Kinect and the gesture based world

Last year, Microsoft unveiled the Kinect, a revolutionary new device that allowed Xbox 360 users to use their bodies as the way to interact with computer games. With the Kinect, Microsoft solved a substantial interface problem that had been slowing down the success of any computing-intensive efforts on the TV screen: How does one increase functionality on a large screen without requiring more complex remote controls.

It was already a given that computer keyboards and mice were not the way to interface with a large screen, as the added complexity they added to a living room setup were making for a more annoying user experience than simple TV remotes. In a world of users being already annoyed by the proliferation of TV remotes.

By introducing a mode of interaction that allowed to get rid of contact with the screen, either through a remote control or by directly touching it (a mode that works for smaller screen like phones or tablets but gets more complex when the screen is larger and thus farther away from the user), Microsoft created a whole new interaction language for computing devices and has made it possible to grow substantially beyond the traditional mode of interfacing with a computer interface.

The kinect interface is something that was predicted as far back as the early 1990s, when AT&T ran its now famous “You Will” TV ad campaign in the United States, and was later popularized by Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report movie. The idea of gesturing in the air took substantial hold in the collective consciousness and when the iPhone and iPad were introduced, people looked at that multitouch model as the answer.

But there has long been a challenge as to how to deal with larger screen. It is difficult to consider users stepping up to a 42 inch (or larger) TV screen and touching the surface of the screen in order to get what they want. So the next challenge became how to get rid of that last piece that stopped the users from interfacing. Nintendo first advanced the idea by putting a sensor in the joystick to the Wii.

 But the Wii still required some component to interface with the system. The real genius of the Microsoft solution was that it did away with every interaction components. In returning to a basic approach using only our bodies, Microsoft created a model that will continue to impact computing for decades to come.

Siri and the voice-driven world

Meanwhile, Apple had also been considering how to get rid of direct touching of a device. Their research led to an innovative company that was doing interesting things in voice-related controls: Siri, Inc.

Upon seeing the company, Apple promptly acquired it, realizing that the approach Siri was taking to voice-enabled interfaces was one of the next components of the future of computing.

There has been many other efforts at doing voice-controlled interfaces, dating back to the 1990s and it has long been assumed by the mainstream that voice-controlled interfaces were the way computing was headed. In Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A space odyssey”, we all met HAL, a computer that could handle conversations with human beings with some disastrous effects for the human. With the possible exception of Star Trek, the ability for a computer to carry on a conversation with a human being has generally been presented as a disastrous thing for humanity: a long strand of movies showed computers and robots (basically humanoid computers, as far as movies are concerned) have shown that the ability to carry a conversation with a human being is the first step to a computer deciding to rebel against his owner. Whether it is HAL in 2001 (1968), Delos Control in West World (1973), Master Control Program in Tron (1982), Edgar in Electric Dreams (1984), or Skynet in the Terminator franchise (1984, 1991, 2003), humanity always seems to be endangered by talking computers.

When technological fears are represented in media forms, they merely represent the farthest the imagination of a society can go when it comes to imagining the peak of what is possible with technology. So computers being able to carry on conversations have long been a holly grail of the computing world… and now Apple owns something that may point to the right approach.

A question as to whether this type of technology will become more than just something that can be found in Apple products is going to turn not on technical merits but on juridical points as Apple may have locked up most of the potential roads forwards by patenting substantial portions of the space. Unless they decide to make the technology available to others, it may find itself locked into the Apple ecosystem with no way to get out for a long period of time.

However, Apple’s competitors including Google and Microsoft will probably consider this an important enough space to attempt to go after it with all their might. As voice driven interfaces have long been seen as a high mark on the technological and technical advances scale, those companies will not want to be left out of what may be the next big thing.

Lessons in hidden complexity

What Siri and the Kinect have in common is that they have managed to package up a lot of complexity into what appears to be a very simple solution.

The Kinect includes infrared projectors, an infrared camera, a video camera, motion sensors, several microphones and motors to track individuals and enough processing power to handle audio and video recognitions into a sleek black bar that sends infrared light all over a room, records where the light is not showing and based on that makes some guesses where bodies are located while at the same time tracking audio and video cues to direct whatever program is being used with it.

Siri records what its user says to it, sends the recording to a server which turns that recording into text it translates it into actionable material before identifying the right information database to retrieve information from,  getting the necessary information, packaging it into a file that will be read back by the device and sending that file back to the phone (all this in a matter of a few seconds).

The big secret in the success of these offerings is that they do not scream about all the innovation and complexity. In fact, they go out of their ways to hide that complexity and there is a lesson here for most startups: it is not because things are complex that you should display them as such; quite the contrary, as new companies should address complex problems and go as far as possible to shield users away from that complexity.

Disappearing devices

The other important thing to pay attention to here is that we are seeing the increasing disappearance of the interface. In the early days of computing, the keyboard was the way to enter information into a machine (I know some will gripe that there were punch cards before that but I’m talking about the modern era of computing); that was eventually augmented by other devices like the mouse and touchpad, which remained the dominant form of interaction with computers over almost 3 decades; more recently, we have seen a more direct interaction with screens as touch interfaces have gained prominence on new form factors like mobile phones and tablets. Each step of the way, we are seeing the friction between a user’s input and the computer’s response slowly fritting away, with less and less being between the user and the device.

But in each case, the interaction was between the user and the computing device itself.

With whole-body and voice interfaces like the Kinect and Siri, that last amount of friction is disappearing and we may be entering a new era of ubiquitous computers, where the computing devices just disappears. I think the current direction of those technologies points to a potential future where we could see the iphone nano, a new screen-less version of iphone that would take the form factor of a simple pair of headphones with no extra wires. All interactions would be handled via voice command with hardly any need for a screen.

Meanwhile, in the living room, your TV will be both voice and motion aware, turning itself off when no one is in the room and completely controlled without requiring any physical remote control (something that will guarantee high acceptance as the proliferation of remote controls in the living room has become a modern annoyance).

That future is not too far away. As an eternal optimist, I would put its promise at somewhere around 5 years from now but as a realist, I also need to warn that it is likely this could take as much as a decade to reach the mainstream. So get ready for new interfaces and if you want to beta test the future, grab a Kinect or a new iPhone 4S: they are the first of many such devices that will populate our world within the next decade.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Beyond touch interfaces. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The rise of New York to prominence is, first and foremost, due to a series of happy accidents. While the technology world was long dominated by hardware and algorithms, the current phase (often referred to as “the social web”) is all about people.

In order to full back those assumptions, I’ve created five lenses, each with its own post:

1. Monocultures have negative impact. Polycultures take longer to create powerful organisms but inherently build ones that are more adaptable.
2. Living in a city is inherently a social experience. Living in a car-driven society isn’t.
3. Everyone poaches techies — the New York tech scene was born of those people that can’t be poached and found ways to attract like-minds.
4. Don’t look at adversity as something that can be overcome with brute force, deal with it as a normal condition and you will find innovative workarounds.
5. Businesses are ultimately about money so to continue fostering success, valley startup might do well to act a little more like New York ones if they want to build sustainable futures.

A historical setting

The New York dotcom scene of the 1990s was vibrant but ultimately flawed. Its own hubris killed it (and I should know as I was one of those people) and along with it killed the chance of New York displacing Silicon Valley as the epicenter of the technology world. A decade after its implosion, New York is being given a new chance to pick up the mantle, along with some distinct advantages this time around.

With many veterans still being part of the scene, it seems the lessons of the past have not been forgotten so the challenge to Silicon Valley’s supremacy will be substantially stronger than it has been in the past. I hope this series will give both groups chances to think about the different issues facing their own environment and work on dealing with those.

At the end of the day, if both Silicon Valley and New York were to emerge stronger than they are today, this conflict could leave the US more prepared for the next set of challenges that will push both coast to pull together and fight against the rise of cities in foreign locale to try to take the leadership away from the USA. If you are reading this, you probably have a dog in that fight and it is up to you, as well as everyone else in the field, to ensure that this competition ends up turning each location into the best it can be.

Note: This post is part of a series of why New York may gain the top position in the tech world, displacing Silicon Valley. The whole series is now online: Intro, Culture Part 1, Culture Part 2, Talent, Adversity, Business. Please read the whole series before making snarky comments (once you have, you’re free to make those comments).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title New York to displace Silicon Valley. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Expanding the audience

A few years ago, Nintendo took a radically different approach to what had been done in the console game world. Historically, the trend had been to games that used more powerful video processors to increase the level of realism in games aimed at the smaller portion of the public called “gamers,” a segment mostly comprised of men between the age of 15 and 35. With Sony and Microsoft having taken the high ground in those processor battle, it looked like Nintendo was in serious trouble.

But, with the release of the Wii, and its motion-sentitive controller, the Wii became a system that was aimed at a more physical experience of gaming, engaging the whole body. Nintendo also opted for a more cartoonish treatment when it came to characters in their games. Between those two decisions, Nintendo ended up moving games into a market that hadn’t previously been addressed. All of a sudden, it became cooler for the whole family to play together.

The success of the Wii in expanding the overall gamer audience left its competitors wondering how they too could enter that market. Sony recently unveiled the Playstation Move controller, which is essentially a copy of the approach Nintendo has taken with the Wii.

Microsoft, on the other hand, looked at the model and decided to completely do away with the idea of a physical controller and unveiled Kinect, a system that combines video cameras, infrared cameras, robotics, and infrared sensors to let people use their body as the controller. It’s a pretty radical move in that anyone can now operate those games, removing one barrier to getting involved in that space.

