Here are some of my preliminary thoughts about what “other” questions Product Managers should ask before they define their product features and functionality.
Archive for the ‘Customers’ Category
Why and Why Not Questions for Product Managers about Data, Actions, Revenue & Communication
Monday, February 25th, 2013Entrepreneurs – People you Trust are not your Tribe users!
Friday, January 11th, 20139.9 out 10 Entrepreneurs expose the first look of their product to their friends, family and people who trust them and they trust. If we throw all of them under the umbrella of “Trusted Users”, these trusted users will help you a lot in the early stage of your product evolution. They will help you find bugs, give you friendly advise, moral support and so forth.
Let me clue you in on one biggest surprise about trusted users -
Trusted Users are NOT your Tribe Users
This blog is inspired by my conversations with Maxim Razmakhin, founder of Mixely – a new way to find friends . Max is really smart and is on to something interesting. Watch his progress.
Where can you find your tribe users?
- Tribe users typically emerge from those who have the problem that your product solves; and will “try” a new solution other than what they have been doing for a long time. Not all people who have this problem will become your tribe users. Only a small segment of them.
- Tribe users are also part of those users who have an immediate need, urgency, desire, resources and time to engage with your “not so great beta” product.
- For each startup, their particular tribe user is defined based on the
- Market (emerging, mature, crowded emerging, etc)
- Business Model (B2c, B2B, B2B2C)
- Revenue Model (Paid, Free, Ad supported)
- Age, demographic, etc, etc.
- In short this is very subjective to every startup – don’t mimic what others are doing. Define your tribe user based on what is ideal for your business
What are other characteristics of Tribe users?
- Tribe users are those who don’t care who you (founder) or your team is BUT love everything about the product
- Tribe users don’t hesitate to tell you that your product sucks and which features work well and what features don’t work well. Tribe users don’t hesitate to voice their dissatisfaction but at the same time change their opinion if you hear and address their concerns.
- Tribe users have an emotional and passionate relationship with the product and company rather than the company management or team. Of course that passion and emotion could emerge from how the management/founders engage with the users, but ultimately their relationship is with the product.
Picking people you trust for the tribe users does not qualify them as your tribe users. Also, picking who trust you rather than their own needs also doesn’t qualify as tribe users.
People who trust you and you trust might not be honest with you. More importantly they may not even fit the profile of your target user. You sister, college roommate, advisor, colleagues, drink buddy – while all of them have a trust relationship with you, they send you incorrect signals for the success of your product.
What to avoid when looking for Tribe users?
- When it comes to tribe users, don’t start with trusted relationship just because you could. They will lead you the wrong way.
- When it comes to tribe users, don’t accept everyone who wants to try your product. Define a “profile of your prospective user” and stick to it. Make it public – don’t worry about alienating others, as most of them are not even looking at your site or your product anyways.
- When you let your users pick their friends to be part of your tribe, I would use some caution; In the interest of “virality” and growth, most entrepreneurs allow their users to invite their friends. While there is less risk in the growth stage, but in the initial stage, this might be risky. So, add proper thought into how you can control this process at the same time empower your users. Priority is to find users who fit your qualifications -rather than just any willing users. Don’t expect your users (even though they are your tribe users) to care as much as you care about these aspects.
-@Vsistla
Linkedin Skill Endorsements Gone Awry? Initial Review & Recommendations!
Wednesday, October 10th, 2012As many of the active LinkedIn users are aware, LinkedIn’s latest feature – social endorsement of “Skills & Expertise” – is in later stage of its beta release and growing like rapid fire in the past few weeks. What’s interesting is LinkedIn brought social validation by your network to this feature they started testing since Feb of 2012 – a social proof for your skills and expertise.
After studying this feature for a few days, I decided to do few social experiments & surveys and my past few weeks of results have been nothing short of eye openers – with respect to user behaviors. While my data set is only limited to my own network, I am quite certain these results would be very akin to majority of LinkedIn users.
While most people endorse as a social convention – “you scratch my back and I scratch your back” – very much similar to how most of us used LinkedIn Recommendations, unlike LinkedIn “Recommendations”, skill endorsements can be removed any time you want after you endorse.
Similar to tweenage kids, I am already seeing immature behavior – where people endorse skills and delete the endorsements if you don’t endorse them back or if you don’t endorse them as many as they endorsed you.
