Kooaba image recognition for mobile.
My name is Conrad Lisco, and this is where I keep odds and ends, things and thoughts.
I work at R/GA in the Mobile & Emerging Platforms group. I'm most interested in the intersection of technology and culture. Addicted to location-based services. Live in Chinatown and love sneakers and street art.
Opinions are my own.
AfriGadget is a website that celebrates African ingenuity and showcases amazing things created from the simplest materials. A team of bloggers and readers contribute their pictures, videos and stories from around the continent. Some of the stories are amazing and truly inspiring, even humbling.
Mag+, a joint project by Bonnier and BERG, is a digital magazine concept and represents what magazines could be like in the future. The concept focuses on the essence of story-telling -- “high-quality” writing and “stunning imagery.” As the Kindle continues to gain momentum and Apple prepares to launch some tablet-like object, this prototype is very timely.
Wired Magazine is also thinking about the future of print media, and created this iTablet concept.
There's a great op-ed column in today's NYTimes by Thomas L. Friedman, author of The World is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded. In it, Friedman describes the "Great Inflection" as the "mass diffusion of low-cost, high-powered innovation technologies plus cheap connectivity." The column goes on about how the Great Inflection coupled with the Great Recession is causing businesses to take advantage of technologies at lightening speed, making them more innovative than ever.
An inflection point is literally a point on a curve at which the curvature changes from convex to concave or vice versa. From a marketing perspective, its a moment of dramatic change, especially in the development of an industry or market. Andy Grove, Founder of Intel, says an inflection point is “an event that changes the way we think and act.” When I think of things that have changed the way we think and act, I can’t help but think about social media. It is perhaps the most disruptive technology/innovation since Al Gore invented the Internet.
Disruptive technology is a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen to describe a new technology that displaces an established technology in ways that the market does not expect. In his book, The Innovator's Dilemma, Christensen puts new technology into two categories: sustaining and disruptive. Sustaining technology relies on incremental improvements to an already established technology. Disruptive technology lacks refinement, often has performance problems because it is new, appeals to a limited audience, and may not yet have a proven practical application.
Here again, social media (in it’s most talked about form) comes to mind. Social media didn’t set out to change the world, it just happened. Just think about social media’s darling, Twitter, and it’s ascent to near-mainstream use. Sure, tens of millions of users is small by comparison to platforms like Facebook, but Twitter continues to innovate. They’re adding new services and experiences and proving its worth as a practical application, and a poster child for iterative development. What’s more, social media has matured as whole and we’re finding it more and more useful (truly useful). It has gone far beyond the mundane and is offering us great utility.
So, what about brands? Christensen argues that corporations are designed to work with sustaining technologies, not disruptive ones – that they excel at developing existing technology and have trouble capitalizing on new marketing opportunities created by “low-margin” disruptive technologies. This seems at odds with Friedman’s point about the Great Recession/Inflection, where companies seem to be capitalizing quickly and smartly. Perhaps THAT much has changed since Christensen published his book in 2007. Brands are not dismissing the value of social media as a disruptive technology. They’re acknowledging that it’s maturing, growing in size and scope and threatening the status quo. And most importantly, they’re beginning to see that it can reinforce brand goals and drive ROI.
A final thought...
Robert Pool, author of Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology, once said, “As I said in the book, [technology] is like having a Great Dane in the room. It may be friendly, but you've got to be very careful to put your breakables out of reach. Another major change in technology is the complexity...And with that complexity comes an uncertainty in how technology is going to behave. When you start to build something, you can never quite be sure how it's going to act. You have to try it and see what happens, and even after five or 10 years with a particular machine, you can't always be sure what's going to happen. So that risk, coupled with the complexity, makes technology a very different sort of creature.”
Google does it again with Google Goggles, an application for Android phones that gives you the ability to search the Web for information on the world around you – visually. Basically you snap a photo and the app analyzes the image for identifiable features. It also boasts some augmented reality functionality using the compass and GPS.
This is most definitely the future (a future) of search.
Some 19% of Americans will use their mobile devices for shopping this holiday season, according to a Deloitte survey. The number is twice as high for young consumers: 39% of those 18 to 29 say they'll use their phones to find store locations, obtain coupons and sales information and research products and prices. One-quarter of all who plan to use their phones to shop say they will make purchases on the devices.
The future of retail will be based on a host digital tools and services. But one of the biggest, most pervasive contributors will be the mobile phone. As phones get smarter and networks get faster, the opportunities for retailers to serve consumers in new ways is nearly infinite. What an exciting time.
Researchers say they have identified five skills that drive innovation: Associating: The ability to connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas from different fields. Questioning: Innovators constantly ask questions that challenge the common wisdom. They ask "why?", "why not?" and "what if?" Observing: Discovery-driven executives scrutinize common phenomena, particularly the behavior of potential customers. Experimenting: Innovative entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots. Networking: innovators go out of their way to meet people with different ideas and perspectives.
