In that vein, the acquisition by Snap of NextMind (included in our list of top brain-computer interface companies) is fascinating.

Major companies including Microsoft, Google, Lenovo, Magic Leap and others have high-end augmented reality glasses on the market, with those initially having considered consumer offerings now focusing on enterprise.

In the consumer space one of the most interesting is Snap’s Spectacles. After a big launch in 2016 the first edition flopped. Snap is still a believer; the 4th generation is now being offered to developers to create content and applications.

While Snap has a lot going on, it is extremely likely that Snap is intending to apply NextMind’s technology to its Spectacles, which would allow those wearing its glasses to control their interactions with their thoughts.

NextMind actually sent me its brain interface device a few months ago since I am considered an influencer in the brain computer interface space.

I ended up not writing about it as I personally found it very difficult to control the interface and some bugs in the software. My daughters were a lot more proficient and greatly enjoyed learning to play some games such as Breakout using thought control. 

Non-invasive brain interfaces using EEG, such as the NextMind interface, are still relatively early in their development. The next phase will come from the algorithms that recognize consistent brain wave patterns. These capabilities and the team able to take it further is what Snap wanted from NextMind.

Perhaps soon, but certainly before long, we will have smartglasses that we can control with our thoughts, even if it is in a rudimentary fashion. 

Will you buy them?

There are many reasons why retro-tech is strong, though it is hardly a new phenomenon. Vinyl record sales are at a 25-year high, 1980s arcade games are keenly sought after in the original and through software emulation, and older but simpler models of a variety of technologies are selling well.

Beyond nostalgia

Beyond the obvious aspect of nostalgia in a fast-changing world, there are a number of other perspectives.

Older technologies can have greater functionality or better performance in a variety of ways, as is arguably the case with music on vinyl.

People who use older technology can be considered to be “technology-centered“, certainly not Luddites, but appreciating technology in a form that they feel closer to.

Certainly the reduced feature set of earlier technology can be a strong draw for some, particularly older people who don’t want to keep re-learning as new devices become available. While user interface design has in general certainly improved over the years, it is easier to use technology that does less.

Choice and control

In the big picture, the rise of retro-tech is a manifestation of the increasing choices we have, ultimately on the degree to which technology shapes our lives, and indeed who we are.

At the turn of the millenium many were yet to adopt mobile phones, saying they didn’t need them. Now a majority of those recognise the utility of mobility, and own mobile phones. However they can still exert a choice, in turning away from the latest features, and only using what they need.

We will see increasing social divides between those who adopt technology to the fullest degree, and those who hold back. The use of older technology is a way of people exerting choice, and feeling in greater control of their lives. We are going to see more of this in years to come.

Image: Steve Cadman

Zuckerman began by running through the severe challenges for the news industry, going on to highlight branded content as the next source of growth for the industry. Below are a few slides from his excellent presenatation.

BCG sees branded content growing at a 21% rate over the next 5 years. I believe it is likely to grow faster than this.
Source: Boston Consulting Group

A study across four countries showed some variation between countries, but overall a strongly favorable reception from consumers. Overall they identified a 21% net increase in likelihood to purchase due to branded content, and a 20% net increase in affinity for a brand. However if consumers already have a negative perception of a brand, branded content will accentuate that perception.

I was very interested by BCG’s taxonomy of branded content, in particular identifying native advertising as a distinct subset of branded content. There is much confusion over the language used in this domain, with ‘content marketing’ being commonly used, as well as ‘sponsored content’, ‘corporate publishing’, and of course still ‘advertorials’.

As made clear in this framework, one of the key distinctions is in the platform used. Many news publishers focus on creating content for their own platforms, yet they also have the capability to create outstanding content for use on other platforms, and indeed even the brand’s dedicated platforms. The intent of the content, from product-specific marketing through to emotion-based branding, implies very different types of content.

There is no question that branded content will be a massive part of the future of media. Its scope is far beyond traditional media boundaries. Brands are rapidly developing their own capabilities in both content creation and platform development. However established media companies have exceptional capabilities to play extremely successfully in this rapidly growing space.

An article in Sydney Morning Herald today titled Beware Facebook creep, publishers warned opened by describing the new Facebook Instant Articles and went on to quote me:

But Ross Dawson, a media strategy adviser and futurist who delivered the keynote speech at the International News Media Association conference in New York last week, told Fairfax Media that publishers should be wary of becoming too reliant on Facebook.

He said news organisations needed to look at all alternatives to distributing their content, including building their own digital platforms as well as partnering with third parties.

“Facebook is offering very favourable terms and requiring no commitment from publishers to participate in Instant Articles, so there is no real downside in trying it out,” said Mr Dawson, who was Thomson Financial’s Tokyo bureau chief in the early 1990s and has worked for Merrill Lynch.

“The danger is that publishers become overly dependent on Facebook for distribution, with no guarantee that the favourable terms will continue. They can mitigate this risk by diversifying their distribution, and having clear plans on how they will shift their distribution if the Facebook deal becomes less attractive, particularly in restricting how they can distribute content on other platforms.”

