Will marketers and developers recognize the full potential of Kinect's functionalities?

What Kinect Does & What Makes it Unique

In an initial ‘Project Natal’ (Kinect) fact sheet released in May 2009, Microsoft describes what differentiates its functionality:

• Controller-free gaming and entertainment. “Project Natal” provides a whole new way to play — no controller required. It uses a sensor to track your body movement and recognize your face, even listen to your voice. If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips, or speak, you and your friends will be able to jump instantly into any “Project Natal” experience.
• Full-body play. “Project Natal” provides a new way to play where you use all parts of your body — head, hands, feet and torso. With controller-free gaming you don’t just control the superhero, you are the superhero. Full-body tracking allows the “Project Natal” sensor to capture every move, from head to toe, to give players a full-body gaming experience.
• Personalized play. “Project Natal” provides an in-game experience in which the player’s face and voice are recognized. Greet and speak to characters in the game, or simply step into view of the sensor to log into Xbox LIVE and connect with friends. Only “Project Natal” is smart enough to remember voices and faces. Fun has never been so personalized.
• Off-the-couch play. “Project Natal” provides gameplay that gets you off the couch, on your feet and in the fun. Each “Project Natal” experience is designed to get players moving, laughing, cheering and playing together. “Project Natal” makes social gaming off-the-couch fun.
• Easy-to-play fun. “Project Natal” makes sharing in the fun a snap. Talk or watch a movie in the same living room or on the other side of the world — no headset, no keyboard and no controllers required. It’s just you, your friends, your family and a whole new way to play.

Controller-free interaction already places Kinect a cut above Nintendo’s wildly popular Wii gaming system–and Sony’s soon-to-be released Move controller apparatus for Playstation 3.

Beyond not needing a controller, the platform’s ability to recognize a person’s entire body — face included — and voice creates a whole new level of identification between the user and her virtual persona. On top of recognizing you, it remembers you, allowing for easy recollection of checkpoints and check-ins (a hint of what’s to come in the article!).

Seeing the Kinections

Now that you know what it does, let’s consider some of its potential applications.

• Retail: Zugara’s webcam social shopper cracked the door open to the possibility of a camera-based virtual retail experience. Despite its efforts, however, its inability to gauge size and body type of the user makes the experience somewhat useless, in terms of how the item actually fits. With its ability to recognize all parts and angles of a person’s body and gauge depth perception, the Kinect platform kicks the door wide open not only to virtual experiences in clothing retail, but also to head-focused retail like cosmetics and glasses.
• Customer Loyalty Programs: Mark Cuban’s recent suggestion of ‘checking-in’ via facial recognition (by a company he recently purchased, of course) is a step in the right direction. Even separated from services like foursquare or gowalla, the notion of ‘checking in’ — particularly, by facial recognition — can dramatically impact how businesses run their customer loyalty programs. For small businesses, Kinect and Xbox 360 could provide a relatively inexpensive platform to deploy this type of model. But, using such a system would naturally depend on customers’ privacy thresholds for being recognized whenever they enter a store.
• Fitness: For Wii users, using motion-sensitive gaming is a foregone conclusion. For Kinect users, the experience will be that much better, largely due to enhanced sensitivity to users’ actual physical bodies, not a controller’s relative position to where it was moments before. This leads to my next point.
• Education: Training programs that require physical movement — e.g., sports training, physical therapies and some forms of art — could be greatly enabled by Kinect’s platform. Not only that–they could be social, and people could participate in programs ‘alongside’ friends and other users from around the world, allowing interactions among those who are learning in real-time.

While I briefly discuss some broad applications, there are certainly more, and I’d love to hear some of your ideas in the comments section! Enjoy this video demo of Kinect from CNN!

Share the Future

Twitter announced on its blog yesterday that it’s rolling out an optional location identification feature across 65 different countries to help provide context to tweets.

According to the post,

“…you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location.”

A well-strategized foray into the geo-local hotbed, Twitter positioned itself as the unifying piece between the two most popular geo-local players: Foursquare and Gowalla. The move gives users access to standard Tweets and check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla, if users click on a Twitter Place, many of which correlate to check-in points generated by these services.

Stripped of virtual goods and rewards (which, in recent times, have demonstrated tremendous economic potential in the West, after a long history of success in the East), Twitter Places could be the singular feature that renders these services irrelevant, as late-adopting geo-local media users shift toward a community with a markedly larger user base. Despite the laudable achievement that  Foursquare accrued users at an initially faster rate than Twitter, the fact is that the competitive landscape is significantly different than it was for Twitter in 2006.

Some, like GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram, look at Twitter’s move as ensuring the longevity of Foursquare’s and Gowalla’s services. Integrated into Twitter’s offering, they will have a place for their own niche, given their gameplay lure that Twitter lacks. Perhaps.

My intuition, however, is that Twitter aims to relegate its would-be competitors to the world of interesting but subservient sub-brands. While I believe that virtual goods and its cousins have yet to reach a saturation point of unearthed demand in the West, I do believe that the space lies across a tech-loving threshold that many potential users are unwilling or don’t care to cross. I may be wrong, though. Hell, FarmVille is a pretty big deal.

The different faces of geo-locality in social media

Geo-locality is undeniably one of the hottest sources of conversation in the social media world. But how, as a concept, it is best utilized and, for lack of better words, serves as an indispensable function remains as unsettled as the Wild West. That is, the question remains: why should we care about geo-locality?

