Feeding the Puppy

Your iPhone is now... a credit card payment system

Oh my giddy aunt.  I talked before about how the digital applications of phones will increasingly replace the solid hardware we've grown up used to...

...I used the example of the iPhone camera apps which replaced the functionality of Lomo style cameras and so on.

Now, via Mark, I've just seen Square for the first time...

It's basically a 'square' device that plugs into the standard jack socket of ANY mobile device smart enough, and lets you receive payments for goods or services.  Yeah, I know.  REALLY.

 


So anyone from a street vendor to a design freelancer has an instant payment system available to them to receive their money. 

Which in turn means everything from the chip & pin systems in shops to the invoice process for freelancers can now change, and be wrapped up in the device folk carry with them anyway.

If this isn't huge, I'll eat my hat.

Then buy a new one, from a guy in the street who's using the system that was even better than Square and hence freed him up to set up his hat stall...

Social Production... my 'big idea'

I was invited to take part in yesterday's APG/Campaign Battle of Big Thinking (yes, an honour to be asked, thanks guys), and managed to carry the public vote in the innovation section...

I talked about Social Production... I've put it together as a slidecast here, I'd love to know what you think.

John V Willshire - Battle of Big Thinking 2009

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

Just click the green 'play' button at the bottom to hear the voiceover... 

...it's not the original audio, I quickly rerecorded a track this morning, hence it being longer than the allocated 15 minutes...

Taykt to the limit - smart free mbl txt srvc

Here's something cool that Dave told me about earlier.  It's called Taykt (pronounced 'Take It').  It's really very simple as a proposition.

Need to set up a text shortcode? 

Then just com to www.taykt.com, enter the keyword you want to use, and the message people get when they text... and you're off...

 

Wow, easy huh?  Anyone can do it.  None of this set-up fee, faffing with different providers and the like.  No worrying about cost, as it's all just '25p+network charge'... so say 35p typically.  Not too much at all.

I can already imagine lots of uses for this...

- small independent shops & bars could pick a 'word of the day' that's written in chalk above their counter or bar... if you text that word, you get back a token for half price drink that day, or 5% off your shopping.

- if you want to test the effect of sales by location, just set up slightly different keywords to text in, and monitor which works best

- not sure which offer is more appealing to people... offer a choice of words, and see which proves most popular

A really smart, simple service as far as I can see.  Thanks Dave :)

Perspective... filtered through the media lens

The perception we always have of the beginning of the 20th century is very much framed by the way in which we see it recalled through the media used to capture it.

So by and large if you think about the 1920s, you'll start thinking in black and white, stuttery images... it's hard to think of it being a time when people even lived in colour.

Which makes this colour of London in 1927 fascinating... it's a weird juxtaposition of the clothing, transport and the like we know is of the period, but it clashes with our perception of that world being 'black and white'.

(via Schmutizie)

And it works the other way around too.  There's an iPhone app called Camera Bag which allows you to add a filter on top of your digital photos to give them a more earthy, dated feel.

For instance, here's a shot of my Dad and James sleeping on the sofa...

 


...and here's the same shot but using the '1974' filter...

 


...which now, to me, makes it much more of an evocative 'family' shot... probably because I'm used to thinking about the boxes of old seventies & eighties photos that make up the photographic records of my childhood... bleachy, harsh colours, and little white frames around the edge and the like.

I wonder what we'll look back and think of this era as, photograph & film wise?

A Gazillion Different iPhones

So, Mashable reported recently that there are now 100,000 approved apps for the iPhone.

Which is a big number. 

But not as big as the number I think is more interesting, and maybe more important. 

How many different combinations of iPhones are there with 100,000 available apps?

 

We can get the average number of apps per iPhone from reports like this from networkworld)

It's about 18, apparently (10 paid for, 8 free).

So from 100,000 apps, how many possible combinations of iPhone are there?

To work this out, I asked my brother, Andrew, who has a PHD in engineering and works at our sister agency BrandScience. 

Needless to say, he has a better grasp of numbers than I...

