require on the order of 11 Mbps always-on broadband in the future to handle consumer data transfer needs, which any of these standards will be able to offer.
23 March 2008
Remember “The Year of the Internet”? It was predicted year after year until it became a joke. But look where we are now. Who could imagine life without the Internet? (I know that’s a little bit of an overstatement, but not much.)
Maybe we are at the beginning of the Year of Technology Simplicity. Or the Year of Technology Where Easy Trumps More Features. Here at Cheskin we’ve been telling our clients for years that consumers and workers want fewer features because technology is too complex and even those consumers who use the technology only access a minority of the features that already exist. And this year we’ve seen some simpler products that became big hits.
The Nintendo Wii expanded the market for video gaming to a whole new group of consumers who never played videogames, leaving most of the traditional videogame world wondering how they missed this opportunity. Hindsight is so useful, but prior to the release of Wii, most pundits predicted that Nintendo was going to continue to lose share because they were planning to introduce a product with inferior chip and graphics technology.
Then there’s the new Flip camcorder which was glowingly reviewed by David Pogue this week in the New York Times. Flip is a stripped down video recorder with a user’s manual one paragraph long which has taken 13 percent share of the camcorder market in the year since its release. I would venture a guess that the Flip hasn’t taken much share from the existing camcorder market but has expanded the market to a whole new group of consumers who would never have bought a camcorder before.
I’ve got a couple free suggestions for technology products I’d love to see simplified. What about a TV/DVR/DVD player set up that let’s the frustrated user in the home access the most basic features with only one remote control (turn on the TV, play a DVD, choose a show to watch). How about an easy way to sort and backup all your photos online, and send selected photos to friends? (A lot of companies are trying, but so far I don’t think anyone has succeeded in making it truly idiot-proof. I have friends who still buy a new memory card when they run out of space.) How about a car navigation system that can find the nearest Peet’s coffee in the direction I am traveling, instead of giving me the stores that are closest to where I am?
If you have a wish list for simpler technology, let me know.
12 February 2008
In my blog a couple weeks ago, I said that The New York Times reported that “Google disclosed that it received more traffic from iPhones this Christmas than from any other mobile device, despite owning only 2 percent of the smartphone market and less than 1 percent of the overall mobile-phone market.”
Similarly, surveys by Yankee Group, show that only 13 percent of cellphone users in North America use their phones to surf the Web more than once a month, while 70 percent of computer users view Web sites every day.
On most mobile phones, the user experience is a disaster. While many phones have some form of Web access, most are hard to use--just finding a place to type in a Web address can be a challenge. And once you find it, most Web content doesn't look very good on cellphone screens. The iPhone offers a much more compelling user experience.
There is a lot of speculation that at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona opening yesterday, there will be multiple announcements of competitors trying to take on the iPhone. Some will be built on the Android platform from Google, or other open platforms like Zumobi. But the easiest way to produce a breakthrough user experience is with a closed system, as Apple has done with iPod/iTunes and the iPhone, where AT&T gave Apple complete control over the user interface on the iPhone. Although this move was counter to everything else the US mobile operators have done in their attempts to protect their revenue stream, it proved to be a smart move given the momentum of the iPhone and the new users AT&T has picked up. The popularity of hacks to the iPhone allowing it to be used on other mobile networks attests to user desire to have the benefits of the iPhone.
Part of the reason there is broader access to web content on cell phones in Europe and Asia is that their mobile carriers have been willing to share the revenue more equally with 3rd party providers and have not demanded they totally control the user access to the web, the way most US mobile operators have. In China, the world's largest mobile market, more than a third of mobile phone owners, use their handsets to listen to music, more than in Britain or the United States.
Maybe one day the US operators will realize that putting the consumer experience first can actually win them customers. Otherwise they’ll be bypassed by the likes of Google and Android.
12 February 2008
Esther Dyson’s article today on the Coming Ad Revolution talks about new online advertising startups using behavioral targeting to offer targeted ad services keyed to web sites users have visited. This raises the specter of Big Brother watching everything you do, but as Esther says, “The discussion about privacy is changing as users take control over their own online data. While they spread their Web presence, these users are not looking for privacy, but for recognition as individuals.”
