Inspiration from PICNIC 2009 in Amsterdam #PICNIC09

One great term I really can to understand at PICNIC was ‘disruptive technology’ and I realized that that’s really what really works in terms of building successful startups.
Following the sheep is such a hit and miss proposal. Thinking out of the box… opening up one’s mind to the changing landscape of convergence in media is really the key to being a successful entrepreneur.

My interpretation of Disruptive Technology is… it’s technology that turns an old economic model on it’s head and creates a new revenue model and helps change the behaviour of consumers.

Here’s some talks that really had an impact for me.

A random selection of things people have posted recently...

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Surf's up Wednesday: Google Wave update

9/29/2009 08:46:00 AM

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we'll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

1 - The mobile phone is the first personal mass media
2 - The mobile is permanently carried media
3 - The mobile is the only always-on mass media
4 - Mobile is the only mass media with a built-in payment mechanism
5 - Mobile is only media available at the point of creative inspiration
6 - Mobile is only media with accurate audience measurement
7 - Mobile captures the social context of media consumption

Some have tried to combine a few, like benefits 2 and 3, but these are certainly quite distinct and offer unique advantages. Lets look at each of the seven capabilities in more detail

Unique benefit number 1 - The mobile phone is the first personal mass media.

How personal? Wired reported in 2006 that 63% of the population will not share the phone even with their spouce. It is that personal. Never before was any mass media assumed to be private. Books and magazines are shared. Movies watched together. Radio we can have the whole family in the car listening at the same time. Records are played to a roomfull of wedding guests by the DJ. TV is watched together by the family. The internet is semi-personal, but often the PC is shared by the family or business employes. Our secretary or IT tech support (or Human Resources staff) may read through our emails. At home our parents often "snoop" what the kids do on the family PC etc. The internet is not a personal media, even if it often seems like it. But mobile. That is mine, and only mine. Nobody reads my messages or looks through my pictures. Not unless I expressly permit that. Want to start a fight in a romantic relationship? Ask suddenly to read the stored messages of your partners' phone. Storm clouds rapidly arising..

What kind of media content can we get from this? Well, the grand-daddy of mobile media is of course the world's most advanced mobile service environment (as well as the world's most advanced social networking service), Cyworld in South Korea. I could use Cyworld features to describe almost any of these benefits. But lets use only one Cyworld example here to start us off. The welcoming song (???). So inside Cyworld you have your miniroom (like your island on Second Life or your room in Habbo Hotel). In your miniroom, you can entertain your guests, who all appear in the form of their avatars (called mini-me). Very much like Second Life or Habbo Hotel. Now, the welcoming song. You can set Cyworld to play a welcoming tune to your guest(s). So when someone enters your room - and Cyworld will of course alert you on your phone that someone is there to greet you - you can be a good host to play music to your friend. As Tomi is a James Bond fan, of course if I had a room in Cyworld (and spoke Korean, ha-ha) I'd have some 007 theme music to play to you, my guest. But it goes beyond that - we can of course customize that music, selected by our guests, who gets what. Only on mobile...  And the money involved? Cyworld offers the welcoming song on a "jukebox" payment principle, every time a song is paid, your account is charged about 40 cents. They make 300,000 dollars daily on the personalization of Cyworld, and the welcoming song is one of those personalization features. (Cyworld is a case study in my latest book Digital Korea, and SK Communication CEO - parent company of Cyworld, Dr Yoo wrote the foreword)

Unique benefit number 2 - The mobile is permanently carried media.

This is so powerful. Only on mobile. Morgan Stanley reported in 2007 that 91% of mobile phone owners worldwide keep the phone within one meter (3 feet) day and night, 24 hours per day, including when we sleep at night. Yes. nine out of ten people will take the phone to the bathroom with them, sleep with the phone. It is our alarm clock. It is quite literally the last thing we look at before we go to sleep and the first thing we look at in the morning. If we leave home without our wallet, most will not go back for it. But if we leave without our phone, most will go back to retrieve the phone. Its that necessary to carry all the time.

