Digital Influence Mapping Project

Visit NextNow Digital…Now

In 2020, I launched a new digital consultancy, NextNow Digital. All of my new ideas and insights can be found at the new site. The Digital Influence Mapping Project has been a labor of love since I started it in 2005.  This blog may continue to live on in some form or another.

For now, visit NextNow Digital Insights & Ideas. You will find fresh POVs on digital marketing and transformation to help startups, small and mid-size businesses, as well as continued thoughts for enterprise marketers.

Start with this post: Why Launch the Next Digital Consultancy…Now?

 

6+ Promising Sessions at Content Marketing World 2017

Content marketing remains a critical strategy for brands eager to earn the attention and interest of customers – ones they already have and those they seek to attract. It’s different than advertising messages but is just as high-tech and data-driven.

Since content sits at the heart of a lot of the marketing that I plan, I am heading off to Content Marketing World on September 5^th – 8^th in Cleveland  (home of Bonin Bough's Cleveland Hustles) to learn from many of the smart people attending and speaking. I will have my own session on how we use data-driven, integrated content marketing to drive business impact. I plan to share what we have learned putting content marketing to work in a large enterprise.

If you go, connect with me via Twitter – @jbell99 . I would love to compare notes on enterprise-level content marketing. Here are some of the sessions I am looking forward to (I hope I can get to most!):

 

The Messaging Science behind Customer Acquisition and Customer Renewal Messaging

Sounds like I will get a good dose of sales ‘behavioral economics.’ And Tim Riesterer (@TRiesterer ) appears to be a very smart guy in this space.

 

Content ROI – How Marketers Demonstrate Value to the Brand and the Boss (a panel)

Connecting the business value for content marketing is not as simple as ‘how much did it sell.’ While that is important, I am looking forward to hearing what this panel including Jenifer Walsh/GE (@jlansky) and Laura Cameron/Key Bank (@lcameron80) have to say in terms of communicating value within an organization.

 

Driving Content Marketing Success in Your Organization: Sales, Product and Global-Regional Collaboration

This session is marked for the “Beginner” yet, even still, I am guessing that Jillian Hillard/Electrolux (@jillianhillard) will offer some good tips on how she engages others like product people in content marketing.

 

Machine-Assisted Narrative: How to Transform and Scale Your B2B Content with Artificial Intelligence

Okay, I know it’s early days yet for applying machine learning and AI to content but we are doing it now on the customer service side and I am keen to see how Paul Roetzer (@paulroetzer) sees the immediate future.

 

Time to Leave the Lead-Gated PDF Behind: How More Engaging Content Can Transform Your Lead Gen and Accelerate Growth

This may sound a little tactical but I am hoping that Aaron Dun (@ajdun) can deliver some insights that get us beyond the “whitepaper.”

Also eager to hear:

• Matthew Glick/Marriott (@matthewglick123)  – these guys do some interesting things
• Matt Heinz (@HeinzMarketing) – I hear this company is smart in this space
• Scott Monty/Brain +Trust Partners (@scottmonty)  – always good to connect with Scott
• Lee Odden/Top Rank Marketing (@leeodden) – a very smart consultant

 

Here’s my session on September 6 at 11:20am:

Under the Hood: Deconstructing Content Marketing the Travelers Way

Travelers publishes hundreds of articles, videos and visuals to engage consumers and business leaders at different points along their buyer journey. This fuel for integrated marketing programs attracts customers before they are even ready to shop for insurance. This session will cover building belief in data-driven content, integrating an editorial team inside marketing, and how we pulled it all together inside the Travelers Engagement Center – a new approach to digital marketing.

 I hope to see you in Cleveland.

(Thanks to Cleveland Leadership Center for the image of The Sixth City) 

The Best of the Best of CES 2017: An Unusual Compilation

Along with 170,000 other people, I am fresh back from CES 2017. Before I left, I had some idea of what to expect there. I had three missions during the show. One was to shoot some video with our partners at CNET for our continued focus on Smart Home tech. One mission was to look more broadly at trends that may affect our company’s (Travelers) contribution to making a safer world for our customers and communities. That includes new marketing ideas. The final mission was to look more broadly at ideas and how people are pursuing innovations that may matter in small and large ways. And I also get to peek at cool concept cars like the one above from Toyota. 