The new, younger generation of social networking and blog users doesn’t have the same fears about privacy. Many aren’t worried about putting personal information online. They feel comfortable controlling access to their information by deciding which “friends” they give permission to. If someone they don’t want to interact with starts bothering them, they can cut off access – much more easily than in the physical world where it’s hard to shake someone who has your phone number.
Many over 35ers still think about online privacy in the context of protecting children from predators. But online privacy is a completely different issue for 20-something adults.
1 February 2008
The biggest change the iPhone will introduce will not be playing music on your cell phone or looking at photos, but a much greater US consumer use of the Internet from a mobile device. For the first time, consumers can experience a usable connection to the Internet – usable not only in terms of speed (which could still be improved) but also in getting the information you want easily. Apple once again looked at what the user wants to accomplish and then built an end-to-end user experience that was satisfying. As with iPod/iTunes, Apple wasn’t the first to offer a solution – they just built one that was easy and worked. Many SmartPhones have offered Internet access for years, but the interface is clunky, often you can’t find what you’re looking for in a tolerable amount of time, and web pages aren’t formatted for the small screen. Offerings like Yahoo! Go 2.0 have made a good stab at offering certain kinds of information, but are still limited.
The New York Times reported that “Google disclosed that it received more traffic from iPhones this Christmas than from any other mobile device, despite owning only 2 percent of the smartphone market and less than 1 percent of the overall mobile-phone market.”
So we’re finally starting to see the effect a well-designed mobile Internet connection can have in the US. People will be using their phones for activities previously done on their PC.
31 January 2008
There is a lot of hype suddenly about touch screens, as a result of the launch of the Apple iPhone. But touch screens have been around for a long time - pressing digital buttons on an information kiosk is nothing new. What really changes the consumer experience is being able to use natural gestures to interact with a computer or mobile device. Although they may sound similar, there is a big difference between the HP TouchSmart PC which allows you to touch a photo and drag it across the screen, and the Microsoft Surface. On the Surface you can gesture through pages of text or graphics, draw on the screen, or turn photos around with your finger. In a similar way, you can change the size of your photo on an iPhone or Surface by moving your fingers apart, a natural movement.
The Tablet PC never really took off, despite the wonderful ability to be able to write or draw on the screen and capture the data. I think the reason is more due to the fact that the laptops were too hot to rest comfortably on your lap, the file sizes were huge, and handwriting wasn’t convertible into editable text, rather than a lack of consumer interest in its functionality.
Whether the Microsoft Surface succeeds as a stand-alone product, I think we will see its functionality incorporated into PCs of the future. It’s far more natural to gesture on a screen than to use a mouse or click pad.
3 August 2007
Lenovo has just announced a $199 PC aimed at China's vast but poor rural market. In emerging markets, it’s really a question about whether people will need a PC, as mobile phones pick up more and more ability to access the internet, do banking, get info (e.g. crop prices), etc. In India, the number of PCs connected to the internet are <5% of the number of mobile phones. Some mobile operators are talking about mobile service being free if the user accepts ads, so that makes a mobile phone even more accessible for the poor.
It’s certainly true that people want to give their kids a leg up on school by having a PC. But $199 is still a lot for the rural poor. It will be interesting to see how sales of low-priced PCs go, now and in 2-3 years when the mobile internet connections are more fully developed.
21 July 2007
CNET News.com’s article a couple days ago reminds me of how much we at Cheskin take for granted our insight into teen technology behavior. We’ve been watching teen use of email declining, starting in South Korea some years ago and then spreading eventually to the US. Teens declining use of email doesn’t seem like new news.
The real story is also not a new story. Social networks only work if your friends are using the network – whether that be the landline phone, the cell phone, email, MySpace, Facebook, text messaging or whatever. And teens are fickle and are followers as a characteristic of their lifestage – they’re supposed to be more open to trying new things, be less risk averse, and more connected to what their friends are doing. So fashions tend to move and fade faster with many teens than with other lifestage groups. [This is a generalization - Cheskin has done a teen segmentation which highlights which groups of teens personify this “typical” teen behavior.] And since being part of a social network is so critical for teens, we see rich development in networking behavior. Teen’s core behavior hasn’t changed, just their method.
