The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.
Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.
Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.
Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.
Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.
Back in the mid-1990s, middleware was a way of describing how layers of software were connected together in enterprises to provide functions and tailored outcomes.
At around the same time, Microsoft was at its most dominant and almost missed out on the web as a nascent platform. In fact the first edition of The Road Ahead that Bill Gates wrote alongside Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson saw the Internet as one of the “important precursors of the information highway…suggestive of [its] future” (p. 89); he noted that the “popularity of the Internet is the most important single development in the world of computing since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981” (p. 91) but “today’s Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway“, the information highway he envisioned would be as different from the Internet as the Oregon Trail was to Interstate 84.
One reviewer noted that
World Wide Web receives just four index citations and is treated as a functional appendage of the Internet (rather than its driving force)
And for a while Netscape had a clear run at the browser market, building up to one of the largest IPOs ever. One of the things that made Netscape so dangerous was that the browser became the gateway to applications like sales orders, email or looking up a database, it was an app facilitator and the browser became an operating system substitute. It no longer mattered so much if you had a Mac or a PC. The browser and web effectively became middleware.
I realised last year that messaging services like KakaoTalk, WeChat and LINE were moving beyond messaging to becoming something more. By becoming platforms they could provide a richer experience to users, the integrate:
Gaming
A blogging-type platform
Payments
Social commerce
Travel information
This looks eerily close to Netscape’s web of middleware positioning in the mid-1990s. Ted Livingston, CEO of Kik outlined just this scenario in an article on the messaging landscape for Techcrunch last week.
Where this gets interesting is when think about what this means for the likes of Google’s Android operating system or Microsoft Windows phone, where the raison d’être of these operating systems is as a gateway to web services (and an audience for mobile advertising). The more functionality that happens inside the messaging application, the less opportunity there is for the likes of Google and Microsoft to direct the consumer towards their advertising inventory.
It corrodes the very reach Google tried to achieve by having its own smartphone operating system and competing with Apple. Google is already under assault in the operating system itself as Chinese vendors like Xiaomi and Oppo alongside Amazon have customised their own operating systems based on Android. Google services are not provides on a third of Android devices sold already, messaging applications as a platform exasperate the situation further.
The web as we know it was built on a set of underlying technologies which enable information transport. Not all information is meant to reside in a website to be surfed or queried. Instead much of the information we need relies on context like location, weather or the contents of your fridge. Web technologies provided an lingua franca for these contextual settings and like most technological changes had been a long time in coming.
You could probably trace their origins back to the mid-1990s or earlier, for instance the Weather Underground published Blue Skies; a gopher-based graphical client to run on the Mac for the online weather service back in 1995. At this time Apple were working on a way of syndicating content called MCF (Meta Content Framework) which was used in an early web application called Hot Sauce.
Hot Sauce was a web application that tendered a website’s site map in a crude 3D representation.
A year later PointCast launched its first product which pushed real-time news from a variety of publications to a screen saver that ran on a desktop computer.
The key thing about PointCast was it’s push technology, covered in this edition of the Computer Chronicles
The same year that PointCast launched saw the launch of the XML standard: markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. This meant that there was a template to provide documents and stream information over the web.
Some of the Apple team responsible for MCF had moved to Netscape and worked on ways of importing content from various media outlets into the my.netscape.com portal; they created the first version of RSS (then called RDF) in 1999. The same year, Darcy DiNucci coined the term web 2.0; whilst this is associated with the rise of social networks, it is as much about the knitting of websites: the provision of services online, integration between websites taking data from one source and melding it with another using a web API formatted in an XML type format or JSON – which does the same job.
By the early noughties applications like Konfabulator (later Yahoo! Widgets) launched their first application to ‘put a skin on any information that you want’.
Major web properties started to license their content through APIs, one of the critical ideas that Flickr popularised was that attribution of the data source had its own value in content licensing. It was was happy to share photos hosted on the service for widgets and gizmos so long as users could go back through the content to the Flickr site. This ability to monetise attribution is the reason why you have Google Maps on the smartphone.
So you had data that could be useful and the mechanism to provide it in real time. What it didn’t have so far was contextual data to shape that stream and a way of interfacing with the real world. In parallel to what was being driven out of the US on the web, was mobile development in Europe and Asia. It is hard to understand now, but SMS based services and ringtones delivered over-the-air to handsets were the big consumer digital businesses of their day. Jamba! and their Crazy Frog character were consumer household names in the mid noughties. It was in Europe were a number of the ingredients for the next stages were being created in meaningful consumer products. The first smartphones had been created more as phones with PDAs attached and quicker networks speeds allowed them to be more than glorified personal information managers.
