2012, the year of relevancy
It is 2012 already. It is a tradition on this blog to look ahead to the coming year. Thinking on what will happening is a good start of the year. But first, for the record, let’s look back at the predictions I did last year and in general what happened in 2011.
The breakthrough of tablets and nearby computing was a good feeling I think. In 2011 I think we saw some serious steps where digital lifestyle is becoming default for our approach to services and products. The way people adopt the home coach app in the Dutch version of The Voice of Holland for instance. Or the growing use of on demand media. And all cumulating in a new smart product like the Nest thermostat and Peel tv-guides.
I predicted (and hoped) newspapers would improve their apps to much more interesting digital content experiences. We saw some examples like the Guardian, and some magazines do good jobs like Autovisie. But many still hold on to the old models. What really did happen however was the emerge of new personalized services based on algorithms, social peers etc. Like Zite, News.me, Summify, and Livestand. This is just the beginning of what to come, I expect more of these kind of services in 2012, in all kind of categories. And we will see a Nest-like product release probably every month.
My optimism for the economy was not completely right. Halfway in a sense. Europe did get a hard time indeed, but I did not expected the Europe paralyzing act. I am not optimistic for the coming year this to change dramatically; we will suffer this pessimism, even if the real numbers will be better than expected. It will trigger some bigger trends that we saw rise in 2011; the sharing economy and the access based products and services. In 2011 Spotify reaches the masses, and different new services for car sharing next to Greenwheels appeared to the market. Car2go, Wego, Snappcar. And also in other branches like tools. This model will be more and more popular in all different kind of branches the coming year. Not all that successful, but there is a fertile ground for sure.
The virtual money layer that functions as play money and mean for exchange of profile data turned out not be as prominent as I expected for 2011. Still a trend that will be a fundamental development I believe. In different manners. If we would have a real economy crash, which I hope (and expect) not to happen, it will be triggered sooner as alternative for our devaluated real money. We will see the first steps however to virtual social currencies with the release of the NFC phones (an iPhone 5 at last) combined with more access based products and services for sure. But this will last till the end of the year and become really big not until 2013.
An interesting field could be our energy consumption. We will see that we are growing into a system where we contribute much more to the production of energy and a market place of electricity will be part of our sharing economy. Electric vehicles will trigger this, a service where private households are offering their fast charger to electric car owners via a service could be well in place soon, probably in 2012. But I think that this will not fly till 2013.
I think I was quite right with the prediction that gamification became hot in 2011, but stayed a hype at the same time. The hope for services that are designed with playfulness as one of the design principles in stead of cheap badgification is something that has indeed not been seen before 2012. There are some signs for this to happen indeed in de the coming year, hopefully with not to many lame implementations that danger the possibilities. The ROI of gamification will be a hot topic. Just like we got with socialification.
The social angle become default indeed in 2011. We see even some fatigue emerge from all social experts that did pop-up. Nevertheless, no company is neglecting to think about social and making it part of their strategies. Bigger corporations did this in 2011, in 2012 also SME will follow. At the same time we as users are grown up and will model our use to specific situations even more. The circles Google+ launched will evolve to a standard approach – that is more basic than the circles – and smaller social private groups will live next to the temporary ties we have more and more. The shift of users becoming part of the organizations as policy makers and product developers will be default.
The big data movement is developing a bit slower than expected. Google with plus and Facebook with timeline are however paving the road for even more data driven knowledge and the war of the ecosystems with Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon is acknowledged all over the industry and will sharpen. There will however be no real losers (expect maybe a disappointing IPO for Facebook), they will together shape the fundaments for the services we make. And data becomes really data science as nicely shown in this presentation. With the serious steps in emerging smart products the flood of data will be only more and we will see the first ‘profile management’ services appear that can manipulate your data presence.
I have to say that the prediction on Facebook launching a Groupon killer did not came true. In stead of trying to save Places Facebook discontinued the development. The dispute on their privacy and profiling continues as expected last year, and the new Timeline function makes us as users even more the product, that is a widespread observation. A voice function and even phone that was a rumor is still on the shelves. Let’s see what the coming year brings for that. I expect that the focus is on leveraging the timeline to all corners of the service with the connection to the pages. 2012 could be a consolidation year for Facebook, connecting all the dots and deepening existing services over all touch points.