Getting Social

The games that have been included as part of the Kinect launch also allow for multiple players to get involved at the same time, create a space that is more social as a result, in a way reminiscent of board games in earlier times. As a result, videogames will probably get more integrated to a greater extent in families’ lives.

But social and gaming is not purely limited to the living room. In fact, social games are now one of the biggest trend, with Zynga being the leader in delivering offerings that combine games with a dose of socialization and a dash of competitive spirit. In only 3 years, the company has established a number of gaming franchises that are now being played by over 60 million people on a daily basis.

But most interesting in the social gaming phenomenon is the fact that the majority of social gamers do not fill the traditional profile of gamers: a survey earlier this year showed that the average social player is a 43-year-old woman.

Game Culture

Between the trends surrounding social gaming and the new impact that game consoles may have, combined with the increased number of people who are playing games on mobile phones, it seems we now need to redefine the demographic profile of gamers.

I would venture, for example, that the profile of gamer is now completely diluted into the profile of most people. The success of Rockband has already shown that music and the gaming space have now merged successfully to create a new kind of entertainment that has given newfound life to older musical talent. The launch of the Beatles edition of Rockband last year was such a cultural milestone that it even warranted its own New York Times Magazine cover article.

And the big movie hit of summer 2010 was Inception, a movie that used lingo like levels, challenges, and players as part of its narrative. In doing so, the movie may have been the first blockbuster to fully leverage game culture without being based on a game.

I’d venture that this past summer was actually a turning point in the acceptance of games as a legitimate form of entertainment. With it, the whole of our culture is now in the process of shifting to support of games as a legitimate entertainment form, to take their place alongside books, music, and movies.

Gamification

With the consumer space having turn its level of acceptance up when it comes to gaming, I believe that it is only a question of time before the enterprise space gets interested. Today, there are already large numbers of companies starting to promote the concept of gamification, or adding game-like elements to different systems, in order to improve the user experience of those systems.

In the next year, the noise around that space is guaranteed to get much higher and I suspect that every corporation in America will have a budget item for leverage game mechanics in some of their offerings. I suspect that a lot of those items will not make the final cut of a lot of budget negotiating rounds in 2011. However, come 2012, those projects will start getting funded in substantial ways.

Conclusion

With the consumer space already dominated, and the enterprise space to soon start getting interested, games are going to be a pretty big concept in the next decade. Along the way, we will see many company try to build new businesses around those concepts and, while many will fail, I suspect that the next Amazon, Google, or Facebook, will emerge from the gaming world.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The Gaming Decade. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Traditionally, the model or rent vs. own has been one that most consumers and companies have mostly considered when it came to real estate (and traditionally, people have looked at renting real estate as more normal than owning, with the possible exception of the last couple of decades, during which real estate ownership appeared more attractive). But today, that concept seems to be increasingly extending to other arenas.

Netflix

For example, Netflix has build a very solid model around renting movies over the Internet. True enough, many people will mention that rental of media dates back to the early days of the video store and were a substantial component in the rise of companies like Blockbuster (born Blockbuster Video). True also that said companies have been falling on hard times lately. But the substantial difference between what Netflix offers and the traditional rental model is focused on convenience: one could argue that Netflix’s original business model was largely centered around the distribution of physical media (the DVDs themselves) but I would argue that the true success of Netflix will be due largely to its digital distribution model, allowing for instant distribution of movies and TV shows with the click of a few buttons. The instant (and the emphasis here needs to be put on instant) access to a large media collection can easily call into question the concept of owning similar content in a physical form: What is the advantage of having a physical copy of a movie sitting on your shelf, collecting dust most of the time, when the same movie is available at the touch of a remote control button from the Internet?

However, the challenge in such concept is that once someone stops paying Netflix, the access to said collection disappears. An owned movie is paid for upfront and can be watched time and time again by a consumer but a rented one can only be watched as long as one keeps paying the owner renting party.

Apple

With Apple’s recent move to sell music tracks without any digital rights management features on it, one could safely assume that Apple is not in the rental business. Apple’s move was largely a response to Amazon’s own marketing around selling DRM-Free music but it is interesting to note that, while the restrictions on music went away, the same was not true of similar restrictions around music videos, movies, and TV shows. The lock-in that appears here is similar to that which exist with Netflix in that if you decide to end your relationship with Apple, the media you bought will stop working. Under such restricted mode, can one really assume that he/she owns the media he/she purchased?

Similarly, Apple is renting out, in partnership with telecommunication vendors like AT&T, an ingenious device called the iPhone. The reason I would call it a rental model is that use of the device is limited by the partners to people who have paid the initial fee and continue to pay a fee to the telecommunication provider on a regular basis. It is a model that exists for most phone providers, as devices tend to be tied to a specific vendor. Once again, people will highlight that it is possible to get rid of that lock-in with software but I will counter that doing so is a violation of the contract terms of the device, voiding warranty and your agreement with Apple. To claim otherwise would be similar to saying that everyone has access to as much money as they want, as long as they are willing to rob banks. (In the interest of disclosure, I should highlight here that I own an iPhone which is not connected to the “authorized provider”.)

Going a little further, Apple gets to lock-in who can and cannot play on an iPhone, only allowing developers who submit themselves to Apple’s whim and offering what is sometimes only temporary access to the userbase as release of every update to a product still has to go through Apple’s review. In other words, Apple gives developers temporary access to the iPhone user base, an access it can choose to revoke at any time.

The Amazon Kindle

All this conversation bring us to Amazon and a couple of its products, starting with the Kindle, which serves as the incentive for writing this lenghthy post. The Kindle, much like the iPhone is a pretty impressive device, bringing several technologies (always on device, e-ink) out of the labs and into more mainstream consumption. And like the iPhone, it has both fans and detractors. And once again, the Kindle offers an interesting kind of lock-in, allowing you to read titles purchased on the kindle (or through the iPhone kindle software) but allowing you access for only as long as you keep a relationship with Amazon. Where the model moves to rental is around magazines and newspapers: you may purchase subscriptions but, should your Kindle be completely full as a result of your subscription, you may loose access to the back issues you “own”.

But Amazon’s move to a rental model is not just around the kindle device. On the consumer end, Amazon now play in the same spaces as Apple and Netflix, renting out or selling digital versions of movies, TV shows, and music.

Renting at the Enterprise Level

In other example of the evolving trend moving from the consumer to the enterprise space, Amazon is now renting itself, or rather portions of its own operating capacity, to anyone willing to pay a fee. Its infrastructure (storage, computing, and databases ) are all available to organizations who are willing to put their application on top of Amazon’s own servers. Amazon offers similar solutions for payment services, and goes as far as providing space in their warehouses along with complete pick, pack and ship capabilities.

The infrastructure component is part of a trend in which enterprise vendors are now providing data center capabilities on a per data transaction costing model. For many Chief Technical or Chief Information Officer, it changes the basic questions around data center from a “Build vs. Buy” to “Build vs. Buy vs. Rent”.

In the process, it also changes the dynamics of how a business can be built as a substantial portion of a company’s activities can now be outsourced to outside players (I’ll go into more details around the enterprise related issues in my next post)

Is it all bad?

If you read this far, you might assume that, by this point, I’m going to claim that this is all about the over-reach of DRM and that it is all a horrible thing.

I’m not.

What I am trying to highlight here is that the experience around internet driven goods is changing. As connectivity speeds increase, the ability to access any movie/TV show/video/ music clip/ books / magazines / etc is going to have a substantial impact on our relationship to said goods (in a fashion similar to the type of relationship kids now have to music, assuming that music on the Internet ought to be free of restrictions, while at the same time assuming that mobile phone ringtones are something one ought to pay for).

The change in our relationship to media forces us to reassess the value of the physical good. In the case of our household, we have made a leap of faith, assuming that the content of certain DVDs will always be available online from one rental provider or another. The reason for that approach is that the experience of watching such thing on our TV using an internet connected video player is not diminished by the lack of a physical medium. Living in a more constrained space (in Manhattan, space is always at a premium), the physicality of a DVD box is actually an impediment to the experience of the medium. As a result, the internet connectivity, and the rental model, appears to make much more sense than the physical ownership of DVD boxes.

In the same way, the value of a CD collection is in what’s on the CD rather than the plastic container it’s in. Much of the value of the physical container of music has decreased: in the past, LPs were designed and the wraping of the LP was almost has important to the experience as the music itself. However, as CDs reduced the size of the cases, and music production companies spend less time on designing custom boxes, physical CDs became more of a commodity, with the music on them being the only thing that truly distinguished one CD from another.

But what about books, magazines, and newspapers?

To a large extent, I would venture that the relationship we have with magazines or newspapers is different from that of a book. When I first saw the Kindle, I was not attracted to it because I could read books on it but rather because I might be able to subscribe to newspapers or magazines. The clear line falls in the arena of experience: with a few exceptions, magazines and newspapers are read and then discarded. The ephemeral nature of that experience archetype seems to make such relationship a prime candidate for digitization: Once again, the convenience of something like a Kindle seems to trump the experience of having to fold a newspaper in a crowded subway or the guilt associated with recycling large amount of newsprint or magazines on a regular basis: because the intrisic value of newspapers or magazines is as conveyors of temporal information that now appears to be archivable and retrieveable online, the need for ownership of that data appears to be lowered.

