The wisdom of crowds

119.jpgThe idea of crowd intelligence is simple: the wisdom of a large group of people is nearly always greater than the intelligence of any single member. The theory is especially hot in Internet circles – where obviously it’s very easy to access the collective intelligence of users – but it’s also emerging as a hot forecasting tool in financial markets. The idea is as old as the hills, but it’s re-emerged due to technological developments (eg, convergence and social networks), and a book called ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ by James Surowiecki. Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Hewlett-Packard are all using group wisdom to predict everything from next quarter sales figures to future economic indicators. Group prediction can even be played for fun on various websites like www.ideosphere.com, www.hsx.com and www. longbets.org. Is this a future trend or just a short-term management fad? What do you all think?

Customised treatments

97.jpg90% of medicines don’t work for 30% of people, so in the future we’ll see treatment programs and drugs tailor made for specific groups and even individuals. We’ll also see diets customised to specific groups of people and genetically based treatments. Fast forward to the year 2033. After supplying a sample of blood you receive an email from the supermarket telling you what you should and shouldn’t eat to extend your life by twenty years. This diet will not be totally unique because you’ll share certain characteristics with other people (for example, different ethnic groups have different food intolerances). In the ‘average’ groups such diets will be unnecessary, but for people with problematic DNA profiles treatments will be highly beneficial.

User generated content

55.jpgOne of the great features of the Internet is how it allows people who don’t know each other to instantly share things with each other, sometimes enhancing them along the way. Old examples include Flicker while new examples include Spore, a game which allows users to ‘evolve’ the players (characters) used in the game. These are very significant trends. User-generated content (also known as open source, collaborative design or customer-created content) is changing the debate about file-sharing because these users are not copying content but creating new content themselves. This kind of ‘bottom up’ innovation raises all sort of interesting legal questions about who owns the resulting content or innovation. Or as Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems puts it, ‘we are now entering a participation age … (where) the endpoints are starting to inform the center’. For example, a newspaper in the US has taken the idea of customer co-creation a step further by asking its readers to choose which story is printed on the front page each day. The Wisconsin State Journal (the state’s second biggest selling newspaper) allows readers to go online between 11am and 4pm each day to vote for one of five top stories. The ‘winner’ usually appears on page one the following morning. Consequences? Sports stories have started to appear on page one. We’ve seen reader-created newspapers in South Korea and a magazine for MTV and Nokia in Europe that’s written and illustrated by customers but this appears to be a first. Where is this trend going? Nobody can say for sure, but open collaborate projects are certain to grow which will in turn drive new business models and ways of making money from free or ‘openly’ created content.

Longtails

117.jpgFirst, in the 1980s, it was ponytails, now, in the noughties, it’s longtails. The longtail effect has long been used by statisticians to describe ‘power-law’ distributions, such as the usage of certain words in the English language (words occurring frequently followed by a slowly trailing ‘demand’ curve). But following an article in Wired magazine a while back, the phrase has become the buzzword of choice in management consultancies and venture capital firms. The reason for this is that longtails explain the fragmentation of consumer markets and the shift from mass to niche marketing. For example, due to the aggregating effect of the Internet, it is now possible to make money selling obscure products and services. Traditionally, a book retailer would focus on big sellers because it did not have enough physical space to stock every book ever published. But now, Amazon makes 30% of sales on book titles outside the top 130,000 sellers. Another example of a business making money from low-volume products is i-Tunes. What does this mean for business? One implication is a shift away from ‘hits’. Another is a move away from researching what people want – just put it out there and find out. This in turn means moving away from conventional marketing and media advertising to investment in intelligent or ‘collaborative’ filtering. From a cultural point of view, the trend is also interesting because we may also be witnessing a shift away from ‘shared culture’ (which is hit dependant) to a more individualised culture that is not.

