The Fuzzy Future of Wireless Internet
David Pogue has a crush. A big one. Yeah, he’s sitting in a tree with the Novatel MiFi 2200 k-i-s-s-i-n-g. It is a cool device that is basically a wireless router that connects with the Verizon 3G network and up to 5 people can connect to it at once. Indeed, a step forward in wireless internet.
But what does the future really hold for wireless internet? The MiFi is an interesting gadget, but it seems like a transition device, something cool, but that’s just a sign of better things to come, much like the laserdisc. After all, if the iPhone can connect to the internet, why do we need to have an external device to help us connect to that same wireless data network?
But this does present the long awaited opportunity for wireless internet everywhere. Instead of buying internet for your home, you’re just buying internet. For everywhere. Period. That seems to make far more sense, and in fact, makes you wonder why that hasn’t happened already.
But again, while this scenario seems likely, so many different routes to “internet everywhere” exist. We’ve heard about municipal WiFi projects, companies like Meraki creating public networks of networks and now the wireless carriers may possibly be stepping up their game. With the power and monopolistic tendencies of the big five wireless carriers, it seems likely that however they want to provide us internet will be the way it is, but it will be interesting to see how we are accessing and paying for wireless internet 5 or 10 years down the road.
The World According to Daytum
As 2008 came to a close, I found myself reflecting on what I had done during the year, and realized that I had a pretty shaky overall picture of the defining experiences of the previous 365 days. The only reliable data I had about my life in 2008 was a basic Google spreadsheet of what books I had read. How to summarize the rest of it?
There’s no shortage of applications and Web sites that would like to help me track nearly every aspect of my life. I use Mint.com to keep up with my bank accounts and credit cards, and numerous iPhone apps and Web sites will track every bite of food I take, every mile I run, and every pound gained or lost. With an application that is sure to horrify procrastinators everywhere, RescueTime tracks every single application you use and every moment you spend on every Web site you visit, so that you can then sort this data into different buckets to determine your productivity levels.
Indeed, it seems that as a culture we are a bit obsessed with the notion of tracking and quantifying various personal data points for a pre-defined end result, be it to better manage money or time, or lose five pounds. Although this Web 2.0-fueled tracking can be illuminating and indeed quite helpful (Mint.com’s budget tool is especially good), what about tracking the miscellany? The random stuff that makes us who we are? To this end, I returned to a post I had read on one of my favorite blogs, Kottke.org, about a beta service called Daytum.
Daytum describes itself as “a home for collecting and communicating your daily data.” Its potential is brilliantly displayed in site founder Nicholas Felton’s gorgeous annual reports. These are heavily visual, consisting of the numbers that constituted his year (i.e. 33,817 iTunes Tracks Played), an annotated atlas (i.e. Best Mackerel at Yu Zen in San Francisco), and charts (i.e. a pie chart of beer brands consumed). A post-modern approach, certainly, but one that is the most compelling summary of a year or a life I’ve ever seen. After all, isn’t there a cliche about how it’s the little things that count?
My first foray into Daytum didn’t get off to a great start because I didn’t really know what to track. I started by counting my breakfasts, but soon became exceedingly bored with myself since I pretty much eat either oatmeal or granola every day. With Daytum, you can specify exactly what you want to track and how you want to display it, whether in a stacked line chart, as an average, with the greatest number first, etc. Currently, I have a pie chart of all the restaurants I’ve gone to this year, which is heavily skewed towards Soup Freaks, a list of goods baked, and my favorite books of the year (so far).
As one of Daytum’s goals is to communicate daily data, nothing you record is private. The home page displays what others are tracking at that moment, offering surprisingly personal looks at other people’s lives. For instance, you can look at graphs of alcoholic beverages consumed, lists of nail polish colors, pie charts of swear words or nails clipped by finger, and statements like “Best Book Read: Bangkok Tattoo.” Through these glimpses of daily data, you’re able to get a uniquely personal view of what matters to people and what random pieces make up their lives. Today’s Internet, whether or not you attach a name like the “connected Web” or the “social Web,” is at least partially about finding and creating communities. Facebook lets users put up traditional information about who they are and what they like, but Daytum uses broad strokes to enable people to quantify and communicate what really matters to them on a mundane, but incredibly fascinating, level.