To that end, I’ll assess potential uses and share some thoughts on different applications of geo-local functionality in social media.

1. Sharing relative position to ongoing deals: In my mind, this application has the most promising potential for monetization, and many are already of the same mindset. Charging businesses for places in the virtual geography of the commercial world, companies like Yelp are releasing powerful mobile applications that can show people’s locations relative to ongoing places where they can spend their money. Add the ingredient of people wanting to share deals with others (getting validation of their value-seeking mindset), and you’ve got a good reason for social geo-locality.
2. Making news about large-scale events discoverable: Proclaimed as a powerful tool to monitor the goings-on of the World Cup, Twitter Places (as well as other geo-local functionalities) enables users to follow large-scale events in real-time from the perspectives of those there. While a bright idea, I wonder whether this is actually a service that many should care about, as real-time updates and streaming online video are nearly ubiquitous and available from sources that are much more informative than a person’s Twitter feed.
3. Broadcasting to your social network: While Foursquare and Gowalla have unearthed a significant amount of demand for broadcasting one’s location to her social network, I struggle to believe that this is something the general public will ultimately want in a big way. Frankly, there are many points in the day where I have no interest in telling everyone in my social network where I am. The key winners if I’m wrong about this trend: parents and stalkers. The key losers: those who want private lives.
4. General context to commentary: Most useful to the Twitterers with proclivities to comment about varying internal states and sights and sounds of surroundings (who, unfortunately, are many), providing general context to commentary isn’t the least reasonable application of geo-locality in social media. The real question, however, is whether the tell-all generation will continue on its merry way or pull back once it realizes that it’s not the best idea to broadcast every aspect of one’s life to her social network.

The linchpins of geo-locality in social media

Whether these applications of geo-locality will succeed hinges on the general public’s sentiments toward a couple broad trends, I think.

1. Privacy: Traditional paradigms of private life are now challenged everyday by the titans of social media, with Facebook leading the way. Personal boundaries are increasingly stretched, but there are some signs of push-back. The adoption of geo-locality in everyday use will largely be a consequence of whether people will want to share their location with others. Unless a better array of tools to segment and target one’s social networks arise, I predict that the answer is ‘no’.
2. Sharing useful info with others: That people want to help others with useful information may be the saving grace of geo-locality in social media. Whether citizen journalism or sharing great deals, people seem to want to tell others about useful public information. That is, when witnessing a public event or participating in a public activity (such as shopping), my intuition is that people are more inclined to share their locations with others.

How this all plays out remains to be seen, but I’d to hear your thoughts in the comments section on what the future looks like as we live it.

Share the Future

Five years ago this past Monday, three former employees of early PayPal — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim — founded the ever-pervasive video-sharing platform. The site now boasts over 2 billion views per day or, as YouTube’s blog puts it,

“…nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.”

Click on this image to see a larger, more readable version of this very informative graphic about YouTube's first five years of existence.

As the story goes,  Hurley and Chen conceived YouTube after having trouble sharing videos shot at a dinner party at Chen’s San Francisco apartment. The mission was simple:

“…give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself.”

Aligned with this mission, YouTube’s celebratory channel prompts users to upload videos and share their YouTube stories, some of which are chosen for the channel’s video wall. Also home to an interactive timeline of some of the most important moments and memes in YouTube history, the channel also hosts big names like Conan O’Brien, Vint Cerf and Katie Couric, who curate playlists that showcase their favorite videos.

YouTube’s Rise: Striking Fear into the Hearts of TV Networks

A few fun facts:

• Users upload over a day’s worth of video to YouTube every minute;
• YouTube broadcasts live sports to over 200 countries;
• and the average user spends about 15 minutes per day on the site.

Needless to say, YouTube’s staggering success is changing the way TV networks are thinking about both their audiences and themselves. As Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk writes, YouTube’s doubling the viewership of the United States’ three major networks

“…hints at an eventual tipping point when the internet could become the world’s dominant video delivery system, Mark Cuban’s predictions aside.”

YouTube, however, may be more of an ally than a foe for TV networks. As Van Buskirk astutely observes, unlike their counterparts in the music industry, TV networks not only own their content, but they also have the leveraging power of having similar, successful projects already in play — e.g., Hulu (ABC and NBC) and CBS.com. This will certainly work in their favor as they make the plunge of officially posting their old content on YouTube.

More interestingly, Van Buskirk notes, YouTube is changing our viewing behavior, and our computer content viewing habits will inevitably alter how we consume TV programming.  The trend toward bringing the internet to TV is already well in motion:

• YouTube reaches TV-using gamers through Nintendo Wii’s and Sony PlayStation’s ability to connect to the internet;
• set-top boxes like D-Link’s Boxee Box are making it possible to stream high-definition and even 3-D YouTube videos onto a TV;
• and Google will soon unveil its next-gen set-top box in partnership with DishNetwork, Intel and/or Sony.

TV networks aside, I think the real losers in this trend may ultimately be TV manufacturers. Recently, I personally opted to buy a large computer screen instead of a TV, given how little I actually consume TV programming (, which was the case even before YouTube,) and the wide-spread availability of those TV shows I do want to watch online. It’s no wonder, then, that companies like Samsung are running to novel technologies like 3-D to reinvent their businesses.

A New Creative Class: New Media Content Entrepreneurs

As YouTube’s director of strategic partnerships Kevin Yen recently noted in his article on CNet, new media like YouTube are giving rise to a growing creative class. While few in the mainstream know of them, new media’s emerging creative class often command weekly audiences that dwarf network television’s biggest shows on a good night, Yen observes.