This is what he worked out:

No. of Apps   /   Total Combinations   

1        100,000       
2        4,999,950,000   
3        166,661,666,700,000   
4        4,166,416,671,249,980,000   
5        83,325,000,291,662,500,000,000
6        1,388,680,567,360,800,000,000,000,000
7        19,837,103,521,810,800,000,000,000,000,000
8        247,946,436,557,054,000,000,000,000,000,000,000   
9        2,754,740,009,356,990,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
10       27,544,920,827,561,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
11      250,383,330,322,534,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
12      2,086,298,234,634,990,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
13      16,046,522,144,975,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
14      114,603,114,979,263,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
15      763,913,803,621,103,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
16      4,773,745,103,441,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
17      28,076,360,613,085,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

...18:

        155,953,264,621,004,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
                              000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Yep; if you select just eighteen apps from the app store, you are selecting one of the 1.56E+74 possible 18 app iPhone combinations.

Which is a very big number indeed. 

To put it in context, if you multiply the number of hydrogen atoms in the galaxy (5E+68) by 311,907, then you get to the number of possible iPhone permutations. 

(EDIT: This is an update on the maths from Andrew... I misinterpreted original email)

 

Interesting?  Maybe, depending on your take on what 'interesting' is... but it's certainly important.

Why?  Because it represents just how unique and customisable the iPhone platform has become... the chances of you ever running into someone who has the same iPhone as you are entirely remote.

...which means that not only is your iPhone unique, it continues to be a social object even when everyone around you has one, because you're always likely to have something new, different and interesting to show each other.

So next year, when the Orange and Vodafone iPhone deals have really kicked in, it's not like everyone in the UK is going to have the same phone...

...they're going to have the most unique phone they've ever owned. 

It's just they're all going to have the same case for it...

 

Barcodes, Perfect Competition, and the future of shopping

Barcodes?  The future of shopping?  Is this some weird sort of retro post?  Like when the newspaper does 'today in 1972...'?

Because, of course, there's nothing new about the barcode... it was first tested in US supermarkets in the sixties.  As technology goes, it's as old as the hills. 

 

So how on earth can it be the future of shopping?

Because what matters nowadays is not the barcode itself, but the reader...

Supermarkets (and now other high street chains) have been putting the control of scanning in the hands of customers for a few years now... not as an advantage to the customer, necessarily, but as an automation of a job that used to be done by checkout assistants.

(...the economic labour market implications of this helps explain why the five members of Girls Allowed had to find alternative employment...)

 


It's not really a move that's putting the customer 'in control' of course... the important part (price comparison with other possible competitors) is locked away. 

With developments such as this, and through years of watching shop assistants at work, we've all been taught by the shops how to scan barcodes... 

However... imagine you could take that barcode, and scan it with something else... something that lets you compare prices across every outlet, order it online... and essentially through market forces means that the price you pay becomes as low as possible...

Well, that scanner is here.  And it costs £1.19.  And it's an app for the iPhone 3GS called Redlaser...

 

It works like this; you fire up the app, and it uses the camera on the phone to take a picture of any UPC barcode you hold in front of it, as the video explains...

When I first heard about it, I expected it to work on things like books, CDs and the like... but then I tried it on baby milk...

 
...which quickly told me that our local pharmacy were charging £1.19 for something that costs £0.58 in Boots.

I still can't quite get my head around just how big a step this represents in the way our economy works... but it's taken me back to my Economics degree and a thing called Perfect Competition.

Like many things in Economics, Perfect Competition was just a theory based on unattainable assumptions... infinite buyers & sellers, costless transactions, zero entry/exit barriers and so on

...read the wikipedia entry here for a full explanation)...

...but the one assumption that is close to becoming fulfilled by Redlaser is Perfect Information; prices and quality of all goods in the market are known to every seller AND every buyer.

Perfect Competition as a theory has many ramifications... but perhaps the most important is this; it becomes impossible in the long run for any company in the market to do any more than cover their costs.

So for instance, if I have perfect information about everyone who sells Aptamil baby milk, and there is no 'transaction costs' which set any seller apart (e.g. I can order from all store in bulk via the internet), then I'll always just order the cheapest one. 

 


Which means for both the retailer (Boots) & manufacturer (Aptamil), I'll only ever give them the least possible money for the baby milk. 

If everyone did that, for every product, that manufacturers and retailers would only ever break even, as market forces will continually drive down prices...

(Now, that's not of course how everyone behaves now... but it's got me thinking of something that's worth a separate post.  And I think there's more implications for the Perfect Competition hypothesis from the internet too, but I'll go in to them on another separate post too...)

So we'll all have perfect price information, but what about the other half of Perfect Information; the quality of products? 

