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.
Sep
4
After Facebook and LinkedIn…?
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Back from the holidays, and into the frothy turmoil of the Big Deal season. Verizon enriches every British pensioner and pension fund with a bigger boost via its Vodafone deal than the UK government has managed in years; Microsoft spends the equivalent of the GDP of Hungary as the lonely couple in the mobile phone corner decide to get married; and Jeff Bezos becomes a born-again newspaperman. Here is what he said in an interview with the Washington Post:
“I had to convince myself that I could bring something to the table,”
he said. “I discussed this at great length with Don (Graham). I thought I
could, because I could offer runway and some skill in technology and
the Internet and a point of view about long-term thinking, reader
focus and the willingness to experiment.”
Well, I am sure that he can deliver all of that, but it was the last words that caught my attention. You see, when newspapermen have experimented in the past it has been all about finding niftier ways of delivering the same old content in the same old format. Mr Bezos has been a prime mover in a different culture: you go back to the user and find out what combination of elements make him feel well-informed and give him satisfaction, then you go into beta and keep on experimenting and iterating and re-iterating… and you never finish. This is a world of work in progress. There is no “launch”, nothing can ever be left unquestioned. The quest is to become ever more essential to the user: like all great love affairs you have to keep working on it and never take it for granted.
Many of us are now caught up in the Amazon utility story (here is a test for his original customers: would you give up the ability to order or download every book whose review catches your eye if idiosyncratic bookstores who never have the book you want could be restored to the High Street?). But Amazon is a company with a difference. It will go on innovating, but once we are into same day/same hour delivery, the differentiating factors in ecommerce will start to diminish. Mr Bezos has wisely moored an escape craft to the roof of the building, like some James Bond villain of old, so that he can escape and look down at us from the Cloud – as owner of the storage that we all need to conduct our business on the networks. In my view this makes his model more robust, and the people I wonder about are the social media players.
I have heard more debate this summer about the future of Facebook than seemed imaginable a few years ago. And while I love LinkedIn (who would have thought when I first started using email in 1980 (it was called BT Gold) that one day my treasured congregation of friends would keep my rolodex up to date for me) it is becoming so big that it ceases to amuse. I am a very limited marketplace for “Four Great Thoughts of Bill Gates” or “Five Whimsical Notions from Warren Buffet”. And I have thought for a few years now that Facebook would burst under its own size pressure. The answer as I have always imagined it was a plethora on niche networks, but each of us would have an interface which collected all of the niches onto one screen, and allowed us to view them all and respond to friends without having to sign into or out of each service separately. The niche element would give greater security as well as the feeling that we are really inside a relevant community. There would be one for the immediate family, one for the golf club, one for the business sector, one for the village, one for the reading circles etc etc. And most of these are there or almost there already.
And this is a striking thought now, as we awaken to the thought that we do not really see the community element once we are much past a billion members, because I seem to be under siege at present from niche networking opportunities – and find myself signing up to them. Yes, I did join Slideshare (www.slideshare.com), because I talk a lot (yes, and often too much) and I am always interested in getting better ideas from other people’s slides. And I joined, like a nervous ingénue in fresher’s week, Charles Thiede’s clever new Zapnito network (www.zapnito.com), as a Micro Genius! There has to be a place for possessed visionaries to hang out and mutter darkly to each other. And, more seriously, there have to be better networks for sharing ideas and encouraging innovation; look at this piece about it on TNW: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/09/01/niche-networks-why-zapnito-wants-to-quieten-the-web/?awesm=tnw.to_d0bFQ&utm_campaign=social media&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Spreadus. I really hope this succeeds. And while I was at it, I signed up for the beta of BloombergConnect.com, as a network of people with interests in private equity. We shall see what the yield is from these three, but meanwhile I would like a vendor to come forward with the niche networks integration software. You see, I have this other idea that if I had on one screen all the interesting news and inputs from all of my services, they would be, well, sort of like my personal “newspaper”. Now, do you think I could sell that to Jeff Bezos?
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