Thursday, October 4, 2007
Bringing Up Babytech
Rachel Rosmarin, 06.19.07, 4:30 PM ET
What happens when gadget-crazy, Internet-obsessed, financially secure adults have babies? A new market is born.
U.S. parents spent $2.9 billion in 2006 on baby goods, and $337 million of that was directed at gadgets like monitors, thermometers and the like. Now a smaller, but growing, industry is leveraging the same technologies people rely upon for business and pleasure--such as Web video conferencing, wireless frequencies and digital media players--to aid in the displaying, entertaining and rearing of offspring.
Most people with an e-mail address have received at least one message containing an attached photo of a splotchy, hours-old newborn. But for some parents, that type of digital birth announcement isn't nearly enough to do their child justice. Next come the slide shows, videos, Web sites and blogs devoted to babydom.
In Pictures: High-Tech Baby Gear
''New parents are the biggest inflection point, except for the teen market, when it comes to entering the blogosphere,'' says Tina Sharkey, chief executive of Babycenter.com. ''These people finally have a story to tell for the first time, news to share that keeps changing. It's a perfect platform for photos, videos and sounds.''
To record those precious memories, parents are investing by the droves in digital cameras and high-definition digital camcorders that cost more than $1,000. But for parents who want easy access to the Web, a tiny, durable and cheap camcorder like Pure Digital's Flip camcorder might serve the purpose--it includes software that automatically publishes video to sites like Google's YouTube. ''Some people like to keep controlled access to their baby, but we live in a culture where parents think they have bragging rights,'' says Sharkey.
There's no better audience for baby bragging than friends and family. That's why many moms and dads are setting family members up with Web cam-enabled computers or stand-alone video phone systems; this way, the interactive Baby Show can be broadcast on demand.
One popular way to accomplish this is with Apple's MacBook laptops, which houses a built-in camera called iSight and operates with the company's iChat software. However, both parties in the video conference need to own a Mac for this to work. Rather than investing in a new computer, products like WorldGate's Ojo video phone accomplish the same task without a computer.
Beyond using technology as a baby syndication tool, parents want to familiarize their tots with technology beginning in the crib. Technology can be soothing--parents are creating iTunes playlists for their iPods filled with upbeat or sleep-inducing music. They place the gadgets right into the cradle or playpen with a baby speaker system for mp3 players, such as Munchkin's iCrib device. Some toy mp3 players could become teething devices, such as the pink plastic teddy bear-shaped player from Baby Bidou.
Parents who want to give their infants a very early start in computers can purchase a special keyboard for pudgy fingers, such as the Comfy EasyPC, and software designed specifically for babies younger than 2 years. Parents who compose e-mails with their babies in their arms know how eager even 6-month-olds are to touch the keyboard. This special software genre known as lapware teaches babies that patterns onscreen change when the keyboard or mouse is touched.
But none of these baby-oriented uses of technology are must-haves. The most crucial type of baby tech is the kind that keeps kids safe and parents reassured. The No. 1 baby gadget all over the world is likely the baby monitor. More than 87% of parents surveyed by Mintel International reported owning one. Sales in the baby wellness and safety product category, of which monitors, baby thermometers and other health devices are a part, increased 8% between 2004 and 2006, according to the Mintel study.
Most baby monitors sold today are wireless. Some feature special digital bandwidth technology to filter out interference from other nearby baby monitors or household appliances, but only a few are video-enabled. Many parents invest in a video baby monitor to keep an eye on sleeping babies in a room across the house, but some use video monitors or Web cams to observe nannies and babysitters at work.
There are some surprises, though: One popular video monitor model, Summer Infant's handheld monitor, recently showed an Illinois mother an unexpected video feed. On June 10, her baby monitor began displaying video from inside the NASA space shuttle Atlantis. Her baby was still safe it its crib, but the monitor was picking up a wireless video signal being broadcast from a Web site.
http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/19/baby-technology-web-tech-cx_rr_0619babytech_print.html
Six High-Tech Disruptors Ready To Hatch
Six High-Tech Disruptors Ready To Hatch
Clayton Christensen and Innosight 09.04.07, 6:00 PM ET
Oftentimes, technology is at the forefront of business disruptions. Mobile telephony, for example, has been a disruptive force for traditional wireline telecommunications providers. Silver halide photographic film is being replaced by digital photography.
Here we take a look at some promising emerging technologies. While great technology isn't enough, with the right business models, these technologies could be at the core of future disruptive change.
Is your business about to be torpedoed by a "disruptive attacker?" Click here to stay ahead of the curve with Clayton Christensen's, Strategy & Innovation newsletter.
Charging Wireless Gear Wirelessly
A physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is researching a process that would be able to charge electronic devices wirelessly, doing away with the array of various cords and chargers so many people are forced to cart around.
Professor Marin Soljacic recently released a paper, titled "Wireless non-Radiative Energy Transfer," that details how a specific magnetic field could be set up in a manner that would enable devices equipped with a special receiver to get a charge from a wireless antenna, doing away with the need to connect directly to a power source. The technology is still in its infancy and it’s unclear how expensive such a technology would be to roll out. Soljacic has begun running a series of tests at his lab.
Disruptive Sweepstakes
ePrize manages a portfolio of interactive promotions for a variety of large consumer-goods companies. Recently, the company launched a service, dubbed Caffeine, that would bring online promotions to small- and medium-sized business that up until now have largely been priced out of the sweepstakes business.
Much like Google's successful pay-per-click model, companies using Caffeine only pay when qualified customers enter their personal information. Caffeine pays for all of the sweepstakes items and handles all of the logistical and legal legwork behind the sweepstakes process. Sounding a disruptive alarm, ePrize CEO Josh Linkner told The Wall Street Journal that his company is "trying to democratize the promotions business."
A Polaroid In Your Cellphone?
A company founded by private investors who acquired some of Polaroid’s technologies during bankruptcy is trying to bring digital printing to the handheld device market. Zink has developed a special paper that can be housed in cellphones or digital cameras. When activated by heat, dye in the paper that had been colorless transforms to produce full-color images.
According to MIT’s Technology Review, a 2-by-3-inch photo could be produced in less than a minute. Zink estimates that print capability could be added to a device for about $100, while a camera and printer would cost about $200. Much like Polaroid made money on its photo cartridges--and as Procter & Gamble's Gillette famously makes loads of cash on its razor blades--Zink plans to rake in profits on its special photo paper, which would retail for about $2 for 10 sheets.
The (Auto) Doctor Is In
As automobiles have become more complex, computer-based diagnostics have replaced old-fashioned, tire-kicking techniques. In response, mechanics have purchased a host of complex, electronic tools and companies like General Motors' OnStar now offer remote, onboard computer assessments.
However, few low-cost diagnostic options are available for consumers hoping to debug their car the same way that they might debug a computer. The SAM system by Smart Auto Management seeks to provide this service with an ATM-style drive-through booth that will scan and assess over 2,000 onboard diagnostic codes in the space of 10 minutes for less than $15.
The system then provides a comprehensive report that points out potential faults in each of the car systems, from engine to chassis. These systems should be appearing in Jiffy Lubes, Kwik Kar stations and selected gas stations in 2007.
Print Your House
If everything goes according to plan, one of the largest printers in the world will soon be rolling into Los Angeles this August. After it is bolted in place, the printer will construct the shell of a full-sized house in less than a week with minimal human intervention. The eventual goal: to use rapid-set concrete to print shell houses in 24 hours that require only electrical and plumbing installation.
The inventor, Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, sees multiple applications of the technology, from emergency shelter construction to low-waste civil engineering projects. If successful, such contour-crafting machines could provide a cheap, convenient way to build some of the concrete structures used in major construction projects.
Here Comes The Sun
Conventional photovoltaic cells that produce solar power are similar to the high-grade silicon semiconductors used in computer. While research has led to ever-more efficient power conversion from silicon, solar-grade silicon is expensive and relatively fragile.
That’s why researchers are pursuing next generation "thin film" solar technologies to generate power. Many thin film techniques also provide greater flexibility, enabling the manufacture of solar cells directly into glass, other building materials and even plastics and fabrics. Leading thin film technologies (including low-cost organic polymers) are nearing market viability; venture-backed companies are breaking ground on massive factories to produce them.
Look for thin film cells to start picking off market niches in which their flexibility and cost advantages outweigh their inferior power production relative to silicon.
Excerpted from a recent issue of Innovators' Insights. For more analysis from Clayton Christensen's Strategy & Innovation and Innovators' Insights. Click Here.
