Apple Siri. The Butlers are coming

Siri

Web2.0 democritised e-publishing and data creation in a friendly way for the masses and low and behold there are 182 million websites available on the net in 2011. Some of these websites have the lions share of the content (Facebook, Flickr, Google, Amazon etc) but collectively it's a grand publish of human thoughts, artefacts, wishes and desires.  What a wonder!

Creating content is one thing but leveraging insights across the content is more difficult. In truth there is still too much information for humans to effectively use and we find ourselves to be a gear in the machine rather than the driver - connecting systems together, cutting, pasting and rekeying.

I want to ask simple questions of my computers and have powerful background processing bring me the answer. Questions like "Which famous guitarists endorse products but don't use them in their live shows?" A query like this would require text analysis of the question to understand the meaning, scouring the net for famous guitarists,  checking which brands they claim to use in endorsements, checking their live 'kit' on websites, picture recognition of what guitars they are using, comparison of statements versus reality and then provide a weighted response based on the volume of data processed. Not easy and lots of key tapping.

Voice Control on the Bat Computer

It won't always be this way.

Batmans computer has been serving him for years (in the fictional world of DC Comics) controlled by his voice helping him fight crime. He simply asks the computer a question while he is driving or smashing heads of supervillans together and his Batcomputer gets back to him with the summary. Questions like  "Cross reference the known toxins that the Joker uses with chemical factories in the vicinity of Posion Ivy's locations over the past three months" are answered with ease. If a clarification is needed then it asks Batman. All achieved using natural language as the interface.

Digital buddies, assistants and advisors are here already for consumers albeit in the form mostly of recommendations engines and advertising systems. Last.fm helps reduce the millions of bands down to something I might like based on my previous listening while Amazon  advises me of books and products I might enjoy based on my previous activity.

These systems help us save time and slash the options and possibilities down to something we can handle. The volume of data falls below our eye and we can concentrate on the richer questions and answers.

For me the biggest aspect of the new iPhone 4S release was Siri - the virtual assistant. I think that as innocuous as it might appear on the surface (fixing calendars, looking up the weather, setting reminders) it is one of the first believable assistants that interact with consumers in a rich way.

Over time this service will grow to understand your accent, tone of voice and mood. It might voluntarily ask you what's wrong or question your commands if it thinks you are acting irrationally. It will potentially develop it's own personality and it will be answering more and more complex queries. Multiple Siris may even communicate and negotiate with one another to save their 'owners' from corresponding back and forth needlessly. Young children that can't type and older people may begin interacting with computers in richer ways. Siri may begin to find it's way into robots and other household devices outside of mobiles.

It's exciting and this is only the beginning. Others have tried to provide this kind of service but none have had the design and user base that Apple have in order to make it 'stick'.

I'll be watching this one carefully.

Wearable and Always On Computing

I'll be surprised if 2011 doesn't see something further happen around the wearable computing space.  We need to stop tinkering with metal boxes and facilitate direct interaction with the world a bit more.

There are two social dynamics to this kind of interfacing:

1. Broadcast the display externally on walls, tables, car bonnets or bodies (not private) OR
2. Broadcast internally on glasses or hidden earpieces (i.e. privately).

I think both approaches are more favourable to the current head down into a mobile neck stretch. Mobiles are private devices and Tablets/iPads a bit less so but they are both metal objects you have to put in front of your face and carry around.  The world is only there in periphery when using devices like these. 

Directly communicating with others and including the web as a 'third voice' is still not an elegant flow when taken out of presentation theatres and onto buses and high streets.

Pervasive and wearable computing will see an always-on environment for audio and video. The machines will listen to you 24/7 and parse what you say. The video components will continually record and pattern match the objects around you. Forget Amazon recommends when the data you can input is your whole day! We don't need to key the data about us like monkeys with typewriters. Spines everywhere will rejoice as we lift our heads to look back at the world once more.

The demos from MIT Wearable Computing Team in 2009 still look fantastic and the prototype only cost around $300 back then.



The TED talk - Pattie Maes' lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry



The interface ideas

The evolution of Steve Manns private eye glass display

BT FON: Now this is Social Computing

The premise of BT FON by British Telecom:

You freely allow for others to share a piece of your home-hub broadband connection in return for free access to theirs and, importantly, access for free to BTs public wifi spots.

It's potentially the worlds largest Wi-Fi community in the world and
my iPad, without a telcom data card, is begging me to join and download the iPhone app to activate it.