Teens have moved away from communicating by email, except with their parents, colleges, work, and for shopping, because their friends aren’t checking frequently. An additional appeal of a social networking site like MySpace was that for awhile adults didn’t understand it and weren’t using the site – which made it like a private teen clubhouse. Part of the impetus to move to Facebook was that it was originally limited to college, and then added high school students, as MySpace became more broadly used.
There are certainly disadvantages to using social networking sites versus email – you can’t send attachments, you need to open a profile before sending a message, and some profiles load slowly. But those disadvantages aren’t determinative if Facebook is where your friends are. Facebook recently opened up to hooking in applications, so you can do things like pull in YouTube videos to your profile, which addresses some of the most important teen needs for attachments. And kids will continue to move as the next best thing comes up.
30 May 2007
Congratulations to Microsoft for launching this cool new product. It’s an acrylic tabletop with an embedded 30 inch screen. You interact with it through hand gestures. It can recognize small objects such as a digital camera with WiFi and download photos to the table surface, where you can sort them by pushing them around the table with your hands.
It’s been fun to be involved with Microsoft on this innovation effort – brainstorming, understanding the consumer experience, and helping identify market opportunities.
23 April 2007
I’ve been puzzled when I talk with teenagers and they say they’re not going out with someone – although they spend hours at each other’s houses and on the phone, go to the prom together, and stop to see the other one on their way home from the airport when they come back from vacation. But they’re not “going out”.
It’s a fascinating example of the way technology influences how people see themselves and how they perceive the world. We’ve all heard about teens hooking up in casual relationships, but “not going out” has nothing to do with hooking up. It turns out that a teenager is “going out” when they indicate on their Facebook page that they are “in a relationship”, and not before. The baggage that goes along with going out is that you have to officially break up at some point, as opposed to just letting things take their course.
In 6th grade, kids are “going out” if the boy asks the girl if she will go out with him and she says yes. And that is the end of the story. Nothing else required.
Cultural anthropology in our own backyard.
10 April 2007
Mac sales have picked up since the success of the iPod. But a closer look at the data is interesting. Mac market share fell about 0.2% per year from 1998 to 2003 in the US. The iPod was launched in 2001, but didn’t really take off until 2004. From 2003 to 2006 Mac has gained 0.4% market share each year.
Since the iPod launch, the incremental Mac sales over the 2001 baseline rate have consistently been about 10% of iPod sales. In other words, about 10% of iPod owners who were exposed to the iPod/iTunes user experience liked it enough to transfer that desire for a similar experience into a Mac purchase. Macs still have less than a 5% US market share, but the trend line is climbing a mountain. And with the new Macs that run Vista, a lot of people who bought Windows-based PCs because of work may make a different tradeoff in the future.
Here at Cheskin we know that designing a meaningful customer experience that connects with consumers in an authentic, transparent way generates passionate loyalty. A great experience creates value. And Apple is showing how that value can spread beyond the initial experience into other products associated with the brand.
Although consumers aren’t as brand-loyal as they used to be, since there are so many consumer-to-consumer sources of information on the web, a great experience will lead consumers to at least investigate other products from the same brand or company. In this era of declining efficiency of marketing expenditures, creating a meaningful customer experience has a big payoff.
26 March 2007
The AMA's Marketing News has a cover story on innovation in the February 1, 2007 issue. This point of view is upheld by what we have discovered in our client work. Line extensions do not lead to real innovation. True innovation means designing a product that delivers significant new value to the customer. And success is first and foremost a function of senior management, not just R&D and Marketing. The culture has to embrace innovation and what comes with it – risk, uncertainty and failure. A few of our observations about successful innovation:
1) Being afraid to fail and not embracing risk stifles innovation. You need to be willing to go in the wrong direction in order to be open to true innovation as opposed to product extensions
2) Stage-gate processes need to be modified to allow true innovation to flourish. You can’t come up with reliable numbers that will pass the stage-gate process early in a true innovation process. Stage-gate processes push products into an existing mold. While it’s important to have some method to make rational go/no go decisions before too much is invested, a company needs to be willing to pursue questionable ideas for some time in order to be able to show potential if it exists. Truly new ideas often look wacky at first.
3) Often truly new ideas come from outside a company, not just from the R&D facility. Companies that manage to avoid an NIH mentality have an advantage.
