The Future is about TIME

Are we able to predict the next five years any better than we did the last five?

What is very clear is that technology and how we apply it is not only changing what we consume, but what we create, how we discover it, value it, share it and is changing our very culture. It was once said that we were no longer listening to music but starting to make it, no longer reading but starting to write our own stories, no longer just watching TV and films but starting to make them. Today these statements are very real and the tools and technology to create media is available to all, along with the channels to promote and sell It, with or without the middlemen. YouTube has started to redefine how many now discover and watch music, Shazam on how we discover it and the likes of Spotify on how we access it on demand.

We now live within a permanently ‘switched on’ environment, where we are accessible at all times and where we can access everything anywhere, anytime. We live with a mobile smartphone in our pockets which can now perform all our office functions, access everything, take pictures and videos, calculate the complex, locate where we are and what we are near, play music, videos, games and more in real time, interact via voice command, communicate with all and even still make and receive voice and now video calls.

Although we now have the smartphone technology in our pockets and the high speed connectivity to make everything happen, what does this mean to how we live? Are we now all creators, journalists, photographers, director, reviewers as well as consumers? The days when we relied on curators and professional reviewers of taste are now giving way to the social recommendations of what are often physical strangers. More importantly, as we become increasingly ‘open all hours’, do we become more discerning, or do we adopt an increasingly low attention channel hopping lifestyle?

Technology is becoming more intuitive. No longer are we wedded to a keyboard and a mouse, but at last we are now starting to become more dextrous and multi-taskers. With voice and even retina control commands becoming more common. The ‘sixth sense’ world envisaged by Pranav Mistry is now here, but is technology now enabling cultural change or responding to its demands?

Some believe that stuff (the various media forms ) will merge and what was once a single format story, video, audio, song is going to become all these plus a game and all rolled into one experience. Some believe that each media form will remain separate, but alternative formats will be immediately accessible on demand. Does it matter whether a story is in text, film audio, or is it more about the time we have to discover, digest and value it? Does multimedia demand more or less concentration than an audio file or a film? Does technology now give us the time to read the book or does it present us with too many alternative distractions and restrict our reading?

Many forget that the other aspect that is under constant threat is time. It is how we use our time and how technology helps us to achieve this that is probably the greatest cultural change.

So what of the next five years?

There will always be a need for quality time and that will demand quality solutions and stuff. What we have to think about is not the mix but the time. Media that was created to fit yesterday’s economic model, be it a cinema channel, space on a disc, or physical print press is still valid but now increasingly challenged by technology that is rebalancing those economics, channels and supply chains. We must start to create content that is not padded out or abridged to fit a form but is now built to fit time windows of lifestyle.

Digital Warming

Global warming is effecting our weather and being blamed for the extreme weather we are witnessing around the world. This year alone we have had exception gales and flooding across the UK, a heat wave down under and polar freezing weather in the US and Canada. We understand some of the causes, but we still appear powerless to predict the future weather past the short term.

Publishing has been effected by its own digital warming which has seen the extreme performance of some, demise of others and a general unpredictability of most.

Is there a critical digital point which tips the scales of all other channels, or are there a series of tremors and spikes that we now have to live with? Technology is fairly predictable but the combined impact of this and changing consumer and social behaviour is making what was once fairly predictable market into one which now appears to be stormy and highly volatile.

Polarisation and consolidation is a given and if anything will increase as the big seek to retain market share and control and the small carve out viable niches. This is not just impacting a few but is now prevalent across the value chain. However, the traditional industry is no longer defined by the book but increasingly by technology, markets and media. Amazon is barely twenty and Google, Facebook Twitter are all relatively newcomers. The recent combination of Random House and Penguin pales into insignificance against the size of the new technology, social and online players. Size as once defined is no longer as relevant as community, touch, engagement and the Wow factor.