For example, Phil DeFranco, who runs the seventh most popular channel on YouTube, “has beaten ‘Larry King Live‘ and ‘The O’Reilly Factor‘ in daily audience,” according to a recent article in Fast Company.

Of this creative class ilk, Yen writes:

“They are not only the actors and stars of their show, but they are the producers, the copy editors, and cinematographers; they work to market themselves, close advertising deals, and sometimes employ a team to support and promote them.”

Online video content companies like Machinima, Next New Networks, and Demand Media collectively represent billions and billions of views, which they have converted into dollars (primarily from advertising). Nascent rental services for YouTube content only supplement an already robust toolkit for online content creators to turn their projects in money-making enterprises.

That said, YouTube undeniably is still home to a plethora of crap. Among that crap is the first YouTube video ever posted, “Me at the zoo” (see below), which features founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The nineteen seconds you’ll spend watching it is probably nineteen seconds too long. Thanks, YouTube, and happy birthday!

Thanks for reading! I hope to read your thoughts and concerns on YouTube, the future of TV networks & manufacturers, and new media’s emerging creative class in the comment section below. If you’d like to contact me directly, you can reach me through my newly added contact form.

Share the Future

Last week’s security lapse that exposed personal Facebook chats was embarrassing for both the social media giant and its users, materializing  many’s most salient concerns about sharing private information over the social Web.

Personal lives are broadcasted across online social networks. Are young people more apt to act with indiscretion? Conventional wisdom says 'yes'; recent studies say 'no'.

The New York Times’ Laura M. Holson recently reports, however, that the tell-all generation (those between 18 and 29-years-old) is learning to keep things offline. Holson writes: 

The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.

Young adults in their 20s, in fact, more frequently delete unwanted posts and more actively limit profile information, according to a soon-to-be released report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. This fact, the report suggests, is indicative of heightened diligence among young adults in exerting control over their digital reputations.

Says Mary Madden, lead researcher on the forthcoming Pew report:

“Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you. Now you are responsible for everything.”

Recent academic research by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and UC Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology attest to young adults’ online vigilance. In the UC Berkeley study, which explores how young adults differ from their elders when it comes to information privacy attitudes and policies, the sentiments are especially clear:

• 88 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds believe laws should require websites to delete their stored information;
• and 62 percent say they think laws should require that people have access to what websites know about them.

Interestingly, as Holson highlighted, this runs counter to conventional wisdom about young adults’ online behavior on social media. The Berkeley study succinctly describes the misconception, which is fueled by frequent media coverage of the risks of social networking:

“Media reports teem with stories of young people posting salacious photos online, writing about alcohol-fueled misdeeds on social networking sites, and publicizing other ill-considered escapades that may haunt them in the future. These anecdotes are interpreted as representing a generation-wide shift in attitude toward information privacy. Many commentators therefore claim that young people “are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.”

According to the study, however, the apparent license with which the young behave online stems from a gap in privacy knowledge. In general, it seems, young people know very little about privacy issues:

• 42 percent of young Americans answered all five online privacy questions in the study’s survey  incorrectly;
• 88 percent answered only two or fewer correctly;
• and the problem is even more pronounced when presented with offline privacy issues – post hoc analysis showed that young Americans were more likely to answer no questions correctly than any other age group.

While many sites offer tips for maintaining one’s general online privacy, substantial guides for navigating social media privacy concerns are limited, largely due to the ever-changing privacy policies of our favorite social media giants.

As the future of privacy online is necessarily unclear, whether the ‘tell-all generation’ remains ‘jacked in’ or ‘checks out’ is now a more relevant question than ever.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to read your thoughts, comments and concerns on social media privacy in the comments section below. I’ll leave you with this relevant cartoon by The Joy of Tech by Nitrozac and Snaggy.

Share the Future

The Dawn of the Mobile Internet Era

Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker — the ‘Queen of the Internet‘ behind both Netscape’s and Google’s initial public offerings — recently provided research and insights into the upward trend of the mobile web and social networking.

Among her more startling predictions was that, within the next five years,

“…more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.”

This trend, Meeker posits, marks the beginning of the fifth era of modern-day technology’s historical progression, roughly approximated below.

1. 1950’s-1960’s: the mainframe era
2. 1970’s: the mini-computer era
3. 1980’s: the desktop era
4. 1990’s-2000’s: the internet era
5. 2010’s-: the mobile internet era

And, compared to the uptake of desktop internet usage, mobile internet usage is growing at a considerably faster rate. This rate, Meeker and her team suggest, is evidenced by the disparity between contemporary adoption rates of iPhone/iPod touch versus AOL/Netscape in the early 1990’s — a staggering 11x difference. This trend, Meeker et al. add, is enhanced by the rise of 3G technology, which is available to nearly 21 percent of the world’s cellular users. Japan leads 3g penetration levels with a breath-taking 96 percent.

Data Usage and a Shafting Landscape for Carrier Networks

Carrier networks, however, will face the challenge of dealing with increasingly cumbersome data loads, as mobile internet usage continues to rise. At present, Meeker’s research notes, average cell phone users’ usage patterns consist in roughly 70 percent voice. In contrast, iPhone users’ voice usage only comprises 45 percent of bandwidth usage. Carrier network NTT DoCoMo of Japan, which Meeker (and others) assume to provide the model for the mobile internet’s future, reports a significantly different pattern: data usage comprises 90 percent of network traffic.

