The trend towards greater and greater customer empowerment requires a deeper and deeper understanding of customer needs.
“When people, teams, and organizations develop new products and services, they tend to have endless discussions about what users or customers need, who customers are, and what features the design of their offering should have,” Tomer Sharon, Search UX Researcher at Google and author of recent book, ‘It’s Our Research’, states. This is what I call designing with five smart people in a room drinking lattes syndrome.
“Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley and a Stanford university professor, says there are no facts inside the building,” Tomer says. “Development teams cannot make decisions without developing customers first. Not products, not technologies: Customers. He coined the mantra, "Get Out of the Building". What he means by that is that developers of products should get up from their comfortable chairs and proactively seek opportunities to learn from their customers about their needs to be able to understand what the company's business model should be.”
Tomer cites “intuition” as one of the primary reasons people don’t get out of the building. In a modern, complex, constantly changing world, intuition is a dangerous thing. Intuition is essentially learned behavior patterns. It speaks to the past. If the same basic event keeps recurring then intuition is great. But if the world is changing rapidly, intuition can be disastrous.
“Some people are just scared of what they'll hear,” Tomer states. “They are afraid of failing and of invalidating their assumptions. Actually, they don't consider their assumptions as such. They think they are facts. It is our jobs (UX practitioners) to help people recognize their assumptions.”
One very interesting technique Tomer uses to combat ‘stay in the building’ syndrome he calls Field Fridays. “Field Fridays are an excellent opportunity for software engineers to meet users face to face, see how they use their products, and learn about their behavior. During these events, a team of engineers moderates 20-minute interview sessions with real users, speed dating style, on a Friday morning once a month. I started this program since I was amazed to learn that some engineers work on products for 3 years without meeting a single human being who actually uses their code.”
Tomer says that divergence between what the team thinks the customer will do and what the customer actually does happens on a daily basis. And don’t trust what customers tell you, either.
“Navigational search queries are ones where users use Google to search for websites or webpages,” Tomer states. “For example, when I enter "netherlands wikipedia" into the search box, I am conducting a navigational query. When I am entering "population size netherlands" into the search box, it is not a navigational query since I don't have a specific site in mind. When you explain this concept to Google users and ask them if they conduct navigational queries, they usually tell you they hardly do them. Yet, when you ask them to complete a certain task or if you analyze usage logs or even the same person's web search history (after getting their permission of course), you find they do many navigational searches. Humans are very bad at analyzing their behavior (past, present, and future) and they tend to rationalize it so they look good, reasonable, and smart. I try to focus my research on observing behavior rather than listening to what people say.”
Zend, providers of PHP based tools for mobile and enterprise app developers, has introduced updates to three flagship products during its ZendCon event this week, and a PhoneGap integration for building cross-platform apps.
PHP is a popular web scripting language, and it powers the likes of Web powerhouses Facebook and Wikipedia. Zend has debuted new versions of its development environment and other tools that promise to leverage the power of PHP for cloud and mobile.
Zend Studio 10
Zend Studio 10 is an integrated development platform meant for building PHP that can add tons of capabilities to apps on the Web or mobile. One of its most powerful attributes is that it can build apps across systems with the added PhoneGap integration.
Companies can use this handy feature to build apps for iOS, Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone among others, and do it using familiar drag and drop features. That kind of add on is always appreciated by those building apps without having been totally immersed in a computer science background.
Mobile apps can me built quickly with drag and drop tools and customized for a variety of operating systems.
As the image above shows, the built in emulator displays what mobile apps will look like on a particular device, and it's another nice visual tool app developers are likely feeling should be standard on any platform. Zend Studio 10 also supports the latest version of PHP known as v5.4, and that means new syntax like traits can be used as well.
Zend Server 6 + Zend Server Gateway
Zend Server 6 is an application server that runs business critical apps in PHP, and the v6 update includes tools for automating app development and monitoring multiple apps at a more granular level. Zend Server Gateway then is the tool that allows apps to talk to other connected systems in the cloud for things like validation and authentication.
All of the new versions are now downloadable from the Zend website. Zend Server for Windows or Linux starts at about US $1,700 to nearly US $15,000, and there is also a Zend Server Production Solution. This is a full package offering complete with two available levels of support, starting at around US $7,000 with an annual subscription. There is also a free 30 day trial available for Zend Studio 10.
Whether you are operating in a B2C or B2B channel, the odds are your customers no longer look to you as a primary source of information about your products and services. Instead, they look to social media to find “other people” to tell them about your brand. You need to identify and connect with these “other people” to help ensure they are saying the right things.
Everyone Is a Publisher
At a late afternoon session during the Revenue-Driven Marketing Leadership Summit hosted by the Aberdeen Group in Boston, MA, Alan Belniak, Global Director of Social Media Marketing for manufacturing software provider PTC, described how marketers can tap into third-party social media influencers to help spread positive brand messaging and gain credibility with consumers.
“Conglomerates used to produce content,” he said. “Now anyone can publish about anything.” Belniak used the immensely popular online news site Mashable, founded by a 19-year-old in his mother’s basement in Scotland, as an example of how individuals can use the Internet and social media to establish themselves as authorities without any outside support or assistance.
Influencing the Influencers
The job of the modern marketer, according to Belniak, is to elevate their brand’s status with the social influencer community — and to focus on providing thought leadership in that space. While brands ultimately have less control over influencers than they do over media channels such as brand journalism or paid advertising, Belniak said influencers offer more credibility, because they are seen as more independent.
Belniak advised companies to connect their subject matter experts to influencers. “You need to respond to inquiries from the right people,” he said. “The typical PR response is not sufficient. You need to nurture and maintain the relationship.” By creating relationships with influencers, Belniak said companies can then reach out to the influencers’ networks. “Take influencers along for the ride while you introduce yourself to new characters,” he said.
Whether an influencer is providing positive or negative commentary, Belniak said it is crucial for time- and resource-strapped marketers to focus only as much attention on them as their sphere of influence justifies. "Look at their reach (number of fans/followers), resonance (how often they are reposted/retweeted, etc.) and relevance (how often they are cited as an expert by other media outlets),” said Belniak.
