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
6
Open a Fab Lab and Re-Invent the Newspaper
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
First of all, a (very) old, (very) bad joke. The great Roy Thomson is sitting in an aircraft at Bangkok en route to Australia. “Get me the Bangkok Times”, he snaps to an aide. The young assistant returns in due course and gives the press tycoon his newspaper. “What did it cost us?”, the great man enquires. “10p”, replies the slightly surprized executive. “Cheap at the price if we got the properties as well” growled the newspaper acquisition legend. But this story comes to mind yet again from my 1960s publishing days not just because the price of a newspaper title is falling so rapidly, but because Roy Thomson was the last of a breed: he bought newspapers without any intention of imposing his views on the world, but simply – indeed, “purely” – to make money. Since his time, and I do not exempt Rupert Murdoch from this, newspaper proprietors have bought in to change the world, exercise power, develop a personal following or compensate for something missing elsewhere in life. And this week, as the Boston Globe goes for a pittance to an industrialist and now the Washington Post goes to Jeff Bezos for a mere $250 million we are back on the track created by the Chicago Herald Tribune: very expensive power jewellery for very rich people.
None of this will save a newspaper or make it more relevant to now-lost audiences. Jeff Bezos is an outstanding businessman who has created a singularly powerful ecommerce environment, but he may not have the answer to news in the network. Bob Woodward says on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “This isn’t Rupert Murdoch buying The Wall Street Journal, this is somebody who believes in the values that the Post has been prominent in practicing, and so I don’t see any downside,”
(http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/washington-post-sale-jeff-bezos-bob-woodward-rupert-murdoch-95226.html#ixzz2bDFk8ntc”), but for all we know at present, Politico, where I saw this story, is the true successor of political news and comment in newspapers. Jeff Bezos will be an experimenter and a catalyst for change, if we can go by his record, but while we wait it may be more interesting to see how the remaining assets of the Graham family fall. For example, will Kaplan go, and which Pearson competitor will try to offset flagging textbook fortunes by buying it (although even Kaplan is looking a bit past its best).
What would be good is a way of putting together the thinking of the best minds and begin to test and re-iterate models of engagement for networked populations. OK, we have done this before and the answer was Twitter – but I do not despair. The best thing that Jeff Bezos has bought may be a brand that he can transfer elsewhere for credibility and profit. All predecessors in the re-invention stakes have started from the idea that you take content first formulated from print and then re-condition it for online audiences. He doesn’t – or does not have to – think like that. And he will look at the Guardian, with 50 million online users, the voice of global liberalism in English, the place where everyone from Assange to Snowden comes to leak, and he will wonder why such a mighty distribution empire produces such pitiful revenues. And he will, as an online storekeeper, know which buttons to press to get revenues moving, since he survived the derision of the world for having no business model at Amazon – until his business model, once found, brought the consumer book industry to its knees and may yet point to its exit.
The keynote here is experimentation and re-iteration. All of us who work in the network must work this way now. Even in domestic terms, as I realised this morning when my wife said “I think we really need to have a 3D printer”. As is wise, I agreed, and then sought to justify my agreement by looking at the things that we might do in a small village in the Chilterns with such a device. And within moments I had found it! The largest number of installations of 3D printers and allied additive manufacturing technologies in Europe and the US is in so-called Fab Labs, many of them housed in libraries. My nearest Fab Lab, one of around 150 created in the past 5 years, is at Manchester, some 200 miles away. Here is its rationale: “Fab Labs – digital fabrication laboratories – were set up to inspire people and entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into new products and prototypes by giving them access to a range of advanced digital manufacturing technology.
The idea was conceived by renowned inventor and scientist Professor Neil Gershenfeld at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His idea was a simple one: to provide the environment, skills, advanced materials and technology to make things cheaply and quickly anywhere in the world, and to make this available on a local basis to entrepreneurs, students, artists, small businesses and, in fact, anyone who wants to create something new or bespoke.” (www.fablabmanchester.org) And here is something about their impact:
“A global network of over 150 Fab Labs now exists, connecting people, communities and businesses across the world and enabling them to collaborate, problem solve and brainstorm ideas.
Shepherds in Norway have used their Fab Lab to create a system for tracking sheep using their mobile phones, while in Ghana, people have made an innovative truck refrigeration system powered by the vehicle’s own exhaust gases.
In Afghanistan, people are fashioning customised prosthetic limbs, while in South Africa a government and business backed project is creating simple internet connected computers that hook up to televisions and cost just ten dollars each.”
Compared to this record of innovation, surely re-inventing what the newspaper means in the network would be easy? And once we are fully functional as the first Village Fab Lab in Britain we may have a go at that too!
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