We all have thought about it when watching one of those weird nature documentaries where one strange plant is completely dependent on some bizarre activity of a specific animal species and the animal needs the plant in order to survive. And you think “How could that happen? How did it get started?” Kind of like the Chicken or the Egg. Which came first?
Or a Catch-22. You should read the book Catch 22, by Joseph Heller. A character in the book, Milo Minderbinder, continuously creates Catch 22s for the other characters in the book.
You know how it goes. Your car is out of gas. You need to go buy gas. But, your car is out of gas. Or how you could prove that you are the best programmer in the world, if only someone would give you a job. But, you don’t have any experience, so no one will give you a job.
This type of Catch 22 is just as bad for large corporations as it is for you and me. The executives have to continuously make the company look better and better. Otherwise, they’ll get fired. But, the industry is changing, so they need to take risks in order to protect the company for the long term. But, taking risks costs money and they could fail. So, then they would lose their jobs. This keeps them from taking risks. Thus, the company that is the leader in the industry soon starts to fall behind the smaller, newer more nimble competitors. And then the company crashes and the executive gets fired. The perfect Catch 22.
The wireline telecom industry is a perfect example. Margins are shrinking. People are turning off their wireline services and switching to wireless. Union contracts keep expenses high. Investing in new infrastructure is risky and expensive. Delivering new services is difficult. And no one at the telcos seem to know what the ‘new’ services are anyway.
Service providers (including telcos and cable companies) find it almost impossible to innovate new services because they need the existing services to keep making money and keep them alive. Their infrastructures require that each new service be built from scratch. They focus again and again on how to keep what they have and expand slightly what they sell. That is why we have seen the triple play slowly become the quad play and then slowly become the quintuple play.
What is needed is a new player to come in and shake up the game. One that builds out a network infrastructure to meet the needs of an expanding market and allows easy convergence of new services no matter what those services are.
It will be a company that isn’t saddled with legacy expenses. Isn’t held back by old infrastructures. A company that understands the potentials of a multi-layer delivery of new, converged services based on high-speed transport that meshes with the lives of consumers not just their devices.
The legacy service providers won’t see it coming. They can’t afford to take the risk in order to compete. They can’t see how it could possibly work.
They don’t want to get fired.
David Croslin
InnovateTheFuture.com
Friday, February 27, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
The Ultimate Killer App - Lifestyle Convergence
What an interesting idea: “Calling on a Customer”. How about: “My sales territory”. Or: “Our regional reach”.
If these sound familiar to you, OK. If they sound right to you then stand up, turn toward the wall and bang your head soundly into the sheetrock until you are crying.
Why? Because, if you are still thinking in any way other than globally, you are missing out on your company’s true potential, and you SHOULD be crying.
People call it the Internet. It was originally called the ‘world wide web’. That’s what that little ‘www’ in the front of a website’s name means. But, now, even the ‘www’ is starting to be dropped. Because every site, unless it is blocked by a parent or government, is visible to EVERYONE in the entire world. We no longer need to distinguish it by using ‘www’.
I am sure you know who Stephen King, the author, is. One of the best selling authors of all time. He likes to experiment with new ways to deliver his personal content to his readers. He was one of the first with his own e-book. His own e-site. He does audio, movies and new video formats like for his story “N” (http://www.stephenking.com/n). He even has his stories now appear in comic books.
Can you guess who the largest seller is of Stephen King comic books in the world? Not Amazon. Not Barnes and Noble. It is my wife. From our home. While raising six children. She has sold in over 20 countries. She ships to soldiers in war zones. She has shipped to some places I had to look up in Wikipedia because I had no idea where they were.
My point is that she sells globally. She has a website (www.endworldcomics.com). She has never physically spoken to a single customer. They search. They find. They buy. They Pay. She ships. Nice!
The global customer is already here. Now.
The next generation of communications networks is coming, and they will have the speed and convergence needed to make service delivery transparent and to take full advantage of the global customer. It will converge lifestyles. A global suite of products will blend with individual lives. Forget about the triple play, the quad play and the quintuple play. I predict the coming of the ‘lifestyle play’.