Those Wi-Fi hotspots were mostly aimed at businessmen but this seems much more democratising....and free. Let's be frank, using mobile data is definitely the easiest approach at the moment to feed your smartphone but it does seems we are at the stage now that those large towers used by telecoms companies to throw your data signals through the air will be replaced by a million peoples home wireless hub. It's social decentralised computing and the model is good.

I notice my existing mobile data provider, O2, has capped my mobile data usage and 10 days before the end of the month I find myself with it all used up and my speed throttled. If BT FON could take some of the load off then this would help somewhat.

I wonder what the telecomms companies will make of it?

I think this is an excellent play by British Telecom. If something like this could gain momentum then it would be quite a disrupter but without the numbers the experience will be poor as I transition between Bob Smiths hub and wait another minute until I can use a little bit of Mary's down the road. If switching between free hub-pimping and mobile data is seamless then maybe the problems aren't so great.

I'd be reading the small print on the security and privacy implications but this is definitiely one to watch.

A

last.fm - The Big Biological Model gets a cold

last.fm is a service I have used and admired for a long while now and I became a paid subscriber for £3 a month (or thereabouts) a few months back which is something notable in a sea of free music services.

Their service really does manage to play music 'like the music I like' while deftly avoiding the stuff I don't like. I've trained it over the past few years like a puppy to respond to my commands of love and hate and now it does a great job in creating my personal radio station.

Their simple delta of being able to mark something as 'not liked' provided them with the extra dimension of customer modeling that the other recommendation and fuzzy logic engines sorely missed. Recommendation models without an 'unlike' are akin to physics environments where there is no 'reaction' to the 'action' - the map is too one dimensional.

I remember reading a list of the jobs that last.fm had available in 2009 and you would have been hard pressed to discern between their job descriptions for marketing and technical staff and job listings for a biotech scientist. The guys at last.fm understand nodal modelling and that the real social graph looks more like something you see in a petri dish in a microscope - constantly changing, fault tolerant, nodal, duplicated, overloaded and alive.

Some howcome last.fm are making some cardinal sins with their customer relationships at the moment?

1. Introducing subscriptions that can only be paid for by PayPal. This was moderately annoying when I was in Latin America recently and my PayPal was suspended after one too many transactions in Brazil making their fraud algorithm jumpy.

2. Removing the two key features that most subscribers pony up their cash for - streaming personal playlists and 'loved tracks'.

The on-demand streaming isn't something I use last.fm for as I use it as my personal auto-pilot radio station and secondly as my database of music likes in the cloud. The truth is I use Spotify for on-demand '' listening. The changes in service however do bother the legions that had moved from their iPods to iPhones and Android devices to have on-demand on the move.

What bothers me is the way that they are making the changes.

No push of email to subscribers to alert them of the situation and a terse statement on the site inevitably sees a raft of users angrily hitting the forums and web. The path for resolution is simply to cancel your subscription if you are unhappy about it.

Problems with licensing seems to be the battle cry with most upheavals in music services but did they really try an explore all the options they could have taken?

• Two tier subscriptions with a higher delta for on-demand streaming.
• Aborting the free model and charging a nominal fee for all users.
• Offer different services/rights to different countries

.....or even less radical - cancel the services that they were going to but run an 'ease the shock' campaign pre-warning users of the reasons why they need to do this.

We're listening to last.fm but they aren't listening back.

Touchpoints (manual and automated) between sCRM and CRM

Dear Readers,

I'd be grateful for insights and comments on this topic.

There seem to be two phases to harmonising sCRM and CRM domains.

1. Don't integrate using software - use people initially.

Use the CRM tools in the cloud (FB comments, Twitter, Get Satisfaction etc) where the customer/prospect is operating and backfill insights and information manually into your CRM system.

This is low risk with no internal technology investment. The cost is mostly around people/staff. It's good education all round and a reminder that a companies systems are no longer the ones sitting on their premises.

2. Automated integration of sCRM data/insights into the 'master' back end CRM and related systems.

This of course is much more difficult. Some outlines of touchpoints and suggested automation are below :

Identity : At it's most simplest you can integrate web2.0 Id's of customers into your back end CRM profile and perhaps use your Campaign Management in your CRM app to deliver/chat with the web2.0 channels. Automated campaign management tools spamming customers web2.0 spaces is clearly dangerous as the personal touch may be lost so simply using your CRM tool as a front end to web2.0 activity might retain the personal touch and allow your CSA's to remain in a single workspace.

Profiling : A unified view of web2.0 profiles with internal CRM profiles. Very useful but prone to legal restrictions. Again the CRM system can pull in public preferences/likes/dislikes for customers and use them for customer support and behavioural targetting solutions.

