Google’s self driving car, the end public transportation as we know it

October 12, 2010 | Johan van Mol | | Leave a comment
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Google did it again
Google anounced that they have been working secretly on a self-driving car. A number of automated Toyota Priuses have been driving around in California and together they have more that 225.000 km on their counters. Unfortunately it will take another decade before we will be able to drive the gCar. (Read more on Google’s blog or Techcrunch)

I think Google’s automated car is not just an augmented version of our individual automobiles. It is the future of public transportation.

Google Computer-Driven Prius from Ben Tseitlin on Vimeo.

The questionable benefits of public transportation
The train was the pinnacle of the industrial age’s public transportation. Railways have played a crucial role in shaping today’s world and in contributing to our wealth, but unless you’re on vacation or have to much spare time, the train sucks. It is a typical industrial age concept that holds disrespect for the customer in it’s design: the customer has to adapt to the system’s tracks and timetables, and if you’re a little late, it just runs off without any apology. Railways have more industrial age attributes: they are often state-owned or at least by an oligarchy, they have a strict command and control type of organization structure, they have trained and uniformed personnel and they will not meet individual customer’s needs.

You may ask yourself why people take the train anyway. I think the most important reasons are

  • An individual car costs too much
  • You need a drivers license which is hard or impossible to get for some groups, e.g. children
  • You’re not stuck in traffic jams
  • You don’t have to park it
  • You can do more useful things when you don’t have to drive
  • Trains are generally safer than cars

Exept for the price tag, the positive aspects are questionable though. If you don’t live or work close to a station, the train typically takes longer than a car. That’s why most people still prefer traffic jams and the hassle of parking. And I don’t see many people doing very useful stuff when riding the train, most sleep, chat, listen to music or talk to their phones too loud. Few people work.

Redefining “public”
Public transportation now means stuffing people in a metal cylinder and driving them to the average closest location. But this can change when technology allows us to redefine public transportation as the optimization of individual and public assets, space, time and environment. I believe automated cars will offer the best of both worlds:

  • The capacity and efficiency of roads will be increased by automated driving, traffic jams and environmental impact will be reduced to a minumum
  • Drivers don’t need much training and certainly not a uniform
  • The car can park itself in optimized spaces
  • You can do more useful things when you don’t have to drive
  • Automated cars are much safer than manually driven cars
  • The main benefit, for which car drivers will sacrifice a lot: the freedom to go anywhere, at any time

Our changing attitude towards ownership
All of the benefits above come from technical innovation. To solve the biggest issue – the price tag – we need social innovation.
We need to change our attitude towards ownership. And we already are!
More and more people are willing to pay for usage rather than for ownership. People and companies are time-sharing vacation houses, yachts and planes for example. Lots of software is being paid for by usage. Since physical DVD’s are disappearing, ownership of movies and TV-series is less attractive and consumers are more willing to pay per view. We want to pay for the right to listen to a piece music, not for ownership of a disc anymore. Companies are experimenting with co-creation concepts: they share assets, intellectual property as well as installations in order to spread the investment.

Why own a car anyway?
There are 2 reasons to own a car. A car is an important status symbol, but if the price would drop to 10% of the current cost, I guess we’ll quickly find other status symbols.
A second justification for ownership is the exclusive availability and the freedom that comes with it. But self-driving cars and a smart traffic management system will give us that freedom. We will be able to order a car to bring us from point A to B. It will pick us up within a couple of minutes, drive us to our desired location, drop us off, and go pick up another user or go park at a non-disturbing place. To align supply and demand I can imagine subscription models with guaranteed maximum waiting times, fares depending on peak times, you can pay a premium for a disinfected car, for a certain brand, a discount for allowing co-passengers or a low-emission route, etc.  If we drive an average of 2 hours per day, then there are 22 hours left for other people to ride the same car. 1 car would theoretically be sufficient for 12 people, which would drop the price to a 10th. Urbanization and flexibility of work-life times will aid this optimization.

