Category: web of no web | 無處不在的技術 | 보급 기술 | 普及したテクノロジー
The web of no web came out of a course that I taught at the La Salle School of Business at the University Ramon Llull in Barcelona on interactive media to a bunch of Spanish executive MBA students. The university wanted an expert from industry and they happened to find me by happenstance. I remember contact was made via LinkedIn.
I spent a couple of weeks putting together a course. But I didn’t find material that covered many of things that I thought were important and happening around us. They had been percolating around the back of my mind at the time as I saw connections between a number of technologies that were fostering a new direction. Terms like web 2.0 and where 2.0 covered contributing factors, but were too silo-ed
So far people’s online experience had been mediated through a web browser or an email client. But that was changing, VR wasn’t successful at the time but it was interesting. More importantly the real world and the online world were coming together. We had:
Mobile connectivity and wi-fi
QRcodes
SMS to Twitter publishing at the time
You could phone up Google to do searches (in the US)
Digital integration in geocaching as a hobby
The Nintendo Wii controller allowed us to interact with media in new ways
Shazam would listen to music and tell you what song it was
Where 2.0: Flickr maps, Nokia maps, Yahoo!’s Fireeagle and Dopplr – integrated location with online
Smartphones seemed to have moved beyond business users
Charlene Li described the future of social networks as ‘being like air’, being all around us. So I wrapped up all in an idea called web of no web. I was heavily influenced by Bruce Lee’s description of jeet kune do – ‘using way as no way’ and ‘having no limitation as limitation’. That’s where the terminology that I used came from. This seemed to chime with the ideas that I was seeing and tried to capture.
Welcome to 1995 | CCS Insight – mobile phones that are well phones is now apparently a thing. Why aren’t they using more modern networks though? It could work with a greater focus on voice, for the right device I would be happy to go back to two phones: a wireless PDA (aka smartphone) and a mobile phone
3UK Launches free VoLTE | Digital Evangelist – voice standards have declined as voice revenue has declined creating a perfect storm. Purely for business users (though I am sure others would want it too) if nothing else having rock solid, good quality voice would be a must have? I always thought it was a powerful sales pitch for One2One’s Precept service of old
U.K. Marketers Will Use Fewer Agencies by 2020, Report Says | Advertising Age – focused on doing prospecting and CRM in-house. Agencies will shrink because its not that hard to media plan if you’ve decided on Google and Facebook. (Not the smartest play, but one that inhouse marketers are increasingly adopting). More marketing content here.
Does Huawei’s Mate S really belong in the top-end bracket? | WantChinaTimes – it is questionable whether the Mate S merits its high price tag, the Chuangshiji report said. Disclaimer: I’ve worked in two agencies promoting Huawei mobile devices. I’ve never wanted to own a Huawei smartphone, phablet like the Mate series, MediaPad tablet or computer. But don’t let that put you off thinking that they’re top-end devices….
Internet of Things: a game changer for cities? – what remains unclear is how IoT will revolutionize urban life and who should take the lead in this transformation. Should it be government agencies, or will we end up with a Snowcrash like corporatisation of the public sphere? A la public privately owned spaces in Hong Kong and other major cities.
Is Mobile Advertising in China Doomed? | Social Brand Watch – probably no more so than in the West. Chinese businesses ‘get’ online to offline a lot better and media companies usually go direct to the clients, avoiding the media agencies as gatekeeper. In return the client gets a commission discount. Mobile advertising probably isn’t doomed, but at least some media buying agencies might be
Social media went into overdrive on Monday evening UK time when Google announced a formal restructure of all its businesses, creating a new company called Alphabet. For the man on the street, Google means Search, YouTube, Drive (including Docs, Sheets etc.), email and Android. For the average marketer you can throw various advertising products and Google Analytics into the mix. For business IT managers, it is everything from productivity, software-as-a-service and possibly as a supplier of a search appliance for its internal servers.
Three different customer types exist and a product set that grows layer-by-layer like an onion. The bulk of Google’s revenue currently comes from advertising due to the clever technology behind it. One can see from Microsoft’s move to the cloud that there is less revenue in cloud computing than in Google’s current business, so when advertising reaches a natural ceiling for growth, services will provide an incremental benefit at best.
Android was designed as a conduit to Google services and for advertising to venture out into the mobile space. But the world’s most popular mobile operating system is not without its own issues. Despite all phones essentially looking the same, there is a massive amount of fragmentation in the Android marketplace, which makes life harder for developers. Google is also a developer, so building applications that it can build loyalty through and make money from becomes more difficult.
Secondly, an appreciable amount of Android devices (those sold in China) and many sold in Russia don’t use Google services and provide little to no opportunity for Google advertising.
