It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.
One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.
My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.
I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.
My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.
Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.
That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.
Green Tomato is a Hong Kong based innovation consultancy founded in 2003. They specialise in developing mobile enterprise solutions and creation of great mobile apps that have won awards. Green Tomato is a winner of several technology and marketing awards including Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Grand Award winner and Red Herring Global 100.
Green Tomato developed TalkBox a proto-OTT voice messenger solution before WhatsApp and WeChat came along. TalkBox has since moved way from being a consumer product to become an enterprise push-to-talk (PTT) competitor. More recently Green Tomato have done a lot of work on the integration of mobile apps, with ‘other screen content’. They have done great work on digital retailing experiences in Hong Kong. Unfortunately their work has been ahead of its time and risks eclipsed by other people building on the likes of iBeacon.
I particularly like the Green Tomato Pointcast demo below. It was done for Coca-Cola Hong Kong. The app works with a Coca-Cola video advert to increase engagement. It could be applied just as easily with with traditional media like cinema or TV advertising or new video advertising formats on YouTube or YouKu. It makes the advertising spend work harder which is one of the key reasons why Mondelez are so excited by mobile marketing.
It also helps make traditional media brand building AND brand activation as well.
The challenge with this technology is that it makes the job of creative directors harder. Interaction becomes a key part of the experience rather than just a story amplifier. The technology is less amenable than social media to be bolted on to the side of a campaign like a rocket motor. On the plus side, it protects creative by providing additional arguments for continued traditional media. The innovation side of things will be an effective bulwark against the media agency skewing plans towards digital because its more profitable. For more content like Green Tomato click here.
I spent much of January in Shenzhen and went to a concert played by a local band. I can’t remember much about their music save that the lead singer work a bowler hat and seemed to influenced by 1990s Brit Pop and A Clockwork Orange. What was remarkable about the gig was that for the first time in about 10 years I saw concert goers dancing, swaying, being in the moment. There was was no digital mediation of these big life moments. More importantly I saw them watch the concert with their view unmediated by a smartphone screen which allowed them to actually participate rather than record the event.
It was remarkable that digital technology had not invaded this happening as the audience were tech-savvy Chinese middle class. The ideal demographic where the smartphone has already achieved ubiquity to capture all their big life moments.
Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants posits that technology like progress is a natural unstoppable force moving forward what he calls the technium. This movement forward changes life, sometimes in ways that aren’t necessarily great. Part of the issue is that social norms don’t move at the same space as technology hence the lack of rules around digital big life moments.
I was looking through Smart magazine: a Japanese men’s magazine and came across an advert for a digital wedding ring box. Big life moments don’t get much bigger.
ENUOVE is a costume jewellery brand that has come up with the movie box; a small media player built into the wedding ring box which can accepts a small video clip in a number of popular formats.
I found this advertisement interesting and cut it out of the magazine because it was a great example of digital inserting itself into social norms of one of the most important life events of all. I tried to understand what role the digital technology would play. Usually in the west, the ring is presented with the man down on one knee whilst he asks the object of his affection to marry him whilst presenting the ring.
My initial reaction was to think that the video allowed the man to use technology to mediate the discussion rather than having to worry about fluffing whatever speech that they had put together. But what would the recipient think this cop out of doing a proposal by box.?
I asked two colleagues who were currently engaged. The first one pointed out that a non-verbal proposal was considered ok if it was suitably grandiose:
Flying over a tropical beach in a helicopter where the proposal is written in the pristine sand below in two-storey letters
Having the proposal appear on an advertising board on Time Square
Hiring a sign writing plane to proclaim the offer across the skies
I thought that these were pretty extreme examples? Outlier proposals? My colleague indicated that this was the case.
The second colleague I asked introduced me to this video below, billed as the first lip dubbed wedding proposal that seemed to involved a whole neighbourhood as the cast.
Isaac’s lip dub proposal has been seen over 25 and a half million times. She thought that the digital box was ok; it was a nice novelty and would be reasonable for a proposal if the prospective groom didn’t have the gumption to pull off something at least as epic as Isaac’s lip dub wedding.
She might keep the box longer, as she didn’t even know where her current ring box was, it got lost after the first few weeks after the engagement.
Now admittedly my study is very unscientific, but my conclusion was that digital had permeated the wedding proposal in a different way to what I had anticipated. YouTube has had a thermonuclear effect on what my colleagues thought was an acceptable / adequate wedding proposal. It had to have drama, spectacle and a uniqueness to it. Their major life moments would take on a large scale cinematic element.
The movie box offered a lower key alternative that was still acceptable due to it’s unique nature for a groom who couldn’t drill family numbers for a few months in performance of a lip dub or have their feelings writ large on a beach in the Maldives.