The end of the industrial age
Public transportation as we know it is a typical industrial age concept: cheap but unsophisticated, relying on brute force, on a central command, on a one-size-fits-all approach, a concept that bears disrespect for its customers in its design. The information age’s alternative should be cheap(er), meet customers’ individual needs and should be environmentally friendly at the same time. Technology, our changing attitude towards ownership, urbanization and flexible work times can make this happen. Value will be created by the traffic management software, not by the automobiles.
If an internet company is more innovative with automobiles than car manufacturers, if automobiles are becoming commodity, we can confidently state that the industrial age is over. At last.

Turning tomorrow’s market into business

September 16, 2010 | Johan van Mol | | 3 Comments
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This is the presentation I gave at LBI Brussels today.

Turning tomorrow’s market into business on Prezi

Here is a round up:

Microtrends vs. Macrotrends
Instead of looking at microtrends (trends that are hot today) we have to zoom out a whole lot and look at macrotrends. These macrotrends are the evolution that we’re going through from an agrarian society over an industrial society to an information society. A simple example of a manufacturer producing a table and consumer buying it, shows the different attitude and behavior in these different societies.

The speed gap
If the whole society were on the same level, there wouldn’t be a problem. But this is not the case. Consumers are evolving at a faster pace than many firms. Closing this gap can generate many business opportunities.

The empowered customer
In order to close this gap, firms or brands or marketeers must look at how the transformation from an industrial to an information society is affecting the customer’s mindset. The internet has empowered consumers, leading to different attitudes, expectations and behavior. Firms must rethink their existing business concepts, adapting them to the needs of empowered consumer. This can result in new touch points, new services, new revenu models or whole new business models.

Case: iRail.be
A case of a new touchpoint is the iRail.be mobile website made by a student Yeri Tiete in his spare time. It gives access to the Belgian railroad’s timetables on mobile devices. This new touchpoint is creating customer value for the occasional user of the railroad. But the NMBS (Belgian’s national railways) tried to shut down his website because of copyright infringements. A classic case of the gap between an industrial age firm and an empowered consumer.

Case: AXA
A case of creating customer value by launching a new service is a mobile application by insurance company AXA. When people have an accident they have a serious amount of stress. AXA launched an application that guides customers through the process of filling out their claim. The iPhone app will also take pictures of the damage, geolocation will add information about the location of the accident, the closest emergency or towing services can be contacted, etc. This relieves stress, limits the paperwork and saves time.

Case: Shutl
A case of a new revenue model is Shutl. This is a service that creates customer value by delivering goods that were bought online within an hour or within a certain time slot of an hour. This service is rolled out in London. The smart thing about it is that there are hundreds of courier services in London, but they all use the same couple of software packages. The developers of Shutl use a web service to request quotes and availability from the couriers’ software and then place orders. As an intermediator Shutl gets a revenue share from the couriers.

Case: FON
A case of how our relationship towards ownership is changing is FON. Consumers who buy a FON wireless router use part of the WIFI capacity for themselves and another part of it is used by other users who are in the range of the router. So FON users share their hardware with other consumers, creating a global WIFI network. This way FON doesn’t have to invest in a nation-wide WIFI antenna system.

Conclusion
The conclusion is not to look at microtrends but to innovate business concepts in order to close the speed gap, to create customer value and ultimately to increase top line results.

Layout, the challenge for web publishers and CMS builders

August 23, 2010 | Johan van Mol | 2 Comments
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You would think that a news site on a laptop and a newspaper on iPad would offer a comparable reading experience: they have different screen sizes and a different navigation, but in the end they are both screens and they have all the advantages of digital media such as searching, bookmarking, sharing, etc. But the reading experience can be quiet different.

De Standaard iPad Layout

The iPad app shows an exact copy of the newspaper

I recently installed the De Standaard iPad app (De Standaard is a Belgian quality newspaper). I was disappointed the iPad app showed the exact image of their printed newspaper with some navigation elements. But – apart from a number of navigation issues – it turned out to be a pretty good reading experience. The reason? Page layout! Page layout gives structure to page, it shows the relationship between articles and their relative importance. This helps users to navigate and to scan pages or the whole paper. In news sites there is little hierarchy or relationship between articles. Clicking on a certain headline may lead to a 5-line gossip story or a 3 page interview. You couldn’t tell until you click.