So to sum up I think relevancy will be a leading theme. If Apple introduces the expected iTV this summer (big sport events are always a good moment) it will set a marker for relevant services. I agree with those that predict a TV-experience that will be much more a personal experience (in the context of the family) and combines the best second screen integration with tablets and cloud. Apps for the iTV will be not used on the TV set but on your personal remote, phone or tablet. And just like with iTunes connect to the PC platform, iTV could connect to other mobile platforms. Google and Windows will follow soon and integrate in their ecosystems the second screens and tv-operating systems, but Apple will set the tone in the user experience as expected, and add gesture and voice interactions.
In the mobile context I think we will see a growing importance of Android becoming more hip and happening with the developers too. Apps still rule web apps but in the second half it could change triggered by two important developments; with the market share of Windows growing to 20-25% it is becoming even more hassle to develop for all the different platforms, especially in economic weak times. And highly related with this; the ‘mobile first’ paradigm will rule 2012 and transforming full website for mobile use will be via webappsification of online services.
In 2012 we will continue to evolve in a complete digital inspired lifestyle (post digital so to say) and relevant services are the corner stones in these new experiences. With economic pessimism we will hold on to cocooning social and sharing based services. Another interesting year in prospect.
The many aspects of a new post digital era
But first, what do we mean with post digital. Dries Verbruggen gave a presentation in which he defined the new era with some examples. In essence the concept is built around the idea that we are now entering an era where digital context is common and part of everything. The special characteristics of digital products and services are now adopted in everything and shapes our role to products. Digital is becoming tangible in that sense.
Dries showed some more conceptual examples from the art scene like the teapot shaped like a rendering that you could see as an archetype of this post digital thinking. Much more interesting is it when we use the digital benefits like easy reproducing, profiled services to real products. In that sense the views of Evgeny Morozov are interesting. He was interviewed in NRC a month ago and could be seen in a TV documentary earlier. His skepticism towards techno utopia was the central theme and relevant for sure, but his concluding remarks on our grow into atomized individuals in stead of the hallelujah networked social concept is interesting. We growing into a society where everything is personalized and fitted to the me, with a danger that we disconnect even more.
This hyper personalized tangible product is also very present in the examples of Russell Davies on the conference. He showed of course his very interesting project of the Newspaper club where you can print your own newspaper in small numbers. And the latest product FRSTEE is a special-for-you printed snowman that is shaped based on the number of twitter followers you have. As Bruce Sterling kicked off with a model with four types of art-tech combinations, all shaping some scenarios. High tech and low art for instances, or low tech with high art. Russell Davies introduced CrappyComp as a definition for cheap stuff made smart. Low art with high tech in a way. The new project of BERG could be considered as low tech and high art. A simple printer prints small paper notes based on the connections with online services. Very sweet and smart in the execution of the concept but using rather basic tech at first sight. Which is of course not really the case, it looks easy but is very smart technology if you take the platform in account. It is a complete system that will grow into a plug and play data driven cloud for smart and sweet products. Something where we will see a new competitive field emerge. Who will rule this new domain of products and who owns the inbetween products that are appearing in the cloud.
At TEDxDelft Theo Jansen showed also how his quest for evolution of his Strandbeest has moved and supported when others make 3D models and prints from his creatures. The very tangible feel becomes enhanced with a digital thinking and will lead a new life. Literally.
At TEDxDelft the work of architect Kas Oosterhuis showed that we are entering a new phase in computer shaped buildings. Where his work is already known for years, with shapes that are only made possibe by using the computer to draw the buildings. Now he adds an realtime adaptive aspect. An example is the sound barriers for trains that react on the train and only operate when the train passes.
Ben Schouten closed the day of the conference with his inaugaral talk on playful interactions. A good story with some fine statements. Play bridges us with the new context and our identities are in constant flux and play as key to our culture. As the game space becomes a personal space. A game space is the ultimate definition of a game, spaces of interactions. Intelligence products mean interactive products. Ben showed us that play will have a very important part in making post digital culture possible by creating new structures
Post digital principles will also get a place in mass products. Like the new Apple TV concept that might be introduced next year. You can expect a product that will take the best of digital inventions around the old technology of watching TV. Things like Peel that makes your guide really personal and the second screen experiences with twitter and so on, will be integrated I expect. Apple will have the clue to disrupt this market by using the best of our digital achievements into the analog experience of doing mass TV consumption.
But more interesting will be all the new tangible products that embody smartness. Like the Nest thermostat and the Sphero ball that is introduced not so long ago. Post digital will stand for hybrid products and cross overs that we gonna use and will evolve into so called New Aestheticwhere we will see that digital behaviour is defining our expectations on how things work. And we will live more and more in a context of systems of things and people as was stated at the Internet of thing conference with the things as the mediators.