Books, on the other hand, are a different issue. Reference books may lend themselves to a good digitizable model (O’Reilly, for example, has had success with its Safari offering, as have encyclopedias like Brittanica and the OED) but fiction books may be in a different class. The book as object may be falling into the same class as those ancient LPs, being designed as a full object rather than just its content and rental of such good (though people will mention that books have been something you can borrow from a library for a long time) may take longer to break through as the advantage of reading such a book on a Kindle is not necessarily higher than that of a physical good. I may be romantic in my thinking, attaching to books not only the content and the packaging but its experience in a greater space, as each book I own has, in itself, a number of memories attached, in the form of sand from a beach where it was read, or wrinkles from being carried on a trip or fold marking and writings from a particular era. In those rare cases, the books serve as containers for more than the stories they held when first presented on a bookshelf or through the online presentation they had: they are containers of a full experience and that, at this point, is not yet something that any digital device (whether it is a kindle or other) has yet been able to reproduce.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Is Ownership Passé?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Televisions: Connected and Flat

It’s been 15 years since the Internet revolution started to take hold and about 3 since video on the Internet has become a more viable option. With the rise of devices connecting portions of the Internet video space to your television (for example, allowing to buy movies or TV shows from the iTunes store or download video streams from Netflix), we’re seeing more ways to connect the Internet to television without requiring a computer. I suspect this trend will only continue and expect this year to mark a turning point with some of the first ethernet-enabled televisions appearing. This type of connection will be available first from Samsung and LG, who have already built such connectivity into their BluRay players so I would expect them to port those capabilities to TV sets shortly.

The other improvements in the TV space will include the introduction of more OLED screens on the high end, providing a third option in the flat screen space ( LCD and Plasma being the other two.)

The economy will pressure many of the companies in the space to drop their margins on televisions and I wouldn’t be surprised if flat screens start dropping under $500 by year end. This will force some of the last CRTs off the market, leaving Plasma as the cheap choice, LCD as the average one, and OLED as the high end one.

BluRay: Losing to Downloads

2009 ought to have been a good year for BluRay. Having killed its main competitor in the next generation physical disk format (HD-DVD), BluRay appeared to have the field open to itself.

But through both blunders on the part of people in the media and consumer electronics space, BluRay has succeeded at painting itself in a corner: having priced disks at a premium, executives have to justify the advantage. The approach they took was that BluRay was a higher video and audio quality experience than regular DVD. But this has represented a major hurdle for them as most consumers are fairly happy with the quality they are getting from their existing DVDs.

The other issue is that the war for a next generation format was not about a physical medium, as they had expected. Sure, Sony and Toshiba tried hard to make it about that, because royalties on selling rights to such formats can go in the billions of dollars over several years, but truth be told, the market bypassed physical as a medium almost half a decade ago.

With the rise of the iPod, people have grown more comfortable with the idea that they could buy a media asset (a song, a TV show, or a movie) electronically without having to deal with the piece of plastic that carries it. The revolution started with music because those files were smaller but, as bandwith availability increases, the amount of time required to download a TV show or movie is dropping. Along with the availability of streaming video, this has changed the level of expectations when it comes to media consumption in such a way that, increasingly, people want access to their media without having to deal with a physical component to carry it (one could argue that the on-demand shows provided first in hotel rooms in the 90s and on most cable boxes in the last few years fall in the same space.)

So downloads are going to be the thing that undoes BluRay. As a result, I expect Sony to start touting downloadable media more heavily than BluRay in its PS3 marketing. I also expect most BluRay players to offer some way to access internet media either through direct partnerships with the providers (Netflix, for example) or through the creation of an open format content providers could leverage.

Mobile Phones: Smart is in but so is Simple

The recent success of the iPhone has gotten every phone providers to focus on developing more smarts for their phones, essentially turning them into multi-use devices. This trend is hardly new (I’ve owned a smartphone since around 2000, starting with the first Treo) but its acceptance by the general public is.

What I expect to happen in the space this year is a continued drop in prices as new contenders enter the space. Palm will make a play at the space with a new net-centric phone and operating system that will come with a under $100 price-tag to follow the recent success of their Centro offering. This will, in turn, force Windows-mobile and Google Android-based phones to come down to the same price range, with some of them even being offered by carriers for free with 2 years contracts. Apple, on the other hand, will keep its $199 price tag and may offer a software upgrade that would turn on video recording on the iPhone. RIMM, with its Blackberry offering, will continue to be the darling of the business world but most of its efforts in the consumer space will be rebuffed.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, we might see the rise of phones that have a single feature: making phone calls. Those phones will be marketed to two different segments of the market: elderly people, who barely use computers and want something that has as little complexity as possible and the first grade set, with some level of parental control being available on the devices.

Computers: Smaller, Cheaper, and More Wireless

Netbooks started making the news last year. Sporting a web-browser and generally less power than traditional computers, PC makers have discovered that there is a large audience for such devices. This is a problem with chip makers like Intel and AMD who have relied on Moore’s Law to get faster and beefier processors out the door at heavier costs to consumer. The problem they are faced with today is that most processors are good enough for what people want to do (ie. read email, go on the web, and maybe edit a few documents). So I expect netbooks to be the only real growth sector for PC makers. This represents quite a challenge as margins on such devices are low and the business model around them is a volume one.

The market is now fragmenting into 4 segments:

• Netbooks, which are probably good enough for most people.
• Powerhouse machines, which are used primarily by computer gamers.
• Office machines, which will demand more security features (eg. Lenovo)
• Luxury machines, which are more in line with the fashion space than the electronics one (eg. Apple MacBooks)

I expect a slowdown in the number of machines sold in the computer games market and a flattening in the office market. This leaves netbooks as the growth area and I would put a question mark on the luxury machine market as I’m not sure it could see more growth if the economic climate continues turning sour.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2009 Predictions: Hardware. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Having gotten that data, I then tried to understand the percentage of fluctuation as far as the high and low values for a given day and then for the close of day. I’ve bolded the values that are over 1 percent of fluctuation for a given day.

From this, a few interesting points come up:

• It seems that market swings of over 1 percent are not that uncommon these days. For the observed period of a month, the market closed with a change of over 1 percent for 19 days compared to 5 under 1 percent.
• Since Lehman went under, a swing of less than 1 percent only happened twice, both times on Wednesdays (September 24th and October 1st)
• Significant swings (over 4 percent in either direction for top or low) seem to be becoming more common with 7 of the last 24 trading sessions seeing such swings.

So all this activity begs the question: is high volatility the new normal?

In order to figure that out, I averaged out the percentage of change for the recorded period and then tried to compare that to the volatility since the Lehman failure (with September 15th being the first trading day after the news became official). The results looks as follows:

I would love for readers to check my math here as it seems that there’s a pretty stunning change (38%) in the overall open to close change in price since the Lehman crisis happens, which makes me wonder whether this is only a temporary period or whether we are going to have to get more used to the concept of large swings in the market.

Anyway one slices it, however, it’s pretty clear that we are looking at a market that is largely panicking and it seems that one cannot deduct any trends (either up or down) from what we are now witnessing. Yes, it’s true that the market has dropped over 10 percent in the weeks following the Lehman bankruptcy, but all this at a time when we’ve seen the market drop almost 7 percent on one day to be followed by an almost 5 percent gain the next day.

I am by no mean a financial wizard, so I’d love some of my more economically astute readers to explain (or provide another area that needs to be explored) whether any of this data holds any value to better understanding what is currently happening.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Is high volatility the new normal?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Recently, though, TechMeme has gotten me thinking about the tech blogosphere conversations as a whole and their longer term relevance. To the small “web 2.0″ community, TechMeme serves as a bit of a paper of record; The subhead even claims that it represents the “Tech Web, page A1”, claiming to bring us the important stories. But how do those stories fare over time? Is today’s hot topic a step in understanding a longer term trend or is it just a temporary distraction that will be forgotten a month/3 months/6 months/a year from now.

Fortunately, Gabe Rivera, the founder of TechMeme must have anticipated such a question and provided a way to look at TechMeme as it was a particular point in its short history. Using the simple interface, it’s easy to see the page as it existed at a precise point in time. So I decided to start looking at the site at the same time in single month spaces. The middle of the night and middle of the day position ought to be good time stamps so I decided to look at the site at 12am and 12pm on the selected date. I also had to discount the fact that April 1st is April fool’s day so I could not use the first of the month as this fact could skew the data. Here are the dates and times I ended up with:

• Today: June 2nd 2008 at 12am and 12pm
• A week ago: May 26, 2008 at 12am and 12pm
• Two weeks ago: May 19, 2008 at 12am and 12pm
• One month ago: May 2, 2008 at 12am and 12pm
• Two months ago: April 2, 2008 at 12am and 12pm
• Three months ago: March 2, 2008 at 12am and 12pm
• Six months ago: December 2, 2007 at 12am and 12pm
• Nine months ago: September 2, 2007 at 12am and 12pm
• One Year ago: June 2 2007 at 12am and 12pm
• Two years ago: June 2, 2006 at 12am and 12pm

With 20 data points, here’s what I discovered.

Today

Based on today’s news at noon, it looks like the important subjects at noon in the blogosphere are Adobe’s latest move, combining Flash and Acrobat with their entry in the already crowded (Google, Microsoft, Zoho, etc..) web-based office suite market. At midnight, things were a little less exciting, with discussion around the privacy issues Google Maps is raising with their StreetView offering.

Of course, it’s still too early to tell whether those stories will have a long term impact so let’s roll the tape back a little.