How can we possibly begin to share the information about a vast array of products across society in a way that bypasses manufacturers and retailers...

...oh, hang on, right you are...

 

Whatever it is you're buying nowadays, there's a discussion/forum/review on the internet from other people which will guide you as to the quality of the product you're looking at. 

What does it all mean? 

Well, in a world where people have access to Perfect Information about just about every market, what implications does this have for branding? 

Is traditional branding a mechanism that only works to protect price premiums in a world of imperfect competition?  Will I find out about the quality of products from other people, then the cheapest place to buy it via mechanisms like Redlaser?

I'm certainly going to be thinking about this a lot more in the weeks to come... probably at 4:00am when I'm feeding James with all this bargain baby milk we've been buying...

The Future, Xplane'd

I'd seen this video around in a few places (including Rosie's, Fiona's and Simon's blogs), and I wasn't going to re-post it here... but I now have:

It's promoting the Economist's Media Convergence Forum in October in NYC, and it's a treasure trove of facts, stats and info on the things that, when you piece them altogether, help build a picture of how the world is changing. 

(Steve, in his endearingly grumpy way, points out that some of the stats might be a little shaky...)

So, why did I repost when I wasn't going to? 

I saw that it was actually created by Xplane, the visual thinking company.  Their mission is to 'create understanding' by helping their clients find simple, clear ways to visualise things

I've got a book written by founder Dave Gray called Marks and Meanings I'm a big fan of, and generally think they've got a great approach to simplifying complicated things to explain them well.

So the Xplane video above is a great example of using a mix on minimal words and illustrative visuals to make points quickly and simply.  Make one simple point at a time, and build up the story sequentially.

It's something I try to do with my own work, and encourage a culture of at PHD.  

I guess I'm on the right track; Ted at The Conversation Group took the first half of this 'Future of Advertising' presentation (didn't listen to the audio) and presented it to a University class over in California... which I guess means it must be pretty self explanatory.

The Future of Advertising, APA, 17/02/09

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

So yes, I think we've all slept through enough presentations where people read the 50 words they've written on a chart off the screen. 

Let's keep it simple.

Gadgets, Spotify, and more nails in the coffin

Once upon a time, everyone presumed that content was king.

Recently though, I've been wondering about that... content is only king if you have some way of extracting value from it...

Let's think about the music industry.  Of course, it's been a while since I posted anything on the massive changes the music industry is having thrust upon it unwillingly.  I guess I thought I'd leave it alone for a bit...

Anyway, I was maintaining my previous stance on buying CDs... being in a band with lots of musician friends, I liked to think that people still valued music, that it was still worth something to people.

But a few things of late have made me see that the actual value of music has plummeted so far that... well, I don't know how much longer we'll see anyone making money out of recorded music.  And if that happens, I guess we'll wave goodbye to record labels too...

So what's tipped me over the edge?

Well, the first thing is that the CDs that occupy the corner of our living room, all five hundred or so, aren't really worth anything any more...

Helen decided she was going to divest herself of some of her CDs.  I (being the hoarding, collecting type) would never countenance such a thing, but their Helen's CDs, and she decided that since she never listened to them any more their stay in the Willshire household had come to an end.

So she went onto Music Magpie, a site that offers to buy your old CDs if you are done with them.  Their offer for Helen's 15 CDs?  £5.76. 

Yes, less than two pints of beer.  A Charlatans album, apparently, is worth about 30p.

So the music that we own already is of value to us, but not really anyone else it seems. 

It seems kind of foolhardy to keep adding to this pile in the corner, especially given the other routes opening up where you can legally get music...

Which brings me to the second thing that's changed my world lately; the Spotify iPhone app.

Spotify as a computer-based application didn't really do anything for me; it's not really where I listen to much music, and so played around for a while before I got bored.

The iPhone app is a completely different kettle of fish; it allows you to download and cache up to 3,333 songs onto your iPhone, and take them with you wherever you go, for as long as you like.

It costs £9.99 a month.  So roughly the same as an album.  I've only had it for 3 weeks, yet I've downloaded around 20 albums, listened to them, and then stopped listening to the ones I didn't like that much (once upon a time, I'd have been stuck with a purchase...).

It's basically like having a library card for a record shop, and you can borrow things for as long as you like.  

All very well, you may think, that sorts the commuting music... but what about when you listen to music at home? 

Well, a package from Amazon arrived today that sorts that... a new Sony mini hi-fi system with an iPhone docking station on top...

