Feb
27
Beyond the Death of Email
Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, privacy, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
I am not sure that I go as far as “Email is where knowledge goes to Die” (http://ipadcto.com/2011/02/28/email-is-where-knowledge-goes-to-die/) but I certainly respond to the current levels of discontent over web-based email, and the comScore survey on data, comparing 2011 and 2012 and released this month, produces some evidence of dramatic declines is usage:
And we all think that we know the reasons. We see the rise of social media and MMS/SMS as equivalents to what happened to the letter form in the mid to late 1990s. In retrospect what happened then seems to have been compressed into a very short time. One minute I was a regular desk worker, with a dictation machine and a secretary, and the right to spend a week deliberating before responding to an idea or an invitation. In an instant all that morphed into a world where response had to be, at most, within the day, though communication could be shorter and less formal. Much wider groups could be co-opted into the ongoing discussion. I now needed to become a two fingered keyboarder. And changing skills meant changing etiquette. I had just asked whether I needed to have two email addresses – one for public and one for private correspondence – when the roof fell in and everyone reached everyone with everything everywhere – including sending so much unwanted advertising matter in one form or another that it was easy to predict that this alone would bring email systems groaning to a halt.
Now email itself is the ancient regime. There is an interpretive temptation as a result to think that events are repeating themselves and that we are all going evolve into a social network + texting communications environment. Certainly articles proclaiming the “Death of Email” have gone incautiously down that track, though the real trends may be a little harder to forecast. To discover them we may need to be more critical in our analysis of what is missing from our email world, and what corporates as well as individuals want to get from their communications. What is happening to email at least permits us to make alternative predictions along these lines:
* Corporate email, internal and private and housed inside enterprize operating systems, makes a comeback. External clients and associates can be co-oped into these circles, temporarily or permanently.
* Corporate users at last discover why they created a corporate Wiki, which has been standing all unused for five years.
* Social media applications like LinkedIn or Yammer (micro-blogging for corporate users: www.yammer.com) will handle a great deal of outbound corporate messaging as web-based email continues to decline, and orkers seek to diminish the time-wasting capacity of email.
* The largest increase in communications will be M2M (machine to machine), as sensors drop below $10 each and all of our gadgets start reporting that they need servicing, or fuel, or that they are too hot or cold, or we are almost out of milk.
* Amongst consumers, Facebook and IM take up the slack, as even less formal and even shorter communication modes become essential.
* Voice drives many of these applications, either via voicemail or through voice to text service environments.
* Most personal communications will be mobile device originated and received.
Within two years, if comScore is correct, those of us who have to send a seventeen year old a text and a voice mail asking him to read his email will be ceasing to bother with the longform communication at all, and in five years email will be an important, but minority, expression of the need to communicate. Looking back, we shall say that we went in this direction in order to realize a need for privacy, but that was only a part of the question. In fact, email overwhelmed us. It became the excuse not to work, instead of a part of work itself. And as soon as it became the focus of unsolicited advertising, its days were inevitably numbered. Far from the future being inexorably web-based, we now perceive that many functions that we rely upon will retreat to the internet or the mobile network: interpersonal communications will lead the way.
So is this really another “death of advertising” piece in disguise? As online advertising share of market continues to grow, and as online sales show impressive annual growth it would seem perverse to take this line. Yet privacy, in currently proposed legislation on both sides of the Atlantic, seems like a political crowd pleaser. And behind it lies another urge, which is not just to control and defend one’s own information, but to be able to trade that information to the highest bidder in return for perceived or sought after privileges. Seeing the founder of Paoga (www.paoga.com) across a crowded room last week reminds me that there have been visionary attempts to do that for some time, so this email decline triggers their powerful emergence. We then create a permissive society of a different type, where we have allowed a marketeer whose goods we seek to message us in return for discounts, coupons or other advantages, and in a context where that privilege can be removed rather more decisively than the current rigmarole unleashed on email users when they hit “unsubscribe”. Social marketing takes up the pace from wasteful and intrusive email blanket bombing. For a time we get back into balance – though no doubt we soon overbalance again in new and unpredictable ways.