One Week Ago: May 26, 2008

At noon, a week ago, the top story was about a new type of SSD, developed by Samsung. Since it’s hardware, I assume that the impact of this news can’t be felt initially but there could be longer term repercussions. Also of note on that page is a small item lower on the page about Paypal outages. An interesting trend in my research on this is that this story is slowly developing over a period of weeks and months and the noise level appears to be increasing on it.

At midnight, the discussion was around Google’s power and the needed for another organization to work as a counter balance to that powerful force in the search engine space. Coupled with the discussions last night about privacy issues relating to Google maps, it seems we are seeing an emerging pattern here.

Two Weeks Ago: May 19, 2008

Two weeks ago, at noontime, the claim that Microsoft would eventually buy Facebook and keep it close was dominating TechMeme. At this point, no announcement has been made so this is largely conjecture and, while an interesting opinion, it’s not really news. This editorial was largely in response to the news item that dominated the previous 12 hour cycle about Microsoft’s statements regarding pursuing a possible deals other than a full acquisition with Yahoo!

One Month Ago: May 2, 2008

On May 2, 2008 at noon, the big news was… that the Google RSS reader is now available for the iphone. I’m sure many people consider this event as a major turning point when… well, hmm… a big big deal. Amusingly, Adobe was also in the news that day, with news that its flash plugin would escape computers and appear in set top boxes and mobile phones.

Another big subject was Steve Ballmer’s mention that Microsoft could go it alone without Yahoo, a discussion that dominated the midnight page on that day. The Yahoo/Microsoft chat has been kind of the soap opera of our industry and this latest installment was remembered as a turning point (or not) by many.

A possibly interesting trend piece, around midnight, was also intriguing: Will Grand Theft Auto IV hurt Iron Man opening weekend sales. I haven’t seen a follow up on that piece yet, which could tell us whether video games are displacing movies as the primary form of entertainment but my guess is that the answer is no.

Two Months Ago: April 2, 2008

On April 2, 2008 at noon, the top story on techmeme was about Intel’s plan for chips that would power up more mobile devices. Interestingly, this story was largely driven by mainstream media as the lead was taken by john Markoff of the New York Times, followed by comments from Forbes magazine, and Infoworld. The other related story was the press release itself, which can be seen as bloggers pointing straight to the source of the news. I suspect that this story will probably have more legs moving forward. A cursory glance provides glances at developing stories ranging from the rumor stage (that all important Google/Skype partnership or acquisition… which didn’t happen) to the focus on process (like the approval of Office Open XML as an ISO standard).

The departure of Google’s CIO dominated the prior night’s news cycle and word of Apple’s 3G iphone started to filter through.

Three Months Ago: March 2, 2008

March 2, 2008 at noon provides us perspective on today’s news, thanks to Microsoft’s announcement of ITS entry into the web-based office suite market. When put side by side with today’s announcement by Adobe, it seems to start pointing to more of a trend. Beyond that, little news that seems to be of note from a memorable standpoint.

The interesting thing here is that the same subject was leading the previous night’s news cycle. This seems to establish a first rule for techmeme: subjects that survive on the front page more than 12 hours may be worth paying attention to.

Six Month Ago: December 2, 2007

There’s an all saying in journalism that 3 items make for a trend. In the case of this study, it looks like Web-based office suite are definitely the hottest trend around, as the top news on December 2, 2007 at noon was information about the future of Google’s offering in that space (either that or there is an unwritten rule in the technology field that information about web-based office suites MUST be introduced on the second day of the month or wait until the following month).

The subject was starting to climb the chart 12 hours earlier, even thought the discussion at the time was dominated by a Facebook misstep (remember Facebook Beacons? Well, that was around that time). From an interface standpoint, it also brings up something that I’d like to recommend to Gabe: could you add and up or down arrow to highlight if a subject is getting more play or not. On something like this, it would be nice to get an idea of the stickiness of a topic. It appears many topic appear low on the page and move up over time, the quicker and faster they move up seems to indicate the importance of the story and it would be a nice addition to have that info on the screen.

Nine Month Ago: September 2, 2007

September 2, 2007 was a quiet news day. I guess everyone was mourning the death of the newspaper, which was forced by Google on that day, according to the noon-time headlines. There doesn’t seem to have been any other major news around midnight either. This, however, could be an artifact in the data as September 2, 2007 was a Sunday, which is generally a pretty quiet news day as most people don’t work on Sunday.

Interestingly, a story that is just now starting to get more notice is the continuing brushfires around Paypal’s outages. Not that sexy a subject but one that started to be raised around that time. At the time, discussion of Google’s entry in the mobile market centered around the idea they would deliver a device instead of a platform.

Last Year and Two Years Ago

A year ago, at noon, the Techmeme conversation was around porn. During the night, though, the conversation was centering around the acquisition of Feedburner by Google. This is probably remembered by people in the industry as an important milestone and here, techmeme shines at organizing a package with the appropriate conversations.

Things do not improve much if you go further back: 2 years ago, at noon, and midnight, gives us little to mull over.

Conclusion

The data seems to point that the front page of TechMeme largely represents what’s hot right now but does not necessarily highlight stories which have a longer term type of impact. In that sense, it may also be highlighting that discussions in the tech blogosphere are largely centered on insider-type minutia while failing to put things in a larger context. This appears to present a myopic view of the tech world that leaves us with lots of data but preciously little information. So while TechMeme provides a useful tool in terms of getting an idea of the pulse of the conversation “right now,” it does little in providing data that would allow someone to understand the larger trends that are affecting our world as a result of the internet (and web 2.0 revolution).

I would argue that the answer to the question I posed in the title for that post is a resounding yes. Because it deals largely with the trivial and assess little value to longer type impact, TechMeme creates a self-imposed myopia on its readers and participants. A possible exception is when a story manages to survives through multiple 12-hour instances, providing many angles to the same events. But those events are few and far between.

Whether the lack of headlines with a major impact is a phenomenon that is unique to TechMeme or to the tech world in general is a question I’d like to leave to readers and I’d appreciate comments as to your thinking around this.

But all this comes down to a simple fact: if you’ve missed what happened on TechMeme in the last XX hours, days or weeks, you may not necessarily have missed much. so kick back, relax, step away from the computer and, if you need to catch up, you can always pick up a mainstream publication that may cover a distilled version of what happened if it’s of any particular significance.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Is Techmeme myopic?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

According to the wired article, some of the reasons have to do with complexities related to going online. In order to resolve those issues, the industry needs to play closer attention to user experience and start figuring out how to make things easier. Return on investments in technology will increase if more people use a system. More people will use a system if it’s easier to use. However, few companies pay close attention to those kinds of details. Next time someone asks you why usability research is needed, point out the relationship between usability and bottom dollars: the business people will immediately see the value.

A question remains, however, on how to get people back. As standard marketing theory often points out, it is easier to convert a customer that has never used a product than to get one that has unsuccessfully used a product to come back. This is a challenge that marketers everywhere need to crack in order to increase overall market shares.

Also of interest in the story is the fact that most disabled people do not go online. This seems to represents a huge market for anyone as the Internet could actually act as a great enabler for disabled people. Site developers should pay close attention to things like the World Wide Web Consortium WAI project which could help lure more disabled people online.

Last but not least is the question of economics and Internet access. Obviously, there is a need for education here as most libraries now offer Internet access for free. However, recent efforts in monitoring what is done online in libraries probably keeps some people from getting online and the remainder is probably either not aware that Internet access is available at their local library, not interested in going to the library (for educational reasons or other), or doesn’t see any value in the Internet. A way to solve this would be through better educational programs related to the fact that the service is available, addressing quick wins by showing people how they can do certain things faster online (for example, showing how people could get a better job or reduce the amount of time and money it takes to do something by going online).

However, all of these points have a pre-requisite. Before addressing the problem, we must first understand who those people are. A demographic make-up of Internet drop-outs could help (are those people mostly from a certain age group, for example) in understanding whether this might become a longer term trend that needs to be addressed or whether most of the problem is going to go away over time (as kids nowadays seem to get online at a faster rate than older people).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Mind the Gap. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The main problem here is the way journalists are trained (and, as a journalism graduate, I went through it): we learn to gather facts and write quickly and efficiently (I know, I know, some people are going to complain about how wordy I’ve been getting lately) but most J-school students do not learn anything else. What should happen is that journalism schools should require that its student also have another major so they would develop field expertise in something else than just gathering facts and writing on deadline.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Water found to be wet. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

His pointing out the fact that changes in behavior show that most people will steal music and movie content on the Internet is largely due to the fact that there are no clear alternatives. Attempts to offer a crippled service like the new Napster or Pressplay are not enough (After all, if I pay for a service, why does the stuff I downloaded expire). Give us an all you can eat legal buffet at a price point that does not gouge us and we will come. Or start paying the artists and your case will be stronger when you tell us that we are starving them.

Right now, many people pay for cable TV. Basic price gives you some access but other channels (like HBO) cost extra. However, people can still record shows and movies once they paid. Why can’t the same be true of music? And why do I have to follow the path the media industry is setting to get my content (for example, why do I have to go to a movie theater to see a first run movie? Why can’t I get access to it either on DVD, pay-per-view or online download on the same day? Yes, this would completely change your business model (couldn’t sell as much soda, advertising, and tickets at the movie theater) but it might be what the customer wants.