Also, from a sheer value standpoint, an individual’s recommendation for you will always be more valuable than that individual’s endorsement, even though in the long run, # of credible endorsements speak a lot about you than recommendations.
Here are some of my thoughts and conclusions around this social experiment -
- Reciprocity seems like an unspoken rule – This seems to be an overwhelming expectation – with my own direct experience as well as with people I spoke with regarding endorsements. Times when people solicit you to endorse them in return for their endorsements and other times they straight up harras you. This is very much akin to some of the spammers in the world of Twitter – You follow me and I will follow you.
- When it comes to Endorsements, huge egos are at play – I have purposely ignored to see what would happen if I didn’t “endorse back” someone who deserves some endorsements. To my surprise, their original endorsements have been removed after few days! This is a big shocker for me.
- Mutual friends & partiality in endorsements don’t get along – When you rate two peers inconsistently on skills they both pride themselves (like endorse Product manager to only one even though both of them are equally good and skilled at Product management), you start a pissing contest – most of the time without any straight confrontation.
- That’s not a skill I am proud off – re-endorse me! – Thanks to LinkedIn’s auto recommendation of skills based on your profile, most of the people I spoke to were unhappy about some of the skills that were automatically chosen for them. I heard one person contemplating to contact all the people who endorsed him on a particular skill to re-endorse for some other more relevant skill. Another wished he could change the skill text without losing the endorsements for that skill.
So, how can LinkedIn make these endorsements more credible and experience less controversial/painful? While it is too soon to conclude where the crowd sourced endorsements could go for LinkedIn, here are some recommendations -
- Endorsements are not same as Follow! – People should not be endorsing others and then remove them the next day. If they are not sure about endorsing someone, they should not endorse to begin with.
- If you insist on leaving “undo” feature, then at least insist on getting rational feedback on why someone wants to undo their endorsement just a few days after they endorsed that person.
- For Credibility, lets focus on Quality than Quantity- LinkedIn can make these endorsements more credibility by offering rich data around individual endorsements and individual motives behind endorsements. Such as -
- Displaying # of endorsements given vs # of endorsements got will give you some understanding of the value of endorsements.
- Publish like an Endorsement Gradient that is calculated based on – # of endorsements given by those who did not get an endorsement vs # of endorsements given by those who got an endorsement.
- Maybe an infographic about who (as in relationship – professional or personal) actually endorsed to learn why they endorsed – if all your endorsements are coming from your family members or close friends who never worked with you, then we know how valuable your endorsements are.
- Percentile the endorsements by skill or overall – When you crowd source people to endorse, some kind of percentile for individual skill endorsements or total endorsements – based on industry, education qualification, # of years of experience, etc – would be very useful.
- Educate your users that endorsements are not social convention! – This is very important. When someone on the street says hello to you, you say hello back to them – that is social convention. Endorsements should not be social convention. Period! Educate your users with proper “coach marks” and alerts.
As per LinkedIn users, to create more credibility for your endorsements, stick to following principles -
- Tell your endorsors to only endorse if they feel strongly about it. You do the same.
- Tell your endorsors that you will not be reciprocating them back. Reiterate that endorsements should not fit social convention. If they try to obligate you, be polite and say that you don’t know enough about them on that particular skill to endorse.
As per endorsing me, take a wild guess!
@Vsistla
Startups: Evaluate Gamification Lest You Piss Off Your Users!
Thursday, August 16th, 2012Gamification methodologies such as “Leaderboard”, “Reputation”, “Badges”, “Rewards” and “Points” are very commonly implemented by startups just to encourage certain user behavior,virality, & increase activity – but not all users respond to these techniques homogeneously.
Gamify at your own peril!
Most of the time, these so called incentives deliver undue results to startups; they are like slow poison – kill user growth; you won’t even know the cause of your user’s dissatisfaction and disengagement;
Many wrong incentives happen to right users.
Let your product and its features become inherent rewards and badges for its users.Let your user community organize around who gets benefited by the ecosystem and who gets sidelined rather than you implementing fake badges and fluffy leader boards.
For example, on Quora, many reputed and highly successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders volunteer their time and effort in enriching the content for millions of its users.
None of the “who is who” who are active on Quora take such a keen interest and effort in contributing to the community just to get Quora Credits. They don’t do it for tangible or intangible rewards. They are motivated by aspects of social norms and in creating communal good that helps everyone. With any kind of rewards or incentives – especially tangible – these same individuals will not show similar commitment and passion in using Quora. Most of the influencers who are active on Quora don’t seem to be on Mahalo even with tangible rewards like tipping for your answers (sometimes up to $100).