As an example, Belniak told the story of a “wildly negative” blogger who was consistently bashing PTC online and praising their competitors. At the CMO’s request, Belniak and his team investigated the blogger’s influence and discovered that rather than having a “pulpit,” he actually had a fairly small audience. “So we let him go,” said Belniak.
Measuring Social Influence
PTC uses a combination of online influence-measuring tools and manual scoring to determine the importance of influencers' comments on the company. Belniak cautioned that automated sentiment analysis tools are mostly “junk,” but said third-party online influence/measurement services like Traackr and Klout can be highly valuable in helping to determine which influencers are most worth focusing on.
Remember TiVo and Listerine breath strips? Products like these dispel the myth of long-term “first-mover” advantage in marketing brands--ultimately, it is the companies able to adapt that thrive.
Why is it that some brands launch like meteors, captivating our imaginations and our wallets, only to fall spectacularly into marketing oblivion? And perhaps more importantly for marketers today: How can this fate be avoided? The answer lies in the difference between what is required to generate initial trial of a new product, versus building a relevant equity that stimulates ongoing interest and repeat business.
Looking backwards from today’s vantage point, it might be easy to dismiss brands like Listerine Pocketpaks or TiVo, but at the pinnacle of their success they had a Jeremy Lin-like, out-of-nowhere stardom that had consumers all atwitter, brought riches to their corporate owners, and had competitors searching for answers. What is it about these brands that relegated them to eventual irrelevance, while other brands with meteoric success remain on top? And what does the future hold for today’s meteoric brands like UGG boots or Keurig coffee?
First, we need to dispel the myth that there is any long-term “first-mover” advantage in marketing brands. This may be true at the start, but ultimately it is the companies able to adapt to changing conditions that thrive. That is to say, survival of the fittest brands, not the first brands, drives the market. Neither Google, nor Amazon, nor even Gillette was the first brand in its respective category that it now leads. So while some “boom, splat” brands were the first to popularize innovative benefits--such as digital video recording--this distinction alone is insufficient to defend against encroaching competition and a restless consumer.
In 2001, Pfizer’s Listerine brand, then famously known for its antiseptic mouthwash, launched Listerine Pocketpaks breath strips. The product not only helped the brand extend into a new category, but also created awareness, relevance, and reinvigorated the parent brand’s equity in fresh breath. Everyone needed to try the distinctive strip format and unique sensory experience. A true innovation blockbuster, brand awareness and trial were off the charts and year one sales exceeded $175 million, quickly establishing it as the number-one brand in the category. But by 2003, brand sales were already off by 40%-50%, fueled by intense competition with copycat products and a consumer seeking more exciting offerings from strong brands like Altoids, Tic Tac, and Ice Breakers. Today under new ownership, Listerine Pocketpaks remains a viable business, generating about $25 million in annual sales, but is a shell of its initial success.
One contributing factor to the brand’s fall may be the polarizing product experience. However, even if some consumers were ultimately not wowed by the product and did not repeat purchase, the brand still managed to engage enough consumers to drive it to category leadership, so the answer may lie more with the brand than the product. Listerine Pocketpaks were so closely associated with a product form, rather than a brand equity, that it lacked the authority to sustain a category leadership position. The brand may have been more successful had it pinned its brand proposition on, say, Listerine freshness to-go or intimate togetherness or anything other than the product form itself, which was quickly copied.
Listerine effectively did not leverage a strong point-of-difference compared to its new competitive set (i.e., mints), beyond a hot new product form. Once the form novelty wore off, the brand did not find a way to win versus other brands doing an equally good job offering a minty fresh experience. The breath-mint consumer was then free to switch to a competitive breath strip, or align with a conventional format mint brand with strong appeal on both a functional and emotional level, such as Altoids.
Listerine is not the only “boom, splat” brand to soar behind the short-term functional difference of a unique product format. In other categories, Motorola’s ultra-thin Razr phone or Pert’s 2-in-1 shampoo both come to mind. In these cases, too, there was no meaningful second act following the initial success of the brand launch. Loyal consumers seeking the next level of involvement were left with nowhere to go but the competition offering newer, shinier objects for sale.
So, which brands are doing these things well? Like their style or hate them, UGG Australia has successfully kept its brand fresh and strong for years. Many predicted that UGG boots would be a passing fashion fad. But a decade after gaining must-have status, the brand keeps marching on, achieving a record $1.2 billion in global sales last year. UGG is more than a fashion icon; the brand solves an unmet consumer need of stylish footwear that doesn’t involve painfully high heels. Worn by countless celebrities, the UGG brand was established as a genuine article, not to be copied by a competitive imitation. And now that it seems every fashionable closet has a pair, the brand has pushed into slippers, gloves, hats, and other accessories where stylish comfort plays a role. At this stage, there is no "boom, splat" forecasted for UGG.
One brand that will be interesting to watch in the coming year or so is Keurig, the single-serve coffee brand that has grown tremendously (their parent company Green Mountain Coffee Roasters announced 2011 revenue of $2.65 billion, up 95% from 2010). The brand has helped usher in a new wave of premium, at-home coffee options with strong partners like Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks, and Newman’s Own, succeeding in a crowded space where some first-movers have failed. However, they will need to stay fresh and relevant, continue to innovate and think broadly about their business once the single-serve coffee market is saturated, by them or Nespresso or someone else, and consumers begin to wonder what’s next.
So what can we learn from all this? I see three important lessons: first, having a brilliant innovation ahead of competition is a great thing. But there is danger in letting the technical innovation be the news itself, because inevitably competitors will copy or leapfrog you. It’s always best to build equity that elevates the conversation to emotional benefits, values, and beliefs, rather than a purely functional one. That’s much harder to copy. Second, ensure your product experience is outstanding, creating ongoing repeat from happy consumers. And finally, have a second act. Keep it fresh and give your loyal user base something to trade up to once they’ve committed to the brand; don’t leave them hanging on wondering what is the next level of involvement. Doing these things may not ensure meteoric success, but it will help you avoid the dreaded sound of “boom, splat!”