What Tech Media Is Talking About
Here at LaunchSquad, it’s vital that we stay on top of all the latest trends (and the newest buzzwords) in the tech industry. My colleagues and I typically get a feel for what’s hot by constantly keeping tabs on what the media is talking about and watching the emerging (and maturing) markets our clients are involved in. I recently worked on a project that included studying what the top technology trade publications are covering and found the results really interesting.
The research process was clearly imperfect, but all things considered, I think they provide a pretty accurate look at what IT topics are being covered the most these days. To get the data, I took about 20 of the most common terms and industry categories and searched the sites of nine popular trade outlets (i.e. InformationWeek, Network World, ZDNet, CIO Magazine) to find out which ones were most popular. A couple terms appeared so few times, they didn’t make the final list (accounted for in the “other” category), but the following 12 topics are frequently discussed – some more than others – in IT media.
Hot Topics in Tech Trades
Marketing and PR folks like ourselves can come up with as many catchy terms as we’d like, but one thing that will never change is that security will always be a top-of-mind issue amongst IT professionals. Our research results show a whopping 20 percent of stories addressing the topic, more than any other. Security has always been and will continue to be important to people, in technology of course, but across virtually all facets of society – automotive, airline, finance, government – people want to feel secure, and the same goes for the IT world.
Storage is tied as the second most discussed topic with 14 percent of the total. As Internet and business needs continue to grow, companies will always need additional storage to keep up with the demand, and it will therefore continue to be a highly relevant topic in IT. One example is LaunchSquad client Ocarina, which optimizes online storage for media-rich, digital files and images, clearly an emerging problem as online data grows exponentially with increased bandwidth and Internet ubiquity.
Virtualization is admittedly a broad term, which probably accounts for it also coming in at 14 percent. But all things point to this being a very important and timely issue that is of increasing interest to CIOs and IT managers. We’ll hear more and more about this topic as the push to virtualize additional IT resources like desktops, servers and storage continues. Some believe this trend is part of a “perfect storm” brewing within IT, so it’ll be quite interesting to see how the topic progresses. Look for some exciting stuff on this issue soon from new LaunchSquad client Precise Software Solutions.
A result we found particularly interesting is that SaaS (and its sister cloud computing) generated almost five times as much coverage than enterprise software. While SaaS has been a growing slice of the enterprise software market, these numbers would suggest its popularity is driving the software market, which aligns with most projections that the future of software will be dominated by on-demand models. Good news for our SaaS clients, SuccessFactors, Daptiv, InsideView and Awareness.
As we’ve discussed previously on Exclamation, cloud computing is an increasingly used buzzword and is getting more attention in IT media. Cloud computing has technically been around for a while as it refers to anything that uses the Internet to allow people to connect to technological services. With just three percent of market share in the IT trades, we expect that number to increase as IT shops get more comfortable with the concept and its benefits.
All in all, a pretty interesting overview of what’s truly hot in the tech space. It might not be true in the tech industry that “one day you’re in and the next day you’re out,” but trends do come and go as new technologies emerge and companies continue to grow and adapt to the constantly evolving needs of their business.
Cool or Scary? You Decide
What you see above is an image from a video the British Broadcasting Company put together using GPS and video imaging to track “the great migrations across our landscape.” The BBC took the GPS trails of taxis in London, freighters in the British Channel and planes flying in and out of Heathrow Airport, then superimposed their routes over composite images of different areas in England. The result? A beautiful pastiche of human travel and movement that’s both interesting and visually stunning. The network also stitched together the call patterns of England’s cell phone users down to the second, producing an image that looks like a blooming flower as London awakens.
