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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.