We lost our bright future. Did we?
What the reason is, I don’t know, but in a couple of events I visited last weeks the main topic seemed how we see our future, and more in particular, how we lost some of the bright images of the future we used to have. The Club of Amsterdam event was completely dedicated to the future of the future. It was not a positive story. Andrea Wiegman of Second Sight gave an overview of the industry of futurists as first speaker and sketched a new era that already started in 2008 with books like the Black Swan. Arjen Huisman of Gendo went even further, like in this concluding slide. And the last speaker – Anders Sandberg of Oxford University - went through a bunch of biases we have in looking to the future. From probability biases, status quo biases to hindsight biases. “We like to shape the future like unrealistic scenarios because that is why we like the future.”
It was also one of the themes of the conference Playful. Brendan Dawes used a quote from William Gibson to express that feeling: “Upon arriving in the capital-f future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower case now.” We are living a middle aged future as Marcus Brown put it. All our dreams for the future as we were children are fulfilled, and there are no new futures to dream of, except for more optimized worlds.
Never before I attended Playful, a sweet conference “all about games and play — in all their manifestations, throughout the contemporary media landscape”. The reports on the conference by Kars and Nicolas make a extensive report almost obsolete, I agree at large in their observations. The theme of the lost future also resonates on the evening on Visible Cities of last week. During the first presentation of Lorenzo de Rita focused on our need to keep imagination. The future of today has more to do with preparation than imagination, he said. His complete talk was build around this theme. He connected the movement to ultimate visibility to this lack of imagination; total transparency don’t leave any room for imagination. Literally.
The idea of the lack of new imaginary images of the future seems to be true. That does not mean there is no interesting future ahead. Also just in this week an Interesting new product was introduced: the Nest Thermostate. Made by some designers from the iPod it is the ultimate example of the future products. It is super simple to use, but at the same time super complex under the hood to enhance our experience. And besides the beauty of the smart experience, it is also a product with a story, initiated to stimulate a better use of our house hold energy use, because this is a big spoiler of energy.
The Nest Thermostate fits a category of smart products that is introduced the last month. Also brand new is the Lytro camera that let you take a shot with one push without worrying on focusing the image; the camera captures all different focus points so you can adjust the right focus afterwards. And you can even keep changing that.
And there are the earlier introduced products like the Peel remote control that creates smart guides based on your behavior, and Sifteo and Cubelets that make interactive toys in a robotic way. At Playful Chris O’Shea showed us the post digital world we are entering with what he called the appcessory-concept; how the digital services get tangible accessories to operate them. Everything is going to talk back to us said another.
Are these products the bright new inspirational future or just the preparable future? For me it is inspiring, but at the same time I see the development emerging to the danger of a relevancy paradox as I described this at PICNIC earlier. If we go on with making our life completely adapted to our projected wishes, room for unexpected experiences will disappear. And in the end it will be even hard to have a good profile to make stuff relevant. I think that we will see a lot of deliberate disturbances in the ideal relevant world to let you make choices to improve the profile. Play will in that sense be the tool to create these experiences. And therefor it was so interesting to see how Playful was dealing with this ideal relevant world.
Matthew Ward showed how you can use our imagination to create a great experience with a balloon that is disarmed like a bomb. Green=boom is a great project that shows how we build our own world based on perceived behavior fed with the consumed media context. Media mediate reality in that sense.
The experiment resembles our future world where we get more disconnections between the actions we play and the consequences they have. We need this playful layer to stay in touch with the consequences.
As Loise Downe said; we will have more intimacy with machines. That requires trust that the machines think in the same way as we do. The reliance depends on the way we can predict the complexity. We will make up rules to deal with the new products.
At the Visible Cities event Michiel de Lange announced an interesting conference coming year on the social city. Inspiration is the development of the smart city, and the fear that we will focus on this smartness and create unlivable perfect worlds. The city as a platform for social behavior is however the driver for the technologies.
So, is the future one where everyone has his own shed to fabricate stuff, like Brendan Dawes describes in his story on the invention of his iPhone photo button device. Do we get the shift to a future where we get ultimate personalized products. Where the haves been able to have their own factory at home and the have-nots will use the prefabricated stuff. The concepts of interactive production are numerous this weeks. Like Myrobotnation and the sweet Twitter Snowmaan Frstee.
