Sep
6
Talking Insurance to Your Motor Car
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
I often get questions about the future role of mobile, many of which stump me, since if you had really wanted to design a less adequate content carrier than the smartphone you would be hard put to know where to start. It is adequately inadequate for reading novels. It has great limitations as a platform technology and if it were not for the fact that we are surrounded by ubiquitous bandwidth and all want to walk and talk at the same time, it is hard to see why we got where we are. I generally mutter words like “transactions” and “fulfilment” and move to the edge of the group in the hope of picking up a hint. OK, I get the tablet and the phablet and the mini-tablet, but I was last completely clear ten years ago when N Negroponte and others said that convergence would take place and everything we did on the move would go into one nano-box. It hasn’t happened, and I have lost the belief that it will. So how will the smartphone transform our lives? My current bet is that it will enable us to talk to the network of objects – and get answers. Lets start with the motor car aka automobile.
Or should I say aka computer? Even my aged machine (I call it Humphrey, fondly imagining its demented efforts to go where it will, not where I am trying to direct it, are pale imitations of civil service passive aggression to my Prime Ministerial decision-making) is a processor that gives up its secrets only to the right people. But OBDII solutions are getting cheaper, as are the scanners that read what the car is thinking about through these interfaces. I am certain that we therefore approach the time when, as you start the vehicle, you smartphone will tell you, having recognized the relationship of owner and driver and activated the Bluetooth, how worn the brake pads are, and that the oil change cannot be further delayed. Indeed, your virtual personal assistant may be already making the appointment. And as your car increasingly morphs into a driverless vehicle (this will relieve Humphrey of a lot of his current uncertainty, since he not me will be reading the satnav, which is an embedded smartphone feature) so your need to talk to it will grow greater. How otherwise will you know about the recall for suspension repairs, or the best place to get snow tyres, or indeed that your tax disc is running out? Increasingly the networked world will talk to your car as well, and that talk will be reported to you as decisions to be made. I believe that we will communicate those decisions mostly by speech: we are poor respondents to email and the power of advertising in conventional media is diminishing. But if the car says, via the smartphone, while you are driving along “Are we getting snow tyres this year, because I have a file here with all the offerings?” we can either say “Yes, bring it on” or “Never mention this in my hearing again, Humphrey”.
So we have a smartphone with satnav and OBDII scanner and we chat away, the car and I, in perfect amity. But where is the factor on the internet that makes all change work? The combination of productivity gain, improved decision making and better compliance that feeds every successful innovation with cost and time reduction that makes things work? I was stumped until this morning, when I chanced upon an announcement from Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions (http://www.lexisnexis.com/risk/telematics.aspx), who have launched Lexis Nexis Telematics Mobile. Their target is the insurer, and the potential future growth of UBI – Usage Based Insurance. Now, if you paid insurance by the month, and your insurer had an interface which showed him how you drove, as well as what your driving record was and how your car was maintained, there would be incentives for careful drivers with properly serviced vehicles to get progressive discounting. Along with greater security from theft, users will for the first time experience vehicle insurance which is not a commodity, based on their address, or their age or gender, but which is a personal reflection of their behaviour. And the monitor for all this, both for the insurer and the user, will be the ubiquitous smartphone.
Now, take this scenario out of the auto world and put it in the context of every day life. When we say that eventually a networked world will change the fundamentals of the way we live, and the smartphone is at the heart of that, then this is what we surely mean. Connect up all those wearable computing devices that measure your heart, your steps, your energy or your brainwaves – and put all those environments into the smartphone, and add the medical insurers. And do not stop until you have covered every human function, extension and attribute. And then calculate the sheer “publishing power” which will be needed to resource and update all these apps, and the software development needed to turn the workflow of life into a conversation with your smartphone, and you are beginning to feel the edges of the cloth from which the future of the information society will be fashioned.