(yes, perhaps with a child on the way it's not the time to be buying gadgets, but it was only £120 which we paid for by selling an old amp and mobile phone on eBay...)

What's so good about it?  Well, because we've got a decent wi-fi signal around the house, the iPhone can play any of the songs directly from Spotify, through the system, into the house.

It's very nearly replacing the need for CDs at all... sure, Spotify isn't an all inclusive service yet (though it does have six million songs, which will keep us going for a while...).

But what the whole set-up has done has turned my mobile device into something that moves with me wherever I go, allowing access to music via either internal storage or straight from the cloud. 

It's beginning to sound very close to the delightful technological future we've been promised for years.  So, what does it all mean?

Well, firstly, things aren't looking great for the recorded music industry... 

If someone like me, who was until three weeks ago still buying CDs, is now listening to three times as much music at a fraction of the cost I used to pay, then whilst Spotify's claim that their main target is piracy, in fighting that battle the collateral damage may just be to wipe out the little money the record labels were still making from selling folk like me CDs.

It's sad to see it, but it's more nails in the coffin of an increasingly defunct business model.

The second thing I think is important, possibly much more so than the music thing, is scaling this behaviour change into the future.

What is the media landscape going to look like when people carry around the 5th generation, 160Gb iPhone that plays BBC iPlayer content from the cloud...

...and plugs straight into their TV system at home? 

If this sort of behaviour shifts into the TV model, the changes in that sector will undoubtedly mirror those that the record industry is facing now.

And the thing about TV content is of course that it's a lot more expensive to make than recording music.  Content creators are going to have to think very cleverly indeed to work out how they're going to make money from it.

Content may have been king, but it's increasingly facing a future living like a pauper...

The iPhone, the white screen of death, and Youtube

I had an awful experience this morning, one of those real 'punch in the guts' moments where you see stretching out in front of you a road of high cost, endless customer service conversations, and all through no fault of your own...

...because when I switched on my iPhone, it looked like this:

 

Just a bright, white screen.  THE WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH.

Nothing I did would get rid of it.  At all.

I swore quite a lot.  For about five minutes.

Then...

...rather than trying to find the instruction manual, or head to Apple's site or whatever, I just searched for 'iPhone White Screen'.

 

That top search result was pretty appealing... a solution?  Really?  Brilliant...

I click through, and get a video of RichyRich7777... an American fella filming on his webcam, telling you how to fix the 'White Screen of Death'...

The solution worked, perfectly.  Thanks RichyRich7777.  The sense of relief... words can't capture it

Anyway, it got me thinking.  There's three things at play here which are characteristic of how the internet is changing the customer service model for companies.

Firstly, there's me, the customer.  For whatever reason, I didn't feel that even a company like Apple is going to provide an easy to find solution on their own website.  I didn't search for 'Apple helpdesk' or 'iPhone problem'.  Experience with the internet has clearly taught me that the quickest route to things is to use Google to search on my precise self-diagnosis.

Then there's RichyRich7777, who's the service.  He had the same problem I did, and found a solution.  Presumably he didn't find it on someone else's video, because he felt compelled to save people the hassle of going through the same pain he did and filmed a video himself.

Finally there's Apple, the company.

 

On the search results, they just about manage to sneak onto the first page with a solution on their forum... to a different problem.

RichyRich7777 is providing the service, and has done so for free.  And it works, it's simple.

So what should the company do?  Point people to it?  Recommend it?  Embed it on their own website with the creator's permission?  Or just leave people to their own devices like they're doing now.

What would you do if you were Apple?

Cricket and Transmedia Storytelling

Like me, you may have become increasing in thrall of the gentleman's game over the last few years...

...yes, that's right, cricket. 

Since the 2005 Ashes, it has moved from being in danger of becoming a relic of a forgotten era, to a hot topic of conversation, beloved of pop stars (like Lily Allen and The Duckworth Lewis Method) and celebrities and TV presenters...

....and most importantly, lots of ordinary people like you and I.

Is it because England, finally, have started winning?  Well, that helps certainly. 

But I think there's something more powerful at its heart; the shift in how the world communicates.

Transmedia Storytelling

Over the weekend I was attuned to the second one day match (oh, Australia, you can have the one day series, it's like winning a battle after the war has been won).

