Archive for 'Traveling Geeks'
Toward the era of (printed?) sentient things…
When I wrote Smart Mobs in 2001 and launched the smartmobs.com blog with the book in 2002, I made a number of forecasts about the convergence of the mobile phone, the personal computer, and the Internet. Some of these forecasts, particularly in regard to the use of mobile communications to organize political demonstrations, were accurate. Some of them haven’t happened yet. Some of them might not happen at all. I looked back at Smartmobs Revisited when I spoke at Mobile Monday Amsterdam in June, 2009. And I recently blogged about some reasons why the mobile Web hasn’t developed as rapidly as the tethered web did. Another 2001-2 forecast that has not come to pass by 2009 was what I called “the era of sentient things:”
Different lines of research and development that have progressed slowly for decades are accelerating now because sufficient computation and communication capabilities recently became affordable. These projects originated in different fields but are converging on the same boundary between artificial and natural worlds. The vectors of this research include:
* Information in places: media linked to location.
* Smart rooms: environments that sense inhabitants and respond to them.
* Digital cities: adding information capabilities to urban places.
* Sentient objects: adding information and communication to physical objects.
* Tangible bits: manipulating the virtual world by manipulating physical objects.
* Wearable computers: sensing, computing, communicating gear worn as clothing.Information and communication technologies are invading the physical world, a trend that hasn’t even begun to climb the hockey stick growth curve. Shards of sentient silicon will be inside boxtops and dashboards, pens, street corners, bus stops, money, most things that are manufactured or built, within the next ten years. These technologies are “sentient” not because embedded chips can reason, but because they can sense, receive, store, and transmit information. Some of these cheap chips sense where they are: the cost of a global positioning system chip capable of tracking its location via satellite to accuracy of ten to fifteen meters is around $15 and dropping.
Watch smart mobs emerge when millions of people use location-aware mobile communication devices in computation-pervaded environments. Things we hold in our hands are already speaking to things in the world. Using our telephones as remote controls is only the beginning. At the same time that the environment is growing more sentient, the device in your hand is evolving from portable to wearable. A new media sphere is emerging from this process, one that could become at least as influential, lucrative, and ubiquitous as previous media spheres opened by print, telegraphy, telephony, radio, television, and the wired Internet.
But…not yet. However, I’ve seen a couple of recent indicators that this forecast might have been more premature than totally off the mark. First, one of the most reliable early indicators I turn to all the time, one of the few RSS feeds that I rarely miss scanning at least once a day, ReadWriteWeb, recently noted that IBM might be getting into the act:
In the Web world, you know that a trend has major traction when IBM is all over it. Like any large Internet company, Big Blue is careful about which trends it latches onto. It was a good couple of years before they were spotted at the Web 2.0 conference, for example. However in the case of Internet of Things, IBM is proving itself to be an unusually early adopter.
I recently spoke to Andy Stanford-Clark, a Master Inventor and Distinguished Engineer at IBM. Yesterday we wrote about how Stanford-Clark has hooked his house up to Twitter. Today we delve more into what his employer, IBM, is doing with the Internet of Things.
IBM is involved in some very interesting projects at the intersection of two big trends we’ve been tracking in 2009: The Real-time Web and Internet of Things. They have a website devoted to this topic, called A Smarter Planet. As the name implies, it focuses on environmental matters such as energy and food systems. Sensors, RFID tags and real-time messaging software are major parts of IBM’s smarter planet strategy. The catchcry for the site – Instrumented, Interconnected, and Intelligent – is about outfitting the world with sensors and hooking them to the Internet to apply the ’smarts.’
My spider-sense might not have tingled as strongly at this tidbit about IBM if I had not met Dr. Kate Stone in Cambridge, UK, a few weeks ago. Although the Travelling Geeks had seen dozens of remarkable startups in London and in Cambridge, the hint of what-might-be-news came when Dr. Stone approached me after a series of pitches and told me about Novalia, a company that is combining current printing techniques, electroconductive ink, and ultra-thin control units to make paper an interactive medium, capable of sensing visual, auditory, or touch inputs, connecting to the Web, displaying audiovisual information. At least in theory. I didn’t see any prototypes. But if you put together the clues from Novalia’s website with the more concrete news from IBM, it seems like the era of sentient things might still be ahead of us – and maybe not too far:
Control module
We have developed and supply a ‘printed electronics control module’; this self contained unit consists of a power source, integrated circuit (I/O control and interaction flow), and sound transducer.Integration
The module is very simple to integrate with the printed item, in fact it’s almost as easy as putting a stamp on an envelope (but for now it’s not quite as thin).Senses
The integration of the module and the conductive inks enables the printed item and the user to communicate through the senses of touch, sightand sound.
