Multitasking the Phone Call
One of the newest buzzes in the app space is Sidecar, which aims to make ‘doing stuff during a phone call’ a little easier.
Now the idea’s not new - it’s been in development in different forms for at least 15 years, demo’d for a decade, touted in standardisation (IMS), etc. Startups like Dialplus were picking up awards back in 2008 (Dialplus won so many prizes at an event I was at in ‘08 they almost had trouble carrying them home :-) . Consumers have said in surveys they would love to ‘do things during phone calls’.
So why hasn’t the likes of Sidecar emerged as a ‘killer service’ with mass-market adoption earlier?
iPhone made its breakthrough as a 2G phone (EDGE), without multitasking or the ability to do stuff like surfing during a call (which one could with 3G phones at that time).
The iPhone demonstrated that doing the task well (task = internet browsing, messaging) goes before enabling people to juggle two tasks. Human beings don’t strictly multi-task (with rare exception), but like to think they do, and some of us like the idea.
Having said all that - I’m downloading Sidecar to a couple of phones and will give this a thorough play-around - it might make it because:
1. It’s on iPhone and Android.
2. It’s not bound one single mobile operator (known in the branch as ‘Over the Top’).
Both points 1. and 2. are important for getting quick mobile user adoption of a communication service - which you need for the next point
3. You work out what works as people use it. Don’t try and write everything in stone first.
If Sidecar gets all three points right, it will get its user community.
(Back in 2008, Dialplus were grabbing the rave reviews but didn’t get past points 1. and 2).
Now I’d better stop writing, it’s distracting me from downloading that app…
In the case of reverse innovation, the cost of inaction (by mature businesses) is much higher than the cost of cannibalization. Unless the chief executives of Western multinationals can overcome their fears of cannibalization, they are likely to be disrupted by emerging market giants.
Handheld devices have less room for ads and Facebook’s long list of features. Currently, Facebook only shows a few mobile news feed ads per user per day, while it shows as many as four to seven ads per page on the web. But if Facebook chokes mobile with too many ads, usage could plummet. As more users shift the time they spend on Facebook from the web to mobile, it will make less of the money that keeps the lights on for the whole service.
Golden Tickets, golden relationships
There is a facinating story buzzing the media right now of the man who bought a Golden Ticket from an airline for 250 000 USD (or more). It entitled him to a lifetime of air travel - that was back in 1987. Since then the man has reportedly clocked up travel costing the airline over 20 million USD - and they drew in the Golden Ticket, saying they had discovered fraudulent use.
I don’t want to go near the rights or wrongs of this case and others. The most important thing is that the business environment changes, usage changes, costs change (the airline in question filed for Chapter 11 a while ago, and whilst their situation can’t be blamed on Golden Tickets I can understand them wanting to review their revenue situation). But there’s a contract in the picture here. I think the whole idea of loyalty needs to move towards a suite of products and customer relation rather than the ’big deal’.
I have an ‘unlimited’ mobile calling and data plan - in practice that means a limit of 10GB per month. For me right now, that is as good as unlimited because I have no desire or need to turn my phone into a video streaming server, and I can cover all my needs without thinking about how close I am to the limit. I am happy - for now, but what happens when my needs change - or the operator’s for that matter?
‘Unlimited’ usually can’t be - because almost everything has a limitation. A life without boundaries. Relationships work within boundaries, need boundaries and can evolve beautifully to meet an ever-changing future. A ‘gold membership’ or ‘gold relation’ sounds like it could be the basis of something future-proof. You keep paying for services above let’s say €40 and the operator makes sure those services are covering your needs - say (at least) by clicking on some relevant radio buttons in a survey each month.
Will my network operator follow up my usage and come with a really attractive offer when my phone contract is up for renewal? I don’t know. I’d like to talk about it with them in the meantime. That would be shining in the right direction.
Stewardship” is insufficient leadership in 2012. Today markets shift rapidly, incur intensive global competition and require constant innovation
….the trend (accelerated by WebRTC) that the actual business of shipping bits of speech or text around is moving down to become a mere function, not a service. Monetisable services will be what happens around voice or messaging
Innovation - Heroes vs.the Wishing Well
![By Fiona Shields (originally posted to Flickr as Wishing well) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Wishing_well.jpg)
Companies should encourage ideation to spur innovation from more people within their organization - right?
Nja.
(“Nja” is a wonderfully ambivalent Swedish word which is exactly what is says - “yesbutno” or “nobutyes”).
If innovation’s all about execution then it’s about finding the game-changer (The person. The driver) not just the idea with the game-changing promise. The opposite is something I would call ‘the ‘wishing well syndrome’ - people have great ideas, submit them to an idea forum, the idea is voted to be a top idea and can even win a prize - then someone has to implement that idea, with something (ie an innovation budget, resources). If ‘someone’ isn’t available, or the right ‘someone’ then we wish we had ‘someone’ - which is why I think of the wishing well analogy.