Interestingly we see a relatively flat overall market. Some sectors may be experiencing greater decline as their market accelerates online, whilst others are more resilient and subject to a more unpredictable path. Prices have fallen and are under constant pressure, merely raising the RRP to compensate for the discount given becomes a vicious circle where the market will increasingly dictate the price in a price comparison world. We have seen publisher declare increased revenues but is this a trend or merely another spike? We have seen other publisher flat line, or decline and is this reflective or the corporate adjustments being made, their publishing mix and offer, or digital warming? Retailers have experienced the same volatility and only recently we have seen John Smiths go one way whilst other flat line or go the other way. Many retailers no longer have the property asset to fall back on and are now a one trick pony. The ebook market is also changing. No longer are we obsessed with ‘lookie likie’ eink readers that offer little but now are focused on mobile platforms and towards a permanently connected online cloud world.

Technology has done wonders to raise the profile of the book but appears to have done little yet to increase reading. We have continued somewhat naively to pour the physical content into the digital container without questioning the logic and consumer need. Some would say it is like giving the early mass literacy readers of the Victorian age ‘War and Peace’ to read as their first book. Books must now compete even more in a time poor, channel hopping, and choice rich market.

Why We Need To Challenge Today's eBooks

Offered below are just three arguments that force us to question what we publish today and what we should publish tomorrow. Individually, the arguments may not pass the ‘so what?’ test, but taken together they should ring alarm bells in every publishing building.

Firstly, we often assume we will see and understand change and importantly be prepared for it. The reality is very different and change today is not linear, nor is it predictable and in many cases it is disruptive. The industrial giants of yesterday have been overtaken by technology and networking companies who connect stuff. Things that were once impossible to imagine can now be achieved from anywhere, at any time, in a click. Technology is enabling us to reevaluate how we develop, manage and market content and its associated context. As change happens society adopts and adapts and expectations and values we took for granted also change. Technology is now enabling everyone to be a creator of content and to connect to an audience and this democratisation of creativity is further impacting content formats such as books, film, TV, music, games, photography, art.

Secondly, we are a society, which in the main, has an ownership culture. We buy bricks and mortar and called it home, we  then set about filling it with possessions, some transient and throw away and others more assets and collectibles. Our possessions often reflect and describe who we are, or who we aspire to be. Unlike yesterday many rooms may not be filled with shelves of books, music, films, magazines etc. On demand instant access to very large ’libraries’ starts to question the basics need for ownership and opens the market to models such as rental and subscription, which were not attractive in the old analogue world. Netflix, Lovefilm, Prime, Spotify, Pandora are all creating the on demand market in film and music and now the likes of Oyster, Scribd, Amazon and others are following their lead in the ebook market.  

 

Thirdly, the way we read, what we read and when we read and how we spend our leisure time today is increasingly different from 100 years ago, fifty years ago and even 20 years ago, yet the content itself has altered very little. The vast majority of ebooks today take the content developed for the physical container and merely pour it into a digital one. Is that logical? Are we presuming that’s what consumers want? Imagine we could take the text and create a perfect audiobook at a click, would we really expect that to be good enough or just a lazy quick fix. Today audiobooks are adapted from books and professionally read to fit the medium and consumers’ expectations. It’s true that they no longer are restricted by the digital media but just how long would it take to listen to ‘War and Peace’ with a synthesised voice? Screenplays of books adapt the content to fit the format, consumers’ expectations and budget. We do not have many 5 hour films and most fit within 180 to 240 minutes and may only cover a fraction of the book content. We don’t have many 15 minute music tracks and again these are no longer restricted by the media. 

So why are ebooks so wedded to the 75,000 word or 256 page economic physical book model?

How we should respond to these arguments today and what will we have to consider tomorrow?