If that is case with tangible rewards, do you think they would actually get motivated by leaderboards, points and credits?
Lets take Twitter as another example. Look at the behavior patters of highest influencers, thought leaders and game changers. If you study those Twitter accounts, few things are very consistent -
- These individuals have huge twitter followers. They don’t have followers because they are actively using Twitter. They have followers because of what they have done outside/before Twitter ever came into being. For example Beyoncé Knowles has over 5 millions followers but she has only tweeted once so far. J.K. Rowling Twitter has over 1 million followers but she has sent less than 20 tweets.
- These game changers are not motivated by # of followers they can gain in Twitter. In fact some of them don’t even know that they have a huge following on Twitter.
- People who follow them – follow them for that one rare opportunity to hear what they are going to say. Millions of followers follow these “no tweet game changers” because of what they have done outside the Twitter sphere.
In the interest of higher user activity and in the name of gamification if Twitter forced its users to take an active role in their platform – by making all its users to “tweet”, Twitter would lose 50% of its user base, especially most of the “no tweet game changers”.
Twitter allows its community of users to inherently reward and gain value from other users while still not forcing any particular behavior on them.
User behavior accountability is very important for all startups and exposing/displaying some of that data with the community has many benefits to the startup as well as to the community.Exposed user behavior data should actual benefit the community rather than spam, distract and pollute the environment.
Examples of such pollution including publishing user activity to everyone in your community and share with all social networks without explicit permission from your users.
On the other hand, there is a role for sharing some of the user behavior and profile data. For example Twitter exposes other user’s # of Followers, # of Tweets and other valuable information. Similarly Quora exposes # of Followers, # of Questions and # of Answers. Such data is useful for following reasons -
- Ability for active users to get/gain more visibility.
- Ability for other users to gain from people who are contributing to the ecosystem.
Neither Quora nor Twitter expose/display user data that humiliates or insults any particular user in front of the community. Not only that they never package or repurpose such data to show in a different form like leader board or badges.
Finally they never deprive their users of certain functionality because of such untoward activity. Remember this – when you limit product functionality based on user behavior, realize that many genuine/valuable users might get pulled in this group and that might piss off genuine users who could have otherwise become long term users.
In summary before you define your rewards, reputation points, leaderboards, badges, and or leverage user behavioral data, think of the following -
- Do Not force yours to “act” certain way to increase virality of your user base or promote your brand or increase activity in your platform. I am not saying a rule less community. Criteria for rules should not be to promote your brand(aka virality) and increase fake activity in your platform.
- When exposing your user activity to other users, in the interest of virality, please keep in mind of your user’s privacy. Most common of these is activity feeds and time lines which are common place in most of the consumer apps/platforms.
- Most of the virtual denizens do not need policing – most of the communities figure out a way to reward right behavior without the platform provider needing to police by fake incentives/rewards/leader board. Baring criminal and grossly unsavory situations, most of the time, this rule of thumb applies. Let your community deal with it.
- Not all your users will respond to incentives with same interest. Your incentives, tangible or intangible will dictate the type of users you will attract in the long run.
- Once again, your product, product benefits, its features, the value created by your users to other users should be the core incentives and motivators.
- Never ever tie your “product feature” access to user behavior data. I would use this as a general rule excluding exceptions/fringe cases/unique circumstances.
Incentives are also in the eye of the beholder!
Monday, October 17th, 2011Not all incentives are created equal! Incentives are a slippery slope – some of them could lead you to paths that you didn’t originally intend to go on to begin with.
This blog is motivated “after” my discussions with Matt Corbett, Founder/CEO of InCXO.com and Amit Gupta, Founder/CEO of TenLegs.com. Both of them are solving the early customer/user development with interesting incentive structures. Very interesting startups …..please check them out!
In the past, I talked about incentives as “features” or “actions” your users perform while using your products -When to enforce “Actions” out of your users & customers? .
In this blog, I will talk about incentives with broad strokes – what they mean to startups, impact of them and impact on the type of users.
Incentives can be tangible or intangible. Incentives could be vanity (leaderboard) or centered around benevolence.