In my keynote at INMA I emphasized how platform strategy must be at the heart of how news publishers shape their future. While publishers have their own platforms – sometimes including print – they must also consider carefully how they engage with others’ platforms.

In my email interview with Sydney Morning Herald I also noted:

News publishers need to look at all alternatives for distributing their content, including participating in third party platforms, and building their own platforms which encompass multiple participants.

In considering distributing content over other platforms, publishers need to look at both potential benefits and costs of participating, including the potential costs of forgoing other channels.

Publishers need to have a clear overall platform strategy, in which they choose which platforms they choose to engage with, but also establish contingency strategies for the case that things don’t work out as they hoped.

My comments at the conference were interpreted as words of caution, which is fair.

However the broader issue is that platform strategy is often about hedging your bets, making sure that you have strategic flexibility even if the landscape quickly changes, which happens often in a multi-platform world.

Seize opportunities, but also make sure your opportunity landscape continues to open up rather than closing down through too focused bets.

The opening keynote on the second day was from Steve Hills, President of Washington Post, who spoke about the state of Washington Post since its acquisition in October 2013 by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. He shared some fascinating insights that are highly relevant for any news publisher looking to create the future.

The big idea of what they are aiming to create is “A national edition optimized for mobile and for interestingness with a simple UX designed for stunning storytelling that is less work for the user to consume.” Bezos thinks it is critical to reduce ‘cognitive overhead’ for their readers.

Hills said that the Washington Post wants to be world class in two domains:
– Excellence in journalism. They need to invest more in journalism, as in a world of noise you need great storytelling. 
– Excellence in engineering. They need to think like a digital product company, as that’s the competition.

Innovation is a process, starting by identifying key trends, followed by a loop of experimentation, measurement, and analysis.

In experimentation, speed is critical. To do that they embed engineers in the business and treat them as “first class citizens”. Each development group owns their innovation program end to end. There are are no central services, and chaos and duplication of resources are OK. They aim to build technology rather than buy it, and focus on open source where possible. 

They have two tyoes of internal measures:
– Lag measures that tell them whether they have achieved their goal.
– Lead measures that tell them whether they are likely to achieve their goal. Examples include content quality, technology quality and performance, and customer complaints.

Paid content is the primary business model, the secondary oneadvertising. Commerce is not a priority, despite the link with Amazon.com. Hills said it is very difficult to be a walled garden, you have to give content for free as well as aim to convert readers to subscribers.

The newspaper is creating new lines of business, notably aiming to sell its ARC Digital Platform for Media as software as a service. The intent is to generate revenue from the platforms they develop to defray the costs of what they are doing.  They have designed ARC as a suite of tools, significantly using open source including WordPress, moving away from the concept of a monolithic CMS.

The Washington Post has done very well over the last year, with total digital traffic up 66% to 49.4 million unique viewers, and mobile up 93% over the same period, significantly ahead of their peers. In Q1 2015 its absolute year-on-year growth is the highest of any US publisher.

Washington Post has some great foundations to work from, including its brand, internal talent, and now backing by Bezos. However it is important to remember that it was on a rapid downward path and had to be sold, it is not all rosy. The path they are taking appears highly promising, and other news organizations should study their approach. 

Over 400 senior news executives from 45 countries are gathering to gain insights into the leading edge and path forward for news organizations globally.

My keynote provides a highly positive perspective on the extraordinary opportunities for the news industry. I am currently refocusing on the future of news and media, and will be sharing a lot more on this topic during this year.

For now, here are the slides to my keynote. As always, note that my slides are designed to accompany my keynote and not to stand alone, and also contain many videos that do not show in the slides below. However they may still be of interest to people who are not attending my keynote.

The next phase of development will be to enable phone users to Shazam actual objects, said Riley, such as a cereal packet in the grocery store to get more nutritional information or a DVD case at home to buy the movie soundtrack.

The capability is not new, with services such as Amazon Firefly allowing users to identify objects and buy them on Amazon, and Slyce identifying objects within a store for lookup and purchase. However Shazam’s excellent and long-standing service suggests they will execute well on object recognition and take the domain further.

There are massive implications for both retail and product design.

Design
A couple of years ago, anticipating this development, I wrote about the idea of “Shoezam“, that could recognize and order shoes on the street. I wrote:

With 3D printing and other customized manufacturing techniques, apps that allow the essence of items to be captured through images will mean that anything can be duplicated virtually at will.

What will this mean for designers?

In a world of open information flows and inexpensive manufacturing all recognized designers are already getting copied wholesale. Yet this may be miniscule compared with what is coming.

Of course recognition technologies used in the app and the manufacturing processes will not be fabulous for some time to come. Customers will only be getting an approximation of the original.

Over time the quality will improve, gradually and surely.

Yet even at the apogee of replicating technologies, there will of course be a premium for buying original designer clothes and objects, for many reasons. It will give prestige and status to have originals, people will prefer to reward designers, and there will always be some quality difference. Quality will be truly to the fore.