Clayton M. Christensen is a professor at Harvard Business School and the co-founder of Innosight LLC, a Watertown, Mass., innovation consulting company.
http://www.forbes.com/2007/08/31/christensen-emergingtech-google-pf-guru_in_cc_0904christensen_inl_print.html
Monday, October 1, 2007
IPhone: It's The Features, Stupid!
IPhone: It's The Features, Stupid!
Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak 06.22.07, 6:00 AM ET
The iPhone is the most anticipated new product launch in recent years, and the most important for Apple since the original Macintosh. Even before consumers have started camping out in front of Apple stores, branding experts--both the self-anointed and the publicly acclaimed--have trumpeted it as the dawn of a new golden era of branding.
Except research indicates the opposite. A recent study by Compete Inc. asked 680 potential iPhone shoppers this question: "How important would each of the following be on your decision to purchase an iPhone?" The results were revealing:
Price of the device: 81%
Performance of the phone: 77 %
Battery life: 76%
Overall ease of use: 75%
Design/look of device: 46%
Ease of using touch screen: 45%
Ability to synch device with music collection: 44%
Wi-fi: 37%
Ease of accessing e-mail: 37%
And, in last place: The fact that Apple makes the device: 32%
You mean, all the anticipation is about the actual, physical product and its features--and the Apple brand is at the bottom of the list, less than half as important as something as banal as "battery life"? After all, conventional marketing wisdom says that some time around 1980, consumers stopped buying products and started buying brands instead. And no brand has been more vaunted than Apple.
Could it be that great brands are the product (no pun intended) of something other than branding? In fact, they are! What's more, branding and great brands are made of altogether different stuff. Branding seeks to transcend tangible benefits, or even compensate for their absence. But great brands are built from the inside out, on tangible benefits. Branding seeks to create reality through perceptions, engendered by compelling communications.
Great brands, meanwhile, are the result of compelling products and services. The exception--a few image-driven categories such as beer, liquor or fashion--only proves the rule.
For those with a stake in selling marketing communications, branding is a convenient confusion of cause and effect. But brands such as Apple didn't become great because of good ads. Rather, the unique and differentiated propositions of the products made for good ads. Macintosh computers really are more beautiful inside and out: easier to use, and better to look at.
A brand is neither a goal nor a means, but a result of consistent delivery against a differentiating, relevant benefit. A brand is not an end in itself, and it doesn't even provide a hedge against future bets.
Case in point: Apple's flops, such as its early 1980s Lisa computer, its highly-hyped Newton PDA and the Motorola/Apple RokR iTunes phone. The Lisa was done in by a high price, the Newton by weak handwriting technology. Most recently, and most to the point, the RokR flopped because of mediocre software and hardware design. In each instance, the Apple brand was only as good as the product.
Great products speak for themselves. Not by coincidence, the iPhone ads are as straightforward as a product demo can be: a hand in front of a black background operating the device. Could Motorola or Nokia get away with this? Hardly. What sets the iPhone apart is its unique design and the promise of new features and a new standard in usability.
Those features better work--and wow--because a brand, even one with Apple's vaunted reputation, won't carry the day by itself.
Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak are partners at Reason Inc., a marketing-strategy consulting firm that works with clients in a range of categories, including media and entertainment, financial and professional services, packaged goods and the public sector.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
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A BlackBerry for Collars of All Colors
As a human being, you’re pretty much stuck with the features you had on the date of manufacture. Very few adults ever become substantially taller, faster or more artistic.
In consumer electronics, though, it’s another story. By nipping, tucking and incorporating improved technologies as they come along, companies can refine a mediocre product through successive versions until it’s a success — if they know what they’re doing.
Research in Motion (R.I.M.), maker of the BlackBerry e-mail phone, definitely knows what it’s doing. If you need proof, just look at the new BlackBerry Curve, which will be available first from Cingular/AT&T in a few weeks. The price hasn’t been announced, but $250 with contract is a good guess. (R.I.M. also announced the cameraless corporate BlackBerry 8830, which, surprisingly, works on the Verizon network in this country and also on the ordinarily incompatible G.S.M. networks overseas.)
The BlackBerry, as any corporate white-collar type can tell you, is an addictive little cellphone with a Stuart Little thumb keyboard. Its best trick is delivering e-mail from any kind of account in real time, as it arrives, without your having to fetch it. In fact, if you have Yahoo Mail or a corporate e-mail account, your BlackBerry even synchronizes your actions wirelessly. Send a reply from the BlackBerry, and you’ll find it in the Sent Mail folder back on your computer.
Lately, though, R.I.M. has been on a quest to hook the rest of us: the hordes who place just as much emphasis on making phone calls and playing music. The tiny BlackBerry Pearl, released last year in chrome and black, may be the most gorgeous smartphone ever designed, and it won legions of new noncorporate fans.
As the torn-out hair tufts from a smartphone designer’s head can attest, however, you can’t have it all; a phone can either be sleek or have a full alphabet keyboard, but not both.
The Pearl has only 14 keys to represent the entire alphabet, most labeled with two letters. Built-in software guesses at which word you want.
That system is generally successful, but it can occasionally drive you nuts. Typing in a word that’s not in its dictionary can take minutes, as I discovered the day I tried to address a message to my friend Jennifer Bowtruczyk.
The point of the new BlackBerry Curve, then, is very simple: it’s a BlackBerry Pearl with a full QWERTY keyboard. On this new model (also called the BlackBerry 8300), every letter gets its own key.
Of course, this new phone is wider than the Pearl, but it’s the smallest full-keyboard BlackBerry ever: 4.2 by 2.4 by 0.6 inches, which is shorter and thinner (but slightly wider) than the Palm Treo 700.
It’s nice that R.I.M. chose a cool name like the Curve, instead of calling its new machine the DCR-5700C or whatever. Still, Curve is a baffling name for this phone, which is no curvier than other BlackBerrys. Nor is R.I.M. throwing you a curve, as in “something totally unexpected”; the Curve is a pleasant and logical descendant of the Pearl. It even has the Pearl’s translucent central clickable trackball, which is so efficient a navigation tool that you forget all about the lack of a Treo-like touch screen.
Actually, several of the Curve’s components are improvements on its predecessor’s. The camera’s flash is much more powerful, and the photo resolution is now two megapixels (although the photos still look as if they came from a phone). You can run a new spelling checker before firing off an important message, although it doesn’t flag errors as you type them, as Word does. The volume increases automatically when you’re calling in a noisy place — an extremely obvious feature that ought to be on all phones.
The Curve’s biggest overhaul, however, has been in its multimedia features. New, attractive, graceful software is in place for playing music and showing photos and videos. You can install a microSD memory card, too — a good thing, since the built-in 64 megabytes of storage hold precious few tunes. Weirdly, you have to remove the battery to get at it.
A new piece of Windows software lets you set up a “watched” folder on your PC desktop; any videos or photos dumped into it are converted into a format that the BlackBerry likes — and are copied over to it.
Better yet, the Curve is one of the first cellphones to offer Bluetooth stereo music playback. That is, it can transmit music from your pocket, wirelessly, to a pair of lightweight Bluetooth headphones; the sound is fantastic. Some of these headsets even have microphones for making calls; when a call comes in, the music pauses automatically until you hang up.
If that all sounds a little bit too 2012 for your tastes, here’s a less radical feature: this phone has a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack. That’s the same audio jack that’s on the iPod and every other music player in existence. On the BlackBerry, it means that you can listen to music with any headphones you like.
This, too, may sound like an obvious feature, until you realize that the earphone jack on 99.99 percent of cellphones is a 2.5-millimeter jack, too small for standard headphones. (The Curve comes with wired stereo earbuds that have a microphone on the cord.)
That’s really the whole Curve story: smaller, lighter, masterly at multimedia.
The rest is pure, traditional, delightful BlackBerry. Efficiency nuts in particular will lap up the ingenious keyboard shortcuts. For example, you can press the I and O keys for “zoom in” and “zoom out” (when viewing photos); N and P stand for “next” and “previous,” T and B for “top” and “bottom,” and so on. In e-mail addresses, you can tap the Space bar to produce the @ sign instead of hunting for a special symbol. The BlackBerry puts in apostrophes automatically in “wont,” “dont,” “Im” and so on, and auto-capitalizes sentences.
There’s also a simple Ringer Off switch on the top, a screamingly obvious feature that is, bizarrely, a rarity on cellphones.