By 2014, Meeker et al. predict, data traffic will increase by roughly 4,000 percent, with the expectation that each year the annual growth rate will exceed 100 percent. Some U.S. networks — namely, AT&T — are already encountering problems in highly populated areas (e.g., New York and San Francisco) due to increased data loads. The data logjam on their network, AT&T claims, is due primarily to iPhone users. Comprising only three percent of the AT&T’s customer base, iPhone users reportedly consume approximately 40 percent of the network’s capacity. And data loads look as though they’re only getting heavier. The next wave of smartphones look more hungry for data than ever.

The Next Wave of Smart Phones (in the Foreseeable Future)

• HTC’s new phone, EVO 4G, comes video chat-ready. Apple’s new iPhone promises to offer similar functionality (through iChat) in its latest iteration, though one wonders when Apple will bring video chat to the iPad.
• Rumors that Facebook will produce its own phone are preceded by Microsoft’s unveiling of its Kin, a social media-focused smart phone with otherwise lightweight hardware.
  

  While interesting, Mircrosoft's Kin only syncs within its "loop" of status updates and messages every 15 minutes -- a time delay that many criticize as being too slow for the social media generation.

• Google’s Nexus One and Motorola’s Droid have subsumed the ‘traditional’ role of mobile GPS navigation devices, and look to enlarge their stake in the navigation market, unfortunately for Garmin and TomTom.
• HP’s recent purchase of Palm promises the advent of a whole new slough of business-ready smart phones that will compete with Blackberry’s newest line of preferred devices for the suits & ties.

What It Means for the Future of Content Production

• Advertising: The most important platform for reaching a captive audience will not be TV, e-mail or the (desktop) internet. Rather, it will be through mobile phones — and companies are catching on. Apple’s iAd will provide developers and agencies opportunities to deliver in-app advertisements. Google is hot on its tails with its attempted purchase of AdMob, but has encountered snags along the way.
• Publishing: It’s  obvious that big publishers are well on their way to taking their content live on the mobile internet. In the near future, do-it-yourself mobile content publishing programs like Maxdox and full-service companies like PressMart will provide publishers — both small and mid-sized — the tools they need to bring their content into the mobile internet era. This point doesn’t take into account the imminent increase in usage of various online publishing platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
• Virtual Goods: With nearly $600m in revenue and $1 per average user engagement, FarmVille’s continued success has proven that virtual goods are no longer a trend relegated to the Far East. And both Foursquare’s and Gowalla’s location-based apps center their models on rewarding users with virtual honors like ‘badges’ and other rewards, sometimes in exchange for real rewards. With the rise of upstarts like Booyah and an ever-growing potential base of users, virtual goods are becoming an unforeseen form of content that is certainly a force to be reckoned with, given it’s significant revenue generation and popularity.

That’s it for now, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on what the rise of the mobile internet means for other aspects of life — technology, media, culture, life or otherwise. Please provide comments below!

See this post re-blogged on Wall St. Cheat Sheet, Jack: a Blog about Experience Brands (Jack Morton Worldwide’s blog), and Point About.

Share the Future

Gizmodo scooped a rare, public in-person meeting between Apple's Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt.

Last week, I was shocked to read Gizmodo’s scoop that Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were spotted in person at a café in Palo Alto. As arguably two of the most ‘jacked in’ people in the world, I was intrigued that they would prefer to meet face-to-face for a conversation that could very well take place over GoogleTalk or iChat.

A couple days ago, I attended a Boston Ad Club event with foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, during which Xconomy’s Wade Roush interviewed him on the start-up’s meteoric growth and the rise of location-based social networking. Again, I was somewhat surprised that this type of interview — of a tech CEO by a tech writer — was conducted primarily, if not solely, in person.

Foursquare's Dennis Crowley is interviewed by Xconomy's Wade Roush on the rise of location-based social networking at a recent Boston Ad Club event (photo taken on my Blackberry).

As someone who currently works in the brand experience space, I’ve heard both my colleagues and others report that, with budget cuts and public scrutiny, many companies are committing their events budgets to the virtual world.

For some reason, though, there seems to be an intuitive, primitive inclination to have our most important meetings in-person — to see who we’re speaking to face-to-face. Why is that?

The Scientific Point-of-View on Face-to-Face Interaction

Of the innate desire for face-to-face social interactions, The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande notes the ground-breaking research of Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, with baby rhesus monkeys.

In the mid-1950s, Harlow began breeding his own monkeys to save money on experimental research. Raised in nurseries under conditions similar to human infants in contemporary hospitals, Harlow gave the monkeys food, warm blankets and toys, but isolated them from others to prevent the spread of infection. While physically healthy and, in fact, larger than their counterparts in the wild, the lab-bred monkeys were more than a bit off-kilter. They were prone to staring blankly ahead, rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively and mutilating themselves.

Wondering what was off with the rhesus (not to be mistaken with Reese’s) monkeys, Harlow and his graduate students tinkered with variables like diet, light exposure, and antibiotics. Then, one of Harlow’s researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to their blankets, and Harlow contemplated whether the strange behavior was due to isolation from their mothers. So, he tried giving them artificial ones, and — long story, short — the baby monkeys became deeply attached to the most life-like of the fake mamma monkeys, though remained psychologically abnormal.

Harlow’s later studies that examined the effect of total isolation from birth found that released test monkeys

“…usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by… autistic self-clutching and rocking…One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later…Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially.”