--Bruce Levinson is vice president, brand strategy at the New York office of Anthem Worldwide, part of the strategic design division of Schawk, Inc. His previous positions include director-level marketing roles at Unilever in the U.S. and U.K., and as an advertising account executive.
Remember TiVo and Listerine breath strips? Products like these dispel the myth of long-term “first-mover” advantage in marketing brands--ultimately, it is the companies able to adapt that thrive.
Why is it that some brands launch like meteors, captivating our imaginations and our wallets, only to fall spectacularly into marketing oblivion? And perhaps more importantly for marketers today: how can this fate be avoided? The answer lies in the difference between what is required to generate initial trial of a new product, versus building a relevant equity that stimulates ongoing interest and repeat business.
Looking backwards from today’s vantage point, it might be easy to dismiss brands like Listerine Pocketpaks or TiVo, but at the pinnacle of their success they had a Jeremy Lin-like, out-of-nowhere stardom that had consumers all atwitter, brought riches to their corporate owners, and had competitors searching for answers. What is it about these brands that relegated them to eventual irrelevance, while other brands with meteoric success remain on top? And what does the future hold for today’s meteoric brands like UGG boots or Keurig coffee?
First, we need to dispel the myth that there is any long-term “first-mover” advantage in marketing brands. This may be true at the start, but ultimately it is the companies able to adapt to changing conditions that thrive. That is to say, survival of the fittest brands, not the first brands, drives the market. Neither Google, nor Amazon, nor even Gillette was the first brand in its respective category that it now leads. So while some “boom, splat” brands were the first to popularize innovative benefits--such as digital video recording--this distinction alone is insufficient to defend against encroaching competition and a restless consumer.
In 2001, Pfizer’s Listerine brand, then famously known for its antiseptic mouthwash, launched Listerine Pocketpaks breath strips. The product not only helped the brand extend into a new category, but also created awareness, relevance, and reinvigorated the parent brand’s equity in fresh breath. Everyone needed to try the distinctive strip format and unique sensory experience. A true innovation blockbuster, brand awareness and trial were off the charts and year one sales exceeded $175 million, quickly establishing it as the number-one brand in the category. But by 2003, brand sales were already off by 40%-50%, fueled by intense competition with copycat products and a consumer seeking more exciting offerings from strong brands like Altoids, Tic Tac, and Ice Breakers. Today under new ownership, Listerine Pocketpaks remains a viable business, generating about $25 million in annual sales, but is a shell of its initial success.
One contributing factor to the brand’s fall may be the polarizing product experience. However, even if some consumers were ultimately not wowed by the product and did not repeat purchase, the brand still managed to engage enough consumers to drive it to category leadership, so the answer may lie more with the brand than the product. Listerine Pocketpaks were so closely associated with a product form, rather than a brand equity, that it lacked the authority to sustain a category leadership position. The brand may have been more successful had it pinned its brand proposition on, say, Listerine freshness to-go or intimate togetherness or anything other than the product form itself, which was quickly copied.
Listerine effectively did not leverage a strong point-of-difference compared to its new competitive set (i.e., mints), beyond a hot new product form. Once the form novelty wore off, the brand did not find a way to win versus other brands doing an equally good job offering a minty fresh experience. The breath-mint consumer was then free to switch to a competitive breath strip, or align with a conventional format mint brand with strong appeal on both a functional and emotional level, such as Altoids.
Listerine is not the only “boom, splat” brand to soar behind the short-term functional difference of a unique product format. In other categories, Motorola’s ultra-thin Razr phone or Pert’s 2-in-1 shampoo both come to mind. In these cases, too, there was no meaningful second act following the initial success of the brand launch. Loyal consumers seeking the next level of involvement were left with nowhere to go but the competition offering newer, shinier objects for sale.
So, which brands are doing these things well? Like their style or hate them, UGG Australia has successfully kept its brand fresh and strong for years. Many predicted that UGG boots would be a passing fashion fad. But a decade after gaining must-have status, the brand keeps marching on, achieving a record $1.2 billion in global sales last year. UGG is more than a fashion icon; the brand solves an unmet consumer need of stylish footwear that doesn’t involve painfully high heels. Worn by countless celebrities, the UGG brand was established as a genuine article, not to be copied by a competitive imitation. And now that it seems every fashionable closet has a pair, the brand has pushed into slippers, gloves, hats and other accessories where stylish comfort plays a role. At this stage, there is no "boom, splat" forecasted for UGG.
One brand that will be interesting to watch in the coming year or so is Keurig, the single-serve coffee brand that has grown tremendously (their parent company Green Mountain Coffee Roasters announced 2011 revenue of $2.65 billion, up 95% from 2010.) The brand has helped usher in a new wave of premium, at-home coffee options with strong partners like Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks and Newman’s Own, succeeding in a crowded space where some first-movers have failed. However, they will need to stay fresh and relevant, continue to innovate and think broadly about their business once the single-serve coffee market is saturated, by them or Nespresso or someone else, and consumers begin to wonder what’s next.
So what can we learn from all this? I see three important lessons: first, having a brilliant innovation ahead of competition is a great thing. But there is danger in letting the technical innovation be the news itself, because inevitably competitors will copy or leapfrog you. It’s always best to build equity that elevates the conversation to emotional benefits, values and beliefs, rather than a purely functional one. That’s much harder to copy. Second, ensure your product experience is outstanding, creating ongoing repeat from happy consumers. And finally, have a second act. Keep it fresh and give your loyal user base something to trade up to once they’ve committed to the brand; don’t leave them hanging on wondering what is the next level of involvement. Doing these things may not ensure meteoric success, but it will help you avoid the dreaded sound of “boom, splat!”
--Bruce Levinson is vice president, brand strategy at the New York office of Anthem Worldwide, part of the strategic design division of Schawk, Inc. His previous positions include director-level marketing roles at Unilever in the U.S. and U.K., and as an advertising account executive.
There are a lot of exciting, fresh and hungry young startups launching impressive products amidst the vibrant atmosphere of Demo's Fall conference. While many are presenting us with a more streamlined, personalized digital portal to the real world, the applications inevitably bleed into each other.