You can charge the phone with a U.S.B. cable attached to your laptop. And the e-mail program can open Word, Excel, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, PDF, JPEG and GIF attachments, which is very cool indeed.
This is a G.S.M. phone, meaning that it works in most other countries (for an additional fee, of course). It works as a speakerphone; you can dial by voice; you can assign speed-dial numbers to any key; and the ring tones are rich and polyphonic.
Unfortunately, the Curve also inherits some of the Pearl’s downsides. It can’t capture video at all. And despite the full keyboard, AT&T’s Curve can’t get onto any of the popular chat networks like AIM, MSN or Yahoo — only Google Talk and BlackBerry’s own proprietary network.
More appalling to the techie set is that while the BlackBerry’s Web browser is nicely designed (and saves you from having to type “http://www” each time), it’s slow; you wait about 10 seconds for the text of a Web page to appear, and 15 more for the graphics. That’s because this phone can connect only to Cingular/AT&T’s sleepy old Edge network, and not to the much faster one that’s already available in several big cities. There’s no Wi-Fi wireless, either.
Finally, of course, there’s the little matter of the network itself; Cingular/AT&T’s cellular coverage is not what you’d call universal. The Curve’s audio quality is fine — but only when a decent signal is available.
Still, only a curmudgeon would focus on those nits. This BlackBerry is a great phone (four hours of talk time, 17 days of standby); a fast, comfortable, responsive e-mail terminal; and a surprisingly full-fledged multimedia machine. With its super-intelligent software design, it blows away all those awkward Windows Mobile phones, like the Motorola Q and the Samsung BlackJack, and presents a tantalizing alternative to the Treo. (The choice of smartphone won’t become any easier in June, when Apple’s even slimmer iPhone is introduced with gigabytes of storage, a complete iPod system and a huge full-length screen — but no physical typing keys.)
All of this is good news. Because even if you can’t upgrade the components you were born with, it’s easy enough to improve upon the ones you buy.
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Get Your Free Net Phone Calls Here
The price of home phone service has dropped 30 percent since 1999. Surely, say the analysts, that trend line will eventually plummet all the way to zero. Surely, thanks to the Internet’s ability to carry your voice, landline phone calls will soon be free.
Already, dozens of calling services promise to slash your residential phone bill by exploiting the Internet. And yet nobody has yet delivered the holy grail: free calling, to any phone number, from your regular telephone. There’s always a catch.
For example, programs like Skype offer unlimited free calls — but not from your phone. You and your conversation partner have to sit at your computers wearing headsets, like nerds.
Then there are those annoyingly named VoIP services (voice over Internet protocol), like Vonage. You plug both your broadband Internet modem and your existing phone handset into an adapter box. Presto: unlimited domestic calls from your regular phone.
But they’re not free. You pay about $25 a month, and you hope that your VoIP company won’t suddenly go under, as SunRocket did last month.
If you’re still forking over $60 or $70 a month for residential phone service, here’s a guide to some newer Internet-calling options.
iCall.com. The promise: Free calls to domestic phone numbers.
The catch: Your friends pick up their phones to answer, but you still have to sit at your computer. In other words, iCall removes only half the drawbacks of Skype.
People can also call you from their phones (iCall assigns you a number, with an extension). But here again, you have to take calls at your computer, not your phone.
Jajah.com. The promise: Unlimited free calls to anyone else who’s signed up for a free Jajah account in the United States, Canada or 35 other countries. You use your regular phone. There’s no special equipment, contract, monthly fees or prepayment.
The catch: You don’t talk on your computer — but you need a Web browser to initiate calls. You begin at jajah.com — or, if you have a Treo, BlackBerry or iPhone, at mobile.jajah.com. There, you type in both your phone number and the one you’re calling.
In about 10 seconds, weird as this sounds, your phone rings: the Jajah Web site has called both of you, connecting the call from the middle. It works reliably and the voice quality is good, but having to place calls from a Web site is a hassle.
The “free calls to Jajah members” part gets a little complicated, too. The calls are free to both landlines and cellphones in the United States and Canada, but calls to overseas members are free only to landlines, and then only in 35 countries (in Europe, parts of South America, plus Australia, Israel, Japan and Taiwan and others).
When you’re not calling a Jajah member, overseas calls can be very cheap: how’s 3 cents a minute to England or China?
Calls to some other countries can still hurt, though. Afghanistan is 26 cents a minute. Greenland, 50 cents. Cuba — gulp — 86 cents.
And those are landline prices. Calls to overseas cellphones often cost five, six or seven times as much. That’s too bad, considering how many people outside the United States use only cellphones.
T-Mobile. Its new HotSpot@Home cellphones make unlimited free calls whenever you’re in a wireless hot spot — or when you’re at home, since a free home Wi-Fi router comes with the deal. Calls you place to numbers in the United States from overseas hot spots are free, too.
The catch: Your voice plan costs an additional $10 a month. Only two bare-bones phone models are available for this program, although more are on the way.
The free calls are available only in hot spots that don’t require a login in a Web browser. (The exceptions: Calls are free from any of T-Mobile’s 8,500 commercial hot spots in the United States — coffee shops and so on.)
PhoneGnome. This gets complicated, so read slowly.
PhoneGnome offers three ways to make free calls through the Internet, all of which should now sound familiar. One works just like Jajah (type in your number and the other person’s, and both your phones ring). The second method works just like Skype (wear a headset at your computer).
And the third is like VoIP: you buy a box ($100) that plugs into both your phone and your broadband modem. The PhoneGnome box, though, entails no monthly fees; you pick up your phone, cordless or not, and dial. If you’re calling someone who uses any of the three PhoneGnome plans, the call is free.
The catch: Calls to non-PhoneGnome members aren’t free. The plans are cheap: for example, $15 for unlimited domestic calls, or $6 a month for unlimited calls to your favorite 10 numbers. A recording tells you, each time you dial, whether the call will be free. But over all, PhoneGnome’s various permutations are not for the easily befuddled.
(Geek note: The PhoneGnome box is a user-friendly version of the Linksys SPA3000, beloved by techie types.)
Ooma. This September, you’ll be able to buy an Ooma box for $400. (The price will be $600 next year.) Then you can make all free calls to numbers in the United States, all the time, from your phone, without paying anything to anyone.
The Ooma box, which looks like a classy little desktop intercom, plugs into both your broadband modem and your telephone. If you have other phone extensions, you can equip each with a $40 minibox.
From then on, you just pick up the phone and dial, free and unlimited. Better yet, the Ooma box gives you a free second line (though not a second phone number). If you’re on one call when another comes in, the other phones in your house ring so someone else can answer. (You hear the traditional call-waiting beep in your ear.) Or someone else in the house can lift another receiver to place a second call.
The box also serves as an answering machine; in fact, through the box’s speakerphone, you can hear messages as they’re being left. You can also check your messages on a Web site.
The Ooma system is diabolically clever — and crazily ambitious. It exploits the practice in this country that local calls (usually within a 12-mile radius) are always free, even with basic phone service. When you call long-distance, your Ooma box connects over the Internet to another Ooma box in the destination city belonging to a total stranger. That person is never aware of it and neither are you, but that Ooma box places a landline call for the final, local leg of the call. Behind the scenes, in other words, Ooma relies on a vast peer-to-peer network.
Ooma says it needs only 1,500 boxes in place to cover 95 percent of the population in the United States — which is why it’s giving away that many boxes this summer (by invitation only).
The catch: The Ooma scheme relies on people who retain basic phone service, which, with taxes and fees, costs $24 to $28 a month these days. If you keep your home line, you keep the traditional 911 emergency service, for example, and you have a backup system if the power goes out. (Of course, a cellphone presumably serves the same purposes.)
If you cancel your home phone service entirely, Ooma still works, but you’ll be issued a new phone number by Ooma.
Ooma calls exhibit a fractional-second delay, much as cellphone calls and VoIP calls often do. It doesn’t stop you from getting your message across, but it can throw off your comic timing.
Finally, if Ooma goes out of business, the whole house of cards collapses. All of those $400 boxes stop working. Fortunately, if you have a $60 monthly phone bill now, you’ll have recouped your Ooma expenditure in seven months. Besides, Ooma has $27 million in venture capital, not to mention the actor, Ashton Kutcher, as the company’s creative director. (Ashton Kutcher? How could anything possibly go wrong?)
Of all of these approaches to free Internet calling, T-Mobile, Jajah and Ooma come the closest to delivering the holy grail: free calling, to any phone number, from regular phones. Even they are not entirely without drawbacks — but they’re certainly enough to keep phone company executives awake at night.
