Why I bought my last newspaper this weekend

July 18, 2011 | Johan van Mol | | Leave a comment
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News stand

On saturday I went to the news stand to buy some envelopes. My eyes crossed the newspapers and I couldn’t resist buying one. The great picture on the cover, the nice lay-out, the smell and the feel of a newspaper – I miss it in my world of screens.

But what a disappointment. All the stuff in there was old news. The background and analysis of opinion leaders that is supposed to make a weekend newspaper stand out from the internet wasn’t really convincing. After a couple of minutes I put the paper down on the coffee table where it’s been for the rest of the weekend. I did pick up my iPad during the weekend quite a bit though. Not to read the electronic version of the newspaper, but to use Flipboard.

For people who don’t know what Flipboard is: it is an application that takes your RSS, Facebook, Twitter and other feeds and turns them into a newspaper experience. More info at flipboard.com.

Software developers vs media groups

How come an application becomes a competitor of a media group? The answer is a change in the news value chain. Media companies came to existence in a time where there was scarcity of information. The basic news value chain looked like this:

  1. Capture events
    First capture events and turn them into a spreadable format: text and pictures
  2. Add context
    Then add context or opinions to turn the raw data into information
  3. Distribute
    And finally aggregate and spread the information under the umbrella of a trusted newspaper brand.

Abundance of information

However at this point we live in a time of abundance of information. Add advancements in technology and social media to it and we can see how things are changing in the whole news value chain.

  1. Capture events
    Professional journalists aren’t the only ones capturing events. Increasingly ordinary people are capturing events. They are called citizen journalists and lots of media groups integrate news from citizen journalists in their regular streams. CNN for example has created a citizen journalist platform and an iPhone app which allows people to capture and upload their stuff at the click of a button. And we’ll even see automatic capturing of events in the future. In London there is a baker who’s oven tweets automatically whenever fresh pastry comes out. And a few years ago an algorithm was patented to automatically summarize baseball games based on the excitement of the audience and the motion on the field. As technology progresses we’ll see more examples of automatic capturing.
  2. Add context
    Turning data into information by adding context is a bit trickier. Automatic semantic analysis could add context to events by linking to Wikipedia content for example. At this point automatic semantic analysis is not sophisticated enough, but it is improving. Last year an IBM computer called Watson won the game show Jeopardy against two all time jeopardy champions.
    The added value of newspapers as compared to other media is that they feature opinion leaders who comment in-depth on current issues. However there are a lot of opinion leaders who are sharing their views on their blogs and in social media. So there is a decreasing need to buy newspapers to follow opinion leaders.
  3. Aggregate and distribute
    Media groups are investing in multi-platform distribution of their content. Which is great of course. But time pressure and information overload are the main challenges with regards to information consumption. There is just too much information and too little time. Google became the biggest IT company in the world in less than a decade because it addressed a problem that didn’t exist before: abundance of information. At that time its competitors like Yahoo! were still creating content portals because they still thought in terms of scarcity of information. In a time of abundance of information there is more value in information gatekeeping (curation) than in multiplatform distribution.

Contest for attention

All kinds of information sources are screaming for our attention: friends on Facebook, opinion leaders and celebrities on twitter, paper and online newspapers, magazines, blogs, movies on Youtube, music on iTunes, etc. But we have only so much time per day. The party that is able to filter all this information and offer us relevant and personalized information streams will be winning this contest for attention.

The added value of the news industry moves from the beginning of the value chain to the end of it: it moves from content creation to content aggregation and curation. Flipboard is positioning itself right there. This start-up company is offering a superior experience with its app compared to the incumbent media groups with their newspapers. And that’s why I bought my last newspaper this weekend.

What you can learn from the online gaming industry

May 1, 2011 | Johan van Mol | | Leave a comment
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The game
At the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam I saw a web game developer called Wooga, who is continuously measuring and improving its products in real time. Wooga is not alone, the process of continuous measurement and improvement is really mastered by the internet industry. Could other industries learn from this? Could we develop cars or food or education or insurance or any other products or services that are improved on a daily basis? I would think so, but many companies are now organized for big budget, big impact, big momentum releases and changing a company’s core processes is extremely difficult. And more importantly, it requires a shift in thinking – from momentum to continuum thinking. It basically requires a change of a company’s DNA.

But it is possible to challenge industry recipes. Let’s take a look at the gaming industry. While most game developers still rely on big releases every couple of years, Wooga is a social media game developer that has this continuous improvement methodology in its core. So what do they do that we can learn from?

Define funneled outcomes
The ultimate goal is customer satisfaction, but what does this mean in terms of measurable results? For Wooga this means having as many people play their games for as long as possible. But this is not specific enough. Wooga has defined a funnel to qualify the behavior of players. For example the drop out rate of players between the different levels is put in the funnel.
In the automotive industry safety is an important outcome. As cars are increasingly being connected, car manufacturers may measure in real-time the number of emergency stops, the number of accidents at 10km/h, 20km/h, etc. And create a real-time safety funnel.

Measure the funnel quantitatively
If a metric is not in line with the expected results, it means that there is an improvement to be made; for example if too many players drop off between 2 levels. In our automotive example, if too many drivers are having accidents at a certain speed and angle, there is an improvement to be made.

Measure qualitatively
At Wooga every 2 weeks usability tests are performed with live testers. Their input is taken into the next release cycle. We’re talking a few weeks here, between the input and the improvement.