The first phone that pulled all the requisite ingredients together was Nokia’s N95 in early 2007, it had:
A good enough camera that could interact with QRcodes and other things in the real world
Powerful enough hardware to run complex software applications and interact with server-side applications
A small but legible colour screen
3G and wi-fi chipsets which was important because 3G networks weren’t that great (they still arent) and a minimum amount of data network performance is required
A built-in GPS unit, so the phone ‘knew’ where it was. Where you are allows for a lot of contextual information to be overlaid for the consumer: weather, interesting things nearby, sales offers at local stores etc
All of these ingredients had been available separately in other phones, but they had never been put together before in a well-designed package. Nokia sold over 10 million N95s in the space of a year. Unfortunately for Nokia, Apple came out with the iPhone the following autumn and changed the game.
It is a matter of debate, but the computing power inside the original iPhone was broadly comparable to having a 1998 vintage desktop PC with a decent graphics card in the palm of your hand. These two devices set the tone for mobile computing moving forwards; MEMs like accelerometers and GPS units gave mobile devices context about their immediate surroundings: location, direction, speed. And the large touch screen provided the canvas for applications.
Locative media was something that was talked about publicly since 2004 by companies like Nokia, at first it was done using laptops and GPS units, its history in art and media circles goes back further; for instance Kate Armstrong’s essay Data and Narrative: Location Aware Fiction was published on October 31, 2003 presumably as a result of considerable prior debate. By 2007 William Gibson’s novel Spook Country explored the idea that cyberspace was everting: it was being integrated into the real-world rather than separate from it, and that cyberspace had become an indistinguishable element of our physical space.
As all of these things were happening around me I was asked to speak with digital marketers in Spain about the future of digital at the end of 2008 when I was thinking about all these things. Charlene Li had described social networks as becoming like air in terms of their pervasive nature and was echoed in her book Groundswell.
Looking back on it, I am sure that Li’s quote partly inspired me to look to Bruce Lee when thinking about the future of digital, in particular his quote on water got me thinking about the kind of contextual data that we’ve discussed in this post:
Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Lee wrote these words about his martial arts for a TV series called Longstreet where he played Li Tsung – a martial arts instructor to the main character. Inspired by this I talked about the web-of-no-web inspired by Lee’s Jeet Kune Do of ‘using no way as way‘.
In the the slide I highlighted the then new points of interaction between web technologies and platforms with the real world including smartphones, Twitter’s real-world meet-ups, the Wii-controller and QRcodes.
A big part of that context was around location aware applications for instance:
Foursquare-esque bar and shop recommendations
Parcel tracking
Location based special offers
Pay-per-mile car insurance
Congestion charging
Location-based social networking (or real-world avoidance a la Incognito)
Mobile phone tour guides
And that was all things being done six years ago, with more data sets being integrated the possibilities and societal implications become much bigger. A utopian vision of this world was portrayed in Wired magazine’s Welcome To The Programmable World; where real-world things like getting your regular coffee order ready happen as if by magic, in reality triggered by smartphone-like devices interacting with the coffee shop’s online systems, overlaid with mapping data, information on distances and walking or travel times and algorithms.
What hasn’t been done too well so far has been the interface to the human. Touch screen smartphones have been useful but there are limitations to the pictures under glass metaphor. Whilst wearable computing has been experimented with since the early 1970s and helped in the development of military HUDs (head-up diplays) and interactive voice systems, it hasn’t been that successful in terms of providing a compelling experience. The reasons for this are many fold:
Battery technology lags semiconductor technology; Google Glass lasts about 45 minutes
The owner needs to be mindful of the device: smartphone users worry about the screen, Nike Fuelband wearers have to remember to take them off before going and having a swim or a shower
Designs haven’t considered social factors adequately; devices like Google Glass are best matched for providing ‘sneak information’ just-in-time snippets unobtrusively, yet users disengage eye contact interrupting social interaction. Secondly Google device doubles as a surveillance device antagonising other people
Many of the applications don’t play to the devices strengths or aren’t worth the hassle of using the device – they lack utility and merit
That doesn’t mean that they won’t be a category killer wearable device or application but that they haven’t been put on the market yet.
Bassline: The UK Dance Scene That Was Killed by the Police | VICE United Kingdom – Bassline was a Sheffield-specific scene. Sheffield has had a history of birthing electronic music genres. The most notable one for me was the bleep techno scene from the late 1980s. Bassline built on the trends that came before it. It has a more driving 4:4 beat than speed garage, lush burbling analogue synths for the techno and acid house heritage of the city. Finally some of the bassline tracks had some string stabs that brought to mind the early Chicago house and detroit technology a la Rhythm is Rhythm and OctaveOne.