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Even in a Virtual World, ‘Stuff’ Matters
IT’S payday for Janine Hawkins. Not in the real world, where she is a student at Nipissing University in Ontario, but in the online world of Second Life, where she is managing editor of the fashion magazine Second Style.
Ms. Hawkins, who in Second Life takes on the persona of Iris Ophelia, a beauty with flowing hair and flawless skin, keeps a list of things she wants to buy: the latest outfits from the virtual fashion mecca Last Call, a new hairstyle from a Japanese designer, slouchy boots. When she receives her monthly salary in Linden dollars, the currency of Second Life, she spends up to four hours shopping, clicking and buying. After a year and a half, she owns 31,540 items.
Living it up in Second Life is a break from Ms. Hawkins’s part-time job as a French translator, but she works just as hard in the virtual world.
Last month, she earned 40,000 Linden dollars ($150), for interviewing designers, arranging fashion shoots and writing about trends in Second Life, called SL by frequent users. “I usually spend what I earn,” Ms. Hawkins said. “It’s entertaining.”
It also says a lot about the real world, especially when it comes to earning and spending money.
When people are given the opportunity to create a fantasy world, they can and do defy the laws of gravity (you can fly in Second Life), but not of economics or human nature. Players in this digital, global game don’t have to work, but many do. They don’t need to change clothes, fix their hair, or buy and furnish a home, but many do. They don’t need to have drinks in their hands at the virtual bar, but they buy cocktails anyway, just to look right, to feel comfortable.
Second Life residents find ways to make money so they can spend it to do things, look impressive, and get more stuff, even if it’s made only of pixels. In a place where people should never have to clean out their closets, some end up devoting hours to organizing their things, purging, even holding yard sales.
“Why can’t we break away from a consumerist, appearance-oriented culture?” said Nick Yee, who has studied the sociology of virtual worlds and recently received a doctorate in communication from Stanford. “What does Second Life say about us, that we trade our consumerist-oriented culture for one that’s even worse?”
Second Life, a three-dimensional world built by hundreds of thousands of users over the Internet, is also being used for education, meetings, marketing and more obvious game playing. It’s a wide world with a lot going on, in multiple languages, and it can be real-life enhancing for populations who are isolated for physical, mental, or geographic reasons. But as a petri dish for examining what makes many of us tick, Second Life reveals just how deep-seated the drive is to fit in, look good and get ahead in a material world.
Many residents have lived the American dream in Second Life, and built Linden-dollar fortunes through entrepreneurship. In what could have been an ideal world, however, or one where anyone could be a Harry Potter, Second Life has an up-and-down economy, mortgage payments, risky investments, land barons, evictions, designer rip-offs, scams and squatters. Not to mention peer pressure.
“Second Life is about getting the better clothes and the bigger build and the reputation as a better builder,” said Julian Dibbell, author of “Play Money,” which chronicles his year of trying to make a living by trading virtual goods in online games. “The basic activity is still the keeping up with the Joneses, or getting ahead of the Joneses, rat race game.”
TO have a Second Life, one needs a computer, the Second Life software, and a high-speed Internet connection. You use a credit card to buy Lindens, and Lindens earned during the game can be converted back into dollars via online currency exchanges. Players start by choosing one of the standard characters, called an avatar, and can roam the world by flying or “teleporting” (click and go). Nobody can go hungry, there is no actual need for warmer clothes or shelter, and there is much to do without buying Lindens.
But walking around in a standard avatar, when there are so many ways to buy a better appearance, is like showing up for the first day of school dressed differently than all the other kids. You stick out as different, as an SL “newbie.”
“It’s hard not to fall into that,” Mr. Yee said. “There are shops everywhere, so it’s easy to say, ‘Oh, O.K., I guess I’ll get a better pair of jeans.’ ”
Second Life was started in 2003 by a Silicon Valley techie inspired by a sci-fi novel, “Snow Crash.” It is owned by a private company called Linden Lab. The original idea of the game was to unleash creativity. Residents don’t have to wear the latest fashions; they don’t have to look — or act — human at all. They can take any animal, robotic, or inanimate form they want.
And while there is a minority population of animal characters, and wearing butterfly wings is currently in vogue for humans, for the most part the population is young women bursting from their blouses and young men bulging with muscle. (Underneath the clothes are cyber genitalia, sold separately. Mark Wallace, a blogger who writes about Second Life, explained that the parts are not fashion accessories but rather “a functional appliance” for, ahem, entertainment purposes.)
While a frequent criticism of Second Life is that spaces are often empty and that there’s “nothing to do,” a crowd can be found at the mall, just as it can in suburbia. For example, the Xcite! store, which sells body parts, is “always crawling with avatars,” said Mr. Wallace, co-author of a forthcoming book, “The Second Life Herald.” Fashion is big business in Second Life, along with entertainment and land development.
Big corporations like Toyota have set up islands in Second Life for marketing. Calvin Klein came up with a virtual perfume. Kraft set up a grocery store featuring its new products. But those destinations are not popular.
“These brands that have this real-world cachet are meaningless in Second Life, so most are ignored,” said Wagner James Au, who blogs and writes books about Second Life. “Just showing up and announcing ‘We’re Calvin Klein’ isn’t going to get you anywhere.” American Apparel closed its virtual clothing shop, and Wells Fargo abandoned the island it had set up to teach about personal finance.
Second Life exclusives do exist: A magic wand was a hot item at one point, and the sex bed is currently in demand. (“If you lie on it with more than one avatar, it’s like you’re in a porn movie,” Mr. Au explained.)
But the more mundane items are what really drive the economy: clothes, gadgetry, night life, real estate. “People buy these huge McMansions in Second Life that are just as ugly as any McMansions in real life, because to them that is what’s status-y,” Mr. Wallace said. “It’s not as easy as we think to let our imaginations run wild, in Second Life or in real life.”
Mitch Ratcliffe, an entrepreneur and blogger, was an early resident of Second Life and built a house with a lake. But he was soon disillusioned with the upkeep involved with owning the property. “I don’t see why I would want my second life to be about the same striving and profit that my first is,” Mr. Ratcliffe wrote in a blog entry about his Second Life adventures. He eventually reincarnated himself as Homeless Hermes.
“People come by, see the user name and tell me how sorry they are that I don’t have a home. Why?” he wrote. “It’s very middle class, very staid in the way economic stigma is attached to a failure to get to work.” In the meantime, Homeless Hermes took up buying and selling virtual land and has pocketed the equivalent of $800.
Land is the biggest-ticket item in Second Life, with Linden Lab selling islands for $1,675, plus a $295-a-month maintenance charge.) Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, a Russian translator in New York who in Second Life is a landlord known as Prokofy Neva, got into the game three years ago and now owns hundreds of apartment buildings, houses and stores that she rents out to about 1,500 tenants who pay from $1.50 a month to $150 a month. She takes several hundred dollars a month out of the game to pay real-world bills. Prokofy Neva herself does not have a house. “If I did, I would rent it out,” she said. “Why not make money from it?”
She has, however, turned over virtual acreage for a land preserve and public use. She and an architect friend were initially entranced by the idea of creating artistic homes that could defy gravity, but they discovered that there wasn’t demand for that in Second Life.
“The average person wants a ranch house or a beach house,” she said. “They don’t want even Frank Lloyd Wright.” (She added, “These people are my customers, so I respect that.”)
Some residents do wear grunge clothing — itself a status symbol in Second Life because of the difficulty of replicating ripped and stained clothing digitally. But the largest slice of the population follows the crowd, and the crowd is not dressing up as dragons.
“The money is in the real-looking stuff: making skins with red lips and smoky eyes, and stiletto boots,” said Ms. Hawkins, the Second Life fashion writer. First comes something popular, then the knockoffs. Soon everyone has one. “People go for similar looks and similar things,” she said.
In Ms. Hawkins’s online closet are avatars that let her move around as a rubber ducky or as a fruit salad encased in gelatin. But those identities are novelty items that usually stay on the shelf. When she goes out in virtual public, Ms. Hawkins usually takes the form of Ms. Ophelia, who has more than 250 pairs of shoes.
Items are real-world cheap — an outfit usually costs $2 to $5 — but they can add up quickly. “It’s so easy to buy something, you don’t realize how much you’re spending,” said Carrie Mandel, a homemaker and mother in Chicago who spends two work days a week as well as evenings and weekends on her Second Life business, selling pets.