But CES 2017 is a big show - 2.47 million net square feet, traffic slowdowns that make jumping between venues an hour-long adventure, and a ton of hustle that makes recognizing the important ideas in the forest of pitches just plain hard.

Here are three round-ups from different smart sources and what they saw there. Each delivers a different POV that adds value and goes beyond the same old product list.

Follow the Money: Top 10 from CB Insights

CB Insights make it easy to see inside the black box of investment and get a sense of where investors are placing their bets. Presuming that many of these venture capitalists, corporate investors and bankers are analytical and thoughtful in their rigor, these choices may reflect where smart money goes. That may include Netatmo and its home weather station.

 

Smart Home Deep Dive: A Way to Analyze Companies from CNET

We would work with the gang at CNET so I have gotten to know their smart insights from Brian Cooley’s view on tech and automotive to Rich Brown’s hands-on knowledge from running the CNET Smart Home.  Here is a great POV from Executive Editor Rich Brown on how to think about how “smart” many of the smart home contenders are.

 

Sharp Design: 10 Coolest Products from Wired

I love that Wired even focuses on design. Here @Lizstins covers products that have some authentic design excellence. That type of curation is hugely valuable as great design is one predictor of user adoption and business success.

(the photo is from Amy Lombard for Wired; she does a terrific job)

Related articles

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The Marketing Technology Stack Dilemma

Comprehensive Guide to Venture Capitalists - Wise Business Plans

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CES 2017: Looking for 4 Interesting Needles in This Year's Haystack

It’s possible that a top product or story will break out at CES 2017. More likely we will witness the slow evolution of some big categories like virtual reality, drones and autonomous vehicles. The size of the show makes finding really interesting needles-in-this-haystack tough. The pace of the show makes it hard to process all that is there. As I get ready to attend, here are a few things I will be on the lookout for:

Exceptional Virtual Reality Content

Last year brought us headsets from Oculus Rift (inside their impenetrable ‘cube’ of a showfloor booth), Samsung and HTC. This year is the year to grab a demo seat to see what content has been created for that experience. The virtual Power Rangers experience showing off Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset could be that go-to experience. Finding that off-hours time to visit the booth and actually get a headset could be the trick.

 

Autonomous Vehicle Demonstrations

We all know we are on that long march to fully autonomous sometime around 2025. Until then, we will see promising innovations announced and incremental demos. This CES, I would expect there to be actual driving demos through the streets or parking lots of Las Vegas. Unfortunately, very few beyond the press will get to experience them. Look for demos from Hyundai's Autonomous Ioniq and Delphi.

“Delphi and Mobileye have also announced they'll conduct a 6.3-mile drive in challenging real-world conditions to show off the Centralized Sensing Localization and Planning (CSLP) automated driving system.”

 

The Connected Home Longtail

The connected home appears held by some marketplace tension. That tension is between the hope that particular “gadgets” like Nest or Alexa will fly off the shelves and drive adoption and the slow growth of “systems” like Apple, Amazon Echo, Samsung Smart Things that promise to seamlessly integrate many smart home technologies. Integrated systems remain the luxury of hobbyists willing to put in the time. That won’t change this CES. What we will see is a long tail of entrepreneurs with quirky solutions in Tech West and the special venue, Eureka Park.

The singlecue Gen 2 gesture-controlled system for example – wave your hand to change your Nest settings.

 

Cool Cars and Vehicles

I wonder what the betting pool on Faraday Futures looks like in Vegas. There seems to be equal parts anticipation of their reveal of their new electric vehicle and speculation of the disintegration of their business. The company reveals its new production vehicle with “extreme technology” at the head of the show. I guarantee the Faraday car will be a must-see.

No doubt Ford, Mercedes and BMW will show off something cool including BMW’s hologram interface for their dashboard experience.

Meanwhile, the French leader in hydrogen fuel cells will show off the hydrogen-powered skateboard. Think of it as a “minimum viable product” that may someday grow up to be a car.  

 

Related articles

The best VR games

Oculus Touch review: The handiest VR controller yet

Rivvr brings wireless VR to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive

Is the ‘Buyer Journey’ a Bunch of Hooey?