There is an incremental innovation that most of us can practice in our everyday activities. Ideation fora are great for that - but I’d rather talk about the innovations that transform business and disrupt other businesses. They are the only ones people will look back at as innovations - the other stuff becomes ‘development’.
Every time I revisited game-changing success stories (and near-sucess) whether it was in ICT or aerospace, I found my heroes. Heroes are the people who grab their idea (even though it’s not perfect) and run with it into a brick wall, then try and bust their way through the wall or climb it.They are the people who you find working at their ‘baby’ after office hours (sometimes in secret). Their stubbornness is just what’s needed in the digital revolution - some of my ‘fave’ start-ups have had to change their business model three times in almost as many years.
Today I believe more in finding and empowering the heroes (or hero teams) than finding the ideas. The heroes’ ideas have direction and energy, and like a guided missile can ‘lock on’ to a moving business target or acquire a seconary target.
What’s Innovation?
This is a post that has been in my head, bugging me for months. When you start to think about something in the laundry room, then it is time to ventilate.
The ‘bug’ is this. The gap between what people call innovation and what actually is innovation. That could be a nice academic discussion, but the gap is glaringly obvious for big and small companies, and countries like Sweden top innovation ratings (e.g, PRO INNO) whilst in practice the number of ‘newly started’ companies is disproportionately low- and if we aren’t sure what we are talking about we are unsure of the gapfiller and we have a question of destiny on our hands.
Innovation is about taking something to market, ahead of the market and reaping the benefit (great players don’t follow the ball, they go where it’s going to be). The ‘newness’ part of innovation is in the ‘ahead of the market’. One can talk about product innovation, process innovation etc. but the commercial aspect is the proof of the pudding.
It’s not in the idea but in the execution. innovation is possible without anything we should define as invention, and invention does not necessarily induce innovation
Everyone wants it, not everyone wants to pay for it - innovation is about managing risk.
There is an alternative - if you stick with the core business you can keep your shareholders happy this quarter, maybe the next —- until the quarter you get disrupted. The dramatic shift in power in the mobile phone vendor space is as much about non-innovation as about innovation. which brings us to…
Yesterday”s innovation is no longer innovation - patents are assets with a ‘best before’ date.
The team that has a record of possessing the ball 60% during the match does not necessarily score the next goal .
Innovation is Disruptive. If something is incremental, it probably won’t disrupt your existing business. If you won’t disrupt your own business by innovating, someone else will do the job for you.
Everyone feels the effects of innovation and most people can describe innovation from those effects. I recently heard a doctor with some innovation title explain how there were so many definitions of innovation - but he had no problem in giving examples of successful innovation (and those were examples I would have given too).
So it’s partly about strategy. Good tech, good ideas, bad strategy = no innovation.
Most importantly it’s about people. If we have the tech and the ideas but no passionate, talented driver of something they believe in then innovation is elusive. More on that in the next post.
From Unplugged to Uncluttered
The game console is great with its wireless hand controllers. But there are four cables to everything else. The remote controls for TV and media players are wireless but … multiple. In a villa you could build a false wall and stuff all your media cables in there, but that’s not an option for many.
IKEA has gone the logical next step and cut the cable spaghetti that gathers dust under the TV. I’ve just been talking to their press and sales - and understood that the phone lines have been glowing.
Bravo, IKEA.
Titanic mistakes are usually policy not tech
I’ve been following TitanicVoyage on Twitter, rather eerie to get imaginary 100-year old tweets. Some have commented that the Titanic was one of the first disasters where there was an over-faith in modern technology. To a degree, I would rather say it was policy getting the better part of common sense (when it’s not policy, it’s usually ignorance, Or both). Unfortunately tech doesn’t usually cover up such fundamental flaws, though that doesn’t stop people trying to blame the particular implementation of tech after things are messed up.
I once saw a plane crash. I’m glad to say the only things broken apart from the plane were probably some egos. It happened at an international trade show where people in general have tended to push their wares to the limits to help secure a billion-dollar contract. In this case, flying was close to the limit and a tail wind helped to push things beyond the limit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmYpP-6r7Lo
If we put our faith in a connected world - then we can get a nasty shock when we get disconnected and there is no contingency plan (just think … in disconnected space, no-one can read your scream. And even the orchestra won’t play to calm you if they’re on Spotify). If your organization has no ‘disconnect’ contingency plan, it probably should - let’s talk, i can help.
With good (comprehensive) policy, you can even get along with poor tech (well, for most of the time). Even Murphy and his law is a whole lot easier to get on with.