A possible way to change this would be to keep charging the same price for movie theater (and enhance the movie experience by getting rid of those commercials before the movie), offer the DVD for premium rental only at an initial point (for example, I could get today’s release from the corner store for $25, hence avoiding the ticket line and watching the movie on MY schedule (if I want to see the movie at 7:30pm or 8pm or 7:54pm, I currently have to find a theater that matches my needs). In the same fashion, I could open up a video on demand feed either on my TV and/or computer and watch the movie at my leisure for a 24 hour period.

Just a few random thoughts (and I just came up with those off the top of my head so there might be others out there): Start thinking of how your business will evolve or suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Memo to Media Execs. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

On the left, you’ve got Google, the 2000 pounds gorilla of search which is now looking to expand its advertising program beyond its site and is fighting to not have its name associated with searching on the Internet. However, playing to its advantage is that it now owns a patent on its ranking technology.

On the right, you’ve got Overture, which once had a business that most people figured would fail (after all, who would pay for a placement in a search engine?) but somehow managed to prove the naysayers wrong and is now going out and buying itself a new seat at the search table.

At stake is the future of search but it may be much more. It looks like the market is reshaping itself to become not just about search but also about targeting. Give the right search result, attach the right ad, and all of a sudden you’ve got a redefinition of online advertising networks. The funny thing is that we’ve been there before. This was what Doubleclick promised but eventually abandoned due to privacy concerns. I suspect that the search engines are headed in a similar direction and that history might repeat itself here (and I suspect that we may see more people starting to worry about privacy issues similar to those that plagued Doubleclick a few years ago.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title History repeats itself. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Significant in the Times story is the following quote:

the recent increases in corporate efficiency appear to have created a long-term change in the level of economic growth needed for an improving job market.

The times is burying a huge story in this line. How did those increases in corporate efficiency happen?

It is my contention that they happened largely due to the fact that a lot of the technology investments made in the 90s as result of the dotcom boom are starting to pay off. Whereas, in the past, memos were sent in paper form, and people had to talk to a lot more people to get access to simple bits of information, the introduction of intranet tools and email in the corporate world have helped workers become more efficient by cutting a large amount of unnecessary steps in the process of getting information. Whereas in the past, one had to spend hours on the phone to get even the most basic information about a product, nowadays people just hit the vendor’s site and get the information they need on their own timeline. This improvement in the information gathering and dissemination (largely through a self-service ethos which allows your employees to do more important work than just shuffling marketing sheets) is just the beginning.

With the advent of corporate weblogs, we will see communications between prospects continue to improve, as the new tools facilitate a discussion between corporations and prospects. This is an important trend that no one in the mainstream media is following and may just be what the “New Economy” is about. It’s not about a new way of selling dog food (or whatever other bad idea received billions of dollars) but it is about removing repetitive tasks in information dissemination and sharing and increasing self service, which greatly improves all business process.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title New Economy Redux. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Web and Email: Essential Campaigning Tools

In 1992, the Clinton/Gore campaign was one of the great innovator in that field. Using a list server, the democratic ticket sent out policy papers, press releases, and announcements of gathering to thousands of subscribers. After they moved into the White House, they continued providing detailed policy information via the Internet. In those days, however, few people cared as the Internet had not yet captured the public imagination.

This year, politicians fully seized the Internet as an essential campaigning tool. As the presidential campaign hits its last few hours, tons of emails are invading my mailbox. They come from all parties and it is interesting to see them pile. People are asking me to vote for Bush, Gore, or even Nader. One has to give credit to all the parties involved: they are getting the Internet and are using it to not only rally their base but also expand beyond it.

Going beyond email, the candidates bypassed the traditional media filter by posting their positions directly to the web. Both Gore and Bush have extensive repertories of policies listed on their site. If you want to know about a candidate’s position on just about anything, you can just check their site and see where they stand on different issues. In researching a story about their Internet stance, I made heavy use of the web sites and discovered them to be fairly comprehensive. By using the web, the candidates appealed directly to voters, making themselves more accessible and providing their view of the world to anyone interested enough to read the sites. The web has essentially allowed, for the first time, to assess politicians side, judging them on their comments.

However, the web has been treacherous to candidates too. Bush, in particular, made a few missteps at the beginning of his campaign when a spoof site popped up and he tried to shut it down. By leaving the Internet component to volunteers instead of putting full paid staffers on it, Bush set himself up for problems. They arrived in the way of gwbush.com, a parody site which was very critical of the candidate and got him to say that “there ought to be limits to freedom on the Internet.”

Gore, on the other hand, found himself entangled in a web of ridicule when he said that he had been instrumental in the development of the Internet.

Furthermore, sites like OpenSecrets.org have tracked PAC donations to candidates and made it possible for more people to see who’s being supported by certain groups. This has made contributions a lot more transparent and candidates a lot more nervous as they try to distance themselves from some of the more controversial PACs.

But interestingly enough, the current front contenders were not the early adopters of campaign related technology in this election. The also-ran (McCain and Bradley) showed the way in terms of using the Internet by leveraging its ubiquity to help them in their fundraising effort.

Both McCain and Bradley pointed people to their websites in every speech, collect campaign donations and mobilizing volunteers online. While their bid for candidacy failed, they realized tremendous savings by using the Internet for fundraising and developed a new channel for campaign contributions. This, I believe, will become a staple of campaigns in the future.

The Internet as Issue

Another interesting factor in this presidential election has been the presence of the Internet in policy discussions. According to a search on the debate transcripts, the Internet was mentioned 17 times during the presidential debate. Bush sees the Internet as both evil (linking the Internet to the Columbine massacre) and useful for education, as long as there is filtering the Internet in public places. Gore, on the other hand, sees the Internet as the solution to many problems including reducing the size of the government by moving more of its services online and dealing with the crisis in agricultural by sponsoring support for Internet businesses in rural areas. While in the final analysis, little in those comments may have any influence in the next four years, they show different states of mind when it comes to technology and they serve to illustrate that the Internet has gone a long way from being ignored four years ago to being included in presidential debates nowadays.

Also of interest is the fact that each candidate has articulated his position on a number of Internet issues. It’s the first time each candidate has presented what can be considered a net agenda and represents a major step in the advancement of the industry. The Internet is no longer just a new technology trend, it now permeates every aspect of business, and presidential candidates recognize our industry’s importance in the economy.

The rise of the E-class

Both Bush and Gore have gone out of their way to get the support of big name VCs and other technology leaders. The good thing for those of us involved in the industry is that Internet issues are now on the national agenda. The bad thing is that most people in the technology arena are politically naive, when compared to leaders in other industries. There are only few efforts to lobby congress on relevant issues, and when those come head to head with groups lobbying for brick-and-mortar companies, they usually loose. It will take some time for the technology industry to recruit the right kind of lobbyists, people who have had a lot of experience in the field and are well connected on both sides of Pennsylvania avenue. However, the good news is that the support the two front contenders for the president’s job have received will probably come with strings attached and the leaders who are supporting the winning candidate will get wider access to the White House, hopefully helping government to understand some of the critical issues related to our fast moving industry.

Voter Trader: Legal or not, they won’t go away

Another important development in this year’s election is the rise of vote swapping sites, like NaderTrader, Vote Swap, and VoteExchange. The basic premise of those sites is that people in one swing state can exchange their vote with people in other states. Many of those sites have been established as a way to rally support for Gore in swing states, where Nader could end up giving a win to Bush. Whether they will have any influence is still up for discussion at this point (we’ll only know early Wednesday) but those sites represent a new way in which the Internet could influence elections. If people start swapping their votes, one could start seeing a larger focus on campaigning directly to those sites’ constituencies. In the future, single issue voters might end up exchanging votes at a more local level in order to get their agenda to pass. If, as the media seem to say, most voters are truly centrist, what we may end up with is a set of loose coalition formed on the web. Imagine two people: One of them wants a new railroad, the other a new bridge. Using one of those sites, they could essentially say “Vote for the Republican mayor because he supports construction of a new bridge and I’ll vote for the Democratic state senator who supports the construction of a new railroad.” This could represent a new trend in politics that would probably shock politicians as they would have to choose their constituencies carefully and follow through on their promises. In a way, this could actually be the rise of an E-democracy.

Instant Polling: Get your wrong numbers quickly

However, the influence of the net on politics this year also had some darker sides. The one I am the most worried about is that of doing instant Internet polls after a candidate’s comment. During the presidential debates, the major news channels all posted multiple choice questions on their site. People would instantly reply and the TV channel would report the result about 15 minutes after the polls had been posted. What worries me about this instant polling is that it is far from being scientific. Because the people who go to those sites were self-selected, the polls were largely skewed in favor of one candidate over the other. Further exacerbating the problem was the fact that many newspapers would then pick up those polls and reprint them. All that was accomplished in the process was clouding the statistical picture by relying on people’s gut reaction to a candidate. If there is one thing that needs to be refined in the future, I think that kind of gotcha polling will have to go.

In the early 90’s, before the Internet was as popular as it is now, many of the people on Usenet talked about the net eventually becoming what Jefferson envisioned: a marketplace of exchange of ideas. With its growing commercialization, the net has gone beyond just being a nice place to chat and become the backbone of a whole new world. On Tuesday, Americans will vote and we will see how the online exchange of ideas can influence the rest of the world.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Election 2000: The Net and Politics. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Hybrid World Lives!

