Category Archives: Gadgets

Why does a company that started by selling books continue to disrupt so many industries they’re not first considered to be experts in? Amazon has evolved from being an online bookseller to becoming not only “the world’s marketplace” but one of the world’s largest providers of cloud services — creating an entirely new service offering that just a few years ago didn’t even exist. And, in the meantime, becoming a high-tech company that rivals the ones expected to innovate in this area.

That may be the primary reason Amazon has been able to take-off in new markets. First, its CEO, Jeff Bezos is not concerned with short-term profits. His vision is what more CEOs need to reflect on: “We like to invent and do new things, and I know for sure that long term orientation is essential for invention because you’re going to have a lot of failures along the way.” Too many American companies seek just short-term profit, and don’t focus on more than 3 or 4 quarters. If Kindle, Amazon Web Services and Amazon Prime were required to show profits in their first 3 or 4 quarters, they would have never even gone to market.

True disruption comes from those that jump into a market not worried about cost. They usually go in with the lowest cost and quality offering and build from there. Ultimately, becoming a market leader means that you have to continue to innovate and disrupt, or you become less a disruptor and just a profit-making machine. Consider the fate of Polaroid, Atari, RIM and Digital Equipment Corporation: all were once disruptors in their respective industries. Once they reached the top, they stumbled. They stumbled because they stopped innovating and disrupting. Amazon continues to discover new markets, innovate products and services, and is restless once they begin to make inroads into a new market. Apple and Google are the obvious candidates for finding it difficult to create market breakthroughs while servicing the markets they currently dominate.

Disruption is based on creating new and valuable products and services in an uncertain market. Once a company gets too comfortable in their market, they will eventually find it difficult to innovate and disrupt. The challenge is to foster a culture that values creativity and innovation and offers a process that encourages its people to ask questions, uncover new possibilities, and explore without being driven by profit only. Amazon has shown it’s willing and able to enter any market it thinks it can add value to. And then it works from within and continually innovates and disrupts. Companies like Apple, Google and even Microsoft should never forget what happened to the companies that lost their hunger for innovation. Maybe they should listen to Jeff a little more.

With smartphones and gadgets like Google Glass grabbing all the headlines, what some of us realize is the vast wasteland of bad reality shows, over-hyped sports events, and sensational specials we call TV is about to undergo a transformation that will forever end the viewing experience as you know it. And although tech companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft have been fiddling around with their idea of how to change TV for a few years now, it’s the big networks and pay television providers that are finally making some decisions to move TV land forward. What’s driving this change? Three biggies:

1. Viewers’ increasing multi-screen behavior — now their TV is just one screen in a world of many. People often watch TV while multi-tasking with their tablet or smartphone. More and more, people want to carry their TV shows with them, and continue watching from different locations.

2. TV execs have realized that you will actually pay for digital content. Paywalls on some online news sites such as the New York Times and revenue on iTunes and other digital marketplaces have shown the money guys that you will actually hand over your hard-earned dough for content. So, they will soon end free broadcast TV. You can start the death countdown now. Viewership on broadcast TV is at its lowest ever, down from 69% in 1993 to 42% this year, according to Nielsen.

3. Small startups like Aereo have begun to offer free access to broadcast TV over the Internet, and are winning court cases to stay alive.

After Aereo got a reprieve from a federal judge, News Corp is now considering going to cable only. And now, Intel is trying to design a new online TV service that will let you control more of your viewing experience.

The coming transformation of TV promises to offer you:

–De-bundling so you don’t have to pay huge monthly fees for just the few channels you actually watch.

–Easier discoverability through better interfaces

–Smarter content relevant to your viewing history

–Easier and more affordable subscription options

Of course, everyone is waiting for what Apple will do with its rumored TV. Will they just make hardware, or are they going full-on with hardware and content?

What all this says is there is no business model for TV right now. Programmers are unwilling to hand-over rights for online TV because they don’t know what to charge for it. But they know they don’t want to end up like the music industry when Napster came along, so they’re scrambling. Either way, you win. TV will transform based on the way you want to consume it. Stay tuned!

, via Wikimedia Commons”]

By Glogger (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL

In just a short time, wearable computing has taken off. Several devices are now flooding the market. The first phase seems to be health-related with Nike’s Fuel Band, Jawbone’s Up and Fit Bit all competing for the fitness geeks. What’s driving the craze? Well, it’s a quick convergence of three things:

– Affordable sensors

– Innovation in manufacturing

– “Always-on” connectivity with smartphones

Although it seems like wearable computing is an overnight sensation, it has actually taken a long time for this technology to come to fruition. Over the last five years, patents, manufacturing, and design have evolved so affordable devices could come to market. There’s a lot of high-tech in these devices — they are full-blown computers that are waterproof, hypoallergenic, and built to take the hits that come from being worn on active bodies.

These devices are indeed complete systems as well: the wearable sensors, the software app for your smartphone, and the data stored in the cloud all combine to provide you information you’re most interested in: calories burned, miles walked/ran, hours slept, etc.

Who’s buying these devices? It seems interest cuts across gender and socioeconomic lines. Everyone is interested in their health, and knowing they can get relevant data on their activity is a major ROI on why people are jumping on the bandwagon. It helps to have the devices priced at less than $200 too.

Face it, wearable computing will go far beyond tracking your treadmill runs… soon, you’ll be wearing devices that offer you what that little computer you hold in your hand all day does… can anyone say Google Glass?

It’s been windy and rainy in the Texas capitol, but there’s still 24,000 people huddled together for SXSWi. Day One of Interactive (for me) was about mobile marketing. Tim Reis, the head of advertising for Google, kicked it off:

Mobile marketing/advertising is now about weaving into the consumer’s device. It’s about having a conversation with the consumer. The device is used for dialogue, and marketers now have to do more than just throw banner ads out there. The real opportunity is to learn how people use their devices and interact with them to build a relationship with them.

