Where Current Mobile/Location-Commerce Paradigms fall Short And Why

Posted on 26. March 2013 by Bardo N. Nelgen

The future of Mobile Business is in Location – now, really!??

Listening to the mobile technology, device and communication industries’ big players currently puts into place two core assumptions about how mobile device usage is going to develop within the years to come:

  1. Location is everything
  2. Location doesn’t matter anymore

As though these seem quite contradictive at first glance, there is some truth to be found inside these paroles, as soon as one takes a closer look:

While mobile devices give you (and the rest of us…) the power to make more informed decisions depending on where you are and where you intend to be in near future (think of navigation, public transit guidance or ), they also disconnect us from the necessity of presence e.g. at airport counters for check-in or .

Despite these advantages, there is an obvious difference between if you go to let’s say an airport on a daily basis for work, occasionally to catch a flight, to pick-up somebody who is arriving or simply for plane spotting and having fun with your kids.

As J. P. Barton already figured out more than a decade ago, real world situational context is not simply about location, but much more about people, places and the things at hand, along with time and the conditions/limitations you encounter.

Barely none but location, however, has been targeted by technological approaches on an end-user scale this far.

This comes out even more interesting, as the technical and organizational hurdles involved have already appeared to be taken an entire decade ago.

Some of the more relevant reasons, why the industry is nonetheless quite slow in anticipating the market potential coming with services like intelligent tickets, context-aware travel-itineraries or automated product-matching for webshops, appear to lie in the integration of already existing, but widely distributed and differing data sources.

This is, where I believe Linked Data can go a long way in easing the adoption process by providing common means for exchanging information online and in near- or even realtime.

Solutions to practically showcase the application of Semantic Web technology to provide such services are to be developed by our appliance team within the coming moths. Stay tuned. :-)

Posted in Apple, Business & Economy, Customer Experience, Microsoft, Nokia, Places, Sales & PR, Social Networking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

The Empire strikes Back:
NOKIA’s Return To Your Pocket And The Magic Of Context

Posted on 7. March 2013 by Bardo N. Nelgen

Sometimes you just don’t see it coming…. We all remember the times, not too long ago, when Nokia were selling basically the same Series 60 models of their phones for years by essentially just changing their outer design – along with the pricetag.
 
And despite a couple of surprising successes like with their N770 PDA tablet (which, at the time, we also used to showcase the early SemaWorx prototypes) there obviously has not been a lot of initiative inside the company to more dedicatedly pushing the technological borders in direction of widening the market for cellphone usage.
 
After all, one could still make a good living from the existing models’ diversification and even afford to send away Apple back in the days when the late Steve Jobs approached them in order to speed up the initial iPhone product development.
 

Though the times, they’re changin’: With Apple’s stock price ranging as high as it may ever get, but their once-superior phone engineering at the same time showing inceasingly more weeknesses in both concept and execution, this is the dawn for their competitors again. And since it can be quite hard to impossible sometimes, to beat huge corporations such as Apple in the business they themselves created, the guys at Nokia did wisely, to leave to others what others can do better.
 
In the past, Nokia’s own developments haven’t ever really been up equally with their counterpart’s products in terms of UI and OS engineering, which in recent years more often than not resulted in quite limited software capabilities even on the newer Nokia handsets. In following this inevitably lead to a shrinking community of application developers willing to take the hassle to write software for e.g. the Symbian or maemo.org platforms.
 

With the introduction of their new LUMIA smartphone series however, the NOKIA management left building the smartphone OS to Microsoft and their Windows 8 product. This did not only bring a new, sophisticated though proven, system base to their latest generation of completely re-engineered phones without causing too much hassle on the run, but brought in a huge crowd of new application developers as well, who already had long-yeared experience in programming for the Microsoft platform.
 

The other strength which NOKIA has just turned into a USP again, is their experience in engineering high-standard cellphones. And even though the current models’ hardware may not always be able to keep up with the installed Windows operating system’s hunger for computational power yet, they focus on the customers’ outcomes by providing them a high level of tools to ease a phone user’s life. And no, I don’t think so much of the literal ˮbells & whistles“ here, but more of features like
 

  • Mutiband Phone Networks (including LTE broadband) Where competitors stick to supporting only certain partner-vendors’ networks, Nokia Lumia customers always get the full spectrum.
     
  • High Quality Multi-Brand Location Services With the strategic purchases of NAVTEQ and earthmine, Nokia product designers get their hands on powerful features like sight-based navigation, making up for a nicely designed AR display of your environment, accompanied by corresponing quality guides: Besides the omnipresent crowd-sourced content, Nokia services provide a wide range of professionally authored information from providers like Michelin, HRS or Expedia.
     