4) True innovation need not be based just on core product innovation. Starbucks has shown that consumers’ emotional experience can create innovation. Orange Glo showed that a customer’s experience with a cleaning product can create a truly innovative experience, even though the underlying cleaning technology isn’t new. Although the Prius represents new technology, the reason it is so successful is due to emotional considerations – a substantial consumer segment care enough about being (and being seen as) environmentally conscious to make that a primary purchase criterion for their car.
20 March 2007
Yesterday’s New York Times had a story by David Carr about Assignment Zero, a new collaboration between Wired magazine and an experimental journalism site at NYU. The idea is to apply to journalism the same open-source model as Linux and Wikipedia. Very interesting, but this has been happening for several years.
The best Katrina photos and videos shown on major TV networks were user-generated. MetroBlogging is a wireless blogging service in 43 worldwide cities that lets bloggers post first-person accounts of news events, like the July 2005 London bombings. There is also an online newspaper in Asia that has been successful using only user-generated content. I believe readers vote on the content and payment is made for the most desired content.
Web 2.0 and user-generated content can edge out old media with the volunteer labor of amateurs who are rewarded by peer acknowledgement and the satisfaction of seeing their work used. Before Web 2.0, group communication was limited to geeks. We’re just beginning to realize how productive the hive can be and how powerful it is when it swarms in a particular direction. Take a couple examples: 1) Mash-ups are allowing people to weave applications together and create information that people want. E.g. Platial lets users create meaningful maps by associating information tags such as restaurant locations. Other mash-ups associate information with photos so you can look for a town in Mexico and see what others have liked there. 2) Social search is becoming a reality in many different blogs and communities that leverage recommendations from like minds. The challenge is finding the right communities, blogs and RSS feeds to target 3) The opinions of a large number of “normal” people can better predict outcomes than experts.
I think the challenge of journalism will become more a matter of editing and selecting the information to present from a wide range of sources, reporters being only one of them. What readers want from a newspaper or information site is intelligently presented sifting of the masses of information out there, coming from an identified point of view.
15 March 2007
Will Marc Andreessen succeed with Ning, which plans to make it easy for anyone, including adults, to set up their own social networking sites? Is online social networking a function of lifestage or is Gen Y just introducing the other generations to a behavior that many of us will adopt?
Why do teens use MySpace and Facebook so heavily? These have replaced email and even IM to some extent, as teens’ preferred way to communicate with their social group and to find out what’s going on (hot new music, who was at what parties, etc.) For teens, the meaningful experiences delivered by social networking sites are Connection and Knowledge.
Adults may not have the same intense need for Connection with a large social group as teens, but easier access to a social network in an area of particular interest is appealing because it helps us wade through the growing morass of available information. And it helps people connect with people of like interests. Personally, I’d much rather get a San Francisco restaurant recommendation from people who are foodies than from Zagat, which may have started out that way but now publishes the scores from too broad a range of people to be reliable. To take another example, American parents who adopt a Chinese baby would like to share with others trying to raise their daughter in two cultures. Much of this kind of connection now happens on blogs, but I would expect the social networking tools provided by suppliers like Ning will make the experience more enjoyable and easier to navigate.
Adults will gravitate toward social networking sites, to a lesser extent than teens, but still in significant numbers. While the Korean social networking site CyWorld is used by 90% of 24-29 year-olds, it’s also used by 40% of the entire population.
13 March 2007
Teens and young adults are leaders in almost all uses of consumer technology. Looking at the technology behavior of Gen Y (those age 6-26 born between 1980 and 2000), you can tell a lot about what will be mainstream in a few years. The big unknown is which of those behaviors are a function of lifestage (teens and young adults) and which are behaviors that the whole generation will carry with them as they age. Will Gen Y still IM relentlessly when they are 40? Will they use social networking sites? Will their primary use of digital photos be to have fun with an image in the moment as opposed to documenting an occasion the way Boomers do?
Consumer technology companies looking for innovative product and service ideas often ask Cheskin these questions since we have looked at this issue for a number of years across many different product categories. The key to the answer is - what meaningful experience is the consumer seeking? Meaningful experiences are those that evoke our sense of the value and significance of our lives - the types of experiences people value most.