We have been fixated on the end form, the finished book and not the creative process itself which for many has changed very little. We have remained locked to the physical book economics and presumed that the chicken will always lay the ebook egg. We have continued to be obsessed with units sold and largely ignored other models which may cause contract friction. We have continued to pour the same content into a similar digital container without thinking. We continue to view the book as the start and not the book as a potential subsidiary. We have many very well subscribed short story competitions which go nowhere. We have failed to grasp or translate the Japanese Keitai opportunity.

There is no silver bullet. No one solution way forward. Expecting that worked yesterday will continue to work tomorrow, is not good enough.

Shifting Technology Boundaries

Technology offers and can quickly deliver social, cultural, medical benefits and opportunities that are often beyond our imagination, but at the same time, it can introduce new threats and risks to our personal information and lives. Balancing the evolution of technology to ensure we can manage these conflicts is probably our greatest challenge.

Today’s technology can accumulate random data from multiple sources to analyse; who we know, who we don’t know, how many steps away from individuals we are, when we last ‘chattered’ and what we communicated. They are capturing the various intertwining circles of social influence and relationships we all have. It can accumulate data on our behaviour; our views, our habits, when and what we buy and what we don’t buy and from where and what we looked at but passed on. It is in fact able to map our taste and probably predict our action and reaction to certain propositions and actions. It knows private information that can identify and authenticate us as individuals and going now even further than mere passwords and ids, to capture information on our very personal identifiers and distinguishing features. Every time we stamp a facial recognition on a photo we are in fact  ‘date and time stamping’ more personal information and aiding facial and feature recognition.

The emerging technology is not only mobile and constantly switched on, but is becoming increasingly intuitive and closer to our senses. Glasses with screens and cameras and driven by voice instructions, are capable of capturing our every movement. We shall be able to identify those in our vision through face recognition and be fed all the facts about them whilst they stand in front of us. Through tracking we shall be able to know who is just around the corner and even out of sight! We can now scroll information with our retina movement of our eyes without even a verbal instruction and in doing s, capture more information on how we navigate, not to sit in a historical repository, but to help our future activity.

The world of the ‘sixth sense’ is upon us.

The boundaries between different services we use are often blurring and what once were standalone social network such as Facebook or Linkedin are is now cross fertilising with email, skype, twitter, blogs, photo and music libraries etc.

So where are we going in the world some refer to as the new contextual dimension? Who will hold the information cards and who and how will information be used? Yesterday it was about content, products and access to all things material. Tomorrow it’s about the social and behavioural extension of information about us.

Marketing becomes mass marketing on a direct marketing basis. Upselling now is becoming about feeding known habits and true likes and dislikes and not merely trying to guess buying habits based on what individual’s bought. 

Rethinking the Future: Skinput

If you think the iPad is the future, think again.

When we reported on Pranav Mistry on TED we thought we were still seeing a future and innovation that was years away, but today we read that it may not be so far into the future as we thought. Remember how Pranav Mistry took pictures using his fingers to form the lens, or how he used his wrist as a watch, or how he used his hand as a keypad and how he could project and manipulate images onto any surface ? His logic was to interact with technology directly and effectively scrap the keyboard, the mouse even the screen and enable humans to interact directly with technology. Removing the technology bottleneck

Now Chris Harrison, a PhD student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon and colleagues Desney Tan and Dan Morris from Microsoft Research, have taken this concept and created ‘Skinput’. The technology uses sensors to detect movement in the fingers and skin’s surface and recognise that as sound waves travel through soft tissue and joints they make many of the locations on the arm distinct. Software coupled with the sensors can detect the location, function and subtle movements with an accuracy of 95%.

The prototype’s sensors are currently enclosed in a bulky cuff but it is envisaged that this can be scaled down to the size of a wrist watch. So we could soon see an alternative to Pranav Mistry’s sixth sense and a camera, phone,connection to any device,a new display and games interface. Microsoft Research's involvement could indicate that thinks are closer than you may think.

We recommend you to watch both Pranav Mistry Ted presentation and the video below to see a future coming soon to you.



Click to read original report on Skinput and see a short video at BBC