What can we do with this, on a media dimension? Otetsudai networks in Japan tells us how to capitalize on it. They are the very short term temporary work online network, connecting people who would like to earn a bit extra through temporary work, and prospective employers who want to get very short term assistance. So a restaurant has a cook with a family crisis at home, has to leave. The restaurant's assistant cook handles the cooking, but now they need someone to assist with doing dishes. Three hours, right now. How to fix that? A newspaper ad? Way too slow. An internet ad? Probably too slow. But mobile? Otetsudai networks offers location-based info, you see immediately where the job is, and where the employee candidates are. The service offers price negotiation like eBay. Two hours to wash some windows because there was a fire in the building next door? Four hours of warehouse work because of a water leak, etc etc etc. Short term work - only because the phone is carried 24 hours a day, this kind of "less than one day" kind of short term temp work, can be efficiently connected - via the phone. Otetsudai networks? Has over 100,000 workers signed up in its first year in Tokyo and thousands of employers.

Unique benefit number 3 - The mobile is the only always-on mass media.

Yes, we can of course leave CNN on at night if we fall asleep, but 24 hour cable TV news was not intended to be consumed 24 hours in a row. Same for radio, yes it is theoretically an always-on service, but it was not assumed anyone tunes in 24 hours a day. But remember the above, we sleep with the phone. And we do not turn the phone off even when we sleep (we may turn the ringing sound off if we don't want to be interrupted at night). The Belgian study by Catholic University of Leuwen revealed that half of Belgian youth wake up at night to incoming SMS text messages, and 20% regularly do so. The only media that can reach us in our sleep, because the phone is always on. Even the very last sanctuary, the airplane cabin, is no longer safe, as dozens of airlines are now adding equipment to allow phones to connect while in flight.

Where is the media business in this? Lots of it, lots. Anywhere where you might find value in breaking news. Finance, sports, gossip, etc. A great example is NTT DoCoMo's iChannel in Japan, which uses the idle screen of the phone. In effect, this is the intelligent next generation variant of the CNN News Ticker (scrolling news headlines on the bottom of the 24 hour cable TV news on screen). But iChannel is far superior to CNN's news ticker, because we can personalize it. I am intersted in sports, yes, but not tennis, not golf, not football, not basketball. I come from Finland, so our national passions are ice hockey and Formula One car racing. That is the sports news I want. And yes, international news, finance news, technology and telecoms news. But I don't want to hear about celebrity gossip about Brittney Spears or about the currency exchange rates or how the stock markets did, etc. So my service is as fast as the fastest 24 hour news service, but tailored so well, that it suits my exact tastes. And where are the TV sets when we need them? But that mobile phone is always in our pocket or on the desk in front of us, or next to us on the sofa when we are watching the game on TV. Only on mobile can we provide a far superior news ticker service than is the best possible one on 24 hour TV news. Is there money in this? You bet.. In just 18 months from launch, NTT DoCoMo had 16% of its subscribers signed up to the paid service, that is 8 million people paying 2 dollars per month to get personalized breaking news on their phones, 24 hours a day. When you do the math, that is nearly 200 million dollars of annual revenues. Just from the idle screen of the mobile phone. (Isn't this industry like a license to print money? This is too easy, once you start to use the true benefits of the 7th Mass Media...)

Unique benefit number 4 - Mobile is the only mass media with a built-in payment mechanism.

This is perhaps the biggest key why mobile content is already far greater in value than fixed internet content, and why content owners fall in love with mobile. The money. For the first time ever, we can enable a "click-to-buy" button on a mass media, and get payments. Not just advertise to the customer but direct call to action. Actual purchase enablement. This is a power that is barely grasped outside of mobile telecoms today. And before you say "but Paypal" - yes, Paypal. On the internet there is NO inherent ability to collect payment. NONE. Only by registering to Paypal, or providing a credit card, can you make purchases. That is lame. Only 10% of all internet users have a Paypal account. This is a cumbersome work-around. Its as far, as any magazine ad which asks you to call a number with your credit card to buy whatever they are selling. But on mobile, it literally is click-to-buy. In fact, mobile is so powerful with this, that mobile payments are regularly used to collect money for other media. American Idol, Big Brother and other reality TV shows earn already billions per year from premium SMS votes. Habbo Hotel collects most of its money - the teenager users do not have credit cards - from premium SMS. Radio stations, even print media collect revenues using mobile. For a credit card you need to be of age in most markets, but any age customer can get a mobile account - remember Habbo Hotel. Even pre-paid (top-up) accounts can be used for mobile payments, no problem. But that really is only the beginning. What if you had custom content for the 7th Mass Media. Let me tell you about Flirtomatic.