It’s very cool, but also a bit weird. You know that GPS unit in your car that tells you how to get from downtown to that flower shop in the Marina you love? Or how about the cool, new GPS unit in your iPhone that let’s you see exactly how close you are to that obscure alley in Telegraph Hill you’re hunting for? If the BBC can do that, be sure the government can do a lot more. Not to fasten the tinfoil hat too tight, but there’s definitely a question here about what information companies and the government can use and what they do with it. It’s that way with all technologies, but the GPS phenomenon makes the argument a bit more real. After all, it’s about where you’re standing – right now.
A few years back, rapper Mos Def had the same thought:
Fourty percent of Americans own a cell phone
so they can hear everything that you say when you ain’t home
I guess, Michael Jackson was right, “You Are Not Alone”
With new technology, comes new problems. Stick around, this one will be with us for a while.
Garmin, Not So Charmin
GPS is great, don’t get me wrong. A few weeks ago when a friend and I, both recent transplants to New York from San Francisco, had to get to Tarrytown, NY, GPS was our savior. But this weekend, it became painfully obvious to me what these GPS systems are lacking…
On the way back from Coney Island on Saturday, my cab driver got us stuck in severe Manhattan traffic due to the closure of a few roads for a street fair. While I did enjoy (sort of) hearing about how my cab driver hates when people block intersections, I missed my train to Washington DC and my cab fare went through the roof.
Fast forward to Sunday, Washington DC. 350,000 Harley bikers participate in Rolling Thunder to raise awareness and honor POWs and MIAs left behind in battle, and closing half of the streets in our nation’s capital. Unaware of this massive parade, a friend and I sat in traffic for 2 hours to go about 10 miles.
Sitting in traffic is kind of like taking a shower — you have a lot of time to think. So I got to thinking: what if there was a central database of all road closures that GPS systems could tap into and inform the driver accordingly to avoid them? It really doesn’t seem like a hard thing to do, since all of these closures are known about far ahead of time, and would be simple for satellite-connected GPS systems to tap into.
Since I was still in traffic after that thought, I had more time to think… GPS is a great technology, but is only as good as the data that it has access to. Getting you from one place to another is a good core competency, but why not extend it by adding other features and services. Once you’ve got a network connection, access to all kinds of data is simple.
LaunchSquad client TimeBridge is a good example of doing one thing really well and adding on features and services to extend that central functionality. TimeBridge is a wizard when it comes to scheduling meetings and sharing availability, but then you can add a conference call line, get a map and directions to the meeting, set up a reservation on OpenTable and more. There’s another pretty successful company that had a similar model centered around search. Anyone?
Maybe some other GPS systems have moved in this direction (traffic data is being used by some of them, but generally not within cities), but it seems like a natural progression AND can make these companies money in addition to revenue from selling the GPS units (many of these services pay affiliates for usage).
Until then, I’ll just have to remember to avoid the Memorial Bridge in Washington next Memorial Day — or buy a Harley and join in.
One Stop Shop for Docs
There is a new start-up in Southern California that I have been excited about for almost a year now. Docstoc is the latest brainchild of one of my former business school classmates, Jason Nazar and his partner, Alon Schwartz. It’s a user generated community where you can find and share professional documents, ranging from legal to technology to business and beyond. Docstoc announced this week that it has raised $3.25M in its series B round of funding from Rustic Canyon Partners.
Docstoc is a great example of the increasingly transparent world that we live in, a vast database of useful information that is part blog, part social community and part encyclopedia of free information. An interesting attribute and arguably the most compelling reason that this start-up attracted the attention (read: money) of such an esteemed, media-savvy venture firm is that it has popularized the ability to embed documents into any blog or website, a feature that we know very well in the PR world is popular in the blogoshpere and on news sites.