I was listening on TMS, checking the scorecard on the ECB app for the iPhone, having a sneaky glance at the Guardian's OBO coverage, and also following a few of the cricket commentators on Twitter...

It occurred that perhaps the revival of cricket is down to it being the perfect sport for Transmedia Storytelling.

Transwhatia Whodeia?

OK, a quick explanation... Transmedia Storytelling is something that I first encountered via Faris (as most folk in the agency arena did), and then through Prof Henry Jenkins' book Convergence Culture. 

What is it? 

Transmedia Storytelling is about using lots of different media to tell separate parts of the same story, as opposed to retelling the same story in lots of different places.

An oft-used example, first suggested by Jenkins, was The Matrix Trilogy; you could just watch the films, but would get more points of view, background etc from comics, computer games, animations etc etc.

The Matrix: Neo goes in to bat for his friends

Read Henry Jenkins' Transmedia 101 for a much fuller, better description...

Transmedia Storytelling & Cricket

So we can see from the way I followed the cricket this weekend how the Transmedia theory is clearly at play in cricket.

In addition to the places I was attuned to this weekend, there's the Sky coverage, Five's highlights show, newspaper commentary and analysis, Cricinfo, various cricket forums etc etc. 

But why does it work so well for cricket?  I think it's down to four things which are a fundamental part of the game itself...

1. Duration

Cricket takes a long time.  Even the 'short' version  like the 50-over game I listened to yesterday takes the best part of a whole day to play.

So in an era where 'appointment to view' is dying out, people perhaps don't necessarily want a sport that they have to sit down at a precise time and watch for 90 minutes. 

A sport where you can duck in and out at any point during five days is very suitable indeed for the way we live our lives and communicate nowadays.

2. Access points

You can't sit and watch five days of cricket on the TV.  It's just too long for people with jobs, families etc.  So you need a variety of different points of access to suit what you're doing at the time...

Get the score from a mobile phone, some opinion from the Guardian's OBO, tune into TMS (Test Match Special) on the radio if you're at work.  Meet a friend in a pub to watch a couple of hours play, talk to other fans on forums about the form of players, or just talk to your friends where you talk to them already (email, facebook, text message etc)

You can use any of these different access points whilst the game is still in progress, which makes the game, and your 'participation' in it, much more engaging than it was before.

3. A love of information

The ease with which data has become measurable and malleable is changing a lot of things in the world (how we listen to music, buy books, see our travel patterns etc).  We know that humans really seem to like looking at data visualisations that augment our experiences. 

Cricket was always a game of stats and numbers, of course, but now technology is being brought to bear in lots of interesting ways, in everything from the coverage itself (Hawkeye, wagon wheels etc)to the ease of access that everyone in the audience has to the statistics only once available in Wisden.

Detailed information in this new exciting, highly visual form helps give the 'story' that's being told an amazing amount of depth, and helps people understand it more.

4. Understanding of the game

There's a lot of depth that in the complexity and techniques of the game; all in all, there's a lot to get you head around.  Which is what help makes cricket the perfect Transmedia foil...

Where once cricket was inaccessible through complexity, the emergence of all of the different access points means people have been much more likely to find a route in that suits them; they can choose the depth of understanding they want to go to, and find their favourite access points in. 

Cricket suddenly becomes a lot more sociable, as more people find that they have a 'route in' to talk about it.  Cricket is a social object (as Mark testifies to here).

It no longer matters how much you know really about cricket; you can still join in a conversation about it.

Accidental Transmedia Storytelling

What's really interesting is that cricket is now big in the UK by accident; the variety of access points which have emerged have not emerged by design.

Sky's TV coverage, BBC's Radio coverage, the Guardian's OBO, Crickinfo, the ECB app, forums, the commentators on Twitter, your friend's commentary on his Facebook status... and all the other access points I've missed...

...no-one sat down and planned for all this to happen. 

Various entities have rights here and there, other organisations reported on things in a particular way, some commentators & producers took it upon themselves to try something new, and people started getting involved themselves.

A more restrictive set of media rights would not have produced as a diverse a set of access points for people to have come into cricket.

Not only do I think cricket is a great example of Transmedia Storytelling, I think it shows what can happen when you cede control (whether on purpose or not) to people so they can help create a different part of the story.

The lesson for companies I think is this:

Transmedia Storytelling works best with more access points.  You don't have to create all of those access points yourself. 

But in order for other people and organisations to create them, you have to let go of as much control as possible.