Users and/or consumers respond differently to incentives and type of incentives. Startups needs to be clearly aware of following aspects when they create incentives -
- Objective of the Incentives – Startups need to be very clear about the objectives of the incentive. Are the incentives
- To grow new users,
- Bring current users back to the site/app regularly,
- Increase the time on site/app for the current user base
- For current users to bring new users,
- For current user behavior/actions to brings new users, and so on and so forth.
- Life of Incentives – Some incentives are short lived and some are part of a startup’s existence. Knowing that well ahead of time allows startups to tailor the incentives accordingly.
- Temporary incentives – These are short lived. Typically offered in the initial days of a startup to grow users, user engagement and loyalty. These could also be offered during special events, campaigns and promotions as well.
- Long term incentives
- Incentives as features
- Target User – Who is the target user for the incentive? What kind of users are you trying to convert or engage with this incentive? Early adopter? Influencer? Networker? Passionate advocate? Biggest catch for any startup is what happens when their target users change? What happens – when the company moves from early adopters to mass users/consumers? How will the incentive structures change and influence the next leg of users? What motivates Quora to attract high profile entrepreneurs to take an active role in discussions where as not in other communities with lot more tangible incentives?
- Behavior - What kind of behavior would incentives encourage/evoke from your “current target” users? Is that behavior consistent with your overall business growth and objectives? During early days of Hashable, all interactions were rewarded equally – which led to active interactions but when they changed the incentive structure to “new introductions” versus “interactions”, user behavior has changed – which in turn led to increased user base for Hashable.
- Which type of user – Understanding which segment/type of your users are being incentivized is also very important. For example, typically for most consumer Internet startups, you have some or all of these types of users – “end users/demand”, “customers”, “producers”, “paid users”, “partners/suppliers”, and so forth. Typically they fall under two broad categories – demand and supply. Its a good idea to white board incentive structures for both those categories – demand as well as supply. There are times when companies focus only on one side of the user base that will not generate optimal results for the startup as they grow.
Related articles
When to enforce “Actions” out of your users & customers?
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011We often talk about gamification, incentives, motivators (lets call them “incentives” collectively) – when it comes to users and when we are defining certain features. Each of these incentives have distinct role to play in the growth of our user base, enable network effect, capture relevant data, launch viral loops and so forth.
Some of these incentives are typically wrapped around features and sometimes are features!
Basically – as a end user/customer – what is in it for me to use your product – is what I am defining as broad strokes incentives.
I have rarely seen these incentives talked with a “Voluntary” and/or “Enforced” lens.
At a high level user’s voluntary actions are motivated due to one of these -
- Tangible Incentive – Examples – Utility, Experience, Rewards, Coupons,
- Intangible Incentive – Examples – Vanity (leaderboards), Social Interaction (Friends, family, being in the know, etc)
Voluntary :Tangible Incentives are broken into “Direct” and “Indirect” incentives;
Voluntary:Tangible:Direct Incentives :
Typically all Utility features fall into this category – Examples – Getting directions from Maps App, checking your bank balance from your Banking App, Checking your email, etc
Voluntary:Tangible:Indirect Incentives :
Indirect incentives are anywhere from gathering Airline miles, Hotel Rewards to raking up Points or Badges in your latest social media app. These incentives can be potentially exchange for some perceived “free” gift or coupon or reward in future.
While playing with http://Turntable.fm, got me thinking about enforced actions. In Turntable.fm, you have to have another DJ in the same room to listen to your own music. This their way to drive viral loop out of their current users.
While one could argue that having another DJ will help the “social” experience to your music listening, enforcing that as a key requirement does create certain inertia for some users.
Yes, “forced actions” is a way for new startups to grow their user base and launch virality, could also generate undue inertia and in some case repulsion to early evangelical customers.
Forced actions are especially risky when there are no intangible benefits to the end user – for example – in case of Turntable, first DJ doesn’t get any benefit in getting another DJ into the room – other than the fact the user get’s use the product. This is really a “service fee” or “compensation” to Turntable to use their product.
Forced actions should come with strong tangible and intangible benefits to the end user!
In summary, companies should play the “Forced Action” card very carefully – it is walking on thin ice!
ps: I do love Turntable.fm as an experience.
Twitteronomics – What is it and what motivates a Tweeter to Tweet?
Monday, May 9th, 2011
Image via CrunchBase
Every Twitter user has a specific role, goal, objective and purpose in the Twitter”o”sphere.