This means that Google is forced to make big bets in very different sectors. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, partly because of their entrepreneurial nature to explore new opportunities, built in an ability to scale Google beyond the business lines that I have outlined above. This was apparent from their original IPO share prospectus and accompanying letter. Xerox is famous in Silicon Valley lore for fumbling the future, by inventing lots of products that would be recognisable to us today in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only to see a corporate head office miss the boat. Brin and Page would have had some awareness of this. Microsoft’s inability to leapfrog beyond its core business successfully is probably also a factor for consideration.
Alphabet formalises the framework that Page and Brin had been working to for a number of years.
So what does this mean to Google?
For the foreseeable future Alphabet will be more of the same for Google. We’ve the seen the business scale back services. By September last year Google had closed down 30 services. It has cut back the functionality of Google Adplanner as a reference tool, to just focus on sales. Google has continued to prune back services such as Google+ (a challenging task given the tentacles + has across Google’s services). The changes inside Google for staffers also reflect similar moves towards profit optimisation, move away from experimentation and being a ‘mensch’.
The biggest move was to get rid of the 20% of time engineers could devote to projects that interested them. The truth is since at least 2009, the Google myth of people working there to change the world rather than delivering profit hasn’t held sway for a great deal of their staff.
On the outside Google will still likely have playful swag and cool offices, but the reality is that it will be more of a ‘normal’ business. That means that we won’t see the next Facebook coming from within Google and that whilst the speed of evolution will continue to run along at the same pace, substantial innovation probably won’t. This kind of business requires a different kind of leader to Page, and by appointing Sundar Pichai, will create a cultural break from the past. Pichai is likely to be able to get more revenue out of the Google ‘cash cow’ to help drive innovation in these other areas.
Page and Brin are freer to bring their energy to the other businesses in Alphabet. For instance, keeping Nest out of Google allows it to work easier with Google competitors like Apple and Microsoft as part of a wider eco-system.
Lastly, it could be an effort to ring fence Google’s anti-trust woes within the existing business and prevent restrictions being imposed against its newer businesses because of the past sins of the core business.
So what does Alphabet mean for marketers?
Google is likely to pursue a steady as she goes approach. The focus will be to optimise revenue, so there will be tension with agencies on advertising practices. We’ve already seen this, with Google restricting methods of buying YouTube advertising. These changes will impact the advertising technology business around programmatic advertising.
The picture with SEO is more about slow and steady change; Google has evolved its Panda index changes to a rolling change rather than the massive shake-ups of old.
More Google related articles here. Originally written for Racepoint Global’s now defunct CommsTalk blog.
Podcasting embraces native advertising | Digiday – interesting as podcasting historically has struggled with finding a advertising model and native advertising doesn’t fit that comfortably in the performance orientation of online ads. Native advertising does make sense in podcasting as it shouldn’t affect the podcasters flow and content integrity too much – more marketing content here.
Beauty
Sephora Launching Beauty Box Subscription Service | TIME – interesting that the retail brand is stepping into BirchBox territory, it’s not only about sales but product market testing and says something about the tyranny of choice. Sephora has also rolled out vending machines in high footfall areas like airports to tap into the tyranny of choice. I can see this working in high value areas but puzzled why subscriptions has caused so much universal excitement across FMCG sectors, yet not luxury brands
Refinery29 – Time cover reinforces tech stereotypes – PCGamer calls the cover “the greatest threat to VR” because it “reinforces, rather than challenges, the perception that VR is a mask that nerds use to blot out the world.” – it also probably isn’t helped by photos from the Facebook F8 developer conference with a sea of coders wearing them whilst apparently staring into nothingness.
Even if I wasn’t interested in technology I would have known about the launch of Apple Pay in the UK some eight days ago. My inbox was bombarded with emails from credit card providers explaining how I use their card on the service. Logos for the payment service appeared in retail partners and on billboards in tube stations.
However despite this onslaught of media hype, educational material and free advertising for the service I have only seen one person use it. A tech forward looking gentleman twisting his arm around to pay for a coffee in Starbucks with his Apple Watch.
Now this isn’t necessarily a big issue. It is a feature that Apple provides rather than being a money generating service (a la iTunes) in its own right. I tend to see the service as an emergency measure of if I left my wallet at home (as I do on occasion).
For retailers and TfL there is not really a compelling argument for supporting Apple Pay, beyond the brand positioning of being ‘on trend’. Indeed TfL warns that transactions take longer than NFC enabled credit cards – which isn’t that desirable when you have a big queue of people looking to go through the gate during rush hour on the central line. That relative performance makes me wonder why Apple didn’t look at other uses like electronic building access or car keys that increasingly rely on NFC or RFID technologies.
Finally, Apple Pay is less attractive for American Express than other card providers due to the lack of support of Amex on Apple Pay by many retailers that accept their NFC cards. More finance related posts.
