target is new

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.

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.

We are entering a new phase in the Internet of Things. It is a promise for years, but it seems that we are heading to a tipping point. And Apple’s new iOS5 could be a accelerator. Tomorrow the new version of the mobile operation system for the iPhone will be introduced, and one of the most interesting speculations on the news is the integration of Twitter deeply in the OS, together with the introduction of iCloud. The real difference of a Twitter integration comes not with the sharing your pictures directly from the tools, but will be the way Twitter will evolve in a notification platform for smart objects via your phone. How does this could work?
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Last Thursday Club of Amsterdam organized the Future of Services evening seminar. Info.nl did partner in the event. Robert Hewin, Pieter Jan Stappers and Lorna Goulden gave great talks sharing their view on the future of services from different angles. I shared our vision on the future of online services, or as the full title was: A future of impulse driven and hyper personalized services. Below you find my slides and a kind of executive summary of the talk.
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In a short post of Matt Webb he pinpointed the new Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is emerging. He refers to another article in the Wired of Stephen Levy were this specific new form of AI is spelled out: not the human brain is duplicated, the own computer generated intelligence is flourished.

I think this interesting stuff. And I like to connected it to a development Jesse Schell coined in one of his recent presentations: the Curiosity Gap. He stated that we develop to a situation where we all have easy access to all the knowledge we need, and the successful people will be defined by the level of curiosity to find the knowledge and be open for it.

Others have coined it the new You-web where knowledge will be relevant and connected to your profile. I use the term Impulse Shaped Services for some time now where services adapt to the context of that one user.

In all approaches you can see that we go from a so-called Artificial Intelligence to an Available Intelligence. Smart people use this available intelligence to relief non-critical tasks and distinguish from non-users. Available Intelligence is used ad-hoc and on demand, profiled. So we can say we will live with Augmented Intelligence.

The smart people are those that know which drawer to pull to use the available knowledge and transform this to value. The trick will be the instant character. The intelligence will be defined by the relevancy and of the knowledge and even the predictive character of it. Services will be providing us with the entrance to these source of instant intelligence. So we have a kind of Instant Available Intelligence.

Well it is that time of year again. Predictions to do. Because it is a tradition and it is fun to do some analytic thinking, just like the last years.

Looking back to the predictions of 2010 I think the developments were slow in some ways. The exploding web as we coined it in 2008 is now fully adopted in the Splinterweb. And functional use of social systems as I expected for 2010 is now widely predicted for 2011. But a lot interesting stuff happened nevertheless. Read the rest of this entry »

In an article on O’Reilly this week I read an interesting discussion on the mobile wallet. Naveed Anwar of Paypal coined the on-demand wallet.

The mobile wallet is necessarily an on-demand wallet, meaning it’s accessible from different devices and platforms and can hold more than any wallet in your back pocket: multiple funding sources, coupons, receipts, loyalty cards, private label cards, and business cards … and that’s just the start.

I believe too that we are moving to a new form of wallet after all and that this will be a service more than a physical thing. A service that can be used from different places and devices. On the other hand I think we need long time some kind of tangible reference points. It is no problem to combine those however.
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This might sounds strange. What is new about talking on the social graph? Well I think there are some interesting developments that can trigger serious steps in the functional use of the social graph.

Interesting for instance is the new function Twitter introduced this week: suggesting friends. For Twitter this is the first service they create out of the knowledge on their profiles. A lot of third parties did stuff before, but you can expect that Twitter should have some advantage with their access to the whole database.

Another interesting new service is that of the Flipboard app on the iPad. A lot is said on that already, but it has certainly a connection to this theme. Flipboard is creating a social magazine out of Facebook and Twitter streams, which is already exciting. I’m still wondering if they do any kind of analysis of my social graphs. It seems so, because I get more stuff than just my stream. I think this will be only more soon.

Of course Facebook and Google are both putting a lot of effort in building the social graph and trying to connect it to our use. The battle of the social graph has just begun. Google seems to place some bets (amongst others) on the social TV experience by making Google TV, while Facebook is about to introduce some location stuff that will shake that market. And Facebook also created their search competitor with their question based service that can benefit highly of the social graph.

The tipping point for the social graph will be in these kind of functional services that are created. You can expect only to see more of this on both sides of the medal: trying to enrich the social graph by connecting it to popular services, and on the other hand popping up of services that use the social graph.

This week a very interesting presentation by Paul Adams of Google was published on Slideshare called The Real Life Social Network. He nailed some trends in social media on real behavior. It was all over the blogosphere already. It reminds me of my presentation on virtual gated communities at Reboot 11 in 2008. One of the things I was thinking about back then was the way we would create groups with different levels of privacy. It will be very interesting if the presented visions of Adams are translated into a new social approach by Google, just like the rumor that was spread this week by former CTO of Google. Interesting to see how Google are trying to use another angle to confront facebook, with a differentiation in groups. Another thought I had is still valid: can we have interoperability in these groups between different providers?

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Why are those Apple keynotes of new products always that big fun. Of course it is the excitement of the new great products that are introduced. But even more the knowing there are some serious steps ahead which we cannot think of yet. These steps are in a way hidden in the talk.

The real surprises are not anymore the product that is introduced. The secrets are not kept anymore, deliberately or not. The interesting guessing starts only after the speech: what are the real consequences of this new product.

So we have a new iPhone and it is beautiful. But what are the hidden developments this time? Some thoughts.

• rebranding iPhone OS to iOS is expected to be the sign of making this OS a carrier of a lot of new devices that will be connected: of course the iPad and the expected new AppleTV. But maybe even a small desktop. As Steve put it: “we will be connecting ten million of devices this year”
• especially on the AppleTV the expectations are high. Will it be just an upgrade of the current concept with the new iOS or will Apple make real TV’s as an intelligent screen. I think the last is not so logic, but there is a chance that the new AppleTV will turn every screen in an internet connected TV by adding live TV capabilities.
• with the introduction of an open standard for FaceTime the are going for videochat domination in the device world. Well maybe, but it is of course crucial that as many people as possible are FaceTime enabled, you have to obey Metcalfe’s Law.
• creating a new gesture interface experience with the glass back. Adding tickling-on-the-back features in coming releases will be interesting. Or just adding new sensing possibilities for light our devices will be more an more sensors to our environment.
• the introduction of iBooks, iMovie, unified inbox and later as expected also iWork shows the cloud computing focus where the device is just the remote control of the mobile life service Apple is providing. Seamless syncing will be a central feature.

Overall I think the new iPhone contributes a lot to the strategy of Apple to keep and expand there share of the market by put real focus on the best device experience and above of all the most balanced ecosystem that will be the key to success. In that manner they will keep there differentiation of other players as Google that never can meet up with this product and service quality. There will be room for both in the market but Apple will prove to make the best profit and lock-in.