Continuous partial attention

Interruption science is the study of why people get distracted and how best to interrupt people. For example, in the late 1980s NASA needed to find ways to deliver important importation to busy astronauts. This might seem trivial but if an important communication is not distracting enough it may get ignored, while anything too distracting could ruin a multi-million dollar experiment. In other words, the timing and style of delivery of communications is vitally important. Text-based communications, NASA found, were routinely ignored while visually-based communications seem to get through. So what’s the relevance of this to people with their feet firmly planted on earth?The simple answer is that many of us suffer from too much information thanks to faster computers and connectedness. We are constantly subjected to a torrent of interruptions ranging from e-mail to mobile phone calls. Indeed, a recent survey found that employees spend on average eleven minutes on a task before being distracted by something else. Furthermore, every time an employee was interrupted it took almost half an hour for them to return to the original task and 40% wandered off somewhere else. In other words, information is no longer power. Getting and keeping someone’s attention is. We are so busy watching everything and multi-tasking that we are unable to focus on or finish anything except after hours or at home. Given that computers and the Internet are largely to blame for this, it’s not surprising that computer and software companies are taking the issue very seriously. Part of the problem is that our memory tends to be visual and computers only allow the display of limited amounts of information on a screen. Some people solve this problem by sticking low-fi post-it notes around the sides of their screen. Another way might be to say no — unsubscribe and unplug parts of your life.If this isn’t for you then technology may once again come to the rescue by changing the way that information is delivered. For example, if a computer could understand when you were busy (via a camera, microphone or keypad monitor) it could rank e-mails in order of importance and then deliver them at the most appropriate moments. Information could also become more glanceable in the same way that aircraft instruments are laid out. In the more distant future we may even figure out a way of getting rid of computer screens altogether and embedding glanceable information in everyday objects.

Simplicity

111.jpgA trend that’s sweeping through the technology industry is simplicity. The idea is starting to make its presence felt in other areas too. Business tends to make things complicated because it’s easier that way. Engineers, in particular, are guilty as charged because complexity sometimes impresses other engineers. Hence most products are over-engineered and feature a myriad of functions that most people will never need or use. Complexity also costs money and can lead to reliability issues – as Mercedes recently discovered when complexity reduced the reliability of some luxury models. Banks complicate product offerings because this makes sense internally, while marketing departments offer customers a plethora of choices because that’s what they learn in Market Segmentation 101. The problem is that ordinary people are busy and don’t spend their whole day thinking about bank accounts or toothpaste. They just want something that does the job and nothing more. A recent survey by the Consumer Electronics Association in the US found that 87% of people (customers) cite ease of use as the most important feature of any new product. Technology companies are the worst offenders in not understanding what customers want because of closed feedback loops and the lack of direct contact with end users. So what’s the solution? Making products simple is actually very complicated. First you need to make your company simple. This means simplifying not only structure and process, but also culture and mission. A good example of a company that’s been ‘simplified’ is Philips. The company now runs just seventy businesses instead of five hundred and there are five divisions instead of fifty. There’s even a Simplicity Advisory Board to ensure that things are made simple but not simpler. Another trick to simplify your relationships with your customers is to communicate in their language, not yours. In other words, if your mother doesn’t understand it, neither will anyone else.

Discipline convergence

41.jpgIf the convergence of computing and communications led to the Information Age, then perhaps we are on the cusp of another dramatic shift. Engineering and computing started to converge some time ago and other disciplines are following suit. For example, natural sciences like biology are merging with physical sciences like engineering. In automobiles, what was essentially an engineering industry is merging with areas like computers, while computing itself is being greatly influenced by biology and neuroscience. Of course, historically science started off as one discipline, which only fragmented into a series of specialisations in the 19th and 20th centuries – so perhaps we’ve been here before. However, our education system is still predicated on the idea of specialisation.

The rise of the machines

40.jpgExpect computers to become more intelligent than humans by about 2025. At this point humankind will be faced with something of a dilemma. If machines become more intelligent than their makers, what’s to stop them taking over? You could of course design machines with certain in-built controls (see I Assimov’s Robot Rules in I Robot) but there will be a very strong temptation for mankind to see what would happen if you don’t. The other intriguing (if not outright alarming) aspect of this issue is the convergence of computing, robotics and nanotechnology which could give rise to self-replicating machines. Add to this the possibility of not only downloading intelligence into a machine but downloading consciousness too, and you are faced with the question of whether it is better to live forever in a machine or live for a limited time as a carbon based biped. Personally I think downloading consciousness is impossible but you should never say never.

US and them

3.jpgIt would obviously be too simplistic to carve up the world between America (and its allies) and the rest of the world, but some people see it that way. So far protest has been limited to street demonstrations and the launch of Muslim brands of Cola, but anti-American (and anti-Western) sentiment could go a lot further. Links with globalisation, localisation and ‘glocalisation’.

Personalisation

64.jpgHow can you have a list of top trends and innovations without mentioning Apple’s i-Pod somewhere? The i-Pod is an excellent example of all sorts of trends including place shifting, device convergence, Moore’s Law and miniaturisation. However, the most interesting thing about the innovation is that it personifies personalisation.Globalisation creates commodification and homogenisation, which in turn creates the counter trend of personalisation as people react against standard issue products. Add a dose of technology and hey presto you’ve got a product that users can tailor to their own tastes and needs. Expect dozens of products in different markets to offer a similar degree of personalisation in the coming years as customer desire meets technological possibilities.