Not all Twitter users have same motivations and goals. Some user’s objectives fit “hand in glove” with other users while some other’s conflict with others. Regardless everyone contributes to the Twitter”o”sphere – even those who have not sent a single tweet out into the ether!
At the end of the day, every Twitter user – hopes and seeks to gain something from the Twitter”o”sphere. Some try to gain influence, while others try to show that they are in the know. Some try to beat the establishment in breaking the news, while others try to read that same breaking news. Some try to engage in one word conversations with thought leaders while others be bystanders and enjoy the repartee’ …..
Twitteronomics!
Similarly each of these users have their own motivations and not all the motivations are aligned or equal. They are very subjective to their own roles in the society and goals/objectives. While a student beat’s the news media in tweeting a breaking news, rest of the beat reporters tweet only after they can drive traffic to their publishing properties. While a stock picking guru with a large following will only tweet about it after he took a (stock trade) position, another day trader will tweet to artificially pump their picks. Political party A tweets to smear party B and party B tweets to clean up the mess.
What’s important about all this is to learn about underlying objectives and motivators of Twitter users – before you act on the message. Make sure their underlying objectives and motivators are in alignment with yours before you respond to the message. For example, you should know if a stock picking guru is tweeting about a trade because its a good buy or because he took a position and trying to get the whole world to pump the stock up; if a watchdog group is spreading smut about a political candidate based on facts or because they have been funded by the opposing political party.
Motivators also change based on content and context. For example – messages that are newsworthy – are typically shared right away where as messages with specific individual actionable benefits are tweeted only after the user benefited/acted on them. For example a tweet about a hot airline deal to Hawaii is only shared after the user consumed it or cannot get any more marginal benefit from that news;
There will be times when you might not be able to tell the Twitter user’s underlying motivations and objectives. Its best not to act on such messages until you get similar directions/guidance from other users.
I would define Twitteronomics as the study of Twitter users, their motivators, objectives & goals based on their individual subjective forces, content being shared and the context.
Opinions expressed are mine own ….
@Vsistla
Dissecting Aza Raskin’s (Firefox) Quote – You can never let your data dictate your design!
Sunday, October 10th, 2010
- Image via Wikipedia
Aza Raskin, Creative Lead at Mozilla Firefox – was quoted as saying you can never let your data dictate design. He adds – “If you do, you end up following what people currently do and never innovating”.
Basically, one way of interpreting what Aza saying is “don’t listen to your customers and the data from your customers if you want to innovate”.
This is a profound statement that could raise many eye brows amongst conventional product planners. This goes against the grain of most line manager’s day to day activity of generating reports and keeping the status quo or make modifications to generate more and better data.
Honestly this statement is not aimed at line managers who have obligations towards their core and current customer base. This is aimed at corporate strategies and new product managers whose primary responsibility is to find out what’s next rather than what’s been.
Opinions expressed are my own and not my employer.
@Vsistla
Related articles
- The Future of the Web: How Firefox Panorama and Aza Raskin will shape the Web (downloadsquad.com)
Social TV – What works and what doesn’t work!
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010Every time we stumble upon a new concept, we extrapolate its use cases across everything we can imagine only to realize that it doesn’t work in every instance! While some other times, we bring those use cases to market much sooner than the market is ready for them. Whether it is the most advanced hard disk drive – Kitty Hawk- from HP in early 1990s, or video streaming in the mid 1990s or online adv supported dot.com ventures in late 1990s, we have left a trail of such untimely ventures in the past.
Welcome to Social TV!Social TV is in its infancy and its good to understand the rules of Social TV based on current market conditions, limitations and end user’s expectations. These rules might not be relevant once the market matures with a different ecosystem than the early days of Social TV.I define Social TV is an interactive television viewing experience with one or more individuals who are not co-located.
These groups of viewers can not only interact with each other via Television but also with any other devices. In case of certain genre shows such as reality TV or live competition, active social TV viewers can easily influence others in their voting/sentiment.
TV watching has been a fairly lonely experience until now. With connected TVs hitting over 40 million sales by the end of 2011, it doesn’t have to be a only experience. That was also one of the reasons why more youth are spending majority of their time Online rather than watching TV – despite good quality and compelling content.
- When you are in the theater
Social TV is akin to going to movies with a bunch of your friends without Shhing …..and turning off your cell phones while watching.
At least a “pinch hit” substitute for going to movies.