Digital had already permeated our big life moments and we’re all as eccentric as Stanley Kubrick. More related content here.
Swedish city introduces payment by hand scanning – The West Australian – having your biometrics such hand scanning to be used as authentication; I am sure that there ethical issues with this. You can change a password, but you can’t change your biometrics. Fujitsu have had an ATM up and running that reads the vein patterns in its hand scanning.
Television Advertising Continues To Reign Supreme | AdPulp – not terribly surprised if one looks at a prominent FMCG brand business like Colgate | Palmolive the overwhelming majority of their advertising spend is television. Also digital doesn’t work well in brand building, if anything spend is overweight towards digital
Another Chinese Counterfeit Product: Social-Media Followers | Advertising Age – One Asian ad exec who asked not to be named described buying fake fans to give an ego jolt to a new venture in China. The rate, he said, was about 5 U.S. cents for a zombie that’s just a name, and 16 cents for higher-quality fakes with some content on their profiles. In addition to zombie fans, there’s a market for faux re-tweets and comments too
Need for speed: Testing the networking performance of the top 4 cloud providers | GigaOm – I was one of the original non-US beta testers for WeberWorks – an online environment / workflow tool for doing and running PR programmes with real-time reporting and the thing that kept killing my usage of the tool was network latency, it was like working in treacle. Interesting to see GigaOm bringing this up as a key performance indicator
Consumers Want More Mobile Data, But Simply Don’t Want to Pay | Parks Associates – this analysis of mobile data makes me think that mobile providers have failed to articulate the benefits of mobile data. Secondly it is probably also a symptom of the way mobile devices are used a lot in the home and tethered to the home wi-fi. The visions of mobile lifestyle used to sell mobile data have little utility and value to customers. This attitude to mobile data likely won’t likely change until horizontality changes in the mobile device and service stack. For instance differentiated high quality voice calls
At the end of last week Amazon unveiled Amazon Dash: an accessory to aid ordering from its Fresh grocery service. Fresh promises free same-day delivery on orders of over $35 of more than 500,000 Amazon items including fresh and local products; including products from respected restaurants and coffee shops. It has been rolled out in three major US markets: San Francisco, Seattle and Southern California.
Fresh has a mobile application on both Android and iOS to aid in shopping – which makes the launch of Dash much more curious. Dash is a piece of dedicated hardware which implies a failing in terms of ease-of-use for the smartphone application. Amazon obviously thinks that Fresh customers will be heavy high-touch, high-value consumers in order to spend this much trouble engineering and manufacturing the hardware and supporting services to make Dash work.
Dash is a product that wouldn’t be out of place in a collection of Braun kitchen appliances. It’s hardware interface so simple it looks really intuitive.
The Amazon Dash can be seen as part of a wider movement from converged general purpose devices to dedicated hardware. It is interesting to compare and contrast the Amazon Dash with the :CueCat; how just over a decade can make such a difference to a product. Back in 2000, Wired magazine sent out the :CueCat to US subscribers of their magazine. The :CueCat was a barcode scanner that allowed readers to augment the print content with a link to web content. Think a prehistoric QRCode. It didn’t work that well for a number of reasons. The codes were proprietary, partly due to consumer privacy requirements and intellectual property around barcodes. In order to use the :CueCat one needed to be connected to an internet-enabled PC via a wired USB or PS2 connection. Using the :CueCat was no easier than typing in a URL or searching via Google; a search engine on the ascendancy at the time. The :CueCat was a spectactular failing for the media industry looking to get to grips with digital media.
Moving forward to the Amazon Dash, the equivalent computing power of that desktop PC has been squeezed into a device that fits in the palm of your hand. Wireless connectivity provides a more flexible connection that removes contextual restrictions on the Dash compared to the :CueCat. The web extended computing so that the website and the PC or mobile device in a symbiotic relationship where it isn’t clear to consumers just were one starts and the other finishes.
The Dash takes inputs via a product barcode and voice memos. Despite the technology advances over the past ten years with the likes of Siri and S-Voice; there will likely be some sort of human intervention required to make these voice memos work. This is at odds with Amazon’s warehouse robot systems and lack of a human customer service face over a telephone line.
This voice memo challenge is not trivial, it was a contributing factor in SpinVox’s failure. The Fresh programme because of its logistical challenges will be hard to scale, and the economics of the Dash have to be carefully balanced between existing products that are repurchased via barcode scan and new or fresh products that would use the voice memo. Acquiring basket growth becomes incrementally more expensive. Over time the system may learn voice commands rather like Google’s old telephone-powered search; on the one hand local area focus is likely to limit dialect variations, on the other sample size maybe hard to scale to be statistically significant for machine learning. More related content here.