Clearly, we won't have several favorite geocaching sites, or we'll have to check all of them to find our friends. At best, you and I have enough time to use roughly one of each, and we'll probably fall into the habit of using the one that more of our friends are using.
That triggers the conundrum: each new social platform is basically a blank page until people pile onto it. Essentially, each is useless until used. The only way to get around that catch 22 (aside from massive investments to promote development, partnerships and traffic) is to mix existing services in a useful (and fun) way. A few new products have managed to continue the trend of blending our online life into the physical world in pretty compelling ways.
Where You At?
The most effective presentations in the social category here have offered a tightly targeted consolidation of recreational life. New apps like MyPref, Go-Matic, Coparent and iSocialite rely on location-based services to connect you with the brands, products or people you love. Sometimes, they rely on existing connections from Facebook, Twitter, your address book, etc. and simply add a layer of convenience.
Go-Matic connects you with nearby buddies in a pretty direct, head-slapping, why-are-we-not-all-using-this kind of way. MyPref records your brand preferences and weaves them into a network. While offering the requisite algorithmic recommendations, it also has the sweet feature of alerting you when a product you love happens to be available at the store you're passing by. The link between online shopping and retail presence (with lots of added social features) seems pretty appealing, as long as you've got a handle on your shopaholicism.
Paving The Way
It pains me to say that some of the companies here will not make a splash on the social scene, perhaps even being out-shined by other presenters at this very event. Each and every startup seems genuinely determined to solve a problem, cater our technology to our lives, fill a glaring gap in the industry or help us navigate the real and digital worlds (sometimes simultaneously). But it seems to be a developing industry with much more of a future than a past.
Location-based services that require a lot of attention, or which bleed into the spectrum of augmented reality, may suffer from the fact that we simply can't be as absorbed in our phones as we are in our surroundings (unless you like walking into mailboxes). When we all get our Google glasses or retina implants, that might change. In the meantime, browse safely!
Today's businesses face the challenge of ensuring customers can access their services and products through whatever means they choose. Channel shift moves customer transactions to the most effective and efficient channel of engagement, creating satisfying customer experiences while delivering savings and increasing revenue.
In times of reduced budget and more savvy shoppers, channel shift is seen as an essential method of delivering better services and increasing sales to people looking to buy or seek information.
Channel shift, or web transformation as some people call it, is applicable across all industries. In this post I have highlighted the challenges and successes some businesses in the Financial Services, Travel and Transportation and Public sectors are experiencing.
Web transformation technology is not just about slick looking websites. Digital channels can:
Deliver more sales
Reduce the cost of sale
Reduce customer service cost
Increase customer conversion
Increase intelligence about customers.
The good news is that many vendors have proven success in this area. When selecting partner agencies, be sure to check that they can deliver at least 250 percent ROI. In other words for every £1/US$ 1 spent, you should aim to see a cash return or benefit of £2.50/US$ 2.50.
Channel Shift in Travel and Transportation
French ferry operator Brittany Ferries, prides itself on a commitment to provide an excellent online customer experience which has delivered increased bookings, outstanding levels of customer satisfaction and a reduction in contact center costs for this quality-focused cross-channel ferry operator. To date, the firm has moved 75 percent of ferry bookings online with a 275 percent ROI and have recently launched a mobile website to further assist travelers.
National train operator Virgin Trains faced a specific challenge — a significant increase in demand over the recent Olympic Games held in the UK. They quickly deployed a LiveChat facility before the games to enable customer service operators to chat online with up to 6 customers concurrently. This allowed them to help customers with quick questions they had about Virgin Trains’ operations and services whilst increasing conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
Channel Shift in Public Sector
Within the public sector many organizations are facing very clear budget cuts. In the UK there are clearly defined channel costs. According to Socitm, a face-to-face meeting costs £8.62/US$ 14.00, phone contacts are £2.83/US$ 4.59 whereas web transactions can be as little as £0.15/US$ 0.24. This clarity has ensured that channel shift is now widely adopted, but sadly still remains under invested.
An example of an organization that understands the need to invest to save, and have a clear eye for tracking ROI is Basildon Borough Council, located just outside London. They are targeting over £1m/US$ 1.6m channel shift savings.
Like every local authority in Britain, Basildon Borough Council is under pressure to reduce its operating costs without effecting the quality of service delivery. For the council, that has meant exploring ways in which its website can work harder to reduce the administrative burden on council staff, whilst protecting front line service to the borough’s 172,000 residents. This channel shift project is achieving improved service delivery and has seen ROI well in excess of expectations.
Mindjet is consolidating itself. On Thursday, the San Francisco-based collaborative work provider announced that it was integrating all of its desktop, web, mobile and on-premise products into one collaborative work management service.
The integration combines Mindjet’s brainstorming/mapping tool MindManager, the social task manager Mindjet Connect, and Mindjet Mobile into one brand for brainstorming, planning and managing.
A Single Collaboration Space
CEO Scott Raskin said in a statement that Mindjet "is changing the way people work" by providing a “single collaboration space for professionals to work inspired and generate real results.” (see: Social Task Management: A View of the Future).
Mindjet’s service, which the company says is designed to help people "work smarter, faster and better" provides a visual interface and collaborative environment for idea generation and project/task management. The company said that over two million individuals, thousands of small businesses, and 83 of the Fortune 100 companies currently use the service to create ideas, organize and share info, and manage workflow.
Better Synchronization Across Apps
Links, notes and documents can be attached to provide content and context or content can be imported into the service. The service also integrates with Google, LinkedIn, Evernote, Twitter, Microsoft Office and Yammer.
The release offers some new Mindjet features. These include the ability to auto-calculate project costs in the planning and budgeting functions, and synchronization of tasks and assignments across desktop, web, mobile and on-premises apps. Additionally, the menus and ribbons in the workspace can be customized to reflect a user’s particular work patterns.
In its announcement of the new, expanded integration, Mindjet cited voltage sensor maker Sensorlink’s C.E.O. Gary Hielkema, who praised the software’s team-based brainstorming and progress tracking. “Mindjet is the first thing our team looks at in the morning, even before checking email,” he said.
