I’m planning a night at the Oscars. By my reckoning, it should happen around 2010.
A budding Hollywood star, Bridgit Mendler, has emerged in my family. At only 15, she’s won a leading role in The Clique, a film based on the popular teen novels of Lisi Harrison.
Exciting stuff in a bloodline whose only prior notoriety was the publication of the Massachusetts Conveyancers’ Handbook (With forms) in 1984.
As connectivity becomes ubiquitous, Yankee Group sees a new consumer emerging: one who wants all his digital experiences and activities to be sensibly and seamlessly portable. If we’re right about that, then businesses must adapt their digital offerings and services to the devices that Anywhere Consumers will use in the way they want to use them.
Is the Anywhere Consumer just this decade’s early adopter — a.k.a. the young, white, male geek? No. Quattro Wireless is a mobile advertising enabler focusing on helping publishers mobilize their online presence. Talking with CEO Andy Miller recently about the campaigns they develop and run with major U.S. consumer brands, he shared some clues of his own about the Anywhere Consumer:
We’re working to paint a fuller picture of this fascinating new species. Stay tuned for an upcoming report from Josh Martin about what we’ve learned in the last year — and the changes needed to make digital activities successful with consumers who want to be anywhere. What clues do you see out there?
So there is to be an OpenSocial Foundation…great! Earlier this week Google, Yahoo and MySpace all got together to tell the world about the importance of creating a Foundation to support Google’s already announced OpenSocial initiative. OpenSocial (the initiative, not the Foundation) allows developers to use one source for code to create applications that can be distributed across a number of social networks including MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, etc.
The Foundation announced on March 25 has been entrusted with ensuring that the original principles of OpenSocial would be enforced and “assure neutrality and longevity of specification for building social applications across the web.” Neutrality and openness are becoming increasingly important for the developer community and for the internet companies themselves who are beginning to show dependence on external development to enhance internal innovation.
However, the announcement itself was far from groundbreaking. We already knew about the principles of OpenSocial, so why bother with a big announcement?
Well if you are Google, this was a big deal indeed. Remember a little story about a company called Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo? Remember Google’s reaction to the news story, through its corporate blog that it hoped the deal would not go through because Yahoo had been an important partner in web development and openness? Well, it looks as if that philosophical idea had become a reality - now Google and Yahoo are partners in ensuring open web development of the social variety.
Moreover, Google and MySpace had been rumored to be breaking up over their partnership for advertising. Again, Google has been able to squelch that rumor with this.
The story a lot of people missed wasn’t the announcement but the players - Yahoo, Google, MySpace all coming together and Google being the tie between them.
So the real winner in the OpenSocial Foundation release? Yes, of course, the little guys (the developers) are winners. Certainly the on-going development of the web, in theory at least, will enhance a consumer experience. But congratulations Google on continuting to be the source of code and partnerships that are tying the world of the web together.
The Justice Department has officially approved the merger of Sirius and XM - an unsurprising end result (Yankee Group predicted as such shortly after the announcement in 2007) to the merger that some expected to experience turblence since it was announced in February 2007. Claims that officials would be forced to endure hours of Britney Spears music if they failed to approve the deal remain unsubstantiated.
While the official merger leads to many expected questions: how will existing hardware be handled, what types of new packaging will be offered, will Howard Stern ever find new employers desperate enough to pay him $500M - its real impact is not on the satellite market and its 17M+ subscribers at all.
One of the primary arguments for the merger was that the Internet, digital audio players, and other emerging technologies not of the satellite radio variety represented viable alternatives and threats. Additionally, the DOJ is taking it on the word of Sirius and XM that synergies in the merged satellite radio monopoly will lead to greater consumer choice and improved pricing - not a throttling of subscribers.
The acceptance of this argument will impact other regulated industries by presenting legal grounds for viewing emerging technology as via alternatives. Such a precedent could allow actions that otherwise may have been viewed as monopolistic behavior. Will DirecTV and Dish now be allowed to merge if they so choose? Will cable companies be allowed to gobble up more markets? Arguably, the internet poses a legitimate alternative to pay TV so old rules may no longer apply in the SiriuX world.
The long term implications of the merger will not be seen until the next controversial acquisition or merger is presented before congress. At that time, Congress will be forced to defend how monopolies can exist in one market but cannot in another. In the interim, technology continues to re-write the rules for what constitiutes a monopoly.
The best parts of my job are the opportunities I get to meet smart, interesting people who think big. Last week I spent a couple of fascinating hours in the company of Ken Silva, CTO of VeriSign. I was asking him his thoughts on the impact of the growth of what YG calls the Anywhere Network. Here’s one insight I enjoyed.
“In a very short period of time, we will realize that the way we see maps now is just cartoonish. Maps are going to be real-time, image-based… showing me virtually any place I want to be. Looking at a real overhead view of where I’m at, or going — that’s going to change the data that I get. That’s the next level. The things we’re used to getting will become richer and richer. We may look back soon and think about how barbaric it was to be typing on a keyboard.”
Even I, as brave a predictor of the future as I try to be, don’t have the nerve to suggest the obsoletion of the keyboard. But Ken’s right about maps. Coupling a ubiquitous, broadband network with the net’s own intelligence about where you and other things are in its mesh means changes not just to static maps, but anything that has to do with ‘whereness’.
Stay tuned for the full text of my interview with Ken - I’ll let you know when it’s up on the CEO Corner of our site.