One coveted status symbol in Second Life is a souped-up muscle car called the Dominus Shadow. It currently costs 2,368 Linden dollars, about $9 at the current rate of 268 Linden per dollar. Many players pay that much every month for premium membership that lets them own land, and all are sitting at computers with high-speed Internet access. So why don’t more people treat themselves to the prized possession of a Dominus?
“It’s expensive in-world,” said Daniel Terdiman, author of the forthcoming book “Entrepreneur’s Guide to Second Life.” “You don’t think of how much things cost in real dollars; you think in Linden dollars. When something is expensive, even though it comes out to a few dollars, a lot of people don’t want to spend that much money.”
Although Linden dollars can be bought with a credit card, there is evidence that the in-world economy is self-sustaining, with many players compelled to earn a living in-world and live on a budget.
Surprisingly, many take on low-paying jobs. They work as nightclub bouncers, hostesses, sales clerks and exotic dancers for typical wages of 50 to 150 Linden dollars an hour, the equivalent of 19 to 56 cents. A recent classified ad stated: “I am looking for a good job in SL. I am sick of working off just tips.” This job seeker listed potential occupations as landscaper, personal assistant, actor, waitress and talent scout.
Second Life players are evidently discovering what inheritors have struggled with for generations: It’s not as much fun to spend money you haven’t earned. Apparently, despite the common lottery-winning fantasies, all play and no work is a dull game, after all.
“People don’t take jobs just for the money,” said Dan Siciliano, who teaches finance at Stanford Law School and has studied the economies of virtual worlds. “They do it to feel important and be rewarded.”
And to buy more things. “A lot of exotic dancers want to become models, so they can earn more money to buy more clothes,” Ms. Hawkins said.
It’s not just vanity that drives people to dress up in Second Life. It’s also seen as good for business. Ms. Fitzpatrick, the landlady, says she doesn’t really care about how her avatar looks. But she cares about what prospective tenants think. “I felt I had to go, finally, and buy the hair and the suit,” she said, “or my customers might think I’m too weird.”
Appearances count in Second Life’s financial world, too. Banks and stock exchanges are housed in huge, formal structures draped in marble and glass. “People in the banking industry wear shiny silver suits and are absurdly tall and have hired a couple people to walk behind them in black suits with ear bugs and shoulder holsters,” said Benjamin Duranske, a lawyer who blogs about legal issues related to the virtual world.
THE stock exchanges and banks in SL are imposing, but they are unregulated and unmonitored. Investors fed Linden dollars into savings accounts at Ginko Financial bank, hoping to earn the promised double-digit interest. Some did, but in July there was a run on the bank and panic spread as Ginko A.T.M.’s eventually stopped giving depositors their money back. The bank has since vanished. With no official law and order in Second Life, investors have little recourse.
Robert J. Bloomfield, a behavioral economist at Cornell University, studies investor behavior in the real world and recently became interested in how investors behave similarly in Second Life. “We know the little guy makes lots of dumb mistakes,” Professor Bloomfield said. “They tend to be overly impressed by the trappings of success. We see that magnified in Second Life.”
Some Second Life residents are calling for in-world regulatory agencies — the user-run Second Life Exchange Commission has just begun operating — and some expect real-world institutions to become involved as the Second Life population and economy expands. “It’s a horse race as to whether the I.R.S. or S.E.C. will start noticing first,” Mr. Duranske said.
Retail Week
November 10, 2006
Woman's touch
BYLINE: By James Thompson
LENGTH: 1533 words
HIGHLIGHT: DIY and electricals retailers have done little to target women in the past, but now several are changing tactics to woo these prime spenders
Given that women make up half the population, some retail sectors have done a poor job of targeting them so far. In particular, some DIY and electricals groups have, until recently, clung to the comfort blanket that is their core customer base, notably male technology geeks and tradesmen.
All that is now changing and fast. DSGi-owned PC World unveiled its remodelled store in Colchester last week (Retail Week, November 3), designed to extend its reach beyond its traditional male customer base.
In the home and DIY sector, following in the footsteps of rival Homebase, B&Q has made a big effort over the past few years to extend its offer to include more aspirational home improvement products and soften store layouts.
But what is driving such shifts in strategy and what are the crucial ingredients for making stores a magnet for women and families?
For myriad reasons, women have made massive strides towards financial and social independence over the past 30 years. Verdict chairman Richard Hyman says: "More women are living by themselves, more marriages end in separation, women are more confident than they used to be and they have some financial independence."
For instance, women hold 40 per cent of professional jobs now, compared with 10 per cent in the 1970s, according to Equal Opportunities Commission's 2006 data.
In fact, Hyman is surprised that more retailers have not tied their colours to the female mast sooner. "Women are much more important in the retail market than men. So what has taken these retailers so long? The fact is that retailing is really about women. They are the prime movers, they spend more and make the major decisions," says Hyman. The fact that many women go shopping with their children and influence their partners' purchases is another important reason why they are the champions of retail expenditure.
When targeting the female purse, retailers in traditionally male sectors need to refine their entire strategy, including product offer, point-of-sale merchandising, store layout - for example, by providing space for prams around tills - and installation services. "They have to understand what drives female demand, as opposed to male demand. Women are less interested in gadgets per se - they are interested in what they do for them," Hyman points out.
Tim Greenhalgh, managing creative director at design consultancy Fitch, agrees that women place a great deal of value on product explanation. Retailers, therefore, have to shift their focus from "killer product categories towards killer explanations", he says. "The first thing a woman says is, 'What can it do for me?'. The first thing a bloke says is, 'How many megahertz does it have'?" argues Greenhalgh.
Alongside explanations, providing female customers with a vision of how products fit into the home is equally important. This is all about capturing the home-improvement zeitgeist, where people increasingly see their home as presenting an image of themselves to the outside world.
Arguably, this is far easier for DIY merchants to achieve than electricals retailers, because all-singing, all-dancing showrooms give customers an instant snapshot of the possibilities. For instance, B&Q is revamping its 114 Warehouse stores over the next few years.
B&Q marketing and customer proposition director Jo Kenrick says: "These revamps include more shop-within-a-shop sections in areas such as lighting, flooring, paint, kitchens and bathrooms. Within kitchen and bathrooms, we are also increasing the number of styled room settings. The decorative areas of the stores have less industrial racking, so the merchandise can be displayed in a softer setting."
In the electricals sector, the same showroom principles are being adopted by retailers. "A lot of men want as many wires as possible, so it all looks as high-tech as possible. But women want to know, 'Does it look good in my lounge?'," says Hyman.
For instance, PC World has tapped into this opportunity by opening its Room of the Future in a few bigger stores, including Colchester and London's Tottenham Court Road. The room showcases the latest gadgets and gizmos in situ, emphasising their uses and benefits, rather than technical features.
In addition, PC World provides a service where experts visit a customer's home and give them a quote for installation. PC World commercial director Bryan Magrath says: "We can demonstrate the opportunities, visit you and come back with a proposal for your home, including cutting holes in the wall for TV recesses or cable channelling and things like that."
Behind such initiatives is the convergence of technology towards integrated home entertainment systems. With mature technology at their fingertips, PC World's customers can use a single console to control an integrated home-entertainment system, which might include a PC, stereo, TV and DVD player.
PC World has not neglected its Colchester store's layout either. It has created an experience area in the centre where customers can test a variety of products, such as computer games that can be sampled sitting in large game pods. This central area is "more experiential than sales driven", says Magrath.
Rival electricals retailer Comet has also introduced a format in three stores this year that is less "clinical and functional", according to Comet category manager for portable technology Ewan Pinder. "We have the new destination format, which is a dramatic change in the way we lay out technology. It is much less clinical, functional and warehouse-like," he says. The Comet stores feature more yellow and purple colours.
On a more basic level, Visual Thinking brand director Karl McKeever claims all traditionally male-oriented retailers could learn a thing or two from the clothing sector. "Look and feel is incredibly important and to try to imitate some of the successful strategies from the fashion sector, such as more space around the point of sale and flagging up promotions clearly, not just to communicate price," he says. Other simple refinements include decluttering stores and lowering fixtures.
US electricals giant Best Buy is seen as a textbook example of how a retailer can plug into the needs of female shoppers and families. Speaking at the Marketing Society's Retail Forum last month, Best Buy executive vice-president John Walden said: "Customers want time back and respect. We introduced personal shopping assistants, largely women, who walk through the store and talk in a language people understand. We also created children's areas."