Analytics : merge analytics observations on your own web/IP properties with those in the cloud. This area is nascent at the present time but the integration between Salesforce and Radian6 certainly looks interesting in examining click throughs from the cloud.

Metadata, Taxonomy and KMS: This is a tough nut to crack and the sharp end of the semantic web. Ideally the taxonomy that your customers develop online should inform your southbound knowledge management and product descriptions. Behavioural Targetting ,SEO/SEM and Customer Support will be more successful if you can develop a commonality between how you describe your domain vs how it's actually being talked about in the real world.

Connect Listening with the Raising of Work/Suggestion Tickets distributed to the rest of the business : Use the listening platform data to directly feed into how you raise suggestions, complaints or issues into the business. This avoids some retype and paraphrasing but still requires staff to manage.

Run Listening Platforms Across internal channels such as Wikis and Forums : this could be automated to filter hot topics and prioritise work and many forum providers are moving into the semantic space to enable just that.

Involvement in Design : beyond providing a Wiki or a Facebook group and harvesting opinions on features via Listening Platforms how do we get customers deeply involved in the creation of the products and services we design?

The big question...
Is deep automated integration an expensiveand proprietary folly between sCRM and CRM at the present time?

Do we end raising projects titled 'Integrate with the Internet'?

Another angle on Social Computing - the iPad

There was a distinct ethereal hum as I finally added an iPad to my iPhone, iPod, Powerbook, iMac and G5 kingdom.

I had to answer some questions for myself on something that felt 'game changing' - magic almost.

What is the magic in the hardware, form factor and software of the iPad?

• Given it's size it travels from room to room with you. The only other computing device that really does that is a feature/modern phone. Laptops get parked which equals bad for a prospective command centre and true on body device.
• The role of phones will change. The size of displays for pocket devices have limits (technical and social) that the iPad immediately begins to highlight. Phone's may be more of a cousin of your car key, wallet and GPS devices than the final form factor of the utopian 'life controller'. Phone holographic technology would of course help phones reassert themselves as a social device rather than a private device.
• Works great as you walk and use the device using only 1 hand (unlike a laptop) for essential workflow tasks of the OS (cut copy-paste-search-open-close) , in fact most programs and tasks are possible given multi-touch to allow context. It also works really well with 2 hands allowing richer expression and depth of interaction.
• No wires and it fits everywhere - that's a fail for most laptops which demand height as well as depth on a desk or surface. iPad display and control are merged into one flat surface.
• The resolution is great - it looks like an interactive magazine.
• It wins the war hands down as the master input device for contacts and calendar control. Phone calendar co-working was not convenient with phones or laptops. Laptops feel 'official' and had to be crowded round with a bent neck (or worse via ping pong mail). The iPadCalendar experience is one where you co-author it with your spouse or friend or colleague sitting next to one another...on the couch, standing in the kitchen, and so on. Passing the iPad back and forth so everyone can download their details makes for good 'ownership' of events and to-do's and will prompt healthier use. This form factor, so far, is the best capture tool and it's social - just like calendars and are meant to be.
• The e-book, e-comic and e-magazine have arrived - they never had before. iPad allows you to zoom on article, photos, paintings or Maps. Hand it to a friend. Magazines can't compete...physical books also look like they will get in the neck strong if iBooks is anything to go by.
• Contact data and references (URL's etc) really are ubiquitous and synchronised across all my equipment. Retyping was hurting the mass uptake of computing - we need to do away with it. A combination of mobileMe, wireless and apple core products (itunes, iphoto et al) ensures that data, preferences and references are available, accessible and synced no matter where you are. No mean feat.
• Resolution of expression for multi-touch fingers. So much more satisfying for almost all application experiences from innocuous address book management and browsing to rich real-time control audio/visual applications.

The form factor of the iPad makes it a truly social device

The laptop and the mobile are personal computers - we don't share them physically with others much at all. They are social in that they can enable 'remotely social' experiences but it's a private affair.

This is where the iPad and form factors like it have a potential to shine ... families passing it round to arrange the trip to the lakes, band members trimming the email marketing list collectively, waiters allowing customers to select their choice and then taking the device to send wirelessly to the kitchen, putting in in grandma's lap to see slideshows.

but it's not all honey...