A/B testing of improvements
When a problem is detected a couple of possible improvements are developed. These improvements are tested against each other on different groups of live players. Literally everything is tested: the gameplay (e.g. The growth time of plants in the game) as well as the user experience (e.g. The size and shape of pop-up windows). Sometimes these tests return no significant results, but at least they are sure. The best performing solution is then released to all players. A/B testing is obviously easier in digital goods or in services than in manufacturing, but it’s not impossible in manufacturing. Manufactured goods often have little differences per country or continent to adapt to legislation or culture.

Benefits
In a highly competitive market with no exit barriers such as the online gaming industry, customers can switch to competitors at any time. Continuous real-time measurement and improvement will optimize the loyalty of customers at any time. This goes hand in hand with an alternative revenue model: Wooga sells in-game features.  Players do not save up for the next big release and provide a continuous source of revenue.

Would other industries benefit from this too? Yes. Unless you have the luxury of being a monopolist or having big exit barriers, every company will benefit from improving their products and services in real-time. Is it impossible? I guess not. Modular design and mass customization have been around for a while, enabling design changes at relative low costs. It is rather a state of mind that needs to be changed.

Why one-to-one communication in digital is so hard for large companies

April 6, 2011 | Johan van Mol | 1 Comment
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I just realized why one-to-one communication in digital is so hard for large companies.
In real life a sales person talks to a customer directly. In digital the whole company governs the conversation with the customer.

Infograph - Why one-to-one communication in digital is so hard

The digital boomerang, hitting the Egytian regime back in the face

February 1, 2011 | Johan van Mol | | Leave a comment
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Digital empowerment

In the last couple of years, the Egyptian government has adopted more liberal economic policies and invested in communication and physical infrastructure. Egypt has also attracted multinational IT companies and local IT companies provide outsourcing services to the West. The Egyptian leaders gave powerful tools to their people, for economic reasons, but they didn’t take into account that this digital boomerang would hit them back in the face.
Digital technology did not create the current protest against the regime, but it surely facilitates it. A tweet sums it up: “facebook used to set the date, twitter used to share logistics, youtube to show the world, all to connect people”

Shut down

It is clear that authoritarian regimes fear digital technology. Egypt tried to shut down all of its mobile and internet infrastructure. However 1 provider stayed online up until yesterday. Internet provider Noor has less than 10% market share in Egypt, but it connects the stock market and large corporations. It was too important for the Egyptian economy to be shut off. And citizens found ways to connect to this network. IP adresses are communicated through Twitter (which poses a chicken-and-egg problem). Landlines can’t be shut off either and Egyptians can use dial-up services in foreign countries.
Other authoritarian regimes fear rebellion too. In order not to inspire its citizens too much, the Chinese government has blocked all search queries for the word “Egypt” from its wildly popular Twitter-like service Sina Weibo.

Digital technology is no friend of dictatorial regimes

The military designed internet technology to stay up in times of turmoil and companies and governments have spread it throughout the world to create economic value. Apparently, once it’s in, it is everywhere, it can’t be shut down and it empowers individuals. Bad times for dictators, if you ask me. I wonder if the Zimbabweans have sufficient access yet?

Tweets trying to help Egyptians getting internet access

Simplicity is the new black

January 18, 2011 | Johan van Mol | | 3 Comments
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Geeks love to solve problems. That’s their reason for existence. Otherwise they would have been wiped out by alpha-males. And to make sure that the alpha-males are regularly reminded of the necessity of geeks, geeks like to create difficult and unusable stuff. This video is a great example:

The video features a highly complicated car that needs constant attention and interaction. At the start of the video the car owner has to ask his smart agent (a hand-held device) if the car is ready to go. The smart agent connects to a data center. This seems to take a couple of seconds. Then the smart agent answers that the car is fully loaded “according to the Toyota Smart Center”, as if it does not want to take responsibility for the correctness of the information. When the user approaches the car, it says with a very bad synthetic voice: “Authenticating mister Toyota”, after a second it says: “Authenticating complete.” The authentication takes a whole 4 seconds! That’s pretty long in case you’re being chased by an alpha-male.
And it goes on like that. Everything talks and needs attention and confirmation all the time. I guess the engineers took the concept of feminization of technology a little too far.

Anyway, this is not what the future will look like. We are already going nuts from our smart phones crying for attention at every mail, tweet or text message coming in. We want technology to be invisible, doing stuff by itself in the background, making our lives more convenient. We want simplicity.
A couple of smart companies started simplifying things years ago. In 2004 consumer electronics and appliances manufacturer Philips changed its brand promise into “sense and simplicity”. Apple managed to develop a hi-tech product that my 4 year old son, who obviously cannot read or write, can use. It’s called the iPad. A couple of days ago, Apple launched the App Store on Mac. I needed to buy a €150 software and with 1 click on a button, it was bought, downloaded and installed. No searching, clicking, downloading, more clicking, installing, still more clicking. Simplicity is a remedy against piracy.

A lack of simplicity and by extension a bad user experience is the reason why many good ideas fail. Consumers will give technology one and only one chance. They will not read the manual and unlike geeks, they don’t enjoy getting to know complicated interfaces. If companies want their technology to be adopted by the masses, they should focus on simplicity. That is pretty bad news for manual writers, but good news for interface designers, usability experts, product developers, service developers and us, users.