While changing store layouts has been a gradual evolution, a revolution is under way in services provided by DIY and electricals retailers. This summer, B&Q started a low-key trial of home installation services, for products including bathrooms and kitchens, from two stores in London in an effort to tap into the growing Do It For Me market. The retailer also runs DIY tutorials in its largest stores, including some dedicated classes for women. They comprise hour-long tutorials on subjects such as how to change a tap or do basic plumbing.
On a much grander scale, DSGi launched its Tech Guys service in September, designed to replicate the success of Best Buy's Geek Squad service, which is itself due to launch in the UK in January, in partnership with Carphone Warehouse.
The Tech Guys provides remote and in-store advice and repair services for customers, irrespective of where they bought the equipment. Significantly, PC World has made a big play of locating its sizeable Tech Guys advice desk and Collect@Store service at the entrance of its larger stores.
Changing female customers' perception can also be a longer-term project for retailers. To try to achieve this goal, Comet introduced Gadget Angels in June - an all-female team of experts who will spearhead a campaign to break down female techno-fear. The project, named after the hit 1970s series and movie Charlie's Angels, launched following a study of 1,000 customers. Pinder says: "It is about communicating technology to women who like technology and yet who are a bit frightened of technology." The Gadget Angels' material is also used in stores to educate staff and associated ads and features will run in newspapers and magazines, including Heat and Metro, ahead of Christmas.
It is fair to say that most DIY and electricals retailers have been slow out of the blocks in targeting women, but all the signs suggest that times are changing. Kenrick is fully aware of the female goldmine. She says: "The UK home improvement market is becoming more female influenced. We estimate that 70 per cent to 80 per cent of home improvement projects are initiated by the female partner. Furthermore, the rise in numbers of women living on their own has acted as a catalyst for many to take on DIY jobs that were often seen as jobs for the boys."
Pinder adds: "I think it is a huge opportunity. Women want technology and they like technology. We believe we have to adapt the way we sell technology to the female market."
However, to really woo women into their stores, retailers may have to look at themselves. "The fact that most of the management at the so-called macho retailers is male places them at a disadvantage," warns Hyman.
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Apple Waves Its Wand at the Phone
SAN FRANCISCO
Remember the fairy godmother in “Cinderella”? She’d wave her wand and turn some homely and utilitarian object, like a pumpkin or a mouse, into something glamorous and amazing, like a carriage or fully accessorized coachman.
Evidently, she lives in some back room at Apple.
Every time Steve Jobs spies some hopelessly ugly, complex machine that cries out for the Apple touch — computers, say, or music players — he lets her out.
At the annual Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Mr. Jobs demonstrated the latest result of godmother wand-waving. He granted the wishes of millions of Apple followers and rumormongers by turning the ordinary cellphone into ... the iPhone.
At the moment, the iPhone is in an advanced prototype stage, which I was allowed to play with for only an hour; the finished product won’t be available in the United States until June, or in Europe until the fourth quarter. So this column is a preview, not a review.
Already, though, one thing is clear: the name iPhone may be doing Apple a disservice. This machine is so packed with possibilities that the cellphone may actually be the least interesting part.
As Mr. Jobs pointed out in his keynote presentation, the iPhone is at least three products merged into one: a phone, a wide-screen iPod and a wireless, touch-screen Internet communicator. That helps to explain its price: $499 or $599 (with four or eight gigabytes of storage).
As you’d expect of Apple, the iPhone is gorgeous. Its face is shiny black, rimmed by mirror-finish stainless steel. The back is textured aluminum, interrupted only by the lens of a two-megapixel camera and a mirrored Apple logo. The phone is slightly taller and wider than a Palm Treo, but much thinner (4.5 by 2.4 by 0.46 inches).
You won’t complain about too many buttons on this phone; it comes very close to having none at all. The front is dominated by a touch screen (320 by 480 pixels) operated by finger alone. The only physical buttons, in fact, are volume up/down, ringer on/off (hurrah!), sleep/wake and, beneath the screen, a Home button.
The iPhone’s beauty alone would be enough to prompt certain members of the iPod cult to dig for their credit cards. But its Mac OS X-based software makes it not so much a smartphone as something out of “Minority Report.”
Take the iPod features, for example. As on any iPod, scrolling through lists of songs and albums is a blast — but there’s no scroll wheel. Instead, you flick your finger on the glass to send the list scrolling freely, according to the speed of your flick. The scrolling spins slowly to a stop, as though by its own inertia. The effect is both spectacular and practical, because as the scrolling slows, you can see where you are before flicking again if necessary.
The same flicking lets you flip through photos or album covers as though they’re on a 3-D rack. All of this — photos, music collection, address book, podcasts, videos and so on — are synched to the iPhone from Apple’s iTunes software running on a Mac or Windows PC, courtesy of the charging/synching dock that is included.
Movies are especially satisfying on this iPod. That’s partly because of the wide-screen orientation, and partly because the screen is so much bigger (3.5 inches) and sharper (160 pixels per inch) than those on other iPods.
The iPhone can get onto the Internet in two ways: using Wi-Fi, at least when you’re in the presence of a wireless hot spot, or using Cingular’s disappointingly slow Edge network.
That’s right: the iPhone’s exclusive carrier will be Cingular. (Nor is the phone “unlocked”; you can’t use it with any other carrier.) At least it’s a quad-band G.S.M. phone, so it will work overseas.
You can also conduct text-message conversations that appear as a continuous chat thread. And like any smartphone, the iPhone can download e-mail from standard accounts at regular intervals. In fact, Yahoo will offer free “push” e-mail — that is, messages will arrive on the iPhone in real time, just as on a corporate BlackBerry.
The iPhone is not, however, a BlackBerry killer. The absence of a physical keyboard makes it versatile, but also makes typing tedious.
Instead of raised alphabet keys, you get virtual keys on the screen. They’re fairly small, and of course you can’t feel them. So typing is slow going, especially for the fat of finger.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be especially precise. Even if you hit the wrong “keys” accidentally, the super-smart software considers adjacent keys — and corrects your typos automatically. If what you actually managed to type is “wrclme,” the software proposes “welcome.” You tap the Space bar to accept the fix. It works beautifully.
The real magic, however, awaits when you browse the Web. You get to see the entire Web page on the iPhone’s screen, although with tiny type. To enlarge it, you can double-tap any spot; then you drag your finger to scroll in any direction.
Alternatively, you can use a brand-new feature that Apple calls multitouch: you slide your thumb and forefinger together (like pinching) or apart on the glass. As you do so, the Web page before you grows or shrinks in real time, as though it’s printed on a sheet of latex. It works with photos, too, and it’s wicked cool.
All of this is cooked up with Apple’s traditional secret sauce of simplicity, intelligence and whimsy. It’s these ingredients, not the features themselves, that inspire such technolust in Applephiles.
For example, voice mail messages appear in a list, like an e-mail in-box; you can listen to them in any order. A proximity sensor turns off the touch screen when the phone is up to your ear, saving power and avoiding accidental touches. The screen image rotates when you turn the phone to see, for example, a landscape-orientation photo. A light sensor brightens the screen in bright light. Finger smudges and streaks are inevitable, but are visible only when the screen is turned off. (They disappear with a wipe on your sleeve.)
The speaker is on the bottom edge, rather than the back, where it would be muffled when the phone is set down. The optional tiny Bluetooth wireless earpiece has its own little charging hole in the iPhone’s charging/synching dock — and it snaps in magnetically for convenience. Apple says that this earpiece “pairs” with the iPhone automatically, sparing you the usual ritual of pressing buttons in a baffling sequence.
Nonetheless, the iPhone won’t be the smartphone for everybody. You may well consider the Cingular exclusivity or the price a deal-breaker. You may also be disappointed that the iPhone can’t open Microsoft Office documents, as the Treo can (although Apple says it can open PDF documents), or wonder why it’s not a 3G cellphone that can exploit higher-speed, next-generation cellular towers as they arrive in the coming years. And you may worry about putting all your digital eggs into one losable, droppable, glass-front basket.
Note, too, that the software is still unfinished, and many questions are still unanswered. Will you be able to turn your own songs into ring tones? Will there be a voice recorder? Will the camera record video? Can you use Skype to make free Internet calls? Will the battery really last for five hours of talking, video and Web browsing (or 16 hours of audio playback)? Will you someday be able to buy songs and videos from the iTunes Store right on the phone?
At this point, Apple doesn’t yet have the answers, or isn’t revealing them.