Social Media forces immediacy of customer support
A theme that came up again and again during our London/Cambridge Traveling Geeks tour was that social media, and especially those that provide “immediate” access to company representatives (such as Twitter), are really changing not only how fast a company can respond to customer questions and problems, but are relocating (dislocating?) where the control of the customer relationship resides within many companies. Twitter provides 24/7 access to company representatives (if they’re actually online), and it shifts the decision point or the point at which the company takes responsibility for a problem, outward from the PR department and “C-level” executives (CEO etc.) to the actual front lines where the company’s employees are talking with the customers! Here’s what Robert Scoble said about this in a roundtable held in Cambridge on Friday. The sponsor of this session, Omobono, also has put up a page about the Traveling Geeks visit.
UberVU – Mapping conversations across the web
This is a repost from TechCrunch
While at the recent Seedcamp Speed Dating event, I was introduced to UberVU. UberVU provides a single location to track conversations across multiple locations and sites. This social aggregation tool provides a conversational graph of threaded conversations. UberVU get comments, reactions, and mentions around a story from multiple services. This can be used by corporations to monitor the buzz surrounding a brand, but it also allows users to take part in the entire conversation.
For example, with the plugin, someone reading an article in Google Reader can see what others are saying about a post. I wonder, though, if we’re already inundated with information and if there’s a need for yet another aggregator. A case in point: a recent story in the Guardian (and this happens on many other news sites) has 300 comments (many of which are by trolls and don’t provide much insight) and a recent post on TechCrunch Europe has 44 comments. Multiply that by the number of comments on other sites and it’s pretty overwhelming.
In the video below, Vladimir Oane, one of the co-founders of UberVU, explains how the service works and its potential for expansion. Developers can add the UberVU plug in to their own sites. Vladimir also explains how it can be used for personal branding as well as brand management.
London’s Accel Partners’ StartUps Share Why They’re Great
I met with a number of Accel Partners portfolio companies in London recently; the industries ranged from enterprise content management to virtual games for kids.
Alfresco’s CEO John Powell’s core competency for the past 20 years has been working with enterprise content management systems that help you power companies. “Open source is a model we want to use,” he says, “we want to make money, but we also want to make a difference.”
It’s not all viral for them. Powell says they do invest a lot in brand awareness and marketing and although they launched the company in the U.K. in 2007, they are currently running businesses in five European markets.
The one woman CEO in the room was Wee World’s Celia Francis, whose company offers a virtual world for teens with a massive mainstream appeal.
More and more educators and researchers are seeing that social play is important throughout a person’s life, particularly through adolescent teen years, when teenagers are trying to learn to navigate their way in the real world.
Their previous service Wee Me has 29.5 million registered users, so based on that stat, there’s still room for the virtual world to thrive. For their newer service Wee World, which is extremely visual, they currently get two million uniques, 90% are return visitors and 85% of those are from the U.S. Why? “Because it’s important to win in the U.S. market first,” Francis says.
They’re also trying to expand their reach in the U.K. and the rest of Europe. 90% of the traffic is organic through word-of-mouth and the other 10% is from people who are making a Wee Me on partner sites.
She describes the service by using one example of life in Wee World, “you can get yourself a pet dog, and every time someone pets it, it evolves and grows. Teens can also make up their own games on the site.”
Apparently 70% of their audience changes things in Wee World every day. “We’ve added trophies, quests and ways you can accomplish things,” she adds, which adds achievement layers on top. It’s a combination of socialization and expression.
The two companies I was most intrigued by and had a chance to spend more time asking questions was Wonga and Mind Candy, most known for their brand Moshi Monsters.
Wonga CEO Errol Damelin is originally from South Africa, so we had a lot to talk about.
Wonga provides short term loans ranging anywhere between five days and a month. Says Damelin, “we want you to repay your loan quickly and, unlike many traditional sources of credit, we’re not about stringing repayments out for as long as possible. Our service is designed to put you in control of your cash flow, for those times when an unexpected expense catches you by surprise.”
Social marketing is limiting because people don’t want to tout that they need money. That said, there’s clearly a market for this service and not just in the U.K., which is where their focus is today. They’ve been live for a year and are focusing their efforts in the early days, on building trust, which is based on three core principles.
Damelin adds, “we get a significant amount of our traffic through word-of-mouth, which comes from us over delivering, being consistent and treating people the way people want to be treated. At the end of the process, did we deliver and would you use us again?”
Unlike most lenders, they enable you to choose exactly how much money you want to borrow – down to the last pound – and for exactly how many days. Wonga doesn’t force you to borrow a fixed sum you might not need, nor do you accrue interest for longer than necessary.
The amount you apply for and the length of the loan naturally affect the cost of repayment too, so you can make adjustments until you’re happy with all elements of your application.