I just got back from my first BMA event, BMA15. This is the association of B2B marketing professionals. (TirelessMC Gary Slack pictured above) The hall held more than a thousand people from brands, agencies and technology providers. Informative, thought-provoking sessions from practitioners like myself (here’s a preview of what I spoke on) were mixed in with the inspirational (like Andrew Davis’ terrific presentation on today’s customer journey). Many speakers referred in some way or another to the need to think in terms of a ‘buyer journey’ – one that is complex, bobbing and weaving between social networks, Google, terrestrial moments, and more.

 As usual, the best parts were the conversations outside the sessions.  Like the dinner chat that started with “All this talk of the buyer journey is crap.”

 

What’s right with the buyer journey

The funnel no longer adequately describes the progression of a buyer from “unaware” to actually purchasing, but finding a neat, simple funnel-alternative that does describe how we come to purchase is just plain hard.

 

We are all influenced in new ways and new sources - No big mystery that what leads to a purchase decision for a business buyer(s) or consumer is more complex today than the golden age of advertising. Andrew Davis in his BMA12 keynote painted the most plausible and laughable “path to purchase(s)” for a consumer inspired to eat (or listen to) meatloaf. The path can be long, circuitous, include many influences. It really is a journey. Google’s view of the consumer journey to buy insurance reveals that it can start six months out. 

The journey describes many touchpoints and contributions to a purchase decision - B2B buyers consider 8.9 sources of information today – twice as many as a few years ago. We are all doing more research before and after engaging a sales person. We talk to colleagues. We inspect products at trade shows. We read expert posts on LinkedIn. And so forth. Gone are the days when a handful or less of communications intercept a potential buyer and drive that purchase.

Everyone’s path to purchase can be different with different influences - IBM, Salesforce, Oracle – all of the marketing technology firms – are promoting this notion of the connected customer and that we ought to be addressing millions of individuals…individually versus as “target audiences” or segments or even personas. Conceptually  this makes sense. What drives someone to purchase, repurchase, advocate, behave loyally is different

 Attributing a sale to a single event is incorrect - Rarely is there a single driver for a purchase decision. A journey view acknowledges that and aims to reveal the important touchpoints that a marketer can affect along the way. Understanding what has more influence in a sales-related action (my euphemism for all the actions we hope people will do – buy, buy again, tell others about the product, behave loyally) is the marketer’s job today. Believing only in the last-click, is irresponsibly naïve.

The buyer journey is inherently more customer-centered - We all need to become increasingly customer-centered. And we need to be wary of just giving this aspiration lip service. Thinking and learning about your customer’s concerns and experiences as they try to solve problems via purchasing products and services, demands curiosity and compassion.  It is the buyer’s journey after all and not the path we aim to force people down.

 

 

What’s wrong with the buyer journey

Like any broad concept, the “buyer journey” can be stretched too far. A conceptual framework can become the answer to too many problems.

Direct marketers may destroy the idea - It’s in a direct marketers dna to try and “stimulate” people with offers and other action-inducing communications. They focus on efficiency – engineering emails and ads to drive people to take the bait at the lowest cost.  Now with the customer journey, the promise of mapping all these wonderful touchpoints and building a technology platform to coordinate them is too good to pass up. But mapping and instrumenting individual buyer journeys may not be worth the extraordinary effort. In the time it takes to do this, habits will change.

Focuses too much on touchpoints vs. the psychology of buying - A buyer follows an email to a Web page. Days later they read a post in their LinkedIn feed and follow a link to a blog post. Weeks later they Google a business problem and browse four sites with credible expertise. And so on. The temptation of a buyer journey-model is to just think of these as a collection of media touchpoints where your brand ought to be to intercept this buyer. It may be more productive to think about what the so-called “buyer” is trying to get done at various points in their journey. They actually don’t likely start out as a “buyer” but as a business person with a problem.

Without believable attribution, complex marketing against the journey will die under it’s own weight - If we cannot measure and understand the contribution to a sale for the dozen or so touchpoints along a journey, we will lose our will to spend our marketing dollars against them. This is just the way the world turns. Now matter how good the model seems, if it cannot be measured, eventually we will give up on it.

B2B buying decisions involve a lot of people and that’s a lot of journeys - How many people inside an organization influence a buying decision? Four? Six? Ten? We know that the bigger the price tag the more bodies there are around that conference table. How do you manage to understand all those journeys and affect them?