UK based converged online-mobile dating/flirting service, Flirtomatic, has innovated by which they make most of their money from the mobile users. Flirtomatic will for example let you send a virtual red rose - costing 23 UK pence per rose (32 Euro cents, 45 US cents) - to your flirting target. How big is it? Out of their approx 100,000 registered users last year, Flirtomatic sold 3.5 million virtual red roses in 2007 and made 1.6 million dollars just with this digital innovation. In the process Flirtomatic became one of Britain's biggest florists as well.. Oh, its not the only thing they sell, Flirtomatic has dozens of cool dating/flirting related virtual objects and gifts and personalization.

Unique benefit number 5 - Mobile is only media available at the point of creative inspiration.

This observation of the fifth benefit came courtesy of our friend Tony Fish the famed author of Mobile Web 2.0 etc. The point is, that when we have a moment of creative inspiration, our laptop is safely tucked inside our briefcase and the digital camera is back in our home. But the cameraphone is always with us, ready to go. This is the fundamental key to citizen journalism, such as the case study of Ohmy News that Alan and I talk about in our book Communities Dominate Brands. Bloggers? Once a good mobile blogging solution is offered, most bloggers prefer to do updates and read comments by readers immediately when they happen, via mobile, rather than waiting to connect to their blogsites when they are back at their laptops and connected.

And of the money in this? Take YouTube on the internet. They would love to be able to monetize user-generated video. But SeeMeTV the more advanced mobile video service on the Three/Hutchison networks across the globe has this solution figured out. They pay one penny of royalty to the original creator of the video whenever it is viewed by someone on a 3G phone on their network. There is so much money in this, that in the UK for example, on SeeMeTV the average video creator gets paid 13 UK pounds (20 Euros, 27 US dollars) for others viewing that video. This is not a hit video. Any average user-generated video earns this much. The most popular videos earn thousands of pounds. SeeMeTV and its close clone on the O2 network, LookAtMe, have had over 32 million downloads of user-generated mobile phone videos - and have paid the original creators a total of 800,000 pounds (1.6 million dollars). If you think user-generated content and citizen journalism is the hot trend in media, then this is truly the future of mass media. Only on mobile.

Unique benefit number 6 - Mobile is only media with accurate audience measurement.

The internet gave us a false promise, that it would deliver a "segment of one" perfect audience measurements. But we have multiple accounts, corporate firewalls, shared computers, internet cafes, deliberatey falsified identities, anonymous servers, and yes, those nasty cookies, many users block them or erase them. The promise of perfect audience data on the internet turned out to be a mirage. Not so on mobile. On mobile we know every individual mobile phone subscriber uniquely and perfectly (on digital networks, ie second generation networks or newer, which are over 98% of all mobile phone accounts today. On the old analogue networks it was possible to clone phones and thus fool the network). Having a prepaid account is no way to hide. We may not know my actual name (which is pretty useless in marketing in any case) but we do know perfectly well my full digital footprint. So we know that this same phone number sent 140 SMS text messages during last Sunday's Formula One race when Kimi Raikkonen won in Barcelona; and that the same phone number has downloaded three F1 games, and uses Google and mobile blogs to an F1 blogsite, etc etc etc. AMF Ventures measured the relative performance of three media for audience identity. On TV we can only catch 1% of audience data. On the internet we can capture far more, 10% of audience data. But on mobile, we can capture 90% of audience data. Not perfect, but as near perfect that it doesn't matter. A whole order of magnitude better than on the web and in a different galaxy than Nielsen ratings on TV. In fact many media now use mobile phone data to collect real time audience data, including TV and radio. Hello? TV and radio audience measurements are so lousy, that they use mobile to get more accurate measurements of their active audiences... Time to wake up and smell the cellphone?