Many of you may remember the February 10th issue about Hybrid Computing. While talking with Birger Steen, CEO of Scandinavia Online, I discovered that the concept is not that far off the market. It is his contention that WAP-enabled phones are largely a pain in the back when it comes to interface. Having to key in every letter on the small phone keyboard is far from the easiest thing in the world. As a result, Scandinavia Online has developed a set of services that allows users of their portal jump on their site and configure their WAP view on the web. From his point of view, this is the best service he can offer now to wireless users.

The point was reiterated by a few people around the conference that told me that going to the web to configure a cell phone was the best way to deal with the small screen interface problem encountered by most WAP phones. Anne Rasmussen, of WAPportal.net demonstrated how their company plans to offer a similar service in a hosted fashion for corporate sites and others. The word around Scandinavia is that if you want to find the best way to configure a WAP phone, you have to go to the web via a computer to do so.

M-Commerce Huge … but not for Etailers

Another significant trend is the rise of M-commerce. In Finland, and to a lesser extent Denmark, Norway and Sweden, people can already use their WAP phones to buy from vending machines. The vending machine has a telephone number on it. You dial that number and a credit is added to the machine, to be billed on your phone bill. With the introduction of security in the new WAP standards, a few people were talking about how in the future the question “will it be cash, check, credit card, or phone?” may not sound silly.

What they envision is that WAP phones could become the new credit card.

A recent survey found that in Scandinavian countries, 82% of the people would go back to get their cell phone if they forgot it before leaving home, while only 64% would do the same thing if they forgot their wallet. The basic concept is one that may be foreign to those of us who live in the United States and revolves largely around the fact that GSM phones are equipped with a small identification chip called a SIM card. You can take the chip out of one phone and put it in another and you don’t have to worry about changing phone number or contact info.

Because of the emergence of such a way to do billing, some of the speakers at the conference predicted that the long run path for mobile phone operators would be to merge with financial institutions as their services will increasingly resemble those of credit card companies.

However, few people were optimistic about the prospects of etailers when it comes to mobile phones. “When I’m in a store buying something, I’m not going to go up on the web to check if it’s available at a web store,” told me one attendant. “I want to get it now and not wait a few days for it to show up in the mail.”

As a result, the promise of m-commerce is good for software vendors (who will sell packages that allow operators to set themselves up as currency clearinghouse) and mobile phone operators (who could become the next big financial force) but unfortunately, current etailers will not fare as well.

Content is King… in a Wireless Republic

The promise of advertising supported content on wireless phone has been hailed by some as a new way to support content sites. Unfortunately, few content providers will survive in the wireless space as demand for those services does not seem to meet expectations. Talking with people from the Scandinavian arm of large American companies who have tried to go the wireless route as a distribution channel, I discovered that there was not much demand for those services. “Sure, people do check the price of their stock on the phones but they still call our voice line to place their order,” said one executive from an online trading company.

As a general rule, the demand for content seems to be limited to a few areas: entertainment (bars, clubs, and restaurants locators), financial (stock prices) and sport-related (latest scores). However, many of the people involved in those areas told me that they were still looking for a proper business model. The locators are looking at a coupon-like scheme, whereas bars can offer a special coupon and people can go to a bar and show the phone coupon to get a rebate on drinks (“It appears that beer is the hot wireless app” quipped one panelist). Financial services and sports services are currently looking at possible subscription based models or at deals with operators whereas they would share a portion of the revenue they are generating for the operators.

CN U RD THS

On the other hand, communication in the hot wireless app. SMS has clearly become the hot app when it comes to wireless service across Scandinavia and across Europe. Because operators are charging lower rates for data services than they are for voice traffic, short messaging has become the quickest way for people to get in touch. A new lingo is starting to pop up around SMS as people are trying to economize the number of keystroke they type (SMS messages are limited to 160 characters). As a result, the headline for this section would translate from CN U RD THS to Can you read this?

Convergence in the Making

I also talked to a bartender who told me that the previous night a woman was in the bar looking for some of her friends and asked him if he could change the TV channel to a particular teletext page (in a lot of European countries, TV channel use the extra bandwidth to carry data. As a result, while watching the BBCyou could switch to the BBC teletext channel and read the latest news, etc… on there). The channel this woman was using allowed her to converse with several of her friends in a TV-based chat room by using her phone and an SMS gateway. True convergence in my book but the problem here is where revenues for an online operator are. Unfortunately, the only operators who will make money on this will be the phone operators who are racking up extra data minutes of usages.

Smaller, Faster, Cheaper

The good news, from a user’s point of view, though, is that those services are coming in a smaller package. A lot of the phones I saw over there would put our American phones to shame. On average, European phones are now weighing about 2.78 ounces (79 g.), a form factor of 3.9 X 1.75 X .6 inches (101.5 X 44.5 X 17 mm.), and a battery life that allows for either 150 hours of standby time or 4 hours of talk time. Of course, they come equipped with voice recognition (so you can have the number dial based on a name you give to it), predictive text input (a new set of tools for SMS which allows the phone to predict what word you’re going to type based on your input), and are WAP ready. The most interesting thing is that they usually are priced under $200 which makes me feel that we’re overpaying in the US.

The future is now?

The new thing around that space, though, is not a smaller phone or a better way to do e-commerce but a new set of services around higher speeds of access. The first step in that direction is GPRS, which offers about 20kb per second and has been rolled out around Europe. This is seen as a way to distribute such services as music and better news on the phones. However, the real discussion is centering on UMTS which promises wireless throughputs of 2Mb per second or more. Portions of the UMTS spectrum have already been allocated in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Norway and Finland, with the rest of Europe moving quickly on allocating this space. UMTS proponents envision the use of wireless video conferencing and a better Internet experience to result from this new development.

Euro Fighting

One of the big challenge in terms of doing business in Europe is location. Because most of the European countries are too small to create an actual market for digital services, European operators usually have to provides sites in multiple languages, and support multiple currencies. As a result, European etailers tend to be in favor of the Euro, which would make their lives a little easier. However, as the currency is slowly deflating in the currency market, opposition to the Euro is growing across Europe. On September 26, Denmark is holding a vote on whether to join the Eurozone or not and this election is seen across Europe as a big test for the Euro’s power.

The reason it the Danish election is so important in Europe is that if the Danish vote fails, England’s upcoming vote will probably do so too. As a result, there is a lot of concern across Europe about this election. Many etailers I met in Copenhagen told me that they were trying to organize themselves to push for adoption and work across borders when it comes to those election. Danes I talked to told me that British conservative politicians (who are opposed to joining the Eurozone) had been lobbying in Denmark. This is a race that etailers both in Europe and the United States should pay attention to as it will most probably dictate the viability of the Euro as a currency and, if the Euro succeeds, could mean less headaches to all of us.

Going beyond Economic matters, support or lack thereof could mean either an acceleration or a slowdown for eEurope, a new initiative by the European Union to become a force in the information age by normalizing rules related to e-commerce across the difference members of the EU and offering incentives to companies that want to bring net services to the EU marketplace. Among the initiative supported under eEurope are net access in public schools and public centers, lower access costs for businesses and individuals, agreement on common specifications for a smart card infrastructure, financial support for emerging tech companies and a number of social support and government services becoming available to all via the Internet.

All and all, what eEurope would mean is that countries would work in the EU government to set up rules about the Internet. I do not need to tell anyone reading this that it would be better for those of us in the industry as we would not have to lobby several governments in order to get the proper support for our industry.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title From Scandinavia With Love. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Yes, L.A. is starting to feel that it has now has to open war on a second front as its leading industry is starting to get threatened by the Internet. The noise is nowhere near as strong as the one you can hear about music but as bandwidth continues to increase, so does the risk of movies becoming widely exchangeable on the Internet. Napster-like tools Gnutella, Freenet and Scour Exchange are the new contenders to the title. Coupled with a new compression format called DivX (not the failed DVD format but a new codec), this spells disaster for the movie industry. So let’s look at this challenge and see what can be done to face it.

For starters, expect the movie industry to sue. It’s already happening and it will end up in failure. Witness the recent case over napster. Sure the music industry won the right to eventually shut down napster but it hasn’t yet managed to shut down similar services. As a result, lawsuits against distribution of digital media have become the equivalent of a giant game of whack-a-mole: take down one company and a slew of others will pop up.

Actually, the lawsuits are only furthering the problem as they bring increased publicity to the subjects and potential users start flooding the new services in increased numbers. Napster, Gnutella, and Freenet were relatively fringe movements until the Napster trial propelled them to the front page, increasing each of those services member base an thus increasing the amount of pirated content available. Confirming the principles of Metcalfe’s Law, the value of those networks increases exponentially for every new user that is in the network and is added to the network. Hence, lawsuits are only making matters worse.

The music industry may be trying to avoid the issue but it will not go away. In the case of the movie industry, it gets worth. In the current world, copies of recent movies are relatively difficult to come by in most places. If you are in a city center like New York (where I live), you can get videos of recent releases on the street, taped by people who sneaked into the movie theater with a video camera. Generally, the video and sound quality of those second-hand productions is less than stellar and they are not worth the $5 they retail for.

However, I’ve noticed that a new phenomenon is starting to spring up: people making digital copies of movies with digital video cameras. What surprised me more than anything on this particular matter was that some of the copies I’ve seen are not made off cameras pulled into a movie theater but off actually production reels. I was recently visiting a hacker friend of mine who recently showed me a complete copy of “The Art of War”, a new movie starring Wesley Snipes which is not going into wide release until… next week! When I asked him how he had acquired it, he told me that it was available for download on IRC a couple of weeks earlier. He then went on to explain to me the nomenclature for some of those files:

• wp usually means workprint, or an exact copy from studio original production reels, as was the case of this movie.
• a screener is a movie that was taped in a movie theater with a video camera.