  

It's the right idea

The buyer journey is the right idea. We just have to decide how we are going to change our marketing practices to align ourselves. We could easily go full force in mapping out dozens of personas and complex journeys. Or we could aspire to an increasing understanding of the path people take from the glimmer of a business need to an actual purchase and then try our hardest to be genuinely useful to our prospects and customers.

Attending BMA15 was a good reminder to me that there are a lot of smart people out there trying to figure this all out. My best strategy is to spend more time with these marketers and hope some of their smarts rub off. In my estimation, this is a worthwhile organization and I plan to participate more in the future.

 

Useful Reads

The Buyer Journey: Content Marketing Versus Sales Enablement – Business2Community

Understanding the Buyer’s Journey – Salesforce/Pardot

The Role Of Influence In The New Buyer's Journey – Forbes

Related articles

Content as a bridge between B2B sales and marketing

Get Creative While It’s Hot: Cannes Lions 2014

For a short time following the Cannes Lions Awards, the organization makes the winning videos available for viewing. Then they get locked up behind the pay-wall. You can often still find them strewn across YouTube or more likely Vimeo by the agencies who made them, but that's a pain.

Now, a subscription to the Cannes Lions archive is definitely a valuable investment but for a limited time you can browse through some of the world’s most interesting advertising/marketing creative.

Actually, there are a number of resources that will help you get caught up on what happened and was shown at Cannes. This may be as valuable a resource to those who attended and were distracted by the Kanye’s and Bono’s of the world (and agency and media company parties).

Cannes Lions Official Winners

See the video case studies of the Grand Prix, Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners along with the credits as to who did what.

 

 

Cannes Lions YouTube Channel & Video Digests

Cannes Lions has done a great job of excerpting the presentations. This is a great way to hear notables in their own words. Hear folks like Sir John Hegarty Marc Pritchard from P&G; WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell, Twitter's Dick Costolo and Viacom's Philippe Dauman among many others (yes, including Courtney Love). 

 

 

Ogilvy’s Daily Digest

Reduced to bite-sized form, these simple and visual decks sum up the noteworthy events, speeches, work, celeb sightings. They are refreshingly opinionated.

Video Recaps from Cannes Lions/YouTube

The organizers published daily recaps including the presentations from Sarah Jessica Parker, Keith Weed, Sheryl Sandberg, Jared Leto, Joe Pytka and more. Good “in-their-own-voices” sound bites.

 

 

Visual Predictions on Pinterest

This Pinterest board is from Dom Heinrich that features work he felt might win. It’s a great way to browse and discover great work that may or may not have won but remains interesting.

 

A Gallery of Winning Print Work (and More)

Ads of the World have assembled a Pinterest-like gallery of the winning work including all of the beautiful print ads from the competition.

 

 

 

Related articles

3 Great Ideas from Cannes Lions 2014

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What Does Innovation in Marketing Look Like at Cannes 2014

The 2014 Cannes Lions is coming up. Bono will speak as will a host of others (happier to have seen Lou Reed last year, personally). Beyond the frenzy of awards, late night parties and an unhealthy dose of "fomo", there are tremendous innovations in marketing revealed each year. I attended last year and was surprised at how much terrific work was shown there. Unlike most of the folks in attendance, I spent hours browsing through the case studies on display in the basement of the Palais. 

This year will be no different. While advertising awards shows can be criticized as overly self-involved events where agency motives sit squarely on winning at any cost, they can still be terrific showcases. 

What to expect at Cannes Lions 2014

Digitas LBI France has put together a terrific look forward - what to watch for at Cannes 2014. Not only have they collected some of the most interesting case studies of likely award winners, organized them in their view of trending categories, they have also created an awesome slideshow with built-in videos.

Browse through this show to view some of the most interesting innovations in marketing this year. 

 

@DigitasLBi_Fr Cannes Lions Predictions 2014 from Bridget Jung

 

Make sure you check out:

• The Digital Newspaper Holder - how to innovate and add value to newspapers
• The Social Swipe - how to make giving a public, easy and creative act
• Wren, The Kiss - I got teary during this terrific video
• NAR Mobile's Life Saving Cable - I didn't think the wrist band had another life and I was wrong
• Melbourne Remote Control Tourist - see through the cams of someone else before flying halfway around the world 
• Droga5's Thunderclap - an awesome way to jumpstart a social good campaign

And so much more...