At Cheskin, we listen to the stories that people tell with an ear for the underlying meaningful experience. Gen Y uses IM heavily because social life is the center of most teenagers’ world, they want to be constantly in touch with a whole group, and they use IM to make social plans. IM’s ability to indicate “presence”, or who else is available on the network is key because Gen Y invests heavily in maintaining a robust network of friends.
So is IM behavior only a function of lifestage, since participating in a wide social life doesn’t rank as high on Gen X or Boomer priorities? Certainly Gen Y will IM less as they age (or use whatever technology replaces IM in the future). But they will take this learned behavior into the areas of their life where it meets a similar need – e.g. staying in touch with a work group during a meeting.
We predict that IM use will rise in older age groups as the current Gen Y ages, but teens and young adults will continue to be the heaviest users. We would advise a client to look for ways to tap into the meaningful experience of Connection in those over age 25 to increase IM-type usage.
7 February 2007
Dropping DRM (digital rights management) protection on music makes a lot of sense, as Steve Jobs is recommending. I saw the same thing happen with copy protection on gaming and edutainment PC software in the 1980s. Consumers found it so burdensome that they invested a lot of energy in getting around the copy protection (read: downloading free MP3 music files) and in breaking the copy protection algorithms (similarly, any high school kid knows how to download music from his friend’s iPod onto his PC). And sales of PC games took off after copy protection was removed.
Consumers hate DRM, and there will be even more of a backlash as time passes and people replace their PCs and find that they’ve already used up all their permissible legal copies and they have now lost all the music they’ve purchased. Or they backup up their collection and then try to download it to a replacement PC and find it isn’t allowed.
18 October 2006
The company's chief executive, Nigel Clifford, told delegates that the dawning era of the smart phone represents a shift "as profound as the Internet and PC were in the 1990s." He suggested that the popularity of smart phones in the developed world and the "leapfrog economies" phenomenon in developing countries--in which expensive wired infrastructures are bypassed in favor of wireless--would create a situation where there was a "smart phone in every pocket.
We at Cheskin have been forecasting this seachange for years as a result of our observations about consumer behavior in Asia and Europe, and it's nice to see our predictions coming to pass! In Korea, where mobile broadband is ubiquitous, we hear things like: "My life has changed because of mobile broadband. It's essential to my daily business and my personal life. Even in the office I have instant access to almost any information or service without having to sit at my desk."
Interesting comments on this CNet article.
19 September 2006
As corporate PC sales have slowed over the past few years, companies have focused more on opportunities to sell to consumers. Witness HP’s refocus on the consumer market and digital photography and Microsoft’s efforts in entertainment digital rights management (DRM) and the new Zune media player. But the playing field is shifting and the established players are in danger of missing a big opportunity because they are tied to their existing way of doing business.
Consumers prefer to bypass the PC altogether whenever possible and convenient. They want to transfer photos directly from their digital cameras to their printer, or send a photo from their camera to a friend’s camera or MySpace site. Although they store music on their hard drive, they prefer to trade playlists directly between MP3 players. For Gen Y, their playlist, like their clothing, is an important way of reflecting their identity and they display playlists on their device, not the PC. Microsoft’s new Zune portable media player is beginning to take advantage of these insights by allowing consumers to download songs directly to the device using WiFi and to beam songs to friends.
Still, the major players are weighted down by their “concrete shoes” which tie them to their existing way of doing business. Instead of assuming consumers will regard the PC as their base for digital entertainment, why not build products for an environment where the PC isn’t central. For example storing photos on the web and sharing and accessing them through a portable device (which has the added advantage of protecting family photos from disk crashes). Or tagging songs from the radio to download directly to the MP3 player, as Sirius is doing. The company that offers an easy ecosystem for digital entertainment which doesn’t involve the PC could be the next iPod-like success story.
21 March 2006
Microsoft just announced an ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) called Origami, which runs a full version of Windows. It will cost around $500 and is slightly bigger than pocket size. You have to attach a separate keyboard, but it has a touch sensitive screen. Origami is made to surf the net, show movies, read email, sync with Outlook and do most of what you would do on a laptop that doesn’t involve heavy text entry. Origami is getting closer to Bill Gates’ vision of a small inexpensive PC, but it needs 3G wireless access in addition to WiFi and Bluetooth to enable people to stay connected anywhere. Pundits such as Ed Hardy of Brighthand are saying “I just can't see any reason why someone would be willing to pay $500 for a Windows Mobile or Pocket PC device when they could get one running Windows XP or Windows Vista for the same price.”