Yammer is now used in 100,000 US corporations. Emails are still not admissable in much litigation in UK courts. The speed of change is now so fast that we do not get to fully move into something before we begin move out of it. And, alas, as soon as we migrate our communications elsewhere, Mr Murdoch will probably employ someone to find a new way of hacking into them. Eventually, we shall reach Venusian mind transfer (aka thought driven computing) and StarTrek will return to high fashion. In five years we will describe email with the same nostalgia now reserved for letter post.
Nov
15
The British Do Irony
Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments
We are always told that a prime difference between the British and their American cousins is that the British “do” irony. So I find it really ironic that, after years of being told in this industry that the credit raters had an unchallengeable hold on their markets because of their unique aggregation skills (not, you will note, their analysis), a six month old start-up which aggregates and gives users free access is giving them holy terrors in the UK. The company is www.duedil.com (give it a transatlantic pronunciation to get the “doodle” moniker they obviously aimed for) and I cannot do better than quote its citation from the excellent news service of the Asia Pacific trade body, Business Information Industry Association (www.biia.com):
“Duedil is a new business information company that offers free financial information sourced from UK’s Companies House (Public Sector Information). It is so confident in the quality of its data, that it offers a £5 payment if one finds any discrepancies in its financials, no questions asked. The company was launched in April 2011 by Damian Kimmelman, owner of “We Are VI Ltd” and co-founder of Mackin Gaming. Duedil claims in its website to have the largest database of free company financials in the world! That is a tall order for an upstart that is only several months in operation. Duedil aggregates data from all over the web and bring this to users along-side information which it pays for. It says the information will correspond directly with the information found at Companies House delivering company financial statements, going back 10 years, with company histories, name changes, litigations, director lists, family graphs & more. According to Duedil, it is funded by Passion Capital, who is predominantly funded by the UK government. Other investors are some of the people behind Skype, LastFM, Yahoo!, AOL & QXL/Tradus, and was chosen as a Microsoft Bizspark company.”
This service is well worth a look. For one thing, the data presentation is good enough to seriously challenge the sector players, and for another the information collection is also hugely competitive. But the irony comes in the thought that a freemium model could be used to take a Trojan Horse right into the middle of the commercial credit rating encampment. Industry professionals rightly point out that Duedil would have to support a great deal of advertising to support such a service long term. But what if that is not the point at all. Instead, a cogent strategy here would concentrate on getting very high free usage levels, and all the time stretch those staid competitors by adding more and more Open Web derived content into the mix, so that the comparison was not with publicly available “official” content, but with the Duedil selection above and beyond that. Then, when you have the attention of the audience, you can begin to charge subscriptions for higher level activities: in-greater-depth analysis, time-elapsed reporting on watch lists, custom service applications for automated purchasing systems, social media-style buying clubs based on shared content with user groups etc. And when you get that second level market locked in, then you will be able to sell plenty of service advertising on the still-free core site.
The creators of DueDil have grasped a key point that the established market has long since conveniently forgotten. The market is all about the collection of commoditized data from the web, and there really is no defensible barrier to entry in that business. Insofar as credit scoring and the development of formulae for rating credit worthiness are concerned, the established industry is on safer ground, but as we used to say on the farm in my youth, if you try to sell potatoes with the dirt on them, you get rich for a while until people realize that clean potatoes cost no more, and are better value. Attempts to sell on openly available content as if it was an “answer” fits this case, and this is the bluff that DueDil calls. Soon, as in every other sector in every information market that I know, the players here those who seek survival will be heading up the value chain. Analytics, the application of Big Data principles and practice, the widespread integration of workflow modelling with third party strategic alliances – all of these are part of the future of a sector which we still call Credit and Business Information, but which we will increasingly come to see as whole web monitoring for business and personal performance.
And as that happens, so will consolidation become more interesting. Choicepoint and Lexis may have been an early sign. Both in the enterprize software solutions field and in the major B2B holdings there must be potential interest in those of the big sector players who add real value. But lets emphasize “value” again – DueDil have demonstrated that the value from pure data collection is negligible, and consolidators, especially if they are deeply into advanced taxonomic search and linked data, may find that smaller regional players in the existing industry have little to add. In the next play, much of their data will look as insignificant as the large and once much vaunted databases of the directory publishers do now.
In short, DueDil is a mouse that roared, and while the elephant of Big Credit is still in the room, he is trying to stand on the curtain rail!
(Declare an interest – I am currently chairman of BIIA – a powerhouse of industry discussion in Asia Pacific!)
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