Mobile is the signature device of the 21st century. It will also interact with the device of the 20th century: the TV. The second screen experience is where your primary focus should be for mobile advertising.

What is mobility and context? New patterns are emerging as consumers integrate multiple screens into their day. Context used to mean placing an ad next to content. Now it means where the consumer is and what they’re doing, and what mood and mode they’re in. You need to focus on how the consumer moves across multiple screens, and their ever-changing context is.

Consumers weave seamlessly through context, doing what they do at any given moment. Devices are blurry — phones are getting larger and acting like tablets, tablets are getting smaller. The device itself is no longer important. Context is what it’s all about. We used to think about intent. Intent is a powerful signal. Combine intent and context, and you see the direction we’re going in.

Five years ago marketers thought of social, local and mobile as buckets. As new tech emerges, we tend to box them into buckets we can understand. Consumers don’t see these buckets, however.

Contextual opportunities are the essence of mobile. Consumers take their digital life with them.

Friction is also key. Eliminating friction in the process empowers your connection to your consumer (stop asking someone for their city and state when you’re also asking them for their zip code). On a phone, that friction is big. Bigger than on a laptop. Think through the friction points. Erase friction.

The tech community has been mostly unified in semi-harsh criticism of Microsoft’s Surface hardware. It’s like schoolyard bullies going after the geeky kid that stands by himself on the playground, thick glasses, and button-down shirt, twiddling his thumbs as everyone else plays sports (I know what it’s like — I was a geeky kid like that). Bloggers have been commenting about the seemingly deficient battery life, the weight, the size, and the cognitive dissonance of going back and forth from the Modern UI to the classic desktop. On top of that, many have been bloviating about how the “Surface is no iPad killer.”

Let me stand apart from the fray and discuss why I think the Surface devices are forging a completely new paradigm shift for computing.

When Apple introduced the iPad in 2010, they ushered in the “tablet era” and revolutionized mobile computing. Although people have been moving to laptops and away from desktop computers for quite some time, in one fell swoop the iPad sped up the move away from being tethered to a desktop. Combined with the App Store, Apple made mobile computing and the cloud real for the masses. In my opinion, the iPad represented the first real example of how mobile computing and cloud technology combine to provide an experience of how people really want to connect with devices and each other. I knew something big was afoot when I was in a mall watching an older gentleman swiping through screens on his iPad. In one device, Apple captured how most people want to interact with technology.

Humans are funny creatures, however. They will naturally try to evolve their own perceptions of what a device means to them and try to make it adapt to their environment, needs and desires. People love the “lean-back” experience of consuming content on the iPad. But many wanted it to do more — they want productivity apps. They want to work with it. They want to always BE with it and make it an integral part of their lives. Many already do this with their smartphones. Inevitably, developers starting building apps to unleash the power of productivity on the iPad.

The app world has moved fast. Developers are innovating at lightning speed. Much faster than Apple’s UI and OS developers can keep up. Supporting two devices that are selling faster than  Chinese kids can screw them together, combined with updating the OS and the built-in apps to keep up with how people are using them, has kept Apple on the edge of its capabilities. Compromises are made. The fragmentation of its operating systems are starting to show. The rough edges are exposed. The “old-school” textured backgrounds in iOS, the debacle of Maps, the bandwidth leaks, and so on show a company splitting at the seams with its strategy as it tries to stay the dominant player in the market.

Along comes Microsoft with a different perspective of how an operating system should support its users. Instead of two OS’s and a fragmentation between devices, Microsoft builds a new OS to blend the lean-back experience with the desktop experience and give the user control over how to interact with their device. They decide to build their own hardware to control the experience. They fundamentally provide a different perspective on what a “tablet” computing experience represents. Enabling the lean-back (what I call the “entertainment mode”) with the “productivity mode” in a form factor that supports both touch and input devices tells the world they’re not going to dictate how their users should interact with the device. In one operating system, Microsoft is saying, “you can traverse between your tablet, your laptop and the Xbox and determine how you want to interact with the device in a seamless fashion, picking up where you left off.” A completely different approach than Apple, which has a disturbingly complex and confusing cloud strategy, a stretched-to-the-max hardware strategy. It seems like Apple’s current strategy is to tack on a few “blingies” to the existing line and host a new launch party. (See the convoluted iPad product family as an example.)

The Surface Pro sold out at Microsoft's Palo Alto retail store today.

Then there is the contrast between the user interfaces. Microsoft’s Modern UI is nimble, flexible, and approachable. iOS is still trying to shake off the legacy of the Jobsian look-and-feel, which is to try and be cute and clever with “real-world” textures and metaphors to physical objects. Firing Forstall was necessary, but Apple is years away from where Microsoft is already. Windows 8 begs you to touch. It wants you to interact with it. I’m tired of fumbling around iOS, falling into holes where the way I use my device is just not well thought out.

Having said all this: The Surface devices, in my opinion, represent how I will interact with my mobile device. When I want to consume content, it provides me a quick, snappy way to engage. It supports an app store experience like any other device. When I need to be productive and “get things done” I have the perfect interface in which to focus on work. I don’t have to try and make the OS work for me and accept compromises (I mean, just try to get Pages to really WORK on iOS — and many features on iPad’s version of Pages are different than OS X’s version).

Bloggers are beating Microsoft up, but history will show it has the right strategy. The Surface devices are representative of how humans want to interact. Sure, battery life will get better, the devices will get thinner. This is version 1, folks. Right now, Apple is the schoolyard bully, throwing it’s punches — but I’d rather be Microsoft right now: the geeky kid with the pocket protector, holding the key to “getting the girl”.