• The weight - any more weight for the iPad would be a fail but it just gets away with it.
• Heat - beware your iPad in strong sunlight...it heats up quickly and then forbids you to use it until it cools down.
• Power and Charging - Non native chargers that work for iPhones don't fare well with the iPad.
• Utilising other devices - I'm not a fan of the buy a wireless or a wireless with 3G simcard approach. It's a bad fit as iPad demographic probably already have mobile data contracts and don't want another. I'd have much rather payed an extra levy per month on my network provider bill (O2) to use my iPhone as a modem. The iPad is a natural main console for all your computing so it would have been nice to see utilisation of slave devices such as iPhone available out of the box - specifically from Apple rather than a 3rd party integrator.
• Upfront user profiles. Given the inherently social capability of the device it is a miss to not have controls for multiple user profiles.

We live in interesting times alright.

Mobile Widgets and Chips

Recently on a visit to a chip shop it struck me that chippie workers constantly have to say the word "chips" over and over and I had a chuckle at how they would slowly dement themselves with all the chip-based permutations day-in and day-out.

My laugh was short-lived though as the next day I caught myself saying the word "widget" at least 14 times an hour.

Widgets are the new chips alright.

Remember the old days when the media majors wanted you to go to their own portals and have your whole Internet experience from within their domain?




They all (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, BT et al) had this approach to try and hold onto the customer. It was the the shopping mall where they'd like to lock the door when you enter as when you left they couldn't successfully advertise, track and sell you things. This would be a fine approach if one web service could really offer us everything but clearly the world isn't like that on the web anymore.

I use hotmail, facebook, google (nearly all their applications), flickr, myspace and a tonne of other web services and before 'widgets' I would have to go to all these different sites running around to get to my data and services. Tabbed browsing helped make this a little easier but still, I was opening pages left right and centre.

Widgets, as a recap, allow you to take a chunk of a websties functionality and present it anywhere you would like - this allowed the data and service to come to you rather than the other way around. The graphical interface of your Flickr or YouTube widget has no dependency on Flickr or YouTube as the widget developer (and you) only want the data from these services. You can embed widgets in your Web2.0 profiles, your custom start pages or embed them in web pages you code yourself. They are modular little lego chunks of functionality that allow us to construct our own dashboards and environments.

Widgets are overground now and are used by bloggers, social network users, auction sites and owners of personal web sites. They exist on home page sites such as iGoogle, Netvibes, or Pageflakes.

Have a look at how I can easily aggregate widgets on one page to help with all aspects of my travel planning. A widget here, a widget there allows me to take the best of each web service and commoditise them to suit myself:




For the most part widgets are sandboxed and operate in ignorance of one another and mostly they manipulate data in the web cloud - it's just safer that way.

Recently there has been a rightful hoo-ha about mobile widgets i.e. widgets running on a mobile phone. For the most part web services on the mobile phone are consumed using a mobile browser or a dedicated application. The mobile browsers such as Safari, Opera Mini or the Nokia browsers are conceptually derived from their web counterparts and for the most part mobile web services via a browser, while improving, tend to be cumbersome with the best experience requiring multi-touch devices and continual zooming in and out to navigate pages that were essentially developed for the 'big screen' web.

The same principal that applied on web also applies to some widget platforms - bring the data to the customer rather than have them run around the web for it themselves.

The first big service in this space was by Nokia with their Widsets offering which was a Java program on your mobile that allowed you to add, view, and configure widgets directly from your mobile. To make life easier Nokia also provided a fixed line service to more easily allow users to manage how the service appeared on their mobile.


The market recently has exploded with widget offerings for mobile and it is in this field that I find myself caught up in - being earnest about widgets, looking at widget solutions, imagining the strategic importance of widgets - this ridiculous sounding little word now holds great gravity for me. I can no longer think of a 'mobile meal' without thinking "would you like some widgets with that?".

Mobile widget solutions have now moved on from standalone application style approaches, like Widgets, to richly integrated solutions that harmonise with a users idle screen (your phones dashbaord). The area is in transition and there are currently no standards on how to do this across multiple handset platforms and phone models.

The fight is on between Telecomms companies, handset manufacturers and large service providers.

Nokia has an S60 solution they are developing with the Symbian foundation, Opera has a widget solution that it is rolling out with operators, handset manufacturers are replacing their 'program menus' with richer widget style dashboards.

My dad would never use a mobile browser but I do believe he would use a Celtic football club widget alerting him of scores and news and providing him with simple links to video footage right from his mobile phone home screen. The simplicity and immediacy of web services has changed with these little critters called widgets and if you don't find yourself coming across this innocuous word alongside some market superlatives in 2009 then I, for one, would be very surprised.