A good service illustrating this is our fave story of the moment, UK based free calls and free messages service provider Blyk, targeting 16-24 year old British youth, who agree to watch 6 ads per day to get their free calls and messages. They just reached their first year target of 100,000 users in only 7 months and have incredibly loyal and passionate and fanatical users. What is their grand idea? It is user-generated advertising. What? What was that? User-generated... advertising? Yes, imagine if you can, for a moment, that the recepient of the ad, can be convinced to join and co-create the ad experience. Telling the advertiser which colour I like, which supermodel I like, which rock band I like, etc. They can then tailor my ads to be more unique, more personal, more beloved, than anything on any other media. Like Alan Moore says, "you embrace what you create." If we get the advertising target audience to co-create the experience, they will fall in love with the outcome. Does it work? After six months of bombarding its user base with 6 mobile ads every day, the average RESPONSE rate (not opening rate, the response rate) is 29%. Wow. But get this - on Blyk the biggest complaint that their users have, is they want MORE of the ads. If we know exactly what you like, and we tailor our offering exactly to your tastes, you will never ever ever go back to mainstream old-fashioned media (or advertising) again. Blyk will not only change mobile advertising; they will change advertising.

Unique benefit number 7 - Mobile captures the social context of media consumption.

So here it is, the newest, the seventh benefit of the 7th mass media. It hit me a couple of weeks ago, based on something that Alan blogged about. We talked it over, and came to the conclusion that yes, this is a unique benefit. Only on mobile can we capture the social context of our consumption. Not what we consume (or when, or where) but with whom. Think of Amazon. That wonderfully powerful algorythm that gives the recommendations to us. But that is 1.0 thinking. What did individual users do. Try to find the patterns. What Amazon does not know is who we shared the book with, once we had it. Who did we call or message while we were reading the book. On mobile - and only on mobile - we can capture this social context. Not what I consumed - if I played a Formula One videogame or bought a Ferrari engine sounding ringing tone - but with whom. Did I share it with someone. Did I send messages to someone while I consumed it. Did I call someone. Did I forward a link or coupon to someone. Did I actually influence a friend of mine to ALSO buy it... WOW... THIS is the BIG IDEA. This will be huge, beyond huge, once the industry learns to capitalize on it. Only on mobile, can we accurately capture the social context.

For this I do not have a good case example yet, as this is the bleeding-edge kind of thinking. Companies such as our friends at Xtract are hard at work deploying the technology to capture the social context. Like Alan Moore says, "Social analytics is the new black gold for the 21st century." But consider this - if my network provider bothered to track my phone behaviour, it would spot a peculiar spike in my messaging traffic. On a Sunday my traffic quadruppled. Then next Sunday nothing. But two Sundays later, same pattern. A tight, two-hour period or so, when I send regularly over 100 SMS, often 150 even 200 SMS. A little bit more of analysis, and you would find that its a tight group of numbers, and those people tend to send messages back to me at about the same volume. A few from Finland, a few from the UK, someone from Poland, from Spain, from Singapore, etc. With just the slightest bit of detective work, it would be obvious, that these are clearly Formula One fans. They are watching the F1 race live on TV, and sending lots of SMS text messages about the race. Imagine the power of this insight. If you wanted to draw us into a racing car multiplayer game, or something relating to Ferrari or McLaren or Renault or Toyota, now we know not only who happened to download some F1 content (me), but my social context - most of whom have not bought a Ferrari ringing tone or an F1 racing mobile game.

The social context info is captured automatically to the network - and companies such as Xtract now are deploying solutions to map out these communities and their influencers (Alpha Users) etc. This is to data mining what blogs and YouTube and Facebook were to the internet. We go from data mining 1.0 to data mining 2.0 (like the internet went to web 2.0). Not what we do, but who we do it with. The new black gold. This will be big. And it can only be done through mobile.

So there we have it, seven unique beneifts. But this is not all. Lets look a bit at the limitations of the phone. Yes it is a powerful mass media, but it is not a mature media, it is the most complex business problem ever, and it has a vast range of its unique challenges.

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