I like Docstoc for many reasons; the site has become my go-to resource for information that I might have had trouble tracking down previously, but I also think that it is leading the charge in changing the way that people use, store and share information. The site is still in beta, the company is brand new, so for me, I will be watching to see what it does with its $3.25M and whether Jason can get another winner off the ground…
Serph – What’s Its’ Buzz Tracking Werph?
There have been loads of products purported to do real-time buzz tracking in the last couple of years. Some cost a lot of money (Buzzlogic, Coremetrics), and some of them are free (Google Trends, Alexa Stats, Pagerank).
(Had it not been for Google Trends, I wouldn’t have known that a New Kids on The Block Reunion may be in the offing…)
When a relatively new entrant comes onto the market, especially a free one, I’m always wondering how solid the data will be.
I ran into Serph’s creator, Hiten Shah, at a Songbird event a few weeks ago, and he encouraged me to check it out. Signup for Serph was easy enough, and it actually allowed me to bypass the usual email registration. I was also fairly impressed that this free service allowed domain blacklisting. For example, if you’re searching for information about your company (i.e. “LaunchSquad”), you’re not going to want information from your own website reporting into the data you’re trying to obtain. It ain’t buzz if you said it about yourself, right?
The backstory on Serph is a little unusual; instead of being created as a product by a software company, it was compiled by ACSSEO, a social media marketing and SEO agency, who have some cool clients (HP, Dogster, TechCrunch).
While Serph’s queries are not lightning-fast (20-40 seconds, typically), the total aggregation of data looks pretty neat, and a lot cleaner than, say, what one would get in a Google Alerts email. The ideal way to track the Serph information, as far as I can tell, is in one’s RSS feeds, especially since the way it reports into feeds looks really nice and neat.
My initial queries for LaunchSquad’s name and the MetzMash social media blog (my other blog) seem to have yielded all of the right hits. While Serph may not be the most robust tool out there, but for brands on a budget, Serph is definitely a clean-looking jumping-off point for buzz tracking.
One-To-Many Text Messaging: How Soon Is Now?
I’m an iPhone geek. I was the third LaunchSquad team member to get an iPhone, and I evangelized it until three more colleagues and my wife bought their own. Obviously, I was delighted when I read (on my phone, natch) in the Gearlive blog this morning that the new update of the phone’s operating system will contain one-to-many text messaging. A lot of brands have tried to create one-to-many and swarm-like many-to-many text messaging solutions, but few have seen mainstream success.
Many a business model has been built on the premise of solving the one-to-many text message problem. 3Jam and NetworkText have tried to solve this problem head-on, and rock brands and corporate brands have also done innovative stuff with text-messaging on the Mozes platform.
If you’re wondering about the usefulness of one-to-many text messaging, consider the following scenarios:
1. Four friends are going to meet at an Italian restaurant. One arrives early, and realizes the restaurant is closed, and wants to notify the others quickly, so they can coordinate an alternative plan.
2. The location for a business meeting is changed at the last minute, and all participants need to be notified, quickly
3. You want to send a message out to a large group of friends (“I just got engaged!”) without putting it in a public space like Twitter, Facebook or Jaiku.
Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook’s newsfeed updates do fulfill a similar function, but I think it’s a pretty big exaggeration to say that adoption of those technologies is widespread. With bloggers predicting that there will be 5 million iPhones sold by the end this month, I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say that one-to-many text messaging will be a pretty widely deployed technology by the end of the year.
A colleague showed me how he could do this on his Blackberry, but the process involves selecting the recipients individually, and they can’t tell that the message sent to them was sent to multiple recipients. It’s quite possible that RIM may have been the first brand to bring one-to-many texting to a widely deployed device, but I don’t know if they will be the brand to capitalize on this innovation. Maybe consumers will only adopt this technology if it’s really easy (and fun) to use. That’s something that Cupertino figured out about 24 years ago.
