I have a seen a few references to the transition between horse and car recently (Bill Gurley quoted Aaron Levie’s widely retweeted comments in his well argued piece on Uber recently, for example), comparing the idea of analyzing the car industry based on the number of horses in the US in the early 1900’s to McKinsey’s work on cellphones in 1980.

 I’d argue that the important thing was not the switch in mode of transport, but in what new use cases it enabled.

 First on the numbers- peak horse in the US was about 1915, with around 25M horses and mules. It took 15-20 years to get to that many cars in the US, and adjusting for population and income (roughly 3x and 4x respectively) it is actually a remarkably good indicator of how many vehicles there are in the US today.  Spend will have shifted, but that would have been a good base for 20-50 year planning.

 What was much more important is what new use cases were created, including, notably, commuting to work; people could live in nicer locations, further from work. US-style suburbs could never have existed without the car. So what moving from horse to car created was an incredible housing and related development boom, with extraordinary economic effects for at least two generations. That’s not necessarily all good (neither was the emergence of an effective oligopoly on car manufacture), but the effect was enormous.

 What I look for in technology shifts is not what gets replaced or displaced on a one for one basis, but what new use case is developed. I think “personal transportation as a service” can be such a shift, but until we see clear new use cases, at massive scale, I am not sure we are (yet) seeing a revolution.

Tags: autonomous vehicles strategy

Looking at Mary Meeker’s slides (#marymeeker) this year one thing that stands out (slide 11) is the factor of ten installed base growth. Does that make the Internet of things, with ubiquitous input (appliances, clothes, road sensors etc) and output (screens everywhere on everything, and via HUD) a 100B touchpoint opportunity? (plausible? that would be 10-20 touchpoints per enabled person- I am already pretty much there).

A few years ago, I was sitting in a management review of a fairly new product, and we were dismayed to see a 7% fall in monthly revenue, when we had been expecting a small increase. It took an embarrassingly long time before it was pointed out that we were reviewing February, which was 10.7% shorter than January, so a 7% fall was closer to a 4% rise on a daily basis.  

This has gotten even more interesting in mobile. It’s pretty clear that consumers engage with mobile devices more at the weekend (look at your Google Analytics logs). Is that important? This year the three months have been completely different. January and February both had 8 weekend days (26% and 29% of days), and March had 10 (32% of days!), April is back to 8 (the only other month this year with 10 weekend days is June). It’s also important to consider holidays, New Year’s Day, Presidents Day, MLK day etc can all impact this calculus. 

Main point- in rapidly moving markets, make sure you are tracking (the right numbers across) relevant time frames. And expect June to be an unusually good mobile month this year…

Are Internet links in real-world advertising today’s “fresh fish sold here?”

In 1997/8 it was probably very exciting to be able to put a URL on a poster, or in a magazine ad. Oh look— we have a web site! (It was about the same time that every MBA who knew anything about the Internet was able to add “established company’s web presence” to her/his resume— you have taken that off your resume by now I hope). Now as you walk around the subway/metro in most big cities, or down the street in any town, most of the posters have a URL, and often of the form excitingband.com/latestalbum, bank.com/mortgages or localtransport.gov/mode.

The famous story of the fishmonger with the sign “fresh fish sold here” (e.g. http://www.vandemataram.com/vandestory/Story6.htm) tells us that we should value simplicity and relevance in marketing communication and increasingly, in our attention- and time-starved world, some sort of actionability. So how does a URL on a poster, in the London tube, or the New York subway, or a billboard on 101, stack up? It is hardly news in 2012 that you have a web site. If people remember your poster, they can google you when they get home, or standing right in front of the poster. What they are very unlikely to do is spend the time typing a precise URL into a browser, when there is a quicker, and less error-prone way to get to some of the same information.

How are people actually getting to the web sites that are advertised this way? I’d hazard a guess that almost all of them, even viewed on a mobile device, come through a search engine. That means a simple call to action of “Google us for more” is interesting some of the time, but defeats the object of an actionable and trackable campaign, unless the searcher looks for exactly the right thing.

How do QR codes stack up? Rather than expecting someone to get their phone, fire up the browser, and then start typing 8-20 characters, on a phone keyboard, with a QR code you open an app, wait for it to scan, and with a single click you are at exactly the desired spot, with no typos. NFC should work the same way, but requires the user to be ~in contact with the poster, which works in a subway, but not as well in a street situation.

Visual search (Google Goggles, Kooaba etc.) offers in some senses an even better alternative. No creative decision about where to put a code, completely uncluttered, but you are relying on people to remember there might be a way of getting more information, and how often will someone do that if there isn’t anything there when they try it? 

Voice search might also be a great alternative. How long before we see “Ask Siri about <new film>” on a poster. The unmet opportunity there is that Siri, and equivalents, will need to be advertising- and location-aware. As a distributor don’t want an independent review of Mission Impossible 4, you want your content, and to be actionable, you want “buy tickets at the nearest theater” at the same time.

So if you want actionability from your real-world advertising think hard about why you have a URL, and not other calls to action, and watch for newer ways for people to interact with posters and other printed material!

Tags: qr codes mobile

Smartphones are enabling more and more people to interact richly and efficiently with the world around them. A standard response today to “what’s this?”, “how much is it?”, “when’s that?”, or “how do I?” is to get out the phone and expect it to produce a smart answer, which, more and more, it does. Smartphones are enabling people to scan bar and QR (quick response) codes, tap NFC (near field communications) tags, experience Augmented Reality, locate themselves on maps, and do sophisticated Visual and Voice search. Even the humble SMS short code is often a way for someone to react to something they see in the real world (or the TV). All of these experiences have the potential to bring the power of the Internet into the real world in a personal and relevant way.

What sort of experiences are we talking about? SMS short codes have been used for TV voting and special offers. QR codes are found in bus stops (when’s the next bus?), on billboards and posters (movie showtimes and trailers, and interactive ads), in newspapers, magazines and inserts (coupons and special offers), in museums (identifying exhibits), at conferences and on wedding invitations (locations and schedules), and (thank you GoDaddy) on the TV screen. NFC is emerging and promises even more, with a strong emphasis on payments.

Rather than static printed information these new mobile-enhanced experiences are on-demand from a user’s point of view— what you want and no more— ­and can be customized by the content owner to the reader, time of day, location or other criteria.  That adaptability and targeting is taken for granted on-line— it’s coming to the real world, via the smartphone.

To deliver great experiences content owners, application developers, and brands start by “attaching” their rich, Internet-based information to the real world, via QR code, NFC tag or the like. Then, to make this useful and actionable, they need analytics to understand how, where, and when that information is being accessed. It is with those real-world analytics that the experiences can be enhanced and developed over time.

It’s already clear a wide variety of technologies will play a role in tagging and enhancing the real world. Sometimes discussion of this is couched in dramatic language; we hear that QR codes are going to destroy short code SMS, and then augmented reality, visual search and NFC will replace QR codes. At the end of the day there is a role for many types of interaction, they are all solving similar fundamental problems.

What’s exciting to me is simply the way the power of the Internet can enhance real-world experiences. Bringing the Internet into the world is the value to consumers, exactly how that happens is not the important thing. Over the next few years the interactions will become more and more seamless, as phones and other devices are better and better connected. I am excited to be part of this.

Ed is the CEO of Delivr, a leading real-world analytics company delivering QR code and NFC based solutions.

Tags: qr codes