Now that Labor Day weekend is over, companies are shifting into high gear to prepare for the holiday push. Among the document management products being released in the next two weeks the general release of M-Files v9.0 and something new from Alfresco. This past week, Google Drive editing capabilities for iOS were upgraded, while enterprise content management looks set to grow in the EMEA region.
Alfresco Moves
Alfresco is due to make an announcement early next week about a new product that will offer businesses syncing simplicity between the cloud and on-premise content.
In the meantime, anticipating increased business interest in the US, Alfresco has announced plans to expand both its management team and Atlanta headquarters. The new appointments are focused principally on building the sales team — specifically, by appointing someone to chase federal sales and consulting initiatives, as well as beefing up its sales department generally. More on this next week, when we can take a look at Alfresco’s new release.
Enterprise CMS in EMEA
Even in the current economic circumstances, Enterprise CMS is set to grow, according to new research by TechNavio. In particular, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region is set to grow between now and 2015, which may come as a surprise to some in light of the difficulties in many European economies.
This period will likely be marked by an increasing number of mergers, of which there is ample evidence already. The report also identifies OpenText, IBM, EMC and Oracle as the big players, but there will still be considerable activity from smaller players like Hyland, Laserfiche and Newgen.
In fact, looking at the brief summary of the report at hand, it looks like a profitable three years with growth expected across the entire EMEA region.
M-Files v9.0
As the end of the month approaches, M-Files is getting ready to offer M-Files v9.0 on general release. At the core of this release, the company says, is advanced support for customer deployments that require multiple document repositories, or vaults.
Multiple repositories can create considerable problems, as we have seen in the past. M-Files president Greg Milliken says that v9.0 offers better interaction and cooperation between these repositories. Using new replication abilities, V9.0 aims to streamline the process of dealing with one of the main problems of multiple repositories — relating data to other relevant data in other repositories.
While an exact date for the general release hasn’t been given, it will be available by the end of the month. More on this then.
Already up and running, users of the new iOS Drive app have the same document-editing ability that users of the Android Drive app already possess. They can also create new documents and format text as well as view other people edits.
In fact, there is a whole range of functionality that has just come on line that will make working in Drive on iOS considerably easier.
Oracle has been hard at work on the commerce portion of its customer experience portfolio. Today it releases updates to two of its Commerce products and offers a chance to dig into the details at Oracle OpenWorld in San Fransisco the end of this month.
Oracle's Commerce strategy focuses not only on helping deliver great customer experiences, but also ensuring that the business user can easily create and manage these experiences across channels without needing to hold IT's hand. It has also ensured that the commerce platform is the best it can be to support a wide range of scalability and performance requirements.
Visual Merchandising: Merchants can now edit content with visual tools that show the shopper's perspective. Tools such as Layout View, Light Table (drag and drop ordering of products) and a contextual menu are new and are meant to reduce the amount of work required to design the shopping experience.
Editing Multiple Items: Get things done faster by changing a number of items at once.
Time Based Preview: Want to see what your site looks like at a time in the future? Now you can.
Mobile and Cross Channel Selling: You can build mobile web sites or iOS web apps using the Commerce Reference Store (a customizable pre-built storefront). Also included are starter applications, best practices examples, and more.
Global Scalability: There are new business model, performance and international commerce features including a merged B2B and B2C set of capabilities and localized UIs for the business tools. Web Commerce is now integrated with Oracle Coherence (an in-memory data grid solution), and it is certified run on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine.
Oracle Commerce Reference Store
According to Oracle, recent benchmarking tests showed ATG Web Commerce improved response times by 50% and delivered 3x more page views per second when it was run on Oracle Exalogic compared to a traditional blade system of similar size and configuration.
Oracle Endeca Commerce
Oracle acquired Endeca back in October of 2011. It has worked hard to integrate Endeca Commerce into the overall Oracle platform. The Endeca product line has been combined into two offerings: Oracle Endeca Guided Search and Oracle Endeca Experience Manager, both elements of Oracle Endeca Commerce.
SRI International, the brains behind Apple's Siri, has launched a dozen consumer products since its digital assistant got famous. We venture inside SRI's labs to find out why you haven't you heard of any of them.
Years before the Apple-loving world met Siri in 2010, Norman Winarsky was playing with SRI International’s then prototype virtual personal assistant among fellow passengers on board a delayed flight.
“I was sitting on the plane waiting for the flight to take off, and I asked Siri, ‘How long will flight 927 be delayed?’ And Siri came back to me and said the flight would be delayed 15 minutes,” recalls Winarsky, who was the SRI executive on the spin-off company’s board before it was sold to Apple. “The guy next to me looked at me and said ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that … why are you in coach?’”
Spoofs and flaws aside, Siri has helped catapult sales of the iPhone 4S and will likely figure prominently into the appeal of the new iPhone 5. Credit is largely due to former Motorola executive Dag Kittlaus, who came on board as the Siri CEO and spotted the market’s hunger for something like her: Smart phones everywhere? Check. Wide availability of fast mobile Internet? Pretty much. The combination of field-based input, tiny screens and imprecise keyboards? Yep. A tool that took advantage of SRI’s deep expertise in artificial intelligence (gained from decades of work on government projects) paired with strong voice recognition software would prove to be a home run. It was a shining moment for SRI’s innovation model, which insists on identifying the market opportunity for a new invention before making it commercially available.
Winarsky remembers being blown away by how well Siri was integrated into the phone when the 4S came out last year. “[It’s] a spectacular edge that Apple has put forward,” he thought. And the cherry on top was Apple sticking with “Siri,” a name easily identifiable with the almost 70-year old company that launched the project.
The smart people who work at SRI International, an organization that’s been involved in cutting-edge research since the end of World War II, aren’t easily surprised. But they never realized the market potential that Apple saw in Siri. As it turned out, brilliant research-oriented inventors used to working for the Department of Defense don’t always make the best innovators.