The RSS Engagement Problem
Last Friday, at the SNAP Summit (basically a Facebook conference), I sat down to have a chat with Newsgator’s Jeff Nolan and we stumbled onto the topic of RSS engagement. This is a really, really thorny problem not only for companies like NewsGator (our client), who build the RSS infrastructure but for media entities that publish lots of RSS feeds (like, say, the NY Times blogs).
If I were able to define the solution, I’d have a bestselling book on my hands. My conversation with Jeff only defined the problem, and I hope this becomes the start of a larger conversation about RSS engagement. We temporarily labeled this problem The Loop. Maybe I called it that because I lived in Chicago for a few years. But this loop is a loop that stubbornly remains open. The question is this: how do you effectively put a metric on one’s engagement with an RSS feed?
I have a few blogs that I read when I’m at home on the weekend; I have them set up in both NetNewsWire and my Google Reader, and I’ve read over the Google Reader’s stats a few times. Google has a real basic approach here; they can put a metric on which feeds you’re clicking on, so the reader can understand how valuable each feed is to him. Let’s call this the UTILITY metric. For example, if I realize that I’m only reading 20% of what comes in on the Oakland Tribune’s feeds, and there’s a high volume of feeds, then that feed has really low utility to me.
But let’s say that I’m reading 100% of what’s coming in from the Entrepreneur Watch blog. So, that blog is a high-utility blog for me. But if that’s all the information I can get, then I’m stuck, as a publisher, wondering what the next-action is for someone who reads that blog. RSS feed readers and enterprise content-management systems lack an effective way of tracking what the reader does as a result of the information they read in an RSS feed.
RSS readers can map out discrete metrics. Google’s Reader can tell whether you’ve shared an item on their service (which ports over to Facebook and a host of other social networks via in-network applications) and NewsGator’s Enterprise Server product surfaces the most popular feeds and articles within organizations, which is really useful. And they also do the Facebook thing well with their NewsFriends application. But no one, so far, has figured out how to close The Loop and really map out any kind of ENGAGEMENT metric. (By the way, this FeedHeads Google Reader application is seeing really low adoption – like under 300 users).
This is only the beginning of this conversation, and a little work has already been done on this in the social media blog space, but the thing that’s clearly come out of that writing is that somebody needs to do something about it (and waiting for metrics companies like Factiva, Buzzlogic or Buzzmetrics to just come up with the answer is probably not the soundest business strategy). I’m beginning to wonder if some sort of engagement consortium is in order, because this is one big question mark.
Microformats: Do You Need To Know This?
I’ve been reading up on microformats for the last few weeks and spending a bit of time over at Microformats.org. Today, I came across a pretty interesting but very dense book by John Allsopp called Microformats. (For your convenience, I’ve added the title to the Metzmash Canteen). The point of understanding how microformats will play in your future communications and marketing is all about figuring out how your brand is going to answer questions.
How is your toilet company, for example, going to answer a question like, "What is a toilet that will fit into a 38" x 24" x 24" space in our new bathroom, that doesn’t use a lot of water and is available in black?"
It would probably take a human searching on the Kohler website and about 15 or 20 minutes to figure that out (have you figured out that I’m in the bathroom remodel market yet?). But there probably is a toilet on that website that meets those exact specifications. That’s where microformats could feasibly come in – product pages and PDFs can be enabled for better searchability. That’s what John Allsopp’s book is all about.
Chapters One and Two are a sturdy preview of what you need to know about microformats, and there’s a fairly solid breakdown of publishers who are currently using them (Yahoo, Cork’d, Eventful, Apple, edgeio). The later chapters get into some real heavy stuff that you’ll want to look over with the I.T. department, but Parts One, Three and Four look like they’re gonna be required reading for marketing and brand managers in the next few months.
The bits and pieces of Alsopp’s book that I’ve investigated are definitely on the geekier side of the marketing spectrum, but if you’re looking for a pretty solid download on emerging best practices of the semantic web, this is a helluva place to start.