The Lifestye Play can include any kind of services, not just communication services. Imagine: A person is traveling the world. As he travels he watches his digital content on any machine and any device. He reads e-books on his cell phone. Or maybe his cell phone reads to him through his bluetooth earpiece while sitting on a train watching the countryside fly by. In each new location he is presented with local ads for local products that fit his agenda, fit his personality, fit his lifestyle. If his train is late, his hotel reservation is changed. His tickets for the local concert are moved to a later time. Automatically. Because his service provider has a network that is integrated with his lifestyle. The network manages external influences like a concierge.
The service provider makes fees from the consumer for acting like a lifestyle firewall. The service provider also charges the advertisers. And the hotels. And the local vendors. And the content providers. Fees, fees and more fees.
Lifestyle convergence. I can’t wait. Cha-Ching.
David Croslin
InnovateTheFuture.com
If these sound familiar to you, OK. If they sound right to you then stand up, turn toward the wall and bang your head soundly into the sheetrock until you are crying.
Why? Because, if you are still thinking in any way other than globally, you are missing out on your company’s true potential, and you SHOULD be crying.
People call it the Internet. It was originally called the ‘world wide web’. That’s what that little ‘www’ in the front of a website’s name means. But, now, even the ‘www’ is starting to be dropped. Because every site, unless it is blocked by a parent or government, is visible to EVERYONE in the entire world. We no longer need to distinguish it by using ‘www’.
I am sure you know who Stephen King, the author, is. One of the best selling authors of all time. He likes to experiment with new ways to deliver his personal content to his readers. He was one of the first with his own e-book. His own e-site. He does audio, movies and new video formats like for his story “N” (http://www.stephenking.com/n). He even has his stories now appear in comic books.
Can you guess who the largest seller is of Stephen King comic books in the world? Not Amazon. Not Barnes and Noble. It is my wife. From our home. While raising six children. She has sold in over 20 countries. She ships to soldiers in war zones. She has shipped to some places I had to look up in Wikipedia because I had no idea where they were.
My point is that she sells globally. She has a website (www.endworldcomics.com). She has never physically spoken to a single customer. They search. They find. They buy. They Pay. She ships. Nice!
The global customer is already here. Now.
The next generation of communications networks is coming, and they will have the speed and convergence needed to make service delivery transparent and to take full advantage of the global customer. It will converge lifestyles. A global suite of products will blend with individual lives. Forget about the triple play, the quad play and the quintuple play. I predict the coming of the ‘lifestyle play’.
The Lifestye Play can include any kind of services, not just communication services. Imagine: A person is traveling the world. As he travels he watches his digital content on any machine and any device. He reads e-books on his cell phone. Or maybe his cell phone reads to him through his bluetooth earpiece while sitting on a train watching the countryside fly by. In each new location he is presented with local ads for local products that fit his agenda, fit his personality, fit his lifestyle. If his train is late, his hotel reservation is changed. His tickets for the local concert are moved to a later time. Automatically. Because his service provider has a network that is integrated with his lifestyle. The network manages external influences like a concierge.
The service provider makes fees from the consumer for acting like a lifestyle firewall. The service provider also charges the advertisers. And the hotels. And the local vendors. And the content providers. Fees, fees and more fees.
Lifestyle convergence. I can’t wait. Cha-Ching.
David Croslin
InnovateTheFuture.com
Sunday, February 15, 2009
The Changing Face of Communications
If you were born after 1978, you are part of the Generation Y, also known as the Millennials. I, unfortunately, am a little older than you. But, I do have a handful of kids that fall in that range, and I love watching how they communicate.
I am a hard core email user; I also Instant Message (IM) when I am on calls. But, I rarely text. I do have Blackberry thumb, but not from texting. And I have a big tendency to actually TALK to people on the phone. Millennials seem to look at communications completely differently than I do.
My daughter was whacking away on her cell phone one evening, so I asked her, “Are you IMing?”. She looked at me and said “No, I am texting”. Hmmm.
Later that night she was in AOL Instant Messenger on one of our many computers and I asked, “So, are you texting your friends?”. She again looked at me, this time seemingly a little concerned with my obvious lack of knowledge, and said “No, I am IMing”. Once again…Hmmm.
To me, if I am on a device and I am exchanging messages with someone in real time, it is always IMing. When I carry on a conversation, be it email, phone, or IM/Texting, I react to an incoming message as if I have been thumped in the head. I feel obligated to reply ASAP.