Such monkeys were permanently withdrawn, social outcasts in monkey society,  and were victims of regular attack by wild monkeys.

Gawande further notes studies among neglected and orphaned children who sustained similarly deep and sustained damage. Results among adults — particularly, prison inmates and long-distance solo sailors — also seem to indicate a predisposition to long for in-person social interaction. It is no wonder, then, that astronauts are screened for their tolerance of long periods of isolation, though they have radio and video communication for social contact.

The Business Rationale of Face-to-Face Meetings

In his white paper “Why Face-to-Face Business Meetings Matter”, Prof. Richard Arvey of the National University of Singapore Business School describes why ‘computer-mediated processes’ simply don’t cut it for some types of communications:

“Group processes and outcomes that require coordination, consensus, timing, persuasion of others, etc. are less effectively accomplished using computer mediated communication modalities. Indeed, according to Straus and McGrath, the type of communication medium is likely to affect outcomes “when there is a need for the expression of emotions, when tasks require coordination and timing among members’ activities, when one is attempting to persuade others, or with task require consensus on issues that are affected by attitudes or values of the group members.” (Straus and McGrath, p. 163).”

More interestingly, Arvey explicates the advantages of face-to-face meetings:

“Face-to-face meetings allow members to engage in and observe verbal and non-verbal behavioral styles not captured in most computer mediated communication devises. There are nuances associated with hand gestures, voice quality and volume, facial expressions, and so forth that are simply not captured in email discussion, chat rooms, and the like. Even videoconferencing does not capture all of the dynamics of group members (e.g. the expression of others while one member is talking, etc.).”

Interestingly, Gizmodo applied analyses of these type of behavioral attributes to Jobs’ and Schmidt’s recent meeting (provided by Janine Driver, who has taught CIA and Scotland Yard members how to read body language).

Beyond body language, face-to-face meetings are important, Arvey avers, because

“…business meetings allow participants opportunities to develop important exchange relationships among themselves. These exchanges can be in the form of business negotiations, personal favors, promises, understandings, etc. that cannot often be achieved via other forms of communication because of their personal and informal nature. One psychological theory that emphasizes this notion is “social exchange theory” where human relations are viewed as an exchange of rewards
among individuals or achieving equity between “what you put in” compared to “what you get out” of relationships.”

Most salespersons will agree: face-to-face sales meetings, while costly and time-intensive, typically have the best results.

…..

To end, I’ll provide this brief excerpt from Atul Gawande’s beautifully written article in The New Yorker:

“Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.”

I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue. Please feel free to leave your questions, comments and concerns below!

Share the Future

Unveiled on March 16, 2010, the FCC’s National Broadband Plan outlines an ambitious vision to make broadband internet speed ubiquitous and affordable in the United States. As reported in the New York Times:

“Fewer than 27 out of every 100 Americans have broadband service, compared with 33 in South Korea and 38 in the Netherlands. The average advertised download speed is 8 megabits per second; in France, it is 51. And according to a study by the F.C.C., the average download in the United States occurs at about half the advertised speed. Meanwhile, the poor, the elderly and other vulnerable groups remain cut off from broadband technology, and therefore from such things as online government services, medical advice and jobs.”

The plan’s aims, far-reaching in scope, are as follows:

Once most known for its censorship of lurid content in media, the FCC is expanding its scope to making ubiquitous internet access a national priority.

• Goal 1: At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second.
• Goal 2: The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.
• Goal 3: Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose.
• Goal 4: Every community should have affordable access to at least 1 Gbps broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals and government buildings.
• Goal 5: To ensure the safety of Americans, every first responder should have access to a nationwide public safety wireless network.
• Goal 6: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.

At roughly 7 times the speed of the internet connection I’m using to write this post (provided by my Comcast cable connection), I’m all for universal broadband. But why should it be a right, if it should be?

The Notion of Rights & The Hohfeldian Analytical System

Talk of ‘rights’ is often muddled, given the varied nature of moral history across cultures. Many, including famed philosopher Jeremy Bentham, think the notion of natural rights are nothing more than “rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.” The good news for us plebes is that most modern thinkers — and, more practically, legislators — tend to think otherwise.

In considering whether internet access ought to be a right, it’s helpful, I think, to understand the form of rights, which will provide a framework for looking at the issues at stake. Legal theorist Wesley Hohfeld (1879-1918) articulates four elements of rights (which are known as “The Hohfeldian incidents”) that are particularly useful for this exercise: the privilege, the claim, the power, and the immunity.

For a more technical description of these elements, check out the Stanford Enyclopedia of Philosophy, but I’ll attempt to give a quick and dirty explanation of what these terms mean for those who aren’t as familiar with the ‘φ‘ symbol. For those less theoretically-inclined, feel free to skip to the next section.

• The privilege (liberties): You have the right to do something because you have no duty not to do that thing. For example, you have the right to pick up a coin that you find on the ground because you have no duty not to pick it up.
• The claim: You have the right to claim a certain action from someone because s/he has the duty to do that action for you. An employee, for instance, has the right to be paid for her work, because of the duty the employer acknowledged in their contract.
• The power: You have the right to alter your own or another’s Hohfeldian incidents, if an agreed upon set of rules allows it. A boss, for example, can create a new duty or for her employee or lessen her authority over others, because the rules of employer-employee relationships allow it.
• The immunity: You have the right to not have your Hohfeldian incidents altered by another person, within a given set of rules. For example, US citizens have immunity from being forced to practice a religion that the government prescribes.