On the contrary, I think many people will want a smartphone with Windows Mobile 5.0. You won’t always carry your UMPC, but you will always have your phone. And you’ll want to check email, and see your address book and calendar on your phone. It will be interesting to see which devices the market chooses as the options expand – smartphones, laptops, UMPCs, Pocket PC handhelds, iPods, PSPs, portable media or DVD players. I don’t think consumers want one converged device, and just adding functions doesn’t mean success (witness iPod Photo, or Nokia N-Gage). Although consumers can’t reliably tell you whether they would use a device until they actually see it in action and watch what others do with it, in the research we’re doing for our clients we’re beginning to see which way the current is pulling.
12 January 2006
We recently had a party and were piping the music from my husband's PC through his new Bose sound system. A friend tried to make a phone call from the room, but was stymied by how to turn down the music. There’s no obvious volume controls if Windows Media Player isn’t open on the desktop. I have several friends who don’t watch DVDs any more unless their kids are home (usually a long shot) because if the home theater was left on some non-standard setting, it’s too hard to figure out how to play the movie.
All this digital entertainment at our fingertips is great, but there is a large segment of the user population that just wants an on/off button, volume up/down key, and a Play Movie key. Some new cell phones have figured this out and come with a Save and Delete key for voicemail so you don’t have to remember which number to push on this system. Where is the iPod approach to the digital living room? Will it be the Google PC? With buttons for Get Email, Get Info, Look at Photos, Play Games, Watch Movie, Watch TV, Listen to Music?
He who has the most features at CES doesn’t necessarily win.
8 January 2006
Working in the technology business on a daily basis, it’s easy to miss those rare glimpses of how all this technology really changes people’s lives. I have a friend who frequently circumnavigates the globe with several stops in 6 days or less, and has coped by taking sleeping pills. Well, his life has changed judging from the email I got yesterday.
“I am aboard Lufthansa 756 flying 37,000 feet over Karachi, Pakistan on the way to Mumbai, but since you just asked. I logged into our BofA account and found the money just arrived. Good news.
All this courtesy of Connexion by Boeing, a wireless LAN that bounces off a satellite and everything is going through our VPN.
BTW, I am also blasting The Eagles greatest hits through my Bose headphones that are plugged into my Dell which is sucking the tunes down live from the Rhapsody online music service.
This is the ONLY WAY TO FLY. What a world.”
10 October 2005
What is interesting about the new website Ning, from Marc Andreessen's latest company 24 Hour Laundry, is that they are putting out tools to see what develops as consumers use the site. This is similar to what happened with the original SimCity, where players developed their own cities and posted them for other to use. Or currently with Second Life where a real dollar market in the online currency Lindendollars was developed by users. It would be nice to see other developers take a similar approach in some of these areas – throw some things out and let them develop from the bottom up, rather than using a top down planned approach. This seems to be what Google is doing. In these cutting edge areas of technology, I don’t think anyone can foresee what will happen and which will be the “killer apps”.
Ning is described as a free online service for building "social applications." Company executives refer to Ning as a "playground" for creating content, such as photos and reviews, and sharing that information to connect with other people. The Ning site hosts these "social applications" and gives Web developers tools to make it easy for developers to build whatever app they want for any topic, interest, group, language, location or product, without a lot of effort. The first topics include a way to share book reviews, tips on San Francisco Bay Area walking trails and profiles of superheroes.
6 October 2005
IDC just reported that 1 billion IMs are sent every day between 28 million enterprise users. Growth in the enterprise segment is all thanks to IM crossover from consumer use. MSN Messenger and AOL IM have been widely used for years in the home. We’ve seen the same thing happen with digital cameras. Here at Cheskin we now use our personal digital cameras for recording what’s written on the whiteboard after a brainstorming session, or for snapping shots of the culture while we travel abroad and sending video-postcards to our clients, or for posting visual data on a project site using our internal Sharepoint portal. We're seeing it happen in gaming as companies use videogame technology and experience to develop training tools and even in scientific research to simulate how people will actually behave during a viral pandemic (e.g. the recent World Of Warcraft virus).