What it does have, however, is a real shot at redefining the cellphone. How many millions of people are, at this moment, carrying around both an iPod and a cellphone? How many would love to carry a single combo device that imposes no feature or design penalties? Considering that the cellphone is many people’s most personal gadget, how many would leap at the chance to replace their current awkward models with something with the class, the looks and the effortlessness of an iPod?
Apple has done its part: it has packed more features into less space, and with more elegance, than anyone before it. The rest is up to the godmother.
January 21, 2006 Saturday
Does it pass the wife check?
BYLINE: By Jen Haberkorn, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
SECTION: PAGE ONE; Pg. A01
LENGTH: 621 words
Eyeing an intricate DVD player or clunky home theater speakers? Better check with your spouse first.
The idea of checking with a mate before purchasing a big-ticket item may not be a new idea, but its name, spouse acceptance factor - usually called wife acceptance factor for the greater number of men interested in electronics - is building steam among technology gurus and electronics manufacturers.
Women control 88 percent of electronics purchases, whether they make the purchase or influence what their spouse buys, according to research by the Consumer Electronics Association. Whether an item passes the wife acceptance factor, or WAF, typically depends on price, design and complexity.
Steve Makofsky, a software engineer and self-described techie, said the WAF is growing among his techie cohort.
"I'm hearing it more and more, especially with friends who are married and trying some more of the out-there electronics," said Mr. Makofsky, of Sammamish, Wash. "It drives what you're purchasing."
He felt the ramifications of the WAF when he installed a home theater television in his and his wife's bedroom.
"I went to turn on the TV and he said, 'not that remote. We have to boot it up first,'" said his wife, Liz. "You have to be kidding me that we have to boot up the TV in the bedroom."
The system was removed and they agreed to limit the extensive electronics to his home theater room and office, they said.
"Guys are happy to have monster speakers with wires and big amps all over the place but whoever the guy's married to isn't," said Ray Lepper, president of Home Media, a Richmond company that can creatively install electronics in walls, behind cabinets and even behind artwork.
Media rooms end up with a price tag between $8,000 and $40,000, including the electronic gear, he said.
Scott Stein, a Bethesda technology consultant, and his wife, Meredith, agree on most major purchases before going to the store and have an understanding that they each know how to stick to a budget.
But he recently bought a television without getting the OK.
"For the most part, she was fine with it," said Mr. Stein, 28. "We had had some discussions about the purchase in the past where she had tried to express some limits on a reasonable amount. I somewhat exceeded the limits."
The price came out about 30 percent more than what they agreed upon, but it didn't lead to a fight.
"She appreciates the nicer toys, too," he said.
Most women like technology, but in a different way than men do, said Michelle Miller, a marketing consultant and partner at Wizard of Ads marketing firm in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Men like hearing about a product's speed, size, strength and accessories from salespeople, Ms. Miller said.
"But if you talk about what technology does for [women's] lives, they love it," she said, adding that women relate to technology in terms of how it can make their lives better.
Electronics companies are responding by changing the way they design and market their products to correspond with the influence of design-conscious spouses.
Wisdom Audio, a specialty electronics company in Carson City, Nev., touted its Adrenaline Speaker Series, which can be placed inside walls and features paintable grilles, as having a high WAF.
"The Adrenaline series are generally regarded as having the highest WAF of any audiophile-quality speaker in the industry," a recent company release said.
In early 2005, electronics company Best Buy changed its in-store signs to focus on how a product is used instead of its gadget details to target women, said spokesman Brian Lucas.
"Part of it is getting women into the store more. They will walk through and see a home theater and they might suggest a change," Mr. Lucas said. "That makes it a lot easier."
New Scientist, August 4, 2007 v195 i2615 p24(2)
If a phone can do the job, who needs a PC? Cellphones with games, video and photo messaging are helping people in poorer countries do business.(Technology)(Report)
Jessica Marshall
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2007 For more science news and comments see http://www.newscientist.com.
THEY were once simple little devices that we used to call our friends from the road to say we were running late. But no longer. As the unfettered drooling over the iPhone has demonstrated, these days we like our cellphones to come customised for our amusement with games, video cameras and internet access.Smartphones may seem like a frivolous indulgence for rich westerners, but it turns out that their added features can be harnessed to help people in poorer countries do business, educate their children and even hold those in power to account.
"Smartphones are probably much more revolutionary for developing countries," says John Canny, an engineer at the University of California, Berkeley," who is creating educational video games that run on smartphones (See "Learn English by phone"). "Here smartphones are a bit gimmicky. In the developing regions you have hostile conditions for a PC so phones have a lot of potential to become the computing platform for people," says Canny.
Being able to communicate in real time via speech and text using basic cellphones has already proved invaluable for communities that were never connected by landlines. Ajedi-ka, an organisation that works to promote human rights in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, distributes phones to local teachers, elders and business leaders so that they can report incidents of children being drafted as soldiers. The phones make reporting faster and easier. Meanwhile, health workers across the developing world have started using cellphones to monitor disease outbreaks in real time. In Kenya phones are being turned into mini-ATM machines via Vodafone's M-PESA program, which allows users to load money onto their phones in shops and then send it via a text message to someone else, in their village say. They can also withdraw the money at another location using a password, which in Kenya can be much safer than carrying cash.
For some financial uses, however, it is the phones' ability to take photos and record and send video clips that researchers believe will come in handy.
Micro-lending groups are typically run by women in rural areas who arrange small loans for each other or act as mediators between banks and the local community. They have proved to be a successful strategy in sparking business endeavours and combating poverty. But one problem is that these groups often keep poor accounts, which can make it difficult for banks or other lenders to invest in them with confidence.
"When banks are interested in lending to these people, if they're lucky the groups will have a stack of paper records," says Tapan Parikh, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who works with micro-finance groups in India.
Typically, these records would include forms stating the agreed amount, duration of the loan and repayment receipts. Parikh learned that group members prefer the paper forms because many can't read and so fill them out by memorising which numbers go in which boxes. As a result, he stuck with paper but turned to camera-phones to make the accounting process more secure and transparent.
He created a new version of the paper forms, which look like the old ones except that a barcode has been added next to each box or section where you need to fill in numbers. Instead of filling out these new forms, you take a picture of each barcode with a cellphone. Software on the phone recognises the barcode and a message appears on the screen, prompting you to enter the figures that would have gone in the section that corresponds to that barcode. There is also a spoken version of the message to make things clearer for those who can't read. In this way, the borrower or lender scrolls through the whole form, taking snapshots of the barcodes and entering data via the phone's keypad. The result is an electronic version of the form, which is initially stored on the phone and later uploaded to a central server when the phone is near a mast.
Saving the information on a server makes accounting simpler as data can't easily be lost, and it provides a way for large banks that are considering investing in these small businesses to check how successful they are.
Parikh's system has another advantage, however: additional information, such as photos or videos, can be attached to the electronic form that was saved, and stored on the central server as well. In order to inform a potential lender of what exactly the business does, you might photograph a written description or send a video of the business in action. "You can capture data potentially in the local language or with people who can't read or write," says Parikh.
After running trials of the barcode system in communities in Tamil Nadu, India, Parikh has co-founded a company that will charge banks trying to decide where to invest for the data the system stores.
The forms can also be used by inspectors who certify rural farmers as organic or fair trade. By laminating the form s so that they can survive the rough and muddy conditions the inspectors face, the barcodes are being used to bring up the correct part of the electronic forms, allowing data gathered on site to be entered straight into the phone. Again, photos or videos can be attached.
Farmers can also use photo and video-recording facilities on cellphones to share information about farming practices. In India, the non-profit organisation Almost All Questions Answered (aAqua) already operates a network where farmers can send questions to agricultural experts via text message or the internet, and check crop price information. But it is only accessible to those who can read, says Srinivasan Keshav of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. "If you're educated, you can send text. If you're not, you need video or audio."
Keshav is working on ways to help farmers send videos from their cellphones in place of text and to make these videos searchable by other farmers.
He also sees other uses for video and photo sharing, such as tracking whether development funds assigned to build a dam, say, are being properly used. With videophones, whistle-blowers could publicise footage showing that a dam is not actually being built or that logging regulations are being breached. Keshav's group is trying to work out how to send such videos anonymously.
One problem with relying on video and photos is the expense. While the cost of the hardware will probably come down, sending photos or videos via a standard cellphone network is expensive because the files are large and take a long time to send. Using Wi-Fi to send messages, instead of cellphone networks, would provide more bandwidth and cost less. But although cellphone chips capable of Wi-Fi have been available for years, phone service providers have fought to keep them shut off, because people talking via Wi-Fi instead of the cellular networks would cut into their revenues.