Broadly speaking, there are a lot of different types of rights, and it’s easier to see how rights can come into conflict when we take a look at their different characteristics.

Some Issues at Stake

Approximately 100 million Americans do not have broadband at home. The FCC aims to change that.

• Education. Both scholars and common sense tell us that internet access is one of the biggest pedagogical boons since the invention of the printing press. Beyond being the vastest free repository of information in the history of humankind, interaction with its content provides users with the skill sets needed to survive and thrive in information-based economies. Parsing through large amounts of data and navigating various conceptual categories are among the many skills frequent internet users acquire. So, if education is a right, then it certainly seems to follow that internet access should also be right–especially given the importance of learning outside the classroom.

• Public Safety & National Security. Since 9/11, the government has failed to create a functional interoperable communication network for first responders to both security threats and natural disasters. The results, as seen during 9/11, can be life-changing. PCMag’s Chloe Albinisius writes: “Police could not warn fire department officials about falling debris. Port Authority police could not tell state police to get out of a building, and so on.” Aside from interoperable communications, ubiquitous internet access would give citizens more immediate, multimedia information about important events from more sources in real-time than other communicative media –  e.g., cable TV, telephone networks.

• Taxation: While most of the National Broadband Plan is supposed to be covered by television spectrum auctions and private investment, some initiatives, such as the aforementioned public safety interoperable network, will come at the cost of additional fees for broadband users. Though FCC spokesman Rob Kenny claims the fee would be less than a dollar, many uber-libertarian types are angered by yet another tax, clamoring for immunity from such a fee.

• Private Enterprise: TV broadcasters are miffed at the thought of lost business opportunities by their auctioned spectrum space, and some telecom companies are worried by the imposition of government standards to increase their delivery speed. The equivalent of online ‘eminent domain,’ auctioning currently unused TV broadcasters’ spectrum is a prime example of sacrificing private interests for the public good.

The issue is complex, to say the least. In my opinion, the educational and national security claims are large enough to warrant internet access as a right. But what do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the comment board below.

Share the Future

Pricing iPad e-magazines provides new opportunities for publishers to get it right this time.

Subject to ongoing battles over who has rights to what, one thing remains certain to both publishers and Apple–content will cost something, unlike most e-newspaper counterparts.

Certain newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, have successfully employed partial pay or pay wall (i.e., pay after a reader has visited more than a certain number of times within a given period) models. WSJ.com boasts over a million pay subscribers for its online content. But, a million pay subscribers certainly isn’t the norm for most news content providers, and even WSJ articles can be accessed for free through backdoor sites like Google News (much to the chagrin of Rupert Murdoch).

Pulitzer Prize winner and former Chairman of Dow Jones & Co. (which publishes the WSJ) Peter R. Kann eloquently describes the decline of print newspapers, the emergence of the ‘free model‘ of online content, and the pricing challenge most newspaper publishers face:

“… by the time Internet editions arrived, the prevailing philosophy in most publishing companies already was that customers could not be expected to pay much for content, that it was easier simply to rely on advertising. The new Internet editions were merely the ultimate extension of that trend: free news to the consumer, total reliance on the advertiser.

But that didn’t quite work out as expected. Online advertising, given virtually unlimited supply and also given clever new competitors like search sites, has been nothing like publishers posited. Online edition ad rates and online edition ad revenues are only small fractions of those in traditional print. And as print advertising continues its steady decline, online advertising cannot come close to compensating.

The print editions still have customers willing to pay for at least a discounted subscription, but there are fewer of the customers as free online editions peel them away from print. And so the publishers are left to juggle their twin products—the old one in inexorable decline and the new one in commercial denial—and pray the future may be somehow different.”

Sadly, many print newspapers seem to be going the way of the dodo, drawing cries of death of the medium, at least as we knew it, from many.

Unlike their faster-moving counterparts, books — in all forms — are doing quite well, financially-speaking. According to the Association of American Publishers, book sales increased year-over-year by roughly 4 percent at $11.2bn for the year. Of those, about $170m were e-book sales, marking roughly 177 percent growth over last year. While not insignificant, e-books grabbed only a little over 3 percent of the total book sales.

Beyond the cost of e-readers, some, like PC World’s Tony Bradley, criticize what they perceive to be e-books’ bloated pricing model. Bradley writes,

“Media businesses–whether music, movies, books, magazines, or newspapers–seem to cling to a pricing model that fails to account for the significantly lower overhead of digital distribution. These entities seem hung up on pricing narcissism, rather than realizing that production costs are different and distribution is almost universal–changing the economics entirely from traditional models.”

Bradley suggests a revenue-focused model, which (to me) makes sense:

“Basically, publishers should be pricing digital distribution based on what it would expect in net revenue from the traditional distribution method, not based on some calculated percentage of the traditional retail price. I don’t know the exact numbers, but If Wiley is only going to net eight dollars when it sells a printed version of my book, then it should create a digital pricing scheme that nets the same.”

Some, like BNET's Eric Sherman, predict that the iPad will 'kill publishing.'

Unsurprisingly, many publishers like Murdoch seem more prone to employ beefier pricing models that hinge on how much people are willing to pay. Can you blame them for wanting a bigger margin?

That said, e-magazines provide a whole new opportunity to find a happy pricing medium that pleases both publishers and readers. Needless to say, the removal of frequent, full-glossy print production costs will reduce publishers’ overhead significantly, allowing them to price e-magazines lower than their costly print counterparts. Better content and more innovative design — enabled by the iPad’s functionality — will allow for the creation of quality multimedia experiences that readers/viewers are willing to pay for.