  • Realtime Public Transport Information The one-of-a-kind just-on-time routing for those of us travelling by foot and public transport.
     
  • Phone Calls Almost forgot about it: No, they haven’t forgotten about building reliable voice calling into the latest generation phones. No antenna-issues involved here…
     
  • Above Standards Camera With photo shooting among the most popular phone features in recent years, Lumia devices come with ZEISS lenses, optical image stabilization, sequence-shots and HDR-like processing tools.
     

In my oppinion, these new approaches will, in the longer run, put NOKIA at the heart of an eco-system fucussing much less on what is possible, than on services users actually need to navigate through life on a daily basis.
 

Posted in Apple, Business & Economy, Customer Experience, maemo.org, Microsoft, New Products, Nokia, Nokia 770, Semantic Web & Web 2.0, Technology, Widgets & Gadgets | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Beyond all hype: The 3 simple things
to get right with your company’s homepage

Posted on 25. February 2013 by Bardo N. Nelgen

O.k. I’m sure you don’t need just another of these How-To-create-Your-Killer-Homepage-Today guides, as web portals appear to be fed with all day. I also don’t believe that any kind of magic or spiritual inspiration is required. Once you combine, match and melt down all these hundreds of pages of guidance, it (almost) always comes down to the same few priciples.

Fighting irrelevance and ambiguity

There are uncounted homepages of businesses of all sizes and industries, who cannot answer every visitor’s most pressing question: Am I right here?

Lots of homepages cannot tell if the business is an investment bank, a pharmaceutical or tool manufacturing company. Non-telling images along with ambiguous headlines, such as Beating The Competition In Every Single Field do not demonstrate anything but corporate PR hybris.

So always makes sure your homepage appearance immediately reflects your industry and value proposition to any visitor stopping by.

Avoiding the Paradox of Choice

This is the opposite extreme (and a widely discussed issue): A website trying to be everything to everybody and thus leaving alone the most relevant ones, overwhelmed and helpless. Hey come on — you’re not Yahoo! or some other general web entry-point. Instead admit your visitors some intelligence and trust them to be able to figure out, if your company’s offering is right for them or not.

Have your homepage provide descriptive entrance points (ideally no more than 4, with one pre-selected a.k.a. The Power Of Defaults) leading prospects deeper into your site, where you provide them the means to refine their search, so you can guide them to the relevant infomation much more reliably as a one-size-fits-all homepage could ever do.

Catering to the wrong half of the visitors’ brain (in all the wrong places)

You likely have learned at school already, that both halfs of the human brain take care of different aspects of your daily life: To most people their brain’s right half is heavily involved handling body perceptions along with the more emotional data to be processed, while the left part caters more to the rationale.

Since, just as with your eyes’ fields of view, the processing of visual impression crosses and overlaps, which is why it has turned out to be wise to place visual information more left in the viewer’s field of vision, while adding the facts (e.g. product USPs to its right). If you like, visit Amazon to learn how to do it.

And now: Have fun adding impact to your own site.

Posted in Business & Economy, Customer Experience, Education, Free | Comments Off

The Grassroots Dilemma, The Return Of Browser Wars And
The Death Of The Plug-In

Posted on 13. February 2013 by Bardo N. Nelgen

With sullenness I look back to the early 2000s when webpages always required ”specific engineering“ simply in order to display properly in certain vendors’ webbrowsers. And it was only a couple of years ago, that the market had consolidated and standardized enough to start fading out that practice. All strictly for the birds.

It indeed has been beneficient to online production, that web standards (much different from their associated markets…) have only used to change slowly over time and that chances are good, web content will display properly for the time being, from the date it has been sent live.

Though, unfortunately, over the years the arising argony caused by interest conflicts, political games and bureaucracy at W3C, the standards giving institution for the web, created more and more resentments among the more practically engaged part of the online creative community. It just hat become too obvious, that the old standards (more often than not from an entire decade ago) were not to keep up with the functional requirements of today’s advanced web applications.

That said, the absence of a credible authority sparked the uprise of open opposition by ambitious revolutionaries, putting themselves and their daily needs at the heart of their very own web standards revolt.­­

As enlightning as the ideas of these freshly founded ”working groups“ are, just by their nature, these concepts lack any kind of official recognition. With a groups core members (often just 1 to 5 people…) by chance even refusing to name a final publishing date or even a version-system for their so-called ”standards“, from a creator’s perspective, it is more and more becoming impossible to publish online content which can be reliably assumed to work for most of its prospective users. ­― So, who cares at all?