Our (near) future could be a world with a second layer under our tangible life that steers us, or in a more positive manner, are at service for us. Playfulness will be give us tools to deal with an impulse-less hyper relevant context. Both Playful and Visible cities showed the importance to create an inspiring model of the future to lead us in the developments.
For our work I think that these playful interactions are a key element in creating the user experiences of the future, the smart experiences. A future where smart products and shared services rules are a great inspiration to develop on the coming online ecosystems. Let’s take the statement of Anders Sandberg as an inspiration: “Make the future, do not predict it”.
Design by fire 2011 closing party
Friday October 14 the fifth edition of the Design by Fire conference took place. Like in other years, the conference offered a nice mix of talks giving an insight of contemporary topics that are important for the interaction design community. Not a lot of surprises were presented, but it is still a nice source of inspiration to pinpoint some trends.
Design with the context. The first speaker of the day, Didier Hilhorst of Flipboard pleaded for looking beyond the input box as main start for interaction. To underline this he showed the app into_now where the sound of a tv serie is the start of a social service. Comparable with Shazam, but with a different goal: to share and have a second-screen experience.
Design the context is the most important trigger for use. “Create a context for interaction and the use will follow”. Social is a standard part of new services and a trigger for usage. Turntable.fm is a good example, but his statement that the essence of Flipboard is to be a social too, can be questioned: the most appealing content of that service is the social stuff itself of course.
Talking context. Jamin Hegeman introduced the concept of service design to the audience. Not so excited for long lasting service design-minded folks like we are, but once again it stressed the importance of designing for more than the touchpoint for those who were not aware of that yet.
Seeing his talk I was again convinced that a common danger for designers is to go for a full design, godlike experience. Designing the complete context is not the aim of service design, and impossible also. Designing the fundaments and rules for the use is the name of the game.
Design for tangible experiences is another theme that is getting hot. Since a major part of the user experience designer community has a background in industrial design engineering, the Internet of Things is always of special interest. In his talk, Jordi Parra focused on our need to design for this tangible experiences. He quoted Hiroshii Ishii: “the digital world is not using all the richness of our senses”. Something Didier Hilhorst was talking about earlier when he explored the different interaction means like sound. The Teague radio showed how different interactions can make exiting products.
Jordi was openly searching for the product and service focus, and showed with his Spotify Radiohow you can make an online service with tangible interactions. In the end his talks remained a bit on the surface. There is a difference in a tangible product that contains the service and a real tangible experience of a service.
In the little game that was played with all the people in the audience we had to work on an upgrade for the Dutch OV Chip card: how to make this an appealing service. We used some techniques from gamestorming, which was fun. The case did especially combine some of the aspects like thinking on the total context and making a virtual service tangible (or the other way round). Putting the chip in the shoe laces as one of the presented solutions did, or like our group; adding a game layer where a collecting game of virtual animals was added to the journey experience. The animals where a means to make that experience tangible. Using hidden gesture check-in moves for extra animals, dating with other animals in the coupe and adding animal sounds to the check-in points.
It would be a great exercise to see if this little game layer really adds meaning to the service, helping passengers not to forget to check out for instance.
This makes a bridge to the design for social responsibility, another theme of the day. It started of with Nynke Tromp, with her design for social dilemmas. The metaphor of the gun was nicely chosen; is a gun responsible for killing a man? Or is it the man using it?
You can ask the same question as a designer. Are you the one that can take responsibility for the way people make use of your designs? Or are you the facilitator of good behavior? If you want to increase social behavior, you need to stimulate solidarity. An example to design this solidarity is the experimental project Solidshare in the Afrikaanderwijk in Rotterdam. In this project, people were stimulated to get in touch with their neighbours by introducing a sharing service for domestic tools. It creates a context for possible social behavior, without garanteeing that it change the behavior in depth of course.
Nynke stated that designers are the new politicans, that you have a responsibilty by making choices. Something Eric Reiss reflected on a lot in his finalising talk. He made a interesting case for the political role.
In his statement, he used the talk of Matt Sheret as counter point. If you play with the data, use will emerge, Matt said. Or as Eric put it: finding uses of the data drop out of a service is like playing with your own shit. An interesting point, but too easy. Matt Sheret had a very solid talk on the way youdesign with data. He is a so-called data griot and looks to the uses of the data within the Last.fmservice. He presented three elements that are important to his work: reveal the human input, create playful data and set a new tone of voice with the data. Always create stories, because you need stories to make date accessable.