But, to the Millennials, there is a vast difference between IMing and Texting. IMing is when they are locked down in one location and people know they are there. So, like me, they feel obligated to reply fairly quickly. But, texting on a mobile device is completely different. The sender doesn’t know what the receiver is doing, where they are and even whether they have their phone. So, the receiver feels safe in not replying until they want to.
The average Millennial (at least the ones born after 1990) don’t seem to like to talk to people. They will IM like crazy with people all over the world; they will comment on blogs; they will post their life stories; they will exchange text messages to the tune of literally thousands every month. My 16 year old daughter texted over 7000 times in one month! And a 13 year old in California texted 14,528 times in one month. Assuming time out for school, meals and sleeping, that is an astounding text message every single minute of every single hour of every single day!
My teenagers have flip phones. Every time they receive a text, they flip open, reply and flip closed. Every time they send, they flip open, send and flip closed. I swear I can actually hear the hinge begging for death.
And how many minutes a month do my kids actually TALK on their cell phones? About 60 minutes per month, at least half of which is to or from their parents.
Oh, and what about email? They swear they have dozens of email addresses spread across MSN, Hotmail and all the social cites. But, they never actually read or write anything. I sent my kids a message titled “READ THIS NOW”. In the text, I offered them $20 each if they would come to me within THREE DAYS and tell me they read it. No winners! I kept my money. To make sure they were still alive, I texted them 3 minutes after sending the email. They were in school, in class. They replied within 1 minute each.
What does all this mean? It means that the types of communications are drastically shifting. That means that the types of networks that are needed are drastically shifting. The bandwidth requirements are totally different. It also means that enhancing voice based services is probably not a long term money maker.
But this isn’t the only thing that is different about the Millennials. More to come.
David Croslin
InnovateTheFuture.com
I am a hard core email user; I also Instant Message (IM) when I am on calls. But, I rarely text. I do have Blackberry thumb, but not from texting. And I have a big tendency to actually TALK to people on the phone. Millennials seem to look at communications completely differently than I do.
My daughter was whacking away on her cell phone one evening, so I asked her, “Are you IMing?”. She looked at me and said “No, I am texting”. Hmmm.
Later that night she was in AOL Instant Messenger on one of our many computers and I asked, “So, are you texting your friends?”. She again looked at me, this time seemingly a little concerned with my obvious lack of knowledge, and said “No, I am IMing”. Once again…Hmmm.
To me, if I am on a device and I am exchanging messages with someone in real time, it is always IMing. When I carry on a conversation, be it email, phone, or IM/Texting, I react to an incoming message as if I have been thumped in the head. I feel obligated to reply ASAP.
But, to the Millennials, there is a vast difference between IMing and Texting. IMing is when they are locked down in one location and people know they are there. So, like me, they feel obligated to reply fairly quickly. But, texting on a mobile device is completely different. The sender doesn’t know what the receiver is doing, where they are and even whether they have their phone. So, the receiver feels safe in not replying until they want to.
The average Millennial (at least the ones born after 1990) don’t seem to like to talk to people. They will IM like crazy with people all over the world; they will comment on blogs; they will post their life stories; they will exchange text messages to the tune of literally thousands every month. My 16 year old daughter texted over 7000 times in one month! And a 13 year old in California texted 14,528 times in one month. Assuming time out for school, meals and sleeping, that is an astounding text message every single minute of every single hour of every single day!
My teenagers have flip phones. Every time they receive a text, they flip open, reply and flip closed. Every time they send, they flip open, send and flip closed. I swear I can actually hear the hinge begging for death.
And how many minutes a month do my kids actually TALK on their cell phones? About 60 minutes per month, at least half of which is to or from their parents.
Oh, and what about email? They swear they have dozens of email addresses spread across MSN, Hotmail and all the social cites. But, they never actually read or write anything. I sent my kids a message titled “READ THIS NOW”. In the text, I offered them $20 each if they would come to me within THREE DAYS and tell me they read it. No winners! I kept my money. To make sure they were still alive, I texted them 3 minutes after sending the email. They were in school, in class. They replied within 1 minute each.
What does all this mean? It means that the types of communications are drastically shifting. That means that the types of networks that are needed are drastically shifting. The bandwidth requirements are totally different. It also means that enhancing voice based services is probably not a long term money maker.
But this isn’t the only thing that is different about the Millennials. More to come.