 

And if that isnt enough, you can always refer back to the next big thing from our colleagues down under:  

Related articles

The Cannes Lions Will Be Social But Will They Be 'Social?'

10 Examples of the Social Side of Cannes 2013

Cannes Lions 2014: See The Best Work And Possible Winners

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Chipotle: Building Content Marketing on a Story Platform

There are many flavors of content marketing. Most of us are using content to build a direct relationship with our customers and sales channel. We divert resources from what we would have tried to accomplish via advertising towards creating valuable content and then extending the reach via paid and earned media.

Chipotle does all of that and is going further. Look at their Cultivate Festival that creates events with music, local food providers and educational food bars for Chipotle. Look at their CAA-fueled work with the Scarecrow video (12M+ views) and the mobile games of the same name/theme. Look at the interview from their Co-CEO Steve Ellis and the subsequent tweetable fast facts on their Web site.

Chipotle has adopted a clear and consistent story platform about the heritage of their brand in the midst of modern food factory production and farming trends. The festival, the slick video stories, the deep information on their Web site and their engagement with their customers online are all grown from a consistent seed. By aligning all of their efforts, they always stay on-message, they reap the benefits of an accumulated understanding of who they are (what I call ‘relevant awareness’), they use their marketing dollars wisely.

I don’t have the inside information about how well this marketing approach is paying off for them in terms of sales. I am guessing they have business goals (sales) and they have brand goals (do people believe that Chipotle walks the walk of a strong community and health commitment). As far as brand goals, I have to believe they are well on the way towards establishing themselves as a responsible choice for millennials and more.

Branded entertainment not a poor man’s entertainment

Check out Michael Weiss’ article in Content Marketing Institute on their brand storytelling. Watch the Scarecrow video and the Back to the Start video that came before. Chipotle works with CAA to create these rich videos and the derivative games that go along with them. I remember when Coca-Cola turned to CAA in the eighties shocking the ad agency world. That was about getting Hollywood talents to develop TV commercials. Now CAA is about sourcing the right storytelling talent to create all sorts of formats not bound by the traditional formulas of television advertising.

The production value of of the Scarecrow video is way up there. The Chipotle branding is way down there. The video is meant to trigger those who are outraged or at least disappointed by the factory farming techniques supporting our fast food nation to view and share. Created by the guys at Moonbot Studios (the Numberlys), the animation is wonderful. The video features a spooky Fiona Apple track just as the previous video featured Willie Nelson (remember Farm Aid?). There is even a "making of" video featuring Chipotle CMO Mark Crumpacker. These are stories designed to be shared and at 12m and 8m+ views respectively, its working. 

 

 

Events as stimulants for online content and sharing

The Cultivate Festival for “food, ideas and music” gears up in early June in San Francisco with at least 2 other events planned in the US. While bands like Neon Trees draw people in, local food purveyors set up stands and the host, Chipotle, draws people to their own stands unlocking their recipe for guacamole. Celebrity hosts like Amanda Frietag hold the main stage for the responsibly-sourced food crowd. This is not just post-hippy stuff. Chipotle knows their customer.

These events will not only build local and regional excitement about their farm to table story, people attending will be tweeting and posting and extending the reach of these live events. 

 

Telling the heritage story and making it shareable

The video from co-CEO Steve Ellis is good. He doesn’t read so much as relate. That means his message comes across genuine (I am guessing it is genuine). Of course, the video is published on their YouTube channel and then embedded on their owned and shared channels. The YouTube channel is neat and tidy and makes sense of the entertainment videos like Scarecrow, the Making of Scarecrow as well as their “On the Farm” videos visiting real farmers.  The company time line on the Website gives us the history in a simple, bite-sized way.

But my favorite part of their heritage story is the “Food With Integrity” Facts (FWI). Seven pages of 12 facts about food, company history, animal feed and more. Each one of these little factoids are ready for tweeting and posting on Facebook including this myth-busting gem,

“There is a popular misconception that Chipotle restaurants are owned by McDonalds. While they were once an investor in our company, they divested in 2006 and our company went public on the New York Stock Exchange that year.”

They make their story genuine, personal and wonderfully shareable. A quick glance at their Facebook wall and the Twitter landscape shows modest dissension amongst the vocal public. The complaints range from too small portions to orders gone a bit wrong but these are normal and the community managers quickly engage. There are some detractor twitter handles but, again, it’s tough to find a brand that doesn’t spark some dissent.