It’s always important for a tech company to monitor what's going on in the consumer market. Too often consumer technology is relegated to stepsister status and not considered real hardcore technology. The crossover phenomenon is real and can dramatically change the business market.
5 October 2005
I went into a Verizon store last week to switch my cell phone number over to a different device. My current phone broke and I want to buy the Motorola Razr Q when it comes out in January. So I brought in my old phone as a temporary replacement. I thought it was identical to the simple phones my kids still use, except that mine’s black instead of a cool silver that lights up blue when a call comes in. But Verizon wouldn’t hook it up. Why? The government no longer lets them hook up a phone unless it has GPS. This must be the best kept secret around. If your cell phone is on, the government or law enforcement can track where you’ve been. That’s creepy.
28 September 2005
There have been a flurry of conversations about whether Google is supplanting Windows as a consumer PC platform. Some of the interesting blogs are:
The Web is on an equal footing with Windows for Microsoft now. From Read/WriteWeb.
From OSNews.com. Maybe they are on a collision course, but the scenario, you need to see fleshed out a bit, to believe it would have to specify what is going to happen to revenues. If you're MS planners, you're looking first at OS revenues, which are closely tied to PC shipments. Now, do you believe that Google is going to affect the number of PCs shipped?
THIS MISSES THE RISK THAT CONSUMERS MAY IDENTIFY WITH GOOGLE MORE THAN WINDOWS AND TURN TO GOOGLE FIRST, BRINGING AD REVENUE WITH THEM. IT'S NOT JUST OS SHIPMENTS THAT ARE IMPORTANT. CONSUMERS ARE A HUGE MARKET AND THEY NOW IDENTIFY MORE WITH THE WEB AND THEIR MOBILE DEVICES, THAN WITH THE PC. THAT COULD MAKE GOOGLE THEIR FIRST CHOICE FOR PAID SERVICES AND COULD MAKE A WINDOWS CONNECTION TO MOBILE DEVICES LESS MEANINGFUL.
From Slashdot. I'd wager we have a while to wait before the Web-as-platform paradigm really takes off.
27 September 2005
It’s true that the telecos are rapidly cutting prices faced with new competition from cell phones and VoIP. But when I look at my historical Quicken budget for telephone services, I was spending a lot less four years ago. Instead of spending $70/month on a landline phone, I’m now spending $20/month on a landline including all long distance calls, but I’ve added $100+/month for my cell phone, not counting the data services which I’m about to add.
There is cause for hope as competition puts pricing pressure on the mobile operators. Right now, mobile operators charge 3-5 times as much as fixed operators per minute. As dual function mobile VoIP/wireless phones become a reality, travelers will use WiFi connections in airports and hotels to make free or low cost calls over the internet. Phones which can switch seamlessly between the mobile wireless network and VoIP calls on the internet will even allow users on the move to switch the call to the internet when in range of a WiMAX or WiFi site. In addition, the mobile operator’s new 3G wireless networks which offer high-speed internet connection will bring pricing pressure to bear as customers are able to place calls at lower data rates.
So maybe I’ll be back to paying $70/month in a couple years. Not counting the kid’s cell phones.
12 September 2005
There is an interesting shift afoot in the PC industry. Google wants to bring consumers into its ecosystem as soon as they open their PC, and completely bypass the Windows desktop ecosystem. In this model, the PC and Windows are just a conduit to the web, necessary only to manage the hardware and peripherals, and Google is akin to an internet operating system. Google is following an integrated model offering many services in one place (not unlike what Microsoft did with Office on the PC) so a home PC user can do most of what they want to do from the Google platform. Google uses each of its services to promote its other services – search, mail, blog, social networking, photo management, shopping, TV and movies, etc.
Handling photos is a good example. Consumers are confused over what software to use to save, edit, organize and print their photos. Google offers Picasa for free and positions it as the place to start when downloading digital photos. Then consumers can use Hello to photo-share and chat, or Blogger, or attach a photo to an email. Google may be able to monetize this consumer traffic by passing consumers on to printing sites for a share of revenue, plus they get advertising revenue on their site based on number of eyeballs.