A story is something the guys of Catalogtree had in mind for sure when they designed the Money & Speed app on the flashcrash. An appealing app, but not the most interesting of the work they showed. The research of New York diplomats parking tickets and the way they made the collected data accessable, showed the true craftmanship of Daniel Gross and Joris Maltha. Important is also that their approach is not to design the visualisation only, but to attempt to create the tool to visualise this.
After all, the Design by Fire conference showed a great mix of topics that count now in our design field. With a important role for the power of big data as design material, and the starting point of big design for context. And with a clear message to us all: don’t forget your responsibilty as designer for shaping meaning.
It is a pity Yohan Creemers and his team decided that this was the last edition of this conference. They did a wonderful job in composing some inspiring conferences.
Back to reality at dConstruct 2011
September 2 happened another edition of dConstruct. A conference I visited before in 2008 and always follow because of the interesting mix of makers culture and design thinking. This edition was interesting again. The struggle with reality turned out a big thing, if you can consider these talks as the barometer for the times ahead.
The closing talk of Kevin Slavin was one of the most clear in that sense probably. I saw his talk earlier this year at Momo in Amsterdam, where his plea against AR was even more subtle and direct at the same time because of the presence of the people of Layar, one of the subjects of his talk. He pinpoints that we don’t need a augmented reality to live a better life, even worse; it makes our life poorer. As the example of heads-up display in cars illustrates; the tool is for a jetstream pilot the complete reality because of the lack of notion of the outer context, in a car it is the other way around; focusing on the augmented knowledge in the head-up display limit your view on the world.
notes on the talk by Boon Chew
The vision of Slavin is great and very true. The question though is interesting how it works the other way around; can we enrich our established digital lives by connecting reality? That is something most of the other talks where about in direct of more distinct way. In several talks reality is connected to the aspect of time. In the sense that we want to connect memories to things, a theme that was very present also at FutureEverything earlier this year. If we can add memories in the context of a service or product, this product will be more real.
Frank Chimero was talking on these memories; the web has a past now. We need an architecture of arrangement to create value. Take a step back to find the value. Start is the difference between digital and analog. Where the digital world is invisible, not visible; and the digital world we forget, not remember as the analog things. And where we find stuff in the analog world while we search in the digital context. In this comparison you find this hunger for realness by pointing out what we miss. With three rules for design decisions for revisiting. How we sort. thinking of LATCH (location, alphabet, time, category and hierarchy), and 2nd: how we move throught time; think of the postponed experiences Instapaper offer us. And third: what media is supported. Culmination. Biblion of New York.
Notes by Boon Chew
Matthew Sheret used another angle. Our digital self translated to a pocket scale. A pocket scale that is bigger on the inside. He was talking also on the object that carry memories. We are not creating mass personalisation but real personalisation transforming our data trails with different meaning. The difference between the ‘old products’ containing lots of visible stories, like a set of keys. Compared to an Oyster card that hides it past in the data.
We need intimate, meaningful objects that humanise networks make time travel a bit more fun. His self-made remote control beam made his points very tangible. Hacking as way to personalize things.
Notes by Boon Chew
Those memories are the way to connect the realtity to the digital products, and that is the important thing as it seems this day. Don Norman started the morning by calling for a focus on designing for memories in stead of experiences. Designing with time as material and with good and bad experiences to create memorable stories, turns out to be present in a lot of talks.
The quest for this reality check in our digital life was challenged the most by Kars Alfrink. In his highly engaged talk he tried to find explanations for the riots in England of last times. He compared the alienation between the classes, and the conscious avoiding of interactions in these neighbourhoods where rioters were let alone with other inhabitants. Like in the brilliant novel of The City & The City and showed in practice with the example of schizophrenic town of Baarle. You can say that our moving into a digital life accelerates those gap with reality, and is especially the provider of a system for avoiding each other. He argues to use gaming to reconnect, like the game of Nomic where defining the rules of the game is part of the game. This talk turned out the ultimate urge for getting the reality back into our digital life’s and create a new elan in self governing.
Notes made by Boon Chew
Without any doubt I think this focus on reality connected to our digital life will be a big theme the coming times. Conceptual by creating new contexts of time and memories, and literally by using the possibilities of the Internet of Things to enhance our digital services with tangible qualities. It will be interesting next year to have also designers of psychical products share their existing knowledge and build some new bridges.
The impact Steve made Apple make
I read a lot (too many) stories on the resignation of Steve Jobs last day. I find this one on O’Reilly Radar the best, really focusing on the impact and change he made Apple make.