In-store comparative pricing
The most obvious implication of Shazam’s object recognition capabilities is simply making it easier for customers in a store to identify an app for comparative pricing.

Shopping on the street
This only slightly streamlines the process of putting in the object’s name or scanning its tag when you’re in a store. However it does allow people to identify objects – such as clothes – on the street or in places other than stores in to purchase them.

Contextual information and reputation
One of the great possibilities is gathering deeper information about a product, not necessarily from just the manufacturer. A ‘Wikipedia’ of products could bring to bear both manufacturer information and others’ data or opinions. This would be an excellent route to access aggregated consumer opinions or manufacturer reputation scores.

Accurate, easy and widespread object recognition was only a matter of time. With Shazam’s reach that is likely to be very soon.

In this shift there are certainly opportunities as well as substantial challenges for retailers, designers, and manufacturers. The landscape of buying is rapidly changing.

While it is always hard to predict consumer response to new technologies, it is safe to say that any early adopters will take to the next generation of devices with alacrity. While traditionalists will remain, certainly over time many who now choose to wear a wristwatch will replace it with a device that does far more than tell the time.

As the wearables landscape emerges there are 5 major uncertainties to consider:

How fast and far will we shift how we access information?

The rise of smartphones as an interface to information has been dramatic. It has been largely foreseeable in terms of the power of the technology available at an accessible cost, however what was less certain was people’s willingness to use a small screen to access information.

Now that wearables are in the market there are major uncertainties around the acceptance of interfaces that are a step beyond what we are used, for example using smaller screens for smartwatches, wearing glasses that are (initially) difficult to make stylish, or adopting contact lenses as an information interface.

What personal data will be captured?

We have already seen fairly wide adoption of simple fitness trackers, and these are likely to become mainstream as they are integrated into devices such as smartwatches. From there it is likely more medical data will be captured, starting from heart beat rhythms. A major uncertainty will be whether and when non-invasive blood glucose measures can be made. There are claims of being able to measure calorific and food intake, which would likely get widespread adoption, however the science is far from proven.

Another issue is the extent to which people will adopt ‘life logging’, capturing audio and possibly video throughout their lives. It will soon be easy and inexpensive, however there are major privacy issues overlaid on the uncertainty on how many people will want to do this.

How will we use wearables to augment our capabilities?

Eyeglasses and writing are old technologies that augment our capabilities. One of the most likely initial applications of wearables is acting as an ‘outbrain’ that allows us to store and access memories. The potential of wearables is to amplify our senses, for example isolating conversations in noisy bars, seeing details at a distance, or detecting ingredients in foods. Intelligent agents could also provide advice on how to deal with social situations, as in the famed play Cyrano de Bergerac.

One of the implications is that those who use next-generation wearables will have significantly greater capabilities than those who don’t, shaping work and social opportunities.

When will wearables merge with our clothes and body?

We are at an early stage of developing clothes that embed technology, with current examples including Wearable Experiment’s Alert Shirt. As technology gets more lightweight wearables such as smartwatches may migrate into our clothes, enabling us to make phone calls from the cuff of our shirt, or using our sleeve as a display. While clothes that change colours and patterns are still avant-garde, it may become commonplace for us to be able to change the look, and potentially even the cut, of our clothes with a press of a button or voice command.

Smart tattoos that act as displays or provide interactivity on our skin could be very convenient, particularly in warmer climates, though for the foreseeable these may not penetrate beyond the early technology adopter community.

How will we use wearables for communication?

A less prominent but also interesting issue is how wearables are used for communicating to those around us, for example indicating mood, openness to conversation, or our personal profiles. These can be communicated digitally to those around us, or even shown in the colours or patterns on our clothes.

It is inevitable that we will wear technology to an increasing degree, but there are still many uncertainties. It will be fascinating to see this space evolve.

This post first appeared on Social Media Week

The Australian newspaper yesterday featured an article titled Mobile exposes need for design skills, programming languages: Ross Dawson based on an interview with myself and Alan Patterson, CEO of the Australian Computer Society, which is organizing the conference.

The article begins:

The rise of mobile is absolutely shifting the nature of technology work as it becomes an important – and often primary – interface to digital worlds. Indeed, mobile technologies are changing the nature of virtually every kind of work.

Interface and user experience design has moved to the center of technology, partly due to the smaller screen sizes on mobile devices, as well as our soaring expectations of beauty. Design is the core skill and capability that makes technology useful today. This is just part of what makes technology a fundamentally creative field.

The full article is well worth a read, it goes on to cover some of my broader perspectives on the jobs of the future as well as Alan Patterson’s insights on mobile and the future of ICT work.

A conference report in NZ Doctor said that “Mr Dawson wowed delegates with examples of technology changing the way we live and work”.

The primary theme of my keynote was that power and control is shifting to the individual, an absolutely necessary shift in the world of health, and beyond.

Below are my slides. As always, my visual presentations are designed to support my keynote, not to be useful by themselves, but I share these in case they are are useful for attendees or others. The actual presentation includes quite a few embedded videos that show up as images in these slides.