That said, these are the basic rules of Social TV.
- Social TV is not for everyone – Social TV is a very interactive and passive experience unlike traditional TV viewing. Most of us are accustomed to this passive experience and might not take to Social TV experience as some of the younger generations might. So, there will be some significant parity between how each generation approaches Social TV. Industry should be mindful of such generational parities in building their Social TV platforms.
- Social TV is not for every type of content/show/movie – Just the way not all types of content evokes similar/same reaction and engagement, Social TV is not for every time of content. Social TV is ideal for content that is inherently debatable, passionate with high emotions and opinionated.
- Social TV is most compelling when it gives a strong enough reason for the audience to change their viewing patterns and behavior! – Social TV is not just about chatting and interacting with other viewers. Social TV should be able to change the user behavior – at its fundamental level. For example- People who are fans of a show who watch the show in “time shift mode” should find compelling reasons to watch the show “live” along with thousands and millions of other fans. That would dictate the success of Social TV.
- Social TV with well-thought through privacy options is very critical. Privacy will be one of the cornerstones of Social TV. Your entertainment viewing options would have profound impact on who wants to be your friend and how close they want to maintain their friends with you. Social TV adds another source of information – about you – to your friends. Your reputation, persona, personality, priorities, values and principles get re-evaluated in the eyes of the world. So, privacy becomes that much more important.
- Social TV should be non intrusive – should not spoil the experience of watching the show or movie. Done right, Social TV should not negatively impact the viewing experience. If anything, it should enhance it.
- Social TV gets interesting when there are two or more sides/teams/parties – aka – Sports is the most apt genre for Social TV. Yes – Social TV thrives when there are sides, teams, emotions and passions. Sports content is most suitable for Social TV interactions.
- Social TV is not just socializing while watching TV ….its also bringing TV to social networks and online communities. Social TV brings conversations from online/web to your living room. Your Online communities enter your living room.
- Conversation is the engine between social TV – content is just a topic at hand! That’s correct – Social TV enables the conversations, heated and passionate debates in real time instead of waiting until the Water Cooler moment the next day morning.
- Image by dennis -Nothing to talk at Water Coolers – via Flickr
- Social TV thrives on the principle that we often look to others when we make media consumption decisions. We are less hardwired about these decisions than life changing/serious decisions
- We are heavily influenced by the people in our physical space than remote. So, your social interactions vary based on who and how many are around you while watching TV. You might interact lot more with your remote buddies when you are watching TV alone versus with someone in the room. As George Custanza from Seinfeld would say, the “World’s Could Collide” that might lead to interesting scenarios - based on type of conversations and your company in the living room.
- People care deeply about how they look to others! Social TV is no different – if users don’t have appropriate tools to control how they are perceived by others, Social TV will die. Humans self-censor and we cannot live without it ….
- Social TV is most suited for Sporting Events, Live Events and Reality Television – Based on above rules and scenarios, I feel Social TV is most suited for Sporting, Live and Reality TV Content - in that order.
- All Opinions are my own and not of my employer.
@VSistla
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Widgets will disrupt traditional TV 30 Second Ad Models
Friday, October 30th, 2009Widgets – otherwise known as Internet Applications on digital TVs are going to breath a fresh air of excitement for DTV viewers as well as the industry.
Here is the skinny ….. Widgets are also going to disrupt the current business models and processes – lot more disruptive than the timeshifting brought about by Tivo and Place shifting by SlingBox.
One of the areas where I can see some massive dislocation is in Television ad buys and 30 second commercials. How valuable is the audience eyeballs to the brand advertiser when the viewer is watching their Yahoo! Stock ticker or reading Financial News via their Yahoo! Widget while the 30 second ad is going in the background?
Ideations
While this means, that the Adv buyer might pay less for the spot; on the other than Networks and Broadcasters can charge more for synchronizing the ad spot with the Widget content. Backend ad serving technologies and processes have to be reinvented or rejigged to make way for Widgets on your big screen TV.
Digital TV Vendors might borrow few ideas from iPhone market model …..right around the corner
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009iPhone and its smartphone clones have rejuvenated the mobile industry in the past few years. Not only that, consumer electronic (CE) vendors might be taking a page or two from the smartphone market, very very soon …
Enter Widgets and Apps on digital TVs.
Last year at CES, most of the CE vendors have offered Widgets and Applications that come built in and can run with the help of network connectivity.