Generally, the files are available in a variety of formats but there has been an increase in the use of DivX, a new format that makes fairly compact high quality video files (on average, a 2 hours MPEG-encoded movie takes about 1 Gb of space, while the same movie in asf will run about 500 Mb. DivX film can offer the same quality as MPEG for about 1/10th of the size (about 100 Mb per movie).

Of course, 100 Mb is not something that you’re going to download with a regular modem but on a cable modem or DSL line, it is something you might consider. After all, if you can get a movie in less than a half-hour for free a few weeks before it is released in the movie theater, it becomes a very tempting prospect.

Coupled with the increasing distribution of P2P tools, this format makes movie pirating the next big Internet trend.

So how should the movie industry deal with this? Here are a few way to deal with it.

First, continuing the crackdown with lawsuits against companies will not work. How about starting to work with those companies in terms of identifying potential problem area. If a new film pops up, alert the service immediately instead of suing them.

However, if you are dealing with services like Gnutella and Freenet, you are not dealing with companies. In order to alleviate some of that, spread the wealth: start packaging complete clips of the film in some ad packages and flood the networks with them. In a way, this can become an extended 5–10 minutes trailer. DirectTV already does that to some extent with their pay-per-view channels: you get the first 5 minutes of a movie for free but have to pay if you want to continue watching.

The other thing to do is to cater to the fan base: seek out their input. Listen to them and see what they would want. Maybe they do want to see the movies directly off the Internet. Offer that as a potential option. Maybe a high speed website with ticketed access to the site (let’s say $5–10 for a first run movie). That might alleviate part of the user base, which will only watch the movie once anyway.

Then start cutting deals with large ISP. In the case of AOL, it seems that WB could start offering an extra “channel” for an extra fee. Think of it as a premium cable channel. Imagine offering a movie of the month package as part of AOL Extra, a new service that would include high-speed access and offer a new movie on demand every month. Look at experiments like Intertainer, which intends to become a premium service for Internet cable subscribers.

But dealing with the problem online only does not solve it completely. Provide incentives to go to the theater, as you have done in the past with DVDs. Back in the 30s and 40s, movie theaters use to offer cartoons (where do you think all that Looney Tunes came from) and news reels, all of which created the movie experience. Nowadays, going to the movies feels more like going to a place with a very big TV: you end up with the same boring concession stand and the same theater-seats in pretty much every movie theater.

However, if you see pictures of movie premieres back in the pre-war era, you are treated to lavish (and almost outrageous) movie houses that were as carefully crafted as regular theaters. Back then, the industry was trying to create an experience. Now, it’s “here’s your ticket, the theater is this way, thanks for coming”: as a movie watcher, you feel like cattle, and the magic is gone.

Some of the bigger theaters are starting to get the idea, though. For example, one theater here in New York had displays of “Titanic” artifacts, when the movie by the same name came out. How about having some props displays go along with a new release? However, those would not be accessible until after you paid your ticket.

Other possibilities include giveaways (when “The Matrix” came out, they were giving away comic books that included some extra back story) or contests (if you keep your ticket, you will be entered in a raffle to win a free trip to Hollywood or some of the props from the movie!). The winning ticket would have two codes: the first one would be the number of the ticket. The second one would be a random list of numbers and letters. Once a week, you would publish the winning number on your site. People would check out the website (and see more ads for your movies) and if someone had the winning number, they would have to enter the second key from their ticket to confirm that they have the winning ticket. At that point, they would have to enter some contact info and details on how to claim their prize. You would contact them to verify that they really are holding the ticket.

Cut out the product ads before the movie. I don’t mind seeing movie trailers when I go to the movie theater (after all, they help me form an opinion as to what I want to see next) but do I really want to see ads for cars? Does anyone? They may be a great source of revenue for the movie theater but to be frank with you, the only impression they make on me is that they are wasting my time. Maybe you can replace those 5 minutes of ads with a “making of [include upcoming movie here]” featurette. This won’t cost you much more as you are already creating those segments for DVD and premium cable channels anyway.

Those may seem like silly ideas (but who knows, they may work), but they could become a starting point for new concepts.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Wired is the first publication to test it out and there are ample benefits to the advertisers. First of all, they can track what publication has prompted someone to go to their site and second they can target readers of those pubs with different messages. Interesting concept but what’s the advantage to the customer?

Unfortunately, Digimarc’s approach is not that uncommon in our industry. Designers build sites that are beautiful eye candy requiring tons of plug-ins and then wonder why more people are not using them. The answer is quite simple: customers do not like to download plug-ins and a recent study showed that customers do not even care that much for graphics on a page.

In a reversal of what is happening in the print world, Internet consumers want text. So why do more and more sites insist on having such things as slow flash movies at their entrance? Quite simply because they do not pay attention to what their customer want. In a recent editorial on his Flash weblog Flazoom, Chris McGregor is calling on all Flash developers to focus on the customers.

At the same time, Jakob Nielsen, “the guru of web page usability”, is talking about using Customers as Designers. The message here is simple: Focus on your customers and they will focus on you.

This may sound like a rant on my part but it’s something that’s been brewing over time. Too many companies have taken their customers for granted (the “if you build it, they will come” phenomenon) and have then wondered why their projected growth was not happening. In a word: Not enough work on usability and too much focus on design.

The genesis

But in a way, this is not an unusual phenomenon. Back in the mid eighties, when desktop publishing tools became available, people at the forefront of that revolution felt the need to use most of the tools. As a result, many publications would come out with different fonts for headlines, story, sub-heads, etc… often making the newsletter or magazine almost unreadable. To a large extent, the apotheosis of this phenomenon was the rise of Wired as a publication, and their almost unreadable Mind Grenades. Yes, they were pretty to look at but they were low on content and high on graphical treatments.

Over the years, Wired has become more conservative in its layout but the damage didn’t stop in print. Taking what they had learned about badly communicating in print, Wired pushed the envelope further on the web by using a number of icons and less than obvious names for their sections. It was fine in the name of experimentation and the folks at hotwired eventually pulled back from their to create more understandable sections but many took it as the reason for creating over-bloated pages with bad navigation.

However, I have to admit that most of us back in those days were checking out Hotwired to see how far the medium could be pushed. It was exciting and since few of us had had many years of experience, we spent countless hours dissecting what was working and what wasn’t.

One step forward and one step back

Hotwired went back to a more traditional look (at least by their standards) in 1995–1996 and started organizing its content around sections that made a little more sense. In the meantime, plug-ins came out, Java came out and we all felt a need to implement the latest technologies on our sites. What we didn’t realize at the time was that while we were putting Java Tickers and 2.0 features on the sites, we were closing the door for a few more people who did not have the technology to look at our sites. With each iteration of a new browser, there was a mad race as to who would implement the latest and greatest extensions and we ended up with sites that were, for the most part, unusable by a lot of people.

This is when the split started between two schools of web page creation: the interface designers, who were arguing that the web was more like a software application and that the role of a web page was similar to that of software and should have a clean design that was transparent to the user (I remember arguing that we should never be happy when a user talked about our design because it meant he or she had noticed it) and the graphic designer group, who believed that the beauty of design was more important than its functionality.

On the interface side, people started looking at whether a site scaled back gracefully, all the way to the lynx text browser. As a result, somewhat more boring-looking pages were born but users were coming in, getting the information they wanted, and getting out.

On the designer side, people continued to look at ways to enhance the experience, adding all kinds of sounds and plug-ins to create more interactive sites. Those sites looked great but needed users to keep up with the latest technologies in order to use those features.

A middle group started looking at templatization and automatic browser identification (the smart way to do things but I didn’t realize it back then) and serving different pages based on what platform the consumer was using. Ultimately, that last group was right in that it can now go on and implement new presentation schemes offering the same content in different format.

Why this diatribe?

Ultimately, this issue is one of customer focus. Back in those days, we didn’t have many customers to cater to (the web was not as mainstream as it is now) so we were afforded the chance to make mistakes. However, now, there is little room for those mistakes and there is an established body or work (and a few corpses) to look at when making decision. Ultimately, however, it’s about the customers.

Another example

I used to love Kozmo for their quick delivery and their clean interface. Then they decided to redesign the site to create more space for them to sell other product. From the inside, I’m sure it made sense: try to sell more products to each customer coming in the door. The problem, though, is that this redesign slowed down their system to a crawl. When I was happy with Kozmo, I didn’t care much about UrbanFetch, Kozmo’s biggest competitor in New York. However, the long time it took to load a single page on Kozmo’s site convinced me to take a look at UrbanFetch. I did, their site reacted faster and I started ordering more from UrbanFetch than I do from Kozmo. Why is this relevant? Quite simply because I am now putting my dollars somewhere else because a redesign pushed Kozmo one step back. As a result, their attempt to sell me more resulted in my buying less from them. Not a good trend and I hope for them that I am more of the exception rather than the rule. But somehow, I doubt it.

Back to the end-user

I’d like to propose a somewhat radical idea: take everything your company is doing and explain, for each of those components, the benefits to your customers. For example, why is a cookie for your ad important? Answer: it allows us to better target customers, hence providing them with ads that may appeal to them and be related to what they are interested in. It’s a bit of a stretch but the customer derives value from being presented with something that is more along the lines of their interest.