The policing policies of the early 2000s were an extension of the top down culture war against youth culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. We missed out on an interesting time in dance music with bassline. Who knows where it might have taken things, could bassline have led to a less sterile EDM sound?
Alibaba bets on Taobao mobile app to boost sales | WantChinaTimes – Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group launched the 24-hour sale “Mobile Taobao 3.8 Life Festival” on March 8 in a bid to boost transactions made via mobile devices and drive mobile app adoption
The idea of consumers being the producers – prosumption; or at least being part of the process within a modern industrial context was envisioned back in 1970 with Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock. Toffler was influenced by technological progress as consumers started to be more involved in the delivery of their own services and products.
The first ATM machine appeared at the beginning of the 1960s and started to be rolled out seriously in the late 1960s, this revolutionised access to money which previously relied on counter service to access their money. In terms of presumption, the customer became the bank teller.
The ability to make phone calls without operator intervention was technically possible since the early 1900s but it was a leap forward in electronics that saw a surge in the widespread adoption of automatic telephone switches by the likes of Western Electric, Northern Telecom and Ericsson.
Prosumption realised
The internet has extended it further, from companies delegating services to us:
Printing your own bill
Arranging you own payments to other people
Answering customer service questions on a brand’s behalf (Get Satisfaction, GiffGaff)
Even the job of product manager and financier has been moved over to the consumer. Businesses like Threadless used consumer votes to decide which t-shirt designs they then manufactured and sold to those who showed interest.
Crowdsourcing platforms built on top of Salesforce are used by major corporates like Dell and Starbucks to filter new product ideas and service improvements. Crowdsourcing has been taken further with the likes of Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Demohour which allow the consumer to fund the manufacture of their product upfront. Something that Jolla copied on its own website when it launched it’s first handset.
Even marketing has been outsourced services like Buddy Bounce have the potential for fans to be a largely self-organising marketing organisation. At the moment you can see the way One Direction fans use social media to rally around their band.
Health groups call to end “Be a Marlboro” campaign | Marketing-Interactive – I grew up with ‘Marlboro Country’ billboards showing the cigarette to be the poison of choice for the middle-aged cowboy taking a break. Be Marlboro was a much need revamp of the Marlboro brand. Modern-day UK Marlboro man could also be a woman; they smoked them in-or-outside the club. Occasionally they broke them down and smoked them with cannabis.
Don’t be a maybe. Be Marlboro
Philip Morris International
The campaign went out in over 64 countries worldwide from Germany to Indonesia. Its rationale was a world away from Marlboro Country
young adults feel overwhelmed by the flood of information and options that new technologies offer. In this time of uncertainty, they have very few life compasses that can provide them with guidance. With the new campaign, Marlboro encourages them to be decisive, trust themselves and follow their inspiration. The concept is very simple: there are three ways to react when faced with a decision: Yes, No, or Maybe. Marlboro does not believe in Maybes
Frederic de Wilde, Philip Morris International Investor Day – Brand Portfolio and Commercial Approach – Script, 21 June 2012
The universal insight that Be Marlboro tapped into is interesting, the discovering yourself moments and the later impostor syndrome of youth.
Business
Plans to boost cultural and creative industries in China | WantChinaTimes – China’s State Council, on Friday released plans aimed at promoting the integration of the creative and design service industries with the real economy – interesting description as if somehow creative and design services aren’t real
China’s super-rich will rise 80% in the next decade | Shanghaist – A report released by Knight Frank LLP earlier this week says that the number of China’s super-rich, those who own more than 30 million USD in assets, will grow as much as 80 percent in the next decade, according to the Global Times.
How Hong Kong Lost the Alibaba IPO – WSJ.com – Alibaba wanted to nominate the bulk of the board post listing rather than one share, one vote – which is enshrined in Hong Kong’s regulations (paywall)
Check Out How Coca Cola Makes the Most of WeChat Marketing – Do You still remember the “nickname bottle” that Coca Cola launched last summer? Such an impressive case was not so long ago, now Coca Cola has shifted its focus from bottle to cap, joining up with WeChat.
Will ‘Makers’ Change Shenzhen? | EE Times – which touches on how China will move up the value chain to be the innovator and designers of products rather than just the assemblers
Windows hits the skids, Mac OS X on the rise | The Register – Apple’s OS X share more than doubles in past six years, Windows below 90% – first time since the 90s years Peak Microsoft. According to two different web-analytics groups – NetMarketShare and StatCounter – Windows’ market share has dropped to below 90 per cent for the first time since the mid 1990s