And even after the Siri score, SRI didn’t exactly kick off a lightning round of consumer product launches, even though SRI is bubbling over with ideas. Today, few products put forth by the organization’s 2,000 employees make it through the gauntlet of SRI’s commercialization board. And only three or four of those are sold, spun off, or licensed by SRI each year. All told, SRI has birthed about a dozen consumer products since Siri. But have you heard of any of them?
Winarsky is quick to point out that the majority of SRI’s budget comes from competing for, winning, and working on government projects. That’s because from its beginnings as Stanford University’s research arm, SRI was happy and honored to work on solving the world’s big problems--curing cancer, developing unmanned aircraft, evading radar detection, renewable energy, robotics, interfacing with computers--and it was deeply invested in an altruistic, nonprofit business model.
SRI worked a lot on “the kinds of things you don’t solve, you just make progress on,” according to Bill Mark, a leader on the artificial intelligence projects that laid the foundation for Siri. But even before then, it was the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act that allowed SRI to parlay the inventions and intellectual property that came from its work on government-funded projects into private business opportunities. SRI transformed from a think tank and research organization sustained by government assignments to a center of innovation with its own nest egg. And over the last few decades, it’s helped birth a few important inventions and companies: Nuance Communications, one of the early players in voice recognition; Intuitive Surgical, which championed the idea of doctors using robots to make minimally invasive surgeries more precise; and various cancer treatment drugs. But there has not been a steady stream of Siri-like successes coming out of the campus on Ravenswood Ave. in Menlo Park.
In 2008 SRI unveiled robots that used the principles of static electricity to climb walls. Why didn’t they partner with a toy maker, slap a hard plastic shell on them to make them look like a ladybug, and make the robots the “it” Christmas present of 2010, asks Manu Chatterjee, a Silicon Valley-based strategist with experience at HP and Motorola. “That’s a storyteller problem, right there.”
“They’d be hard-pressed to refute the criticism that aside from [those products], they’re not hitting home runs, they’re hitting singles and doubles,” Chatterjee says.
Kittlaus had been the storyteller at Siri. As he said in a Chicago Tribune story earlier this year, “(Research) guys are great at solving technical problems. They're not necessarily great at figuring out what the hell to do with it.”
While there is a trophy case in SRI’s subdued main lobby populated by mementos from successful acronym projects--DARPA, DOD and ARPANET and even a couple Emmy awards for work on the technology used in HDTV-- it seems secondary, like a happy coincidence, the result of smart people doing great work but not trying to get rich. Even today, with iPhone commercials featuring Siri hobnobbing with a cavalcade of stars--and an SRI program that lets employees share in profits from their commercial successes--SRI lacks the buzz of tech-incubated startups that churn out more millionaires than profitable apps.
During a visit to SRI's campus for a daylong demo, the sheer brainpower on display is impressive. Scientists and researchers--only a few wear white lab coats, the rest are dressed business casual--live in a world where watercooler discussions are less likely to include the names of MVPs in last night's San Francisco Giants game and more likely to reference the official names for cancer causing proteins (HER-2, the one that causes breast cancer, is a hot topic). The long hallways in some buildings were compared by one researcher to stalls at a flea market. Another ponders a comparison between the lab and the Island of Misfit Toys but says some projects here are hot, live, and destined for consumers. Plenty are considerably cooler.
Janey Ly, a researcher in SRI’s biosciences division who began the laser-aided cancer screening project called FAST at Xerox’s PARC and moved the program down the road to take advantage of SRI’s deep knowledge in her field, seems unfazed by her long timeline. Even working quickly, she and her colleagues won’t see FAST being used widely for at least five years. It took them almost a year to set up their lab on SRI’s campus, and clinical trials (the FDA requires two, one of which has been completed) can take up to three years.
Grit Denker and Rukman Senanayake, key collaborators on the eye-tracking, gesture-following, display-morphing device called bRIGHT, are talking about 10 years before their project might really be finished.
And Rich Mahoney, SRI’s director of robotics and key proponent of the thousand-dollar robotic hand, marvels at how much progress his industry has made making robots that can safely participate in human environments since he was a PhD candidate in the 1980s. (If you shook hands with a robot working on an automaker’s assembly line then, it might rip your arm off.) “Starting in about 1980, every decade was supposed to be the decade of robotics,” he says. He’s still patiently awaiting its arrival. “I’ll never say this is the decade of robotics.”
There’s a certain amount of audacity required in an organization to believe you have the staff to even tackle these problems, to start from scratch and go through all the R&D growing pains, but there’s no cockiness on display at SRI. Its campus resembles a small liberal arts college while the plans for Apple’s new building evoke the UFO from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Aside from an updated grill/wok station, the cafeteria probably hasn’t changed in 40 years. And Winarsky, now the vice president of SRI Ventures, an organization with a couple thousand great minds at its disposal, is still sitting in coach.
What Siri has done here, however, is spawn a host of opportunities for SRI to leverage its AI resources and win clients for decades to come. Its aggressively pushing forward with apps like TrapIt, a content aggregator for the iPad; Desti, a search engine focused on travel in the San Francisco Bay area; and the web-banking concierge Lola, developed for Spanish bank BBVA-Compass. Winarsky suggests there will be more to come, with businesses looking to gain a competitive edge in their industry asking SRI to develop an app for them.
“One of the challenges we face is trying to bridge the gap between the kind of things we can do, and the problems people have. So having Siri as a point of reference--‘how good would Siri be at solving your problem, what else would you need?’--provides something people are familiar with,” says Mike Freed, an SRI artificial intelligence expert.
But the challenge for SRI and its employees is to maintain the spirit of innovation that swept the campus after Siri’s star turn and push for their projects–some might be world-changing, others might just be fun. Freed, for example, asked during a lunch of fish tacos how some of his nascent projects could make a journalist’s life easier; Mahoney seems committed to being a researcher/entrepreneur and even has a role with a robotics incubator called Redwood Robotics. But what the company might need most are more people like Kittlaus, who could bring storytelling to SRI’s inventions to help turn them into innovations.
Twitter is rolling out a Certified Products Program that offers Twitter-based products and services from third-party developers and partners to businesses. The program is launching with three verticals — engagement products, analytics products and data reseller products.