So what about Digimarc?

In the case of Digimarc, who’s the end user? It’s the reader of a magazine. Why should that reader use such a technology? Because it enhances the magazine. Just keeping the technology as a way to bridge paper ads to web promotions doesn’t really enhance the customer experience but how about using it as a web to link to more info. For example, if you were a subscriber, you would get a version that allows you to delve deeper in a story. I would scan the page, it would send me to the publication’s web site, where I would find such things as links to the companies mentioned, links to other articles about the subject in this magazine’s archives, etc (furthermore, the publication can sell advertising on these online pages to advertisers that are already using the technology in the print edition)… This would add real value to the experience, truly creating a bridge between the print content and the online one. The concept is good but the implementation right now needs that kind of tweak. If you’re an advertiser using that technology, try to push the magazines to follow that concept through, hence unlocking extra value for you.

Conclusion

Of course, focusing on the customer is no guarantee of complete success but it goes a long way in taking you there. Technology is always intrusive, the question is how do we make it less so and therefore increase usage of that technology. Of course, there will always been a few people out there trying out everything new (I am one of those people) but those of us who do are already favorably predisposed toward technology. In other words, we are not the right kind of focus group. If you are a technologist or a techophiliac, you are not the right person to judge whether this will work with the mass public. Ask someone around you who doesn’t use technology as much as you do (parents, friends, people at the corner store) about how they feel about a particular concept and start aligning your thoughts with theirs. Look at what you’re doing critically (does this make sense to someone with average or low computer skills?) and focus on your customer. It’s a tough practice and it’s often a frustrating one, as you will find that what may have seemed obvious to you isn’t to other people. But the end result will be that your customers will love you for it and will keep coming back.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title It’s About the Customer. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What I came to realize is that what works for a computer does not necessarily work in a wireless environment. The main issue is input and output. A wireless Palm is great to get information but somewhat difficult to use to send out email (typing in graffiti being the biggest challenge so far) and WAP works well to get little bits and pieces of information but is limited to a set number of characters (depending on which version of WAP you’re using, you will get an allocation of between 1500 and 2000 characters). As a result, sending out something like this newsletter over WAP does not seem to make sense.

However, a new breed of services is now popping up and it could be the next big thing: connecting to the Internet by just dialing into a phone number. In order to test this out, I checked out several services: Tellme Networks, which launched last month to a barrage of publicity, and Quack, which has been quieter but is also launched. Other contender for the space (and all of those are launching “soon”) are Internet Speech, BeVocal, and 888TelSurf.

Tellme Networks

Mike McCue is no stranger to bleeding edge technology. I met Mike back in 1995, when he was running a company called Paper Software. Paper did VRML browser, at a time when VRML was not only cool but also seen as the potential future of the net. Netscape acquired his company and Mike ended up as VP of technology there. While there, he looked at the future of the Internet.

However, as many other Netscapees, Mike ended up leaving Netscape and founded a new company: Tellme Networks.

Their goal: to make the web as easily accessible as using a phone. Pulling talent from both sides of the browser war (Netscape and Microsoft), Tellme was a very secretive operations until a couple of months ago, when it announced its offering: a phone service that gives you access to news, weather, sports, stocks, movies and restaurant info.

An interesting concept but how well did it hold up? Would I be stuck in one of those horrible menus (press 1 to access news, press 2 to access stocks…) or would it be better, I wondered as I registered for the service. To my surprise, it worked very well.

There are a number of interesting features in this service. First of all is the text to speech engine, which is one of the best ones I’ve heard so far. It takes bits of information and relays them in a clear and understandable way, which I found quite amazing. The voice recognition algorithm also held up very well, clearly understanding what I was saying (for those of you who’ve heard me speak, you know I have a fairly strong French accent, which makes this all the more amazing).

But what about the selection? Well it is, in one word, adequate. Not great but not bad either. I was able to get stock quotes (an interesting feature allows you to use the touchpad to spell out a stock symbol if the service does not recognize the name of the company you gave it), grab the latest news from CNN (the only general news provider tellme offers), pick up the weather in New York, check out a movie schedule, get some restaurant info and be connected to the restaurant for reservations. Also interesting was the phonebooth, a feature that allows you to make 2 minutes phone calls anywhere in the US for free (brought to you by AT&T). All and all, I was impressed enough to save the number into my cell phone memory.

Quack

Quack offers basically the same things as tellme (with the exception of the phone booth) but requires you to set up personalization largely through the web. As a result, the service may seem a little kludgier. On the plus side, however, the voice recognition algorithm gets some points. For example, I requested stock price on Internet.com on both services. Tellme was unable to find Internet.com and asked me to enter in the stock symbol using the keypad. Quack immediately recognized the stock, gave me its symbol and, while playing ads, went on to retrieve the information. What was disappointing, however, was that their text to speech engine is not as advanced as tellme’s. The voice on the other end of the line was unmistakingly a computer when it came to particular bits of information (weather reports, stock quotes) compared to the syntax used by tellme.

Another plus for Quack is their caller-ID system: The service also recognized that my call was coming from New York and immediately gave me the weather report for that city (I had to request New York on tellme’s service).

All and all, I found very little difference between the two services, with the possible exception of Quack carrying traffic reports (which tellme did not offer when I tried it). However, since I am one of those New Yorkers without a car, traffic reports held little value for me. If I were outside of New York, I am sure that this service could be a godsend.

Looking at the future: the other contenders

Internetspeech and bevocal seem to be aimed at the same market. They both plan to offer similar services. InternetSpeech seems to go a step farther by trying to capture an audience that will be able to say a URL and get what’s on that page read to them. This could be interesting but can get kludgey as the example on their site shows. Going to Yahoo means that their service will read the links but also shows that it doesn’t know how to stop on a particular link.

However, a somewhat more promising concept is that of 888Telsurf, which plans to not only offer information but also access to an online calendar and address book as well as over the phone reading of emails. Advertising revenues will finance their service, like the others. Unfortunately, none of those services are available now nor do they have announced launch dates.

Where is it all going?

Obviously, those services do not plan to stand still. Each of them is trying to establish a beachfront as the new “portal” to the Internet. I personally believe that a lot of those will end up either being acquired or striking significant relationships with the current group of already existing portals. Ultimately, all of them will have to follow the lead of 888telsurf by offering email, address book and calendars as part of their standard package.

While they are all squarely aimed at the consumer market, I think that at least one of them will break away and start offering the technology as a software offering, allowing corporations to set up private intranets with dial in interfaces. For example, one could be able to call into the main office to get part numbers on something they are selling, or check the latest sales statistics for a particular region.

Another potential use for the technology developed here is in the Ecommerce arena. Why not use that technology to offer a call-in service for ordering. Wanna get that new book from Amazon.com? Why not call 1–800-AMAZON (or whatever their number will be) and order it via phone. This could go over the scare hurdle that some people still have about online commerce.Or at least, it will give it a new dimension.

The other thing that could help those offerings become more popular would be the integration of comparative shopping features. I can see myself in a store, looking at prices on a particular item I want to buy, then pulling out my phone to check if someone will offer the same item for less.

Either way they play it, I think that this group of companies will present the first serious challenge to WAP, unless more content providers start offering WAP-enabled content (at current time, the selection is fairly weak).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Challenging WAP?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Much like new developments in wireless platforms (mobile phones and other devices) and interactive television are now moving at a faster pace abroad than they are in the US, E-commerce is bound to become a non-US lead field if American companies don’t watch out. The reason is quite simple: legacy systems and lack of identification of variances that exist outside of the US.

Let’s take a simple example: selling in multiple countries. Because no country in Europe is sufficient to create a strong market for a particular retailer, Europeans Etailers are keeping an eye out on issues like multiple currencies and multiple language management. In the US, it’s dollars and English. In Europe, it’s pounds, deutchmarks, kroners, etc… and English, French, German, etc… That somewhat simple difference means approaching the development of systems with a different view. From the get-go, Europeans are kicking off their systems with an eye towards supra-national sales. That means being able to deal with custom taxes, rates of conversions, and multiple languages from the start.

Those are but a few of the issues they are accustomed to deal with but not the only ones. In the UK, for example, the interactive TV platforms have been rolled out and web and email access from your cell phone is more of the rule than the exception. As a result, European Etailers are developing their web based systems with an eye to other platforms. Most American systems are stuck into legacyware that ties their platform specifically to the web and will eventually have to be trashed in order to take advantage of the new platforms.

That said, American companies have a definite advantage in knowing the web VERY well. That advantage turns to disadvantage though, when they are asked to do things differently. We are now an industry that is getting more ingrained into its own frame of mind (well, this is the way other web shops do it so why should we change it). However, because non-US markets got into the game late, they had the advantage of being able to deal with more mature tools and try to go beyond anything that’s been done before. For example, I talked about Accompany.com back a few months ago, and saw it as a major development in the way people buy (Aggregation of customers for reverse auction). That message apparently also sunk in with some people in the European market and there is now a healthy competition among vendors in this market. However, in the US, it seems that by and large, this area of Ecommerce is widely ignored.

What will we do if that landscape is dominated by non-US players?

It’s now high time for American Etailers to wake up and realize that the global market is as important as the American one. After all, we’ve all been talking about one of the advantages of the Internet being that it is a global market. Let’s remember that fact and start acting as global companies instead of US-only ones. Otherwise, European companies will most likely eat our lunches.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Tech Race: Is Europe Getting Ahead?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.