In an era where entrepreneurialism is too often defined by incrementalism and pursuit of the exit strategy, Jobs’ Apple was always defined by true husbandry of a vision, and the long, often thankless, pursuit of excellence and customer delight that goes with it.
Ironically, though, Jobs’ greatest innovation may actually be as basic as “bringing humanity back into the center of the ring,” to borrow a phrase from Joe Strummer of the seminal rock band, The Clash.
Nuff said? Well, the article doesn’t go into the impact of the resignation itself. Is Jobs replaceable? He may have raised Apple to stand on its own feet, and he may also have built in the right insurance by staying in the board, but time will tell if this is enough to resist the urges from a market leader too control its positions in stead of keeping the view on the future product leaps.
I truely hope it will. But there are enough signals it is moving into a new phase. Not only based on the lawsuits for market protection and the patent wars, I think this was probably always a invisible part of the business. And also not only based on the fact that the new CEO Tim Cook has earned it credits in making the business more effective. But definitely by the next phase of lock-in strategies with the introduction of iCloud. How great the service seems to be, it could be well used to play the world domination card like we know it from Microsoft the last decades.
I’m a big lover and collector of the Apple products, and enthusiastic user of the service ecosystem. And I give it a fair chance that the DNA of the company is strong enough to inspire us with more disruptive human touched products. But it will be exciting times for sure…
The battlefield continues in the war of ecosystems
Today Google announced to acquire Motorola Mobile division. Superficially a strange move; why would Google danger its position as open platform maker by creating his own devices that compete his partners? The explanation can be found in the battlefields in the war of the ecosystems that definitely has started and will come to new heights the second half of this year as Apple will go for even more market share with their iCloud offer and Nokia and Microsoft will finally introduce their integrated products. Google is clearly focusing on more control too with the open platform philosophy as a marketing story mainly.
There are two aspects to it. Google will have discovered that there is a crucial role for controlling all aspects of the ecosystem getting to the next step in user loyalty. Rumors on 30% returns by clients of their Android phones underlines this. With full control over all touch points, there is a better chance to be a serious competitor to Apple. This goes also for Google+ and all services that have more design focus than ever. It helps to build a better ecosystem and create trust for the clients, also those with devices from other manufacturers. And they would be more capable of controlling the quality of the apps, the success factor of the new operating system.
It would not easy to challenge Apple in this of course, but Google will have more chance together with an experienced player.
Another more hidden aspect can be find in the dungeons of lawsuits and patent wars. In this article it is extended described what is happening. On the background a fierce battle is going on fighting each others patents.
All in all a clear sign that the control on the ecosystems is crucial in the next phase of the Internet and the war is severe. And is not over yet for sure.
How Foursquare is paving the road to relevant services
We see a lot of stories on the success of Foursquare, or better, the lack of success. The tool is popular with 10 million users world-wide, but absolutely per country the use is modest. A Dutch analysis show for instance that only 4,4% of restaurants had claimed their page, and just 1% offered specials. On the other hand, 64% of the restaurants are present in Foursquare, and 71% has also people checked-in. Foursquare is relatively small compared to Facebook check-ins, but also there the use is still low.
So what to make of this kind of findings? I believe it is not so important to look to the services on its own. I think the use will still grow, stimulated with the adding of deals in Foursquare with Groupon and Facebook deals. But it will never be a mass service. A substantial part of the population will never be active in checking in.
What I think is important however, is the influence check-in services have on the development of relevant services. We will see that the services will adapt to the user, but that the user will be in the lead to activate these relevant services. The behavior of giving permission to give relevant offers and adaptive services, is trained in the way we use check-ins tools. We can learn a lot on how these work and what makes them tick. I think the tools will integrate in services in general, will be a tool for service providers and producers to make services relevant.
In that sense it is interesting to use the check-in tools and learn what works. From playful and collecting behavior to the commercial drivers and levels of transparency to make the use acceptable. Let the check-in services pave the road for a future with ad-hoc relevant services.
Design for privacy at the Annual Internet of Things Europe 2011
I attended the Annual Internet of Things Europe conference in Brussels last week. The conference gives an overview of the current state of the development towards an Internet of Things where not only computers and mobile phones are connected to the world wide network, but also all kinds of other objects become part. And just like computers make the Internet by being the hubs, this will happen in the Internet of Things where object are hubs in the network. This generates lots of new challenges and opportunities. The conference discussed both societal as technical consequences with an important role for standards and enabling technologies. I was invited to a panel and talk on the way this developments influence the design of online services ecosystems as we make them within Info.nl.
Read the rest of this entry »