Central to paid e-magazines working is leaving old models behind–from both a production and consumer standpoint.

Content and design worthy of pay

In many ways, the term ‘e-magazine’ is too antiquated to encapsulate the multimedia, dynamic possibilities of content production and distribution through the iPad. It’s a given that video and audio should be integrated among text, but navigation through content should move beyond a page-by-page linear progression.

The navigational structure of each issue could take on unique properties, linking different portions of content to one another and external sources. Typefaces, sizing and layout could vary dependent on the content and what would be most aesthetically gripping to readers/viewers/listeners — much like magazines are now. To do this, however, developers would play an increasingly important role, taking on tasks akin to layout and design editors of magazines–but with more design elements at their disposal. It’s not just a matter of positioning text, pictures and headlines anymore. It’s creating a dynamic, multimedia experience with which readers and viewers can interact and experience with multiple senses.

In other words, publishers need to envision a medium that consumers are willing to pay for. If publishers utilize the technology to its fullest and give readers/viewers great content in a way they have never experienced it, I predict they will not only make good money, but they will also reverse magazines’ downward trend in recent years. Granted, that’s easier said than done. It may be the case that old magazine houses are too entrenched in their old ways to look into the future, and it may take a disruptive innovator in their industry to catalyze forward motion.

Shifting consumer focus: from price to value and cost

Most good sales people will agree that it is key to shift clients’ focus onto value, as opposed to price. A closer examination of  this notion and  re-reading Kann’s article in WSJ casts some light on how this is relevant to publishers’ making money with their content.

Entrepreneur.com’s Barry Farber writes,

“…there are customers worth working with, whom you can help understand the difference between price and cost. Price is what they pay for the product or service; cost is what the investment is over the lifetime of doing business. Can you help your customers grow their business in a way they never thought possible?”

In the case of publications, readers and viewers are in the ‘business’ of personal edification. And if publishers can convince their audiences that they convey quality content in a quality way, the cost of an e-magazine becomes an investment in personal edification.

Looking at the difference between e-books and e-newspapers (and WSJ’s content contrasted with many e-newspapers), the difference is quality. Books take a significantly longer time to write, and readers are thus willing to pay extra for the value of the writer’s labor. The WSJ has unique, quality reporting and a distinct brand, and hence people are willing to pay for the content over free content available on Joe Schmoe’s blog. Admittedly, this is an oversimplification of the issue at stake, and free content isn’t necessarily bad (achem…this blog).

To end, here’s a video demonstration of Wired’s iPad e-magazine, in current form. It’s looking pay-worthy, in my opinion.

Share the Future

A graphic provided to convey differing opinions on privacy by the The New York Times in its 'Week in Review' Section on February26, 2010.

Contrary to most contemporary intuitions about media treatment of stars like Tiger Woods, the court ruled, as related in an article by MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan, that:

“…posing for the photographs did not mean Dumas and Menken had surrendered their rights to privacy and dignity, even if they consented to do just that during a heady romantic moment. These rights trumped any commercial property rights the photographer might have claimed, the court said.”

For most Americans, this ruling, along with the recent ruling against three Google executives in Italy for passively allowing ‘privacy-infringing’ videos to be posted on YoutTube, is troubling.

Beyond the need to fine-tune Google’s passive distribution policies for offensive content, this case highlights a deeper ideological divide, which Dumas’ case also exemplified. As The New York Times‘ Adam Liptak writes,

“… it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone.”

In the  abstract (no, I didn’t read the entire paper) of Yale law professor James Whitman’s paper ‘The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty,’ Whitman (or, more likely, some editor of the Yale Law Journal) clearly describes the issues and implications at stake:

Privacy advocates often like to claim that all modern societies feel the same intuitive need to protect privacy. Yet it is clear that intuitive sensibilities about privacy differ from society to society, even as between the closely kindred societies of the United States and continental Europe. Some of the differences involve questions of everyday behavior, such as whether or not one may appear nude in public. But many involve the law. In fact, we are in the midst of major legal conflicts between the countries on either side of the Atlantic–conflicts over questions like the protection of consumer data, the use of discovery in civil procedure, the public exposure of criminal offenders, and more. Clearly the idea that there are universal human sensibilities about privacy, which ought to serve as the basis of a universal law of privacy, cannot be right.

The article (achem…abstract) later argues:

European privacy norms are founded on French and German ideas of “personal honor.” Continental “privacy,” like continental sexual harassment law, prison law, and many other bodies of law, aims to protect the “personal honor” of ordinary French and German folk. American law takes a very different approach, protecting primarily a liberty interest. The Article traces the roots of French and German attitudes over the last couple of centuries, highlighting the French experience of sexual license in the nineteenth century and the German experience of Nazism…

Throughout, the Article argues, American law shows a far greater sensitivity to intrusions on the part of the state, while continental law shows a far greater sensitivity to the protection of one’s public face. These are not differences that we can understand unless we abandon the approach taken by most privacy advocates, since such differences have little to do with the supposedly universal intuitive needs of “personhood.” Instead, they are differences that reflect the contrasting political and social ideals of American and continental law. Indeed, we should broadly reject intuitionism in our legal scholarship, focusing instead on social and political ideals.