The part, which makes the topic worth discussing, is that (after years of rather slow, incremental improvements and despite the missing assurance about the outcome) browser vendors just seem to have waited for a chance to add tons of brand new funky bells ad whistles to their widely adopted software – in order to show off their superiority over any anticipated competitor. But, just as with the standards revolutionaries themselves, every company also tries to add their own approach for deploymemt. Along with unique features to each webbrowser-product, the most advanced developers shall eventually be lured away from the competitors’ software – in pretty much the same way Microsoft wasted billions pushing its free Internet Explorer webbrowser in the late nineties.

The current result now appears only too well-known to year-long web developers: we go back in time and again start to engineer every webpage template separately for any software-client in question, including the upcoming new mobile ones. And to really get the results right, the required adjustments add to development costs by at least a third – which, of course, may be fun for web agencies, but much less for their customers – companies simply needing these websites to run their business.

After all: Is there anything in it for the avage web user with this game? Sure. Since most revolutions, despite considerable collateral damage, use not to go all-bad, there are clear end-user advantages involved:

  1. The death of the plug-in: It already today is very unlikely you will need to install additional software only to properly display an average webpage’s content, such as sound, video, animation, immersive imagery or even 3D objects.
     
  2. Easier-to-handle forms: Web forms will start verifying your input already as you type and assist you to easily enter appropriate values, especially on mobile devices.
     
  3. High performance content: Previously unseen display quality for web content will become common to an amount as it has only been available to high-end computer games just a couple of years ago.

So please prepare for the most innovative technical changes to online experience since the late nineties, and watch out for those just wanting to cash-in on you for plain eye candy that will likely available to a selected few only anyway.

Posted in Business & Economy, Customer Experience, Microsoft, Organisations, Semantic Web & Web 2.0, Technology, Webbrowser | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

In Defense of AIDA (and other 1@1 concepts…)

Posted on 1. November 2012 by Bardo N. Nelgen
— a modern e-tailer’s takeaways from early 20ieth century hardselling theory

Undoubtedly there are things that get better the more often you cook them up: e.g. sour kraut, bean stew or chili con carne. And then there are those whose state tremendeously degrades away from “desireable” with every re-heating, but that nonetheless are getting boiled-up over and over again. Deep-frozen pizza and marketing-paradigms obviously belong to the latter.
 

Salesology in the early 1900s
 

It was no sooner than in 1898 when one of the early experts of American sales theory, Elias St. Elmo Lewis, came up with the concept, that described the structure of a typical selling process as it may be encountered by a typical salesman of its time:
 

Attention
which needed to be grabbed, in order to spark the customers’
Interest
for which it was the salesman’s job to turn it into
Desire
for the customer to buy the product, and thus taking the necessary
Action
to complete the deal.

 

This is the way A.I.D.A. has been taught ever since. Over the years, however, many people forwarded and developed the idea without any regard of its original intention: Some praised it as instructional guide, which it isn’t as it only shows the stages of a sale, rather than any advice on how to reach them. Others thought it to provide a universal structure for largely any kind marketing/sales process, which it cannot deliver as well, since it has been constructed for a mainly direct-selling audience with their particular requirements in mind.
 

So shouldn’t we finally put this thing to rest in our history books as a 19th/20ieth century legacy item? Hm. Not so fast…
 

It wasn’t until the advent of the internet and e-commerce, that for many industries the ability to deliver perfect direct-buying experiences has become essential to both their survival and everyday business. This comes to matter even more, since most online-experts and first-class web citizens like programmers, designers and writers have never encountered any type of selling education. Many of them are now trying to make up for it in rather expensive ways (notice the boom in web analysis and multivariate testing within recent years…!?), and a lot of people nowadays become ”experts“ on the run at challenges that had actually been believed to be solved for an entire century now.
 

Among the most impressive tools for modern-style product show-offs (probably beside video keynotes shot in front of large audiences… ;-) ) is the pitchpage.
 

A forever-long/high-running webpage, that concentrates solely on selling a single product or service by deploying the entire arsenal of modern online technology, including (but in no way limited to) detailed imagery and packshots, video presentations, animated visuals, interactive 360°/panoramic images, customer credentials, along with fact sheet and demonstration downloads.
 

Crafting a working pitchpage is an art, which (as of now) only few have really mastered.
 

Different from other kinds os online presentation, pitchpages provide the necessary linearity required for a show to successfully build up suspense and momentum — which is hard to achieve otherwise and has for long been missing from non-linear interactive media.
 

Keeping that in mind, skilled authors finally have the means to make use of proven rhetoric concepts for their online promotions and sales. Just as they have aleady got used to offline e.g. by deploying the Heath brothers’ SUCCES(S) framework, Zig Ziglars long-running/going hardselling encounters or Cialdini’s ”50 Scientifically Proven Ways“ to get to ”Yes!“.
 

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