Aug
14
Things Every Boy and Girl Should Know…
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments
” Well,” she said, in a determined and slightly defensive tone of voice “the last thing we intend to do is turn ourselves into a software house. We are publishers and cannot be expected to understand software, which is such a terrible distraction. I took my correction silently and philosophically. After all, this has been a litany I have heard for a decade. And the paradox is that the more that software controls and modulates the way publishers create content, and the more it dominates the way in which users view it, the more permissible it has become for very senior executives in all sorts of places that do “publishing” (rapidly becoming a meaningless term) to proclaim with pride their ignorance of some of the basics. Some tell me “that’s what we have a CTO for”, while others tell me that it is not a creative area (yes, really!!) of their business. The largest decisions a modern information industry CEO will make concern software. The delivery – critical decisions a publisher of romantic novels will mainly concern software. We cannot avoid it – so surely every senior executive should know enough to intelligently quiz the CTO, outside suppliers and potential alliance partners?
You have now been reading for about 60 seconds. During that time, the software that holds us all in place in the network has been mightily engaged. 168 million emails were sent during that time. 694,445 Google searches took place. 320 new Twitter accounts were opened and 58,000 new tweets were posted. 600 new videos were posted – I could go on (courtesy of Go-Globe.com) but I hope you get the message. If people who run businesses they call “publishing” do not understand the platform upon which they stand, as they once understood the possibilities of print, then what hope is there for the traditional end of the market? I meet very many CEOs in the course of a working year, and in every 10 there are three who are brilliant on the bedrock technologies that drive their businesses. There are three more who struggle but know it is important. After that come four who do not really see it at all, and this group is strongest in the areas of greatest current risk – consumer book publishing, magazines and events. I almost feel as if there should be a test: Differentiate and suggest how you would use HTML5 and XML. Distinguish RDBMS databases from NoSQL databases and explain the advantages of the latter over the former. What does Epub3 allow you to do that you could not do before? How would you use the Cloud to support a reduction in Capex in your development programme? What is Open Source and is it cheaper or more expensive than proprietary software? What is entity extraction and how do I use the semantic web to add value? What is SaaS and how does it create scope for your expansion?
Readers here would doubtless have no difficulty with any of this. But still, we all – me especially – need a jolt of recognition of the speed of change at the moment. Venture Capital has a current investment of some $16 billion in SaaS software alone, with about half in business functionality (FactSet). The global software industry will top $1.1 trillion in 2016 (Gartner) – for comparison the current sizing of the publishing and information marketplace is $400 billion today (Outsell). Gartner see media and communications as a key area for the software businesses, with 2012’s spend by the sector of $61 billion rising to $78 billion in 2016. Some $21 billion of this spend ($25 billion in 2016) is for media-specialized applications. This is the top ranked vertical sector for software in 2016. My argument at the moment would be that this sale is resting on the shoulders of a very small, technically-capable group of senior buyers – it is time now for a better informed cadre of senior management to help to bear this burden, and for boards to have a generally better informed decision-making discussion which is capable of putting the view of the CTO and the professional advisers and evaluators into the medium term context of the business.
Finally, lets just look at one section of the information waterfront. This week I noted with interest the acquisition of a company called Edaboard.com by Design World (WTWH Media LLC). This brings together a leading brand which provides information services on design engineering with a community-driven forum focussed on electrical engineering topics. We have seen deals like this, and will see a lot more. But the decisions that come next – one platform or two, in-house or outsource, service integration, Cloud-based services etc will be critical to the success of this investment. I do not know Design World and I have no reason to believe that they are not fully capable of doing the job, but in many corporations of my acquaintance many of these decisions would be taken by a small coterie of tech-savvy operators, with some of the most senior people acting in faith and trust that someone else had made the right tech bets.
In a great allusion, Mike Olson of Cloudera remarked that “We are living through a Cambrian moment in database history”. As the Age of Data morphs into Data Science, we all struggle to keep up. As major data concentrations meet the Cloud, and we have to work with PaaS (Platform as a service) and DaaS (database as a service) it is not going to get slower or easier. But it is clear that the boundaries around “what we need to know to do the job” are radically changed as well. None of us should be frightened about going back to school!
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