One key difference with Wonga vis a vis a credit card or overdraft: you must commit to settling your Wonga loan quickly. They actually make their money when you repay them on time, not by continually extending a growing line of credit. They don’t endlessly roll their balance from month-to-month and no further funds are made available until your existing loan is repaid.
Wonga is not a typical internet lender. Because they have a sophisticated credit reference system, all application and payment is entirely online. Their technology allows them to assess applications in seconds and select people whom they believe are able to repay them.
He adds with a smile, “the lending business has been calcified and static for years, but over the past couple of years, it has liquified, which has created a lot of new opportunities for us.”
I also shot some video of Damelin on site in London, so be sure to listen to his pitch in his words.
At Mind Candy, the parent to Moshi Monsters, they make multimedia games. “Playing alone is fun, playing you’re your friends is even more fun but playing with people from around the world is the ultimate,” said CEO Michael Acton Smith.
“The coming boom of the next two years are games for everyone else, like games around subjects that are more mainstream, such as dancing, fashion, sports, and virtual pets,” he says.
Moshi Monsters is a little bit like Facebook but for kids, but you can also create your own custom monster. Apparently 7-11 year olds is the prime audience for virtual pets.
The heart of the game is called stealth education. There’s a puzzle palace where kids can play and compare their scores with each other.
“We’re trying to adopt adult behaviors and make them safe and usable for the kids space,” said Smith.
There’s also a Friend tree and every time you add a friend, your tree grows. Kids can leave post-it notes on their friend’s walls and create their own puzzles and then rate each other. They’ll soon be launching a news feed, so kids can get a personalized view of what their friends are up to.
They launched a little over a year ago, and within five months, the site became cash flow positive. They currently have over 4 million registered users, a 1 million of those users signed on in the last month alone.
Viral? The early traffic was but not the big spike in the past couple of months. They just doing some TV advertising and it’s paying off.
A third of their traffic comes from the U.K., a third from the U.S. and the remaining third is from the rest of the world. 70% of their audience are girls and revenues are growing at 75% month over month.
I shot video of Smith at Accel Partners, where he talks not just about their growing in popularity service but their experimentation with marketing in both traditional and non-traditional outlets so be sure to tune in.
Huddle and Spotify Talk About Their Services
Huddle’s Andy McLoughlin and Alastair Mitchell and Spotify’s Shakil Khan talk about their value-adds for the consumer. We chatted in central London earlier this month. Tune in below for their stories in their own “voice.”
On the London Tech Scene
Ayelet Noff of Blonde 2.0 Sarah Lacy and I at the TechCrunch Europa Awards in London earlier this month on the UK tech scene. Damn fly……
Andrew Scott Talks Rummble…..
Andrew Scott talks to me about his latest gig, London-based Rummble. Rummble builds you a personal trust network, recommending stuff from people with similar tastes – some will be friends, but many will be people you don’t even know yet. Click play to learn more.
A Chat with Andrew Mulvenna of Pearl Software
Below an interview I did with Pearl Software’s MD Andrew Mulvenna during a Cambridge TweetUp in the UK earlier this month.
Cambridge Consultants UMI Lowers Energy Consumption & Saves Money
Below, I’m talking to Eric Wilkinson at Cambridge Consultants in the UK to better understand their UMI (Universal Metering Interface), a new low power board-to-board wired interface. UMI is primarily aimed at smart metering of meters (electricity, gas, water, heat), displays and gateways.
Many metering product developments are being held up because the communications standards have not yet been finalized by the relevant national authorities.
UMI solves this problem by separating the metrology and communications functions into modules with a wired connection between them. This unbundling is useful because the metrology standards and regulations are stable.
Manufacturers can develop smart-ready MID-approved meters today by including one or more UMI ports. These meters can actually be installed in the field now; the primary aim is at ultra low power applications.
UMI will be launched as an open standard later in 2009. The below video shows how this technology can be used to regulate kitchen appliances.
By monitoring energy consumption, UMI can automatically turn off higher energy consumption appliances during expensive times and run lower priced appliances when absolutely necessary, saving consumers money.
Consumers can actually select what they are ‘prepared to pay’ on a dial on their wash machine or other appliance. Click play to learn more.
Mitzi TV’s Take on Quirky London
At this month’s TweetUp in London, I had the opportunity to meet with Mitzi Szereto who runs around London and shoots, all of which ends up on Mitzi TV online.
She’s actually a yank who nows lives in London and her videos are her personal take on quirky London……. from prowling the streets of London in pursuit of a bowl of jellied eel and chatting about vintage cars with shoe designer Jimmy Choo and Formula 1 racecar driver Tiff Needell, to being recruited into a dance by a troupe of Morris dancers.
Below Mitzi with Geeks Sky Schuyler and Renee Blodgett