Chipotle has created a consistent story platform and then expressed it consistently and creatively across their digital channels.

Related articles

How Powerful Brand Storytelling Can Supplant Commercials

How Powerful Brand Storytelling Can Supplant Commercials

Chipotle Gives a Great Lesson in Video Marketing

What Marketers Can Learn About Storytelling From Chipotle's Scarecrow Video

Can Chipotle Change the World of Fast Food Restaurants? Foodie Underground

Consumer Brand Perception of Chipotle's Ad Campaign

CES 2014 Hints at How We Will Live in the Future

Update: Sadly due to serial plane cancellations (at least 4), I will not be attending CES2014. While disappointing, I know I can follow along #CES2014. Just don't bother trying to connect with me at the show. And don't rub in what a good time you had there. 

 

I am excited to attend CES this year. I sent folks last year but was not able to go myself. And now, with my new gig, my head is in a different place. I am hoping to see glimmers of how different businesses from the consumer electronics giants to the startups in Eureka Park believe we will all live in the future. What are new consumer behaviors implicit in new hardware and software? What will be the unmistakable trends (e.g. 3D Printing) versus those that may be more tangential but still prophetic.

Here are seven trends, technologies, ideas that I will be on the lookout for. Each has been informed by some of the smart minds looking ahead and writing about the event.  I will still be open to serendipity and am particularly grateful for my new friends at DigitasLBi and Vivaki for what looks like a great curatorial effort. (If you are there and want to connect, ping me via Twitter @jbell99)

 

The Internet of Everything...Applied

I worked on consumer device for moms last year that just happened to connect to the Internet. It was partly thought-out. It allowed the device to potentially trigger re-order’s when the dispensed product ran low. But part of the reason the device was connected remained to be defined. I am looking forward to seeing more examples where smart folks have thought about how connectivity can enhance or change our experience with products. I still love my Ford Fusion which even in its dated form (2011) sports some terrific connectivity. Now other technologies are coming online that help your older car connect like Mojio. It snaps into your diagnostic port and promises benefits like connecting to your friends. 

Inspred by @obrien Los Angeles Times (Chris O'Brien)  "CES2014: Consumer electronics show to feature 'Internet of Things'"

Inspired by Josh Ong and Natt Garun, The Next Web “What To Expect at CES 2014”

 

Wearables Get Real…Sort Of

The Samsung Galaxy Gear “watch” seems like a solution in search of a problem. It was cool when Dick Tracy had a watch device, it’s just not clear that we have really uncovered the use-cases and innovation that will change our lives. (that being said, I love the look of the Pebble Watch and pay attention to their announcements.) Clearly the Nike Fuelband, and other devices in that category have “stuck” a bit. GoogleGlass remains a prototype for some future device/application that we haven’t yet discovered. That doesn’t mean that ‘heads-anywhere’ displays aren’t an important trend. If anything they have great promise in professional circles – repair techs on big machinery, field service reps in insurance following a big storm, physicians. I want to see more than tech for tech’s sake but how smart folks have thought about the application of wearables.

Inspired by @petepachal Mashable “CES 2014: Five Tech Trends to Watch”

• See Fitbark, tracks your dog’s activity via a wearable
• See SensibleBaby, monitors your baby’s ‘vitals’ through the night

 

 

The Connected Home Gets Weirder

I love the idea behind an Opower project which aims to use aggregated home energy use data to drive us all to adjust the temperature of our homes meaningfully up or down in response to the view of what our community is doing. I love the idea of Nest which is now trying to build a business with connected and controllable home systems. And I grew up with a science fiction view of the future like what The Veldt. So, I am keen to see how connectivity will change our homes. I fully expect it to get strange before it becomes a standard.

Claire Cane Miller at NYTimes Bits shared her own experiences this holiday season with the state of the connected home now,

“My mother received Hue lightbulbs, for instance, made by Philips and controllable with her iPhone. She can set custom lighting for ambience in the dining room, turn lights on or off remotely, and set lights to slowly brighten in the morning.