For those of you still reading the post after reading through that quote (it might be a bit dry for some), I tend to disagree with Whitman’s rejection of the notion of some universal concept of ‘personhood’, though I also (unsurprisingly) lean toward sympathizing with American ideological and, hence, policy decisions.

The differing opinion lies in what I believe to be a false dichotomy that Whitman presents: between ‘dignity’ and ‘liberty.’ The value of ‘liberty,’ I think, draws its compellent force, like ‘privacy,’ from an intuitive notion of ‘personhood’ or ‘human dignity.’ And so, the dichotomy instead lies between ‘liberty’ and ‘privacy.’

Like most talk of ‘rights,’ however, these discussions are muddled by differing foundational concepts, not to mention differing laws (premised on those differing concepts) across national boundaries.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, we must weigh the value of ‘liberty’ against ‘privacy,’ knowing that that the results will vary by situation. I wouldn’t, for example, value a voyeur’s autonomous choice to spy on someone through a window over the watched person’s desire not to be watched while changing. More broadly, it’s understandable, too, that there should a sliding scale for the threshold of what constitutes tolerable infringements of either value across different cultures and national boundaries.

University of Michigan Internet law professor Susan Crawford also cautions against cagetorical thinking in the aforementioned NYTimes article:

Privacy is a broad enough concept, and Europe and America are varied enough, that it is easy to find counterexamples. Britain, for one, is only slowly moving toward the Continental model.

Something tells me, however, that the ideological divide will continue and deepen as online media continues to proliferate. I wonder how French courts would feel about the sale of copies of of Dumas’ and Mencken’s photos on this NY state-based site.

Share the Future

Beyond Status Messages: Google's push into social sharing of updates, photos, videos & more.

Leaked yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, Google announced the deployment of Google Buzz, its exciting foray into providing its own real-time social media platform.

Other Google Social Media Endeavors

To say, however, Buzz is Google’s first social media venture is not quite right. In 2004, Google launched Orkut, its proprietary social network, to little fanfare and minimal Stateside impact to this day. According to demographic reports, over 50 percent of users hail from Brazil, roughly 20 percent from India, and a measly 17 percent from the US.

Interestingly, Google’s nascent real-time social media search has received considerably less media coverage (largely obscured by its release of Google Goggles on the same day and the existence of rivals like Collecta and Bing Twitter), although its ultimate impact on the largely untamed social media landscape, I think, could be tremendous. Echoing Michael Arrington’s sentiment, social media now feels like search did a decade ago. Perhaps Google can be the transformative force in real-time media, as it was in taming the vastness of the internet. Arrington writes:

A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn’t know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and had a profound effect on the quality of Internet search. Suddenly (and it really was that sudden), we couldn’t imagine going back to AltaVista and searching pages of results for the thing that Google gave us immediately.

…

The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.

Google Buzz

Google Buzz may very well be the piece of social media that “unites the clans,” so to speak. While Gmail has allowed its 146 monthly million users (as of July 2009) to update Gchat statuses, this functionality lacked the timeline-view that allows one to view her friends’ update history, akin to viewing friends’ feeds on Facebook and Twitter. While Buzz links to external sites like YouTube and Picasa (which it owns), it also links to Twitter but doesn’t link to Facebook.  After a brief look at some of its other features and factors like competing ID systems, it becomes clear, I think, that Google is taking a big swing at Facebook with Google Buzz.

Multimedia sharing and viewing interface. A demonstration of Google Buzz’s multimedia viewing and sharing tools (see the video posted below) reveals moderately superior tools to Facebook’s. With roughly 15 billion photos (and adding 100 million/mo.) Facebook is quickly becoming the front-runner of user-generated online photo repositories (second only to ImageShack, which is growing at a much slower rate). It’s Facebook’s game to lose, and integration of Picasa into Buzz, which will ride Gmail’s coattails, will breathe new life into Google’s picture-posting positioning (say that three times fast).

Sharing privately and publicly & integration into Gmail. Unlike Facebook or Twitter (I think), Buzz will allow users to share updates with specific users (and only them, if the user so chooses), and will send responses immediately into one’s e-mail inbox. Beyond the benefit of automatically signing up users for Buzz, utilizing its integration into Gmail places Buzz updates in a much more interesting space than a mere update — part broadcast, part e-mail, part private message, all multimedia. A Google buzz communication may altogether become a new medium for communicating content-rich  messages to one or many users.

And further, the demographic ubiquity of Gmail versus the relatively older crowd of Tweeters may make it the preferred broadcasting medium over Twitter, placing it in direct competition with Facebook.

Mashable’s Adam Ostrow, however, makes an interesting point:

… Gmail has historically added people to your contacts based on e-mail interactions. Hence, this contact list often varies significantly from your friends on social sites where relationships need to be made explicitly.

In other words, your Gmail contacts aren’t necessarily the same people you want to share status updates, photos and videos with. This is an issue that shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the new features Google is soon to unveil.

True story, Adam — but neither Facebook nor Twitter allows updates to reach a specific group of people (as I said, I could be wrong; it seems that the closest thing is Facebook’s multi-user messages). Separately, it’s oftentimes the case that Facebook users don’t want all of their Facebook friends (which include, in many cases, family members, co-workers and others who you’d prefer not to see the “less professional” side of you) to see their updates, and so end up not posting their updates altogether.

That’s my two cents on Google Buzz thus far. Please feel free to send/share thoughts and other articles as the subject gains more media traction. Until then, bask in the glow of Buzz’s demo video below.

Share the Future