This scenario could end with consumer’s primary emotional attachment and brand identification on the PC being with Google. Will we see a $200 Google PC that accesse the web, supports email and IM, manages photos, schedules and online shopping and integrates with your mobile phone?
8 June 2005
Collaboration is an important part of any consulting assignment, but to work effectively at Cheskin, I've had to take this skill to a whole new level. I've had to learn to collaborate remotely with team members scattered in different countries, operating in different time zones, and using different communication tools. I've had to adjust to working with people who are at home, in their car, in a client's lobby or at the zoo with their 3 year old. Usually they have road warrior laptops or web-connected PDAs, but sometimes all they have is a phone.
Collaboration is important here for a number of reasons: Whether we're thousands of miles apart or sitting face-to-face, we know the only way we'll succeed is through the sum of our efforts. Our competition is just too tough for a one man act to beat. Because we know how to collaborate across time and space, we are truly flexible about where people work. This allows us to hire from a much broader and deeper talent pool. The type of creative, intelligent thinkers we desire find us far more attractive when they learn they can work from their home in Las Vegas or Redmond or Mexico. And because we invest in the latest collaboration tools (like Sharepoint TeamServices, MS Live Meeting and Smartphones or Treos, we are exposed to new visions of sharing and communicating, which end up regularly influencing and improving our work processes.
But no matter how strong a company's philosophy and tools are, there's one aspect of collaboration that matters above all else...
27 December 2004
Forget shelling out $.99 per song. Monthly subscription to digital music is easier and it matches the actual behavior of teenagers and young adults, who share songs widely, passing playlists around their circle of friends. And our research shows that many adults who consider music an important part of their life love to discover new music and share it with their friends – and what better way than having unlimited access to a library of 900,00 songs on Napster, Rhapsody, etc.
All that is missing is a company ready to invest in promoting subscriptions to consumers. Yes, consumers fear “losing” all their music if they stop their monthly subscription payments. But there are ways around this – e.g. give subscribers ownership of x songs with a one year subscription. Steve Job’s opposition to subscriptions for iTunes is missing the boat. This is a golden opportunity for someone like Walmart or Sony or Microsoft to jump onboard.
24 August 2004
Apple offers an option within the DRM (digital rights management) protection in iTunes called "share my music," that lets users make their playlists available to any other computer running iTunes on their local network. By clicking on someone else's shared music within iTunes, users can "stream" the music to their PC, playing it without actually storing it. Since most colleges have fast local area networks, this has become standard procedure at many colleges. In dorms you can click on the network and see 40 or more music libraries. And programs are widely available that use iTunes as a conduit for illicit music downloading.
Once again Apple has created a cool factor around its products by making it easy for users to showcase their personality and taste by posting their personal playlist. So what’s wrong with allowing sharing on local area networks?
26 April 2004
I read LiAnne Yu’s blog on dinner planning in the 50’s with a feeling of recognition and curiosity. I attended a women’s college that has well attended reunions every five years where we get together and talk about the major issues in our lives for that decade. Even though we are a decade or two older than LiAnne, the same issues remain for working women. Most of us try to do superior work at each of our jobs – working professional, mother, wife, daughter, friend, and keeping our physical and emotional selves in shape. We’ve concluded that we need to redefine success as doing a good or good-enough job, rather than an A+ job, at all these things.
When LiAnne writes “intellectually, she's a working woman and shouldn't have to feel responsible for producing a home cooked meal from "scratch" every night, [for visiting in-laws, but] it is, emotionally, an entirely different issue”, I realize many expectations haven’t changed in the past 25 years. But it’s largely up to us to move the goalpost.
22 March 2004
This weekend I had one of those technology experiences that I want to tell everybody about. Right now I feel the same way about Starbucks as I felt about my teddy bear when I was 6. How could I live without it? Starbucks has just bought more of my consumer goodwill than any company whose products I’ve used all year.
Knowing I can wirelessly connect in any small city enriches my life so much. Instead of grumbling about being separated from my family for yet another day, I could meet a hard deadline and still watch my daughter’s team win the division volleyball championship. I’m so grateful to Starbucks, that even though I know offering wireless high speed internet access was a marketing tool to bring in business and enhance the brand, I feel as if they have just made a selfless contribution to the world. What a marketing coup!
© 2007 Cheskin Added Value