My father received a Nest Protect smoke alarm, which sends his phone messages if it senses smoke or has low batteries. He planned to install it near the kitchen, because if it senses smoke from cooking, it speaks with a human voice before sounding a loud alarm and can be silenced with a wave. He can connect it to his Nest Thermostat, which will automatically turn off the gas furnace if there is a carbon monoxide leak.

The devices join my parents’ Withings scale and Bose music system, controllable with a smartphone.”

Inspired by @clairecm NYTimes (Claire Cane Miller) “Is 2014 the Year of the Connected Home?”

Inspired by @ @JW_Ten14 (Jonathon Weinberg Mirror “CES 2014: Top 10 Trends…”

• See Canary, a smart and connected home security and safety system
• See Doorbot, the smartphone enabled doorbell (yes, see who’s at your door via video)
• See Petzila, app-controlled treat dispensing for your pets
• See Smart Diet Scale, evaluates food prep data and displays via mobile device

 

 

More Confusion in the Living Room

I don’t think I care about 4G televisions or the opportunity to own a 110” TV. I set aside my gameboxes when Halo was just emerging. But I like to watch movies and my “stories” (e.g. over “The Killing”) the question is now that I am moving into a new house, do I need cable or can I subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, or Aero? Should I just get the next Xbox and connect with that? Is there really any there-there to Smart TVs?  Anyhow, it’s a mess. Loads of choices but since I only care so much about watching video I am not likely to configure my own solution. So far we have had new technologies and delivery platforms. New program “packagers” who bundle Hollywood and more exotic programming to deliver via satellite, the Internet and cable but no one really thinking through my experience and needs in a multi-screen living room. I will be keen to see how CES participants view the living room experience. .

Inspired by @b_fung (Brian Fung) Washington Post “CES 2014 Starts Tuesday: Here are Five Tech Trends to Expect…”

 

The Robots Are Among Us

Remember Roomba. What could be more benign than a robotic vacuum cleaner? Well since then more investment dollars have been pouring into developing technologies that add up to a range of next generation robots. Look at some of the start-ups like Hands Company with Adam, “the first personal robot.” And RoboThespian which looks an awful lot like yesterday's vision of robots-as-humans. We are years away from pratical roll-outs beyond industrial robots but, still, it will be neat to see some of teh visions of this future. 

 

Technology Solving Real World Problems

Sustainable clean water. Lighting in the face of disaster (or lack of infrastructure). Cheap, mobile connectivity. It will be interesting to see how start-ups and more established companies go beyond the entertainment space to deliver promising solutions to real world problems. Look at MPowerd’s Luci Light. Simple elegant source of lighting when no power sources are available. Think about its application following a debilitating earthquake, hurricane or other natural disaster.

And look at Xiaomi’s Mi phone – well designed, in the hands of 20million (double that in 2014), so far and about $330 per handset in China vs. double that for Apple iPhones. Not just a cheap smartphone but a well-designed, half-the-cost smartphone. Innovations like this could easily accelerate the evolution away from feature phones and open up new mobile solutions for folks whose main connectivity is via mobile device.

 

The Continued Consumerization of Business Tech

Jason Hiner at ZDNET called out this trend of BYOD and, I would argue, BYOS (Bring Your Own Service), where employees are helping (forcing?) corporate tech to change. Everything from building infrastructure that allows for employees to use their preferred smart phone but also apps and utilities that tap into business data (e.g. phone directories) without any significant risks to data and systems security. I see many big businesses committing to become more social businesses. Supporting a more open approach to device and platforms is a big step in that direction.  

Inspired by @jasonhiner ZDNET “Four Mega Trends for the Professionals”

 

Get this handy map and guide from CES

(thanks to all for the images used respectfully and to Gagitech for the CES hashtag image)

Attend Social Data Week for Big Insights

Next week I am speaking at Social Data Week in San Francisco. My colleague, Irfan Kamal, speaks at Social Data Week in NYC. When I heard that DataSift was organizing events dedicated to social data, I jumped at the chance to attend and share our own approach at applying data to the work we do for big, global brands.

Folks from Dell, CBS, Twitter, Marketwired, and, of course, Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble are all there focused on the role data plays in social media or, more importantly, the role that social data plays in business.

I will share about a unique study we did globally. We crunched over 7 million brand conversations to understand what people care about most in relation to brands. What drives casual and passionate advocacy. It’s a great way to use data.

I am not sure if there is still space to attend on either coast but here’s the link to find out more and register.