If rich the page layouts of newspapers and magazines are so important for the reading experience, why don’t we use them for websites, instead of the current restrictive templates? Well, our Content Management Systems (CMSs) are not up to that task. The philosophy behind CMSs is that content and layout should be strictly separated. For a good reasons: if content and layout are mixed up, the content cannot be reused in another format. Therefore the content is stored in a database and when a user opens a page in his web browser, the content is poured into a fixed lay-out, called a template. If a user wants to open the same page on a mobile device, the content stays the same but it is poured into a different template to accomodate to the different screen size and the capabilities of the device. To create a rich lay-out, you could create a different template for each page, but the creation of templates is hell. Most templates require meticulous manual editing to be compatible with all current browser versions. On top of that I doubt that many web designers who have been focussing on navigation and usability for years are able to step out of the template paradigm. So readers end up with the lowest common denominator: a template that works for any piece of content in any browser version.

In the past we hardly noticed the need for rich and sophisticated layouts, because we were still impressed with the advantages of digital media: we could save, bookmark, search, share and have it anywhere at anytime. But now readers see how magazine and newspaper publishers are offering superior reading experiences on the iPad. The noble craft of lay-out is being reinvented for screens. Very soon readers may demand the same reading experience from websites.

CMS developers, graphic software manufacturers and graphic designers, you might want to talk. Your end-users are getting bored with the uniform and crude web templates.

Enjoying wifi on vacation

August 17, 2010 | Johan van Mol | | Leave a comment
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I was on vacation for the last 2 weeks. I had my laptop, my iPad and my Android phone with me to make sure I could do some reading, writing and thinking. I hardly use paper or even a hard disk, I completely rely on the cloud: gmail, google docs, mindmeister, facebook, twitter, online newspapers, blogs, etc. But that means that internet access is key. And this isn’t as obvious as I thought it would be. I refuse to pay a ridiculous 3,63 € per megabyte for mobile roaming. That would cost me a couple hundred euros on a 2 week vacation. So I had all my hopes set on WiFi.

I spend my first week sailing in the Netherlands. In the marina of Yerseke I found a KPN hotspot. I got myself a 24,95€ subscription for a week. But the quality was terrible: the connection was slow and I had to stay outside to keep my connection alive – which isn’t very pleasant when it is raining. I don’t mind paying for stuff, but then it has got to work in a reasonable way.

The second week of my vacation I was in the south of France. There I discovered FON. Fon claims to be the world’s largest WiFi community. The idea is that all Fon members – called Foneros – create a public hotspot with their Fon Wifi router. Other Fon members can access the Fon hotspots for free, while non-members can buy passes for as little as 3 € per day. I like the idea of individuals sharing their WiFi connection in an organized way, but as the quality of service depends on the proximity to the router, there is no guaranteed service level. And again I had to hang out of the 2nd floor window to keep my connection up.
Fon is a great idea, but it requires a massive amount of users.

This experience got me a little worried. I’ve made myself dependent on internet services to do basically anything, but we’re still far from global reliable internet access. And wasn’t really planning to stay at home to have access.

Consumer Commerce Barometer launched on Interact 2010

June 2, 2010 | Johan van Mol | | Leave a comment
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Barcelona hosts the 2010 Interact congress of which Duval Guillaume is a sponsor.

The most interesting speech I heared today was about the Consumer Commerce Barometer. This is a global research project of IAB Europe, TNS Infratest and Google to quantify the role of online in the consumer journey from research to purchase.
The result of this research is the website http://www.consumerbarometer.eu/ which features a searchable database with data from 27 countries, over 30 verticals, over 40 questions about the purchase cycle, gender and age groups. I haven’t played with it yet, but at first sight this is a very valuable source of information on consumer behavior.

consumer-commerce-barometer