It seems to be my lot at parties, work, and even when I was in school, to inevitably end up sitting near the “young hot thing.” This makes for highly enlightening eavesdropping into coversations to say the least. Hearing about their web of social contacts, their crazy weekends and their “plans” for the future (which usually does not include meeting their financial planner and investing in a 401K), certainly passes the time in an entertaining fashion. But, as so many of us know, the young hot things of the world usually don’t stop the conversation there. Often we get an earful of a whole lot of details we just don’t want to know.
This familiar story becomes the refrain in my ear when I hear so many internet portals, wireless carriers and social networks talk to me about some of their product plans. “Imagine being able to track your friends constantly!” is a phrase I hear quite often. But, like too many details from the young hot thing’s weekend party, how much is too much?
Social media (including the social networks) have lots of benefits for the consumer, but I’m not convinced seeing everything that is happening in my friend’s lives, at every moment, is what I want to know, or what they want me to know about.
The goal of programs like Beacon, LBS from the carriers and presence enabled tools from the portals should be providing me with the essentials of information when both myself and my friends want each other to know it. It should not be constant contact.
Constant contact leads us inevitably from digitally enabled social awareness to virutal snooping. And everyone has a private life of some sort - believe it or not even the young hot things.
Joy swept through consumerville as the conclusion of the next generation DVD format war finally offered clarity on which single format would stare down the barrel of digital downloading for content dominance. Elsewhere, manufacturers who bet on HD-DVD, (Toshiba and Microsoft) and content owners who released movies on HD-DVD (Paramount and NBCU) wallowed. Despite their losses the biggest hit may be felt by retailers who not only had to stock multiple versions of the same film (HD-DVD, Blu-ray, DVD and a smattering of versions contained there-in such as Special Edition, Wide Screen, Pan and Scan, Director’s Cut Edition, Criterion Collection Edition, 10th Anniversary Edition - you get the point) and now must suffer more indignities and loss by generously offering rebates to early adopters to avoid looking like scrooge.
The decision to offer millions of dollars in rebates (Best Buy will offer up $50M) will hurt the bottom line of retailers already concerned about the recession and slowing DVD, HDTV, and MP3 player markets. From amid the rubble of the format war and the fallout now being cleaned up by retailers one can only think that the war which on its face appeared bad may in fact result in a positive conclusion if it emboldens retailers to more strongly flex their muscles in the future to prevent this situation from happening again.
The proliferation of connected devices (and competing formats for wireless HDMI, home automation, etc.)may result in less interoperability, not more in the future - the topic of a pending Yankee Group report. While the CE industry tries to sort out which standardss work best and offer the nicest logo to affix to their products consumers are faced with decisions that have long term ramifications on their connected home today that will impact their future buying opportunities.
So, perhaps the $50 million giveback that Best Buy and other retailers (such as Circuit City) are engaged in will prove an expensive lesson today but a cheap one moving forward as retailers begin to serve as the stop-gap between a convoluted CE industry and consumers desiring interopeability, long term support for their products, and assurances of quality. Only time will tell if retailers have learned their lesson - (a lesson which would have been cheaper if only SACD and DVD-Audio had been more popular) preventing the next format war from taking place on their shelves.
When was the last time you chose to dine at an all-you-can eat buffet?
You know these places — you pay a fixed price, and then you graze through the buffet line piling your plate with a pile of salad, some beef bourgonon, some pasta, some chicken, and oh, you really need to try some of that salmon. If you’re like me, you usually sit down with too much food, and then either leave stuffed, or you leave some of the food you took behind. And it’s rare you come away from the buffet saying, “Oh, that was the most amazing evening! We have to go back!” More likely, you’re saying something more like, “Oh, I ate way too much; let’s go someplace nicer next time.”
That last comment brings me to the research business. Yankee Group CEO Emily Green wrote this week about how we here at Yankee Group need to present our insights and data more simply to help mobile clients. And as she also noted, time-starved and rushed mobile clients don’t have the luxury of browsing our content through big 15-inch screens — they’re lucky if they get 3.5-inch screens.
The rattle of jackhammers and traffic gridlock welcome any visitor to London after the ides of March.
The UK financial year is ending: Spend your budget by April 5 or expect a cut, particularly if you’re in public works.
This year, the thud of suitcases locking and money swooshing down the Thames join this noisome mix. London’s non-doms and investors are in startled exodus.
The cause: severe new UK tax laws. And they’re empoverishing our industry.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting interview with Douglas Merrill, Google’s chief information officer about how Google allows employees to choose their own operating systems to use and download their own software. Why? It’s all about employee productivity:
At most organizations, technology is done by one organization, and is very locked-down and very standardized. You don’t have the freedom to do anything. Google’s model is choice. We let employees choose from a bunch of different machines and different operating systems, and [my support group] supports all of them. It’s a little bit less cost-efficient — but on the other hand, I get slightly more productivity from my [Google’s] employees.
In many ways, Google’s implementation parallels the co-op care model YG analyst Josh Holbrook promoted last year in his report, Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management. Not only does this approach unlock innovation, but it also can be a major catalyst to reduce costs, as Merrill notes later in the article. And Google isn’t unique in this approach; energy company BP has been employing a similar strategy in some of its companie and divisions for almost a decade now.
With Google acting as a reference account for higher productivity and lower costs through co-operative IT support, I fully expect to see more companies adopting this approach. And who knows? Maybe we can do more research based on other Google practices. Let’s see…. Maybe Zen and the Art of Free Gourmet Lunches for Employees?