David Croslin
InnovateTheFuture.com
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Staggered Stream Content Delivery - Serving the Millennials
I have a lot of kids in my house. Some are young, some older. So, I can’t watch ‘adult’ content on TV or even my computer without having some little eyes and ears snooping around behind me. We watched a German movie last night called Run, Lola, Run and we watched it in German instead of English knowing that we would have to read the subtitles. But, at least our kids wouldn’t hear the bad language.
It is worse than that though. I really, and I mean REALLY, love to watch my favorite shows and actually HEAR what is being said. I’m one of those engineering people who believe that the devil is in the details. I mean, how can you watch an episode of Lost and afford to miss the 15 seconds where they talk about the sky turning purple? So, when people start talking, I pause my movie. But, I can’t pause first-run TV without recording it and coming back to it later.
Ok, so now you know how anal I can be about my TV. It’s the same as reading a book. I don’t skip every 10th page. You would never know who shot Mitch Rapp in a Flynn novel, and you would really be lost in a Stephen King novel like Lisey’s Story where they are jumping between worlds.
So, to make up for the noise, hustle and bustle, and interruptions of our world, we have already sought compromises.
In the beginning, in another galaxy, TV shows came on always at a particular time. You knew when because you looked in the TV Guide. You made yourself an appointment to sit down, be quiet and relish this hour of your favorite show. This is the traditional appointment, broadcast model. As far as content delivery is concerned, it is a continuous stream model: shows are delivered at set times, people show up and watch.
The PPV, DVR and digital download models allow consumers to shift the appointment, but it is still restrictive and doesn’t fit the new Millennial generation’s habits. The Millennials run around zipping from one thing to the next, texting this, IMing that, sharing content and blogging away. These are the young people, born after 1978. They shift from one device to another as they Twitter here and show their Facebook there. The current appointment model, even with the shifted stream of DVRs, have forced them to watch a 3 minute, compressed, Cliff Note version of their favorite shows.
The problem is that the delivery models have not shifted to match the shifts that have occurred and are still occurring within our lives. If you asked me when my favorite show Lost is on, I would have to plead ignorance. I now wait for the full season to come out on DVD, buy it and watch at my leisure. Kind of like how I read a book. I carry the book with me wherever I go, read a couple pages, put it away. If I don’t like it, I recommend it to a friend and give it to him. If I like it, I eventually finish it.
Soon, content delivery will shift into this ‘book-reading’. It will be more like what I call a ‘staggered stream delivery’. We should be able to go to a database of movies or other content and add them to our viewing library. We should be able to watch anything in our library on any device we have - be it a TV, a computer, a phone or a player in the car. And, if we don’t like it, we shouldn’t have to pay full price for it; we should be billed for the amount of content we absorb, not the fact that it is hanging around waiting for us to view it.
This type of delivery model has many advantages for service providers. The first is bandwidth management. Since content is not being bulk downloaded, the Internet won’t be buried at night when everyone downloads and steals movies and songs.
Second, controlling Digital Rights is significantly easier. Since content is being delivered in pieces to specific devices with JAVA applets managing the presentation, it is much harder for someone to steal first-run content. We can get back to studios, actors and distributors actually getting paid for all the views of their content.
Third, and most important, is the vast amounts of money to be made by service providers! Service Providers could offer first-run content initially free with an ‘amount used’ fee. So, I could put Run, Lola, Run in my online video library for free. But, there is a catch. In exchange for getting free access to it, I have to allow commercials/ads to wrap the presentation.
If you think about it for just a few minutes, you will start to do the math of how many times the staggered stream model gives a service provider the power of ads. Instead of a single commercial as is tacked on the front of many online viewings, the SP could push as many commercials as I have viewing sessions. If I watch Run, Lola, Run over a four day period with 10 different sessions on multiple devices, then there are at least 10 opportunities to wrap my session with ads.
And tailoring the ads is now totally flexible. If I am viewing content on my phone, then wrap an ad related to a store near my current physical location. If I am watching on my notebook, then dig into my most recent search terms and pop up ads relative to those. If I am watching on my TV, then show ads that fit the time of day like food at dinner time or infomercials for late night.
The consumer wins too! No disks to lose or break. No excess fees if I don’t like it. The right to watch it again for reduced or no fee. The ability to view it wherever I am on any device.