Does this mean, five years from now, one might have 100s of applications, widgets and gadgets running on their HDTVs in their living rooms ….. I see the signs all over the place ……This is equivalent to “Decoder cards” for the 1930′s era television viewer.
The biggest challenge or issue for this to happen until now is lack of network connectivity in these TVs along with less software footprint and so forth …..
While current CE vendors offering limited “premium” App/Widget capabilities (from the likes of Netflix, Ebay, Amazon) as a customer acquisition strategy rather than an up sell or increased revenue potential, the tables might turn in a few years, where DTVs with unlimited Apps and Widget support are bound to command a premium over DTVs without any such capabilities.
While the current generation is spending more time on the web, TV still continues to command a health share of attention in the media consumption verticals. In fact, a research done by Nielsen concludes that more U.S Teens are spending as much if not more time in front of the boobtube as of 2008 …..
With that kind of end user loyalty, the future generation TVs with Widgets, Apps and Gadgets are well positioned to steel the thunder back from the PC Monitors, in the near future ….
PS: Note to PCs and Laptops – the party is coming to an end ….. pack up and clean up …..
The Real "Real Time" Analytics is Still Vaporware!!!!!
Sunday, September 13th, 2009Just in the last 2 decades we have moved from information scarcity to overload. While there was so much focus on data generation, aggregation and distribution of information, we have barely touched on analytics let alone leverage analytics – creating actionable intelligence around the data that is being generated. Our current generation analytics are static and not contiguous: not real time: does not drive real time productization – in other words Contiguous Productization.
Data mining which was looked at as a fringe benefit of technology was relegated to research labs has become front and center of current generation business operations and success. Business Intelligence is very critical for retail and industrial sectors – small, medium and large enterprises – across the board. In fact leveraging Analytics is a key competitive advantage for leading CIOs in this day and age.
Market research, customer surveys and benchmarking used to be part of external vendor solutions. Today businesses can generate similar data, analysis and intelligence with off the shelf tools and open source technologies.
For example, we were happy to just gather the data two decades and over the years have learned to track the progress of our business using the data generated to manually respond to the analytics generated by the data. From late 1990s we have seen a slue of business intelligence software companies that helped traditional industries to leverage the richness in the data that is generated during their normal process of production & operations. Faster computers, more powerful networks, society’s propensity to live, share and propose in the virtual worlds is helping generate more data, crunch the data in real time and respond to changes in customer interaction. Consumers and end users are not consuming in silence – technology has paved way for them to share their knowledge and experience – which in turn helping businesses increase their own productivity, customer satisfaction and affinity.
Points of “data generation” has also increased – initially started with understanding and learning internal processes, operations (that made way for Six Sigma and others) to capturing data through interactions with customers and end users.
Today Social Media is much more than just an outlet for Teens to dish out their personal factoids: it has become a “PR and Sales engine” for businesses in all verticals; data mining has entered a new era – opening opportunities for innovation and productivity.
Where do we go from here?
Businesses can ingest, analysis massive amounts of data in real time and issue predictive intelligence for product teams to respond to changes in end user interaction and market direction.
IBM InfoStream is targeting “Stream Computing” for crucial business verticals. All that will enable only certain businesses to respond to information and data generated by other computers and devices on the network. While this is step in the right direction, we are still long way for achieving Contiguous Productization.
Abundance of data and near real time response is not good enough in the future. While innovation in real time response to analytics will be limited to critical and crucial verticals (such as medicine, security, natural calamities and so forth) in the near future, rest of the verticals will catch up in a hurry.
Product innovation through internal research is archaic. Businesses need to align their resources and processes to tap into collective intelligence, end user feedback and customer touch points. Contiguous Productization is possible with real time capture of data, analysis and response to the intelligence generated by the data.
Internet & Software based industries will have tremendous opportunity for Contiguous Productization in the future. This concept of productization also brings its only challenges and new nuances; For example, software and platform releases and versioning we have been used in the past few decades might become an out dated practice – at least the concept of small change and patch releases will cease to exist. Businesses could benefit from collective intelligence without really becoming open source.
Analytics is only means to an end. Its not end all. Analytics should lead to product innovation – in real time – not to serve some distant future but NOW! Contiguous Productization through actionable analytics turns Customization from a Privilege to a Standard Feature. Niche replaces mainstream. Niche is mainstream!