Twitter Seeks Engagement, Analytics, Data Resale
Twitter is aligning its three initial certified products verticals as follows:
Engagement Products — Helping brands keep in touch with their customers. This includes activities such as providing workflow or advanced sorting, delegation and assignment of replies, as well as alerting users to high-priority events or tweets requiring immediate action. Developers must make Twitter and Twitter account management and network engagement part of the core product experience and offering.
Analytics Products — Helping businesses learn from their customers on Twitter. Examples include historical analytics of how previous campaigns unfolded on Twitter and industry-specific analytics that tie activity on Twitter to success metrics. Developers are required to encourage further engagement with Twitter, clearly attribute Twitter as a data source and make Twitter a core part of the product experience.
Data Reseller Products — Platforms for innovation on top of large numbers of tweets. These include APIs that allow analytics companies to study past conversations and with customers' private data to tie activity on Twitter to proprietary business processes. Developers need to offer API features that are significantly differentiated from Twitter's own, actively encourage customers to build products which drive engagement with Twitter and staff a sales and support organization to meet enterprise customer service expectations.
Twitter Incentivizes API Development
As reported by CMSWire, earlier this month Twitter publicized plans to release version 1.1 of the Twitter API in the coming weeks, and it involves a number of new user restrictions. Changes will include required authentication on every API endpoint, a new per-endpoint rate-limiting methodology, and tighter “Developer Rules of the Road,” especially around applications that are traditional Twitter clients.
Twitter said these restrictions and requirements are intended to prevent “malicious” use of the Twitter API and to gain an understanding of what types of applications are accessing the API. However, many observers have been skeptical about how altruistic Twitter’s intentions really are. According to VentureBeat, the Certified Products Program is a good start to Twitter’s new API policies.
“For some time now, in private meeting rooms and on public stages, Twitter has urged developers to make these kinds of products — noncompetitive products that would give their makers a real business opportunity,” stated a VentureBeat posting. The article went on to say it is “somewhat encouraging to see Twitter creating incentives for building the right kind of Twitter apps, not just punishments for building the wrong kind.”
Twitter is launching the Certified Products Program with 12 initial partners: Attensity, Crimson Hexagon, Dataminr, DataSift, ExactTarget, Grip, HootSuite, Mass Relevance, Radian6, Sprinklr, Social Flow and Topsy.
After its bruising defeat in the courts to Apple, Samsung tries to get on with business as usual, with some of its more distinctive products, including a New Samsung Galaxy Note, being launched today in Berlin at an event titled "Unpacked."
Welcome to the Future
Samsung's Unpacked event is being livestreamed now on Facebook but most of the details are out already. With new phones, tablets and computing devices on the way, it promises to be quite a show.
Is It A Phone or Is It A Camera?
There have been quite a few iPhone stuck on the back of a camera spoofs, but Samsung has gone and done it for real, with a new product shown ahead of today's event. The Galaxy Camera looks like a sleek consumer camera with a large touchscreen on the back and a super 21X zoom lens up front.
Taking 16megaixel shots, you can view them on the 4.8" HD screen and upload them direct to your usual social and photo services directly using your Android apps. Internals include a likely 1.4GHz processor, 8GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot. Expect more details on this soon.
Taking Notes
The specs for the Galaxy Note 2 are also being widely dispersed ahead of the event. as expected, it will offer a 5.5″ HD Super AMOLED screen running at 1280×720. Inside is a 1.6GHz quad-core CPU with 2GB of RAM (with 16, 32, and 64 GB options and a microSD slot) plus dual cameras.
Juice is delivered by a huge 3,100mAh battery which makes it a smudge heavier by a couple of grams on the original, even so the overall dimensions are slightly thinner. There will be LTE and HSPA+ 21 models depending on your region and it will ship in white or grey with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. It is out in October in Europe, U.S. release details to follow.
Phoning Home on Windows
Samsung is also showing off its first Windows 8 phone, the ATIV S, this features specs that match the latest Android devices, but will be a key part of Microsoft's success as a smartphone player. This ATIV s offers a 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED screen, 1.5GHz dual-core and dual cameras.
Windows 8 Phones are headed your way in huge numbers
Looking rather executive in silver and grey, the phone was shown on Microsoft's Windows Phone blog which has more photos and specifications. ATIV is the product name for all Samsung's Windows 8 products including a smart tablet PC, with detachable magnetic keyboard.
Samsung showed off Windows RT tablets, Ultrabooks and other devices, focusing on lightness, thinness and design specs, but the phone came across as the highlight of the show.
Never mind Facebook or Face.com, a new visual recognition engine uses a machine-learning algorithm to spot objects and scenes, logos and products, even gender and emotions--all to better target you.
Facebook has been taking a lot of flack lately over Face.com, the startup it reportedly acquired for roughly $60 million for its facial-recognition technology, which is creating a whole new set of privacy concerns for the social network. But a new visual recognition engine developed by startup Orbeus aims to go far beyond facial features.
Today, the founders of Orbeus presented their system at Chicago-based accelerator Excelerate Labs' demo day, showing off a machine that can detect everything from emotions and gender to objects and scenes, and logos and products. By mining an ever-growing database of images, the Orbeus team can teach its machine-learning algorithm to recognize myriad photo features and categories. Xing Meng, CEO of Orbeus, believes the technology could have a huge impact not only on online social sharing, but also on advertising and content delivery. "Every time you upload photos to the service, we could learn your taste or general patterns from the images, which could allow more interested ads or content based on the context of your photos," Meng says.
When uploading a service onto Orbeus' Rekognition tool, an API third-party developers can integrate with their own services, Orbeus scans the photo against its expansive database of categorized images to determine certain characteristics. If the photo is of a person's face, Orbeus can recognize gender, approximate age, and even certain emotions. It can also recognize scenes, such as if there is a beach or forest present in the photograph, and objects, such as products, logos, or even various types of foods. "Certain categories we can train for a pretty high degree of accuracy," Meng says. "So instead of recognizing foods as vegetarian because there is a lot of green in terms of the texture, we could actually soon recognize broccoli. But distinguishing between living rooms or bedrooms or living rooms for scene recognition--well, that's a little more complicated."