The potential is staggering! (Get it…”staggered stream”) But, it will only be possible for service providers that have the flexibility in their converged networks to manage, maintain, sell and deliver content across multiple devices.
David Croslin
InnovateTheFuture.com
It is worse than that though. I really, and I mean REALLY, love to watch my favorite shows and actually HEAR what is being said. I’m one of those engineering people who believe that the devil is in the details. I mean, how can you watch an episode of Lost and afford to miss the 15 seconds where they talk about the sky turning purple? So, when people start talking, I pause my movie. But, I can’t pause first-run TV without recording it and coming back to it later.
Ok, so now you know how anal I can be about my TV. It’s the same as reading a book. I don’t skip every 10th page. You would never know who shot Mitch Rapp in a Flynn novel, and you would really be lost in a Stephen King novel like Lisey’s Story where they are jumping between worlds.
So, to make up for the noise, hustle and bustle, and interruptions of our world, we have already sought compromises.
In the beginning, in another galaxy, TV shows came on always at a particular time. You knew when because you looked in the TV Guide. You made yourself an appointment to sit down, be quiet and relish this hour of your favorite show. This is the traditional appointment, broadcast model. As far as content delivery is concerned, it is a continuous stream model: shows are delivered at set times, people show up and watch.
The PPV, DVR and digital download models allow consumers to shift the appointment, but it is still restrictive and doesn’t fit the new Millennial generation’s habits. The Millennials run around zipping from one thing to the next, texting this, IMing that, sharing content and blogging away. These are the young people, born after 1978. They shift from one device to another as they Twitter here and show their Facebook there. The current appointment model, even with the shifted stream of DVRs, have forced them to watch a 3 minute, compressed, Cliff Note version of their favorite shows.
The problem is that the delivery models have not shifted to match the shifts that have occurred and are still occurring within our lives. If you asked me when my favorite show Lost is on, I would have to plead ignorance. I now wait for the full season to come out on DVD, buy it and watch at my leisure. Kind of like how I read a book. I carry the book with me wherever I go, read a couple pages, put it away. If I don’t like it, I recommend it to a friend and give it to him. If I like it, I eventually finish it.
Soon, content delivery will shift into this ‘book-reading’. It will be more like what I call a ‘staggered stream delivery’. We should be able to go to a database of movies or other content and add them to our viewing library. We should be able to watch anything in our library on any device we have - be it a TV, a computer, a phone or a player in the car. And, if we don’t like it, we shouldn’t have to pay full price for it; we should be billed for the amount of content we absorb, not the fact that it is hanging around waiting for us to view it.
This type of delivery model has many advantages for service providers. The first is bandwidth management. Since content is not being bulk downloaded, the Internet won’t be buried at night when everyone downloads and steals movies and songs.
Second, controlling Digital Rights is significantly easier. Since content is being delivered in pieces to specific devices with JAVA applets managing the presentation, it is much harder for someone to steal first-run content. We can get back to studios, actors and distributors actually getting paid for all the views of their content.
Third, and most important, is the vast amounts of money to be made by service providers! Service Providers could offer first-run content initially free with an ‘amount used’ fee. So, I could put Run, Lola, Run in my online video library for free. But, there is a catch. In exchange for getting free access to it, I have to allow commercials/ads to wrap the presentation.
If you think about it for just a few minutes, you will start to do the math of how many times the staggered stream model gives a service provider the power of ads. Instead of a single commercial as is tacked on the front of many online viewings, the SP could push as many commercials as I have viewing sessions. If I watch Run, Lola, Run over a four day period with 10 different sessions on multiple devices, then there are at least 10 opportunities to wrap my session with ads.
And tailoring the ads is now totally flexible. If I am viewing content on my phone, then wrap an ad related to a store near my current physical location. If I am watching on my notebook, then dig into my most recent search terms and pop up ads relative to those. If I am watching on my TV, then show ads that fit the time of day like food at dinner time or infomercials for late night.
The consumer wins too! No disks to lose or break. No excess fees if I don’t like it. The right to watch it again for reduced or no fee. The ability to view it wherever I am on any device.
The potential is staggering! (Get it…”staggered stream”) But, it will only be possible for service providers that have the flexibility in their converged networks to manage, maintain, sell and deliver content across multiple devices.
David Croslin
InnovateTheFuture.com
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