Now that could change. Last month, T-Mobile tried to snag new customers by becoming the first US cellphone provider to allow users to talk via Wi-Fi whenever they were within range of a base station, from anywhere in the world, for a monthly fee of $10. Keshav hopes that allowing phones to use Wi-Fi networks wherever possible will also speed up the sending of video and pictures in the developing world and make it cheaper.
LEARN ENGLISH BY PHONE
It isn't just the photo and video features of smartphones that are useful to people in the developing world. The advanced graphics and high-speed chips they come with are being harnessed to build educational video games.
John Canny's group at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the language skills of some English teachers in Mysore, India, were lacking and that children were often kept away from school to help with chores. Yet 19 of 47 students had parents with cellphones.
To tackle the problem, they have created educational video games that run on cellphones. In one, based on the South Indian children's game Tree Tree, trees displaying different letters from the English alphabet are scattered around the screen. The player hears a letter pronounced and must move an on-screen figure under the tree whose letter was spoken while avoiding being caught by a "baddie". Another builds a knowledge of animal vocabulary: based on the game Frogger, where a player has to cross a road without being hit by traffic, children playing Canny's game must choose to move one of a number of animals across the road depending on an instruction spoken in English. The game can be adapted to teach the words for vegetables or colours as well.
The team is testing the games this summer to see whether they improve students' English. The next step is to allow students to collaborate on games via Bluetooth connections. Later the group plans to incorporate speech recognition, so students can get feedback on their pronunciation based on whether the phone software recognised what they said. Meanwhile, the company ZMQ Software Systems has developed Hit/education games for cellphone users in Africa and India.
Article A167430964
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
August 1, 2006 Tuesday
FINAL EDITION
Study: Women like tech toys more than shoes
BYLINE: Edward C. Baig
SECTION: MONEY; Pg. 3B
LENGTH: 456 words
NEW YORK -- Is a plasma TV a girl's new best friend?
An Oxygen Network survey released today found that more than three out of four women said they'd choose the TV over a diamond solitaire necklace. Women preferred a top-of-the-line cellphone to designer shoes by a similar margin. And a little white iPod narrowly trumped a little black dress.
These are among the results of the Girls Gone Wired survey by market researcher TRU for Oxygen. TRU surveyed 1,400 women and 700 men 15 to 49 years old to compare tech attitudes among the sexes.
The findings suggest advertisers need to address a broad audience and not talk down to women. Advertisers are best served communicating lifestyle benefits of tech products by showing what's useful about them, rather than focusing on specifications, Oxygen says.
"There have been some missed opportunities to market consumer electronics to women," says Steve Koenig, senior manager of industry analysis for the Consumer Electronics Association, whose research reveals only subtle differences between the sexes in their attitudes toward technology.
In the Oxygen survey, 59% of women agreed with the statement "Women are much more tech savvy than they give themselves credit for." Among the men, just 38% agreed.
"Men and women are equally competent in the technology arena," says Oxygen CEO Geraldine Laybourne.
Katie Richardson, 25, a project manager for an elevator company in Chicago, says family members come to her for help setting up iTunes or fixing a digital camera. "I love figuring out all the different functions," she says.
Still, just 35% of women agreed that "most of the time people rely on me for technology help," vs. 54% of men.
However tech-savvy they are, women are typically the decision makers when it comes to buying.
"From every piece of data we've seen, by and large, household budgets are controlled by women," says Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a prominent venture-capital investment firm. But they are "far more oriented toward solutions rather than tools."
Kristen McDonnell, CEO of LimeLife, a producer of mobile content for women 15 to 35, agrees. "Women are power users of the Internet now in terms of MySpace pages, e-commerce and photo sharing."
New York City College of Technology radiology student Shavonn Tatum, 26, is passionate about gadgets. "I love technology and can't wait to graduate so I can buy things I really want," she says.
Comparing computer use
Percentage of people who regularly use the computer to:
Women Men
Shop online 64% 60%
Edit digital pictures 53% 48%
Access online health services 35% 22%
Listen to music 60% 72%
Listen to or view Internet media streams 45% 69%
Watch DVDs 35% 54%
Access porn online 6% 38%
Source: Oxygen
The International Herald Tribune
September 8, 2007 Saturday
Social networking catering to older set;
New Web sites look for a niche among tech-savvy baby boomers
BYLINE: Matt Richtel - The New York Times Media Group
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 901 words
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO
Silicon Valley's next new thing? Old people.
Technology investors and entrepreneurs, long obsessed with connecting to teenagers and 20-somethings, are starting a host of social networking sites designed for their parents and grandparents. The sites have names like Eons, Rezoom, Multiply, Maya's Mom, Boomj and Boomertown.
Think Facebook with wrinkles.
The sites are being built to capture the attention of a generation of Internet users who have more money and leisure time than those several decades younger, and who may be more loyal than teens flitting from one trendy site to the next.
People who use the sites say they offer a smaller community of like-minded, and like-aged, people than on bigger sites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster. The sites offer discussion and dating forums, photo-sharing, news and commentary, and copious chatter about diet, fitness and health care.
''I've discussed my divorce, my medical issues, and when do I dare go dating again,'' said Martha Starks, 52, a retired optician in Tucson, Arizona, who spends an hour or two each evening on Eons. ''I sure wouldn't discuss that stuff with a 20-year-old.''
She said she talked about fun things, too, like movies and music, with an audience that gets what she's saying, unlike a younger generation.
''They don't even know who Aretha is - she's the queen of soul!'' she said.
Social networking has thus far largely focused on executives in the business world and young people, because they are tech-savvy and treasured by Madison Avenue. But there are 78 million American baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964 - roughly three times more than there are American teenagers and 20-somethings - and most of the boomers are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace. The number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm.
Plus, according to the creators and financiers risking tens of millions of dollars building and marketing the new sites, older people have something the youngsters typically lack: patience. Older users, because they are relatively settled in their ways, will stick with a social network once they get comfortable with it, rather than capriciously skipping to the latest new site when fashion or hormones dictate, the network developers say.
Some prominent entrepreneurs and investors are banking on the prospect that social networks will become popular among this demographic.
In the past week, VantagePoint Venture Partners announced that it was leading a $16.5 million financing round into Multiply, which considers itself a social network for people who want to stay connected with existing friends and family, not those trying to hook up with new friends at the hottest club. VantagePoint knows something about what works in social networking: it was among the earliest MySpace investors.
Another start-up is TBD, which stands for ''To Be Determined,'' as in: just because you are not 20 and fitted with the hippest mobile gadget doesn't mean you are heading gently or otherwise into that good night.
The founder of TBD.com is Robin Wolaner, who created Parenting magazine in 1987. That year marked the start of at least seven parenting-oriented magazines. Wolaner said there has been the same sudden recognition of a need for Internet publishers to respond to the demands of older Americans.
She came up with the idea for the site, she said, ''when I was sitting around with friends and we said: 'We're not going to hang out at the AARP site. What is there for us?' ''
Plus, she said, she wanted to find a community where she could discuss her interest in getting an eye lift.
''There's a recognition that this generation now uses the Internet just like younger people,'' she said. ''The one thing this generation hasn't done yet is network online.''
TBD, which announced in August that it had received about $5 million in venture capital funding, lets users post profiles, designate friends, start and participate in discussions and get expert commentary. Recently on the front page was a link to a discussion on ''the best dishwasher to buy'' and another link to a discussion on ''how to kick start your libido.'' By contrast, the front page of MySpace that same day highlighted a video titled ''Daring Escalator Slide.''
Social networks aimed at older users are a big draw for investors and consumer products and services companies, said Susan Ayers Walker, a freelance technology journalist for the AARP, the group for people age 50 and older formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, and founder of SmartSilvers Alliance, which offers consultant services to businesses looking to connect with senior citizens.
''Not only do we have a lot more money, we pay a lot more attention to advertisers,'' she said.
Meg Dunn, 38, who is raising three kids in Fort Collins, Colorado, said she tried MySpace and Facebook but found that the short attention span of users did not suit her. She now uses Multiply, where she shares family photos with her relatives and gets into discussions on substantive topics, like a peculiar form of dementia called Pick's Disease that her father suffers from.
''I feel like I'm putting down roots, building relationships,'' she said. ''My feeling on MySpace is that people give you a poke and then they're gone and you never see them again.''