With that level of specificity, Meng imagines the technology could help developers serve up more tailored content. "We tested it on one of our cofounders, and found that almost 50% of the food photos he took were of vegetarian food," Meng says. "Yet Facebook is still pushing Ruth's Chris [Steak House] ads? It's clear he's likely a vegetarian."
Of course, it's still early on in the startup's life, and its technology is far from perfect. When scanning a few photos--you can test the system yourself here--we ran into a few complications. For example, Orbeus guessed that Apple iOS SVP Scott Forstall was just 22 years old, when he's actually twice that age. Orbeus was also unable to recognize the Mercedes logo, instead pegging it, bizarrely, as a 31-year-old female. But other tests were more successful, and the Orbeus team touts that its system has shown better results in certain instances than Facebook's Face.com platform.
But the more accurate the technology becomes from Orbeus and Facebook, the more critics are likely to have privacy concerns. It's one thing for Orbeus to recognize the name of one of my friends, but to then guess how my friend is feeling, his approximate age, the food he's eating, and the products present in his kitchen? That might be too much information for some.
And it's quite possible Orbeus hasn't even dreamed of all the applications of its technology. It demoed an experimental app today to show off what its technology could do in a social setting, such as organizing friends based on similar interests seen in photographs (sailing, swimming, and so forth). It's also already working with some 200 developers who are taking advantage of its API.
Says Meng, "When Facebook acquired Face.com, it left a big hole in the market."
With its large database of human cognitive performance, Lumosity has become a small but significant force in the science surrounding its products.
As a neuroscience PhD candidate at Stanford, Michael Scanlon explored the effects of cognitive training through small-scale experiments on fish and rats. Now, seven years after dropping out to start a company that makes brain games, he can base his research on anonymized data from 25 million people.
Lumosity, the company Scanlon co-founded, makes games that promise to sharpen memory, focus attention, enhance creativity and improve attention. At least by Silicon-Valley terms, it’s been successful. The startup announced a $31.5 million investment from Discovery Communications last week, bringing its total amount of funding to $70 million. Its mobile app has reached the coveted No. 1 spot in the App Store, and its userbase has swelled to 25 million.
Studies about whether playing games like Lumosity's can indeed make people smarter have produced conflicting results. One study, for instance, found subjects who trained in cognitive tasks improved only at those specific tasks. Others, meanwhile, have showed improvement in fluid intelligence among those who played a brain game.
Lumosity's research branch, Lumos Labs, runs its own studies about how the games impact intelligence. But it also lends assessment tools and, in a few cases, its massive data set to independent researchers who are studying cognitive training. It's running an experiment and a company at the same time and has thus become a small but significant force in the science surrounding its products.
According to a paper the company published in the MENSA Research Journal, after 10 hours of training, subjects improved 10% in memory and 20% in divided attention. At the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in October, it will present further research on the transfer of cognitive training to core underlying cognitive capacities and whether older adults need to train more frequently than younger adults to receive equivalent benefits.
With the exception of the research published in MENSA Research, however, none of its findings have been submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
“We know it’s possible,” Scanlon says. “We haven’t submitted enough times to know if we we have a high rate of success or a low rate of success.”
Regardless of whether Lumos Labs successfully publishes more studies, Scanlon acknowledges that research produced by organizations without revenue at stake are more likely to be trusted. Which is one reason Lumosity has helped supply about 100 independent researchers with brain games their subjects can play at home instead of at the lab.
Researchers from Stanford, the University of New South Wales and other schools have used Lumosisty brain games in published studies, many of which support Lumosisty's findings, and scientists at Harvard and UC Berkeley are among the 25 researchers that are currently incorporating the games into experiments.By default, testing their subjects on Lumosity games also helps cement the company’s position as the most data-equipped researcher in the space.
That's the business genius in Lumosity's research programs: As new understandings emerge about how cognitive training works and in what ways it is or is not effective, it's a good bet that Lumosity will be the first to arrive with updated games.
“The product is informing the science, which then turns back into the product,” Scanlon says. “Not all companies have the option of having their R&D and business models in such alignment.”
Lawyers have some new tools with which to fight their battles. Today, HP-owned Autonomy unveiled three new innovations for its products that are designed to help law firms and corporate legal departments utilize the convergence of social, cloud and mobile technologies.
Neil Araujo, chief executive officer of Autonomy Project Legal, noted in a statement that his company has “long been an innovator in information management for the legal industry,” and that these new innovations help lawyers “take advantage of consumer technologies,” while maintaining their security and enterprise system requirements.
‘Self-Curated Collections’
One of the enhancements utilizes HP Labs’ patent-pending Compass technology, which allows users to more easily find personal connections and share content inside a company. This technology will be integrated into iManage Universal Search, Autonomy’s knowledge management application.
This new functionality automatically suggests relevant people, collections and content based on content or a person currently selected. It also enables the creation of communities that Autonomy described as “self-curated collections” revolving around a given topic. The interface is designed to act like a social network’s, so users can follow collections and receive updates from communities.
Doc Exchange, Mobile Scanning
A second enhancement provides a secure, cloud-based document exchange within Autonomy WorkSite, which is used by law firms and legal departments for document and email management. The new functionality is intended to make document sharing with outsiders easier, more secure and more auditable.
An improved process for capturing images from mobile devices is the third enhancement Autonomy is rolling out. This capability allows mobile camera users to remove extraneous background, de-skew an image or remove page creases.
Once cleaned up, the image can be read more easily on an Optical Character Recognition system, and then utilized as a text-based document. The company said that use cases include attorneys-in-the-field capturing signatures on engagement letters, affidavits or other legal documents.
Autonomy, founded in 1996, said it currently has over 65,000 customers worldwide and more than 400 OEM partners for its products, which seek to extract meaning in real time from all forms of information. Product areas include content management, knowledge and records management, compliance, business process management and collaboration.
After its bruising defeat in the courts to Apple, Samsung tries to get on with business as usual, with some of its more distinctive products, including a New Samsung Galaxy Note, being launched today in Berlin at an event titled "Unpacked." 
